The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization [1 ed.] 0815359454, 9780815359456

Table of contents :
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Notes on contributors
Introduction: the intersection between translation and globalization • Esperança Bielsa
Part I: Key concepts
1 Translation encounters and the histories of globalization • David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe
2 Multiple and entangled modernities, cosmopolitanism and translation • Gerard Delanty
3 The individuality of language: internationality and transnationality • Naoki Sakai
4 Translation and inequality • Paul F. Bandia
5 Translation and geography: the globe and the Western spatial imagination • Federico Italiano
6 Translation and climate change • Michael Cronin
7 The internationalization of translation studies • Jorge Jiménez-Bellver
8 Transnational and global approaches in translation studies: methodological observations • Mattea Cussel
Part II: People
9 Translation and the semiotics of migrants’ visibility • Moira Inghilleri
10 Living in translation • Siri Nergaard
11 Interpreting in a globalized world: current perspectives and future challenges • Paola Gentile
12 Translation in contexts of crisis • Federico M. Federici
13 Non-professional translators in the context of globalization • Michał Borodo
14 The impact of globalizationon translator and interpreter education • Marc Orlando and Leah Gerber
Part III: Culture
15 Globalization, cultural hegemony, and translation: the paradoxical complexity of translation theory and practice in the emerging world order • Maria Tymoczko
16 World translation flows: preferred languages and subjects • Annie Brisset and Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez
17 Translation and authorshipin a globalized world • Salah Basalamah
18 Literature and translation: global confluences and meaningful asymmetries • M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera
19 ‘The one-inch barrier’: the translation hurdle of world cinema • Nataša Ďurovičová
20 Translation and the globalization/localization of news • Claire Scammell
21 Museums as translation zones • Robert Neather
Part IV: Economics
22 Translation in the neoliberal era • Joss Moorkens
23 Translating tourism • David Katan
24 Globalization, advertising and promotional translation • Ira Torresi
25 Language demand and supply • Donald A. DePalma
26 Localization • Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo
27 The impact of technology on the role of the translator in globalized production workflows • Elisa Alonso and Lucas Nunes Vieira
28 Volunteerism in translation: Translators Without Borders and the platform economy • Attila Piróth and Mona Baker
Part V: Politics
29 Translating democracy • Esperança Bielsa
30 The travel, translationand transformation of human rights norms • Tine Destrooper
31 Nations in translation • Brian James Baer
32 Translation and borders • Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte
33 Multilingualism and translationin the European Union • Alice Leal
34 The activist role of translators and interpreters under globalization • Fruela Fernández
35 Further on the politicsof translation • Rada Ivekovic´
Conclusion: Paradoxes at the intersection of translation and globalization • Dionysios Kapsaskis
Index

Citation preview

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization

This is the first handbook to provide a comprehensive coverage of the main approaches that theorize translation and globalization, offering a wide-ranging selection of chapters dealing with substantive areas of research. The handbook investigates the many ways in which translation both enables globalization and is inevitably transformed by it. Taking a genuinely interdisciplinary approach, the authors are leading researchers drawn from the social sciences, as well as from translation studies. The chapters cover major areas of current interdisciplinary interest, including climate change, migration, borders, democracy and human rights, as well as key topics in the discipline of translation studies. This handbook also highlights the increasing significance of translation in the most pressing social, economic and political issues of our time, while accounting for the new technologies and practices that are currently deployed to cope with growing translation demands. With five sections covering key concepts, people, culture, economics and politics, and a substantial introduction and conclusion, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation and globalization within translation and interpreting studies, comparative literature, sociology, global studies, cultural studies and related areas. Esperança Bielsa is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her research is in the areas of cultural sociology, social theory, translation, globalization and cosmopolitanism. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Translation and The Latin American Urban Crónica, and co-author of Translation in Global News. Dionysios Kapsaskis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, UK, where he teaches translation theory and audiovisual translation. His interests and publications are in the areas of comparative literature, translation and film. He is also a specialized translator and film subtitler into Greek.

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive overviews of the key topics in translation and interpreting studies. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited, Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy Edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics Edited by Rebecca Tipton and Louisa Desilla The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology Edited by Minako O'Hagan The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education Edited by Sara Laviosa and Maria González-Davies The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition Edited by Fabio Alves and Arnt Lykke Jakobsen The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism Edited by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender Edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization Edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics Edited by Kaisa Koskinen and Nike K. Pokorn

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RHTI.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization

Edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bielsa, Esperança, 1971– editor. | Kapsaskis, Dionysios, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of translation and globalization / edited by Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis. Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge handbooks in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029690 | ISBN 9780815359456 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003121848 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. | Translating and interpreting—Social aspects. | Globalization—Social aspects. Classification: LCC P306.2 .R67 2020 | DDC 418/.02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029690 ISBN: 978-0-815-35945-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12184-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors

ix x xi

Introduction: the intersection between translation and globalization Esperança Bielsa

1

PART I

Key concepts

11

1 Translation encounters and the histories of globalization David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe

13

2 Multiple and entangled modernities, cosmopolitanism and translation Gerard Delanty

27

3 The individuality of language: internationality and transnationality Naoki Sakai

39

4 Translation and inequality Paul F. Bandia

55

5 Translation and geography: the globe and the Western spatial imagination Federico Italiano

71

6 Translation and climate change Michael Cronin

85

7 The internationalization of translation studies Jorge Jiménez-Bellver

99

v

Contents

8 Transnational and global approaches in translation studies: methodological observations Mattea Cussel

113

PART II

People 9 Translation and the semiotics of migrants’ visibility Moira Inghilleri

129 131 147

161

176



190



202

PART III

Culture

217

219

230



251

265

vi

Contents



278



293



306

PART IV

Economics

321



323



337



351



363



375

391 406

PART V

Politics

425



427



441

vii

Contents



455



469

­

483



498



513

Conclusion: paradoxes at the intersection of translation and globalization Dionysios Kapsaskis

528

Index

535

viii

Figures

11.1 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 25.1 26.1 28.1 28.2 28.3

Representation of the model of analysis Top five source languages Distribution of the six UN languages as source languages (SL) Top five target languages Respective shares of the six UN languages (TL) The ecosystem of language services and technology Different areas of research in localization studies Screenshot from TM town page ‘10 reasons to upload your prior work to TM town’ T WB – In the words of our volunteers Words translated counter on TWB’s homepage

163 232 234 235 235 365 380 408 409 412

ix

Tables

16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5 16.6 16.7 16.8 16.9 16.10 16.11 16.12 16.13 16.14 16.15 16.16 25.1 25.2 25.3

x

Top 20 source languages Speakers of the world’s languages (L1) 2017 Top 20 target languages Translating country and subject of books translated from English to French Origin of French to English translations UN languages (TL): subjects Non-European supercentral languages (TL): subjects Origin of translations from Turkish (SL) Hindi and Urdu Malay Malay (TL): subjects Swahili and Hausa Russian translations into swahili: subjects (1979–1991) Russian (TL): subjects before and after 1991 Mandarin SL (1979–1989) Mandarin (SL) to minority languages of China (1979–1989) Changing ecosystem demographics that will drive language industry growth Technology platform changes that will drive language industry growth Challenges faced by the language sector

232 233 234 236 237 238 239 240 240 240 241 241 242 242 243 244 367 369 372

Contributors

Elisa Alonso  is Lecturer and Researcher in Translation Studies at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain, where she currently teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her research interests include the impacts of technology on sociological aspects of translation and on translator training. Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, USA. He is founding editor of Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation. His recent publications include Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature and Queer Theory and Translation Studies. Mona Baker is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at the University of Manchester, UK and Director of the Baker Centre for Translation  & Intercultural Studies, Shanghai International Studies University. She is co-coordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network, author of Translation and Conflict and editor of Translating Dissent. Paul F. Bandia is Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of French at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. His interests include translation history and theory, orality, post- colonialism, decolonization, interculturality, transmigration, literary heterolingualism and multilingualism. He also studies linguistic, literary and cultural encounters between the Global South and the Global North. Salah Basalamah is Associate Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, Canada. His fields of research include the philosophy of translation, translation rights and ethics, social and political philosophy, postcolonial, cultural and religious studies. He is the author of Le droit de traduire. Une politique culturelle pour la mondialisation (2009). Esperança Bielsa  is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her research is in the areas of cultural sociology, social theory, translation, globalization and cosmopolitanism. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Translation and The Latin American Urban Crónica, and co-author of Translation in Global News. Michał Borodo  is Assistant Professor at the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He has published on various topics in translation studies and his main research interests include translation in the context of globalization and glocalization, the translation of children’s and young adults’ literature, the translation of comics, and translator training.

xi

Contributors

Annie Brisset  is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focusses on sociocriticism and the sociology of translation. A former consultant to UNESCO on translation-related projects, she is a founding member and past president of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera is an Associate Professor at the School of Philology and Translation and Interpreting of the University of Vigo, Spain. Her research focusses on translation in relation to socio-political and intellectual frameworks vis-à-vis the concept of cultural mobility, and on transnationalism, foreignness and silence in Modernism and contemporary Irish fiction. Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez has a PhD in Translation Studies and is a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. With complexity theory as the main theoretical approach, his research centres around three topics: translation of theories, collaborative activist translation and world translation flows. Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. He is an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Academia Europaea and is an Honorary Member of the Irish Translators and Interpreters Association. He is editor of the Routledge New Perspectives series in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Mattea Cussel is Teaching Fellow and Predoctoral Researcher at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has studied Latin American Studies and Translation Studies and is currently researching a PhD on US Latina/o migration stories and their translation and reception. Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His most recent publication is Critical Theory and Social Transformation ( Routledge, 2020). Other publications include: The Cosmopolitan Imagination (2009), Formations of European Modernity, 2nd edition (2019), Community, 3rd edition (2018), and The European Heritage: A Critical ReInterpretation (2018). Donald A. DePalma is the founder of CSA Research, a market firm in localization and globalization. Prior to CSA, he co-founded Interbase Software, was vice president of corporate strategy at Idiom Technologies and analyst at Forrester Research. Don holds a doctorate in Slavic linguistics ( Brown University) and is the author of Business Without Borders (2004). Tine Destrooper is an Associate Professor at the Human Rights Centre of the Faculty of Law and Criminology at Ghent University. Her research focusses on the contextualization of human rights norms, particularly in post- conflict settings. Together with Sally Merry, she recently edited the volume Human Rights Transformation in Practice. ˇ urovicˇová edits the book series and electronic publications of the International Nataša D Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and teaches in the MFA programme in Literary Translation there. She has also co-edited World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (2010) and At Translation’s Edge (2019). xii

Contributors

Federico M. Federici  is a Professor of Intercultural Crisis Communication at the Centre for Translation Studies, University College London. His research currently focusses on translators and interpreters as intercultural mediators, online translated news and the study of translation in crises. Fruela Fernández is Lecturer in English Studies at Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain. He is the author of Translating the Crisis: Politics and Culture in Spain after the 15M (Routledge) and Espacios de dominación, espacios de resistencia ( Peter Lang), as well as co- editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics. Paola Gentile is a postdoctoral researcher and adjunct professor of Dutch at the University of Trieste. She holds a MA in conference interpreting and in 2016 she obtained her PhD in Interpreting and Translation at the University of Trieste. Her research interests are: the sociology of translation and interpreting, the reception of translated literature and imagology. Leah Gerber is a senior lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Studies programme at Monash University. Her research concentrates on literary and cultural translation, with a focus on Australian children’s texts and their translation into German. Leah is also the current Editor of the literary translation journal The AALITRA Review. Moira Inghilleri is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include translation and migration, sociological approaches to translation and interpreting research, ethics, and translation and conflict. She is the author of Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language (2012) and Translation and Migration (2016). David Inglis  is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He writes in the areas of cultural sociology, the sociology of globalization, historical sociology, and social theory, both modern and classical. He has written and edited, most recently, An Invitation to Social Theory (2nd edition), The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology and The Globalization of Wine. Federico Italiano is Senior Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer in Comparative Literature at LMU Munich. His recent publications include Translation and Geography (Routledge, 2016), Grand Tour (with Jan Wagner, Hanser, 2019) and The Dark Side of Translation ( Routledge, 2020). An Italian poet and translator, Federico has published five poetry collections. Rada Ivekovic’, philosopher, born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1945, taught at the Philosophy Department of Zagreb University, at the Universities of Paris-7, Paris- 8, and the Collège international de philosophie, Paris ( Programme director 2004–2010). She works on political philosophy (nation, state, gender, migration, violence, partition, ( post)colony), Indian philosophy, feminist theory and translation. Jorge Jiménez-Bellver is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa. He earned his BA in English and his MA in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Alicante. He also earned an MA in Comparative Literature ( Translation Studies Track) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. xiii

Contributors

Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University. He is the author of Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies ( John Benjamins) and Translation and Web Localization ( Routledge). He has been the editor of the Journal of Internationalization and Localization ( JIAL). Dionysios Kapsaskis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, London, where he teaches translation theory and audiovisual translation. His interests and publications are in the areas of comparative literature, translation and film. He is also a specialized translator and film subtitler into Greek. David Katan is Full Professor of English Studies and Translation at the University of Salento (Italy), and Visiting Professor at the University of South Africa. He is currently combining his experience in tourism translation (museum panels and tourist guides) with his research on cultural mediation, insider- outsider asymmetries and transcreation. Alice Leal is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. Her recent publications include chapters in the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy and in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Her new book, English and Translation in the EU after Brexit, is coming out in 2021 ( Routledge). Joss Moorkens is an Assistant Professor at Dublin City University and Funded Investigator at the ADAPT Centre. He has authored over 50 articles, book chapters and conference papers on translation topics, is General Co-Editor of Translation Spaces and sits on the board of the European Masters in Translation network. Robert Neather is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include museum translation and collaborative translation, particularly in the Chinese context. He has published in a variety of venues including Meta, Semiotica and The Translator. Siri Nergaard teaches at the University of South-Eastern Norway, and at the University of Florence, Italy. In addition to numerous articles, Nergaard is the author and editor of several books in Italian on translation studies. Forthcoming is the book Translation and Transmigration. Nergaard is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal. Lucas Nunes Vieira is a Lecturer in Translation Studies with Technology at the University of Bristol. He researches the use of machine translation in human translation practices and how this affects processes, products and attitudes. Marc Orlando is Associate Professor and Director of the Translation and Interpreting programme at Macquarie University. His work focusses on practice-led research applied to the training of translators and interpreters and on the synergies between academic research, professional practice and T&I didactics. He is an active conference interpreter. Attila Piróth is a freelance translator and the coordinator of Solidarités International’s translation internship programme. He has translated works of Albert Einstein, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn into Hungarian. He is the founder and director of Théâtre le Levain, a small independent theatre in Bègles, France. xiv

Contributors

Naoki Sakai is Goldwin Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Cornell University. He has published in comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, and so on. His publications include Translation and Subjectivity (1997), Voices of the Past (1991) and The End of Pax Americana and Inward-looking Society (in press). Claire Scammell is a translator/editor with ten years’ professional experience. Her doctoral research, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and completed at King’s College London, examined readers’ responses to translations in global news. She is the author of the book Translation Strategies in Global News: What Sarkozy Said in the Suburbs. Christopher Thorpe is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter. His areas of expertise include classical and modern social theory and cultural sociology. His forthcoming monograph with Routledge is entitled British Representations of Italy: A Cultural Sociological History. Ira Torresi is Associate Professor in the Department of Interpreting and Translation ( DIT) of the University of Bologna at Forlì. Her main interests are advertising translation, Child Language Brokering, James Joyce in translation, gender and advertising, all approached through visual and social semiotics as well as translation studies. Maria Tymoczko is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a leading theorist of translation and an expert in translation studies. Her research areas also include Medieval Studies and Modernism including the work of James Joyce. Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte  is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. She has published 14 books, 12 anthologies and over a hundred essays on translation theory, post-colonialism, gender and geo-politics. She is a practising translator specialized in the fields of philosophy, literature and contemporary art.

xv

Introduction The intersection between translation and globalization1 Esperança Bielsa

Globalization is no longer the magic buzzword that at the turn of this century suddenly seemed indispensable to grasp the contemporary world and its challenges, although few people quite knew how to specify or define. The concept was in everybody’s mouth ( politicians, journalists and activists, not just academics, embraced it), and this ubiquity, as well as its wide-ranging but imprecise meanings, led some to remark that globalization was in danger of becoming the cliché of our times (Held et  al. 1999: 1). It was this very dynamism that fostered the booming of interdisciplinary globalization theory and the constitution of a now firmly established new research domain: global studies. Overly economistic approaches that viewed globalization largely in terms of the liberalization of world markets were soon complemented with more multi- d imensional accounts that identified a complex of distinct social, cultural, economic and political aspects; studies of these objective characteristics of globalization were joined by research that focused on its subjective dimensions; early views of globalization as homogenization were challenged by more nuanced accounts that identified the significance of widespread processes of localization and hybridization; a long history of globalization that went back to at least the great empires of antiquity was investigated, and the methodological nationalism that prevailed in social scientific and humanistic disciplines was exposed. As we enter the third decade of the t wenty-first century, the dynamism that once nourished new understandings of the global seems to have vanished, as self-reflexive accounts of our lack of understanding gain ground. Some of the most interesting recent approaches to globalization precisely elaborate on the increasing opacity of the global as one of its fundamental features. For Chris Rumford, globalization leads not only to the realization that we live in a smaller, deeply interconnected world but also to an increasing sense of strangeness, as the social world becomes unrecognizable in many ways and familiar reference points are eroded ( Rumford 2013). Ulrich Beck elaborates in his last, posthumously published book an attempt to describe how the world has metamorphosed into a substantially new reality we no longer understand ( Beck 2016). Moreover, in contemporary politics globalization and globalism have become the object of widespread opposition and rejection, most visible in the Trump government and the new right, an a nti-g lobalism that in time will prove to be

1

Esperança Bielsa

as misplaced as the contrasting optimism that lead to beliefs of globalization as the end of history in the 1990s. What has recently been described as a globalization backlash (Crouch 2019) has led globalization theorists to reexamine the significance and character of globalization processes that not so long ago seemed unquestionable. Thus, attempts have been made to respond to current deglobalization claims by providing explanations of why and how globalization continues to matter even when the world has come to doubt its purpose and relevance (Steger and James 2019: 19). In their book, Manfred Steger and Paul James tackle new global challenges such as populism and the current political and cultural dimensions of climate change while reaffirming the continuing significance of intensifying globalization processes. It is not just that deglobalization arguments that show a relative decline in the movement of people and objects across the world miss the growing significance of ‘disembodied globalization’, defined as the extension of social relations through the movement of immaterial things and processes (Steger and James 2019: 122) – or what Jan Aart Scholte differently approached as new forms of ‘transworld simultaneity’ and ‘transworld instantaneity’ to designate the largescale spread of supraterritoriality in contemporary globalization (Scholte 2005: 60– 64). In fact, the very position that allows the articulation of deglobalizing perspectives presupposes intensifying globalization and the internalization of globality to such a high degree that it becomes no longer visible. An interruption of the now so much taken for granted and assumed normality of global interconnectedness, relationality and mobility, such as that created by the pandemic of Covid-19 in 2020, challenges its invisibility and suddenly awakens us to the pervasiveness of this existing reality. A somewhat similar argument can be made with respect to the significance of theoretical and empirical approaches to globalization in translation studies. Michael Cronin’s seminal book Translation and Globalization (2003) was soon followed by other contributions that tackled the intersection between globalization and translation from an interdisciplinary perspective and empirically examined some key areas such as news or political violence ( Bassnett et  al. 2005; Bielsa 2007; Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Bielsa and Hugues 2009). However, if globalization theory was seen to have mainly ignored the key mediating role that translation plays in global connectivity and the movement of people and information around the world ( Bielsa 2005), it must also be said that translation studies has remained rather unconcerned about relevant developments in global studies. But this relative lack of interdisciplinary engagement should not blind us to the deep transformations that current understandings of globalization have brought about in the field of translation studies. Contemporary globalization has changed how we approach translation and the work of translation scholars profoundly. Within the so-called cultural turn ( Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), characterized by the emergence of new concerns to investigate the social and cultural contexts that condition translation and are inevitably transformed by it, it has contributed to a renewal of the discipline and added a wealth of new topics and viewpoints to translation research, of which this handbook seeks to offer a representative sample. Such a reorientation is a precondition for the much expected translational turn ( Bachmann-Medick 2009) in the humanities and the social sciences. The present conjuncture is precisely what makes the production of this handbook possible as a first but already feasible attempt to bring together the wealth of scholarship that is currently investigating the effects of globalization on all forms of translation and conceptualizing the role of translation in a global context. In the two last decades, globalization has become an inescapable aspect of all areas of translation research. Globalization has become normal. By explicitly identifying and describing how it has shaped translation in the most 2

Introduction

diverse social contexts, from tourism and migration to politics within and beyond the state, this handbook shows the contribution of translation studies to globalization scholarship and debate. Moreover, in the present phase of globalization, variously approached by scholars as the uncertainty phase ( Robertson 1992: 59) or ‘the great unsettling’ (Steger and James 2019: 157–162), translation is bound to increase its significance, as abstracted or disembodied connectivity comes to play a bigger role when compared to more traditional forms of movement of people and objects across world space. As Steger and James point out, ‘the defining dominant condition of contemporary globalization is the movement of abstracted capital and culture  – including words, images, electronic texts, or encoded capital and cryptocurrencies – through processes of disembodied interchange’ (Steger and James 2019: 255). Many of these forms of disembodied connectivity are only made possible by the shared languages and linguistic competencies that are a key, if sometimes forgotten, infrastructure of intercultural communication and interaction ( Held et al. 1999: 345). In this context, and in face of the homogenizing ambition of English and of the idiom of neoliberalism, the question of translation acquires a new urgency ( Venn 2006: 82), not just for translation scholars but for the humanities and the social sciences more widely. There is a need to specify the complexities involved in negotiating cultural and linguistic difference and to examine the centrality of translation in constantly producing and reproducing the global reality that shapes our lives. This handbook emerges from the combined effort to account for the role of translation in making possible global connectedness and to chart the disciplinary changes that a global focus brings to translation studies. With respect to the first objective, it offers w ide-ranging interdisciplinary perspectives on the phenomenon of translation, incorporating accounts from authors in other disciplinary fields in the social sciences and the humanities on some key topics that include the history of globalization ( Inglis and Thorpe), multiple modernities and cosmopolitanism ( Delanty), literature (Caneda- Cabrera), cinema ( Ďurovičová), human rights ( Destrooper), democracy ( Bielsa) and the politics of translation (Iveković), as well as contributions from translation scholars that examine areas of interdisciplinary interest like geography ( Italiano), migration ( Inghilleri), world translation flows ( Brisset and Colón), authorship ( Basalamah), museums ( Neather) or the EU ( Leal). With respect to the second objective, that is, that of charting significant changes in translation studies brought about by a consistently global focus, it gathers contributions that approach translation primarily from a transnational perspective, rather than a national one. A transnational perspective emphasizes interconnections across existing borders and illuminates translation’s key role in mediating between different localities and between the local and the global. While only a few chapters extensively focus on this significant dimension, most notably, Naoki Sakai’s approach to internationality and Mattea Cussel’s critique of methodological nationalism, the transnational perspective informs all the chapters gathered in this volume. Both interdisciplinarity and the transnational perspective are essential to the contribution that this handbook seeks to make to current scholarship on the intersection between translation and globalization through a coherent general approach that provides a common framework for all chapters, in spite of the diversity of authorial contributions and thematic scope. In addition, we wish to draw attention to the following significant issues that animate current scholarship, and which we have sought to represent in this volume, described below.

A plurality of understandings of both translation and globalization Both translation studies and global studies are home to lively debates on how to define the very basic concepts from which they originate. In translation studies, more traditional 3

Esperança Bielsa

definitions of translation as interlinguistic transfer can be contrasted with views that seek to foreground translation as a social relation with otherness that leaves neither the text nor the translator unchanged. On the other hand, the concept of cultural translation has been developed to underscore the significance of the wider cultural relations involved in translation and is used especially by authors in other disciplines (who implicitly take translation to signify a strictly linguistic process in more narrow terms), but has also had some repercussion within the field of translation studies itself. There is always something that seems to defy a comprehensive grasp of translation as a research object, a quality of translation that remains obdurately evasive, and it is precisely from this fact that fruitful speculations about the significance of metaphors of translation originate. It is important to note that similar debates regarding the concept of globalization and its basic periodization have characterized the field of global studies since its inception, a fact to which translation scholars have tended to remain oblivious. David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe’s chapter describes the widespread disagreements concerning what globalization is and when it began, and their attitude of keeping ‘an open mind about such matters’ is echoed in the more general position of this handbook with respect to fundamental disagreements about the basic concepts of translation and globalization. Inglis and Thorpe’s chapter also brings into focus the significance of translation in the early history of globalization, while Paul Bandia traces the historical relations between the global South and the global North in the context of colonialism, postcolonialism and neo- colonialism.

