As a child, I loved this saying, which I understood as “The translator is a traitor”—a literal translation in the strictest sense—because I later wrote a short story in which a character wanted to visit his favorite author, Elizabeth Laird, but since he didn’t speak English, he brought a translator along. Once in Scotland, he had tea (of course!) with the author and asked his interpreter to convey just how much he admired her. That traitor, of course, said the exact opposite: “This gentleman hates what you write,” and my main character ended up in prison.
If the apparent misunderstanding of this phrase was, in the end, just another illustration of it, over the years, as I learned foreign languages and tackled difficult translation exercises, I eventually came to understand what was meant by this idea of the necessary betrayal—unintentional, yet inevitable—inherent in translating words into another language.
In the United States, I was coming back from a wedding when an American friend asked me how it had gone. “Very well,” I said, translating the words “It was very good” literally. My friend’s expression changed: “Good? It was just ‘good’?” I then realized that I hadn’t done enough—that to convey that French “very well,” which really was “very well” to me, I needed to say in English that it was exceptional, fantastic, that I’d had a very good time—“had” and not “spent”—because in English, we possess space-time, whereas in French, we merely pass through it.
To cross paths, to pass through, to run into: two ways of inhabiting space
Speaking of “crossing,” I was out walking with my coworkers the other day when one of them, who is American, suggested that we cross the street at one spot rather than another. But instead of using the verb“traverser, ” she used “croiser”: “We could cross here.” Everyone understood what she meant, of course, but as we explored the difference between “croiser” —to draw a line between two places—and “traverser”—to go through a space—we then realized that in French we can use “croiser” to describe an action on the street when it refers to a chance encounter with someone. “J’ai croisé Michel dans la rue,” however, does not translate to “I crossed Michael on the street,” but rather to “I ran into Michael”—a much more energetic, fast-paced one, conveying an image of a bustling public space teeming with people rushing about who can’t help but run into each other without getting hurt—the other way to describe this unexpected encounter being “bumped into,” literally “to bump into, to hurt oneself by bumping into someone.” This translation is not simply another way of describing reality; rather, it clearly illustrates a different worldview between two cultures.
The beauty of these living languages, above all, lies in all those expressions that can’t be translated—or only roughly so—because they simply don’t exist. As a fan of old-fashioned sayings, I often find myself stuck trying to translate them literally: “Packed like sardines,” “to have a long nose,” “to have a blast,” “to make a mountain out of a molehill,” “it’s no big deal”…
Let’s take a closer look at a few of them, because each one tells a story.
To be lazy. French laziness runs so deep that it has time to grow something. An English speaker, on the other hand, would say “bone idle”—lazy to the bone. One exaggerates through growth, the other through depth. To translate here is to choose which of the two images we are willing to lose.
Make a quick getaway. My favorite, because it turns the tables: the English, to say the same thing, say “to take French leave.” Each language accuses the other of misbehaving. Translation is never a flat mirror; it’s a mirror that reflects back our own flaws with our neighbor’s accent.
The Reunion. Here, it’s English that’s at a loss for words. “Reunion” is too solemn—it smacks of a school dance and name tags; “seeing each other again” is accurate but perfectly flat. French, on the other hand, has coined a noun for this moment—and a plural form of it, as if it took more than one person to experience it.
And in the same way, there are English phrases—or rather, turns of phrase—of an elegance that French simply cannot match: “there’s only so much we can do.” Or take “I look forward to,” which we translate as a rather poor “j’ai hâte,” even though it conveys something about the gaze, directed forward toward what is to come. We also shamelessly borrow “weekend” and “spleen,” terms that Baudelaire himself borrowed from the English. In return, they borrow from us “déjà-vu,” “rendez-vous,” “je-ne-sais-quoi,” and that “esprit de l’escalier,” which they keep in French because no English word is quite up to the task.
If all of this translates so poorly, one might wonder why we should persist in learning. In a world where artificial intelligence and generative language models seem capable of translating our ideas better than we can ourselves, we might get the impression that learning foreign languages is no longer useful, that all we need to do is speak to our machine and it will instantly translate for our conversation partners, and that it might not even be necessary to learn spelling since simply speaking would be enough to write correctly.
And yet. It is because language is lived, and understanding others involves a constant search for the right meaning, that a machine—no matter how sophisticated it may be—cannot do all the work for us. It provides an equivalent, and that equivalent is often good. But it doesn’t tell us what we lose by choosing it. It would have translated my “très bien” as “very good” without ever warning me that my friend, sitting across from me, would interpret it as meaning the wedding was just average. It won’t warn me that my sentence, though grammatically correct, has just conveyed something other than what I intended. That’s what’s missing, and it can only be learned through conversation: in the hesitation, in the other person’s slightly perplexed smile, in that moment when someone gently corrects you—“that’s not really how you say it”—and you suddenly understand, not a word, but a way of seeing the world.
So yes, “traduttore, traditore.” But perhaps the traitor isn’t who we think it is. The traitor is more likely the one who thinks there’s nothing to betray—that a language is like a piece of clothing you can change, while the body underneath remains the same. Learning a language today is no longer really about learning to make oneself understood—machines handle that, and quite well at that. It’s about learning to understand what one is saying, and to be able to truly connect with others, on a deep level, with all that words conceal from us.
