Language Sciences 33 (2011) 524–530

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Language Sciences

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Harris’s Saussure – Harris as Saussure: the translations of the Cours andthe third course

John E. JosephLinguistics & English Language, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Bldg, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 6 May 2011

Keywords:Ferdinand de SaussureCours de linguistique généraleTranslationsRoy Harris

0388-0001/$ - see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltddoi:10.1016/j.langsci.2011.04.017

E-mail address: john.joseph@ed.ac.uk

a b s t r a c t

This article compares Roy Harris’s translations of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique généraleand of the notes by Constantin of Saussure’s third course in general linguistics, and consid-ers how each aligns with traditional theories of translation and with Harris’s own integra-tionist theory of language. Focussing on the passage concerning immutability andmutability of the sign, the article also contrasts the edited Cours with its source materials,and Baskin’s earlier translation with Harris’s. It is argued that the voice behind the trans-lation of Constantin’s notes is that of ‘Harris’s Saussure’, a figure not identical with the his-torical Saussure but shaped by Harris’s own interpretation; while that behind thetranslation of the Cours is ‘Harris as Saussure’, (re)performing the act of communicationbetween Saussure and his students that is the primary linguistic reality.

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1. Introduction

In her insightful article comparing the translations of Ferdinand de Saussure’s posthumous Cours de linguistique générale(Saussure, 1916, henceforth CLG) by Baskin and Harris, Sanders (2000) explains why it is not a simple question of one beingbetter than the other. Baskin was translating for an English-speaking audience to whom the CLG was an obscure work, if nota seemingly outdated one. A quarter of a century later, the situation was very different.

By the time Harris published his translation, the CLG had become a canonical text which was known but still misunder-stood and misquoted. His task was presumably twofold; firstly, he needed to offer an updated and readable version whichwould enable the lecture notes of the 1900s to speak directly to the contemporary reader. Secondly, he needed to takeaccount of the (often ill-informed) debates that had taken place by the 1980s in order to try and give an idea of whythe CLG was of such importance to mid and late 20th century thought. This should be enough to suggest that Harris’ taskwas arguably the harder of the two, even though he had Baskin’s translation to consult. (Sanders, 2000, p. 355)

Regarding the last point, a previous translation in fact creates another obstacle: re-translators have to avoid reproducingwhat any predecessor has done, even if they would instinctively translate many sentences in the same way.

Sanders’s remark about making the lecture notes speak directly to the reader of 70 years later is meant figuratively, butstill raises substantive theoretical questions. Saussure spoke directly to his students. Their notes from his three sets of lec-tures, combined with manuscript fragments of his own, were fashioned by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye into the CLG,which does not ‘speak’ to readers, but through them. Like any text, it needs to be interpreted. The translator is first of all areader of the text, and as argued in Joseph (1998), all that he or she can translate is, not the text itself, but his or her readingof it. Interpretation is harder across a cultural divide, and I take Sanders to mean that Harris’s task was to bridge that divide.

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That makes sense — and yet, as Schleiermacher (1813) pointed out 200 years ago, the result of such bridging work is not atrue translation, which would aim to be the text Saussure and his editors would have produced in their own time and placebut in English. When, as is more usual, the so-called translator strives instead to transport the reader back to the culture ofthe original text, or the text into the reader’s culture, the outcome is a new text that is properly a commentary rather than atranslation. Harris is following the second path, bringing the text to the reader, and, as I shall show, doing a bit more besides.

There is a long tradition of declaring translation to be impossible, on the grounds that it would require the same align-ment of words and meanings in both the source and the target language, which is never the case. In Saussure’s system, wordsand meanings are reconceived as signs, made up of acoustic images (signifiers) and the concepts to which they are boundpsychologically and socially (signifieds), each of these representing a value generated by the difference of each such elementfrom every other in the system of which it is a part. Real translation between systems would if anything be even harder toimagine under these conditions than if a language were a nomenclature, with meanings bound to and by things in the world.

