Found in Translation: How Language Shapes our Lives and Transforms the World
Authors: Nataly Kelly, Jost Zetsche
Publisher: Penguin
New York, 2012

Review by Martin Boyd

Imagine a room full of junior high school students talking about their plans for the future. What career paths do they envision themselves taking? “I’m going to be a lawyer,” says Daniel. “I think probably a veterinarian,” offers Maria. “Definitely an actress,” affirms Eva. But would any of these bright-eyed youths declare an interest in becoming a translator?

Probably not. As Lawrence Venuti has astutely pointed out, translation is the invisible profession. Even when translators do get noticed, the value of our profession is generally underestimated in society at large. As Nataly Kelly recently noted in an article for the Huffington Post, popular beliefs that machine translation is eliminating the need for human translators, or that any bilingual person can be a translator, are among the most common misconceptions about our profession. Kelly’s new book Found in Translation: How Language Shapes our Lives and Transforms the World, co-authored with Jost Zetzsche, aims to dispel such myths and to address the serious image problem suffered by a profession that has a much bigger impact on world affairs than most people realize.

In their book, Kelly and Zetzsche have assembled an impressive collection of data and anecdotes that highlight the importance of translation in our everyday lives. Both Kelly and Zetzsche have worked for years in professional language services, and some of their stories are drawn from their own experience. One such experience is the dramatic anecdote that opens the book: one Friday night, around midnight, Kelly, working as an interpreter for the 911 emergency hotline, is contacted to interpret for a desperate caller who whispers urgently into the phone: “Me va a matar.” Kelly does her best to control her terror as she swiftly interprets the caller’s words: “He’s going to kill me.” Thus, from the first page the reader is struck by the fact that translation may in some cases be a matter of life or death.

While such anecdotes should capture the attention of any reader, they offer an additional layer of fascination for translators and interpreters. Even as I share vicariously in the panic inspired by Kelly’s story, I am wondering, why did she interpret the caller’s words as “he’s going to kill me”? The Spanish original gives no indication of gender; it might equally mean “she’s going to kill me”, or even “it’s going to kill me”. In the heat of the moment, interpreters have no time for such reflections, but have to make a decision right then and there, and go with what their instinct tells them is right. Translators, on the other hand, those of us who work with the written word, have the luxury of being able to ponder over these interstices between languages, before committing to a final version in the target language. The opportunities it offers to ruminate over such linguistic conundrums is what makes Found in Translation a particularly interesting read for the language specialist.

Yet this is a book that should appeal to anyone with even a vague interest in how the peoples of the world interact. And the message it has for such readers is simple, and eloquently expressed in the book’s foreword by David Crystal: humanity depends on translation for its successful functioning. The authors illustrate this point with numerous examples at the international level, such as the vital role of translators in finalizing the wording of international treaties, or the important part translation has played in turning social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn into truly global phenomena. However, translation can be just as important within borders as across them. Consider, for example, the huge costs in unnecessary tests and misdiagnoses that can be saved by using professional interpreters in medical consultations, or the startling case of the “seventy-one-million dollar word”, in which the absence of a professional interpreter in a Florida hospital resulted in a US$71 million malpractice suit due to confusion of the Spanish word intoxicado (“poisoned”) with the English word “intoxicated”. Yet another example is the significant role translation can play in protecting or reviving the languages of minorities such as Ireland’s Gaelic-speakers or New Zealand’s Maoris – or even, as in the remarkable case of the Wampanaog language of Massachussetts, in resurrecting a language that had been long declared dead. But if all this isn’t enough to convince you of the importance of translation in our world, you might simply want to consider the sheer size of the translation industry: in 2012, the global market for language services was worth more than 33 billion US dollars, making it perhaps “the biggest industry that most people have never heard of.”

If quality translation is essential to intercultural communication, it is equally true that mistranslation can have tragic effects in fostering intercultural misunderstanding. Take, for example, Nikita Kruschev’s famous declaration “We will bury you”, so often quoted in Western media during the Cold War to underline the Soviet Union’s supposedly hostile, war-mongering stance towards the West. According to the authors, the Russian phrase Kruschev used would actually be more accurately translated as “We will outlast you”,  as the statement was merely intended to express the Russian belief that the Soviet model of government would outlast the capitalist model of Western countries – hardly the virtual declaration of war that the English (mis)translation tends to convey. Found in Translation offers numerous cases of translation blunders, the effects of which range from the comical to the catastrophic. Indeed, even St. Jerome, patron saint of translators, was apparently not immune from mistakes in his translations, at least one of which had particularly dire consequences for intercultural relations for centuries afterwards.

It could be argued that Found in Translation focuses a little too heavily on the impact of translator errors, a tendency all too common to overviews of translation history. Yet being in the business themselves, Kelly and Zetzsche are conscious of the extreme pressures and limitations that translators and interpreters face, and it is clear that their purpose in including such anecdotes is simply to highlight just how challenging a profession translation actually is.

Found in Translation is an enjoyable read that makes its point on the vital importance of translation extremely well. Treatises on the value of translation rarely manage to reach a broader readership and all too often end up merely preaching to the converted, i.e. to translators and interpreters. In this respect, Kelly and Zetzsche should be applauded for producing a book that is accessible enough to appeal to any reader. Hopefully, it will have the mainstream success it deserves, and thus make our invisible profession a little more visible.