FOOD FOR THE
N.R.F.
673
and reference-a bigger task than it may seem if one forgets the
technological, legal, medical, and other special vocabularies that "cul–
ture" now draws on, and the innumerable languages that the world
now recognizes. The institute's next duty would be to elaborate canons,
appoint a teaching staff, prepare manuals, and devise a curriculum.
When properly equipped, like any other school, it could accept stu–
dents, train them, and finally certify them, both at large and for
specified languages. The staff, aided by graduates returning for ad–
vanced study, would in time be expected to produce the handbooks
and lexicons that are still wanting, and perhaps to exert a steadily
increasing critical pressure on those who write and publish.
Meanwhile, every reader of translated matter must continue to
be on
his
guard.
It
will not do to think that grave misunderstandings
occur only as isolated and dramatic events, like the one Churchill
reports in
his
war book, when the verb "to table" a suggestion, mean–
ing opposite things to the group, nearly split an Anglo-American mil–
itary council. Nor is
it
only the Japanese language, with its surfeit of
homonyms, which runs the risk of fatal ambiguity, as in the famous
"Mokusatsu Mistake."1 The passage from one tongue to another al–
ways entails danger, even in a library, even in a bank-as I recently
discovered from a friend's inquiry: didn't
en provenance des Etats–
Unis
applied to goods mean "originating in the United States"? This
ancient firm had always assumed that it did, but now a question had
arisen. Very properly, too, I had to admit, since the French phrase
i'mplies nothing about origin;
all
it says is "corning from." Yet prov–
enance by itself, in both languages, commonly suggests an ultimate
source. This is but another proof of the generality that all translation
depends on verbal tact, and that consequently no such thing as an
IBM
translating machine is possible: it would be as unsatisfactory as
what we now have.
When I am tempted to console myself with the thought that
things
cannot
be as bad as I make out, that I must see trouble mag–
nified from being too close to it, I take down from the shelf a volume
from a respectable encyclopedia which, until a recent revision, thirty
years overdue, included translated articles by foreign authorities. Those
1 On this, see William
J.
Coughlin in
Harper's
for March 1953; and as
regards the general problem of East-West intellectual exchange, Donald Keene:
"On Appearing in Japanese Translation,"
Twentieth Century,
September 1'953.