Harris’s integrationism shares Saussure’s rejection of nomenclaturism, and goes further, denying the reality of languagesand of the systematic binding of sounds and meanings. Instead it takes everything back to primordial acts of communication,out of which all our concepts of language and meaning are abstracted, whether in everyday discourse or in the specialisedjargon of linguists. It is not obvious what status the activity of translating has within integrationism; certainly any notion ofrecuperating and reproducing original meaning or authorial intent would run afoul of the fundamental fallacies which Harrisand his followers decry. What I want to propose is a reading of Harris’s version of the CLG not as a translation or even as aSchleiermacherian bridge, but as a new communicative act inspired by the fundamental reality of Saussure at the lectern,communicating with his students. It would not be in the integrationist spirit to attempt to ‘recreate’ that reality, as if Harriscould mystically channel Saussure’s mind. Rather, it is as though he is taking on the role of Saussure, in an enactment thatstrictly limits its own claims to be a re-enactment. Each time something is omitted, added, shifted, the limitations on suchclaims are performed.

Sanders’s global judgement is that Baskin ‘‘stayed relatively close to the original’’, so much so that ‘‘the translation had avery slightly archaic feel even when it was first published’’. Harris, in contrast, ‘‘‘domesticates’ the text to a greater degree’’,altering sentence structure to produce ‘‘a resolutely plain and modern rendering’’, where Baskin is more faithful to the text’s‘‘original cadences’’. This is clear in the passage I shall focus on, the start of Chapter II, taken by the editors from Saussure’sthird course on general linguistics (1910–1911, lecture of 19 May 1911). Here is the passage as it appears in the CLG, withnumbers added at the start of each sentence:

[CLG] Chapitre II: IMMUTABILITÉ ET MUTABILITÉ DU SIGNE§1. Immutabilité1Si par rapport à l’idée qu’il représente, le signifiant apparaît comme librement choisi, en revanche, par rapport à la

communauté linguistique qui l’emploie, il n’est pas libre, il est imposé. 2La masse sociale n’est point consultée, et lesignifiant choisi par la langue, ne pourrait pas être remplacé par un autre. 3Ce fait, qui semble envelopper unecontradiction, pourrait être appelé familièrement ‘‘la carte forcée’’. 4On dit à la langue: ‘‘Choisissez!’’ mais on ajoute:‘‘Ce sera ce signe et non un autre.’’ 5Non seulement un individu serait incapable, s’il le voulait, de modifier en quoi quece soit le choix qui a été fait, mais la masse elle-même ne peut exercer sa souveraineté sur un seul mot; elle est liée àla langue telle qu’elle est. (p. 104)

Its five-sentence structure (the last being actually two sentences separated by a semi-colon) is retained in Baskin’stranslation:

[Baskin CLG] Chapter IIIMMUTABILITY AND MUTABILITY OF THE SIGN1. Immutability1The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with

respect to the linguistic community that uses it. 2The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen bylanguage could be replaced by no other. 3This fact, which seems to embody a contradiction, might be calledcolloquially ‘‘the stacked deck.’’ 4We say to language: ‘‘Choose!’’ but we add: ‘‘It must be this sign and no other.’’ 5Noindividual, even if he willed it, could modify in any way at all the choice that has been made; and what is more, thecommunity itself cannot control so much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language. (p. 71)

In stark contrast, Harris’s version divides the five sentences into ten, and adds a three-sentence translator’s footnote.

[Harris CLG] Chapter IIInvariability and Variability of the Sign§1. Invariability1aThe signal, in relation to the idea it represents, may seem to be freely chosen. 1bHowever, from the point of view of the

linguistic community, the signal is imposed rather than freely chosen. 2aSpeakers are not consulted about its choice.

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2bOnce the language has selected a signal, it cannot be freely replaced by any other. 3aThere appears to be somethingrather contradictory about this. 3bIt is a kind of linguistic Hobson’s choice. 4What can be chosen is already determinedin advance. 5aNo individual is able, even if he wished, to modify in any way a choice already established in thelanguage. 5bNor can the linguistic community exercise its authority to change even a single word.* 5cThe community,as much as the individual, is bound to its language.

