'Cette phrase en français est difficile à traduire en anglais'

When I recently talked about Inaccurate localization can make you bust out laughing, I found myself thinking about one of the very early Metamagical Themas columns in Scientific American written by Douglas R. Hofstadter, where (in a later postcript in his book of the same name covering the column) he discussed a concept that is rather central to the concept of answering the question What is Localization?:

I wonder what literalists like John Case would suggest as the proper translation of the title of the book All the President's Men (a book about the downfall of President Nixon, a downfall that none of the people around him could prevent). Would they say that Tous le homes du Président fills the bill admirably? Back-translated rather literally, it means "All the men of the President". It completely lacks the allusion -- the reference by similarity of form -- to the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty". Is that dispensible? In my opinion, hardly. To me, the essence of the title resides in that allusion. To lose that allusion is to deflate the title totally.

Of course, what do I mean by "that allusion"? Do I wish the French title to contain, somehow, an allusion to an English nursery rhyme? That would be rather pointless. Well, then, do I want the French title to allude to the French version of "Humpty Dumpty"? It all depends on how well known it is. But given that Humpty Dumpty is practically an unknown figure to French-speaking people, it seems that something else is wanted. Any old French nursery rhyme? Obviously not. The critical allusion is to the lines:

All the King's horses
And all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Are there -- anywhere in French literature -- lines with a similar import? If not, how about in French popular songs? In French proverbs? Fairy Tales?

One might well ask why French-speaking people would ever care about reading a book about Watergate in the first place. And even if they did want to read it, shouldn't it be completely translated, so that it happens in a French-speaking city? Come to think of it, didn't Ioranto once remark that the French for Washington is Montréal?

Clearly, this is carrying things to an extreme. There must be some middle ground of reasonableness. These are matters of subtle judgment, and they are where being human and flexible makes all the difference. Rigid rules about translation may lead you to a kind of mechanical consistency, but at the expense of all depth and charm. The problem of self-referential sentences is just the tip of the iceberg, as far as translation is concerned. It is just that these issues show up very early when direct self-reference is concerned. When self-reference (or reference in general, for that matter) is indirect, mediated by form, then fluidity is required. The understanding of such sentences involves a mixture of deriving the content and yet retaining the form in mind, letting qualities of the form conjure up flavors and enhance the meaning with a halo of not-quite-conscious pseudo-meanings, connotations, flavors, that flicker in the mind, not quite in reach, not quite out of reach. Self-reference is a good starting point for investigation of this kind of issue, because it is so much on the surface there. You can't sweep the problems under the rug, even though some would like to do so.

Now the actual column was titled "On Self-Referential Sentences" which is of course why much of this excerpt from the postscript talks about them, but many of the principles that are raised here this text actually relate to the real differences between translation (especially machine translation) and localization.

These are the concepts that good localization -- and good localizers -- can capture. It requires not only a good understanding of the item that is to be localized; it also requires a good understanding of both the source market and the target market.

The localization of software often has it slightly easier, at least in that the formal style of the item might contain less in the way of allusions and such. But to be honest one never knows what one is going to get, which is why a good localizer is needed to pick up the slack....

By the way, the actual column is highly recommended has many interesting examples, such as asking how one might take the sentence in the title and translate it into English.

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