Translation in its most diverse forms and contexts Globalization reveals the existing diversity of forms and types of translation, as well as its widespread significance in different social domains. Moreover, this is not just a contemporary feature, but one that is deeply ingrained in the role of translation through history. Since antiquity, uses of translation as a means of cultural appropriation coexist with the intervention of translation in processes of conquest and religious conversion. Contemporary globalization has greatly aided to the growing visibility of widely significant forms of translation in the media, which have led to the development of new subfields and areas of specialized research in translation studies, such as audiovisual translation and news translation. This handbook seeks to represent the existing diversity of forms of translation in all types of social connections and relations across linguistic borders and to analyze its intervention in contemporary culture, economics and politics. With respect to culture, the translation of literature (chapters by Brisset and Colón, Caneda- Cabrera), global news (Scammell) and cinema ( Ďurovičová), as well as translation in museums ( Neather) are examined. In economic terms, while translation has become a major global industry ( DePalma) and tourism, advertising and promotional translation have flourished alongside global trade ( Katan, Torresi), widespread localization processes ( Jimenez- Crespo, Scammell) illustrate the local-g lobal dynamics that are an inherent feature of globalization, which not only penetrates localities from the outside but is also deeply shaped at the local level, a process well captured by the notion of glocalization. Economic aspects of translation and employment conditions of translators and interpreters are also inextricably bound with major political and technological developments, such as the impact of neoliberalism (Moorkens) and the rise of the platform economy ( Piróth and Baker). Perhaps the topic that has received more critical attention beyond translation studies is the growing visibility and significance of translation for politics beyond the state (see, for instance, Santos 2005; Balibar 2006; Doerr 2018). In this light, the handbook contains chapters on democracy ( Bielsa), human rights ( Destrooper), the EU ( Leal), political 4

Introduction

activism ( Fernández) and feminist ethics (Iveković), which address how translation relates to the new political landscapes brought about by globalization. At the same time, the continuing significance of nations ( Baer) and borders ( Vidal), as well as constitutive and mounting gender, ethnic and national violence (Iveković), are also distinctive features of the present where translation is called to play a key political role. Globalization has also impacted on the nature of the discipline, confronting mainly Western views of translation with other conceptualizations and leading to what Jorge Jimenez-Bellver describes in terms of the internationalization of translation studies. This is a dimension that is also explored, in different ways, in chapters by Maria Tymoczko and Paul Bandia, who coincide in noting the paradox that emerges when globalization opens up new understandings of translation while, at the same time, enforcing and augmenting fundamental asymmetries and inequalities.

The role of technology In addition to the diversity of understandings concerning the very basic terms that define them as academic disciplines, as indicated above, translation studies and global studies have another interesting similarity: the need to account for the central role of technology in making possible the current phase of globalization, which differs from earlier forms in significant ways, and the widespread changes that translation has undergone in recent decades. Arguably, one of the best approaches to the role of technology in contemporary globalization is Manuel Castells’s groundbreaking conception of informational capitalism. For Castells, contemporary globalization is linked primarily to the revolution in information technologies of the 1970s, which became the motor for the expansion and rejuvenation of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century, just as the steam engine was the motor of the first industrial revolution. Informationalism, based on knowledge, is for Castells the base of the socio- economic restructuring of the 1980s that gave rise to the network society. Significantly, Castells distinguishes between the notions of ‘ information society’ and ‘ informational society’. While the former underlines the role of information in society, in contrast, the term ‘ informational’ indicates the attribute of a specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power because of new technological conditions emerging in this historical period. (Castells 2000: 21) Castells thus uses ‘ informational’ in a similar manner as ‘ industrial’: an industrial society refers not just to a society where there is industry, but to a society where the social and technological forms of industrial organization permeate all spheres of activity. The information technology revolution in the last quarter of the twentieth century provided the indispensable basis for the creation of the new economy, informational capitalism, where there is a historical linkage between the k nowledge-information base of the economy, its global reach, and its network-based organizational form. In this new technological paradigm, information itself has become the key product, the raw material upon which technologies act as they become the new base or material foundation of the network society. In previous technological revolutions information acted on technology; in the current context, fundamentally, technology also acts on information (2000: 70). As Castells explains, the informational economy does not oppose the logic of the industrial economy, but rather takes 5

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it to a completely new level through technological deepening in all processes of material production and distribution (2000: 100). A key aspect of this transformation is the constitution of a global economy, which is a historically new reality. If a world economy had existed for centuries through transatlantic networks of commodity production and exchange established in the early modern period of Western expansion, a global economy, which Castells defines as ‘an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time, or chosen time, on a planetary scale’ (2000: 101), was only made possible by the new infrastructure provided by information and communication technologies. It is thus its supraterritorial character that determines this historically novel aspect of contemporary globalization. Yet if, as Castells argues, in the t wenty-fi rst century information has become the new raw material, the confrontation of human translators with machine translation today resembles the struggle of workers against machines that took place during the industrial revolution, as described by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, in some fundamental ways. First, informational capitalism has turned translation, which had until recently remained a persistently artisanal activity, into an industry of massive scaling possibilities. An illustration of the dynamics that shape the shift from artisanal, to industrial, to platform economy is found in Attila Piróth and Mona Baker’s analysis of the case of Translation Without Borders. Second, this process is characterized by the devaluation of human labor, in this case the labor of translators and interpreters in the informational economy. ‘The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things’, indicated Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1992: 323–324, original emphasis). The mature Marx would analyze in Capital the concrete effects of machine production on workers in terms of the incorporation of women and children into factory work, the prolongation of the working day and the intensification of labor. In this volume, chapters by Joss Moorkens and Piróth and Baker describe the worsening of working conditions for translators, with reference to the still largely unregulated reality of freelancing and crowdsourcing that is an important feature of the new translation economy. Third, automatic or machine translation hides its social origins, the fact that both the translations that are pooled as sources and the technologies themselves are made by human beings. This is what Marx approached in terms of commodity fetishism, referring to the mysterious character of the commodity, which ‘reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of the labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’ (1990: 164–165). Finally, a new quality of contemporary globalization that Marx could not have foreseen is the geographical dispersion that coexists with the highest level of capital concentration, which is made possible by the new information and communication technologies. If Marx’s workers could meet and organize themselves in the factories to fight for their collective fate, today’s professional translators largely constitute a more evanescent, though no less significant, networked virtual crowd (Cronin 2010). Widely underpaid, isolated and called to compete with the transparent instantaneity of automatic translation, but also commanding over a never before envisaged range of resources through computer-a ssisted translation tools, they are one of globalization’s most paradoxical faces. Nevertheless, from a more heterodox materialist perspective it becomes possible to illuminate the potential of new technologies to be used in radically different ways and, more generally, to reflect on how technology has fundamentally altered the nature of all culture. Today’s widely significant activities of different types of volunteer, fan and activist t ranslators – the blurring of the boundaries between producers and consumers that is often alluded to with the notion of ‘prosumer’ – a re prefigured in Walter Benjamin’s examination of the dynamics that turn viewers into experts and readers into writers, erasing the very distinction between 6

Introduction

author and public (1992, 2005). Furthermore, his perspective is not limited to a consideration of production but also theorizes new forms of perception and reception, made possible not just by the new technical means which facilitate the collective appropriation of works in a state of distraction (most significantly in cinema), but also by the increased participation of the masses in cultural life (Benjamin 1992; Bielsa 2016: 80). Mechanical reproduction allows the emancipation of art from ritual and the politicization of art. It is not a coincidence that Benjamin turned his attention to widely undervalued cultural activities, such as photography and translation, in order to reexamine and critique still dominant notions of cultural authenticity and uniqueness. In this volume, Donald DePalma describes the translation industry in terms of technologydriven language services of outsourced business processes, while Miguel Jimenez- Crespo approaches the dynamics of localization. Chapters by Moorkens, Alonso and Nunes Vieira, and Piróth and Baker explore the social consequences of technological innovations that have become key for translators and translation. Paola Gentile deals with interpreters’ growing concerns on the effects of information and communication technologies for their profession, while Michal Borodo describes different types of grassroots translation projects initiated by fans and activists, as well as top- down crowdsourcing as an increasingly significant area of non-professional translation practice.

Subjective globalization and translation in ordinary people’s lives Globalization does not just refer to increased connectivity in all aspects of social life. As Roland Robertson already observed, ‘Globalization…refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ ( Robertson 1992: 8). However, as Steger and James argue, the subjective dimensions of globalization have received far less attention than the objective phenomena of time-space compression in the globalization literature (2019: 78). Subjective globalization goes beyond consciousness and reflexivity and involves the most intimate dimensions of our self-perception, as well as our perceptions of others and of the world. It is intricately related to what Ulrich Beck approached in terms of globalization of biography and, later, cosmopolitanization of biography. Globalization of biography indicates generalized mobile individual existence, a transnational life that stretches across frontiers, or what Beck refers to as place polygamy: people are wedded to several places at once ( Beck 2000). This means that global contradictions are not only outside, but have also become part of people’s own lives, even without being actively sought or consciously reflected upon. Cosmopolitanization is defined by Beck as ‘internal globalization’, ‘globalization from within the national societies’ ( Beck 2002: 17, original emphasis), calling attention to the fact that globalization does not only involve interconnections across borders, but also causes fundamental transformations inside national societies. Cosmopolitanization of biography similarly emphasizes the internalization of difference, ‘the clash of cultures within one’s own life’ and ‘the co-presence and coexistence of rival lifestyles, contradictory certainties in the experiential space of individuals and societies’ (2006: 89). Significantly, ‘place polygamous ways of living are translated biographies: they have to be constantly translated both for oneself and for others’ ( Beck and Beck- Gernsheim 2002: 25) while cosmopolitan competence, as a fact of everyday and of scientific experience, is forcing us ‘to develop the art of translation and bridge-building’ ( Beck 2006: 89; Bielsa 2016: 6). Indeed, a focus on language and translation can precisely reveal significant trends toward internal globalization and cosmopolitanization in relation to both individuals and societies. Translated lives question taken for granted notions about the separateness of languages (or what Sakai, in 7

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this volume, refers to as the individuality of language) that have prevailed in methodological nationalism and what can be described as the monolingual vision ( Bielsa, this volume). Part 2 of this handbook foregrounds ways in which translation has become a key fact of cosmopolitan competence as well as a fertile resource of individual and collective imaginaries. Moira Inghilleri examines interactions and entanglements between diverse groups in the context of the building of the transcontinental railroads in the United States in the nineteenth century by Irish and Chinese migrant workers. A focus on the conflicts and contradictions that emerge in these translations between disparate cultures and languages can complicate the clearly defined ‘we’ and ‘they’ narratives on which the politics of multiculturalism rests. The subjective experience of living in translation in the context of global asymmetries and its consequences for notions of identity and belonging are analyzed by Siri Nergaard (and, from a border perspective in a different part of the book, by África Vidal). Gentile examines how public service interpreting developed in the second half of the twentieth century to assist growing numbers of migrants in accessing services in host countries, while its more prestigious double, conference interpreting, served the increase in international organizations and growing needs for global governance. Interpreters’ perception of their profession is a major concern in this chapter. The role of language and translation is also coming to the fore in crisis and risk communication in multilingual contexts, and Federico Federici discusses how poorly served multilingual needs widen existing vulnerabilities and become global risks. Translation is also a prominent task in the activities of other professionals, such as journalists (Scammell), or in those of non-professional translators ( Borodo) or activists ( Fernández) who, for a host of different reasons, engage in a wide variety of types of translation. Although this is not in itself a new phenomenon (Inglis and Thorpe refer to the translating and interpreting work of traders, business people, soldiers, diplomats and others as unacknowledged actors of globalization), its growing significance and visibility both attest to the key mediating role of translation in contemporary globalization and pose new economic and ethical challenges to professional translators and interpreters. A focus on the effects of globalization on translator and interpreting training in higher education (Orlando and Gerber) identifies the demands and expectations, as well as the new pressures that the translation profession faces in the twenty-first century.

Reflecting on the most pressing social and political issues of our time Examining how translation intervenes in the most pressing social and political issues of our time has become unavoidable. This handbook seeks to contribute to this task by offering approximations to key areas and topics of current research the interest of which goes beyond purely scholarly debates, such as migration, climate change, and the changing meaning of borders. In all of these areas, a consideration of how translation is present in any response to the global risks that humanity faces becomes a necessary reflection not just in globalization research or translation studies and the intersections thereof, but also in socio-political domains and discourses beyond the academy. In turn, these wider socio-political discourses and debates animate the renewal of academic disciplines and the development of new areas of interdisciplinary interest. In addition to other substantive areas that have already been discussed in this introduction, such as the globalization of biography or the social role of technology, we wish to call attention to two particularly significant topics in this respect that are approached in different chapters of this handbook: the issue of climate change, and the role of English as global lingua franca in relation to debates concerning multilingualism, translation and democratic politics. 8

Introduction

Even as climate change and the destructive impact of human activity on our planet have been a known reality for decades, there has been a certain tendency to consider that the substantial overcoming of territorial geography would somehow be accompanied by the domestication of nature. Globalization has brought into view the alarming rate of species destruction, the shrinking of the ozone layer and the ensuing rise of world temperatures, the pollution of air and water and the unstoppable growth of waste of all kinds, as well as the terrible consequences of human-caused accidental disasters at least since Chernobyl. But such realities, as somber as they are, have not still fundamentally challenged the view that we are in charge of development, that we can change the course of events, or come up with new technologies to face unwanted consequences. The climate emergency should awaken us to the fallacy of this approach and make us aware of the existence of a hostile nature as a powerful force that puts human life in danger. Tsunamis easily efface kilometers of coastlines taking hundreds of thousands of human lives, fires can burn through entire continents and, at the time of writing this introduction in March 2020, the global spread of a new virus is unswervingly bringing the world to a halt. What is slowly becoming visible is that we cannot even comprehend, let alone control, the profound changes that the human species has unleashed in nature. Beck had this in mind when he proposed the term metamorphosis to capture the radical transformation of the world ( Beck 2016). Michael Cronin argues in this volume for a terracentric approach that can identify areas of translation practice that are complicit in cultures of unsustainable resource extractivism. Indeed, thinking about translation as a scarce resource calls for a different perspective on the global translation industry and a new ethics for translation technology that, instead of serving toward endless commercial growth, could be deployed for other, more socially responsible aims in the provision of health education, public services for migrants (Gentile), or in crisis and risk communication in multilingual contexts (Federici). Contemporary globalization has witnessed, for the first time, the emergence of English as a global lingua franca among elites ( lingua francas of the past, such as Latin, only ever achieved regional status). In spite of some neo-babelian designs, such as Castells’s approach to the significance of a new digital language that can connect deterritorialized workers and managers around task and performance (Castells 2000: 212; Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 25–26), the global use of English has not led to a diminishing significance of translation, but rather placed new demands and pressures on translation and translators. In this volume, Gentile relates it to a decline in the prestige of the interpreting profession. However, in the case of the European Union, it can be argued that the use of English, as the EU’s unofficial lingua franca, is what allows the viability of one of the most multilingual political institutions of the world or, as Alice Leal puts it, the EU’s de jure multilingualism is enabled by its de facto monolingualism. It is too early to analyze the impact of Brexit on the language regime of the EU but, as Leal also notes, the predominance of English is ‘controversial in terms of democratic representation as it is neither a widely spoken language nor a neutral language that “ belongs” to no one’. In this context, it is important to realize that it is not English but rather translation that is the basic medium for the creation of a transnational public sphere in a democratic sense, the ‘common’ idiom of its citizens ( Balibar 2006: 5– 6, see Bielsa in this volume). A fascinating approximation to what this involves can be found in Tine Destrooper’s approach to the travel, translation and transformation of human rights across the world. The uncertainty of the present urges us to consider translation in all its forms in connection with the most diverse aspects of reality, animating and revitalizing academic fields and interdisciplinary debates. This handbook seeks to represent an exciting variety of research approaches from the intersection between translation and globalization that relate translation to the most pressing cultural, social and political issues of our unsettled times. 9

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Note

References ­ Balibar, É. (2006) ‘Strangers as Enemies : Further Reflections on the Aporias of Transnational Citizenship’, Globalization Working Papers. Université de Paris-X Nanterre and University of California, Irvine (06/4). Bassnett, S. et al. (2005) ‘Global News Translation’ (Special Issue), Language and Intercultural Communication, 5(2), pp. 105–187. Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (1990) Translation, History and Culture. New York: Pinter. Beck, U. (2000) What Is Globalization? Trans. P. Camiller. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2002) ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19(2), pp. 17–44. doi: 10.1177/026327640201900101. Beck, U. and Beck- Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization. Trans. P. Camiller. London: Sage. Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision. Trans. C. Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2016) The Metamorphosis of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, W. (1992) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Benjamin, W. (ed.), Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. London: Fontana Press, pp. 211–244. Benjamin, W. (2005) ‘The Author as Producer’, in Jennings, M. W., Eiland, H., and Smith, G. (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 2. Trans. R. Livingston. Cambridge, MA. and London: Belknap Press, pp. 768–782. Bielsa, E. (2005) ‘Globalisation and Translation: A Theoretical Approach’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 5(2), pp. 131–144. Bielsa, E. (2007) ‘Translation in Global News Agencies’, Target, 19(1), pp. 135–155. Bielsa, E. (2016) Cosmopolitanism and Translation: Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign. London and New York: Routledge. Bielsa, E. and Bassnett, S. (2009) Translation in Global News. London and New York: Routledge. Bielsa, E. and Hugues, C. W. (eds.) (2009) Globalization, Political Violence and Translation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Cronin, M. (2010) ‘The Translation Crowd’, Tradumàtica: Tecnologies de la traducció, 8, p.  1. doi: 10.5565/rev/tradumatica.100. Crouch, C. (2019) The Globalization Backlash. Cambridge: Polity Press. Doerr, N. (2018) Political Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Held, D. et al. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marx, K. (1990) Capital. Volume 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1992) Early Writings. Trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton. London: Penguin. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Rumford, C. (2013) The Globalization of Strangeness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Santos, B. de S. (2005) ‘The Future of the World Social Forum: The Work of Translation’, Development, 48(2), pp. 15–22. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.development.1100131. Scholte, J. A. (2005) Globalization: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Steger, M. B. and James, P. (2019) Globalization Matters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Venn, C. (2006) ‘Translation: Politics and Ethics’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), pp. 82–84. doi: 10.1177/026327640602300214.

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Part I

Key concepts

1 Translation encounters and the histories of globalization David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe

Introduction Understanding the nature of translation practices in relation to globalization processes necessarily involves careful historical consideration of both. This is a challenging endeavour, because there is no generally shared understanding either of what ‘globalization’ entails, or of its history. But no matter how one defines globalization, with however many phenomena and whatever types of processes it is assumed to involve, and however long one thinks its history is, it is certainly the case that translation must be regarded as central to globalization dynamics (Cronin 2003; Bielsa 2014, 2016). The term ‘globalization’ in one way or another refers to processes of connectivity, whereby some people in some places are brought into new forms of connection with other people in other places. In any specific case, there is a good chance that each group will not speak or read the same language as the other. Hence processes of translation are crucial for globalization, because they allow connections to happen in the first place, and then can profoundly shape how those connections develop over time (Chanda 2007). In this chapter we will not adopt any one viewpoint on what globalization is or when it began, but we will instead keep an open mind about such matters. This is so that the broadest possible analysis can be offered of globalization/translation interfaces, as these have occurred over the centuries in different places, and in so doing have brought different places and people into new forms of connectivity and interaction. We will first set out the various possible answers to the interconnected questions what is globalization and when did it begin? Then we will consider how translation activities are bound up with globalization processes, first in terms of the actions of the human actors who do the translations, and then the locations where translations are carried out. Finally, we will illustrate the general points raised in these earlier sections with some illustrative examples drawn from Eurasia from ancient times until the start of the modern era. In this way we will attempt to map out the connections between historical modes of globalization and forms of translation practices, in ways that to our knowledge no- one has yet attempted.

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Defining globalization and its history Among scholars today, there is no consensus as to what ‘globalization’ entails, or what its history involves. The definitional and historiographical aspects are deeply intertwined: how one defines globalization entails specific understandings of its history, and vice versa. Narrating the history of ‘globalization’ involves making a series of assumptions – about what the term refers to, which processes it encompasses (and which it does not), how the various processes can be understood to connect with each other, and, crucially, when globalization is meant to have ‘ begun’. Opinions on the latter issue vary greatly, from positions which see globalization as a very recent set of phenomena – perhaps dating from about the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall – to viewpoints which regard globalization as involving very long-term processes that have operated over thousands of years (Inglis 2005). There is a large and complex literature in which various specialists – such as historians, and historically oriented economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others – debate the vexed issue of when globalization ‘ began’. There are various possible responses, varying in chronological extent. First, globalization is at least several thousand years old, perhaps stretching back as much as 5,000 years. Second, globalization can be found in the ancient world, in the two millennia before and after the time of Christ. Third, globalization could have started in the period after the fall of the Roman Empire, or in the early medieval world. Fourth, globalization begins around about 1500 CE, around the time of the European conquest of the Americas, and the start of modern capitalism in Europe. Fifth, globalization starts in either the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries CE, with the coming to dominance of the European empires across the planet, and then the industrial revolution in Europe. Sixth, some scholars assert that globalization only really takes off in the twentieth century, either in the aftermath or WWII, or with the development of new features of the capitalist economy in the 1970s, or with the end of Soviet Communism in the late 1980s, or with the rise of internet and related communications technologies in the 1990s (for overviews, see Bentley 1999, 2006; Hopkins 2002; Gills and Thompson 2006; McKeown 2007; Pieterse 2012). As can be seen from this list, practically any period of human history can be chosen as the starting point of globalization. The choice is wholly dependent on how any given analyst defines globalization, and which phenomena they choose to focus on as evidence of globalization’s apparent beginnings. Once a starting point has been chosen, a model can be created of what that analyst believes were the periods that variously (a) were wholly ‘ before’ globalization; ( b) created the conditions for, and acted as the run-up to, globalization (such periods are often referred to as those of ‘proto-g lobalization’); (c) involved the beginning of ‘globalization’ per se; (d) constitute the subsequent phases of globalization, from the beginning period up until our own time ( Bayly 2002). Howsoever more ‘modern’ phases of globalization may be conceived, it is important not to assume that these are either completely different from premodern variants, or, conversely, are just bigger and more expansive versions of previous phases. Each phase may build on previous ones, or may involve ruptures with them ( Bentley 1999). The scope for dispute and confusion in labelling the different alleged periods of globalization is potentially endless. Periods that some scholars refer to as ‘archaic’ globalization ( Bayly 2002), others refer to as not involving globalization at all, or conversely as ‘protoglobalization’. There is some consensus among scholars that the period around 1500 CE is somehow special. This partly reflects an apparently commonsensical assumption: surely globalization only really begins when most of the planet is involved in its processes? If so, then given that the Americas were only pulled into systematic connection with Eurasia and Africa after that point, with Australasia following a little later, it must be the case that 14

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globalization ‘proper’ only really begins at the start of the 1500s CE. The European conquest of the Americas must therefore be understood as the great turning-point in the emergence of planet-wide connectivity. This idea sounds plausible on the surface. But if there is anything that the debate about the beginnings of globalization can teach us is that common- sense assumptions do not pass muster when put under historical scrutiny. Focussing on the period about 1500 CE is deeply Eurocentric. It assumes that globalization, and more broadly world history, pivot on relatively recent European interventions. It also assumes a diffusionist model, where action emanates from a Western centre, spreading outwards to non-Western peripheries, instead of recognizing that the circulation of people, ideas, languages and objects over time has been much more complex and multicentric than that (Olohan 2014). Such a chauvinist and parochial viewpoint omits many other things too: that much of the forms of human connectivity throughout planetary history were created in other parts of the globe beyond Europe; that the Europeans were late starters in this regard; that much of Europe’s alleged distinctiveness and innovative nature were borrowed, usually in unacknowledged ways, from other civilizations, notably China; and that over-emphasis on the role of the so-called ‘West’ goes together with the equally untenable assumption that globalization must be wholly ‘modern’ in nature. Given that there were extensive trade networks across Eurasia and subSaharan Africa many centuries before 1500 CE, one could argue that globalization was well in place before then (Frank and Gills 1993). So, what if globalization is as much to be found in, say, thirteenth-century CE Mongolia as it is in nineteenth-century CE London? What if evidence points us towards finding the presence of globalization at times, and in places, including ‘premodern’ ones, that Eurocentric and modernist thinking has trained us not to look at? Both contemporary globalization studies and translation history have become over the last 20 years more attuned to understanding history in non-Eurocentric ways, which emphasize instead t rans-regional flows and circulations, and polycentric complexity ( Bandia 2006). Such a shift in emphasis has great implications for how translation in history is understood and studied. Up until quite recently, translation studies and translation history could be accused of deep Eurocentrism. This took various forms. One was uncritically using JudeoChristian timeframes (ancient, medieval, modern, etc.) as if these were somehow natural and applicable the world over. Another was assuming that the civilizations like ancient Judea, Greece and Rome, from which came the great, canonized texts like the Bible – which scholars primarily focussed on, while ignoring more mundane w ritings – were simply coherent and self-contained cultural totalities ( Bandia 2006). But once one looks at the world through the lens of globalization theory, which itself has been sensitized by post- colonial thinking to recognize historical complexity and difference, things look very different. As Appiah (1995: 55) writes: The Greece to which the West looks back was at the crossroads of cultures of North Africa and the Near East; the Spain that began the conquest of the New World had been deeply shaped by Islam; the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient learning owed a great deal to the Arabs who had preserved that tradition through the European Dark Ages; and the economic basis of modern capitalism depended on the labour of Africans, the gold and silver of the New World Indians, and the markets of Asia … The West acquired gunpowder – at the military heart of the modern European state – f rom China and the astronomical data on which was based the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution from the ancient Near East. 15

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So what may seem like self-enclosed cultural and civilizational entities are in fact hybrids, and indeed one way to describe the history of globalization is to say that it is the history of different socio-cultural entities coming into contact, and new entities being created in the process. Such hybridization is made possible in and through translation practices, both those that are more explicit and, perhaps more often, hidden and subterranean. ‘Translation’ here means two things: first, something more general – ideas and cultural influences from some groups are adopted, adapted and transformed by others; and second, something more precise – the adoption, adaptation and transformation had to operate somehow through linguistic means. Translation practices have been the means through which different groups, cultures and civilizations have influenced each other, and have thereby created new, hybrid entities, the mixed nature of which has often been subsequently denied. But the complex mixing that has happened becomes apparent again when we look at such matters in light of globalization processes, and this becomes even more clear when we understand these globalization processes as themselves involving complicated practices of translation.