* This is not a denial of the possibility of linguistic legislation, nor even of its potential effectiveness. What Saussuredenies is that the collective ratification required is a matter for collective decision. It may be illegal for trade purposes tocall Spanish sparkling wine ‘champagne’: but that will be merely one external factor bearing on speech (parole), whichmay or may not ultimately affect the word champagne as a linguistic sign. (Translator’s note) (p. 71)

Although Sentence 1 of the CLG continues to be a single sentence in the Baskin translation, the word order has actually beenmore thoroughly changed than in Harris’s. Baskin reverses the order of the clauses in both halves of the original sentence:the opening Si par rapport à l’idée qu’il représente (literally, ‘‘If in relation to the idea which it represents’’) is postponed untilafter le signifiant apparaît librement choisi (‘‘the signifier appears freely chosen’’), and the same is done in the next part of thesentence with ‘‘fixed, not free’’ and ‘‘with respect to the linguistic community that uses it’’. Harris, however, apart from drop-ping the ‘if’ and moving le signifiant (translated as ‘the signal’) to the start, keeps the original word order, even across the fullstop which he has inserted between 1a and 1b in his version.

Each translation contains some words that are not the closest English cognates to what is in the original. Baskin gives‘fixed’ for imposé, whereas Harris stays with ‘imposed’. There is a semantic difference: to be fixed is to be immovable, a con-dition; to be imposed is a process, implying an explanation of why something is not arbitrary. The reverse is the case withHarris’s translation of (im)mutabilité as ‘(in)variability’ rather than ‘(im)mutability’. Mutability is a process that takes placeover time, and — to judge from the context which follows in the CLG — wilfully on the part of speakers. Variability is a con-dition, the presence of variation, however it may have come about. There is ample evidence that Saussure recognised theexistence of variation in language (see Joseph, 2010). What he denied was specifically that it was mutable by a deliberateprocess.

The polar opposition between the semiological and social perspectives is established in the CLG by the repetition of parrapport à, and of ‘with respect to’ in Baskin’s translation. Harris, on the other hand, undoes this parallel, using ‘in relation to’for the semiological part and ‘from the point of view of’ for the social part. This makes it less clear that there is a fundamentalparadox. It seems instead to be just a shift of viewpoints. Actually, the repetition and contrast have not disappeared entirelyfrom Harris’s version, but are displaced to the phrase ‘freely chosen’, with which Harris ends both 1a and 1b, where the CLGand Baskin instead introduce a stylistic variant.

But what did Saussure originally say? For our best clue to this we need to look to the course notes taken by Émile Const-antin, one of the students attending these lectures.1

[Constantin’s notes] Troisième chapitre: Immutabilité et mutabilité du signehNous avons vu:i 1Par rapport à l’idée qu’il représente, le signifiant hsignei quel qu’il soit, est arbitraire, apparaît comme

librement choisi, pouvant être remplacé par un autre (table pouvant s’appeler sable ou inversement.) 2Par rapport à lasociété humaine qui est appelée à l’employer, le signe n’est point libre mais imposé, sans que cette masse sociale soitconsultée et comme s’il ne pouvait pas être remplacé par un autre.

3Le fait qui dans une certaine mesure semble envelopper une contradiction de la non-liberté de ce qui est libre, hce faitipourrait s’appeler familièrement le phénomène de la carte forcée. 4hOn dit à la langue:i ‘‘Choisissez au hasard!’’ maison lui dit en même temps: ‘‘vous n’avez pas le droit de choisir, ce sera ceci ou cela!’’ 5Si un individu voulait changer unmot français ou un mode, il ne le pourrait pas, même la masse ne le pourrait pas; elle est rivée à la langue telle qu’elleest. (Saussure, 1993a, pp. 306–307)

The paradox described in sentences 1 and 2 is established even more strongly here than in the CLG, by having both sen-tences start with Par rapport à. It is clear too that the first thing Saussure means by immutability is the irreplacability of onesignifier by another, as in the example of table and sable (sand). Again, that is a separate matter from variability, which has todo with variation between signifiers (or combinations of signifiers) that is not of an order to prevent them from signifyingthe same signified. This may happen accidentally, but that is not what modern studies of variation are interested in. As Sand-ers points out, Harris is striving for a text that speaks directly to the contemporary reader, for whom ‘mutability’ is not afamiliar word, either within linguistics or outside it. The more familiar ‘variability’ has been chosen despite the risk ofmisunderstanding.

