54. ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE (Part-4)

Go to Amsterdam or Antwerp or Oslo and you will find that almost everyone

speaks superb English, and yet if you venture into almost any bookstore in those

cities you will usually find only a small selection of books in English. For the

most part, people want to read works in their own language. Equally they want

to watch television in their own language. In the coastal areas of Holland and

Belgium, where most people can both speak English and receive British

television broadcasts, most still prefer to watch local programs even when they

are palpably inferior to the British product (i.e., almost invariably). Similarly,two English-language satellite networks in Europe, Sky TV and Super Channel,

had some initial success in West Germany, but as soon as two competing satellite

networks were set up transmitting more or less the same programs but dubbed

into German, the English-language networks' joint share slumped to less than i

percent—about as much as could be accounted for by English-speaking natives

living in West Germany. The simple fact is that German viewers, even when they

speak English well, would rather watch Dallas dubbed badly into German than

in the original English. And who can blame them?

In many places English is widely resented as a symbol of colonialism. In India,

where it is spoken by no more than 5 percent of the population at the very most,

the constitution was written in English and English was adopted as a foreign

language not out of admiration for its linguistic virtues but as a necessary

expedient. In a country in which there are 1,652 languages and dialects,

including 15 official ones, and in which no one language is spoken by more than

16 percent of the population, a neutral outside language has certain obvious

practicalities. Much the same situation prevails in Malaysia, where the native

languages include Tamil, Portuguese, Thai, Punjabi, twelve versions of Chinese,

and about as many of Malay. Traditionally, Malay is spoken in the civil service,

Chinese in business, and English in the professions and in education. Yet these

countries are almost always determined to phase English out. India had hoped to

eliminate it as an official language by 1980 and both Malaysia and Nigeria have

been trying to do likewise since the 1970s.

There is certainly a good case for adopting an international language, whether it

be English or Malaysian or Thraco-Phrygian.

Translating is an enormously costly and time-consuming business.

An internal survey by the European Community in 1987 found that it was

costing it $15 a word, $500 a page, to translate its documents.

One in every three employees of the European Community is engaged in

translating papers and speeches. A third of all administration costs—$700

million in 1987—was taken up with paying for translators and interpreters.

Every time a member is added to the EC, as most recently with Greece, Spain,

and Portugal, the translation problems multiply exponentially. Under the Treaty

of Rome each member country's language must be treated equally, and it is not easy even in multilingual Brussels to find linguists who can translate from Dutch

into Portuguese or from Danish into Greek.

A more compelling reason for an international language is the frequency and

gravity of misunderstandings owing to difficulties of translation. The 1905 draft

of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated

the English control and French controller as synonyms when in fact the English

form means "to dominate or hold power" while the French means simply "to

inspect." The treaty nearly fell apart as a result. The Japanese involvement in

World War II may have been inadvertently prolonged when the Domei news

agency, the official government information service, rendered the word

mokusatsu as "ignore" when the sense intended was that of "reserving a reply

until we have had time to consider the matter more carefully."

That may seem a remarkably wide chasm between meanings, but Japanese is

particularly susceptible to such discrepancy because it is at once so dense and

complex and yet so full of subtlety.

It has been suggested, in fact, that it is probably not possible to give accurate

simultaneous Japanese-English translations because of the yawning disparity

between how the two languages function.

To take just one instance, in Japanese it is considered impolite to end a sentence

with an unexpected flourish; in English it is a sign of oratorical dexterity of the

first order. English speakers, particularly in the context of business or political

negotiations, favor bluntness. The Japanese, by contrast, have a cultural aversion

to directness and are often reluctant to give a simple yes or no answer. When a

Japanese says "Kangae sasete kudasai" ("Let me think about it") or "Zensho

shimasu" ("I will do my best") he actually means "no." This has led many

business people, and on at least one occasion the president of the United States,

to go away thinking they had an agreement or understanding that did not actually

exist.

This problem of nuance and ambiguity can affect the Japanese themselves.

According to John David Morley in Pictures from the Water Trade, when

Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to announce the Japanese surrender at the

end of World War II, he used such vague and arcane language that most of his

audience, although listening attentively, didn't have the first idea what he was talking about. In 1988, a member of parliament, Kazuhisa Inoue, began pressing

the government to form a committee to come up with ways of making

parliamentary debate less dense, suggesting that the Japanese habit of hiding

behind rhetoric was heightening the reputation of the "sneaky Japanese.

Having said all that, we have a well-practiced gift for obfuscation in the English-

speaking world. According to U.S. News & World Report [February 18, 1985],

an unnamed American airline referred in its annual report to an "involuntary

conversion of a 727 . – It meant that it had crashed. At least one hospital,

according to the London Times, has taken to describing a death as "a negative

patient-care outcome." The Pentagon is peerless at this sort of thing. It once

described toothpicks as "wooden inter dental simulators" and tents as "frame-

supported tension structures." Here is an extract from the Pentagon's Department

of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type z sandwich cookie:

"The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling between

them. The weight of the cookie shall be not less than 21.5 grams and filling

weight not less than 6.4 grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a

color ranging from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711… . The

color comparisons shall be made under north sky daylight with the objects held

in such a way as to avoid specular reactance." And so it runs on for fifteen

densely typed pages. Every single item the Pentagon buys is similarly detailed:

plastic whistles (sixteen pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty

pages).

Although English is capable of waffle and obfuscation, it is nonetheless

generally more straightforward than eastern languages and less verbose than

other western ones. As Jespersen notes, where we can say "first come, first

served," the Danes must say "den der kommer first til mollem far forst malet."