Connections and actors The connections involved in, and made through, globalization processes can be of a potentially infinite variety. But certain types have reoccurred again and again over time across the world. They include forms of peaceful and constructive interchange, as well as violent forms of control and domination. They can involve face-to-face contacts between specific persons, or more indirect, impersonal, and mediated connections. They can be of a more economic nature (e.g. trading connections), or of a more political type (e.g. imperial conquests, and resistance to those by the colonized), or of a more cultural sort (e.g. religious conversions). It is likely that some or all of these types will be intermingled in any given real-world case (Holton 2005). Each type of connection, and how they may mix with each other, is made possible by, and depends on, associated translation processes. For example, different groups can only keep trading with each other, and so bring their parts of the world into economic connection, if they work out some sort of way of communicating, involving translating between two or more languages. The history of economic globalization (or as some scholars would prefer to say, the economic facets of globalization) is full of instances of ‘pidgin’ languages being created to allow trading relations to operate. Likewise, what we can call political globalization ( how different political units, such as nation- states or empires, relate to each other) is dependent on translation practices. An invading army needs interpreters to speak with the local population, to gain crucial information and co- opt local knowledges. A conquering power will need to find ways to communicate with the conquered, and to impose its own language upon them in some ways, such as by demanding that official business be conducted only in the conquerors’ language, and by rendering place and street names into the dominant language. Yet conquerors may also live in fear of the potential duplicity of native translators, who might feed the masters faulty information (Cronin 2000). Religious globalization (which primarily involves the spread of belief systems across territories) partly relies on missionaries being able to talk with potential converts in ways that the latter understand (Chanda 2007). Conversion often means the converted adopting the language of the missionaries and therefore of the holy texts that they venerate. The same sort of point applies to other types or facets of globalization. Cultural globalization (the spread of ideas and imageries across space) and social globalization (the creation of new sorts of social relationships across distances, including between people who were previously disconnected, in whole or in part) also rely on translation practices (Inglis with Thorpe 2019). 16

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Focussing on translating and interpreting encounters allows us to see some of the very concrete practices that make up the m icro-level aspects of wider and bigger globalization processes. A good way to understand how translation practices and globalization processes have intersected and made each other possible at different times and places involves focussing on the people who did the actual translation and interpreting work, in so doing operating as brokers between one group and another. This focus chimes with contemporary approaches in translation history, which are less interested in translated texts taken in isolation, and more interested in how everyday translation work was done, by whom, and with which tools (Cronin 2003). Sometimes those doing translation have been individuals or groups who have explicitly been understood by their contemporaries as professional ‘translators’. There have also been those who were not recognized as translation professionals, but who nonetheless undertook translation activity on an everyday basis, such as merchants who dealt with people from different language groups as part of their day-to- day transactions ( Holton 2005). There have also been people who were defined by those around them as ‘ interpreters’, who are a much less studied group than translators. This is partly because, often working in spoken rather than written language, and for everyday pragmatic reasons rather than for scholarly purposes, they have left behind far fewer visible traces than have the translators (Santoyo 2006). But despite their relative invisibility to us ( Venuti 1995), interpreters are some of the most important, if unsung, makers of globalization processes. In addition to doing on-the-spot oral translations, they also produced texts, most of them, of a pragmatic, matter- of-fact condition, which … [for a very long] time have been present almost daily at school, at court, at church, in monasteries and chanceries, on routes of pilgrimage, at ports, harbours, and interstate frontiers. (Santoyo 2006: 16) In so doing, interpreters have significantly created the everyday fabric of globalization across the centuries, helping to forge day in and day out the sorts of linkages and connections that the umbrella term ‘globalization’ refers to. Translators of various sorts, as well as interpreters, have often been migrants, sometimes possessed of multiple and/or hybrid identities (Cronin and Simon 2014). Sometimes they have taken on more passive or more active roles in inter-language brokerage ( Demirkol-Erturk and Paker 2014). Some have been in a position not only to traverse, but also to transgress, linguistic and cultural boundaries (Meylaerts and Gonne 2014). They have come from, and occupied, both higher and lower social positions, ranging from the honoured translator of sacred texts through to the humble servant or slave who interprets for their master ( Koskinen 2014). Translators and interpreters have often come from outsider or nomadic groups, such as the Jews (Steiner 1996), or those who have been displaced by political and economic circumstances, such as the Huguenots and Irish Catholics (Cronin 2000). Historians of translation practices know that translation has occurred in relation to, and as part of, many other sorts of transfers and exchanges ( D’hulst 2012). Much translation and interpreting work throughout history – and therefore throughout the history of globalization – was done not by professionals, but instead improvised by those engaged primarily in other occupations which required linguistic interchange. The list here would include people like traders, business people, financiers, soldiers, sailors, political administrators, diplomats, spies, priests, missionaries, and other types of person ( Kartunnen 1994; Roland and Delisle 1999; Cronin 2000; Santoyo 2006; Chanda 2007). These are the often anonymous and unacknowledged actors (Serres 1993) who have ‘made’ globalization over the centuries ( Holton 2005). 17

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These linguistic mediators have been characterized as the ‘anonymous heroes’ of crosscultural communication (de Certeau and Giard 1983). Their actions were always at least two-fold in nature, combining their primary activities with their translation and interpreting practices, the former necessitating the latter, and the latter making possible the former. The linguistic elements of translation processes encompass understandings and misunderstandings ( Vlasova 1999), ‘dialogue, exchange, [and building] bridges’, as well as verbal domination and exclusion ( Veit 2008: 417). Those engaged in translation have been involved variously in the production of mutual intelligibility between groups (and sometimes mutual unintelligibility too), as well as the constructive creation of recognitions of difference by different groups, and the destruction of difference in the favour of more powerful parties ( Ribeiro 2004). In more negative cases, translators of various sorts have helped to construct and corroborate dominant groups’ senses of their own superiority, thereby devaluing, ignoring, silencing and reducing the words and values of the less powerful ( Frow 1995). Language imposed upon a conquered group, forcing them to speak in the language of the conquerors, can involve total or partial cultural assimilation, or even annihilation. Translations may be licensed by authorities, or may seek to undermine those authorities ( Lefevere 1990). Representatives of conquered, subordinate, or marginal groups might adapt, parody, or otherwise subvert the linguistic pretensions of the dominant. Translation is usually both multivalent and ambivalent, even in situations where the dominant seem to hold all the advantages ( Deleuze and Guattari 1986). In more positive cases, which some scholars today might label as historical instances of ‘cosmopolitan encounters’, each side of a translation process may have begun to see themselves through the eyes of their interlocutors, and then possibly coming to incorporate the linguistic Other partly in their own self-i mage, perhaps prompting new forms of self-reflection and interrogation of their own identity and culture ( Bielsa 2014). That is why translators have not only been go-betweens, but sometimes also have been get-betweens, challenging cultural assumptions, especially of the dominant groups involved in interchanges, and creating new, more mixed and hybrid words, ideas and worldviews ( Ribeiro 2004). Sometimes translations have operated as transformations, subversions and hijackings of orthodoxies and hegemonic linguistic and cultural dispositions ( Koskinen 2000).

Translation and places In addition to the people who, through translation and interpreting, have created globalization processes and made them possible, we should also examine the places where such activities have been undertaken. As Pratt (1991) notes, large cities have throughout history in all parts of the world been crucial ‘contact zones’ between different cultural and linguistic groups. Metropolises, major harbours, entrepôts and trading centres have acted as cosmopolitan crucibles of translation practices. If it is the case that ‘no city is monolingual’ (Meylaerts and Gonne 2014: 133), with linguistic plurality being the general historical norm, then we would expect to find within them the enactment of all manner of relations between languages and language groups. Such relations encompass socio- cultural struggles and shifting, linguistically mediated power relations on the one side, and mutual influence, interpenetration and instances of trans-community understanding and appreciation on the other. The former, more negative, sorts of processes have been dramatically illustrated in the cases of long- standing multi-l ingual cities like Thessaloniki and Vilnius, which were linguistically purged at specific times in their history by new ruling groups intent on imposing

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novel monoglot regimes. Such trends have often been motivated by conservative factions in the ruling group regarding the large city as corrupted, both linguistically and otherwise, and as the antithesis of small town and rural heartlands where monolingual purity is apparently a dominant virtue (Cronin and Simon 2014). We can also note the tendency of tourist industries today either to continue and extend older processes of erasure of the polyglot history of a city, or conversely to highlight and celebrate previous situations of linguistic complexity and heteroglossia in the lived urban fabric of the past (Sywenky 2014). The more positive kinds of phenomena alluded to above can be seen in instances of ‘ in-between’ cities like Trieste, where multiple major languages – in this case German and Italian – have both co-existed alongside, and have informed, distinctive local dialectics and patois. In multiple language cities, for example Ottoman Istanbul, the work of translators has often been particularly complex and subtle. There may be indefinite borderlines between source and target languages, with authors often engaging in acts of self-translation, such that it becomes ever more unclear – to both participants at the time, and to later observers – which is the ‘native’ and which is the ‘non-native’ language, both of a given author and of the city in which they lived ( Demirkol-Erturk and Paker 2014). Universities, which are themselves a pre-eminently urban phenomenon, have been institutions where translation practices have very often been concentrated throughout history. Pre-modern universities were often, if not indeed always, trans-national rather than localized in nature and orientation. They have operated in and through the great international languages of their times and places, such as Latin and Arabic. These sorts of languages, which were used and understood across great swathes of the planet, were deployed in the pedagogy and scientific endeavours of the universities, being used as highly convenient and productive lingua franca ( Lo Bianco 2014). This was as much the case in India as the Arabic and Latin worlds, with universities in the subcontinent in the medieval period attracting people from vast cultural areas, just as their counterparts did in places like Cairo and Paris ( Lo Bianco 2014). These processes point to broader trajectories of Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic cosmopolitanism ( Pollock 2006; Euben 2008), which of course merit quite as much scholarly attention today as do Christian and European versions of cosmopolitan thought and quotidian practice. Medieval universities across different parts of Eurasia were in some ways quite as ‘global’ in their functioning as those today. They gathered up scholars from all over the extensive geographical area covered by the language(s) they operated in, as well as those from outside those culture areas, to allow for the comprehensive study of issues that were defined to be of truly ‘universal’ significance. Such study was often defined as requiring scholarly adeptness in multiple languages, at least those deemed to contain or express significant forms of learning. At the same time, language was used in more parochial and instrumentalist ways, with teaching being greatly oriented towards languages and knowledges directly useful to a given university’s sponsors, such as European students being inculcated with Latin for the purposes of religious and political administration ( Bleich 2008). So, just as in the broader case of cities, so too in the case of universities does the historical record attest to the ongoing and complicated interplay of more monoglot-hegemonic and more polyglot- cosmopolitan dynamics. On the one side, religious and state officials and evangelists have at times sought to suppress the use of specific languages in universities in favour of specific dominant ones. But the opposite situation has also applied too, with the flourishing of cross- cultural communication through translation also being an important element of university life at many points in time (Bleich 2008).

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Globalization/translation/history: some pre-modern Eurasian examples In this section, we will pursue and illustrate some of the more general points set out above, by considering more particular instances of translation practices, looking at how these have been embedded within, and expressive of, those dynamics of t rans-national and cross-group interaction that can be understood under the umbrella term of ‘globalization’. This involves re-narrating some otherwise famous and familiar cases of translation, especially ‘Western’ cases, in a new light, emphasizing their complex, hybridized and t rans- cultural nature and genesis. We will focus on examples from Eurasia, ranging from ancient times to the sixteenth century CE, to illustrate some broader points. As Barnstone (1993) points out, a modern mindset tends to separate supposed original ‘authors’ from apparently derivative ‘translators’, according most or all of the literary and aesthetic glory to the author. This point certainly applies in the case of the long- standing and widely held belief that Homer was the first genuine auteur in the so-called ‘Western’ tradition. But in fact, Homer was an editor, compiler, and re-teller of tales which he gathered from around his cultural world, and which he may have translated from other linguistic sources beyond his native Greek. This point raises further issues about how translation processes, now partly or wholly occluded to our view today, were responsible for creating literary works which were subsequently construed as the essential flowering of self-enclosed literary and cultural communities. Given the widespread presence of Greek language in the East, especially through the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, it may be that at least parts of the Ramayana, the great Sanskrit epic which is one of the great poems of ancient India, may owe some debt to Homer. In a reverse cultural and linguistic flow, this time from East to West, the major work of Roman propaganda, Virgil’s Aeneid, which was explicitly modelled on Homer’s Odyssey, was partly influenced by the Mahabarata, the other major Sanskrit epic (Frankopan 2016). These literary works may be regarded as the partial results of the crosscultural and trans-linguistic flows promoted by those pan-Eurasian trade networks that some scholars would put under the heading of Eurasian proto-globalization ( Pieterse 2012). The case of the Aeneid is particularly interesting, as the Romans seem to have been remarkably uninterested in direct and explicit translating from any other language than Greek. There seem to have been almost no translations from Eastern languages ( Barnstone 1993). Even when engaged in Greek translations, Roman literati were notably uninterested in retaining any kind of fidelity to the original, adding in present- day concerns to older texts and often erasing altogether the names of the original authors. Yet at the same time it was Roman culture which eventually passed on to its ‘Western’ inheritors the major works and ideological concerns of both the Greek and Judaic worlds, with very long-lasting effects not just on Europe but on the whole world ( Brague 2002). One of the major elements that Rome passed on to later societies was the form of Christianity that first took shape within the eastern part of its empire. Both the Torah and the Koran are still today read in their original languages (Chanda 2007). The Christian Bible is a very different case, with translations into most of the world’s languages today. Here we can discern a fundamental ambiguity in Christianity. On the one hand, there is a two m illennia-long set of fears about linguistic entropy, translation of the (variably defined) ‘original’ being scorned, as it seems to involve loss or perversion of initial perfection, in turn leading to denunciations of translation as heresy and bans on vernacular versions of the holy writings. The Catholic Church banned vernacular translations of the Bible over a remarkably long period, from the fourth to sixteenth centuries CE, throughout its vast sphere of influence (Moore 2014). On 20

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the other hand, there is a contrary tendency towards the evangelizing need to speak in – and therefore to render the Bible into – the language of potential converts, to be able to win them over to the true path. Monoglot and polyglot tendencies once again are at war with each other. Translation figures as part both of the construction of canonical religious texts, and of their transformation and therefore potential destabilization ( Barnstone 1993). Given this ambiguity, much contemporary scholarship sees the Bible as a radically unstable entity, with both the text itself and the meanings conveyed by it changing according to specific translation practices ( Barton 2019). The contents and sub-titles vary according to the denomination which has commissioned or uses any given translated version. But each faction usually presents its version of the text as pure, definitive, and simply the direct expression of the Word of God. Many ‘Westernized’ versions disguise the Eastern roots of the source texts, which ultimately were originally the linguistic products of Jewish scholars, and in the case of the New Testament, Hellenized ones who operated across Greek and Jewish linguistic and cultural domains. Much of the Old Testament, and most of the New Testament, are in fact disguised translations, and they should not be seen at all as mono-linguistic and monocultural products. Translation processes have hidden likenesses and connections between the Judaic and other religious traditions, but with traces of these connections left in the texts for expert readers to discern ( Barnstone 1993). For example, in the Old Testament, the Judaic conception of God derived from the Canaanite deity El, who through complex mediation processes became the Hebrew Elohim. In the Hebrew text, the name retains a sense of ambiguity: is God one or many? Sumerian and Babylonian elements were also suppressed but left hanging obliquely in the Old Testament texts. El’s offspring Baal, one of God’s other incarnations, eventually became Beelzebub, God’s antagonist ( Barnstone 1993). These textual traces bear witness to the fact that in the ancient Near East, individuals and groups moved about incessantly, ideas went with them and became mixed with those of other groups, and new scriptures were as a result created, at the same time as denials were enacted of any cultural and linguistic impurities in the texts. The central and influential Septuagint translation into Greek of Hebrew-Aramaic texts was aimed at Greek- speaking Jews living in the broadly Greek- speaking world of the third and second centuries BCE. It was quoted more in the New Testament scriptures than was the Hebrew version of the same texts, as more Jews spoke Greek than Hebrew by that time, reflective of broader cultural and political processes in the region (Moore 2014). The New Testament is also a hybrid production. The texts were translated into Greek mostly from lost Aramaic sources, possibly oral as well as textual, which were presented as the original Gospels. Successive translation processes purged ‘Jesus’ (originally Joshua), his mother ‘Mary’ (originally Miryam), his family, and his disciples of their ‘Jewish’ characteristics, rendering them mysteriously unaffiliated persons of no specific ethnicity or language. A major ideological shift occurred as a result: Christianity was no longer framed as a dispute within Judaism, but as a rift between two novel groups, ‘Christians’ and ‘Jews’, the latter ever more defined as morally lacking or wholly wicked. Translation has again and again over time concealed itself, creating a new and original product, which gives the appearance of literalism and of being the original itself. Successive Greek, Latin, English, and German translations – to name only a few major target languages – of Old and New Testaments have been claimed as authoritative by those with vested denominational interests in presenting them so. For example, for 400 years, many English speakers have experienced the King James translation of the Bible as the genuine words of God, speaking to them directly, with any divergences from the sonorous language of the seventeenth century CE being a matter of often grave dispute ( Barnstone 1993). 21

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Perceptions of textual purity occlude the actual history of inter-textual influences, which are themselves expressions of inter-cultural processes. Understanding this involves reconstructing the movements of translators across cultural boundaries and along highways of cultural influence, which, in turn, were made possible by political, military, and trading routes. Thus the fourth century CE evangelist Ulfila worked in both Bulgaria and Constantinople to translate over the course of 40 years the Greek translation of the Christian scriptures into the Gothic language, further spreading Christianity into that cultural world (Santoyo 2006). In the fifth century CE, Armenian scholars were sent by religious authorities to Constantinople, to gain access to Greek translations of the Bible, in order to improve existing A rmenian ones. As Cronin (2003: 26) remarks, repeatedly the ‘product of one translation process becomes a tool in the commencement of another’. The more translations there are into more languages, the more potential sources of conflict there may be, as well as greater reach into new regions. Serious disputes over Bible interpretation accompanied the spread of Christianity, as texts moved from Syriac into Greek, and when the Eastern church spread into Arabia and central Asia in the sixth century CE, in turn creating the need for more translation work (Frankopan 2016). Over subsequent centuries, as the Bible was translated into languages like Armenian, Georgian and Coptic, sometimes preserving subsequently lost originals along the way, the translational route was often ‘ long and devious, from Greek into Syriac or Hebrew, thence into Arabic and thence into Latin, often with Spanish as an intermediary’ ( Haskins 1979: 281). Within such processes, both translations and translators travelled, over often long distances. For example, Irish monks re-evangelized major parts of Europe, where Christian belief had fallen into desuetude or had never existed, throughout the sixth to eighth centuries CE. Moving through France, the low countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, they promoted education in Latin and produced Latin translations of Greek works (Cronin 2003). Interactions between different ( but usually empirically overlapping) religious and political civilizational complexes may be understood as forms of early or proto-globalization ( Inglis 2010). Relations between the various Christian churches and the newly ascendant religious and political power of Islam involved multiple and complicated translation practices. As far as we know, between the seventh and tenth centuries CE, only one Western book was translated into Arabic, but large numbers of other, more prosaic kinds of documents flowed both ways at this time (Santoyo 2006). Translation was an important practice in the various Islamic centres of learning, involving various sorts of inter- cultural influence. In late eighth century CE Baghdad, the dynamic nature of translation processes can be seen in the fact that knowledge of algebra, a new discovery, inflected the translations made of earlier, pre-a lgebraic Greek mathematicians (Cronin 2003). In the same city in the ninth century, important translators like Abû Utmân al-Jâhiz and the Arab Nestorian Christian Hunayn ibn Ishaq were at work; the latter translated key texts from Greek into Syriac and Arabic. The Baghdad-based Persian mathematician A l-K hwarizmi introduced Hindu numerals and the concept of zero to Arab mathematics, which were then subsequently introduced by Latin translators to Europe in the twelfth century (Chanda 2007). Al-Hasan ibn Suwâr al-Hammar translated Aristotle into Arabic around 1000 CE (Santoyo 2006). In the tenth century CE, within the Abbasid and Mughal empires, translations of texts that were meant to facilitate better societal administration, were very expressive of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. In Abbasid Baghdad, translations aimed at reviving and reworking ancient Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, and Greek knowledges, with the resulting translations building a common way of communicating in a strongly multi-lingual context (Selim 2009). Scholars from these linguistic groups and others were invited to participate in the translating 22

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process. Often the translations made at this time are the only ones left to us today, the originals (or in some cases, earlier translations) having been lost. The Umayyad rulers of Spain sent agents across the Islamic sphere of influence, to Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and other locations, to buy books in multiple languages and to attract scholars and translators to Iberia. Eventually the rich libraries of Islamic Spain would be crucial resources for the scholars and translators of the so-called ‘European’ Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Muslim translators were also linchpins connecting their world to other civilizational complexes, notably India. Located in the relatively peripheral location of Afghanistan, in the early eleventh century CE the polymath A l-Biruni learnt Sanskrit, wrote an influential account of the subcontinent, and translated and transmitted works of classical Indian literature to the Muslim world (Chanda 2007). It has been tempting for modern scholars to present times and places of intense translation activity as involving formal, institutionalized ‘schools’ of translators. But just as there was no formalized ‘Baghdad School’ of translators turning Greek texts into Arabic, so too, despite subsequent myth-m aking, was there no such School in twelfth century CE Christian Toledo, that supposedly brought translators from across Spain, Italy, England, the low countries and further afield to translate Arabic and Greek texts (Santoyo 2006). Nonetheless, the so- called Renaissance of the twelfth century involved intensive translation activities, dispersed across key centres in Western Christendom, such as the earliest European universities like Salerno and Bologna. At the same period, the Norman rulers of Sicily developed the island as an intellectual entrepôt, commissioning original scientific works in Arabic, as well as translations of Arabic science into Latin ( Takayama 2003). The ‘discovery of Greek and Arabic texts provided a qualitative change in Europe’s intellectual atmosphere that motivated students to look into how these texts might affect canon law, civil law, and religious practices’ ( Bleich 2008: 501). Students from all over Europe subsequently came to such places of learning to learn about the new knowledges created from old translated texts. It was often Jewish translators, placed between different cultural worlds, and living in places where different groups and languages met, who provided the translations (Haskins 1979). Translations from Arabic coming out of Spain yielded the West European (re)discovery of Aristotle, some of whose works became available about 1200 CE, along with those by Galen and Hippocrates. It was often accidental whether the version of a text that came into wider circulation was taken from either a Greek or Arabic version of it. But the glosses provided by Arabic scholars on the Greek originals often had a major impact on how Western scholars took up and made sense of those originals ( Bleich 2008). The historian Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) has argued that in the thirteenth century CE, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean area, China, and Europe were becoming ever more integrated by the connection of major trading hubs linked by sea and land trade routes. This was in large part made possible by the vast expansion of the Mongol empire across much of Eurasia. Santoyo (2006: 16) makes the point that at that time ‘not a single book seems to have been translated between Mongolian and any European language, Latin included’. Nonetheless, ‘the chronicles of the mutual relations’ between Westerners and Mongols abound with messages, letters and documents which went to and fro in the hands of successive emissaries ( William of Rubruc, friar Giovanni di Pian del Carpine, and friar Ascelino of Cremona among them), translated from Mongolian into Latin, from Latin into Russian, Persian, or Mongolian, from Greek into Mongolian, from Latin into Arabic or Syriac, and so forth. 23

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The constant movement of translators and translations, usually done on-the-hoof while multiple sorts of people moved along the trade routes, is a key feature of pre-modern Eurasian globalization. Contemporary scholarship often re-narrates phenomena that have for a long time been understood to be products of self-enclosed cultures, especially so- called ‘European’ ones, in light of broader, trans-regional processes, including pan-Eurasian dynamics. For example, the so- called ‘European’ Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE is better described as a trans-national and trans-regional cultural movement. This is partly because it involved Ottoman Turkey as much as it did places we conventionally associate the Renaissance with, such as Italy (Inglis and Robertson 2005). It is also partly because the Renaissance involved the discovery and putting to use of translated texts preserved by Arab scholars, many of which were the only surviving copies of the original works of Greek authors. But such translations from Arabic into the various early modern European languages were presented in ways that created spurious direct relations between the Greek texts and the target languages, cutting Arabic out of the transmission story, and therefore out of the history of the Renaissance itself (Cronin 2003: 39).

Conclusion This chapter has laid out some of the main contours of the relations between historical globalization and translation. It has done so at two levels, considering both general types of those relations, and specific Eurasian instances of them. It has been seen that multiple types of actors – professional translators, non-professionals who were engaged in translation activities, interpreters, and so on – have all contributed to the making and running of globalization processes. There is no current scholarly agreement as to how to define the latter, or to say how long they have existed. Nonetheless it is clear that, however globalization in history is understood, translation and interpreting practices have been crucial in forging connections of multiple types between different human groups and the places where they have dwelled. It remains the case that translation studies and the historiography of translation still need to integrate models of historical globalization more fully into their intellectual skill- set, just as students of long-term globalization must place translators and translation much more at the forefront of their analytic purview. This chapter has sought to contribute a grounding for future constructive rapprochements in those directions.

Further reading Bastin, G. and Bandia, P. (eds.) (2006) Charting the Future of Translation History. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press. An intriguing collection of essays that touch upon multiple globalization/translation issues. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. A wide-ranging analysis of “modern” globalization processes on translation practices. Gills, B. and Thompson, W. (eds.) (2006) Globalization and Global History. London: Routledge. Offers comprehensive overviews of the problems involved in examining historical globalization.

