“Let Him Have It”: The Unbearable Lightness Of Meaning

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist who pioneered theories on the communication of meaning. He proposed a two-part model of meaning composed of a “signifier” (the sign that represents a concept) and the “signified” (the concept itself).

For example, the word “dog” is a signifier that consists of three letters (themselves just squiggly shapes drawn on a paper or displayed on a screen that represent the mouth noises we make when we speak), while the signified is the mental image you may conjure up in your head when someone says the word. Charles Sanders Peirce later introduced the notion of the “referent,” which denotes the actual thing or object in the real world.  

Ambiguity in communication arises from the relationship between the signifier, the signified, and the referent, and the extent to which we make assumptions about what our interlocutors know about these relationships. If I use the signifier "dog" to refer to a springer spaniel I had when I was a child, this will evoke a mental image of a dog in your mind (the "signified"). If, due to your own personal experience, you picture a chihuahua, there will be very little resemblance between your mental image (the “signified”) and the actual dog I am talking about (the “referent”).

Translators and interpreters are all too familiar with the difficulty of communicating meaning in situations of ambiguity or where context is limited. The curse of knowledge means that speakers and writers invariably overestimate their audience’s level of knowledge, causing them to leave out crucial context. There is very little riding on the misunderstanding above, but it is easy to imagine the potential for harm given the assumptions we make about what others know.

The 1991 British film “Let Him Have It” is based on the life of Derek Bentley, a young man with severe learning difficulties who was involved in a tragic incident leading to his controversial trial and execution. The film’s pivotal moment revolves around a critical exchange during a botched robbery. In this scene, Derek Bentley, played by Christopher Eccleston, has been detained by the police, while his accomplice, Christopher Craig, played by Paul Reynolds, is still armed. The police are trying to convince Craig to surrender his weapon. It is at this tense moment that Bentley, shouts to Craig, "let him have it, Chris!"

The ambiguity of Bentley's shouted phrase (in English, “let him have it” can mean “give it to him” or “attack him”) becomes the crux of the case. The prosecution argues that Bentley was encouraging Craig to shoot the police officer, and that he was therefore partly responsible for the policeman’s death, while the defence argues that Bentley was telling Craig to give up his weapon to the police, that he wanted to de-escalate the situation, indicating Bentley's innocence.

I watched the film as a teenager, and the message around the potential real-world consequences of ambiguous language stayed with me for a long time. I recently learned of a French film that depicts a remarkably similar incident: L’honneur d’un Capitaine (A Captain's Honor), by Pierre Schoendoerffer. In this film, a commanding officer instructs a soldier to bring a group of prisoners down from a hill. His order ("Descendez-les") is misinterpreted as an order to execute them. Like “let him have it,” the French phrase "Descendez-les" is ambiguous because the verb “descendre” can either mean to physically move something downwards… or to kill someone. The tragic outcome of this misinterpretation is the prisoners’ death.

The British film Let Him Have It used this case to highlight flaws in the justice system, particularly the lack of consideration for diminished responsibility, the inappropriate interpretation of evidence, and the harshness of the death penalty. The controversy around the Bentley case eventually contributed to the abolition of the death penalty.

While L’honneur d’un Capitaine is a fictional story, Schoendoerffer worked as a war correspondent during the Algerian war and served as a war cameraman for the French army during the Indochina War, enabling him to bring a nuanced and authentic perspective to the painful issue of colonial war.

Both films feature famous examples of context-dependent meaning and the potentially tragic consequences of miscommunication. Anyone who has experienced multi-cultural or multi-lingual professional or social situations will also be aware of the potential for misunderstandings — and will no doubt have experienced painful or embarrassing situations — albeit in a lower-stakes context.

Saussure and Peirce show us that ambiguity is inevitable given the limitations of language, the arbitrary nature of signs, variability in how they are interpreted, and the evolution of meaning. The potential for misunderstanding is even greater in a digital communication landscape; we often communicate in short messages via interposed screens meaning we cannot interpret our interlocutors’ body language or facial expressions, which exacerbates the potential for misinterpretation. While emojis can help the reader understand the emotional valence of an electronic message, there is still scope for them to be misconstrued. Increasingly, younger generations prefer to use voice messages rather than text messages — maybe in part to avoid the limitations of text-based communication.

Translators are famously allergic to ambiguity* — I have devoted quite a few blogs to the subject myself — and the issue is even more acute for conference interpreters, because speech is generally less structured and coherent than the written word, and interpreters are rarely able to obtain further explanations in the middle of a conference. The more background you can provide, the more likely the translator/interpreter is to convey the intended message in a way that the target audience can understand. Even in everyday interactions, it still behoves us to consider the clarity of our messages and to show emotional and cognitive empathy for our interlocutor to avoid misunderstandings where possible.

* Hence the classic translator’s joke:

“Question: How many translators does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Answer: It depends on the context”