“Sorry” was not good enough for China. Its leaders insisted that to end the crisis that began on April 1 with the midair collision and emergency landing of an American spy plane on Hainan island, and to see the release of its 24 aviators from captivity, the US must instead say that it was “very sorry”. President Bush complied, and the eleven-day affair concluded with Beijing saving face and Washington bringing its pilots home.
Is there some linguistic finesse here separating “sorry” from “very sorry”, seemingly so crucial to the Chinese before they agreed to end the standoff, that we’re missing?
Yes there is, and it has to do with culture — and the place that an apology has in Chinese culture is more exulted, and is taken more seriously, than in America. In the Chinese translation of “sorry”, we hear scholars of Chinese language and literature tell us, there is no indication that the speaker has acknowledged wrongdoing, whereas by adding the syllable “quian”, transforming the term into “very sorry”, the apology then becomes an expression of contrition and admission of guilt.
This was, it would seem of paramount importance to the Chinese, though it remained a puzzle to the average American.
On the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, for example, Japan issued what was translated into English as an expression of deep remorse for the attack, and for its occupation of Asian countries during the war. The US reacted positively to the statement — not so China, South Korea and countries in Southeast Asia, whose leaders interpreted the wording of the apology as a mere expression of “deep reflection, a far milder form of regret,” and thus the statement was spurned.
In the global dialogue of cultures, how do we communicate with one another? Well, we translate from one language into another, and that should be easy, shouldn’t it? Far from it. Language is more than a mere currency of everyday, rational exchange, for there is organic, vital reciprocity between those who speak a language and their felt reality. In fact, among linguists, it is axiomatic that language and culture are one and the same. Not only are a culture’s value system and historical experience semantically embodied in its conventions of speech, but also its entire repertoire of consciousness.
To translate from and into the languages of two peoples, especially when they are as culturally disparate as the Chinese and the Americans, all you can hope to attain are rough or approximate results. Often, however, the task, even in the hands of translators with the most penetrative grasp of both languages, is daunting. The issue, you see, is that to translate a language is to translate the culture of the people who speak it.
It is all well and good to translate, say, from and into Spanish, German, English, French and Italian. After all, the nations of Europe and North America have shared, more or less, the same intellectual tradition throughout their history, from Hellenic to Roman times, from the Renaissance to the Reformation, and from the Industrial Revolution to the present. And the translation here would be flawless. Not so, of course, when it comes to a part of the world linguistically determined by an entirely different set of historical and spiritual mythologies.
Take the nightmare of untranslatability that exists today between the Islamic world and the Euro-American world.
All that the English language can yield, for example, in the translation of our common, almost everyday Islamic outcry, Allahu Akbar, is “God is Great”, which sterilizes it of its spiritually enriching connotations, and renders it meaningless. But even if we were to give it the exact, or literal, translation — God is Greater — it still does not point anywhere near the shaping force it has in the soul of a Muslim who utters it when he feels the need to do so.
A Muslim would yell this supplication in unison with others, or whisper it alone in contemplative self-address, at a moment of crisis when he feels he is facing challenges larger than himself. By deciding to meet these challenges head-on, I as a Muslim would then say Allahu Akbar, God is Greater, that is, greater than any human challenge facing me, and by having Him on my side, I shall triumph.
Muslims have been chanting the words from the time they crossed the Arabian desert to conquer the Byzantine Empire 1,400 years ago, to the time they crossed the Suez Canal to conquer the Barlev Line three decades ago. And every time they did so (and ask a Muslim to explain the inexplicable mystery of it all), these Muslims never failed to feel a rush of superhuman — well, let’s call it Godly — energy surging through their whole being.
How then, I ask, do you translate these two words — in my view the two most powerfully evocatives words that any one culture has ever produced in human history — into English, or any other language? You don’t. We let them be, because some supplications come to us with divine will encoded in them and are beyond translation.
Or look at how Americans, and other native speakers of English, have come to translate, both in the media and in scholarly tomes, our concept of Jihad, and you realize, with sickening conviction, that their understanding of our culture is based on, and verbalized in, trivial pidgin. They translate Jihad simply as Holy War.
That is the problem of translation from one language to another, of transferring the speech world of one culture, along with its enigmas of cultural individuality and context of historical resonance, into another: The more radically different the two cultures that speak those two languages are, the more insurmountable the task is.
On the subject of the possible transfer (and in this case you can only “transfer” rather than “translate”) into English of Chinese philosophic concepts, the well-known American linguist I.A. Richard once wrote, in the anthology “Studies in Chinese Thought”: “We have here indeed what may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos.” And I assure you, a scholar of Richards’ stature is not given to hyperbole.
And no, Jihad does not mean Holy War. And I am sorry but I can’t translate it. Not good enough, you say? Okay, I am “very sorry”.
