Linguist No. 1: Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams), in the film Arrival (2016, dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Not long ago, another translator of my acquaintance launched her blog with a reference to the film Arrival, so it may be appropriate to kick off my own blog the same way – but with a somewhat different focus.
One of the things you can learn about the portrayal of linguists in fiction is what ideas non-linguists have about them. Arrival, which is based on a short story by Ted Chiang, certainly delivers on that front. Louise Banks is a linguist and professor who is trying to communicate with space aliens who have recently landed on earth.
Early in the film we discover she is fluent in Farsi (Persian), and later she turns out to be adept in Chinese. What is the likelihood of having professional-level mastery of this particular combination? It’s not impossible, but it should be explained in the context of the story. Here, the filmmakers have missed an opportunity to make Louise, and the film in general, more interesting. Was Louise a child of diplomats, moving around the world from a young age and picking up languages along the way? Did she do a college major in Chinese, with a side helping of Indo-Iranian studies, which would explain her Persian knowledge? We don’t find out.
I suspect what is happening is an assumption I’ve run into: that if you’re a translator, that means you can translate all languages! It’s similar to the inability to keep the translator/interpreter distinction clear, which is something that happens a lot. I’ve often been introduced as “an interpreter,” which I’m not. Translation is written; interpreting is oral – they’re different skill sets.
The most flagrant example of this kind of misunderstanding that I’ve seen comes from Victor Pelevin’s satirical novel Generation P, where the hero has a degree in “translation from the national languages of the USSR.” Really, all of them? There were numerous national languages in the USSR – Kazakh, Lithuanian, Georgian, and so on – representing a wide range of language families. It would be impossible for a single translator to handle all of them.
In an unconscious echo of Pelevin, LinkedIn regularly sends me “translation leads.” These leads are totally random as to what language combinations and needs are in demand (marketing material from English into Japanese; an autobiography from Tagalog into Spanish). In the wide world of translation, there may be a Louise Banks out there, who could take on both of these jobs. But it’s safe to say that such people are rare.
Complicating things is that translators tend to specialize. A translator who can handle both legal texts and engineering manuals is in a very fortunate situation in terms of getting work, because these are very different linguistic zones, and you have to spend a lot of time in both to feel comfortable with them. Louise Banks can figure out what space aliens are saying, so she can probably translate anything. However, given that she’s not listed in the American Translators Association directory, you’ll probably have to use someone a little more specialized for your project.