Another of the translation choices Harris has made here is still more controversial: ‘signal’ rather than ‘signifier’ for sig-nifiant. The rationale would however seem to be consistent with the one just discussed. Yet the question arises of whether a

1 Constantin’s notes were not available to Bally and Sechehaye, who used notes by George Dégallier and Marguerite Sechehaye in compiling this passage forthe CLG. Constantin’s notes are however cited here because, as will be seen, they are the only ones to have appeared in English translation — by Roy Harris. Thethree sets of notes give generally similar versions of this passage.

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translator can ignore Saussure’s long history of agonising over this particular term, before finally settling on signifiant (and itscounterpart signifié) in the final weeks of his last course of lectures on general linguistics. Such has been the success of theCours that the words signifier and signified have entered the English language, at least in scholarly usage within the human-ities and social sciences, and a fair bit beyond. Here we face a sort of ‘ordinary language purism’ on the part of Harris, who,not unreasonably, wants to avoid terms that are a part of a limited register in favour of ones in everyday use. This was a keytenet of the Scottish common sense philosophy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: the use of a term throughout thecommunity was the best guarantor that it designated something that really exists, rather than the fantasy of a linguist orother analyst. That is a healthy instinct, of which Saussure certainly would have approved; he only introduced against-the-grain usage as a last resort. But this is one of the places where, after a lifetime of reflection, he determined that itwas necessary. His use of signifiant and signifié in French go against the grain every bit as much as signifier and signifieddo in English. In rejecting them for his translation, Harris is implicitly questioning Saussure’s use of them in his originallectures.

When we look at the last passage in Harris’s translation of Constantin’s course notes, we find many surprises.

[Harris transl. of Constantin’s notes] [. . .T]hird chapter: Immutability and mutability of the sign.hWe have seen thati 1in relation to the idea it represents, the signifying element hsigni, whatever it may be, is arbitrary,

appears to be freely chosen, is replaceble by another (table might be called sable or vice-versa). 2In relation to thehuman society called upon to employ it, the sign is not free but imposed, and the corporate body is not consulted: it isas if the sign could not be replaced by another. 3This fact, which to a certain extent seems to embrace contradiction ofthe non-freedom of what is free, hthis facti could be called colloquially the Hobson’s choice phenomenon. 4hYou say tothe language:i ‘Choose at random’, but at the same time, ‘You have no right of choice: it must be this or that.’

5If an individual wanted to change a French word or a mood, he would not be able to; even the community could not; itis tied to the language as it is. (Saussure, 1993b, pp. 93–94)

Here the original sentence breaks are kept, and ‘in relation to’ is repeated in the first two sentences. Gone are the ‘(in)var-iability’ and ‘signal’ of a decade earlier, in favour of ‘(im)mutability’ and ‘signifying element’. The former is a tacit compro-mise. The latter, more serious change, is addressed directly by Harris in his translator’s preface, where he explains that‘signifying element’ was inspired by the use of élément at one point in Constantin’s notes (Saussure, 1993b, p. 93) to coverboth the signifiant and the signifié. But this is not a criterion he applied in translating the CLG: Saussure never used Frenchsignal in this context, except when referring to maritime signal flags.

Harris’s preface underscores Sanders’s insight, when he points out that, unlike with the CLG, he was not translating thesource materials for a wide, non-specialist general audience. The ethos of ordinary language purism did not need to apply.One could say that the voice behind the translated text of Constantin’s notes is that of Harris’s Saussure (via Constantin), afigure who, like Kripke’s Wittgenstein, is not a false version of the original, but is interesting in his own right because of theinterpretation invested in him.2 The voice behind the translated text of the CLG is something even more interpretative: Harrisas Saussure (via Bally and Sechehaye and all the students whose notes were consulted), carrying out his communicative (re-)enactment.