References Abu-Lughod, J. (1989) Before European Hegemony. New York: Oxford University Press. Appiah, A. (1995) ‘Geist Stories’, in Bernheimer, C. (ed.), Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 51–57. 24

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Bandia, P. (2006) ‘The Impact of Postmodern Discourse on the History of Translation’, in Bastin, G. and Bandia, P. (eds.), Charting the Future of Translation History. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press, pp. 45–58. Barnstone, W. (1993) The Poetics of Translation. Yale: Yale University Press. Barton, J. (2019) A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths. London: Allen Lane. Bayly, C. A. (2002) ‘ “Archaic” and “Modern” Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena’, in Hopkins, A. G. (ed.), Globalization in World History. London: Pimlico, pp. 47–73. Bentley, J. (1999) ‘Cross- Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History’, American Historical Review, 101(3), pp. 749–770. Bentley, J. (2006) ‘Globalizing History and Historicizing Globalization’, in Gills, B. and Thompson, W. (eds.), Globalization and Global History. London: Routledge, pp. 16–29. Bielsa, E. (2014) ‘Cosmopolitanism as Translation’, Cultural Sociology, 8(4), pp. 392–406. Bielsa, E. (2016) ‘News Translation: Global or Cosmopolitan Connections?’, Media, Culture and Society, 38(2), pp. 196–211. Bleich, D. (2008) ‘Globalization, Translation and the University Tradition’, New Literary History, 39(3), pp. 497–517. Brague, R. (2002) Eccentric Culture. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. Chanda, N. (2007) Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization. Yale: Yale University Press. Cronin, M. (2000) ‘History, Translation, Postcolonialism’, in Simon, S. and St.-Pierre, P. (eds.), Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press, pp. 33–52. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. Cronin, M. and Simon, S. (2014) ‘The City as Translation Zone’, Translation Studies, 7(2), pp. 119–132. de Certeau, M. and Giard, L. (1983) ‘L’Ordinaire de la Communication’, Réseaux, 1(3), pp. 3–26. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. ­ D’hulst, L. (2012) ‘( Re)Locating Translation History’, Translation Studies, 5(2), pp. 139–155. Euben, R. (2008) Journeys to the Other Shore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frank, A. G. and Gills, B. (1993) The World-System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? London: Psychology Press. Frankopan, P. (2016) The Silk Roads. London: Vintage. Frow, J. (1995) Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gills, B. and Thompson, W. (eds.) (2006) Globalization and Global History. London: Routledge. Haskins, C. H. (1979) The Renaissance of the 12th Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holton, R. (2005) Making Globalization. London: Palgrave. Hopkins, A. G. (ed.) (2002) Globalization in World History. London: Pimlico. Inglis, D. (2005) Culture and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Inglis, D. (2010) ‘Civilizations or Globalization(s)? Intellectual Rapprochements and Historical WorldVisions’, European Journal of Social Theory, 13(1), pp. 135–152. Inglis, D. and Robertson, R. (2005) ‘The Ecumenical Analytic: “Globalization”, Reflexivity and the Revolution in Greek Historiography’, European Journal of Social Theory, 8(2), pp. 99–122. Inglis, D. with Thorpe, C. (2019) An Invitation to Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Kartunnen, F. (1994) Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides and Survivors. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Koskinen, K. (2000) Beyond Ambivalence. Tampere: Acta Universtiatis Tamperensis. Koskinen, K. (2014) ‘Tampere as a Translation Space’, Translation Studies, 7(2), pp. 186–202. Lefevere, A. (1990) ‘Translation: Its Genealogy in the West’, in Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (eds.), Translation, History and Culture. London: Pinter, pp. 14–28. Lo Bianco, J. (2014) ‘Domesticating the Foreign: Globalization’s Effects on the Place/s of Languages’, Modern Language Journal, 98(1), pp. 312–325. McKeown, A. (2007) ‘Periodizing Globalization’, History Workshop Journal, 63, pp. 218–230. Meylaerts, R. and Gonne, M. (2014) ‘Transferring the City - Transgressing Borders’, Translation Studies, 7(2), pp. 133–151. Moore, R. (2014) ‘The Case for Bible Translation, Viewed in Historical Perspective’, The Bible Translator, 65(1), pp. 77–87. 25

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Olohan, M. (2014) ‘History of Science and History of Translation’, The Translator, 20(1), pp. 9–25. Pieterse, J. N. (2012) ‘Periodizing Globalization: Histories of Globalization’, New Global Studies, 6(2): Article 1. Pollock, S. (2006) The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pratt, M.L. (1991) ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, 91, pp. 33–40. Ribeiro, A. (2004) ‘Translation as a Metaphor for Our Times’, Portuguese Studies, 20, pp. 186–194. Roland, R. (1999) Interpreters as Diplomats: A Diplomatic History of the Role of Interpreters in World Politics. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press. Santoyo, J.- C. (2006) ‘Blank Spaces in the History of Translation’, in Bastin, G. and Bandia, P. (eds.), Charting the Future of Translation History. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press , pp. 11– 43. Serres, M. (1993) Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Selim, S. (2009) ‘Nation and Translation in the Middle East’, The Translator, 15(1), pp. 1–13. Steiner, G. (1996) No Passion Spent: Essays. Yale: Yale University Press. Sywenky, (2014) ‘( Re)Constructing the Urban Palimpsest of Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv’, Translation Studies, 7(2), pp. 152–169. Takayama, H. (2003) ‘Central Power and Multi- Cultural Elements at the Norman Court of Sicily’, Mediterranean Studies, 12, pp. 1–15. Veit, W. (2008) ‘Globalization and Literary History’, New Literary History, 39(3), pp. 415–435. Venuti, L. (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Vlasova, M. (1999) ‘The American Declaration of Independence in Russian’, Journal of American History, 85(4), pp. 1399–1408.

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2 Multiple and entangled modernities, cosmopolitanism and translation Gerard Delanty

Introduction: the idea of modernity1 The idea of modernity concerns the interpretation of present time in terms of a repositioning of the present in relation to the past and to the future. It refers to the major transformations that led to the making of the modern world and the formation of new imaginaries concerning the possibility of human autonomy. The term modernity did not arise until the nineteenth century and was very much reflected in the major historical upheavals of that century, especially in the way these were experienced by people in Europe and the Americas. One of the most famous uses of the term was in 1864 when the French poet Baudelaire (1964: 13) wrote: ‘By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent’. This notion of modernity was an expression of the literary movement of modernism and captured the dynamic movements and fast moving currents in modern society, in particular those that conveyed the sense of renewal and the cosmopolitanism of modern urban life. It also signalled the spirit of creativity and individualism that was taken up by the avant-garde movement. However, the term has a wider currency beyond its cultural and artistic signification. It captures the revolutionary impetus of modern industrial capitalistic society. Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 invoked the spirit of modernity with their account of the rise of capitalism as the condition in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’. This condition also engendered a new revolutionary politics in which ‘the working classes have no country’. Within classical sociology, Max Weber captured some critical aspects of the modern transformation by the concept of rationalization, which had an enhanced importance in shaping the ways that human beings think and act in modern society. The notion of modernity in classical sociological theory expressed the transformation observed in political institutions as well as in the economic and societal transformation of Western societies. Georg Simmel is generally regarded as the figure who first gave a more rigorous sociological description of modernity in his account of everyday social life in the modern metropolis. For Simmel, as for Walter Benjamin, modernity is expressed in diverse ‘momentary images’ or ‘snapshots’. Modernity is the condition of the fragmentation of modern society, on the one side, and, on the other, one of new possibilities and forms for culture, made possible, for example, by the

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camera and the cinema. These technologies led to such momentary images and the related sense that nothing is durable and solid but that everything is fleeting. Thus there is nothing like a modern condition that is able to crystallize itself in a specific spatial context. It is a condition that is open to new forms. This is a critical aspect that was asserted by late twentiethcentury critiques including post-modern theories. Modernity can be defined as a condition of awareness that nothing is settled for once and for all and therefore the future is not predetermined. It expresses the idea that the present is not determined by the past, especially by the recent past. Most conceptions of modernity have announced a rupture of present time from the past, generally the recent past. The modern is the present time; it is the ‘now’ and ‘the new’. The consciousness of the new is common to most cultural, philosophical and political expressions of modernity from the eighteenth century onwards. The modernist movement in literature, the arts and architecture strongly emphasized a spirit of newness, purity and the break from tradition. The social and political ideas of what Reinhart Koselleck (2004) referred to as the Sattelzeit, the period from 1750 to 1850, provide the main reference points for modernity, the Neuzeit. This period, which saw the formation of key conceptual and structural changes, made possible the emergence of modern society as a new kind of society that sought to reach beyond itself, beyond what had previously been contained within what he called the ‘space of experience’. In the terms of Koselleck, the ‘horizon of expectation’ was considerably expanded beyond the ‘space of experience’, which was also broadened. The discovery of the notion of ‘progress’ in this period, which he attributes to Kant, marks the point at which new expectations become possible and are not limited by previous experience. For Koselleck, experience and expectation are key registers of a shift in historical consciousness. Koselleck’s theory of the emergence of modernity in terms of a particular kind of time consciousness has been very influential. It suggests a notion of modernity that is defined in categorical terms rather than reducing it to a particular period or epoch. The Sattelzeit can be seen as the period when modernity took shape in Europe but is not confined to this period. However, Koselleck’s account conflated modernity with its European expression. Despite their co-emergence and entanglement, they need to be conceptually separated. One aspect of the notion of modernity that is striking is that it reflects a strong faith in the capacity of human agency to shape society in light of guiding ideas and in knowledge. It is also important to highlight the connection between technological advancement and the ‘civilizational mission’ of Western countries during the colonial period in the second half of the nineteenth century. The emergence of discourses and institutional practices in relation to the affirmation of human beings in European contexts took place at the same time when colonial domination extended over much of Africa and Asia. Thus it came about that modernity was a leading idea in the struggle for emancipation and for the affirmation of more inclusive states in the European context, but it was also used as the reason for the affirmation of domination and exploitation of other supposed backward areas of the world. The post-colonial critique that emerged by the 1950s emphasized this connection in calls for new genealogies of the modern age. The idea of modernity also signals an epistemological condition that announces the loss of certainty and the realization that certainty can never be established for once and for all. It is a term that can also be taken to refer to reflection on the age, rather than being coeval with a specific era. For Habermas, modernity is related to the capacity of modern society to contest power through communicative means. Developments in post-modern thought suggest a view of the modern as a reflective moment within the modern, rather than a new era, a particular kind of consciousness than a societal condition as such. This has also been 28

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affirmed in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Modernity is thus a condition that is essentially open as opposed to being closed or a specific societal formation. For this reason, the concept of modernity should be seen as an alternative to the notion of modernization in so far as it draws attention to a greater diversity of forms and the capacity for self-transformation.

From multiple to entangled modernities While much of the literature on modernity outside the sociological theory has tended to emphasize the cultural dimensions of modernity, it should be noted that it is also a social and political condition that goes beyond the European assumptions that have tended to accompany the debates. In recent years there has been a huge literature on modernity as a global and a plural phenomenon (see Gaokar 2001, Wagner 2012). Much of this derives from the work of S.N. Eisenstadt (2003), who developed the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ whereby modernity is based on different civilizational trajectories. The older assumptions of modernity as essentially a product of European or Western civilization have been much criticized in wider-ranging scholarship that has emerged from, for instance, comparative historical sociology, transnational and global history, post-colonial theory, and cosmopolitanism. While Eisenstadt gave the notion of modernity a wider and more global relevance, the tendency in recent years has been less centred on its civilizational characteristics in so far as these relate to the emergence of the major Eurasian civilizations of the Axial Age. Eisenstadt’s own work also gave the European variant of modernity undue significance in shaping other varieties of modernity. He also neglected questions of power and imperialism in the diffusion of modernity, which he tended to see in largely cultural terms. Nonetheless, the civilizational dimension cannot be entirely neglected in any kind of global comparison, as Johann Arnason (2003) has shown. The multiple forms that modernity takes can be related to civilizational trajectories, but there are also endogenous logics of development and the entanglement of these with exogenous ones. In place of the notion of multiple modernities has now come a new emphasis on varieties of modernity and on entangled modernities, since the divergent forms of modernity do not develop without interaction with other forms (see Manjapra 2011; Delanty 2018). The concern with multiple modernities, without this interactive dimension, can lead to the mistaken view of different modernities isolated from each other. Whatever the solution to this problem is, it will have to entail a theory of how modernizing cultures interact and why modernity is present to varying degrees. This is where cultural translation and cosmopolitanism enter the picture. The idea of multiple modernity draws attention to processes of multidirectionality and interconnectivity. Modernity unfolds through the interactions of different cultures and civilizations; it is transnational and made possible through processes of interaction rather than autonomous national trajectories. The rise of global and transnational history in recent times has inadvertently opened up a cosmopolitan perspective on the formation of modernity as a condition of interconnections and consciousness of globality. Recent scholarship in global history has drawn attention to earlier expressions of globalization in history and the emergence of a consciousness of globality, which Robertson has highlighted in a seminal work on the cultural dimensions of globalization (Robertson 1992; Hopkins 1984; Bayly 2004). In this context, the notion of ‘entangled modernities’ has been proposed to capture the enmeshed, interconnected nature of modernities and that there are not just multiple but overlapping ones (Arnason 2003; Therborn 2003; Delanty 2018). This has the advantage of capturing the ways in which Western and non-Western modernities are linked and the co-existence of different modernities within one national tradition. 29

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The suggestion that modernity exists not just in multiple forms, but in overlapping, entangled forms points to transformative processes and interconnections. No account of modernity in global perspective can neglect the interactive mechanisms and processes that lie at the root of modernity as a transformative process. Modernities do not simply exist as coherent or stable, well-defined units, but are in a constant process of change due to the nature of the particular forms of interpenetration, selection, combination, adaptation and processing of cultural codes, resources, imaginaries etc. Such ideas are reflected in recent studies on global trade and cultural encounters, which suggests a more explicit connection with cosmopolitanism (Curtin 1984; Bentley 1993; Bayly 2004; Osterhammel 2014). The key to this is the interaction of modernities. The logic of interactions is one of the central insights of global historians such as Hodgson (1993) and McNeil (1963) whose revisions of the rise of the West thesis have given a central place to the interaction of East and West. Their work builds upon the earlier pioneering work of Benjamin Nelson, who introduced the notion of civilizational encounters and the idea of a civilizational complex (Nelson 1976, 1981). Influenced by Weber’s comparative sociology of civilizations, Nelson went beyond Weber’s conception of civilization as holistic entities to emphasize the importance of cultural interaction between civilizations in the shaping of civilizational forms of consciousness. Arnason’s contribution to the debate on multiple modernity extends the hermeneutical dimension that was implicit but undeveloped in the work of Nelson. As with Eisenstadt and Nelson, he approaches modernity from a civilizational perspective (Arnason 2003). His starting point is Castoriadis’s theory of the imaginary, which is a central feature of the self-constitution of every society (Castoriadis 1987). For Arnason, Castoriadis broke new ground with his notion of a radical social imaginary, which for Arnason can be seen as the mechanism that lies at the core of civilizations and civilizational encounters. His civilizational analysis holds that civilizations are contested grounds in which different visions of the world emerge and undergo transformation, central to which are dynamics of encounters and syntheses. Civilizations are internally plural and exist within a plurality of civilizations; they are all based on frameworks of meaning that can be interpreted in different ways within and beyond the contours of a given civilization. Such frameworks constitute fields of interpretation for more or less radical interpretations of the world. Modernity, he argues, is the major example of internal conflict and contested identity and as such it bears the imprint of the fundamental tension of the imaginary significations of civilizations. The divergent patterns of modernity should thus be seen as combinations of civilizational complexes. His aim is to link the civilizational perspective to an important but under-developed theme in the theory of modernity: the dynamics of tensions and conflicts, between basic orientations (such as the cumulative pursuit of power and the more ambiguous moves towards autonomy) as well as between divergent institutional spheres – economic, political and cultural – with corresponding interpretative frameworks. (Arnason 2003: 49–50) In other words, the self-transformative capacity of societies is thus grounded in a pluralistic vision of civilizations and of modernity. In addition to the plural and overlapping nature of modernity, the global nature of modernity must be noted. Modernity, while not globally uniform, is nonetheless a globalizing process. This does not mean one single modernity, but rather a uniformity in forms of consciousness, modes of cognition, interpretation and orientations. Modernity is necessarily global in outlook, while it first emerged in Western Europe and North America it is not 30

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Western. This can be clarified further by an argument Therborn (2003) has made concerning the global nature of modernity. Rather than begin with a premise of diversity, he argues for a notion of modernity as global but which expresses itself in major macro-regional variations, of which he lists four: the European route of revolution or reform; the American route of independence; a route represented by Iran, Thailand and Japan based on external threat and selective imports; the route of conquest experienced by much of Africa and Asia. In addition to avoiding an over-pluralization and reduction of modernity to national trajectories, it places globalization at the core of modernity without reducing modernity to globalization as such. As Dirlik (2003) has also argued, the notion of non-global modernities makes little sense. Moreover, it also avoids a purely culturally oriented view of modernity. The global dimension to modernity is most evident in the relation of the local to globality. Globalization can be seen as a process that intensifies connections, enhances possibilities for borrowing, cultural transfer, translation and transformation. As such, it can be found in many historical contexts. The forms, interrelations and dynamics of modernity are varied and uneven, but underlying them is the most basic impetus towards self-transformation, the belief that human agency can transform the present in the image of an imagined future. This view of modernity as a break from the past seems to accord with the major philosophical and cultural understandings of modernity as a dynamic process that has made change itself the defining feature of modernity. Modernity is thus a particular kind of time consciousness that defines the present in its relation to the past, which must be continuously recreated. Modernity is not a historical epoch that can be periodized, but a mode of experiencing and interpreting time. Modernity unfolds in different ways, according to different paces and can take different societal forms depending on the configurations of state, the capitalist market and civil society. Modernity is thus not exclusively Western but can emerge anywhere. It is therefore possible to speak of multiple modernities without pluralizing the notion to the extent that it becomes meaningless. Viewed from the lens of global history there are at least three ways to approach a cosmopolitan conception of modernity. The first and minimal approach is simply to demonstrate through empirical examples how concepts that ordinarily relate to Western societies can be generalized to all kinds of society. Thus, the notion of civil society, generally associated with European modernity, is a relevant term of analysis for non-Western society. Indeed, the very notion of modernity can be universalized to include, for example, an Islamic modernity, an African modernity, a Chinese modernity etc. The disadvantage with this approach is that it seeks only to find non-Western examples of concepts that have a largely Western applicability. A second approach is a modified version of the previous. Rather than generalize Western experiences to the rest of the world or take Western concepts as a point of departure, a radicalized global history would posit universalizable concepts that take multiple civilizational forms. In this case the objective will be to examine, for example, the global diversity of concepts rather than posit a universally valid framework of concepts. In other words, there is a plurality of civilizational forms and concepts. Pollock’s (2006) argument for a ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ would be an example of such an approach to global modernity. A third approach would shift the emphasis from plurality towards modes of interaction, such as cross-cultural encounters and interactions. Here, the cosmopolitan momento occurs when two or more cultures interact as a result of global forces, for example, trade or even as a consequence of war or large-scale migration. Approaching the problem of multiple modernities in this way avoids the limits of internal and external accounts of modernity. The rise of the West and European modernity, for instance, cannot be explained without taking into account how the West interacted with the East and with other parts of the world. 31

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However, reducing the relation to a one-way account of colonial appropriation, as reflected in recent revisions of the rise of the West (Frank 1998; Hobson 2004), neglects the complex nature of the interaction, seeing it only in terms of appropriation. In an assessment of the internal and external accounts of the rise of the West, Arnason (2006) concludes that the latter perspective is best seen as a corrective of the traditional account that would explain the rise of the West with respect to factors internal to the West. Implicit, but underdeveloped in Arnason’ s account, is the recognition of a third position, which is neither internalist nor externalist but interactionist. An interactionist account of the rise of modernity would place the emphasis on the dynamics and modes of interaction whereby different parts of the world become linked through the expansion and diffusion of systems of exchange, networks of communication, and various forms of third culture. Thus it was not the case that modernity was European per se or that different models of modernity emerged spontaneously on their own, but the rise of modernity was determined by the extent to which in a given part of the world the capacity existed for the expansion of local cultures into a globally oriented third culture. It was consequential that this happened in Europe, and only in certain parts of Europe, but this does not mean that modernity was European per se. Approaching the problem of modernity from the perspective of global history offers, then, a corrective to the received view of modernity as a Western condition that was transported to the rest of the world. Moreover, it also avoids some of the problems of an appeal to a non-Western modernity or multiple modernity. The notion of modernity divested of its Eurocentric assumptions has a direct relevance to cosmopolitan analysis if it is accepted that it is a transformative condition that arises out of multiplicity and interaction. It is a concept that cannot be confined to national patterns of development, but has a wider application including, importantly, civilizational influences.

Cosmopolitanism and cultural translation The shift towards global history and the related emphasis on multiple modernity as discussed in the foregoing can be complemented with an additional argument that may go some way towards correcting a weakness in the global history perspective. The major revision that global history has brought about in the approach to modernity is that it corrects the Eurocentric bias that was an integral aspect of the older comparative history with its characteristic emphasis on Western civilization as the norm and nations as self-contained entities. From a cosmopolitan perspective, this has not gone far enough in that the emphasis on multiplicity and interaction alone does not sufficiently capture all aspects relevant to the cosmopolitan dimension of modernity. The main weakness is that the emphasis on encounters and borrowings is not strong enough to capture fully the transformative dynamics of modernity. One of the major impulses in modernity is the striving towards an alternative society and the genesis of universalistic principles. The central impulse of modernity – the belief that the world can be reshaped by human agency – has entailed a commitment to normative frameworks that offer a means of imagining an alternative social world. This has been expressed in modern political ideologies – nationalism, republicanism, socialism, communism – which, in their various ways, have responded to the modern condition of perpetual renewal and a future orientation. The turn to post-Eurocentric global history may have opened up new perspectives of a cosmopolitan nature, but what needs further development is the normative, critical dimension.

