From time to time, I have
wondered why the draft program of action for the International Conference
on Population and Development in Cairo used the term fertility regulation
instead of birth control, which is far more understandable.
I got the answer from Peter
Waldman of the Asian Wall Street Journal, who explained that birth
control "somehow connotes state coercion," and so fertility regulation
"must be what couples practice voluntarily."
This was one of the examples
Mr. Waldman gave to illustrate the difficulties faced by translators at
the Cairo meeting.
Even as the conference was
starting, the translators were still trying to figure out how to translate
many of the buzzwords and idioms of American-led women's groups into the
five other official United Nations languages (Arabic, Chinese, French,
Russian, and Spanish).
Consider female empowerment
-- the the belief that women have the same rights as men. There is no such
term in French, said a French translator.
If this is the case for
French, would one expect Arabic, Chinese, or Russian to have an equivalent?
Mika Kusmenko, the LTN's Russian translation chief, remarked, "Female
empowerment is such vague terminology that I doubt that it exists in
any language but English."
"The Chinese wanted to know
what kind of power was being discussed -- personal, political, or physical,"
Mr. Waldman said. "With no clear answer, they did the best they could."
Or consider the term reproductive
health.
The literal translation
of this phrase into Russian would mean "health that reproduces itself again
and again" -- and this obviously is not what is meant by the English text,
conceded Mr. Kusmenko, who admitted in the same breath that he didn't quite
know how to fix it.
The French resuscitated
the phrase sante genisque, which has not been used since the nineteenth
century and which few French speakers have heard of.
Reproductive health
was rendered in Arabic as "health concerning the begetting of children."
The Arab translators, though,
had difficulty with the term sexually active unmarried individuals --
not because Arabic has no equivalent but because such persons would
be criminals under Islamic law. The Arab translators settled for the euphemism
"sexually active as-yet-to-be-married individuals."
Almost everybody was stumped
by family leave, Mr. Waldman said, referring to "the policy of providing
time off to employees for family situations, such as births, deaths, or
sickness."
The Russian translation
suggests that the whole family goes off on vacation while the Arabic translation
describes the spouses as taking leave of each other after a child is born.
A Chinese translator said, "We translated family leave literally,
but nobody reading this will know what it means."
Though the Cairo conference
was the third international conference on population held, it was only
in Cairo that such term as female empowerment came to be used.
That is because women's
groups in the United States -- thanks to the encouragement of government
-- have become especially active in population control.
The population movement
has been transformed into the women's movement, said political scientist
Jason Finkle, who adds that the population movement, as a result, must
address many new issues.
These new issues are women's
and children's health, female literacy, and women's labor rights.
Much of the "jargon-laden
call to arms was drafted by Americans," Mr. Waldman said, but he was quick
to add that "it was women from the developing countries who set the plan's
goals in a series of preparatory meetings in the past two years."
Of course many of these
conference activists have been recipients of US grants.
Here in the Philippines,
I think that our population program people will be satisfied to work with
the English version of the Cairo plan of action-and so will not be faced
with the same translation problems.
It would be interesting,
though, to have them attempt a translation. I wonder, for instance, how
they would translate female empowerment or reproductive rights.
Unfortunately the communication
problem we face here in the Philippines is even more basic -- we have many
conservative Catholics who cannot see the difference between a contraceptive
and an abortifacient.