Translators Beware!
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
Translation can be a tricky thing, particularly when it comes to plant and animal species whose names in one language might not have direct equivalent in another. There are a few hacks and shortcuts translators can use for these, and there are plenty of online resources for specific languages these days, but it’s still a tricky business, and it’s rare for translators to moonlight as expert botanists or zoologists.
An easy trick for translators to remember, however, is the idea that species whose distributions were restricted to the Americas pre-1492 (at the earliest) probably shouldn’t be turning up in Afro-Eurasian texts written before that point. If you’re working on a mid-fifteenth-century Middle English text then you’re pretty unlikely to encounter a word for ‘chocolate’ — and if you do encounter such a word, and it really is chocolate, then we have to rewrite our history textbooks from the ground up. It’s more likely that you’ve made a mistake or that the text is a forgery.
Many plants now common in Afro-Eurasia — I’m going to focus on plants here because I know comparatively little about animals — only came to the hemisphere after 1492. The first chilis came to Europe in 1493 when Columbus returned to Spain after his first voyage; there weren’t any capsicums anywhere in Afro-Eurasia until then. There weren’t any allspice, Brazil nut, chayote, guava, manioc, potato, quinoa, sunflower, tobacco, tomato, or vanilla plants in Afro-Eurasia before then either. All cactus species are native to the Americas, and only one may have been found in Afro-Eurasia before the sixteenth century (although that’s not certain). If you’re tempted to use the word ‘cactus’ to translate a term in a fourteenth-century text from China, say, then you should stop and think.
A few plants and plant products could be found in both hemispheres, sometimes because the same genera or even species could be found globally even before the Columbian exchange. Brazilwood came in an American form (Paubrasilia echinata) and an Asian one (Caesalpinia sappan), as did cotton (Gossypium arboreum in the Afro-Eurasian case, G. barbadense and G. hirsutum in the American one). References to cotton can be found in pre-Columbian texts from both the Americas and Afro-Eurasia, and translators probably don’t need to get into the fine distinctions between species in their work (Figure 1). The dry fruits of domesticated bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria) float; some appear to have floated across from coastal West Africa to South America not too long after the plants were first domesticated, and domesticated gourds of precisely the same species and derived from the same domestication event grew in the Americas and Afro-Eurasia before the Columbian exchange. But this isn’t true of most domesticated plants in each hemisphere pre-1492.
Well, I suspect awareness of the Columbian exchange is fairly low among translators and area studies specialists working outside of the Americas. American plants, animals, and commodities can be translation blindspots. They present particular pitfalls when an American species has become so thoroughly indigenised in a particular place that it seems intuitively obvious that it must have been present in the region centuries ago, like lime in Mexico or chili in Indonesia, or when you’re working on a language, like Malay, that uses the same word for both an American species and an Afro-Eurasian one.
The modern Malay word for chili is cabai, which was formerly the name for a species of long pepper (Piper retrofractum), whose fresh fruits look like chilis. The Malay for ‘peanut’ (Arachis hypogaea) is kacang, originally meaning simply ‘nut’ or ‘bean’, and the word for ‘maize’ (Zea mays) is jagung, whose original referent was ‘sorghum’ (Sorghum bicolor). These terms have been so completely transformed that speakers of modern Malay/Indonesian are unaware that these words had earlier referents. Translators often are as well.
This translation trap is usually avoided these days — a recent edition and translation of the oldest surviving Malay manuscript text, the fourteenth-century Nītisārasamuccaya from Kerinci, Sumatra, gets each of these identifications right (Kozok 2015) — but ‘peanut’ and ‘capsicum/chilli’ do sometimes appear in earlier translations of Old Javanese works. The Old Javanese words for ‘bean/pea’ and ‘long pepper’ are cognates of the Malay terms, kacaṅ and cabe respectively; in P. J. Zoetmulder’s renowned (and extremely useful) Old Javanese-English Dictionary (1982), ‘peanut’ and ‘groundnut’ are given as equivalents of the Old Javanese kacaṅ. In Theodoor Pigeaud’s well-known work Java in the 14th Century, which consists of several volumes of Old Javanese text, English translation, and scholarly commentary, cabe is translated as ‘capsicum’ in its sole appearance, in a copperplate inscription dated 1391 (Pigeaud 1960–63:I:116, III:167).
