In his article, Deutscher reported on the possibility that languages shapes how a speaker thinks. In a limited number of ways, at least. His observations are based only on the difference between how speakers think about gender, space and other hidden rules governed by a language’s grammatical rules. The examples he gave do not apply to the difference between English and Japanese though, so here I will try to extend his argument to how the two languages use pronouns differently. In English, a person can get away with saying “I” without providing more personal information, whereas in Japanese a person must choose between an array of first-person pronouns, each of which convey the gender, status and other information about the speaker. In English, a person can just address their listeners by the second-person pronoun “you”, whereas in Japanese the listeners are usually addressed by their names, titles or roles, or be omitted from the sentence altogether. Deutscher would argue that Japanese requires its speakers to reveal and understand more information about each other than English does.
Why does it matter to us translators, then, that the people who wrote source texts have a different habit of thinking that differs from the habit shared by our readers? It connects to the problem of literal translation. If sentences from Japanese were translated as is into English, the readers may be distracted by fragments that appear unnatural, conveniently explained by Deutscher’s argument. The differing habits should also help a translator decide whether it is suitable to modify source texts to sound more natural to the readers. It would be acceptable to replace names, titles and roles with generic pronouns if they sound more natural to an English-speaking ear, for example.
- Marcus
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