Eating the Void

Today I went to visit a neighbor across the street who has a big shesek tree in her front yard, which is currently laden with ripe fruit. While biting into a juicy, sweet shesek, I had a true translator moment. I realized that I was eating a cultural void!

I know that shesek can be accurately translated into English as loquat. But lexical precision does not fill the cultural void, because in the part of the world I live in, shesek are ubiquitous and unremarkable, while in most parts of the Western world, they are exotic, if not unknown. The word "shesek" means something very specific to those who use it, while the word "loquat" is meaningless to most readers of US English.

Let's say I was translating a Hebrew story that casually mentions a man who ate a shesek. If I translate it to say that the man ate a loquat, readers may begin imagining him eating kumquats or loganberries or pawpaws, or whatever irrelevant tropical fruit association comes to mind. In addition, the mention of this mysterious fruit may add a hint of exoticism to the story which the author did not intend. The author did not mean the episode of the loquat to be at all evocative or remarkable.

In such a case, I, as the translator, may decide to avoid the void.

I may well take the license to write that the man ate an apple or pear.

I call that eating the void...

And this particular void tastes really good.

Avoid the Void!

One of the common hurdles translators encounter in the textual steeplechase we call "work" is voids.

What is a void? In a nutshell, voids are terms that cannot be translated because no cultural or lexical reference to them exists in the target language.

To give a funny example, when speaking to a fellow Australian recently, he told me that many years ago he had attended a certain person's "barmy." Since I am familiar with that dialect, I knew he was referring to a bar mitzvah celebration. But let's say a client hired me to translate this interview into general US English. This term, as a both a lexical and cultural void, would present a translation problem, as detailed below:

1. I could translate it as "bar mitzvah," but thereby lose his slangy, colloquial tone, since there is no equivalent slang term for barmy in US English - this is the lexical void.
   
2. I could leave in "barmy," and then put the following in a footnote or parenthesis: "Australian Jewish slang for bar mitzvah" - yet these options are clunky, distracting and inappropriate for many contexts, such as magazine articles or web content.
   
3. And what if this text is intended for a very general audience, including readers in Timbuktu who don't understand the concept of a bar mitzvah? Due to this cultural void, I might have to forgo the tone altogether and just focus on making the concept understood to some limited degree ("Jewish coming of age ritual marked at age 13" - how's that for a literary clunker? On the brighter side, at least I get paid by the world.)

As you can see, there is no truly satisfactory solution to the above translation problem. This is often the case with voids.

Often the best way to deal with translation voids is to avoid the problem all together. For example, a former student wrote to me about such a problem recently. She was translating a poster for an organization that helps the elderly to live independently. The poster was advertising their service of selling adult diapers and other hygiene products at their "mercaz tetzuga." This term would translate literally as "display center" or maybe, at a stretch, as "showroom."

I hope you are immediately sensing the lexical void that is lurking behind this translation problem. In Hebrew, such a service may be known euphemistically as "mercaz tetzuga" but in English, "adult diaper display center" or "showroom" sounds like the beginning of a lowbrow comedy skit.

After some discussion, we agreed that there was no getting around this void. Instead, we avoided the problem with a creative new title: "Special Sale for Seniors."

That's a completely non-literal translation but we felt it works.

What do you think?