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Part of What to expect from cultural speeches
Cultural speeches misquotes: how they start and why it matters
Cultural speeches misquotes usually start as a translator's sentence. The translation chain, the anthology vector, and how to correct one without amplifying it.
Most cultural addresses that circulate widely reach their readers through at least one translation, one anthology and one retelling. Each stage is an opportunity for a sentence to change, and none of the stages leaves a mark on the sentence when it does.
This page is about those stages, and it traces them through one case the National Archives has examined in detail: the speech attributed to Chief Seattle, one of the most quoted cultural addresses in American life.
What to take away
- A cultural quotation is usually a translator's sentence being credited to a speaker.
- Anthologies are the main vector, because they print without provenance and are then cited as sources.
- Retranslation, where a translated line is translated back, produces text that matches nothing anybody ever said.
The translation chain
Speech travels through this field in stages, and each has its own failure mode.
Translation chain stages
- Delivery in original language
- Interpretation on the day
- A supplied text
- A commissioned translation
- An anthology reprint
- Retranslation
- Delivery in the original language.The only stage where the speaker's words exist.
- Interpretation on the day.Simultaneous work compresses and reorders in real time. The professional account of language interpretation makes clear that this is a distinct activity from written translation, with different constraints and different products.
- A supplied text.Sometimes written before the event and not necessarily matching what was said.
- A commissioned translation.Made from the supplied text, or from a recording, or from a transcript of the interpretation. Which one is rarely recorded.
- An anthology reprint.Often taken from an earlier anthology rather than from the translation's source.
- Retranslation.The reprinted line rendered back into the original language for a domestic audience, now different from what was said.
By the last stage, the sentence has a speaker's name on it and no traceable relationship to any recording.
A traced case: the speech of Chief Seattle
The National Archives' journal Prologue followed the Chief Seattle speech through every one of these stages in "Thus Spoke Chief Seattle: The Story of An Undocumented Speech" (1985).
- No original-language text.There is no Duwamish-language text of the speech, no notes by the man who reported it, and the speech does not appear in the official treaty proceedings.
- Interpretation through two languages.At one documented meeting with Governor Isaac Stevens, Luther Collins translated into Chinook, the trade language of the Puget Sound tribes, and an Indian in turn translated into the local tongue.
- A late reconstruction.The text everyone quotes comes from Dr. Henry A. Smith's article in the Seattle Sunday Star in October 1887, some thirty-two years after the alleged episode.
- Anthology reprints.Versions with variant texts appear in McLuhan's Touch the Earth (1971) and Virginia I. Armstrong's I Have Spoken (1971).
- A new "translation."A television documentary used a "translation" by the Latinist William Arrowsmith, who later admitted only to polishing the literary style of a nineteenth-century source.
The article's conclusion is the honest form of a correction: unless new evidence appears, it is impossible either to confirm or to deny the speech.
Where the errors enter
| Stage | Typical error | How to detect it |
|---|---|---|
| Interpretation | Compression read as concision | Look for a recording; interpreted speech is shorter than the original |
| Supplied text | Prepared wording quoted as delivered | Compare with any recording; check for an "as prepared" note |
| Translation | A translator's phrasing credited to the speaker | Find two independent translations; where they diverge, the wording is the translator's |
| Anthology | No source given, or a source that is another anthology | Follow the acknowledgments page, not the headnote |
| Wall label or catalog | Institutional paraphrase in quotation marks | Ask the institution for the source it used |
| Retranslation | A line that no native record contains | Search the original language press from the week of the event |
The anthology row is the important one. Anthologies are compiled under
Error detection by stage
Stage
- Interpretation
- Compression read as concision
- Supplied text
- Prepared wording quoted as delivered
- Translation
- Translator's phrasing credited to speaker
- Anthology
- No source or another anthology
- Wall label
- Institutional paraphrase in quotes
- Retranslation
- Line absent from native record
Typical error
- Interpretation
- Look for recording
- Supplied text
- Compare with recording
- Translation
- Find two translations
- Anthology
- Follow acknowledgments page
- Wall label
- Ask institution for source
- Retranslation
- Search original press
How to detect
- Interpretation
- Supplied text
- Translation
- Anthology
- Wall label
- Retranslation
Institutional paraphrase
Museums, festivals and prize bodies produce a large amount of quotation in labels, catalogs, plaques and press material. It is written by staff, often from a translated source, often shortened to fit a panel, and it is then quoted by visitors and journalists as though the institution had published a text.
Treat a label as a secondary source with an unstated intermediary. Institutions are usually willing to say what they worked from if asked directly, and the answer is sometimes that nobody now knows, which is itself worth reporting.
The Chief Seattle case shows how far this travels. When Prologue examined the speech in 1985, the Smithsonian's "Nation of Nations" exhibit included a portion of it for the thousands of tourists who visit each year, and the National Archives, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress each received numerous requests every year for the original text of the statements attributed to the chief.
Correcting without amplifying
- Lead with what the record supports. Put the erroneous version after it, once, briefly.
- Name which of the four claims failedwording, speaker, occasion, or the language the remarks were made in. Cultural errors fail on the fourth more often than any other genre.
- Say which translation you used and who made it. A correction that quietly substitutes a different translation has not corrected anything.
- Describe rather than reproduce. Where an estate or a publisher administers a translation, describing the passage avoids a permissions question entirely, and the reasoning behind that habit runs through cultural speeches.
- Where the honest answer is that the original cannot be reached, publish that. The exceptions written into national copyright law, such as the guidance on exceptions to copyright published for the United Kingdom by the Intellectual Property Office, are narrower than most writers assume, and a description is always available where a quotation is not.
Why this genre is worse than the others
Political misquotation usually has an official record behind it that settles the matter. Ceremony misquotation at least has a broadcast. Cultural misquotation frequently has neither: a lecture given once, in one language, to two hundred people, printed years later in translation by an editor working from a typescript that no longer exists.
That is not a reason to avoid the material. It is a reason to write about it differently: to describe the occasion, the brief and the argument, and to say where the text came from, which is the working method throughout speech analysis and the reason political speeches treats version history as the first question rather than the last.
Common questions
Two translations of the same address differ substantially. Which do I use?
Name both. Where they differ, the difference is the translators', and your reader should be told that rather than shown one and left to assume it is the speech.
Is a quotation in an exhibition catalog citable?
As the institution's wording, yes. As the speaker's, only after the institution tells you what it worked from.
A line exists only in an anthology with no source. What can I say?
That the earliest appearance you could find is that anthology, and that its source is not stated. Readers can use that. A confident attribution they cannot check is worse than useless.
Does the speaker's approval of a translation settle the wording?
It settles that the speaker accepted it as a representation. It does not make the translated sentence something the speaker said, and the distinction matters whenever the wording itself is the point.