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Cosmopolitan normative critique concerns changes in self-understanding arising out of the encounter with another culture whereby, to varying degrees, a relativization of values occurs and eventually the movement towards a shared normative culture emerges. Civilization analysis, as in the impressive body of work by Eisenstadt and Arnason, is not normally associated with cosmopolitanism since there is not an explicit attempt to connect global historical analysis with normative critique, though in the case of the latter the connection with immanent transcendence is more evident. Neither Eisenstadt nor Arnason addressed cosmopolitanism to pursue the normative implications of their work. An additional problem is that civilizational analysis is primarily focussed on Europe and Asia and would appear to exclude non-Eurasian civilizations. Furthermore the emphasis on civilizational analysis may be too limiting when it comes to understanding the nature of modernity. Cosmopolitanism offers a perspective that overcomes some of these problems if it is linked to the idea of cultural translation, for the problem is essentially a matter of how one culture interprets itself in light of the encounter with the other and constantly undergoes change as a result. This involves more than the relativization of universality or the emphasis on interaction, but a logic of transcendence. The notion of cultural translation draws attention to immanent processes of transformation determined by modes of interpretation in which an evaluation occurs. Global history does not give adequate attention to the genesis of new interpretative frameworks in which cultures undergo transformation arising out of the re-evaluation of standpoints. The emphasis tends to be more on global histories than on developmental logics in which subject formation occurs. Viewing modernity in terms of the model of translation offers a way to conceptualize the cosmopolitan current in modernity as one that has normative significance as well as cultural specificity. The significant consideration here is the tendency within modernity for translation to become the very form of culture. The universalizing feature of modernity is the drive to make all of culture translatable. This does not mean the obliteration of cultural differences or the creation of a universal language but a condition of universal translatability. As a condition of universal translatability, modernity arises when cultures become embroiled in the logic of translation. The key feature of this is the communicative relation of cultures to each other by means of a third culture. This third culture – globality, world culture – does not necessarily exist as an overarching culture or a global lingua franca, but is a medium of translation and one that is embedded in local cultures. Throughout history the world religions and universalistic languages – Latin, Sanskrit, English – served this purpose which is today being carried forward by the Internet and other media of communication as well as by new discourses such as democracy and human rights which provide cognitive models by which cultures interpret themselves. The result is that cultures are becoming more and more translatable. As they do so, changes in self-understanding occur and a certain cosmopolitanism enters the interpretative system. If, as Ricoeur has argued, cosmopolitanism entails the capacity to view oneself from the eyes of the Other, then cultural translation might be the medium in which one views one’ s own culture as foreign (Ricoeur 1995, 1996). The resulting universality is more one of pluralization than a singular rationality. The notion of translation has increasingly been applied to the analysis of a broader concept of culture than the purely textual (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990; Budick and Iser 1996; Assmann 1997; Cronin 1998). A developed use of the notion of translation has existed for some time in philosophy since Wittgenstein (Benjamin 1989) and has been implicit in anthropology (Asad 2003). Translation has been proposed as a general methodology for the social

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sciences (Callon et al. 1986), where it refers to the process whereby one thing represents another thing so well that the voice of the represented is effectively silenced. New perspectives on translation have been opened by Gadamer’s Truth and Method and MacIntyre’s signal essay, ‘Tradition and Translation’ (Gadamer 1975; MacIntyre 1984). Walter Benjamin’ s classic 1923 essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’ is now a key work in rethinking the contemporary relevance of translation from a cosmopolitan perspective (Benjamin 1982). The essay introduced the idea that in translation an element of foreignness is brought into one’ s own culture and that as a consequence it is no longer unique or singular. The idea of cultural translation has been an important focus for Homi Bhabha (1994) who has argued for a concept of translation as the performative function of communication and which comes into play in the discursive constitution and contestation of cultural phenomena. James Clifford (1992, 1997) in a classic essay in 1992 extended the notion to various kinds of localization, hybridization and vernacularization (see also Ang 2003). This is not the place to review this diverse literature, but it can be noted that it offers a fruitful approach to global modernity and to Cosmopolitan analysis. What is suggested by these diverse approaches is that translation is more than interpretation and the transmission of meaning; it is also about the transformation of meaning and the creation of something new, for culture is never translated neutrally. The logic of translation is inherent in culture, which is not static or the expression of authorial meaning but is dynamic and transformative. The cultural logic of modernity can thus be seen as a mode of translation that is constitutive of modernity and its forms of communication in which otherness is constantly transformed. The capacity for translation – of languages, memories, narratives, experiences, knowledge – is the basis of communication, tradition and cultural possibility and entails a continuous process of social construction. Translation as a cultural process is a mode of cultural transmission wherein the process of transmission is transformative. It has been widely recognized that translation is not a simple act of replication. As Gadamer has argued, ‘every translation is at the same time an interpretation’ (Gadamer 1975: 346). Translation refers to something that transcends both Self and Other. In Gadamer’ s words: ‘The horizon of understanding cannot be limited either by what the writer has originally in mind, or by the horizon of the person to whom the text was originally addressed’ (Gadamer 1975: 356). Translation can never overcome the gulf between two languages, he argued in this seminal work on truth, tradition and interpretation. Translation arises because of a need to bridge this gap but it cannot overcome it. While Gadamer makes the point that translation is never the norm in ‘ordinary communication’, which is based on a shared language, or even when the speaker is speaking a foreign language, it is increasingly becoming the space in which many forms of communication are played out. Migration, globalization, new information and communication technologies have changed the nature of communication to a point that cultural translation has become a central category in all of communication. The terms of Gadamer’s approach also need to be expanded in the need to take account of the critical moment in which newness is created. Cultural translation is a process of mutations, transferences, innovations, appropriations, borrowings, re-combinations and substitution. It concerns the symbolic and cognitive processes by which cultural aspects of a given collective identity are appropriated by a different one, which will variously adapt, transfigure it, subvert it. In the resulting re-codification of culture, new meanings and structures are created. Bhabha has hinted at a critical normative interpretation that is lacking in Gadamer’s account: it is not simply appropriation or adaptation; it is a process through which cultures are required to revise their own systems of reference, norms and values by departing from their habitual or ‘inbred’ rules of transformation. Ambivalence and antagonism accompany 34

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any act of cultural translation because negotiating with the ‘difference of the other’ reveals the radical insufficiency of our own systems of meaning and signification (Bhabha 1994). This is the cosmopolitan condition of living in translation. The question of power and inequality cannot be neglected since translation is not only never neutral but frequently involves violence. This is particularly the case in multicultural encounters where there can be significant questions of power at stake in those cases where one cultural form as opposed to another is privileged (Asad 2003). Forms of translation can be devised which reduce the inequality of positions. For example, law, which is itself a form of translation, is the major way in which modern societies have created a universal language to translate differences. But not all translation takes this form. When cultures meet, dislocations and even pathologies can result. Cultural translation can have a destructive moment producing reifications, racism, misunderstandings. It is therefore necessary to address the ‘failures of translation and whether the result will be changes in self-understanding, in acts of resistance and empowerment’ (Clifford 1997: 182–183). How to achieve reciprocity is the cosmopolitan challenge in cultural translation. On the basis of the foregoing three kinds of cultural translation can be identified: translation of the Self and Other, local and global translations, and translations of the past and present. Translations of the first kind can be simply a matter of the translation of one culture into another; they may take the form of an adaptation or a partial or a wholesale borrowing. Such forms of translation in undifferentiated premodern societies generally assume a degree of sameness in the cultural and social presuppositions of the two cultures. With the advancement of civilization and the resulting encounter of cultures that are very different, a new mode of translation emerges based on a shared system of exchange based on a third language. Examples of this syncretism vary from a lingua franca to a common system of exchange to universalistic religions. In this case the integrity of the local culture is not necessarily in question and can even be protected since the native culture does not have to translate itself into the categories of the Other (see MacIntyre 1984; Assmann 1997). In the case of the second type of translation, the local culture is translated onto an overarching global or universal culture, which also functions as a third culture. Examples of this tendency towards universalization range from money and cartography to nationalizing projects to science and law. While this can lead to hegemonic forms of translation in which the local is obliterated or becoming unrecognizably transformed, the reverse can also happen in that the global can be translated into the local. This localization can take many forms, ranging from vernacularization to hybridization and indigenization. Finally, translations of past and present are a perpetual feature of all societies since the present is always defined by its relation to the past. Such translations may take the form of an ‘invention’ of the past, they may also take the form of a renunciation by which the past is translated into a new symbolic form. The nature of the translation – which may be nostalgic or revolutionary – will depend on the understanding of the present. The past can be translated into the shared present time of a given culture or into a globalized present. The nature of translation thus entails a relation to otherness, to the universal, and to an origin which are all experienced in terms of distance and loss. Translation arises in the first instance because of the reality of cultural distance and plurality. Translations have existed since the beginning of civilization when the need to communicate with others arose but became intensified with modernity, which has brought about a culture of translatability in which all of culture has become translatable. In this translation is more than a medium of communication; it is the form in which communication takes place and expresses the modern condition of culture as communication. Rather than define modernity as a singular or a multiple condition it can be defined as a condition of translatability. 35

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Modernity is a condition that can arise within cultures as a cognitive form or structure in which the various parts of a culture are translated not into each other but also into and through a third language. The multiple forms of modernity are simply the diverse expressions of this orientation towards universal communicability. Modernity is thus always in process depending on the nature of the particular forms of interaction, selection, combination, adaptation and processing of culture codes, frames of meaning, symbolic structures. While the capacity for translation has existed since the beginning of writing, it is only with modernity that it has become the dominant cultural form. Prior to modernity, translation served the function of communication and was not the basis of a given culture. The movement to multiplicity has become a more pronounced current in modernity today as the logic of translation has extended beyond the simple belief that everything can be translated into a universal or global culture to the recognition that every culture can translate itself and others.

Conclusion The main thesis of this chapter has been that the concept of modernity must be related to the self-transformative capacity of society. I have related this to a radicalized notion of cultural translation. The argument is that what is often called multiple modernities is best seen as different modes of cultural translation that arise through entanglement. Modernity can arise anywhere; it is not a specific historical condition, but a mode of processing, or translating, culture. Modernity is a particular way of transmitting culture that transforms that which it takes over; it is not a culture of its own and therefore can take root anywhere at any time; this is because every translation is a transformation of both the subject and the object. Viewed in these terms there is a cosmopolitan dynamic to the project of modernity. This goes beyond arguments concerning the multiple nature of modernity and also the global diversity of cosmopolitan cultures to a position that places at the centre of historical awareness the interconnectivity of the world.

Further reading Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (eds.) (1990) Translation, History, and Culture. London: Pinter. A useful collection of essays within the field of translation studies that looks at translation in the shaping of culture. Budick, S. and Iser, W. (eds.) (1996) The Translatability of Cultures. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. A key collection of essays on cultural translation addressing the central problem of alterity. Delanty, G. (ed.) (2019) The Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. A comprensive collection of essays on the major debates on cosmopolitanism. Gaonkar, D. P. (ed.) (2001) Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. A classic collection of essays on multiple varieties of modernity and cosmopolitanism beyond Western narratives. Wagner, P. (2012) Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. An important comprehensive account of modernity in contemporary social theory.

Note

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References Ang, I. (2003) ‘Cultural Translation in a Globalized World’, in Paperstergiadis, N. (ed.), Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalization and Cultural Difference. Sydney: Rivers Oran Press. Arnason, J. (2003) Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill. Arnason, P. (2006) ‘Contested Divergence: Rethinking the “Rise of the West” ’, in Delanty, G. (ed.), Europe and Asia beyond East and West. London: Routledge. Asad, T. (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Assmann, J. (1997) Moses the Egyptian: The Memory in Western Monothesism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (eds.) (1990) Translation, History, and Culture. London: Pinter. Baudelaire, C. (1964) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaidon Press. Bayly, C. (2004) The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell. Benjamin, A. (1989) Translation and the Nature of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Benjamin, W. (1982) ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations. London: Routledge. Bentley, J. (1993) Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Premodern Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Budick, S. and Iser, W. (eds.) (1996) The Translatability of Cultures. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Callon, M., Law, J. and Ripp, A. (1986) Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology. London: Macmillan. Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Clifford, J. (1992) ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Grossberg, L., Nelson, B. and Treichler, P. (eds.), Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cronin, M. (1998) Unity in Diversity: Current Trends in Translation Studies. Manchester: St Jerome Press. Curtin, P. (1984) Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2018) The European Heritage: A Critical Re-interpretation. London: Routledge. Dirlik, A. (2003) ‘Global Modernity? Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(3), pp. 275–92. Eisenstadt, S. N. (2003) Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities: A Collection of Essays by S. N. Eisenstadt. Volumes 1 and 2. Leiden: Brill. Frank, A. G. (1998) Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1975) Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward. Gaokar, D. P. (ed.) (2001) Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hobson, J. (2004) The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Hodgson, M. (1993) Rethinking World History. Essays on Europe, Islam and the World. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins (1984) Cross-cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, R. (2004) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1984) ‘Translation and Tradition’, in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame. Manjapra, K. (2014) Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Europe. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. McNeil, W. (1963) The Rise of the West: A History of Human Community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nelson, B. (1976) ‘Orient and Occident in Max Weber’, Social Research, 43(1), 114–29. Nelson, B. (1981) On the Road to Modernity. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield Osterhammel, J. (2014) The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 37

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Pollock, S. (2006) The Language of the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ricoeur, P. (1995) ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21(5/6), pp. 3–13. Ricoeur, P. (1996) Oneself as Another. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Therborn, G. (2003) ‘Entangled Modernities’, European Journal of Social Theory, 6(3), pp. 293–305. Wagner, P. (2012) Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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3 The individuality of language Internationality and transnationality Naoki Sakai

Introduction One of the most elementary questions about translation, that is also among the most difficult to answer, is this: what allows us to regard language as an individual; on what grounds are we authorized to render language as an indivisible unity? In talking about translation, however, are we accustomed to discussing languages as if they were unproblematically individual and indivisible unities? At this juncture, we may further ask why we oblige ourselves to specify a language as an individual? As a matter of fact, have we not always, that is, trans-h istorically, taken for granted that language is a countable being, something that can be counted, one, two, three, and so on, like oranges and apples, and unlike water? Perhaps more out of habit than conviction, we have not bothered to ask in what context and under what circumstances language can be treated as a countable nominal. The time has come to discard this absentminded habit. It may be necessary at the outset to elucidate what is at issue in raising such a question: what allows us to assume, as if indisputably, that a language is an individual unity in our discussions of translation? Why do we have to be concerned with the countability of language and then the individuation of it, especially in regard to translation? First of all, let us remind ourselves of the truism that on innumerable occasions, the word ‘translation’ is used metaphorically. Since translation can involve a wide range of topics and approaches, the concept of language that is mobilized is not necessarily unitary; one may well infer diverse tropes by saying ‘ language,’ so let me specify not only one, but also many contexts in which the individuality of language presents itself as a problematic.1 Translation is commonly used metaphorically to such an extent that it is not easily distinguishable from a metaphor or a figurative expression in general, and all too often it serves as a trope by which, for instance, a medical doctor’s diagnosis is translated into everyday parlance for ordinary folks, or the literary script of a novelistic work is translated into cinematic language. After all, might translation be a metaphor in its etymology, so that, strictly speaking, there is no way to prevent translation from being used as a substitute for a metaphor? Given a wide range of tropic uses of the word ‘translation,’ it is unsurprising that some scholars search for the definition of what translation ought to be in its propriety, for a definition of 39

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translation that serves effectively to distinguish translation as a trope or metaphor from translation proper or translation in and of itself. So, what is translation proper, after all? In our conventional apprehension of translation, the conduct to translate or the act of translation is presumed unnecessary unless different languages are at issue. In the last few centuries – at least since the inauguration of the universal system of national education – the dominant apprehension of translation has assumed that translation occurs between two different languages or a pair of languages, such as German and French or Hebrew and Greek. ( For the time being, let us evade the possible question as to whether or not translation is able to involve more than two languages. As it becomes immediately obvious, this question itself depends upon how we are possibly able to count languages, on the modality of language’s countability.) In most cases, each of the paired languages between which the act of translation is performed is regarded as an individual marked by a clear- cut border that divides its inside from its outside, as an internally consistent entity that sustains an indivisible unity. Accordingly, it is usually assumed that two different languages between which translation is conducted are different from one another, first of all in terms of individuality as well as indivisibility; in other words, the difference between the languages is an individual difference. Once again, it seems that we are drawn back to the initial question: what allows us to regard language as an individual? On what basis, can we say that language is an individual that can be symbolically, figuratively, and spatially represented as an enclosure with a clear border that divides its interior from its exterior? Roman Jakobson is one linguist who has responded to such queries about the indivisible individuality of a language in translation as well as the difference of languages in translation at the same time. According to him (1959), the non-tropic or proper use of translation is given in contrast to those apparently tropic or metaphoric uses of the word; the propriety or the archetype of translation must be preserved for the type performed between two natural languages. He insists that translation in the proper sense must be distinguished both from intralingual translation (translation within the same language, which does not involve another one) and intersemiotic translation (translation involving non-l inguistic sign systems), and that in the proper sense of the word it means an interlingual translation, a translation between one language and another, between two different languages external to one another. Let me avow at the outset that I cannot avoid feeling skeptical of the classification of translation types that Jakobson lays out; I am hesitant to endorse the framework against the background of which his analysis of linguistic aspects of translation is conducted. The formulation he deploys in classifying types of translation seems to me to be based upon rather disputable postulations. Conceding that the three types of translation he puts forth are operational hypotheses, whose truth values are to be judged according to how well they serve to illuminate the workings of translation, I can hardly ignore the inkling that Jakobson guilelessly replicates the conventional notions about the event of translation, the definition of translation, and the figures or schemata of languages in terms of which this dialogic event called translation is represented, imagined, or figured out. Under these circumstances, let me reiterate the initial question concerning different languages: what kind of difference is at stake when we problematize the conventional view of translation? It is supposed that the difference of and in languages prompts translation, and it is also a response to this difference because it is usually assumed that this sort of difference gives rise to difficulty in understanding among interlocutors. For, whenever translation is mentioned, a certain scenario is presupposed by which some difficulty in comprehension or conversation naturally arises when different languages are involved. In our conventional

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apprehension of translation, therefore, difference in and of languages is often equated to the cause for some difficulty or impediment in apprehension between a speaker and a listener in a dialogue; whereas, when no difference is involved, we do not normally expect such a difficulty or impediment to arise. Accordingly, translation is supposedly a natural response to this dialogic obstacle or hindrance that happens between interlocutors. In this regard, let me further expound on what kind of difference is expected or demanded in our apprehension of translation. How do we conceptualize this difference that supposedly accompanies or gives rise to the occasion of translation? However, one must keep in mind that, as soon as language is postulated as an individual, a certain logical confusion inevitably ensues: since every language, ethnic or national, is of necessity a composite – language as such always contains variations called ‘ dialects’ – a language is already a species of languages in the hierarchy of logical classification. 2 In other words, l anguage would be doubly registered at the level of individual as well as that of species. Therefore, difference between languages would necessarily be at the same time one between individuals and one between species. 3 Is it a difference upheld as such, what is referred to as specific difference (diaphora), or one that exists between two substances or individuals, each of which cannot be further divided (atomos or adiairetos) in terms of classical logic, and both of which share some common property by virtue of belonging to the same class, namely that of languages in our case?4 Two languages A and B are separated from one another, and they are different. At the same time they can be subsumed under the same category since they both belong to the same class, that is, the specific class of languages. Thus the difference at issue is represented in terms of an interstice between two unified individual things, two individual languages, as if they were represented spatially as two figures or territories marked by their respective borders and external to one another. Indeed, difference cannot be of a specific kind when either ‘category mistake’ or catachresis is committed. In addition to ‘category mistake’ and catachresis, can there be some other kind of difference beyond a specific one, to remove the need to postulate two substantive or unified individuals between which there is an interstice? Whereas Jakobson sees no problem in subsuming the difference of languages to which translation is a response under the general category of difference between individuals, our discussion of translation may well take an alternative journey, since we entertain a different conception of difference precisely because our discussion of translation does not start with the premise that translation proper is an interlingual translation, or as a response to difference subsumed in the traditional concept of specific difference. What if, in contrast to Jakobson, we assume that the difference of languages cannot be subsumed under specific difference, under the general category of difference between individuals both of which belong to the class of languages? As I discuss later in this chapter, we cannot preclude the possibility that the difference involved in translation can be something else not subsumed under the general category of specific difference or diaphora; it can be a difference other than a specific difference, a difference that does not require the postulation of languages as individuals. Tentatively I call this difference ‘discontinuity.’ We now must call into question the historical conditions thanks to which the very classification of these types of translation – interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translations – appear indisputable. These historical conditions are, most often, summarily referred to by ‘ internationality’ in the modern world. Henceforth, let me situate the problematic of translation in the modern international world.

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Many in one It is implicitly a ssumed – and rarely thematically questioned – that, while there is one common world, there are many languages. The world accommodates many languages. Even though humanity is one, it contains a plurality of languages. It is generally upheld that, precisely because of this plurality, we are never able to evade translation. Thus, our conception of translation is almost always premised upon a specific way of conceiving the plurality of languages. Not surprisingly, we are often obliged to resort to a certain interpretation of the fable of Babel when trying to think through the issues of the unity of humanity and translation. Assumed behind this fable is a certain vision of the international world, according to which the entirety of humanity is divided into units of languages, and each language constitutes an individual unity that cannot be mixed or conflated with other such units. The internationality of the international world thus represented consists in the juxtaposition of individual languages. And each is external to any other. It follows that the link between any two languages is necessarily of an interlingual kind, so that the representation of the international world coincides with the Babelic vision of the world that is fragmented by the individuality of languages and unified only through interlingual translation. Interestingly enough, the inter- of interlingual translation somewhat resonates with the inter- of the modern international world. But, can we take this assumption of a unity in plurality of humanity for granted transhistorically? Are we always permitted to presume that the plurality of languages in the world can be apprehended in terms of an ‘ interlingual’ framework, or according to the economy of the classical logic of individual, species and genus? In other words, can we possibly conceive of discourses in which the thought of language is not captured in the formula of ‘many in one’? Are we able to entertain some epistemic possibilities in which language is conceived of in an alternative way? How do we recognize the identity of each language, or to put it more broadly, how do we justify presuming that the diversity of language or languages can be categorized in terms of one and many or of an interlingual plurality? Appealing to our familiar grammatical category, I can also pose the question this way. Is language a countable? For example, is it not possible to think of language, in terms of those grammars in which the distinction of the singular and the plural is irrelevant? What I am challenging is the individual unity of language, a certain ‘positivity of discourse’ or ‘ historical a priori’ in terms of which we understand what is at issue whenever a different language or difference in language is at stake. My question is: how do we allow ourselves to tell one language from others? What allows us to represent difference in and of languages in terms of specific difference? I stated my answer to this question some 30 years ago, and I still believe it is valid (Sakai 1992). My answer is: the individual unity of language is like a regulative idea. It organizes knowledge, but it is not empirically verifiable. Immanuel Kant introduced the term ‘regulative idea’ in his Critique of Pure Reason. The regulative idea does not concern itself with the possibility of experience; it is no more than a rule by which a search in the series of empirical data is prescribed. What it guarantees is not the empirically verifiable truth; on the contrary, it forbids the search for truth ‘to bring it[self ] to a close by treating anything at which it may arrive as absolutely unconditioned’ ( Kant 1929: 450 [A 509; B537]). Unlike some religious convictions, it never confirms truth absolutely or unconditionally. Therefore, the regulative idea only gives an object in idea; it only means ‘a schema for which no object, not even a hypothetical one, is directly given’ ( Kant 1929: 550 [A 670; B 698], emphasis added). The individual unity of language cannot be given in empirical experience 42

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because it is nothing but a regulative idea that enables us to comprehend other related data about languages ‘ in an indirect manner, in their systematic unity, by means of their relation to this idea’ (ibid.) It is not possible to know whether a particular language as a unity exists or not. It is the reverse: by prescribing to the idea of the individual unity of language, it becomes possible for us to systematically organize knowledge about languages in a modern, scientific manner. It follows then that the existence of a national or ethnic language cannot be empirically verifiable. In this respect, it is a construct of schematism, figuration, and imagination. Just as a nation is in the imaginary register, so is a national or ethnic language. To the extent that the unity of national language ultimately serves as a schema for nationality5 and offers the sense of national integration, the idea of the individual unity of language opens up a discourse in which not only the naturalized origin of an ethnic community but also the entire imaginary associated with ‘national’ language and culture is sought after, debated, and refuted. What is of decisive importance is that such a language is represented in a schema or an image of national or ethnic totality. Regardless of whether or not it is somewhat proven to exist, first of all, it must be projected and postulated as an image. Only through an integrated image of a language can a vast variety of traditional heritages, bundles of familial lineages, and a wide range of fragmented customs be synthesized and unified into the figure of national culture. In short, it is in this discourse that the imaginary of an ethnic community, whose members are supposed to share the same language, a common tradition or a set of collective customs, comes into being, but it does not necessarily follow from this postulate of ethnic community in imagination that an ethnic community or a prototype of national community can be shown to be present factually or empirically. On the contrary, one could argue that an ethnic community ought to be brought into existence, whereas actually it is totally absent. An argument about the absence of national language, or by implication, of an ethnic community, can equally serve to endorse a sort of discourse in which the individual unity of language is postulated. As was the case in the birth, or more precisely stillbirth, of the Japanese nation, the imaginary of an ethnic community becomes available in its absence, in the modality that it is absent where it should be present.6 What is at stake in the discourse of national language is not the actual existence of a national or ethnic language, but rather the very possibility of imagining it as a topic. Such a discourse opens up the theme of a national language as a possible topic in such a way that it becomes possible to discuss many of its aspects including its absence. Regardless of whether it is affirmative or negative, adorable or deplorable, present or absent, the very possibility of imagining such a language as some mysteriously shared medium is postulated there. This is to say that, in such a discourse, the very figure of a proto-national language is introduced for the first time as ‘a historical apriori’ (see Foucault 1969: 166–173, 1972: 126–131). The language that is debated may be pure, authentic, hybridized, polluted or corrupt, yet regardless of a particular assessment of it, the very possibility of praising, authenticating, complaining about or deploring it is offered by the unity of that language as a regulative idea. It is repeatedly argued in American mass media that the English language is a national matter, and that the soundness of the language is intimately related to the welfare of the nation, and such conventional contention is rarely challenged. Moreover, by focusing exclusively on the language of the majority, it seems that little attention is paid to the fact that many other languages, heterogeneous or even foreign to what is assumed to be ‘good English,’ are spoken in the population coextensive to the territory of the United States of America. Regardless of how unscientific and capricious popular discussions on ‘good and beautiful English’ may be, the strategic principle of national language is scarcely challenged. It is precisely because of this strategic aspect of the schema of national language that the discussion 43

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of good and proper language has never failed to be oppressive toward minorities who are perceived as deviating from the ‘standard,’ thereby rendering it possible to mark the authentic from the inauthentic in terms of nationality. Nationality is not merely a matter of the inside and outside of the national community; it is also a matter of prescription and manipulation. It demands and prescribes how one should conduct oneself in order to participate in the feeling of nationality (see Sakai 1992), rather than whether one is or is not in the national community in an exclusively descriptive way. One is offered the choice of national inclusion and exclusion in the conditional: if you conduct yourself in such and such a manner, then you will be entitled to belong to the nation or the ethnicity; but if you do not, you will deserve to be discriminated against. It is a threat, but it is given as a modality of conduct. For Kant, as I have so far argued, a regulative idea is explicated primarily with regard to the production of scientific knowledge; it ensures that the empirical inquiry of some scientific discipline never reaches any absolute truth, and is therefore endless. Furthermore, Kant qualifies the regulative idea as a schema that is not exclusively in the order of idea, but also in the order of the sensational. Hence, the regulative idea works in the realm of imagination, of the faculty of the human mind that synthesizes the ideational and the sensational. Kant’s critical philosophy was contemporary with the emergence of a new form and image of community called ‘nation’; he witnessed the revolutions which helped establish a new state sovereignty based on the nation. In this regard too, the institution of the nation- state is no older than German idealism. In due course, we are led to suspect that the idea of the unity of language as the schema for ethnic and national communality must also be a recent invention. The regulative idea thus serves to organize the modern international world as well as the imaginary formation of national or ethnic language in that world regulated by the inter-lingual schematism of inter-nationality. By now this much is evident. From the postulate that the unity of national language is a regulative idea, it follows directly that we do not and cannot know whether a national language, such as English or Japanese, exists as an empirical object. The unity of national language enables us to organize various empirical data in a systematic manner so as to allow us to continue to seek knowledge about that language. At the same time, moreover, the regulative idea offers not an object in experience but an objective in praxis toward which we aspire to regulate our uses of language. It is not only an epistemic principle but also a strategic one. Hence, it works in double registers: on the one hand, determining propaedeutically what is to be included or excluded in the very data base of a language, what is linguistic or extral inguistic, and what is proper to a particular language or not; on the other, indicating and projecting what we must seek as our proper language, what we must avoid as heterogeneous to our language and reject as improper for it; the unity of a national language as a schema guides us on what is just or wrong for our language, what is in accord or discord with its propriety. In this respect, it is worth noting that invariably the modern discussion of national language assumes itself to be situated ‘after the Babel,’ so to speak, in a world marked by ‘many in one,’ in a characteristically particular manner. Walter Benjamin is among those authors who rely upon the mythology of Babel, but it is noteworthy that he deliberately adopts a particular tropic strategy that highlights the fragmentary nature of languages while purposefully obliterating the very distinguishability of interlingual and intralingual translations ( Benjamin 1992). He emphasizes languages as fragments and splinters that retain the shapes and contours of the original unity, thereby he very judiciously evades postulating languages as individuals and indivisibles, each of which is internally coherent or organically intact. By ‘pure language,’ he designates one that can never be an individual or indivisible. If we strictly 44

