{"id":1544,"date":"2021-05-28T12:14:43","date_gmt":"2021-05-28T11:14:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/cmems\/?p=1544"},"modified":"2021-05-28T12:14:43","modified_gmt":"2021-05-28T11:14:43","slug":"translating-the-salmon-leap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/cmems\/2021\/05\/28\/translating-the-salmon-leap\/","title":{"rendered":"Translating the Salmon Leap"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Anna Strowe<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not often that you get to write about a Sylvester Stallone movie and medieval literature in the same paper, but I\u2019ll definitely take the opportunity when it comes! In an article for the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies<\/em>, I recently wrote about a kind of weird problem in translation: what happens when you actually have no idea what something means, and no way of finding out. In talking about translation, we usually start with the premise that the translator knows what everything means, and that if they don\u2019t, there are ways of doing research to find out (e.g. reading up on tungsten inert-gas welding, or asking a native speaker what a particular idiom means in context). After all, how can you translate something if you don\u2019t know what it means?<\/p>\n

There are a few situations, though, where we need ways of thinking about precisely that question. One of them, and this is mainly what I focus on in the article, is when we find ourselves at such a distance from a language and culture that we have simply lost knowledge about what something might mean. By that, I don\u2019t just mean familiarity\u2014we can still know what a quill pen is, for example, even though we don\u2019t have a lot of familiarity with them personally. I mean cases where we simply don’t know what something is or what its significance is. Anthropologists and archeologists come up against this sort of frequently: finding an object and not knowing what it\u2019s for, and it\u2019s sort of a running joke that when they do, they simply announce that it is for \u2018ceremonial purposes\u2019. But in translation, we can\u2019t just speculate about what something is; we have to actually write something down as a translation, and then deal either with the idea that we may have made something up, or that the reader won\u2019t know what\u2019s going on (and might think that this means that the translation isn\u2019t any good!).<\/p>\n

I started this project with two medieval Celtic \u2018things\u2019 that scholars haven\u2019t pinned down: the \u2018salmon leap\u2019 from the Old Irish Ulster Cycle and the \u2018speckled ox\u2019 from the Middle Welsh poem \u2018Preiddeu Annwn\u2019 (the Spoils of Annwn). The first is something that the hero C\u00fa Chulainn does a few times, and we know the words \u2018salmon\u2019 and \u2018leap\u2019, but we don\u2019t know if there is any actual movement that it\u2019s referring to. The second is something that\u2019s listed in the poem as a way to show how weird a group of people are: \u2018They don\u2019t even know about the speckled ox!\u2019 Well, as Craig Davis (who teaches Middle Welsh at the university I went to for my undergrad) says, unfortunately, neither do we.<\/p>\n

The salmon leap turned up again unexpectedly while I was doing some research on the ownership of a particular book for an unrelated library special collections project. I had a family name, and so I was trying to find out more about them, when I found a genealogy that included the startling fact that one of the family members could perform the salmon leap, and then it described something that sounds sort of like a kip-up backflip. That started me thinking about the fact that we don\u2019t actually know what kind of movement it was in the Old Irish literature, even though we have an idea that it\u2019s a sort of impressive jumping thing (and that\u2019s how it\u2019s used later on in Scots as well).<\/p>\n

I connect this in the article to a philosophical question about how we know what any word means, which was posed by the linguist and philosopher W.V.O. Quine under the name \u2018radical translation\u2019. His idea of radical is not about politics, of course, but about how fundamental it is (\u2018radical\u2019 being a word that etymologically has to do with \u2018roots\u2019). I connect this to another concept from translation studies, which is the presence of \u2018culturally specific items\u2019, which are things that exist in one culture and are difficult to translate into another language because they don\u2019t exist in that other culture. Usually, we can at least describe or explain the item, talk about why it\u2019s important, and what function it serves. But in a radical sense, we wouldn\u2019t even be able to do that, and this is what I argue is happening in these cases with medieval concepts that we have lost track of.<\/p>\n

And then this\u00a0 connects, in a fascinating way, I think, with what happens in science fiction, where an author has actually invented things that don\u2019t exist in the (non-fictional) culture of the language that they\u2019re writing in. Some of these medieval examples (although not the ox) are effectively science fiction: impossible or made up things that happen to characters in the mythological past. Which means two things. First, sometimes that as long as the main idea gets across (the \u2018salmon leap\u2019, whatever it actually looks like, is a really impressive and weird jump), a modern audience might actually understand just as much as a medieval one, because this thing doesn\u2019t actually exist.\u00a0 And second, that I could explain this with reference to the Sylvester Stallone movie Demolition Man<\/em>, in which there\u2019s a running joke about the fact that Stallone\u2019s character, who has awoken in the future from cryogenic suspension, doesn\u2019t know how to use the \u2018three seashells\u2019 that have replaced toilet paper. Of course, we don\u2019t know either, and because it\u2019s made up, it actually has no meaning apart from its function as a humorous element that helps remind us that this is the future, not the present.<\/p>\n

If you want to pursue this further, here are some references.<\/p>\n

The article itself:<\/p>\n