Even so, sentence 1 of Harris’s translation of the course notes contains a noteworthy deviation from the original. Const-antin recorded Saussure as saying that the signifier apparaît comme librement choisi, pouvant être remplacé par un autre — lit-erally, appears as though freely chosen, able to be replaced by another — where the last part, about replaceability, dependson ‘appears’. It turns out to be a false appearance, based on abstracting away the speakers. Both mutability and immutability,in other words, are ‘appearances’ in Constantin’s notes, and follow from the perspective which one takes. The CLG text tiltsthe balance somewhat by leaving out the last part of Constantin’s sentence 2, which says (in Harris’s version), ‘‘In relation tothe human society called upon to employ it, [. . .] it is as if the sign could not be replaced by another’’. Instead the CLG saysthat ‘‘it could not be replaced by another’’, again remaining tacit on how this appearance falls out from the perspective taken.

Sentence 1 of the CLG text contains the term communauté linguistique ‘linguistic community’, which has been changedboth in words and position from the société humaine ‘human society’ of sentence 2 of Constantin’s notes. This is relativelystraightforward, but later in the same sentence Constantin has Saussure referring to the same grouping as cette masse sociale,literally ‘this social mass’, and rendered by Harris as ‘the corporate body’ (with uncharacteristic inelegance: anyone withHarris’s knowledge of Latin will hear this as equivalent to ‘the bodily body’). In the CLG this becomes la masse sociale, literally‘the social mass’, with the use of the definite article la implying, albeit with a measure of ambiguity, that this is a conceptnewly introduced into the discussion, and not simply an alternative designation for the earlier ‘linguistic community’. Baskinrenders la masse sociale as ‘the masses’, Harris simply as ‘speakers’. Both of these miss the implied sense of all these individ-uals acting as a ‘corporate body’ — but the art of translating, in whatever mode it is undertaken, includes having the wisdomand taste to leave minor implications aside sometimes, when they would distract from the main point. Baskin’s use of theterm ‘the masses’ has demonstrably led to at least one significant distraction: it recalls Marx, and has led some to construethis passage as evidence that Saussure was an enemy of the people in the Marxist sense. He was an aristocrat to be sure, and

2 The various versions of Saussure examined in Harris (2003) do not include Harris’s own Saussure. But since that would have left us with a Harris’s Harris’sSaussure to grapple with as yet another analytical artefact, perhaps it is just as well.

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became a target of socialist political reformers near the end of his life (see Joseph, 2008). But for him la masse sociale includedhimself and every other speaker of French, and his point is that none of them, however powerful or linguistically gifted, hasany more or less power to change the language than any other, which if anything is a radical view in political terms — andone that loses some of its force with Harris’s ‘speakers’, who might be just an élite rather than the entire community.

Harris introduces another slight change into sentence 2. In rendering Saussure’s remark that, once chosen, the signifier nepourrait pas être remplacé par un autre (‘could not be replaced by another’), Harris reprises the word ‘freely’ from sentence 1.This seems at first like an innocuous addition, but it creates a potential ambiguity. A reader of Harris’s version might takeSaussure to be saying that the signifier could be replaced by another, just not freely, that is, not easily. In fact the statementin the CLG seems more resolute; the only tiny element of wavering is in its use of the conditional pourrait ‘could’ rather thanpeut ‘can’. But if we look back to Constantin’s notes we find something quite different. Saussure is recorded as saying that it iscomme s’il ne pouvait pas être remplacé par un autre (‘‘as if it could not be replaced by another’’). This sort of clause is known inEnglish as a condition contrary to fact: meaning, in other words, that the signifier actually could be replaced by another,though it appears as if this were not so.

What has happened in the CLG? Possibly the editors missed the nuance, or decided to omit it; but more likely is thatsomething is going on in this passage that is not immediately obvious. It may be that the apparaît (‘appears’) of sentence1 has been given a wider scope than one would normally expect, such that the (false or misleading) appearance referredto continues all the way through sentence 2. This may be one of the ways in which the editors made the text concise:the 168 words of the passage in Constantin’s notes have after all been distilled to 134, a reduction of 20%. While concisenessis generally a virtue, beyond a certain point it can produce ambiguity — to the point that Harris’s introduction of ‘freely’ intosentence 2 may serve as a disambiguating recognition that Saussure is speaking only of appearances and conditionalityrather than of a genuine impossibility.

