3. Do you know any funny stories / anecdotes about translators / interpreters? Share them with the class.

Now read the jokes below. Is there any truth in them?

Deadlines

Translator gets 400 words to translate. Client: How long will it take? Translator: About a week. Client: A whole week for just 400 words? God created the world in 6 days. Translator: Then just take a look at this world and afterwards take a look at my translation.

Help!

Two translators on a ship are talking. "Can you swim?" asks one. "No" says the other, "but I can shout for help in nine languages."

To make a long story short...

A missionary goes to Africa to visit a community, a very old, primitive tribal community. He gives a long sermon. For half an hour he tells a long anecdote, and then the interpreter stands up. He speaks only four words and everyone laughs uproariously. The missionary is puzzled. How is it possible that a story half an hour long can be translated in four words. What kind of amazing language is this? Puzzled, he says to the interpreter, "You have done a miracle. You have spoken only four words. I don't know what you said, but how can you translate my story, which was so long, into only four words?"

The interpreter says, "Story too long, so I say, 'He says joke - laugh!' "

READING 1. Ambassadors of the Word

1. You are going to read the text under the title ‘Ambassadors of the Word’. Who could be called an ambassador of the word? Why? Discuss with your partner.

2. Look through the text quickly and check your suggestions. Ambassadors of the Word

by David Lehman with Theodore Stanger in Rome and Barbara Rose in London

Translators are the invisible men of literature. Overlooked and underpaid, they "require the self-effacing disposition of saints," in the words of writer and translator Alastair Reid. Without them, most readers would have to do without the Bible and the "Iliad", Dante and Tolstoy, Freud and Kafka. Yet for every hundred readers who were captivated by Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" - to cite just one recent best-selling literary knockout - are there even five who recognize their debt to William Weaver, the book's translator into English? Probably not, and for a very simple reason: the better the translator has done his job, the less aware we are of his work. The ideal translation resembles a window through which we can behold the original text.

Though little known to the public, a handful of translators is recognized by their peers as the elite in the English language. Heading the list are Weaver translating from Italian, Richard Howard from French, Gregory Rabassa from Spanish and Portuguese, and Ralph Manheim from German and French. They are a rare breed. They can't be in it for the glory (there isn't much) or the money (no one's going to get rich at the going rate of $50 per thousand words); it must be love of literature and a sense of loyalty to languages. "A person with very frugal tastes could live on translation." says Rabassa, 64, the foremost translator of Latin American fiction. "Other than that, no."

Penury is only one of the pitfalls. One irony of the translator's lot is that the only reader qualified to judge a translation is the very reader for whom that translation is unnecessary.

A few years ago it became fashionable to talk of a "global village" created by advanced communications, but the Biblical Tower of Babel remains a better metaphor for our linguistic condition. Rabassa offers a charming illustration. "A rooster sounds the same in Mexico and in New York," he says. "But when you read about roosters crowing in a book, in the United States he says 'cock-a-doodle-do' and in Mexico he says 'ki-ki-ri-ki.' So we've even made the roosters crow differently."

Critic George Steiner devoted his book "After Babel" to the implications of "the magnificently prodigal, redundant multiplicity of mutually incomprehensible human tongues." Steiner reached a grand conclusion: that in order to understand one another, we automatically translate thoughts into words and words into other words, even when we're speaking the same lingo. "Inside or between languages." Steiner asserts, "human communication equals translation."

If that is so, it would be fair to call our premier translators the unacknowledged ambassadors of the word, cultural emissaries who cross linguistic frontiers with ease and almost convince us that the book we're reading was actually written in English.