Hacking - Mistranslation

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Was There Ever a Radical Mistranslation?Author(s): Ian HackingSource: Analysis, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct., 1981), pp. 171-175Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis CommitteeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3327741

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WITTGENSTEIN'S OPERATOR NITTGENSTEIN'S OPERATOR N

REFERENCES

[I] D. Favrholt. An interpretationnd critiqueof Wittgenstein'sTRACTATUS Copenhagen,Munksgaard, 1967.

[2] R. Fogelin: Wittgensteinin The Argumentsof the Philosopherseries,ed. Ted Honderich,Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).

Addendum. ince writing this article I find that the confusion between the N operator andtheSheffer stroke occurs also in H. O. Mounce's book Wittgenstein'sTractatus,An Introduction(Blackwell I98I), pp. 52-3: admittedly there is some modification of the misstatement lateron in the chapter on generality.

WAS THERE EVER A RADICAL MISTRANSLATION?

ByIANHACKING

On their voyage of discovery to Australia a group of CaptainCook'ssailorscaptureda young kangarooand brought the strangecreaturebackon board their ship. No one knew what it was, so some men were sentashore to ask the natives. Whenthe sailorsreturnedthey told theirmates,'It's a kangaroo.' Many years later it was discovered that when theaboriginessaid 'kangaroo'they were not in fact naming the animal,butreplying to their questioners,'Whatdid you say?'1

THAT would be a radical mistranslation if the story were true. A radicalmistranslation is defined as follows: (i) Speakers of two very

different languages are trying to communicate. (2) A speaker of one

language says s. Speakers of the other language take him to be saying p.(3) This translation is completely wrong. Yet (4) neither party realizes it,although they continue to converse. Moreover (5) the mistranslation

persists until it is too late to correct.

Condition (i) restricts us to people who are talking to each other andexcludes the decoding of ancient texts. Condition (3) rules out mere

differences of nuance, moderate misunderstandings and misclassifica-tions that occur to all of us all the time. Since my story is about namingI shall call this kind of radical mistranslation malostension.That occurswhen (6) an expression of the first language is taken by speakers of thesecond language to name a natural kind. (7) It does nothing of the sort,but (8) the second language incorporates this expression as the name ofthe natural kind in question. (7) is intended as a strong condition.Malostensions are not just misclassifications, or the taking of the name ofan individual as the name of a class.

I cannot prove that radical mistranslations never occur. But I shallshow that some famous alleged malostensions are frauds, founded uponrumour and refuted by facts. This may matter, because of the doctrineof the indeterminacy of translation. Quine's thesis is a priori, but it

1 Quoted from The Observer(London) I973 on p. 150 of my WhyDoes LanguageMatterto Philosophy?Cambridge University Press, 1975). Many thanks to Professor J. J. C. Smartfor telling me that the story is false, and for providing me with references 2 and 3.

REFERENCES

[I] D. Favrholt. An interpretationnd critiqueof Wittgenstein'sTRACTATUS Copenhagen,Munksgaard, 1967.

[2] R. Fogelin: Wittgensteinin The Argumentsof the Philosopherseries,ed. Ted Honderich,Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).

Addendum. ince writing this article I find that the confusion between the N operator andtheSheffer stroke occurs also in H. O. Mounce's book Wittgenstein'sTractatus,An Introduction(Blackwell I98I), pp. 52-3: admittedly there is some modification of the misstatement lateron in the chapter on generality.


ByIANHACKING

On their voyage of discovery to Australia a group of CaptainCook'ssailorscaptureda young kangarooand brought the strangecreaturebackon board their ship. No one knew what it was, so some men were sentashore to ask the natives. Whenthe sailorsreturnedthey told theirmates,'It's a kangaroo.' Many years later it was discovered that when theaboriginessaid 'kangaroo'they were not in fact naming the animal,butreplying to their questioners,'Whatdid you say?'1

THAT would be a radical mistranslation if the story were true. A radicalmistranslation is defined as follows: (i) Speakers of two very

different languages are trying to communicate. (2) A speaker of one

language says s. Speakers of the other language take him to be saying p.(3) This translation is completely wrong. Yet (4) neither party realizes it,although they continue to converse. Moreover (5) the mistranslation

persists until it is too late to correct.

Condition (i) restricts us to people who are talking to each other andexcludes the decoding of ancient texts. Condition (3) rules out mere

differences of nuance, moderate misunderstandings and misclassifica-tions that occur to all of us all the time. Since my story is about namingI shall call this kind of radical mistranslation malostension.That occurswhen (6) an expression of the first language is taken by speakers of thesecond language to name a natural kind. (7) It does nothing of the sort,but (8) the second language incorporates this expression as the name ofthe natural kind in question. (7) is intended as a strong condition.Malostensions are not just misclassifications, or the taking of the name ofan individual as the name of a class.

