Noncompositional

Recently I’ve been going back to reading actual novels, you know, for fun, and most recently I read The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams. Most of the story takes place in a world of fairy creatures that exists parallel to our world, but the main POV character is a regular old human from San Francisco. He ends up in this other universe, but somehow is able to communicate with everyone there, despite their not using anything like English. Fairyland natives mention that human visitors tend to perceive fairy-speak as some form of their native language, through some magic that somehow exists but no one really knows much about. This is fine - it’s a regular conceit of such fantasy and science fiction stories. But, while reading one section of the book which is from the POV of a native fairylander, I realized that this conceit leads to some problems. A small (and, outside any context, basically spoiler-free) excerpt:

She took Poppy’s shoulders in her hands and placed kisses like the nudge of a parrot’s beak on each cheekbone. “So nice to see you here. How are your … how is your father?” She seemed to have remembered at the last moment that Poppy’s mother was dead.”

So how are we supposed to interpret this little mis-step? The literal option is to guess that Fairyspeak has subject-verb number agreement, and the verb comes before the subject, at least in this context. But that’s probably a bit too literal. Somehow, the speaker must have made some sort of parent/father mistake. Maybe it was originally, “your par– father: is he well?” There are many possibilities.

This isn’t just a problem for never-mentioned, always-translated foreign languages. If you’re a translator, the exact same problem arises. Let’s say you wanted to translate Flowers into Japanese, which has no number marking (and which is also always verb-final): what would you do? Perhaps start with go ryo– otoosan wa doo irasshaimasu ka ‘parents-HON — father-HON TOP how be Q’. No doubt there are more clever ways of translating it. Maybe you’d even skip it entirely, and find another way to demonstrate the person’s not-quite-awareness of Poppy’s family situation.

The same goes for figuring out which politeness-marking to put on every sentence in the dialogue, since in Japanese you definitely can’t just skip all of that. In general, these little details of what grammatical and contextual features which language encodes must be horrible for the translator, especially when they come to the fore with performance errors, metalinguistic negation, puns, and so forth.