Saying the same thing

Is accurate translation impossible?

Our tutor was trying to make some point to his Spanish students (he doesn’t now remember just what it was) and came up with a pair of sentences he thought the students might identify with: “I think that this is not easy.  I do not think that this is easy.”  They say almost the same thing in slightly different ways, and he went on to show what they looked like in Spanish.  Well, it turned out to be more complicated than he expected.  The doubt in the second sentence threw the second verb (“is easy”) into the subjunctive.  This is a conjugation reserved for things that probably won’t happen, didn’t ever really happen, or about which there is some doubt or emotion.  The same thing happens in French.  It doesn’t include things that might not happen but probably will, or things we use “could” or “would” for in English (the conditional tense).  The never-maybe land of the subjunctive is often difficult for English-speakers to grasp.

English does have a subjunctive of its own. It’s seen more rarely, but consider: “It’s important that you be on time for your job interview.”  Not “will be” or “are,” future or present, but “be,” subjunctive.  It was more prominent in Old English.  It has all but disappeared from British English.

Our other consultants were not to be kept out of the picture and quickly added their languages.  Scottish Gaelic verbs have three forms, positive, negative and question; with corresponding linking forms.  And there are actually no present tenses of most verbs at all, only “to be.”  So “I think” is literally “I am at the thinking,” while “I do not think” is “I am not at the thinking,” with “am” and “am not” quite different words.

Russian is the simplest of our examples, with the negative particle (the equivalent of “not”) just shifting from one verb to another.  Except that there is no form of “to be” in the present tense to shift to; Russians say “this easy” and “this not easy.”  Even modern English has a complication you may not have noticed: the “do not” construction, something that trips up many a learner from elsewhere.  Why isn’t it just “think not,” a form we recognize from Shakespeare?

Our Old English consultant notes that that language would use “me thuncth” (in slightly different letters), meaning “it seems to me” instead of “I think.”  Sometime in Modern English the shift of action changed from whatever was being considered to the person doing the considering; Shakespeare has “me thinketh.”  He also points out that the first sentence would use “nys,” a contracted form of not-is.  There were a few common words like this where the negative particle attached itself to the verb, sort of like “isn’t.”  He isn’t sure, though, whether the second sentence would include a subjunctive, and hasn’t been able to find an Old English native speaker to ask about the proper form.

We are impressed that a simple pair of sentences, seemingly quite straightforward, throw up such difficulties in translation.  The main idea, of course, is not in doubt.  But Spanish and French unavoidably wander into subjunctive-land, while a literal rendering into Russian or Gaelic is technically impossible.

What would happen with something more complicated?