I cannot prove that radical mistranslations never occur. But I shallshow that some famous alleged malostensions are frauds, founded uponrumour and refuted by facts. This may matter, because of the doctrineof the indeterminacy of translation. Quine's thesis is a priori, but it

1 Quoted from The Observer(London) I973 on p. 150 of my WhyDoes LanguageMatterto Philosophy?Cambridge University Press, 1975). Many thanks to Professor J. J. C. Smartfor telling me that the story is false, and for providing me with references 2 and 3.

17I7I



gains credence partly from anecdotes. We tend to feel that indeterminacyis radical mistranslation carried to the limit, where no possible informa-

tion can settle which of two incompatible translations is correct. I rejectthis plausibility argument by rebutting the anecdotes with which it

begins. The remarkable thing about human interaction is that mis-

translations are so readily cleared up.Cook's team recorded many words of a language they encountered

in the Endeavour River area of Australia. They were confident of the

spelling and meaning of only 60 of these words. 'Kangaroo' was amongthem. Later travellers did not in fact encounter the word. Hence the

story with which I began-people made up an explanation of Cook's

word. But the story is based only on the fact that few subsequenttravellers spoke with the Australian community that Cook had met.

This was apparently pointed out in a letter to an Australian newspaperin 1898, but did not become common knowledge until the work of the

anthropologist John Havilland in i972.2 He wrote up a vocabularyfor a dialect called Guugu Yamidhirr, spoken by people in just the

area that Cook landed. Their word for kangaroos is "ganurru," where I

use "n" for a phoneme which is a bit like "ng." Kangaroo, in short,was no malostension, although perhaps our spelling is the result of poor

phonetics.There is a printed conversation in which Quine and Putnam mention

two other alleged malostensions:

Quine: David Lewis pointed out a nice exampleto me [... ] There was,in the nineteenth century, a French naturalistnamed Pierre Sonnerat,who was doing field work in Madagascar.A lemur went up a tree, andSonneratasked a native "Qu' est que c'est?" The native said "in dri,"which in Malagasymeans "There he goes." Sonneratthought that thenative understood his question and had given the answer, and the

animal is known as the indri to this day.Putnam: That's like the word 'vasistas'.

Quine: Right. The Frenchword for transomis "Wasist das".3

Putnam and Quine do not actually assert that vasistas is a malos-

tension, but others have told me that it is. Yet it is hard to imagine the

circumstances. Were some German tourists pointing at a French

transom, asking 'Was ist das?' Did some French people overhear that

and think, 'Hah, that little window must be called a vasistas'? One can

hardly credit that. In fact the French word was first written, in French,with German spelling. It is thus used by the French mining engineer

J. F. C. Morand in a I776 book chiefly describing foreign equipment for

mines. He speaks of a Wass ist das and means a little grille, built into a

2 R. M. W. Dixon, TheLanguagesf Australia (CambridgeUniversity Press, I980) pp. 8-9.3 Synthese 7 (1974) p. 500.

ANALYSIS7z




door and which can be opened to see what is outside or pass small

objects,messages,etc., in or out.

Thus the 'What is that?' does not have the force of a question,namely,what is this funnylittle window or opening. Rathervasistass a

word intended to convey a function. The vasistas s the grille throughwhichyou look to find out 'What s that?' .e., whatis thatthing outside,who is knocking,who is there?

In I784 one finds Wasistdass the name of aproposedsmallwindowinan enclosedplatformattached o aMongolfierballoon. The passengerscouldbe completelyprotected,but could openthe Wasistasrom time to

time to see the view.4 The spelling of the word soon became com-

pletely gallicized.The vasistashad been a grille to separatethe housefrom outsidersbut by I793 popularjusticegave it the reverserole. The

lunettein the guillotine was jocularlycalledthe vasistas as in: Passera

teteauvasistas!No malostensionhere.Indri is a little trickier. I suspect that we have exactly the same

situationaswith 'kangaroo,'namelya word usedin a dialectencountered

by Sonnerat,but not noticed by latertravellers.Bewareof thinkingthatsuch writers were careless. Cook was reporting back to Sir JosephBanks,one of the most criticalNewtonianinductivistsof all time. Cook

did not relyon casualreportsof his sailors(asin the storywith which Ibegan). His team sifted all their data and settled on only 60 words,

including 'kangaroo'of which they were sure. Likewise Sonneratwas

no tripperwatchinglemursscoot up trees (as Quine'sversion tends to

imply).He was one of the most detailedof reportersandit is on worklike his that Cuvier was glad to rely.

The Oxford English Dictionarydoes assert that 'indri' is a malos-tension. The evidence is provided by a missionaryfrom Madagascarwriting, in 1893, in a magazinethat he edited. Rev. Sibreesays of the

short-tailed emurthat,

theirnativename s Babakbto,iterallyFather-child'or boy),not Indri,as saidby Sonnerat,who discovered he species.Indri or indry)s a

Malagasywordmeaning lo!' or 'behold!'andwas probablymistaken

by him for a nameand otherEuropeansor a name,whenthe nativesexclaimed: Indry zy!"("Therehe is!")5

Wasthisthen theperfectmalostension?First et us get our authorities

straight.All modern

etymologicaldictionaries fall back on the old

Oxford English Dictionary and its citation of Sibree. But in fact the

above quotation from Sibree is an unacknowledged word-for-wordtranslationof the observationmadein I868 by Fran9oisPollen, another

4 Gunnar von Proschwitz, 'En marge du Bloch-Wartburg,' Studia Neophilologica36

(1964) p. 329.5 J. Sibree, AntanarivoAnnual andMadagascarMagatine 5 (1893) p. 83.