Plants aren’t the only things to present pitfalls of this kind. Most animals in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago today were also present there before early modernity, but there are nonetheless some American species that can be confused for native Southeast Asian ones, particularly monitor lizards and iguanas. Monitor lizards are big lizards in the genus Varanus native to Africa and Asia. Iguana is the name of a genus of exclusively American lizards of somewhat similar appearance (Figure 2). Old Javanese words for the former are often translated with the word ‘iguana’, even in quite recent works. In a list of animals in the Old Javanese kakawin Deśawarṇana (50.5), for instance, Stuart Robson translates the word goḍeya (or godheya), which comes from a Sanskrit word for ‘monitor lizard’ (godhā́), as ‘iguana’ (Robson 1995:60 — Old Javanese from Pigeaud 1960:I:37):
‘… wök sĕṅgah gawaya lulāya śalya cihna
goḍeya plawaga wiḍāla gaṇḍakāḍi’‘… Pigs, barking deer, wild bulls, buffaloes, porcupines, chevrotains,
Iguanas, monkeys, wild cats, rhinoceroses, and so on.’
‘Iguana’ also appears as the equivalent of godheya in Zoetmulder’s Old Javanese-English Dictionary, so it’s not surprising that it ends up in translations.
This post was inspired, by the way, by having read something that didn’t agree with me in an edition and translation of an Old Kannada literary text in the Murty Classical Library of India — The Life of Harishchandra, a work written in the thirteenth century by the poet Raghavanka. The translation is good, as is the poetry, and the text contains a lot of the botanical details I particularly enjoy. (I’m aware this is a niche interest.) The part I found bothersome is the appearance of the word ‘cashew’ in a list of plants in the English translation (2017:98–99):
‘The grove was overlaid
with a marvelous clump of plants and trees:
mango, jāmūn, lemon, banana, dāsāḷi,
kuravakam, bannāḷi, cashew,
and a profusion of orange and sweet lemon trees,
all joyously coming into being…’
Cashew trees (Anacardium occidentale) come from South America and certainly didn’t grow in South India in the thirteenth century. I’m far from an expert on Dravidian languages but I suspect that this is a simple case of misidentification; the Kannada word ಗೇರು (gēru), which is the word in the original text, now means both ‘cashew’ and ‘marking-nut tree’ (Semecarpus anacardium). Only the latter is native to India. Even if the translation were accurate, I’d expect a note here, at the very least, pointing out that this must be a later interpolation and not something in Raghavanka’s original text. Instead, it appears that the translator assumed cashews to be native to India, perhaps because they’re so common there today — a case of the indigenisation of a post-Columbian introduction leading to an error in translation.
Interestingly, these sorts of translation mishaps seem to be less common in work on medieval European texts, although you’ll still see tomatoes and potatoes appearing in pieces of popular culture inspired by medieval Europe, like Lord of the Rings and Skyrim. I’m not sure why that is. I suspect Euro-medievalists are aware that life in the Middle Ages in Europe was very different from life in Europe today, while Indonesianists and other area studies specialists tend to assume continuity.
The assumption of continuity is almost axiomatic in area studies, which has focused on using an understanding of the past to better comprehend and manipulate places today and which has seldom been a disinterested academic discipline. (Historically these area studies disciplines existed so that the CIA and MI6 could influence elections and craft anti-communist propaganda tailor-made to suit an area’s particular history and conditions; from the scholar’s perspective, this meant ample available money to allow them to pursue their hobbies and interests. Win-win for the capitalist-orientalist.) I suppose this notion fails and the raison d’être of the discipline falls apart if you assume that there’s been an outright break in continuity, in this case a break caused by the introduction of new things from the other side of the globe by Europeans.
The Columbian exchange is perhaps the most consequential and interesting phenomenon of the last few millennia of life on Earth. It had, or has had, an impact on just about everything; it is the essence of modernity. And yet it seems to me that acknowledgement of this is remarkably rare among scholar who conduct research anywhere but the Americas, where the break is more obvious.
A. J. West — Leiden, 2022 (posted here 2024).
References
Kozok, Uli (ed). 2015. A 14th century Malay code of laws. The Nītisārasamuccaya. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Pigeaud, Th. G. Th. 1960–63. Java in the 14th century. Five volumes. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Raghavanka. 2017. The life of Harishchandra. Vanamala Viswanatha (trans). Cambridge, MA: Murty Classical Library of India. Harvard University Press.
Robson, Stuart O. 1995. Desawarnana (Nagarakertagama) by Mpu Prapanca. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Zoetmulder, P. J. 1982. Old Javanese-English dictionary. Leiden: KITLV Press. Online edition: http://sealang.net/ojed.