In sentence 3 of the CLG, the editors have eliminated what Constantin’s notes call the ‘contradiction’ la non-liberté de ce quiest libre (‘‘the non-freedom of what is free’’). Probably they considered this simply repetitive of what was said in sentence 1,yet there the contrast is not posed so starkly. Here again we find Baskin staying closer than Harris to the CLG text, while intranslating Constantin’s notes, Harris proceeds more like Baskin. But at the end of sentence 3 all three translations straysomewhat from Saussure. The carte forcée, forcing a card, is a very basic trick introduced early on in the manuals of magic.In the version I was taught as a boy, you fan a deck of cards and ask someone to choose one — then, as their fingers are reach-ing toward the deck, you push out from underneath, the tiniest fraction of an inch, the card you want chosen. The movementis not consciously detectable, yet the result will nearly always be that the person chooses the forced card.

The psychology of this is significant, as indeed are its philosophical and even its political implications: the person makesan apparently free choice that in fact has been determined by you. This is far less striking in the case of a ‘stacked deck’,which is how Baskin renders la carte forcée. In a stacked deck the cards have been ordered in a certain way, so that the dealerknows what hand each player holds, though the players think the cards have been distributed randomly. Here it is the ele-ment of chance that is compromised, not free choice.

With Harris’s translation as ‘Hobson’s choice’ — in the Constantin notes as well as the CLG — we are dealing with some-thing else again. Thomas Hobson was the 17th-century Cambridge stable keeper who offered his customers their choice ofhorses: the one in the stall nearest the door, or none at all. Here choice is compromised, but without any sense that a freechoice is being made. In political terms, it is like voting in an election with only one candidate, whereas la carte forcée is likevoting in a multi-party election where a powerful propaganda campaign has assured the outcome. Voters in the second casebelieve they are making a free choice at the ballot box, while voters in the first case harbour no such illusion. As analogiesabout the working of language, these have very different implications. All of them were available to Saussure, and there is noreason to suppose that he chose one by accident, nor indeed via a forced card, stacked deck or Hobson’s choice.

Sentence 4 of the CLG text contains the striking use of an imagined quotation — oddly, of someone speaking to the lan-guage, ordering it to ‘Choose!’ (and even addressing it with the formal vous). The considerable disjuncture between the CLGand Constantin versions derives directly from the differences in the notes by Constantin and those by Dégallier, on which theCLG editors relied (see note 1). This whole image of giving an order to the language is beyond the pale for Harris, and he dropsthe entire quotation. Arguably this is a decision of which Saussure himself would have approved. He was such a perfectionistas a writer that he could not bring any of the many books which he undertook over his adult life to the point of meeting hisown exacting standards, and abandoned all of them incomplete. Even in his lectures he took great care to word things pre-cisely and clearly. But while books and articles could remain unpublished, the lectures had to be given, and he could not lethis perfectionism get the better of him. Hence passages appear which he surely would not have contemplated putting intoprint. This can create an ethical dilemma for the translator — whether to represent vividly and directly the discourse of Saus-sure at the chalkface, or apply some of his Calvinist discretion to create a more austere text.

The last and perhaps most controversial translation issue in the passage involves la langue, which occurs in sentences 2, 4and 5 in the CLG, though only in 4 and 5 in Constantin’s notes. The occurrence in 5 has a further qualification in both versions— la langue telle qu’elle est, the language just as it is — and it is rendered as ‘the language’ by Baskin and by Harris in his trans-lation of Constantin’s notes, and as ‘its language’ in his translation of the CLG, the possessive being the equivalent of the def-inite article (one can say the book or my book, but not �the my book or �my the book). At issue here is a fundamental syntacticdifference between French and English, whereby English nouns do not take an article in a case of general rather than specificreference, while their French counterparts do: war and peace, versus la guerre et la paix. On the other hand, la guerre de centans, being specific, is the Hundred Years’ War. For any specific use of la langue in French, then, a translator has to decide

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whether a general or a specific reference is being made. Baskin reads the instances in sentences 2 and 4 as general. Harristreats the one in sentence 2 as specific; the one in 4 is dropped in his curtailed rendering of this sentence in the CLG version,but again treated as specific in Harris’s translation of Constantin’s notes.

