Of all the earth's creatures, man alone has the capacity for language. Yet, although speech expresses his meanings, the latter are not perfectly represented by it. This becomes evident when one translates a constellation of thought, such as a poem, from one language into another. Subtle changes take place, no matter how careful the translation. Grammar and idiom differ among languages, and other subtle nuances come into being between languages, rather than within each--for example, the psychological overtones of languages and the degree of compactness with which an idea in each is expressed.
English is a markedly irregular language. The polyglot mixture of Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, and, to a lesser degree, German, Italian, and Spanish give a unique and supple quality to English constructions, which are not bound by as many arbitrary usages as other tongues. Although this kind of admixture is true of all languages, it is particularly marked in English. Thus to this observer, English is an emotionally neutral and irregular tongue, a language of moderate density against which one can fruitfully estimate the result when other languages are translated into it.
Catullus
The differences revealed in the following comparisons are, after all, peculiar to the poems discussed and not necessarily representative of anything fundamental. Yet they do cast significant light on the dilemma of translating nuances unique to one language into another tongue.
In the "Odi et Amo" of Catullus, the Roman poet who lived at the time of Julius Caesar, for example, a number of difficulties come up in translation. In the original, it reads:
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiri? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excruciot.
In English, the sense of it is:
I love and I hate. "How is this possible?" you ask.
I don't know, but I burn and am anguished.
Compared to the Latin, this is a very weak rendering. All the meaning is there, but the passion of the Catullan version is missing. And when comparing the two poems phrase by phrase, one notes a consistent pattern in the number of words used in each case. "Odi et amo" consists of three words; "I love and I hate" has five. With a maximum of contraction, it becomes "I love and hate." "Quare id faciam, fortasse requiri?" has five words, while "How is this possible' you ask" has six. And the second line has six words in the Latin, but has nine in the translation. The entire original contains fourteen words, while its translation has at least nineteen. To see if this concision in the Latin is characteristic, one can examine the entire body of Catullus's work, and discover an even greater disparity.
In another Latin work and its translation, a selection from Ovid, translated literally by Clark, choosing at random on page 97, one finds 105 words in the Latin and 177 in English. Although counting words totals may seem to be a superficial way of comparing the two languages, in this instance, it is significant, for the disparity occurs again
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