At a deep level, translation deals with the rendering of
ideas or information from one form of expression into another. Into different dialects,
languages, scripts, or media. It is the concept of difference which also helps us
to define an idea, or a unit of information. The celebrated scientist and philosopher
Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980) addressed this issue in the Nineteenth Annual
Korzybski Memorial Lecture, which he delivered on January 9, 1970, for the
Institute of General Semantics. His lecture, titled Form, Substance and Difference is a rich broth of ideas about cybernetics,
information theory and mind. In the essay Bateson defines information: ‘...what
we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which
makes a difference...’. This wonderful phrase
of Bateson’s, a difference which makes a difference, was later used by Robert
Bringhurst to also define an idea. On face value it is meaningless, it is not
even a tautology (the saying of the same thing twice over using different words).
But Bateson’s phrase tells us something about both language, and about experiments
in the physical sciences.
It is universally the case, that if we make repeated measurements
of a physical quantity, such as the mass of a potato or othermacroscopic object, with a sufficiently
sensitive balance or measurement device, we see small differences between the
measurements. If the time period between the repeated measurements is small,
and the difference in the measured quantities is small, we call this variation ‘measurement
error’, or ‘noise’, and we often ignore it. Our belief is that the true
quantity is unchanging and that the differences in our measurements are not
meaningful. Numerically we take the average of the varying measurements to smooth out these differences. But
not all small differences are noise. Some are meaningful differences - in other words they are differences which
make a difference. A number of Nobel prizes in science have been won by
investigators who chose to find the cause of small differences that others had either
not noticed, or had noticed and ignored.
Bateson’s not- even tautology, also tells us something
specific about the nature of the English language. The historically contingent
development of English means that we should be completely unsurprised that a
single word, such as difference, would
be overloaded with a number of different meanings, which depend
on the immediate context of its use. In Bateson’s example, he uses a single word to
describe two types of difference. The first is a perceptible difference, the
second a meaningful difference. In concordance with the example of experimental
measurement, we can sometimes perceive a difference, but it has no meaning. It
does not ‘make a difference’. In other languages, which have developed and
evolved through a different sequence of steps, and from different roots, these
subtly distinct meanings of the word ‘difference’, might well be more usefully rendered
with completely distinct words.
