Bellos David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything

Faber and Faber. 2011. — 124 p. — ISBN: 9780865478725Funny and surprising on every page, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means—whether we wish to understand Astérix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron’s Avatar. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world.In the words of Bellos: The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition.What Is a Translation?
Is Translation Avoidable?
Why Do We Call It Translation?
Things People Say About Translation
Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of Foreign-Soundingness
Native Command: Is YourLanguage Really Yours?
Meaning Is No Simple Thing
Words Are Even Worse
Understanding Dictionaries
The Myth ofLiteral Translation
The Issue ofTrust: The Long ShadowofOral Translation
Custom Cuts: Making Forms Fit
What Can’t Be Said Can’t Be Translated: The Axiom ofEffability
HowMany Words Do We Have forCoffee?
Bibles and Bananas: The Vertical Axis ofTranslation Relations
Translation Impacts
The Third Code: Translation as a Dialect
No Language Is an Island: The Awkward Issue ofL3
Global Flows: Centerand Periphery in the Translation ofBooks
A Question ofHuman Rights: Translation and the Spread ofInternational Law
Ceci n’est pas une traduction: Language Parity in the European Union
Translating News
The Adventure ofAutomated Language-Translation Machines
A Fish in YourEar: The Short History ofSimultaneous Interpreting
Match Me IfYou Can: Translating Humor
Style and Translation
Translating Literary Texts
What Translators Do
Beating the Bounds: What Translation Is Not
UnderFire: Sniping at Translation
Sameness, Likeness, and Match: Truths About Translation
Avatar: A Parable ofTranslation