By Gruffudd ab Owain
April
This is a story of two desires.
One is a desire to understand others, build bridges, find common ground, and find compatibility. This desire is often satisfied by translation, or at least a search for a word that is close to encapsulating the meaning hidden within the ink of its letters.
Another is a desire to appreciate and celebrate difference, to celebrate the nuances, the peculiarities of language. This desire is satisfied conversely by the inability to translate; the search for words whose meaning cannot be encapsulated by means of a word or phrase in another language. I’ve often been confronted with the question: “Are there any words in Welsh that can’t be translated?” The default answer is always the most well-known, ‘hiraeth’. The ability to translate ‘hiraeth’ is debated; whether it may simply correlate to a sense of ‘yearning’ or ‘longing,’ or whether it’s a deeper feeling, or indeed a distinctly ‘Welsh’ feeling.
The Mediterranean Sea is quite often described as a space for dialogue between cultures; a ‘crossroads’, a ‘hotbed’ of cultures. Its waves may be visualized in many ways, portraying both desires; flowing in a particular direction from east to west or vice versa, or indeed as a mélange of currents amalgamating into some sort of unity.
Such is the joy of multilingualism, as I drop a French word naturally into an English sentence: the ability to appreciate not only a different means of communication but also a different means of thinking. I’m often struck by how a word may have a simple translation in another language, yet it won’t be used in the same way, in the same phrasing, or in the same context. For example, Duolingo may teach you that the French je vous en prie means ‘you’re welcome,’ yet it’s much closer in its root and use to the Italian prego.
Evidently, translating meaning is enough of a challenge in itself, in this perhaps surface-level search for corresponding meanings. If we were to delve deeper by looking at the roots of words and phrases, would we get closer to a true understanding of meaning?
Let’s take the example of the ummah, washing up on the shores of our campus in Menton. Returning home clad in our fresh ‘ummah Mentoniyya’ hoodies, my explanation of its meaning to inquisitive family and friends was ‘community’, the Menton campus community.
Indeed, it is deemed plausible to encapsulate the general sense of ummah as community, as Abdullah al-Ahsan argues, for example: “The general sense of the term, ‘community’ is clear, and an association with the term umm, ‘mother; source,’ is plausible both linguistically and to native speakers of Arabic.” The author attests that this is sufficient evidence to support the hypothesis that the term is not a borrowing from another language.
Asyiqin Ab Halim, meanwhile, prefers to translate ummah as ‘brotherhood,’ in discussing the relationship, or lack thereof, as disputed by scholars, with the term ‘asabiyyah’, which can also mean ‘anger’ in some dialects. The root here is again illuminating to comprehension of its true meaning. It is linguistically derived from ‘asab’, which is taken to mean ‘bind’.
Not only have the waters of meaning flowed from Arabic to English and other languages with centers further west, but historically they have also flowed in the other direction, for example through the Arab scholars who traveled to France in the 19th century.
One is immediately struck in ‘An Imam in Paris’ by Rifa’a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (at least, ironically, in Daniel L. Newman’s translation) by a similar search for corresponding meanings, particularly with regards to ‘Rights accorded to the French people.’ See below a few examples:
“Article 1. All Frenchmen are equal before the law (shari’a)”. The literal translation of shari’a is ‘way’ or ‘path’. It’s more recognized as the term for traditional Islam religious law based largely on the Qur'an, which has equality as an intrinsic principle.
“Article 18. The state executes laws only if they have been agreed by the majority (jumhūr) of both Chambers”. Jumhūr is derived from ‘crowd’ or ‘public’, but is largely agreed to also mean ‘majority’.
“Article 45. The Chamber is divided into small councils called bureaux (al-būrū), i.e. offices, whose members are entrusted with examining matters designated and submitted by the king”. My first impression of this correlation was that they must share a common origin. Yet it seems not to be even a translation, rather a transliteration, transferring this foreign concept to Egypt by keeping its pronunciation as close as possible to the original French.
These three examples clearly demonstrate the complexities of this search for correlating meanings. Sometimes, observing the etymology or literal meaning of a word fails to encapsulate its use in context. Other times, it is foreign influence that creates a necessity for a new word. In both instances, translation alone seems insufficient for a full comprehension of meaning.
The conclusion I gathered from this very brief venture into the complexities of translation across the Mediterranean Sea is that context is everything.
Now, when I come to think about it, this becomes evident frequently in conversation. When someone asks for a translation of a word, and fails at the first attempt to find one, the next port of call is: “Put it in a sentence for me.” More often than not, it becomes much easier to find a corresponding meaning when weaved into a wider context.
The Mediterranean may appear as one sea on a map, yet, to quote Braudel: “there are ten, twenty or a hundred Mediterraneans.”
With thanks to Dr Alaa Badr for her guidance.