In his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote the following about how to translate the term "Jabberwocky" which may have implications for untranslated words in the Book of Mormon:
Translations
of “Jabberwocky”
Imagine native speakers of
English, French, and German, all of whom have excellent command of their
respective native languages, and all of whom enjoy wordplay in their own language.
Would their symbol networks be similar on a local level, or on a global level?
Or is it meaningful to ask such a question? The question becomes concrete when
you look at the preceding translations of Lewis Carroll’s famous “Jabberwocky”.
I chose this example because it
demonstrates, perhaps better than an example in ordinary prose, the problem of
trying to find “the same node” in two different networks which are, on some level
of analysis, extremely nonisomorphic. In ordinary language, the task of
translation is more straightforward, since to each word or phrase in the
original language, there can usually be found a corresponding word or phrase in
the new language. By contrast, in a poem of this type, many “words” do not
carry ordinary meaning, but act purely as exciters of nearby symbols. However,
what is nearby in one language may be remote in another.
Thus, in the brain of a native
speaker of English, “slithy” probably activates such symbols as “slimy”, “slither”,
“slippery”, “lithe”, and “sly”, to varying extents. Does “lubricilleux” do the
corresponding thing in the brain of a Frenchman? What indeed would be “the
corresponding thing”? Would it be to activate symbols which are the ordinary
translation of those words? What if there is no word, real or fabricated, which
will accomplish that? Or what if a word does exist, but is very
intellectual-sounding and Latinate (“lubricilleux”), rather than earthy and
Anglo-Saxon (“slithy”)? Perhaps “huilasse” would be better than “lubricilleux”?
Or does the Latin origin of the word “lubricilleux” nt make itself felt to a
speaker of French in the way that it would if it were an English word (“lubricilious”,
perhaps)?
An interesting feature of the translation
into French is the transposition into the present tense. To keep it in the past
would make some unnatural turns of phrase necessary, and the present tense has
a much fresher flavor in French than the past. The translator sensed that this
would be “more appropriate”—in some ill-defined yet compelling sense—and made
the switch. Who can say whether remaining faithful to the English tense would
have been better?
In the German version, the droll
phrase “er an-zu-denken-fing” occurs; it does not correspond to any English
original. It is a playful reversal of words, whose flavor vaguely resembles
that of the English phrase “he out-to-ponder set”, if I may hazard a reverse
translation. Most likely this funny turnabout of words was inspired by the
similar playful reversal in the English of one line earlier: “So rested he by
the Tumtum tree”, It corresponds, yet doesn’t correspond.
Incidentally, why did the Tumtum
tree get changed into an “arbre Té-té” in French? Figure it out for yourself.
The word “manxome” in the original
whose “x” imbues it with many rich overtones, is weakly rendered in German by “manchsam”,
which back-translates into English as “maniful”. The French “manscant” also
lacks the manifold overtones of “manxome”. There is no end to the interest of
this kind of translation task.
When confronted with such an
example, one realizes that it is utterly impossible to make an exact
translation. Yet even in this pathologically difficult case of translation,
there seems to be some rough equivalence obtainable. Why is this so, if there
really is no isomorphism between the brains of people who will read the
different versions? The answer is that there is a kind of rough isomorphism,
partly global, partly local, between the brain of all the readers and these
three poems. (Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden
Braid [New York: Basic Books, 1979, 1999], 372-73)
Further Reading:
Jerry Grover on "cureloms" and "cumoms" in the Book of Mormon
John A. Tvedtnes, "Untranslated Words in the Book of Mormon"
