We are told, in chapter 11 of Genesis, that once "the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech". In the aftermath of Noah's flood, the survivors decided to celebrate their lucky escape in a time-honoured way: with triumphal architecture. "Let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach even to heaven" is how the Bible expresses this aspiration. "Let us make us a name," said the children of Noah, "lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth".
Fat chance. According to the Old Testament, mankind's urge to find a common purpose does not appeal to the Almighty. So the idea that men and women should be like gods was a non-starter, and the name of the doomed project was called Babel. As the King James version has it, "the Lord did there confound the language of all the Earth". For good measure, he scattered the differently speaking peoples across the globe.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the world remains a patchwork of more than 5,000 separate and competing languages. But for those who still dream of the restoration of a universal language, the outlook has rarely been brighter: 2011 has been an extraordinary year for the art of translation. Could the tower of Babel actually be rebuilt?
Many language scholars now accept philosopher Noam Chomsky's ground-breaking perception that, notwithstanding mutually unintelligible vocabularies, "Earthlings speak a single language" – an observation Chomsky claimed would be evident to a visiting Martian. For a variety of reasons, we are perhaps closer than ever to making it intelligible.
Through the power of global media, there is more than ever before a market for literature in translation where the default language for such translations will be British or American English. Such versions may sometimes bear as much resemblance to the original as the wrong side of a Turkish carpet, but that hardly seems to lessen their appeal.
Lately in the US the appetite for "foreign fiction" – Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy or Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 – has sponsored a trend that has inspired new audiences for international literary superstars such as Umberto Eco, Roberto Bolaño and Péter Nádas. Perhaps not since the 1980s, when the novels of Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa became international bestsellers, has there been such a drive to bring fiction in translation into the literary marketplace.
In prose, if not in poetry, there are few worries about the "vanity of translation" identified by Shelley, who wrote that "it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as to seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet".
New editions of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Flaubert's Madame Bovaryand Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu have pushed overworked translators – a shy breed – into the spotlight. David Bellos, whose new book, Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything was published this autumn, observes that, in Japan for instance, "translators are rock stars" with their own book of celebrity gossip, The Lives of the Translators 101.
The surge in this global audience for new fiction has been driven by the complex interaction of the IT revolution and the antics of literary promotions such as the Orange Prize and Man Booker hyping their brands through social media.
None of this would be thinkable, or commercial, without one extraordinary statistic. According to the British Council, backed by many other reliable sources, about half the world's population – 3.5 billion people – have knowledge of, or acquaintance with, "some kind of English". And for the first time in human history it has become possible for one language to be transmitted and received virtually anywhere on the planet.
This unparalleled linguistic phenomenon is underpinned by the formidable power of global media. Lindsey Hilsum, the foreign editor forChannel 4 News, reports how, asking for the meaning of some Arabic graffiti sprayed on a wall in Tripoli, she was given a translation that made a comically incongruous cross-cultural nod to Anne Robinson: "Gaddafi, you are the weakest link. Goodbye."
Unsurprisingly, given these expanded horizons, Google is in the vanguard of what is becoming a revolution in the scope and technique of translation. Google's solution to a quintessentially human problem is the launch of a computer that approaches the holy grail of artificial intelligence and can translate "natural language".
Previous forays into this minefield involved stripping language to its constituent elements and rebuilding it, with often comical results ("kindergarten" rendered as "children garden", for example). This, says Bellos, has been the "hopeless pursuit of the purely hypothetical language which all people really speak in the great basement of their souls".
Google Translate doesn't do this. Instead, it implements Wittgenstein: "Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use." So it will search stupendous archives of translated material and uses probability to derive the likeliest meaning, based on context. To do this, Google Translate draws on a database of several trillion words, taken from a corpus of UN documentation, Harry Potter novels, press reports and inter-company memoranda.
Recently Google Translate added five tongues – Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali and Gujarati – to its iPhone app, and can now supply translations for some 63 languages. Bellos gives the most succinct explanation of its mechanics: "Translation is what you get, but translation isn't really what Google does. It's like the difference between engineering and knowledge. An engineering solution is to make something work, but the way you make it work doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the underlying things. Airplanes do not work the way birds fly."
The dream of a true universal language is in the end dependent on perfect translation. Aside from the lessons of Babel, the history of the Bible istelf offers other cautionary tales, particularly this year – the 400th anniversary of that great cathedral of language, the King James Bible. The anniversary has proved to be both a cause for celebration and for reflection on whether there can ever be an ideal or final version of such a work. Isn't every new rendering bound to reflect the social and cultural context in which its translator works ?
Here, the impact of a global audience equipped with "some kind of English" (but not much) becomes acute. As Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, noted in his sermon at the thanksgiving service for the KJB, "the temptation is always there for a modern translation to look for strategies that make the text more accessible".
By contrast, he added, there is a role for complexity too. The notorious mysteries of the KJB have the power, as he put it, "to surprise us into seriousness". He pointed to the modest ambitions of the 1611 translators, who declared that the job of translation was to let in the light and remove "the cover of the well, that we may come by the water".
The dialogue between clarity and opacity, or accessibility and mystery, will be played out on a religious stage again today with the publication of the new English translation of the Roman missal, the fruit of long gestation in the Catholic church. When the Second Vatican Council called for the use of the vernacular at mass, the first translators of the missal employed the principle of "dynamic equivalence" – the spirit and meaning of the text rather than word-for-word translation. In the interests of simplicity, some prayers were reduced to short, declarative sentences. The new translation celebrates "formal equivalence", a more literal rendering of the text. In Roman Catholic churches across the English-speaking world, the new missal will no doubt provoke outrage among worshippers who have grown used to the 1960s translation.
Closer to home, the fate of many Bible translations in English illustrates the problem of rendering texts timelessly in language that is always in flux. Supporters of the KJB, a translation made in the age of Donne and Shakespeare, point with horror when "strips of cloth" replaces "swaddling clothes" or "noisy gongs" replaces "sounding brass". Sometimes modernised translation can be ludicrous. The New English Bible, for example, replaces "wolves in sheep's clothing" with something more appropriate to Monty Python: "men dressed up as sheep".
So despite a boom year for translation and the proliferation of technical breakthroughs in the way we understand each other, it's hardly the last move in Wittgenstein's eternal language games. Indeed, across many tongues the world over, Google Translate will still have to solve local versions of the Frankfurter Conundrum. This is not an abstruse German linguistic crux, but the solution to a simple question. What is the translation of "hot dog" – fast food, or puppies?
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