---
title: The Futility of Translation
date: 1970-01-01
tags: []
techne: :wip
episteme: :speculation
---

For weeks now I want to quote a certain song. But I can't. It's in German. And I can't translate it. Not in a way that does it any justice, at least.

The song is Die Interimsliebenden by Einstürzende Neubauten. Watch it:

<%= vimeo("http://player.vimeo.com/video/36592271") %>

(BTW: I love the video. It's so amazingly meta-pretentious.)

The lyrics consist of a massive amount of puns, clever rhymes and idiosyncratic phrases that probably only make sense to someone familiar with German culture. I don't want to pull a Continental here, but it really feels like you first ought to deeply immerse yourself in the *spirit* of a culture before you can *possibly* attempt to understand just this one song.

But maybe it's worth a try anyway.

Translations have one impossibly-to-solve problem, one that classical debates like the subs vs. dubs flame wars tend to ignore. Or at least they don't make it explicit.

Yes, you can translate a layer of communication from one language into another with a reasonable level of accuracy. A textbook has typically only a single layer, only one message it wants to get across at any given time. Thus, textbooks can be translated just fine. 

But you lose once you get to multiple layers. These complex layers won't function the same way in different languages, so even though you can find a fairly good mapping between any two layers, there's one thing you won't be able to preserve - the Schelling points, i.e. the obvious or interesting points of interaction between layers. (Defining "obvious" and "interesting" is left as an exercise to the reader.)

For example, puns exploit non-obvious but powerful interactions between the sound and the meaning of a word. They work by finding a slight alteration that keeps the sound of a word mostly the same (i.e. you don't jump to a different plateau in sound-space), but also adds an association to a new meaning that is unexpected, but still *works*, is still related to the original meaning. 

There will be many such interactions in any human language, but they will be at different *points*. Unless two languages are closely related, or you'll have to rely on luck to find any overlap. Thus, to attempt a translation of a pun in context, you'd have to find a *new* pun that also works in the *same* context and is about *equally clever*. Good luck with that.

But these association themselves might add further layers by adding another meta level, e.g. by referencing the spelling of the word. The more complex they become, the more impressive - and rarer - they will be.

And then you encounter Heidegger or James Joyce.