I73



missionaryand naturalist.6Now whether we owe the story to Rev.Sibree or Father Pollen, Quine has certainlycapturedits spirit. We

imaginethat Pierre Sonneratvisits Madagascarn I780 andaskswhat acertain lemur is called. He gets indrior somesuch in reply, and theanimal scoots up a tree. We get the pictureof Sonneratnever gettingmuch closer to an indri-they areforevergetting away.

But in fact, as Sonnerat ells us7, indri areveryeasilytamed,andin

the Southernpart of the island are used in hunting, much as we use

dogs. Far from just overhearinga cry of indri he asks what it means,and is told that it meanslittle man of the woods. So Sonneratnot onlyheardthe word, but discussedit. He laterprinted his engraving of a

nice fat indri eating a... banana?Might that be a fanciful recon-structionof a glimpsedanimal that he never got close to? No, he took

one aboardship and laterpresented t to his king. For a while it playedin the royal gardenand was later stuffedand put in the Paris natural

historymuseum.You maysee it thereto this very day.None of this proves conclusivelythat Sonneratgot the nameright.

You will not find thewordindrin dictionariestranslatingromMalagasyinto Europeantongues. But takinga hint from the kangaroo story, we

may ask if Sonneratgot the phonemes slightly wrong. Sure enough:

thenineteenthcenturydictionariesdo have aword endrinaora speciesoflemur.8This might, of course, be a back-formation rom French, but

given that Sonneratwasvisiting a verybig islandthathadlong been on

Araband then on European raderoutes,andgiven thathe was a giftednaturalistwith able companions, t seemslikely that we can rely on his

report. Even if the word endrinawas not widespread,the people he

talked to used something like endrinaor the lemur in question. Once

again, there was no malostension.

Certainly hereare errorsof understanding hat do persist,but they

contrastwith what I call radicalmistranslation.Hereare two examples.

6 F. P. L. Pollen, 'Notices sur quelques autres mammiferesabitent Madagascaret les

lies voisines,' in Recherchesur la FaunedeMadagascart de ses dependances'apres es dicouvertesdeFranfoisP. L. Pollenet D. C. van Dam. 2me partie. Mammiferes t oiseauxpar H. Schlegel t

FranfoisP. L. Pollen.Leiden i868, p. 20.7 Pierre Sonnerat, Voyageaux IndesOrientales t a la Chine, ait par ordre du Roi depuis

I774jusqu'en 1781, Paris, 1782, Vol. II pp. 141-143, and Plate 88. Second edition, I806, Vol.

IV, pp. 89-92. Collection eplanches ourservirau voyage ux IndesOrientales t a la Chine,Paris,I806,Planche86.

8 The first dictionary or Malagasyand a European anguageis A Dictionaryf the

MalagasyLanguage,Part I, English-Malagasy, by J. J. Freeman; Part II, Malagasy sy English,

byD. Johns;Antanarivo, ondonMissionary ociety,I835. Freeman rovidesno entries n

English for lemurs. Johns does have the word endrinawhich he translatesas a kind of monkey.The next English dictionary is A New MalagaseyEnglishDictionary,J. Richardson, Antana-

rivo, London Missionary Society, 1885. Here endrinas translated as a kind of lemur and

other sources confirm this. We infer that the earlierEnglish missionaries did not see that the

lemur is not a kind of monkey, but, at the time they were writing, endrinawas current in

Malagasy. (At that time there were virtually no true monkeys on the island.) Sibree's own

copy of the Freeman dictionary is now in the library of Yale University. It has alternatingblank pages so that the user can enlarge the list of entries in the field. Sibree made few

additions, and none of a naturalistic sort.

I74 ANALYSIS



WAS THERE EVER A RADICAL MISTRANSLATION? 175

Among the Malagasywords that now applyto lemurs we findgidroand

rajako orjako). A gidro is a smallishgrey lemur.The word is derived

from the Swahilingedere hich meansmonkey. There are no lemursinmost of Africa,nor were thereany monkeysnative to Madagascar.Soit was some sort of mistake when tradersspeaking Swahili called alemurby the nameof ngedere,ut it was an errorof classification,not oftranslation.As forjako, it too, ought strictlyto apply only to monkeys.An English sea captainhad a pet monkey that escapedand the sailorsran afterit, calling it by name. 'Jack! Jack!' they cried, and the namestuck.9

StanfordUniversity ? IAN HACKING 1981

9 That,at anyrate, s whatRichardson's885 dictionary ays.

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Hacking - Mistranslation