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follow Benjamin’s tropics, it would have been extremely difficult or almost impossible to either equate translation proper to an interlingual translation, or to represent it to ourselves as a transaction taking place in the interstice between two individuated figures of languages. In this respect, he illustrates an entirely different orientation to that of Roman Jakobson. Inopportunely, nevertheless, we must admit that Jakobson represents the overwhelming majority, as a consequence of which very few scholars in translation studies today appreciate Benjamin’s discussion on translation. By virtue of the fact that we take the model of interlingual translation as translation proper, we are obliged to acknowledge that we live in a world ‘after the Babel,’ in a modern world ordered by internationality. In the modern era, an inquiry into language begins with an acknowledgment that universal language has been lost, so that humanity is inevitably fragmented into many languages. None of us can occupy the position of totality from which the oneness of humanity is immediately apprehended. Every one of us is necessarily situated within one or some languages; our apprehension of humanity is destined to be partial because it is no longer possible for any of us to have access to an aerial view from which the entirety can be grasped instantaneously. Instead, the apprehension of oneness requires tedious processes in the interstices of many autonomous and individuated languages. I want to tentatively call these processes translations as they are represented according to the modern regime of translation. Of course, translation serves as a metaphoric term with much broader connotations than an operation of the transfer of meaning from one national or ethnic language to another, but in this context I am specifically concerned with the delimitation of translation according to ‘the modern regime of translation,’ by means of which the idea of the national language is practiced and thus concretized. What I want to suggest thereby is that the representation of translation in terms of ‘the modern regime of translation’ is facilitated as a schema of cofiguration: it helps to project a paired schemata of individual languages between which interlingual translation is supposed to take place. It is of translation, so that it always involves difference. And this difference is of a specific kind between two individual languages. It follows that the representation of interlingual translation necessarily requires a pair of schemata, a pair of two figures. To the extent that the representation of interlingual translation is projected by means of a pair of schemata, it is a process of a co-figuration. The paired schemata work as if one synthetic schema, so that only when translation is represented by the schematism of co-figuration, does the putative unity of one national language as a regulative idea ensue. The schema of co-figuration is an apparatus that allows us to imagine or represent what goes on in translation; it allows us to give to ourselves an image or representation of translation. A corollary immediately follows: unless another language is represented, a language would never be figured out as an individual unity. A language is identified only through the schematism of co-figuration, so that the image of one’s own language is dependent upon how another language partnered with it is represented. In other words, only when an apparatus is available by which to recognize and imagine a different language into which a topic, theme or message is translated from this language, can a language be figured out as an autonomous and individuated language independent of the other. This is to say that, unless a foreign language is recognized, one’s own would never be recognized as such. This is why a national language becomes representable and recognizable only in an international world, even though the internationality of this world may not be immediately ascribed to that instituted by the Eurocentric international law, Jus Publicum Europæum. Thus imagined, the representation of translation is no longer a movement in potentiality. This image or representation always contains two figures, and, in due course, is necessarily 45

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accompanied by a spatial division in terms of ‘ border.’ Hence, the image of translation is given by the schematism (the putting into practice of schema) of co-figuration in the regime of translation. In other words, the unity of a national or ethnic language as a schema is already accompanied by another one for the unity of a different language. This is how the unity of a language is possible only in the element of ‘many in one.’ Translation may well take various forms and processes insofar as it is a political labor to overcome the points of incommensurability in the social. It need not be confined to the specific regime of translation; it may well be outside the modern regime of translation. In the context of our discussion of translation, the ‘modern’ is marked by the introduction of the schematism of co-figuration; without this it is difficult to imagine a nation or ethnicity as a homogeneous sphere. Thus the economy of the foreign, that is, how the foreign must be allocated in the production of the domestic language, has played the decisive role in the poietic – and poetic – identification of the national language. Without exception, the formation of modern national language involves certain institutionalizations of translation, according to what we have referred to as the regime of translation.

Translation as continuity in discontinuity Finally, we will return to the question of the relationship between the issues of translation and discontinuity. This is to say that we will probe how our commonsensical notion of translation is delimited by the schematism of the world (i.e. our operation of representing the world according to the schema of co-figuration), and inversely, how the modern figure of the world as ‘ inter-national’ (i.e. a world consisting of the basic and juxtaposed units of nations) is prescribed by our representation of translation as a communicative and international transfer of the message between a pair of ethno-linguistic unities. An inquiry into translation invokes a seemingly endless series of questions when some formulaic response to this inquiry is postulated. Retracing the network of affinity in translational equivalence – taking fanyi in Chinese, Übersetzung in German, honyaku in Japanese, as instances strictly within the economy of the modern international world – you may well find the sense of transferring, of conveying or skipping from one place to another, of linking or mapping one word, phrase, or text to or on another. Comparing the lexicographical and etymological explications of the word ‘to translate’ or its cognates in many languages, one may feel vindicated to offer this definition: translation is a transfer of the message from one language to another. Even before specifying what sort of transfer this can be, you would realize it is hard to refrain from asking initial questions about the message. Is what is referred to as the message in this definition not a product or consequence of the transfer called translation, rather than something whose being precedes the action of transfer, or something that remains invariant in the process of translation? Is the message supposedly transferred in this process determinable in and of itself, without first being operated on or affected by something? Is the sense of translation determinable prior to its being translated? Does this future-a nteriority of the message in translation not suggest that what remains invariant does not belong in the worldly time of past – present – future? It neither belongs to the present of the past, the present of the present, nor the present of the future. Is it because the message is never present or because it repeats the very movement of what Jacques Derrida called ‘ iterability’ that it can be said to remain invariant in translation? ( For iterability, see Derrida 1982.) Accordingly the message transferred in translation is, above all else, a supposition of the transmitted invariant that is confirmed, retroactively, after the fact of translation. So, what 46

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kind of definition is this that includes the term that ought to be explained by what the very definition aims to determine? Does it not constitute an emblematic circular definition? Likewise, the unities of languages are also suppositions, in whose absence the above-mentioned definition would hardly make sense. Then, are we not required to examine what translation could be when languages are not countable or when one language cannot be so easily distinguished from another? In the first section of this chapter I already provided my answer to this question. The languages from and into which a text is translated are like regulative ideas; they serve as schemata in our representation of translation. As to the empirical existence of these languages, therefore, we cannot tell whether they exist or not except through our operation of translation in which these languages are retrospectively represented. The measure by which we are able to assess a language as a unity – let me stress again that I am not talking about either phonetic systems, various morphological units, even syntactical rules of a language, but instead the whole of a language as a langue – is given to us only at the locale where the limit of a language is marked, at the ‘ border’ where we come across a nonsense that forces us to do something in order to make sense of this non-sense. It goes without saying that this occasion of making sense out of non-sense, of doing something socially  – acting toward foreigners, soliciting their response, seeking their confirmation, and so forth – is generally called translation, provided that suspending the conventional distinction between translation and interpretation is allowed. So let me repeat once again that the unity of a language is represented always in relation to another unity. It is never given in and of itself, but in relation to another, transferentially so to say. One can hardly evade a dialogic duality when it is a matter of determining the unity of a language; language as a unity almost always conjures up the co-presence of another language precisely because translation is not only a border crossing, but also and preliminarily an act of drawing a border, of bordering. This is why I have to introduce the schematism of co-figuration in analyzing how translation is represented. Already we are concerned with a range of problems difficult to evade when attempting to comprehend the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘ language.’ At the very least we can now say that, logically, translation is not derivative or secondary to meaning or language; it is as fundamental or originary in our attempts to elucidate these two concepts. To the extent that translation suggests our contact and encounter with the incomprehensible, unknowable, or unfamiliar, that is with the foreign, we must insist that nothing starts until we come across the foreign. If the foreign is unambiguously incomprehensible, unknowable, and unfamiliar, it is impossible to talk about translation since translation simply cannot be actualized. If, on the other hand, the foreign is comprehensible, knowable, and familiar, it is unnecessary to call for translation. Thus, the status of the foreign must always be ambiguous in translation. It is alien, but it is already in transition to something familiar. The foreign is at the same time incomprehensible and comprehensible, unknowable and knowable, and unfamiliar and familiar; this foundational ambiguity of translation derives from the ambiguous positionality generally indexed by the peculiar presence of the translator. Apparently the translator’s work consists in dealing with discontinuity among the interlocutors, among whom incomprehensibility, miscommunication, or non-sense can possibly occur, and then building continuity in this discontinuity. This situation may be rephrased this way: for the first kind of audience, the source ‘ language’ is comprehensible while for the second it is incomprehensible. Only insofar as the distinction between the two kinds of audience exists can someone be summoned to be a translator according to the modern regime of translation. Yet, it is important to note that ‘ language’ in this instance is figurative in the sense that it need not refer to any ‘natural’ language of an ethnic or national community, such as German 47

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or Tagalog; it is equally possible to have two kinds of audience when the source text is a heavily technical document or an avant-g arde literary piece. Here ‘ language’ may well refer to such a set of vocabulary and expressions associated with a professional field or discipline, such as ‘ legal language’; it may imply a style of graphic inscription or an unusual perceptual setting in which an art work is installed. One may argue that these are exemplary of intra-linguistic and inter- semiotic translations respectively. But, these two types of translation can be postulated only when they are in contra- d istinction to inter-l inguistic translation or translation proper. Let us not forget, however, that the propriety of translation presupposes the unity of a language; its propriety would be impossible unless one unity of language is posited as external to another unity, as if already, languages were given as countable like apples. Thus, these figurative uses of the term ‘translation’ illustrate how extremely difficult it is to construe the locale of translation as a linking or bridging of two languages, two spatially marked domains. Here I want to stress once again that translation is not only a border crossing but also and preliminarily an act of drawing a border, of bordering. What is disclosed here is a certain cartography in the representation of translation. However, this cartography is not about mapping from one striated space onto another; it is concerned with the mapping of something alien or anterior to spatial coordination onto a coordinated space; it is a mapping of the incomprehensible onto a distance between two figures in a striated space. It is precisely because the unities of languages are no more than ‘objects in idea’ or schemata with no corresponding objects in experience, that the schematism of co-figuration projects figures of language at the locale of translation. In this respect, the schematism of co-figuration is an art of spatialization, some technology that one might call a primordial cartography, without whose aid the externality of one language to another would be inconceivable. For brevity’s sake, allow me to skip the many steps necessary to move from this primordial cartography to the global configuration of modernity in which the dichotomy of the West and the Rest serves as a ruling trope in the imagination of the international world.7 It goes without saying that this conception of translation according to the schematism of co-figuration is a schematization of the globally shared commonsensical vision about the international world; it consists of basic units of nations and is segmented by national borders into territories. In this schematization, the propriety of ‘translation proper’ does not only claim to be a description or representation of what happens in the process of translation; but it also prescribes and directs how to represent and apprehend what one does in translation. In this respect, the propriety of ‘translation proper’ is a rule of discursive formation: it is part and parcel of an institutionalized assemblage of protocols, rules of conduct, canons of accuracy, and manners of viewing in the operations of bio-powers. In other words, the modern regime of translation in bio-politics is poietic or productive in bringing out what Speech Acts theorists call the ‘perlocutionary’ effect; it repeatedly discerns the domestic language co-figuratively as if the two unities were already present in actuality. As long as one is captive to the modern regime of translation, one can only construe the ambiguity inherent in the positionality of the translator as the duality of the position a translator occupies between native and foreign languages. One either speaks one’s own mother tongue or a foreigner’s. The task of translator would then be to figure out discernible differences between the two languages as well as the two positionalities, those of the native and the foreign. In each language one’s position is discernibly determined, so that the difference one deals with in translation is construed always as that of two linguistic communities external to one another. Despite innumerable loci of potential difference within one linguistic community, the modern regime of translation obliges one to speak so as to address oneself according 48

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to the binary opposition of either speaking to the same or the other. I call this attitude of address homolingual address, the anticipatory attitude of relating to others in enunciation, whereby the addresser adopts a position representative of a putatively homogeneous language community and relates to general addressees also representative of an equally homogeneous language community. However, I must hasten to add a disclaimer: by homolingual address I do not imply the social condition of conversation, generally referred to as monolingualism, in which both the addresser and the addressee supposedly belong to the same language; they believe themselves to belong to different languages yet can still address themselves homolingually. Ineluctably, translation introduces a disjunctive instability into the putatively personal relations among agents of speech, writing, listening, and reading. In respect to personal relationality as well as to the addresser/addressee structure, the translator must be internally split and multiple, and devoid of a stable positionality. At best, she can be a subject in transit. This is firstly because the translator cannot be an ‘ individual’ in the sense of individuum in order to perform translation, and secondly because she is a singular that marks an elusive locale of discontinuity in the social, while translation is the practice of creating continuity at that singular point of discontinuity. The place she occupies, therefore, belongs to a space anterior to one striated with coordinates, rather than to an extensive one in which the relationship of externality is possibly predicative. Translation is an instance of continuity in discontinuity 8 and a poietic social practice – bordering – which institutes a relation at the site of incommensurability. This is why the aspect of discontinuity inherent in translation would be completely repressed if we determined it according to the model of communication. And this is what I have referred to above as the ambiguity inherent in the positionality of the translator. To elucidate what is implied by continuity in discontinuity, it is necessary to elaborate upon the concepts of continuity and discontinuity. As is the case in the mathematical conception of continuity – often talked about in the name of ‘the Dedekind cut’ – continuity primarily concerns cutting and divisibility. The possibility of infinite cutting defines continuity, for instance, at point A in the neighborhood of that point. In order to recognize a boundary or cut at A, therefore, that point must be continuous. Routinely we represent difference inciting the act of translation in terms of a gap or crevice, but despite such a habit of making sense by means of a spatialized figure, the incommensurability that we want to understand as difference cannot be represented as such. The difference at issue is a radical one that is ‘non- sense,’ for it is prior to the act of translation which is after all a process of sense-making; translation is ‘an act of making sense out of non-sense.’ Yet, this difference cannot be determined in and of itself. We cannot think of the past, the present, or the future in which this difference presents itself. In other words, just like what Plato called khora, it is never present or in the present. The representation of incommensurability as a cut or boundary, therefore, is bound to betray what it is supposed to represent. In other words, incommensurability is unrepresentable because it is discontinuous. What is suggested by discontinuity is the impossibility of cutting or of comprehending in terms of a boundary. It is non- sense precisely because it is anterior to continuity. The difference in or of language to which translation is a response must be distinguished from measurable difference that is representable as a gap, crevice, or boundary, for such a representation is possible only when difference is conceived of in the measure of continuity. What we refer to as incommensurability is a radical difference lacking in common measure. It is for this impossibility of finding common measure that this difference is called incommensurability. This is why difference in or of language that incites the act of translation comes as a representation only after the process of translation. Inherent in translation is a paradox of temporality that cannot be accommodated in the worldly time of 49

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the past, the present, and the future; it calls for a positing of an invariant that is never present 9. Translation is not only a process of overcoming incommensurability; it is also a process in which difference is rendered representable. Thus, translation pertains to two dimensions of difference that should not be confused: a radical difference of discontinuity that does not render itself to spatialized representation, and, a measured difference in continuity imagined in terms of a border, gap, or crevice between two spatially enclosed territories or entities, figuratively projected as a distance between two figures that accompany one another. And the transition from the first to the second is what we often call ‘translation.’ Undoubtedly, the locale of translation as the ambiguous point of difference is also the state of exception in the sense that Carl Schmitt talked about the sovereign. In due course, the positionality of translator is comparable to that of the sovereign who, ‘although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, nonetheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether constitution must be suspended in its entirety’ (ibid.: 6). Referring to Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben argues (1998: 17): ‘Through the state of exception, the sovereign ‘creates and guarantees the situation’ that the law needs for its own validity.’ By overlooking the moment of discontinuity, one could easily be oblivious to the fact that the locale of translation is the state of exception, and the place of the sovereign; but it is also a site of transformative labor. Now, it is possible to inquire into the social performance of labor in terms of translation (cf. Solomon and Sakai 2006). In considering the positionality of the translator, we are now introduced into the problematic of subjectivity in an illuminating manner. The internal split within the translator, which reflects in a certain way the split between the addresser – or the addressee, and furthermore the actualizing split within the addresser and the addressee themselves10 – a nd the translator, demonstrates the way in which the subject constitutes itself. In a sense, this internal split within the translator is homologous to what is referred to as the fractured I, the temporality of ‘I speak,’ which necessarily introduces an irreparable distance between the speaking I and the I that is signified, between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated. Yet, in the case of translation, the ambiguity in the personality of the translator marks the instability of the ‘we’ as the subject, rather than the ‘I,’ suggesting a different attitude of address which I elsewhere term heterolingual address, and in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner. Heterolingual address is an event because translation never takes place in a smooth space; it is an addressing in discontinuity. Captured in the regime of translation, however, the translator is supposed to assume the role of the arbitrator, not only between the addresser and the addressee, but also between the linguistic communities of the addresser and the addressee. And, in the attitude of monolingual address, translation as repetition is often exhaustibly replaced by the representation of translation. What is rejected in monolingual address is the very social character of translation, of an act performed at the locale of social transformation where new power relations are produced. The study of translation will thus provide us with insights into how cartography and the schematism of co-figuration contribute to our critical analysis of social relations, premised not only on nationality and ethnicity, but also on the differentialist identification of race, or the anthropological difference and discriminatory constitution of the West.

Conclusion It may still be necessary to remind readers that the viewpoint I have adopted in this chapter is historically delimited, and that I have scarcely done justice to the topic of translation in view 50

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of the diversity of skills, practices, and accomplishments in human attempts to deal with the incommensurate, the incomprehensible, and the foreign. This chapter is not designed to give a comprehensible vision of what translation can be. Instead it is designed to historicize what we take to be ‘translation proper’ – provided that not only peoples in the West but also in the Rest are designated by ‘we’ in this case – and to show that the modern regime of translation, a bio-political technology in terms of which we conduct, apprehend, evaluate, and judge ‘translation,’ is a rather recent invention. Yet, undeniably, this regime of translation is viable only in the modern international world, a particular order of inter-state politics, which, as Carl Schmitt illustrated in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, originated in Europe around the seventeenth century and subsequently spread all over the globe, through modern colonial rules and capitalist commodification. In other words, our apprehension of translation is under the auspices of the international order in which the world supposedly consists of the horizontal juxtaposition of national languages, and each of these national languages is assumed to be an individual, indivisible unity. Prior to the modern international world, a plurality of languages existed, but this plurality was not that of individuated languages. Yet, the modern regime of translation drastically changed our ways of apprehending the plurality of languages and the differences among them. Since the eighteenth century, step by step, we have been obliged to accept the legitimacy of an imaginary order according to which one’s belonging to the newly constructed community of ‘nation’ is most decisively and deterministically marked by one’s own ‘national language.’ Now, for some miraculous and fantastic reasons, one must be able to be identified as a native of this national language community and not allowed to change it as if one were born into it. This is nothing but a consequence of the modern regime of translation in the modern international world. I do not believe that the modern international world will disappear in the near future, even though for the majority of humanity on this planet, the basic unit of this international world – the nation-state – is rather new, less than one-century old, and appears temporary and artificial. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that the very structure of the international world is in transition. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson argued in Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, the borders of the modern international world are less and less effective to regulate the global distribution of labor forces, capital, population, knowledge and commodities. What we conventionally call ‘globalization’ is eroding the regularities of the international world. Far from giving rise to a ‘ borderless’ world, globalization generates more and more borders and new regimens of discrimination. With globalization, the inadequacy of conventional translation studies is all the more evident. Because of their uncritical acceptance of the modern regime of translation, they have so far failed to address the socio-political aspects of translation, how it has contributed to the institutionalization of nationality and ethnicity. To the extent that we draw attention to the expanding sense of anxiety in that globalization is experienced as humiliating, impoverishing, alienating, and demoralizing by the majority of people on the planet, the critical assessment of the individuality and individuation of language should serve as a critical supplement to the inadequacy of existent translation studies.

Further reading Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Arguably the most important book on the social and political significance of globalization through an analysis of border under transformation. 51

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Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘ Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. In this book I attempt to broaden my scope of translation studies to include the twentieth century development following the initial insights laid out in my seminal work Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse (1992). Schmitt, C. (2006) The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum. Trans. G. L. Ulman. New York: Telos Press. A classic work that discusses the early modern formation of the international world and its inherent Eurocentricity. Simondon, G. (1989) L’individuation psychique et collective; A la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité. Paris: Aubier. Perhaps the most insightful examination of individuation and individuality. Solomon, J. (2019) ‘Discovering the Modern Regime of Translation in China: Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past and Wuhe’s Remains of Life’, Journal of Translation Studies 3(1) ( New Series), pp. 139–189. A brilliant analysis of how the modern regime of translation was institutionalized in modern China.

Notes 3 That language cannot be an enclosed unity or represented as a spatial enclosure is brilliantly demonstrated by Ferdinand de Saussure. By analyzing the instances of dialectic features, de Saussure demonstrates convincingly that it is impossible to postulate a dialect as an indivisible unity. The same can be said about any language. Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, TROISIEME COURS DE LINGUISTIQUE GENERAL (1910–1911), d’apres les cahiers d’Emile Constatin, Eisuke Komatsu ed. Roy Harris trans. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993, 24~32. 4 Here, let me outline the preliminary procedure involved in the classification according to classical logic. For difference between two individuals A and B to be of specific difference, A and B must both belong to the same group. It would be tantamount to sheer meaninglessness if A and B are a desk and a family. Yet, a desk can be an individual just as a family can be an individual. A desk and a family cannot be comparable to one another unless the common denominator is specified. For instance, as two words or nouns, they can be compared, yet the referents these words refer to remain incomparable. The minimal condition for comparison is that A and B share some common quality or predicate. Expressed in propositional form, the two propositions, for example, ‘A is C’ and ‘B is C,’ are upheld where C signifies some quality or predicate that A and B share. In the absence of such a shared predicate, a specific difference between two individuals is unthinkable.



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( The Stillbirth of the Japanese as an Ethnos and as a Language). (Sakai 1996, Second edition: Tokyo: Kôdansha, 2015.)





References Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, W. (1992) “The Task of the Translator”, in Arendt, H. (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. London: Fontana Press, pp. 70– 82. Chang, B.G. (1996) Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Saussure, F. (1993) Troisième Cours de Linguistique Générale (1910–1911) d’après les cahiers d’Emile Constantin/ Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures on General Lingustics (1910–1911) from the Notebooks of Emile Constantin, Eisuke Komatsu ed., Roy Harris trans. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Derrida, J. (ed.) (1982) ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 307–330. Derrida, J. (1987) The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1969) L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Fukuzawa, Y. (2008) An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. Trans. D.A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst. New York: Columbia University Press. Jakobson, R. (1959) ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in Brower, R.A. (ed.) On Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 232–239. Kant, I. (1929) Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, p. 450 [A 509; B537]. Mill, J.S. (1861/1972) Utilitarianism: On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government. London & Rutland: Everyman’s Library. Morinaka, T. (2007) ‘La traduction comme critique de l’ethno-anthropocentrisme d’aujourd’hui’. Paper presented at conference La traduction et le sens du mo(n)de. Tamkang University, Taipei, Taiwan, 16–18 June 2007. 53

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Nishida, K. (1934/1965a) ‘Genjitu no sekai no ronri-teki kôzô’ (‘The Logical Structure of the Real World’), in Nishida Kitarô Zenshû Collected Works of Nishida Kitarô, Vol. 7. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, pp. 217–304. Nishida, K. (1935/1965b) ‘Sekai no jiko dôitsu to renzoku’ (‘The Self-Identity of the World and Continuity’), in Nishida Kitarô Zenshû Collected Works of Nishida Kitarô, Vol. 8. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, pp. 7–106. Sakai, N. (1992) Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse. New York and Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sakai, N. (1996)『死産される日本語・日本人』( The Stillbirth of the Japanese as an Ethnos and as a Language). Tokyo: Shinyôsha. Sakai, N. and Solomon, J. (2006) ‘Introduction: Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners, Echoing Foucault’, in Sakai, N. and Solomon, J. (eds.), Traces 4, Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 1–36. Schmitt, C. (1988) The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum. Trans. G. L. Ulman. New York: Telos Press. Solomon, J. (2019) ‘Discovering the Modern Regime of Translation in China: Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past and Wuhe’s Remains of Life’, Journal of Translation Studies, 3(1), New Series, pp. 139–189.