But there is a further complication, in the form of a theoretical problem that famously exercised Saussure. Even conceivedas a generality, ‘language’ can still mean two rather different things: either the human language faculty, our ability to speakand communicate; or language as the organised systems of sounds and signs found around the world. The French words lan-gue and langage were (and are) used largely interchangeably for either of these general meetings. Saussure tried to introduceclarity by proposing to use le langage for the human faculty, and la langue for the organised system (with la parole reservedfor yet another meaning, ‘language’ as the texts produced using the system). English, of course, does not have two wordscorresponding to langue and langage: the closest dyad we have is tongue and language, but we do not use tongue in generalreference (e.g., language is complex but not �tongue is complex).

Harris’s solution is to use the language in the case of general reference to systems, and language for general reference tothe human faculty. This is again imperfect, because the language is normally used for specific reference. What Harris gains inclarity between the two types of general reference comes at the cost of introducing a new confusion — and sometimes anawkwardness, as when Harris’s CLG translation reads ‘‘5aNo individual is able, even if he wished, to modify in any way achoice already established in the language’’. Here one expects ‘a language’ or just ‘language’, since no specific language isbeing referred to. The use of the definite article sounds foreign, in much the way that Harris objected to in the case of sig-nifier and signified. Still, it would be hard to deny that at this point Baskin’s translation misses what is in fact the very sig-nificant distinction between the two types of general reference, and makes it sound as though the CLG is talking about thelanguage faculty when, quite clearly, organised systems are what is meant.

There is of course something to be said for translations sounding ‘foreign’: as Schleiermacher and many theorists of trans-lation after him have argued, it is good for readers to be reminded periodically that the text they are reading is not in fact anoriginal composition in their own language, and that there is inevitably a gap of culture, and usually one of time, to take intoaccount. But again, foreignness runs counter to what appears to be the general ideology of Harris’s CLG translation. To thatideology must be added a proviso: the need to clarify Saussure’s redefinition of langue trumps the desire for domestication.

This happens again with the introduction of the footnote by Harris: it is an intrusion upon the page, though not within thetext proper, of a theoretical point that is important to him, though not something Saussure wrote or lectured about. Perhapsto limit the intrusiveness, Harris keeps the footnote brief, but some confusion results. The sort of ‘linguistic legislation’ Harrisrefers to comes about after a change has already taken place (in his example, the shift of champagne from the wine of thatregion to any sparkling wine). The legislation is an attempt to limit the commercial damage caused by the change (to poorwidows and mendicants such as Veuve Cliquot and Dom Perignon). In saying ‘‘Nor can the linguistic community exercise itsauthority to change even a single word’’, the CLG really is denying the ‘potential effectiveness’ of legislation if, as the footnoteseems to imply, it is not simply a matter of stipulating how wine can be marketed, but of reversing or undoing a linguisticinnovation. The example involves complex issues of variability, social class and the spread of language change which, whileimportant and intriguing, lie well beyond the discussion Saussure was pursuing.3

In conclusion, no single theory of translation consistently underlies Harris’s versions of the CLG and of Constantin’s notes.Although less of what Sanders calls ‘domestication’ is going on in the latter, even here Harris cannot resist occasionally tak-ing over the lectern, as when he turns ‘the forced card’ into ‘Hobson’s choice’. On certain key points, including the handling ofla langue, Harris’s solutions, while imperfect, are better than Baskin’s. This is particularly true with the translation of Const-antin’s notes, where for the most part the semi-fictive author communicating with the imagined reader is Harris’s Saussure,rather than Harris as Saussure.

Yet it is surprising how often Harris as Saussure second-guesses Saussure, who struggled endlessly to make his ideasabout language accessible to students lacking specialised knowledge of linguistics. Perhaps the most striking instance ofall is Harris’s footnote, which concerns a point unlikely to occur to the average reader coming to Saussure for the first time.It seems instead to be the sort of question that might be raised in the common room of an Oxford college in the 1980s, oramongst Cambridge dons whose predecessors once hired horses from Hobson. For all its flaws, Baskin’s translation does notseem quite so anchored to its time and place, a characteristic which it shares with the CLG itself.

