Quantity operates in textual rhythms, not only in regular verse but also the rhythms that beat most deeply within cultural identity, within the most poetic and sacred dimensions of belonging. Quantity is the problematic underlying the more disturbing rhythm with which information is accumulated, manipulated, and accelerated in a highly imbalanced electronic globalization. Or the sexual rhythms mimicked in erotic language. Quantity is the editorial problem of fitting texts into pages, flowing around brochure pictures, to the exact bottom of this or that column. It is the key to successful interpreting, similarly editorial in that texts must be fitted into limited temporal space. It is the main criterion in film dubbing and subtitling, where linguistic values should correspond to the shape and duration of moving mouths or the available space on the screen. In all such areas, criteria of textual quantity can and do have priority over questions of strictly qualitative representation.
The maxim of representational quantity in translation holds that, since input and output should have the same inherent qualities, there should be no significant difference between their quantities. And yet there usually is a difference, if only because the same qualities tend to require different extensions in different locales.
One fundamental reason for the difference lies in Zipf's "rank-frequency" law, which basically says that frequency of use correlates with shorter forms of linguistic expression (1965:20ff.). The words we use most tend to be the ones that are the shortest. Zipf's law is important because localization generally moves from specialized locales with high frequencies of technical language to locales with low frequencies in the same domains. This is because something
new is being brought to the receiving locales. Hence the need for different quantities, normally for expansion but also, in some cases, for reduction of some kind. The maxim of representational quantity ignores this very basic requirement.
Let us immediately admit that Zipf's beautifully simple principle becomes very complex when we actually set about measuring quantities in different languages. Should we count metrical feet, spoken syllables, written characters, words, ideograms, or what? The only solution is to count in whatever measure is pertinent to the specific problem to be solved: inches or centimeters if we are working on layout, seconds and characters if we are subtitling, and so on. Hopefully this distinction will enable us to talk about quantity as a general factor, independently of its measurements. The beautiful principle might thus survive unscathed.The technical difficulties should not blind us to theoretical importance.
If no account is taken of the differences between quantities, localization becomes an abstractly facile concern. When Katz, for instance, attempts to base cross-cultural communication on the naturalist semantic hypothesis that "each proposition can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language" (the principle of effability), he must first declare that length is not a semantic consideration (1978:205). No matter how difficult the term or concept, if we
have several thousand words and a few years in which to explain it, complete localization can be achieved. Of course, the cost of such a project will probably outweigh the benefits (we will study relative costs in a later chapter). So we must conclude that quantity is subject to constraints in all forms of localization, at least for as long as price is an object.
The case of translation has its particularity within localization on this point as well. As Keenan (1978) argues in his reply to Katz, a sentence of a hundred or so words might well be a very precise semantic explanation of a five-word proposition, but it will by no means be universally accepted as a worthwhile translation. Effective translation rarely obeys the NANS principle, but it must nevertheless depend on some reasonable relationship between the quantities involved. This "reasonable relationship" could be a question of clines. At the ideal of ideals, the quantities are exactly the same; then come the trivial differences that reasonable people would overlook, extending out to the obvious discrepancies that would raise reasonable doubts about any translation. This logic would lead to a prototype view of translation, for which there is much justification. We nevertheless suspect that there are other logics involved as well, imposed upon the gradations at various points between ideal sameness and radical discrepancy. The following pages will attempt to bring out those hidden logics.
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