Let us now try a slightly more intriguing example. In film dubbing from English into Spanish, code-referring utterances like "Do you speak English?" are commonly rendered as “¿Hablas mi idioma?" (“Do you speak my language?").
Here, as we might have predicted, the problem of self-reference in translation is solved by avoiding the third-person name ("English"/“inglés") and retreating to the neutral if highly ambiguous space of a first-person pronoun (“my"). No one can really say if the "I" of the resulting “my language" speaks Spanish, English or, in a vaguely utopian projection, all languages at once. Reference to the translator's situation would appear to have been avoided by the construction of a very peculiar first-person pronoun. Does this then contradict the general tendency for translational discourse to seek refuge in third-person terms?
We approach through a relatively inventive example. In the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), we find two bank-robbing heroes who move to Bolivia. There they are faced with the problem of having to learn enough Spanish to exercise their profession, viz. robbing banks. Of course, in the dubbed Spanish version of the film they already speak very good Spanish. Why should they now have to learn this same language? The localizers might perhaps have made them learn English, but this part of the film is very definitely set in a visual Bolivia. So the localizers hijacked the storyline for two or three sequences: the heroes now decide to learn French in the hope that they will not be recognized as Americans. When they enter a Bolivian bank, the rudimentary Spanish of the American film is replaced by rudimentary French in the Spanish version. The neutral space of the third term "French" conceals their identity, not from the bank officials (who take about two seconds to recognize them as Americans), but from the viewer of the dubbed film, who is supposedly spared an upsetting reference to the fact of translation and the presence of a translator.
Why might such a reference have been upsetting? After all, some localized versions of Pygmalion and My Fair Lady (at least into Catalan and Spanish) make prolonged and repeated references to the English language, setting up the acceptable (since accepted) convention that the target language is to be treated and named as if it were really English. The fictional "as if" of this contradictory self-reference can assume conventional status when structurally prolonged,
when it becomes part of a possible world where two “I"s may become one. The bank-robbers' French, however, concerns a language with only transitory status in its fictional context, without sufficient narrative space to set up conventions of its own. The difficulty concerns not a locale, but a border between locales.
Now, exactly where is this "French" referred to by the Spanish? Certainly not in France. It would seem to belong to the same textual world as the "Spanish" referred to in the American film. That is, these third terms (the languages referred to only because they are supposedly unknown) belong to the world of the excluded other. Their world is present only thanks to otherness, which is a form of necessary absence. In fact, in the neutral world of this third term we might also expect to meet the "my language" of the peculiarly translational "Do you speak my language?", since the language referred to only functions as such for as long as it remains unspecified. A certain mode of translation, speaking with neither authority nor foresight, can thus built its own possible world, in a dimension created by the fleeting negation of immediate locales. In this, again, translation achieves effects like those of internationalization, but without the authority of explicit internationalization.
Let us now return to the operator ".…. translates as.….". So far we have more or less assumed that its correlative is the homogeneous content "WORDS", ascribed to one sole author and thus implicitly to one sole language. This, however, is a dangerous assumption. Maurice Blanchot (1949: 186) pointed out the half-way status of Hemingway’s characters who, by speaking Spanish in English (inserting the occasional Spanish term and adopting features of Spanish syntax) created a “shadow of distance" that could then be translated as such. Does localization deal with words in one language only? The internal distance described by Blanchot, and picked up later by Derrida (1985), suggests that we too-readily assume texts to be monolingual. Surely what is being translated in the case of the American-Spanish-French bank-robbers, for example, is neither English nor Spanish nor the French of France. It would seem to be more like the following:
(5) Movement from English to Spanish translates as movement from Spanish into French.
One boundary zone or overlap translates another. Interpreted in this way, the linguistic content of the bank-robbers' first person is not in any one language, nor in all languages (no need to dive into metaphysics). It is an asymmetric border, defined by discontinuous distribution yet unlocalized beyond that definition.
If we now go back to the example "Do you speak my language?", we see that the content of the utterance is not whatever language the first person speaks but whether or not the situation calls for translation. Indeed, the question "Do you speak English?" could be rewritten as "Is this a situation requiring translation?". There is no translational schizophrenia, only cultural disjunction.
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