There are too many words for scavenger in Czech but none of them was good enough for Star Wars: Adventures in Undertranslation Dominik Lukes Follow Dec 22, 2015 · 5 min read

Warning: May contain spoilers for the easily spoiled.

The excellent Language Log has a running beef with the internet and journalism meme ‘No word for X in language Y’. And they are not wrong. This meme does not come out of a nuanced linguistic analysis but rather an exoticising urge of a writer who grew up on National Geographic and wants to do more than write boring opinion pieces on commodity price increases in Bulgaria. Those people are too different from us, no wonder there’s something funny about them. I’m not ethnocentric, I’m a serious ethnographer. And that’s nonsense. There are loads of differences between cultures and whether the culture has or has not a word for something is generally only of passing interest.

But the Language Log’s standard counter attack is to look the word in a dictionary and that gets you exactly nowhere. In this, the National Geographic wannabes are onto something even if they don’t know what to do with it. It’s virtually impossible to translate between too languages with perfect word economy while keeping all the meanings and intents of the original. Each language sees the world in subtly different ways and goes about saying things through all sorts of round-abouts. Languages makes different sorts of commitments and leave other things implied or simply hidden.

A good chunk of the words we say or write are there just to hold the text together or to dress it up in the pretensions of this or other style. And each language has developed its own ways of doing that. Sure, they’ve borrowed a lot of things from each other and inherited others from the good ole days but by the time they’re done with the borrowing, they’ve put more twists and turns on them than a tie-dyed T-Shirt.

This is not some hard linguistic relativism maintaining fundamental incommensurability between languages. This is the daily hurt and pain of the jobbing translator. The better they understand the source language, the more tears they have to shed when saying good-bye to a beautiful allusion or a side presupposition just to preserve the word count on a form or trying not to expand a novel into a saga. A good translator can generally express or describe anything given enough space or time but such luxuries are afforded to few. A kingdom for a footnote! Such is the dying gasp of the hero translator charging into the battle of languages on their word processor, monitor half-obscured by stacks of dictionaries with broken spines.

That’s if they care. Or notice. Not all translators are noble knights. The smart ones know that sometimes you have to leave a meaning behind. If centuries of translation and undertranslation have shown us anything, it is that perfect translation is impossible. We’ve built a whole religion on a book translated from a translation. A cardinal sin! God (we hope) knows what the original meanings were. The truth is, no translation is perfect but most are good enough or just fine. Virtually no two words between a pair of languages match up in all aspects. But we can generally train translators to get close enough. And part of this training is to give up. You can’t convey everything. Just focus on the key things. (Which is why machine translation is unlikely to be very good any time soon at translating complete sentences, let alone full texts.)

I don’t know if the person translating the new Star Wars film and cutting it down to subtitles was a translator knight or knave. People doing these jobs are usually shackled down by all sorts of constraints — such as how much text can you fit on a screen for audience to read while also paying attention to the action on screen. Not many.

One of the (main) characters starts their arc as a scavenger, ripping out old parts from dead space ships. And when they get into trouble, they get called names. One of the insults hurled at them was something like: ‘Why should we care about you, you’re just a scavenger.’ But the Czech translator chose to say ‘you’re just a nobody (zero/nula)’. What’s going on, I thought. Is there no word for scavenger in Czech? I couldn’t come up with one quickly enough in my head but later the dictionary showed me that there are loads.

But this bounty was about as kind to me as mutineers to captain Bligh. None of them really described what the character did or what the insulting person meant. Most of them referred to cleaning and two described animal scavengers who eat what they scavenge. None implied a person scavenging bits of technology and most emphatically not eating them. I went and asked on a Czech translation board which came up with a few more equivalents that got me closer but still not close enough.

I concluded that it didn’t matter. What the insult was meant to convey was: you’re insignificant, what you do means nothing, you are no threat to us, you are nothing. And ‘You’re nobody’ or ‘You’re a zero’ does that job admirably. And it fit in the context. But we lost the allusion to what made the character insignificant in the eyes of their accuser. It didn’t hide any meanings because we already knew about scavenging. We just didn’t have a good word to describe it. But here, in the heat of the ass-kicking which the scavenger was about to deliver to the nay-sayer (I did say Spoilers!), it wasn’t important. We got all we needed out of those big white letters on the screen. We got the point, and moved on.

So, what did we learn today? You can actually say ‘There’s no word for X’ about almost any word in any language even if the dictionary is bursting with eager counterparts. The slight shifts in the direction of travel, like refraction through swirling water, will get you in the end. Looking at one language through the lens of another will always create distortions of all sorts. But it won’t make us blind to what the other language is trying to say. It may even help us see more clearly. In as much as mutual understanding is possible between people, we can usually solve for ‘no word for X’. But just like with any efforts at communication between people, it may be through a painful process of negotiation and fine tuning. It may take a few tries and even, if the Gods smile upon us, a footnote or two.