Translating takes more than knowing the equivalent word.

I HAVE never been a fan of sporting activities of any kind. Yes, I can generally tolerate 10 minutes of netball (watching, not playing) but as a teenager, I avoided sports activities like the plague, always thinking up diversionary tactics that would take me away from the field and back into the safety of the classroom. The 2006 Winter Olympics, however, is something that has always stuck in my mind, but for purely linguistic reasons.

Most of us would probably have forgotten by now but the 2006 Olympics was officially known as “Torino 2006”. I remember feeling rather astounded at this bit of information as I had no idea where Torino was. Granted, geography was not particularly exciting when I was in school, but at least I knew where Salt Lake City, the host of the 2002 Olympics, was. The location, of course, was etched in my memory due to my childhood crush on and fascination with Salt Lake City’s most illustrious son, Donny Osmond (who could forget that toothpaste-ad-worthy smile?).

Now, going back to Torino, I really had no idea where it was, except that it must be somewhere with snow and ice. It was only after rummaging through the sports sections that it descended upon me that Torino was actually Turin. Granted, my knowledge of Turin is limited to the fact that it is located in Italy but at least the name “Turin” was somewhere there in the depths of my temporal lobe.

Where translation is concerned, it helps to know that some places are sometimes known by different names in different languages. Just as the place we know as Turin is actually called Torino in Italian, Warsaw is actually Warszawa in Polish and Prague is Praha in the Czech language. In the field of linguistics, this is related to the concept of exonym and endonym. Exonym is a name of a place that is not used within that place by the local inhabitants. The name that is actually used by the locals would be the endonym. Therefore, Torino is an endonym. Italians call the place Torino, never Turin, although it refers to the same place. Turin then is the English exonym of the place.

Perhaps the best example of a country with various exonyms would be Cote d’Ivoire, which is generally known by its English exonym, Ivory Coast. The interesting thing is that the various exonyms derive from the literal translation of the words “ivory” and “coast” into the various languages. The country is known in Finnish as Norsunluurannikko, from norsunluur (ivory) and rannikko (coast), in Norwegian as Elfenbenskysten, from elfenbens (ivory) and kysten (coast), in Hungarian as Elefantscontpart, from elefantscont (ivory) and part (coast), in Dutch as Ivoorkust from ivoor (ivory) and kust (coast), in Icelandic as Filabeinsstrondin, from filabeins (ivory) and strondin (coast) and in Spanish as Costa de Marfil, from costa (coast) and marfil (ivory). The country is actually called Pantai Gading in Indonesian. Although names are generally left untranslated, my translation students are often made aware of the concept of exonym and endonym, as this may come in handy when they are actually doing translations.

Although translation generally involves two or more different languages – called interlingual translation – I often include in my own lectures the topic of intralingual translation, that is, translation that takes place within a language.

Most of us, without realising it, have been involved in situations involving intralingual translations, where words in English need to be rephrased into much simpler English before they can be understood. This normally happens when we encounter people who speak a particularly strange “dialect” of the English language, making them totally incomprehensible to the rest of the human race. Those involved in new technology often use a rather odd form of English to describe gadgets to the less technologically savvy sections of humanity, and it is precisely this kind of language that requires intralingual translation. For example, when a CD player is described as having “a hybrid pulse D/A converter”, it means nothing more than the fact that when you put a CD in the CD player, you’ll get music.

Doctors are among the worst offenders, and they become repeat offenders many times over in the course of their career. For example, if you go and see the doctor with a bad cough and he says that “auscultation would be a good diagnostic technique”, there is really no cause for alarm. Far from doing a major surgical procedure on you, the doctor is only going to use a stethoscope to see what’s wrong with you.

And if your doctor comes to you bearing a facial expression more often reserved for those with terminal illnesses and solemnly tells you that because of “increased abdominal girth” you have to be put on “a special diet involving reduced consumption of nutrients”, it basically means that you have grown fat and therefore have to eat less.

While flipping through his lengthy notes, if the doctor might tell you that your “abdominal distension is due to the lack of masticatory efficiency”, rest assured you’re not suffering from a viral infection that’s threatening to wipe out the entire human race. Instead, the doctor is merely telling you that you have a swollen abdomen because you’ve not been chewing your food properly.

If I didn’t know better, I would think that people in the medical fraternity are involved in a sordid communication conspiracy, attempting to set up an exclusive community made up only of people with similar linguistic (dis)ability, and this they do by speaking in a dialect only comprehensible to those who have had similar training, and by recruiting only those who speak the same strange and unintelligible dialect (people who have this irreversible linguistic defect and possess bad handwriting are given priority).

        Dr. Haslina Haroon is a lecturer in Translation Studies at the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Pulau Pinang.

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