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4 Translation and inequality Paul F. Bandia

Introduction Early conceptualizations of translation and its practice in Western scholarship seemed to have presumed a non-polemic and unequivocal transfer between two relatively stable language cultures. This Eurocentric perspective was largely due to the fact translation practitioners often worked with genetically close European languages that may not have involved radically different linguistic, cultural and historical circumstances. The objective was often to ensure complete or total equivalency between established and well- defined monolithic entities with particular emphasis on linguistic and comparative stylistic approaches devoid of any ideological concerns. Translation was viewed as an objective endeavour to bridge the gap between noncognate languages and cultures and a mechanism for ensuring intercultural communication. The notion of fidelity, with its implied moral or religious overtone as sanctioned by Judeo- Christian belief systems, was central to any ethical consideration of the translation act. The task of the translator was viewed as one of resolving differences and establishing congruency between languages and cultures. The linguistic bias inherent in this conceptualization of translation had reduced the art to a mere mechanical craft which from an early epoch served scholastic and pedagogical interests. In the Western tradition translating had been of particular interest in philology where it was considered a useful skill to acquire or learn foreign languages. The idea of translation was equated with the ability of a polyglot, someone who knew languages and could move with ease between disparate linguistic worlds. This view of translation meant that establishing equivalency between language cultures for the mere enactment of interlingual communication was of the essence. Even with the professionalization of translation in the early to m id-twentieth century the predominant understanding was the restitution in a target language of the full equivalency or sameness of meaning derived from the source language. As theoretical interests grew in the field and some theorists began questioning the very essence of translation by raising issues related to notions of (u n-)translatability, some practitioners began to wonder if the theorists were indeed talking about the same art or craft which they practised daily with palpable results and rewards. The question of (un-)translatability surfaces in the Renaissance as groups like the Pléiade made up of French poets raised doubts about the adequacy of 55

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vernacular languages in translating from classical Latin. This scepticism is indeed implied in the well-known and clever consonance tradutorre, traditore (translator, traitor) attributed to Italian sceptics who felt French translations of Dante had betrayed either the beauty or accuracy of the work. Recent examples of discussions on (un-)translatability can be seen in Barbara Cassin’s (ed.) Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2014), which focusses on philosophical terms that have proven difficult to translate across language cultures often due to their linguistic, historical and philosophical specificity; and Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013), inspired by Cassin’s book, in which Apter highlights the failure of translation as inevitable, although we must carry on with the task given the need for intercultural understanding. Apter’s book alludes to issues related to inequalities in the context of globalization, which often emphasizes universalist trends and overlooks differences to the detriment of minority or marginalized cultures. The notion of the incommensurability of cultures, which does not necessarily imply untranslatability, was virtually absent in translation discourse, as most practitioners would engage with historically cognate or related global languages. In fact, for most old- school practitioners it was unthinkable to question the relevance or feasibility of translation, let alone to imagine occurrences of inequalities when the entire enterprise of translation was construed as an honest or objective attempt to establish equivalency between language cultures. In light of this normative view of translation it is therefore a misnomer to speak about ‘translation and inequality’, a contradiction in terms as the raison d’être of translation is supposed to be the erasure of difference, hence of inequality between language cultures, by establishing equivalency or sameness of meaning. Then came the ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies in the 1990s which opened up the field to include several other factors (cultural, ideological, political, sociological, etc.) which are likely to influence the translation process. The cultural turn in translation studies was fuelled by the theoretical debates of the 1980s and 1990s, which also gave rise to the field of cultural studies (see Bassnett and Lefevere 1990). The preoccupation with what has been referred to as the postmodern condition relied on post- structuralism and inspired theoretical approaches that were generally aimed at deconstructing the hierarchy or power asymmetry characteristic of mainstream or normative translation theory. There was a major shift from a quest for sameness in translation to an emphasis on difference. This postmodern ethic of difference highlighted issues related to identity and ideology and brought the previously overlooked political aspects of translation to the fore. Translation became a forum for asserting the voices of marginalized groups such as women, indigenous communities and formerly colonized peoples in an attempt to redress the inherent inequalities ingrained in a normative translation process based on an ethic of sameness. Although Europe had always had its own realities of asymmetry between dominant and minor languages, the concept of minority as a research paradigm became even more relevant in the context of power inequalities resulting from the consequences of Western imperialism. Postcolonial theory intersected with translation theory to establish a research paradigm that has moved the field forward into what can be termed the postmodern era. Postcoloniality continues to hold sway in significant ways in many disciplines including translation studies as researchers grapple with the implications of the rapid globalization and internationalization of the world community. This seismic shift in the humanities and the social sciences enhanced translation research beyond the mere linguistic and stylistic approaches and set the stage for accounting for translation phenomena in the light of power relations between dominant and subaltern language cultures, as well as in terms of issues related to transculturality in the encounter between 56

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distant or remote language cultures. Translation-inspired conceptualizations began to provide the basis or trope for analysing and comprehending transnational forms of aesthetic production. Accounting for inequalities or power differentials in translation studies enlarged the field and enhanced its profile, by adopting a mainly interdisciplinary approach, intersecting with a variety of disciplines such as postcolonial studies, cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, gender and queer studies. Translation ceased to be viewed as a mere restitution of meaning and understood in its wide range of affect and complexity involved in encounters between disparate cultures with at times conflicting worldviews and divergent historical circumstances. The foundational pragmatic dimension of translation was now being enhanced by a metaphorical conceptualization of translation enabling the field to intersect with various areas of scientific enquiry and providing concepts and theoretical frameworks for elucidating questions related to transculturality and transnationalism. It is in the context of this overlap between the pragmatic and the metaphorical in translation studies that issues of power relations or inequalities can be better explored across historical space and time, from the early encounter of pre-industrialized and industrialized worlds to our current context of globalization. In the early stages of this encounter the practice of translation consisted mainly in capturing and deciphering the worldview of the other, the ‘savage’, to know what makes them tick, as it were, the better to control, dominate and assimilate them into the inevitable long march of civilization. Although purporting to be a factual or literal translation of dominated peoples’ culture for the sheer anthropological understanding of their humanity, the affect or weight of inequality had dogged translation from the very beginning, as it was never practised on an even playground, but rather pursued on the basis of an agenda with an imperial devotion to a mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission). Hence, the caption ‘translation and inequalities’, which might seem at first glance to be incongruous with the concept of translation, is indeed a fundamental and apt way of perceiving the act of translating. As a general rule, the need for translation often arises in contexts of unequal power relations, whether political, economic, cultural or linguistic. Even among cognate languages ( European languages, for instance) there is often a power dynamic that underlies the need and practice of translation. More often than not, translation flows from major to minor languages, as the consequence of power imbalance imposes a translated (or translating) existence upon the minority. This one-way traffic is even more relevant in contemporary globalization, which is largely commandeered by the dominant economic and military global powers. It is said that empires do not translate, and as clichés go, this statement is fundamental to understanding the power dynamic inherent in the translation process. Lawrence Venuti discusses this ‘asymmetries of commerce and culture’ (1998: 160) and points out that ‘British and American publishers  … translate much less’, and that ‘Translation undoubtedly occupies a marginal position in Anglo-A merican cultures’. Venuti observes that ‘… among the foreign texts that do enter English, writing in African, Asian, and South American languages attracts relatively little interest from publishers…’ In other words, there is a vested economic and cultural interest in translating from English rather than translating into English. This was especially the case during colonization when Western classics, both religious and secular, were routinely translated into indigenous languages, as strategies for religious proselytism and cultural assimilation of the colonized. The reverse flow of translation, that is, from indigenous languages into the colonial language, was practised less only insofar as it was necessary to grasp native languages and to comprehend native lore, customs, culture and mentality. The predominantly one-way flow of translation from the centre to the periphery has persisted in the current context of globalization, following trends in global flows of commerce and culture. According to Pascale Casanova, ‘It is in confronting the question of language that writers 57

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from outlying spaces have the occasion to deploy the complete range of strategies through which literary differences are affirmed’ (2004: 254). The adoption of power relations in terms of inequalities as a paradigm in translation studies, which was enabled by the ‘cultural turn’ discussed earlier, is fundamental to the understanding of the pivotal role of translation in the current context of globalization. If contemporary globalization is understood as the spread of an essentially Western worldview or way of life, then translation has been instrumental in the global Westernization of economies, languages and cultures. Although one might argue that translation has also been antithetical to globalization, as dominated cultures strive to resist global homogeneity by translating or representing themselves in ways that would ensure diversity or multiplicity. This chapter therefore seeks to explore the impact of inequalities, whether political, economic, social or cultural, on translation both locally and globally. Drawing from postcolonial and postmodern discourses, the intercession of translation between majoritarian and minoritarian cultures or between the centres of power and their peripheries is discussed in light of the power differentials that have characterized relations historically in the contexts of colonization, postcolonialism, neo-colonialism and globalization. With respect to the latter, particular emphasis is placed on the impact of inequalities on translation in the linguistic, cultural and material exchanges between the global North and the global South.

Colonization and globalization There is a close link between the spread of modern globalization and the historical fact of colonization and empire. Globalization would not have been possible without colonization understood as the ‘political and economic domination of a territory and its population(s) by citizens of another territory’ (Mufwene 2013: 35). Indeed, contemporary globalization is a corollary of European imperialism, as the acquisition of territory, control of natural resources and the exploitation of other humans for cheap and profitable labour remain a constant, tracing a direct link between imperial history and globalization. In fact, it is rather interesting that today’s key players in world-wide globalization include nations that evolved out of settlement colonization—whereby Europeans resettled or founded new homelands in territories outside Europe, eliminated or marginalized indigenous populations, developed highly glocalized economic systems that they intended to be better than in the Europe they emigrated from and imposed socioeconomic world orders that reflect ‘occidentalism’ or westernization. (2013: 35) It is hardly a coincidence therefore that the United States of America is among today’s leading agents of globalization ( hence the oft-mentioned ‘Americanization’ of the world, particularly through the spread of American culture in music and other products of global consumerism). It would be imprudent to misconstrue current trends in American world affairs promoting an ‘America first’ policy as a desire to scale back America’s global influence. In spite of its nefarious consequences, globalization has uplifted some populations particularly in the global South enabling the growth or expansion of a middle class that is virtually on par with its counterparts in the global North. On the flip side, some populations have felt left behind, which has, in turn, brought to the surface some measures of nativism and nationalism currently being exploited by right-wing groups in the global North. There is 58

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a rising anti-immigrant as well as an anti-g lobalization sentiment, although the forces of global capital and commerce hold on stubbornly to the benefits of globalization. The United States of America is still more defined by its global influence than by its current nativist and isolationist policy. In fact, contemporary perception of English as the global language is more intimately related to global Americanization. Furthermore, even global powers such as the United Kingdom and France, though not settlement colonies, had built powerful economic systems thanks to huge colonial empires which allowed them total control of the natural resources of colonized nations until the m id-t wentieth century (Mufwene 2013). It is perhaps not so far-fetched to surmise that Great Britain would rely heavily on its network of Commonwealth nations, built largely through a history of colonization, once Brexit becomes a reality. Colonization and empire resulted in the encounter of peoples, languages and cultures, as well as the movement of capital and labour, often in a context of inequality whereby the imperial language and culture are clearly dominant. The spatial distribution of major languages and cultures in today’s globalized world can be traced to the patterns of colonization. This evolving ‘ linguascape’ (due to migration or relocation of people) often reflects the tension between the dominant colonial language and the marginalized indigenous languages. Slavery, a corollary of colonization, saw the widespread relocation and forced migration of people around the globe, the exploitation of labour for economic gains, in much the same way as in current globalization where underprivileged peoples toil for mere pittance and ultimately for the commercial and material benefit of the developed world. Western colonization (whether trade, settlement or exploitation colonization) and empire had indeed set the stage for the kind of power asymmetry evident in current globalization practices whether economic, cultural or linguistic. This power imbalance explains somewhat the tendency to resort to translation as a strategy for understanding or grasping the Other as practised by anthropologists, administrators and missionaries in colonial times. Translation was mainly unidirectional, into the colonial language, as indigenous oral traditions and texts were the main focus. There was a thirst for the exotic, understanding or grasping the mind of the native and their worldview to ensure total control or better yet to hold them up as a mirror or contrast to Western modernity. There were numerous instances of colonial administrators, without much training in anthropology or linguistics, who dabbled in Sapir/ Whorfian linguistics in other to make a link between what they perceived as the simplistic nature of indigenous languages and the limitations of the native’s mind. Colonial language translations of indigenous texts were almost entirely for the benefit of the colonizer, who would soon revert to translating colonial language texts into indigenous languages or the local lingua franca with the aim of spreading Western thought and values among the natives as mentioned earlier. Even here, as is often the case in contemporary globalization, there was a paternalistic need to raise or bring the native into the fold of Western enlightenment and modernity. The desire to shape the native into one’s own likeness recalls the homogenizing trend characteristic of globalization, a trend that has been referred to as the ‘McDonaldization’ or Americanization of the world. When translation was carried out in the dominated indigenous languages it was often to ultimately achieve similar goals, as was the case of translations carried out by missionaries for the sole purpose of religious conversion and evangelization or translations done by linguists to alphabetize or give written form to a mainly oral literature (see Bandia 1998). Vicente Rafael (1993) discusses this phenomenon in the context of the early Spanish colonization of the Philippines and the conversion to Christianity of the Tagalog speaking society. Like today’s globalization, colonization fed into the myth of the language of empire, all-powerful and far-reaching, which has established the inequality or asymmetry of power 59

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at the basis of translation and intercultural communication between the global North and the global South.

Postcolonialism and globalization The creation of postcolonial independent states was often based on political systems that were essentially clones or adaptations of the governing systems of the colonial metropole. For instance, the partition of Africa among European colonialists, eventually led to the creation of nation-states (in the manner of European nation-states) without regard for historically welldefined boundaries of ethnicities, languages and cultures. These conditions were from the very inception of the nation-states extremely favourable to outside encroachment and the continued reliance on former colonizers. The ensuing confrontation of divergent ethnicities, languages and cultures hampered successful governance and exposed the postcolonial nation-states to political strife and economic stagnation. The postcolonial condition therefore is highly conducive and permeable to the kind of globalization driven by the West, which has undoubtedly taken advantage of the shortcomings and vulnerabilities of the postcolonial nation-states. The postcolonial has become a metaphor for engaging the unequal power relations between the global South and the global North. As an ideological construct, it seeks to represent the view or the perspective of the dominated or oppressed or marginalized. Its relation with globalization has to do with the strategic creation of postcolonial nation-states ensuring political and economic dependency on the colonial metropole and subsequently constituting a marketplace for all manners of commodification. The blatant consumerism in postcolonial societies often contrasts with the high poverty levels of such societies, and the influx of goods or commodities from the West is often inversely proportional to the capital available to such nations. It is as if postcolonialism, as an enabler of globalization, was a sure way to tether newly independent states to their European colonizers in order to maintain spheres of influence for political and economic gains. France has often figured as a major example in this regard in terms of its relations with its former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, which have remained France’s chasse gardée or preserve, as it were. Recently there has been talk of some of these former colonies in Africa abandoning the French-based CFA Franc—which was based on the now defunct French currency and manipulated to ensure France’s economic grip on the region—for an African regional currency pegged to the Euro. Language is arguably the most impactful legacy of colonization. As aptly stated by Casanova, ‘The question of linguistic difference is faced by all dominated writers, regardless of their linguistic and literary distance from the center’ (2004: 255). The imposition and subsequent adoption of colonial languages ensured the continued domination of postcolonial societies by Western powers and laid the groundwork for the kind of dependency that has, in turn, facilitated the spread of globalization. Just as colonialism placed the colony squarely within the sphere of influence of the colonial power, so too did postcolonial arrangements ensure the continued influence of such powers. A main characteristic of the relationship between postcolonialism and globalization is the continued presence and influence of major colonial languages across the globe. In other words, colonization and postcolonialism had prepared the ground for the dominance or widespread use of colonial languages such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. If English is today considered to be a global language, it is because the language had been imposed on vast territories under British colonial rule. Even for nations that were never within the British empire, either as exploitation or as settlement colonies, the English language thrived initially as the language of trade, and

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eventually served as the lingua franca of vast territories without a British colonial past. It is generally acknowledged that China is fast becoming a global power with an important geopolitical presence and influence in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, etc., and considered a menace to the interests of former colonial powers. Yet, to emphasize the importance of postcoloniality for the spread of hegemonic languages, it must be mentioned that the Chinese language does not (yet?) carry the same weight as former colonial languages around the globe. Chinese is not a former colonial language in Africa, for instance, and it would take a seismic mutation of cultural and political relations for Chinese to compete with English or French in a postcolonial country in Africa. There are now enclaves of Chinese speakers in parts of Africa, but they are usually centred around Chinese business interests on the continent. It is not surprising therefore that postcolonial theory, which seeks to represent the voice of the subaltern, has made language one of its most important arenas for redressing the power imbalance or inequalities between the global South and the global North. While some postcolonial writers have lamented the use of colonial languages for the expression of local art and literature, others have claimed the colonial legacy and view the colonial language as part and parcel of their national heritage. In his seminal book, Decolonising the Mind (1986), Ngugi wa Thiong’o discusses the impediment of writing in a language that is not only foreign to one’s native literary resources but also represents a psychic wound left behind by the colonial experience. In an attempt to enhance the literary status of his native language, he subsequently wrote fiction in his native Gikuyu language and translated it into English, giving his native language centre-stage and relegating English to a mere instrument of communication beyond his Gikuyu-speaking readership. After bidding farewell to English he extolled the virtues of translation as an age-old medium through which he will be able to continue conversation with the wider public. More recently, in 2004, as Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, he reaffirmed his commitment to translation and imagined ‘translation as conversation’, especially between and among minority or marginalized language communities. This recalls what I had described elsewhere as ‘ horizontal translation’ ( Bandia 2008), which is essentially having minority languages in conversation without the impediment of inequalities that underlie the translation process in situations of power imbalance. For the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1975) English today is an African language insofar as the language has taken on an African inflection in line with African idioms and expressions. In order to redress the inequality implied in the global status of English vis-à-v is local African languages, the writer must subvert English transforming it into a local idiom in a process at times referred to as glocalization (the localization of a global language) that often involves translation marked by a power differential between cultures of orality and writing. Alluding to this power differential, Casanova surmises that It therefore became necessary to reinstate a paradoxical sort of bilingualism by making it possible to be different linguistically and literarily, within a given language. In this way a new idiom was created, through the littérarisation of oral practices (2004: 282). In my foundational book Translation as Reparation (2008), I discuss extensively the linguistic and sociocultural underpinnings of the littérarisation of African oral practices and the mechanisms underlying the literary transmutation of African orature. Casanova notes that, ‘In literary worlds in which the national language is initially endowed with only an oral tradition, … literary capital—that is, the traditional forms associated with written tradition—is almost non-existent. (2004: 274)

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The fundamental bias towards orality is at the basis of the unequal treatment of literary products emanating from either the global South or the global North. In the context of globalization therefore postcolonial theory encourages an alignment against linguistic neo-imperialism and the writing practice recalls translation as a strategy to resist imperial domination and to redress power imbalance. In its various manifestations worldwide English becomes a lingua franca for those speakers intent on preserving their national linguistic resources, as well as their identity in direct contrast to the globalist neo-liberal discourse of monolingualism and uniformity. This indeed evokes the concept of ‘panlingual globalization’ whose aim is to offset the drift towards global monolingualism through English by the practice of ‘panlingual translation’ ( Pool 2013: 146). The latter ensures the representation of minor languages and cultures in translating between unequal entities. Panlingual translation asserts the power of vernacularity in situations of linguistic globalization. This concept—which initially refers to automated efforts to preserve low- density languages in order to favour linguistic diversity as a stalwart to global unilingualism—is evocative of Pan-Africanism, a movement in the 1920s led by W. E. B. DuBois and others, calling for solidarity and the democratic and egalitarian unification of all peoples of African descent. The movement was uplifting and assertive of the identity of all African people v is- à-vis the effects of slavery and colonialism. Similarly, panlingual translation emphasizes the egalitarian treatment and respect for all languages and cultures. It is an obstacle to wanton globalization and the drive towards global monolingualism. Panlingual translation practice is not necessarily foreignizing, as the global language of communication is not considered foreign in its context of usage, but rather glocalized and infused with local inflections. In other words, unlike the foreignizing practice of bending English in non- standard ways to capture non-Western aesthetics, panlingual translation recognizes English as a local language with assertions or manifestations of local inflections in a global language. The revival of World Literature as an academic discipline can be related to the effects of panlingual globalization, as a variety of literary traditions are being disseminated globally with their specific cultural inflections. Although the predominant A nglo-American conceptualization of World Literature is Anglocentric, with input from diverse linguistic backgrounds read mainly in English translations, the issues of translation and inequalities have surfaced prominently thanks to the influence of postcolonial theory which is generally interested in linguistic and cultural diversity. The sub-field of postcolonial translation theory has highlighted the importance of difference and issues of translation for a world literature in English that must account for the specificities of languages and cultures expressed in a global language. Postcolonial theory and practice resist the simple linear accounts of globalization which hold that the world is becoming smaller and more uniform, and that we are headed towards a kind of monolingualism of English. According to Appadurai ‘… as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one way or another’ (1996: 29). Globalization is therefore non-l inear and thrives on the tensions between sameness and difference, the hallmark of postcoloniality which is mobilized to assert subaltern identity within a globalized cultural and linguistic landscape. The intersection of postcolonialism and globalization can therefore be understood in terms of the interaction of sameness and difference, which generates hybridity and multiplicity. This interaction is simultaneously globalizing and localizing, hence the characterization of nonlinear globalization as ‘glocalization’ mentioned earlier. Glocalization makes possible the practice of panlingual translation, which in effect accounts for minority representations in our increasingly globalized world. 62

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Neo-colonialism and globalization In tracing the historical relations between the global South and the global North, neocolonialism can be construed as a corollary of globalization, seen as somehow related as both concepts coincide in contemporary accounts about North- South relations. In other words, neo- colonialism is often the specific manifestation of globalization in formerly colonized territories. Although globalization often involves three familiar dimensions—namely, economic, cultural and political—the primary point of convergence with neo- colonialism seems to be economic, as it conveys the sense of commodification of everything else including the other two dimensions (culture and politics). Whereas postcolonial relations catered to the will of the colonial metropole to maintain total control (albeit a kind of remote control)—economic, cultural, political and military—of the colonies, neo-colonialism seems mainly preoccupied with safeguarding the economic interests of the colonial metropole. Current interventions by the metropole such as demanding and orchestrating regime change, maintaining a military presence and engaging in joint military exercises in the postcolony are control mechanisms to ensure protection for Western interests and economic capital. Rapid globalization or what has been referred to as ‘ banal globalization’ (that is, ‘the everyday textual realization of global capitalism’ (Coupland 2013: 14) has unleashed competing forces among developed nations who have, in turn, sought to maintain their former colonies as economic spheres of influence (a kind of chasse-gardée). This has defined or reduced North-South relations to an even narrower purpose of exploitation or commodification of inequalities or the gap between the developed and the underdeveloped world. As remarked by Young, ‘… by the end of the nineteenth century, imperialism formed a global system through physical occupation of most inhabited territory on earth, together with often coercive practices of trade’ (2015: 118). He notes however that, ‘In the twentieth century, decolonization into a world of separate states appeared to break up this globalized imperial world back into its constituent parts’ (2015: 118). Young goes on to cite Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of the newly independent Ghana, who in 1965 decried the fact that he and his fellow politicians had achieved liberation and sovereignty for Ghana in 1957 only to discover that they remained subject to larger economic forces, markets, and multinational companies that controlled the prices of local crops, the rate of investment, and the ability to borrow. (Nkrumah 1965, cited in Young 2015: 118) As it so happened, these powers were controlled by the very same countries that had formerly been colonial rulers. It was Nkrumah who had labelled this condition of financial control by the big foreign powers ‘neo-colonialism’. Nkrumah was actually describing a new order that has been referred to as ‘American’ or ‘ informal’ imperialism without colonies, exerting control over independent nations through economic and financial means ( Young 2015: 118). After the end of the Cold War globalization became synonymous with the spread of unbridled capitalism. The relationship between neo-colonialism and globalization opens up other avenues for elucidating translation in the context of power differential or inequality. In the context of neo- colonialism the ‘postcolony’ (Mbembe 2001) becomes the main focus in terms of the dynamics of class and power, as well as the relations with the outside world. Although postcolonies are indeed former colonies, in the current context of globalization they can be distinguished into three main categories: ‘postcolonies’ that are called such simply because they 63

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were once colonies, perhaps due to some historical oddities, like Sweden making annual payment to the King until 1983 for his loss of the island of Guadeloupe (1813–1814); ‘settler postcolonies’ that are simply former settler colonies; and ‘ “dysfunctional” postcolonies’ described as such because they have not been able to rid themselves of colonial domination and mentality and have been unable to transcend the effect of colonization and to establish a stable, functioning government and society ( Young 2015: 136–137). While the settler postcolonies such as the United States of America, Australia and Canada (though guilt-r idden regarding the unfair treatment of indigenous peoples) have managed to create modern states owing to their ancestral relationship to Europe, the dysfunctional postcolonies which Mbembe locates in Sub- Saharan Africa in particular are characterized by their specific dysfunction modes of domination and violence. Through their institutions and bureaucracies these states impose an authoritarian rule and are rife with corruption obliging the citizenry to participate in a carnivalesque performance of the state for survival (Mbembe 2001). There is a forced or hypocritical relation of conviviality (Mbembe 2001: 110) between the authority and the people, a kind of spectacle or farcical theatre whereby opposition is marginalized or contained in a carnivalesque inversion that plays into a general state of stupor, impassivity or what Mbembe refers to as ‘zombification’ (2001). And when opposition or resistance does occur it is met with an unparalleled level of violence and bloodshed. These ‘ kleptocracies’ ( Young 2015: 145) are known for their high level of corruption and appropriation of wealth by the ruling elite driven by what the French historian Jean-François Bayart has referred to as ‘the politics of the belly’ ( Bayart 1993). An elaborate scheme is set up consisting of a culture of patronage, palm-greasing and public ostentation in order to enhance the appeal yet terror of the state, often without regard for human rights and criminal accountability. The dynamics of class and power rests on the exploitation of the masses by the elite. The significance of dysfunctional postcolonies in contemporary globalization is that they are often an open market and are conducive to the spread of globalized linguistic, cultural and economic practices. They also showcase drastic inequalities within the state itself, as well as between the global South and the global North. While some settler postcolonies have themselves become the leading agents of globalization, assuming the mantle of today’s imperial power (the United States of America), the dysfunctional postcolonies have for the most part remained marginalized and confined to the receiving end of globalization. Owing to inequalities within the postcolony itself, the tendency has been one of consumerism of anything Western and a desire for flight towards the West. For the masses, consumerism is driven by the mere desire to overcome the dire effects of poverty, while for the elite it is the condition diagnosed as colonial mentality, based on the reverence for anything Western that draws them closer to a mimicry of their former colonial masters. The dysfunctional postcolonies have endured a considerable flight of their populations towards greener pastures in the West, as well as the flight of capital towards the West by the corrupt elite seeking to hide their ill-gotten wealth in Western financial institutions and businesses. In many dysfunctional postcolonies today the masses depend on financial remittance sent by family members living abroad in Western metropolises. The circulation of these remittances has been largely enabled by the other important dimension of globalization, which is the spread of modern technology such as the internet and the easy access to cell phones. While the elite collaborate with supranational institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund ( IMF) to cope with the i ll- effects of corruption and mismanagement by the elite, the masses bear the brunt of the rigorous preconditions imposed by these supranational institutions such as massive layoffs and unemployment, drastic reduction in salaries, as well as reduced revenues from cash crops and 64

