Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

"Au revoir!"
He strode from the classroom slamming the door behind him.
For the rest of the year he taught me French. He believed in the total immersion method and would not
permit a single word of English to be spoken in his lessons. Outside the class Mr Anthony was a perfect
English gentleman and raving loony. He felt that hymn tunes were far too dirge-like so he sang them fast
and cheerfully at morning assembly and was invariably two verses ahead of the congregation, much to
the consternation of the pianist and the discomfiture of everybody else since his singing voice was
powerful and tended to overlap and lead the crowd. Hymns invariably ended in total confusion with Mr
Anthony looking puzzled, all the other masters looking angry and the school as a whole feeling semihysterical.
Inside the class Monsieur Antoine spoke French, and only French. I still treasure the memory of the day
he taught us the French words for various articles of clothing. As he named an article, he would take it
off and wave it at us. Perhaps I should point out that to this day I do not know the French for
"underpants" (but I do know "jacket", "shoes", "shirt", "vest" and "trousers"). I've had a soft spot for
languages ever since, though Latin tested that tolerance sorely, and it is probably worth pointing out
that I learned more French in that eccentric year with Monsieur Antoine than I learned in the next four
years with more conventional teachers. I remember him fondly and will always be grateful for the firm
grounding he gave me in the one foreign language that I can claim to speak with a fair degree of fluency.
Assuming that you can talk to the aliens, how can you be certain that what you are saying is what they
are hearing? Some words simply don't translate as you would expect them to. Philip K. Dick had a lot of
fun with this idea in Galactic Pot Healer where the protagonist plays a game with his friends. They
submit book and film titles to a computer to be translated into a foreign language. They then submit
these foreign translations to another computer to be translated back into English in an attempt to guess
what a foreign person might see and hear when presented with the word. These re-translated phrases
are then shown to each other and each attempts to guess what the originals might have been. My
favourites from the book are "The Male Offspring in Addition Gets Out of Bed" (The Sun Also Rises)
and "Those for Which the Male Homosexual Extracts Transit Tax" (For Whom the Bell Tolls), both by
"Serious Constricting Path" (Ernest Hemingway). Also The Corn is Green which became "The Cliche is
Inexperienced". Some friends and I played with this idea once. Here are some retranslations of some
famous SF book titles. See what you make of them (answers at the end of the article):
Soil Stays by George Stewart
Sandy Hill's Kids by Frank Herbert
The Metal Mirage by Norman Spinrad
More Unusual in a Funny Country by Robert Heinlein
The Autumn of the Keeps by Samuel Delaney
The Last Tree by J. G. Ballard
The Person Hotel the Stoned Rook by Philip K. Dick
All of which seems to suggest that the universal translating devices so beloved of SF are probably not
viable, though they are undeniably convenient as a means of moving the story along. The structure of
languages seems to be rather too complex to permit meaningful translation to be possible (at least it
appears that way at the moment) though I have read articles seriously proposing that the artificial
language Esperanto be used as a common middle ground in the translation process. Since the grammar
and construction of Esperanto is completely defined and completely regular it should be possible (the
theory goes) to make an exact translation of something from one language into Esperanto and from
Esperanto into a different language (Swedish to Esperanto and then Esperanto to English, for example)
rather than by trying to translate directly between the languages in one step. This sounds fine in theory
but I am dubious as to how well it will perform in real life simply because there is so much in a real
language that cannot be translated literally since it depends on custom and culture. Consider the very
common concept of an April Fool. In the English speaking countries, this is an old tradition and we all
have a lot of fun with it (I remember once in England when the Guardian newspaper published a travel
supplement one particular April 1st. The supplement spent many lyrical pages extolling the beautiful,