For serious, specialised work, Harris’s translation of Constantin’s notes is the most adequate of the three texts. As for theCLG, Baskin’s translation is more useful than Harris’s for scholarly purposes, because of its greater readiness to trust Saussureas a thinker, a writer and a creator of images and metaphors. Perhaps it is true that, figuratively speaking, Harris’s CLGtranslation ‘spoke more directly’ to readers, or some readers, in the 1980s; but three decades on, some of that directnesscomes off as an excessive textual interventionism, heavily stylised in a way that was of its time but feels dated now. That

3 Those of us who distinguish crémant de Bourgogne from champagne do not on that account speak a different language than our countrymen who call themboth champagne. The fact is that if someone holding a bottle of good Catalan cava asks me if I would like some champagne, they have not failed tocommunicate; if I reply, ‘‘I surely would, but I will settle for that cava’’, I may fail to communicate, or I may get the wine poured over my head. No doubt I havebeen served the odd glass of first-rate crémant de Bourgogne that I have taken for second-rate champagne (a mistake Harris would never make), and havingfinished it, asked for another glass of champagne. The crux is not the sign champagne in itself, but the network of related signs and the knowledge particularindividuals have of them — specialised technical knowledge, such as I lack with regard to civil engineering or the finer points of cricket. Harris’s concisenessleaves the impression that he takes oenology to be general knowledge possessed by one and all, which of course it is in the common rooms of Oxford colleges. Inany case, another, less class-loaded example, such as hypothetical legislation restricting tangerines to fruit grown in Tangiers, would involve the same confusionof reversing language change and limiting its commercial damage.

530 J.E. Joseph / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 524–530

a translation should give us, not Saussure directly, but Harris’s Saussure, is inevitable. That it should give us Harris as Saus-sure is intellectually welcome at key points, the more so when the textual disruption, again inevitable, is kept to a minimum.The ideal would be a translation of the CLG combining the best insights of Harris as Saussure with the truer textuality ofHarris’s Saussure. With the study of French in steep decline in the English-speaking world, the need has never been greater.Since it is hard to imagine a third CLG translation finding a publisher, our hope lies with Harris producing a second editionalong the lines of his translation of Constantin’s notes. It would be the King James Version to the CLG’s Geneva Bible.

References

Harris, R., 2003. Saussure and His Interpreters,, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.Joseph, J.E., 1998. Why isn’t translation impossible? In: Hunston, S. (Ed.), Language At Work: Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the British

Association for Applied Linguistics held at the University of Birmingham, September 1997, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, pp. 86–97.Joseph, J.E., 2008. The attack on Saussure in Le Genevois, December 1912. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 61, 249–280.Joseph, J.E., 2010. ‘‘La teinte de tous les ciels’’: Divergence et nuance dans la conception saussurienne du changement linguistique. Cahiers Ferdinand de

Saussure 63, in press.Sanders, C., 2000. Saussure translated. Historiographia Linguistica 27 (2–3), 345–358.Saussure, F. de, 1916. In: Bally, C., Sechehaye, A., (Eds.)., with the assistance of Riedlinger, A. Cours de linguistique générale. Payot, Lausanne and Paris.

(English version, Course in General Linguistics, transl. by W. Baskin, Philosophical Library, New York, 1959; another transl. by R. Harris, Duckworth,London; Open Court, La Salle, Ill., 1983.)

de Saussure, F., 1993a. In: Komatsu, E. (Ed.), Premier et troisième cours de linguistique générale d’après les notes de Riedlinger et Constantin. GakushuinUniversity, Tokyo.

Saussure, F. de, 1993b. Troisième cours de linguistique générale (1910–1911), d’après les cahiers d’Emile Constantin/Sausure’s Third Course of Lectures onGeneral Linguistics (1910–1911), from the notebooks of Emile Constantin. Komatsu, E., Harris, R., (Eds.) and Trans. Pergamon, Oxford & New York.

Schleiermacher, F., 1813. Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens. Read 24 June 1813 to the Royal Academy of Sciences, Berlin. In: SämmtlicheWerke, Dritte Abteilung: Zur Philosophie, vol. 2, Reimer, Berlin, 1838, pp. 207–245. (English version, On the Different Methods of Translating, transl. byS. Bernofsky, in: Venuti, L. (Ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., pp. 43–63, Routledge, London & New York, 2004.)