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natural resources whose prices and conditions for production are now being determined unfavourably by global market forces. There is also the corrupt exploitation of natural resources such as timber and precious minerals often lead by Western corporations and destined for the Western market in order to line the pockets of the corrupt elite and their Western counterparts. This anthropocentric treatment of the environment is a nefarious consequence of globalization, which has been particularly damaging to postcolonial societies. This servile economic globalization is often accompanied by forces that undermine the local linguistic and cultural heritage. Hence the spread of former colonial languages to the detriment of indigenous languages and the undermining of the local culture in favour of a globalized culture, particularly among the youth. These and other effects of globalization are taken up in contemporary postcolonial literature dealing more specifically with the postcolony. It is often in this context that the rapport between translation and power imbalance is discussed. The postcolony is characterized by pluralism in language, culture and in its ethnoscapes (ethnic pluralism). It is the microscope into the superdiversity that is currently associated with globalization. The demographic mobility engendered by global forces has resulted in a kind of global multilingualism, which is in sharp contrast to the kind of global homogenization often espoused by critics of the Americanization of the world. Postcolonial literature of or about the postcolony highlights the writing strategies of resistance often applied to counter the homogenizing effect of globalization. Local linguistic forms are resemioticized and stylized in the global language taking on new ideological values that contrast with early postcolonial writings. A fitting example of this practice can be found in the fiction of the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who has become something of a global phenomenon. Following Chinua Achebe’s well-k nown position regarding diversity within the English language, one can point to her novel, Americanah (2013), as an example of writing that submits the global language to a local treatment that is indeed glocalized. Americanah blends a spectrum of Englishes including Nigerian, British, American and other global varieties, as well as non-l iterate varieties such as pidgin English and the broken English spoken by non-A nglophone African immigrants struggling to eke out a living in American inner cities. The novel displays the multilingual currents within English itself and requires a reading process that is at once local and transnational. ‘Emeka say his mother tell him if he marry American, she kill herself,’ Aisha said. ‘That’s not good.’ ‘But me, I am African.’ ‘So maybe she won’t kill herself if he marries you.’ Aisha looked blankly at her. ‘Your boyfriend mother want him to marry you?’ … ‘Yes. She keeps asking us when we will get married.’ … ‘Ah!’ Aisha said, in well-meaning envy. … ‘You talk Igbo to Chijioke. He listen to you’, Aisha said. ‘You talk Igbo?’ ‘Of course I speak Igbo’, Ifemelu said, defensive, wondering if Aisha was again suggesting that America had changed her. (2013: 48–49) There is a sense of multiplicity and heterogeneity that evolves into a kind of creolization of language. This creolization recalls translation as a writing strategy for postcolonial writers who champion linguistic and cultural hybridity in the assertion of discourses of differentiation in an increasingly globalized world. The writing of the postcolony is transglocalized, 65

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so to speak, to ensure the simultaneous globalization and localization or preservation of a minor literature. Transglocalization is made possible through a panligual translation practice. In dealing with translation in the context of power imbalance or inequality postcoloniality is the nucleus of most subaltern literatures and its discourses of differentiation should not be lost in translation in the global marketplace.

Translation and inequality: a brief survey of current research How translation deals with issues related to power imbalance or inequality has been broached in several disciplines including translation Studies. The study of translation and inequalities is highly interdisciplinary drawing theoretical concepts and methodology from a variety of fields, including anthropology, political science, history, philosophy and cultural studies. As mentioned earlier, the cultural turn in translation studies had a major impact on the discipline by moving its concerns beyond conceptual and practical issues having to do mainly with the basic Eurocentric paradigm of fidelity and linguistic equivalency. Current translation discourse is heavily steeped in this desire to conceive translation as much more than the mere restitution of meaning between stable language cultures without ideological input. It goes without saying that in our current context of globalization some languages are more equal than others and movement between the languages is not always performed on a level playing ground. The asymmetric relations of power among nations have been translated into unequal or uneven relations between languages. Global and transnational languages such as English, French and Spanish are dominant within global communication systems and networks, and minority languages and cultures seek representation through translation onto the world stage. Chief among the paradigms that have opened up translation studies to account for power differentials is postcolonial theory, which has a very broad reach, as it deals with the inequality between the global South and the global North, articulates non-Western perspectives, and ‘ identifies with other political practices that reverse customary power relations in the name of women, the working class, or even the earth itself ’ ( Young 2015: 151), including sexual orientation and indigenous rights. Postcolonial translation studies have been front and centre in the quest for an ethical dimension to translation theory and practice in the postmodern era (or what some prefer to refer to as late modernity). Some of the earliest contributions to this endeavour have been Talal Asad’s foundational essay, ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’ (1986), which laid the framework for the cross-l inguistic analysis of non-Western language cultures. Homi Bhabha’s seminal book The Location of Culture (2004) has been highly influential in defining the concepts of hybridity, multiplicity, heterogeneity, mimesis, and cultural translation, which have proven to be fundamental to the understanding of translation and its relation to power. Robert J. C. Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (1995) is also fundamental in relating translation to issues of empire and postcolonialism. These references by scholars from varied academic backgrounds attest to the heightened interest in translation studies as a forum for elucidating the encounter between disparate cultures, histories and civilizations, as well as for mapping and exploring the inequalities underlying relations of power in transnational transactions. Other studies from outside the specific field of translation studies that have proven relevant to issues of translation and inequality are Michel Foucault’s (1982) study of the relations of power, Gramsci’s concept of the ‘marginalized’, Spivak’s use of the term ‘subaltern’ to infer gender inequality, Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s the ‘remainder’ to define that which resists translation and hence affirm ‘otherness’ (see Lecercle 1990); Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (1987) 66

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concept of the ‘rhizome’ to argue for multiple, horizontal rather than vertical relations; and Louis-Jean Calvet’s ‘deterritorialization’/‘reterritorialization’ of language (see Calvet 1979). These concepts have grown out of the intersection between philosophy and translation theory, highlighting the interdisciplinary character of postcolonial approaches to translation theory. A more direct postcolonial or minoritizing theorization of translation and its practice can be seen in Salman Rushdie’s designation of postcolonial subjects as ‘translated men’, implying a multilingual or multicultural existence by default (see Rushdie 2013); the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s concept of ‘anthropophagy’ or cannibalism to refer to a translation process likened to the consumption of European colonists by indigenous peoples metaphorically as a mode of resistance (see Andrade 1982); Bandia’s conceptualization of translation in postcolonial contexts as a form of ‘reparation’ and in migrant contexts as ‘translocation’; and Jacques Derrida’s ‘monolingualism of the other’ that highlights relations of language in postcolonial contexts. These are just a sampling of the wealth of knowledge that has been inspired by the input of postcoloniality in the field of translation studies. There are still quite a few relevant studies from outside the field such as Pascale Casanova’s classic The World Republic of Letters (2004), which discusses the plight of minority languages and cultures and the role of translation in the representation of minority literatures in the global literary space and Gisèle Sapiro’s La sociologie de la littérature (2014) in which the author discusses issues related to translation and the global circulation and publishing of literature. More specific to the field of translation studies are early publications such as Niranjana Tejaswini’s Siting Translation (1992) about the need for retranslations of colonial history by colonial subjects; Antoine Berman’s The Experience of the Foreign (‘L’Épreuve de l’étranger’) (1992) which builds on the concepts of ‘ foreignization’/‘domestication’; Lawrence Venuti’s The Scandals of Translation (1998), which highlights the issues of fluency and transparency in relation to accounting for difference in translation; Vicente Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism (1993), mentioned earlier, which discusses the role of translation and forms of resistance during the Christian conversion of the Philippines; and Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone (2005) that pushes the limits of translation studies by expanding its role in comparative literature in dealing with issues of postcoloniality and transculturality. Maria Tymoczko’s Translation in a Postcolonial Context (1999) is foundational as it presents Ireland as a case study for exploring postcoloniality in translation. Michael Cronin’s Translation and Globalization (2003) deals more squarely with the topic at hand, as it discusses translation in relation to the linguistic and cultural flows in the context of globalization. Paul Bandia’s Translation as Reparation (2008) has been quite influential in elucidating the conceptualization of translation in postcolonial Africa. There have been quite a few edited volumes such as Venuti’s special issue of The Translator journal entitled ‘Translation & Minority’ (1998) with a collection of articles on postcolonial, gender and queer literatures; Bassnett and Trivedi, Postcolonial Translation Theory and Practice (1999), one of the early volumes that set the stage for studying postcolonialism in translation studies; Tymoczko’s and Gentzler’s Translation and Power (2002) with contributions covering a wide range of scenarios where power relations play a vital role in translation matters; and Theo Herman’s Translating Others (2006) published in two volumes including a wide range of contributions about translation as representation of otherness. It is indeed fascinating to see how much work has been done in translation studies in relation to issues of power differential or imbalance. It is as if the cultural turn in translation studies did not only move the field away from a mainly linguistic approach, but had also opened up new avenues for studying translation phenomena beyond the familiar Eurocentric paradigms. There are obviously many more studies that are relevant to the topic, and many more to come in this growing field, especially when the theme of translation and inequalities is elevated or 67

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updated to keep track of the inevitable transformations resulting from an ever- expanding and volatile globalization movement.

Conclusion Far from being a mere instrument of communication in the context of globalization, translation exposes the far-reaching implications of globalization with its concomitant privileges and inequalities. Translation lays bare the inequities of globalization by demonstrating the struggles of minoritizing languages and cultures to carve space for themselves within the global marketplace. The mechanisms set forth to assert minoritized identities and positions in the global space are reminiscent of the kind of strategies that have been developed and deployed in postcolonial contexts. These mechanisms which have been characterized as strategies of resistance in postcolonial theory take on a more proactive dimension in the current phase of globalization as the context is broader and the implementation more diffuse than it would be within the confines of a specific colonial geography under the aegis of an imperialist power. A more proactive engagement means that, rather than retreating into a nativist position, minoritized cultures embrace the global language, for instance, but submit it to a process of acculturation in order to have a voice on the global stage. Casanova alludes to this phenomenon when she describes the following strategies used by writers from minority cultures: The attempts by writers on the periphery to deal with distance and decentering—notions that are subsumed here under the generic term ‘translation’ which includes adoption of a dominant language, self-t ranslation, construction of a dual body of work by means of translation back and forth between two languages, creation and promotion of a national and/or popular language, development of a new writing, and symbiotic merger of two languages…. (2004: 257–258) This process of cultural affirmation is akin to translation insofar as minoritized societies translate themselves in the global language in terms that are at once assertive of their identity and comprehensible to the global community. In this respect, translation has been instrumental in redressing the inequalities brought forth by the power differential inherent to globalization. The concept of transglocalization discussed in this chapter seeks to encapsulate the desire to assert or retain the local within the global in an effort to resist or contain the effects of globalization.

Further reading Casanova, P. (2004) The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The book covers the topic in relation to the power imbalance in the global literary market. Chapters 5 ‘From Internationalism to Globalization’ and 9 ‘The Tragedy of Translated Men’ bring together minority literatures, translation and power differentials in very pertinent ways. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. This is one of the rare books that deal with translation in the context of globalization. Chapter  5 ‘Translation and Minority Languages in a global setting’, is of particular relevance to issues related to translation and inequality. Tymoczko, M. and Gentzler, E. (2002) Translation and Power. Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

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The collection of essays emphasizes the ideological and political underpinnings of translation, and showcases a variety of cultural and social contexts where translation addresses issues of inequalities. Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. New York: Routledge. The entire book addresses issues of inequality in translation, and Chapter  8 ‘Globalization’ deals squarely with the various asymmetries and power dynamics at play with respect to translation in the global economy. Young, R. J. C. (2015) Empire, Colony, Postcolony. Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. This book provides clear definitions and discussions of some of the major concepts in history from imperial to postcolonial times, highlighting the tensions between dominant and dominated peoples. Chapter 10 ‘Neo- Colonialism, Globalization, Planetarity’ discusses contemporary issues of inequality that are relevant to translation.

References Achebe, C. (1975) ‘The African Writer and the English Language’, in Achebe, C. (ed.), Morning Yet on Creation Day. Essays. London: Heinemann, pp. 55–62. Andrade, O. (1982) Anthropophagies. Trans. J. Thiériot. Paris: Flammarion. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Apter, E. (2005) The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Apter, E. (2013) Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso. Asad, T. (1986) ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, in Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. E. (eds.), Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 141–164. Bandia, P. F. (1998) ‘African Tradition. Translation in Sub- Saharan Africa’, in Baker, M. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 295–305. Bandia, P. F. (2008) Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing/London and New York: Routledge (2014). Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (eds.) (1990) Translation, History, and Culture. London and New York: Pinter Publishers. Bassnett, S. and Trivedi, H. (eds.) (1999) Postcolonial Translation Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Bayart, J.-F. (1993) The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. Trans. M. Harper, C. Harison, and E. Harison. London: Longman. Berman, A. (1992) The Experience of the Foreign. Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Trans. S. Heyvaert. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bhabha, H. (2004) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Calvet, L.-J. (1979) Linguistique et colonialisme. Petit traité de glottophagie. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot. Cassin, B. (ed.) (2014) Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Trans. and edited by E. Apter, J. Lezra, and M. Wood. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Chimamanda, N. A. (2013) Americanah. New York: Random House. Coupland, N. (2013) ‘Introduction: Sociolinguistics in the Global Era’, in Coupland, N. (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization, Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–27. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry, 8(4), pp. 777–795. Herman, T. (ed.) (2006) Translating Others. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Lecercle, J. (1990) The Violence of Language. London and New York: Routledge. Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Trans. A. M. Berret. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mufwene, S. S. (2013) ‘Globalization, Global English, and World English(es): Myths and Facts’, in Coupland, N. (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 31–55. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) Decolonising the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey Ltd. Pool, J. (2013) ‘Panlingual Globalization’, in Coupland, N. (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 142–161.

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Rafael, V. (1993) Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Rushdie, S. (2013) Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticisms 1981–1991. New York: Odyssey Editions. Sapiro, G. (2014) The French Writers’ War 1940–1953. Trans. V. D. Anderson and D. Cohn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tejaswini, N. (1992) Siting Translation. History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press. Tymoczko, M. (1999) Translation in a Postcolonial Context. Early Irish Literature in English Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (ed.) (1998) Translation and Minority. Special issue of The Translator 4 (2). Young, R. J. C. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race. London: Routledge. Young, R. J. C. (2015) Empire, Colony, Postcolony. Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.

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5 Translation and geography The globe and the Western spatial imagination Federico Italiano

Introduction This chapter explores the relationship between translation and geography from a globalization perspective. Drawing on Denis Cosgrove (2001) and Peter Sloterdijk (2011, 2013) among others, it will first discuss the translational implications of a spherical understanding of Earth, tracing to what extent spatial, geometrical and cartographical notions of ‘globe’ interconnected and determined translation practices that fuelled and provoked geographic exploration, colonization and knowledge circulation. Second, it will address Edward W. Said’s seminal concept of ‘ imaginative geographies’ and how it prepared the field for what I call ‘geography of translation,’ that is, the question of where translation happens. Building on the works of Homi K. Bhabha (2005 [1994]), Emily Apter (2006) and Sherry Simon (2012) among others, I will touch on the importance of a spatially and geo- critically conscious discussion of translation. More specifically, I will examine some leading concepts in cultural studies that imply a geographical dimension in translation, such as Chakrabarty’s ‘rough translation’ (2000), Emily Apter’s ‘translation zone’ and ‘translational transnationalism’ (2006) and ‘planetarity’ as first introduced by Spivak (2003) and later re-actualized by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (2015). Third, I will address what I call the ‘translation of geographies’ (Italiano 2016) that is the question of how and to what extent spatial and geographical imaginations have been translated across languages, media and epochs.

610 CE: translating the globe In his genealogy of the Western spatial imagination, Cosgrove asserts that geography ‘ lays particular claims to the globe,’ since its task, by definition, consists in describing the face of the Earth (Cosgrove 2001: ix), which has indeed the form of a globe. As he explains, three words in English usually designate the planet on which we live: Earth, World and Globe. While ‘Earth,’ denoting ‘rootedness, nurture, and welling for living things,’ is something environmental rather than spatial, the word ‘World,’ implying cognition, agency and mobility, has more of a social, political and spatial meaning (ibid.: 7). However, neither earth not world, states Cosgrove, denote the spatiality implied by the term ‘Globe’: 71

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Globe associates the planet with the abstract form of spherical geometry, emphasizing volume and surface over material constitution or territorial organization. Unlike the earth and the world, the globe is distanciated as a concept and image rather than directly touched or experienced. As a globe, the planet is geometrically constructed, its contingency reduced to a surface pattern of lines and shapes. Thus the globe is visual and graphic rather than experiential or textual. As a spherical object, the globe of Earth can be associated with other spheres, such as the crystalline spheres that revolved in the Ptolemaic planetary system or crafted by the fortuneteller. The form of the globe finds anthropomorphic expression in the human eye or the female breast, generating a poetics of form that connects the microcosm of a gendered human body to the macrocosm of the planetary globe (Cosgrove 2001: 7– 8). In this poetics of the globe delineated by Cosgrove, we see the pivotal connection between globalization, geography and translation. Beginning with the sphaira (the shell, the sphere) of the Greeks, which translated ontology into geometry and explained the cosmos with concentric, transparent spheres, we observe a complex transition process shaping the whole history of the Western spatial imagination: the ‘geometrization of space’ ( Koyré 1965: 6). According to Koyré, the main output of this transitional and translational process was the destruction of the ancient cosmos of the Greeks, considered as a finite and hierarchically ordered whole, and the substitution of the ‘ homogeneous and abstract – however now considered as real – d imension space of the Euclidean geometry for the concrete and differentiated place-continuum of pre- Galilean physics and astronomy’ ( Koyré 1965: 6). The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in his comprehensive and ambitious trilogy on the idea of the sphere analyses this progressive rationalization of space – f rom Plato and Aristotle’s geometrization of heavens to the Early Modern Euclidean revolution – offering an intriguing philosophical reflection on globalization. For him, globalization is, at its core, the reconstruction on planetary scale of an artificial sphere, in order to compensate the loss of the cosmic spheres. His ‘theory of spheres’ can be considered as ‘a morphological tool’ for understanding ‘the exodus of the human being, from the primitive symbiosis to worldhistorical action in empires and global systems, as an almost coherent history of extraversion’ (Sloterdijk 2011: 67). In this history of progressive ‘extraversion,’ Sloterdijk individuates three main forms of globalization that have followed in European thought (Sloterdijk 2013: 9–10). The first form was the ‘cosmic-Uranian,’ that is, the celestial globalization of ancient physics, in which the entire cosmos assumes the appearance of a sphere or of concentric series of spheres. The ‘terrestrial globalization’ (ibid.: 9), the second form, which started with Columbus’s western route to India and the consequential collapse of the three-continent image of the Earth, is the result of the crisis of the Aristotelian model. The outcome of this modern crisis leads, in the second half of the twentieth century, to the third and last form of globalization, generated by the accelerated circulation of images in the electronic network, which is usually ‘ indicated by the concept, as familiar as it is opaque, of Virtuality’ (Sloterdijk 2011: 66). This temporalization’s attempt by Sloterdijk is plausible and convincing. Nevertheless, the process of translation that led to the terrestrial globalization began much earlier. The transition of the globe from a pure geometric and symbolic form into a practical tool of understanding the spatial constitution of our planet was already part of the early Christendom and its translational culture, as a little passage from Jonas’s Vita Columbani (c. 643 CE) shows us. In Translation and Globalization (2003), Michael Cronin begins the chapter on the geography of translation (a concept on which I will later expand) with an exquisite anecdote about the Irish Monk Columbanus, who was visited by an angel in Bregenz, Austria, after having been expelled in 610 CE from Luxeuil in Burgundy, a monastery he himself had established. The 72

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angel of the Lord showed ‘ him in a little circle the structure of the world [mundi compagem] just as the circle of the universe is usually drawn with a pen in a book’ (cited in Cronin 2003: 76), eager to persuade him that the whole world stood open to him and his mission. Columbanus, who interpreted this vision as a sign to remain in Bregenz ‘until the way to Italy was clear,’ established afterwards in Bobbio, Northern Italy, a monastery that became one of the most important sites for translation and knowledge circulation in early mediaeval Europe. For Cronin, this passage from Jonas’s Vita Columbani describes one of the founding moments in the history of translation, since it links the figure of the globe and the activity of translation processes. Columbanus’s vision of the global seems less prescience than recognition, a mirror held up to his own wandering as an Irish peregrinus in the Europe of his time. That this peregrinatio is shadowed by the practice of translation hints at the enduring nature of a connection that is sometimes annexed to the post-modern alone (Cronin 2003: 76). But there is more than this. The circle shown by the angel to Columbanus is nothing less than a T- O map, that is, an orbis terrarum presented as a circle divided into three portions by the letter T, first described in the Etymologiae (c. 600– 625) by Isidore of Seville. As Patrick Gautier Dalché explains, commenting on this very passage of the Vita Columbani, this circle had not only a symbolic value, but it was ‘conceived as having a “practical” purpose,’ helping to ‘situate the points of departure and arrival for a journey and to think out its stages’ ( Dalché 2015: 145–148). In this sense, this essential mappa mundi, which from the Late Antiquity onwards translated the spherical imagination of the Earth into a bi- dimensional, cartographic imagine, was not anymore just a symbolic representation of the world’s perfect roundness, but a device for spiritual and physical orientation. Jonas’s account of Columbanus’s vision can be thus considered one of the first statements on the interrelatedness between the concept of globe, geographical imagination and the activity of translation. It affirms that translation is always geographically anchored and thus involved, as an integral part of it, in the global circulation of knowledge.

1492: imaginative geographies In 1492 two men had very similar plans on how to reach Asia from Europe, namely setting sail westward towards Japan and China, that is, towards Marco Polo’s Cipango and Cathay. Martin Behaim constructed in Nurnberg his famous globe, based on a map by Toscanelli, the same map on which Columbus conceived his western route to the West Indies. Both the German globe-maker and the Genoese navigator wanted to lead a voyage not to demonstrate that the Earth is round – this was clear at least since Eratosthenes –, but to show that the westward route was the most reliable and convenient way for reaching China. Only one of them did the journey, setting in motion what Sloterdijk calls the ‘terrestrial globalization,’ which began, as he puts it, with the emancipation of the Occident from its ‘ immemorial solar-mythological orientation towards the East’ (Sloterdijk 2013: 33). With the discovery of a western continent, he had succeeded in denying the mythicalmetaphysical priority of the Orient. Since then, we have no longer been returning to the ‘source’ or the point of sunrise, but rather moving progressively with the sun without homesickness […] After the Portuguese seafarers from the mid-fifteenth century on had broken the magical inhibition obstructing the westward gaze with the Pillars of Hercules, Columbus’s voyage gave the final signal for the ‘disorientation’ of the European interests. Only this ‘revolutionary’ de-Easting could bring about the emergence of the neo-Indian dual continent that would be called ‘America.’ It alone is the reason why for half a millennium, 73

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the cultural and topological meaning of globalization has always also meant ‘Westing’ and ‘Westernization’ (Sloterdijk 2013: 33–34). Interesting enough, this foundational episode of the colonial, Western globalization begins with a gigantic translation failure. Columbus, in fact, signed up as a translator and interpreter for his first voyage a converso Jew, Luis de Torres, who served to the Governor of Murcia and was known for his profound knowledge of Hebrew, Chaldean and Arabic, besides, of course, Latin, Spanish and Portuguese (Columbus 2006: 122; Italiano 2016). Since the Genoese explorer was completely convinced of sailing westward to Asia, he thought that Torres’s versatility in Arabic and Hebrew could help him to communicate with the people he would encounter or at least with Jewish or A rab- speaking merchants who lived there, as told in The Travels of Marco Polo (Italiano 2016: 67). Obviously, Columbus strategy was doomed to fail and he himself understood that the only way to solve the translation problem was to captivate the natives, ship them to Spain and teach them Spanish (ibid.). This episode is not only paradigmatic for the cultural negotiations that shaped the terrestrial globalization at the beginning of the modern era, but shows an important and still decisive aspect in the interconnection between translation, geography and globalization: translation is always located somewhere. However, the location of translation is never simply the place where the transfer happens – the apartment of the translator, the site of a publishing house, the cabin of the interpreter, the street of an interchange between tourists and local inhabitants, or the aseptic desk of a costumes officer. Translation is also and foremost located in the minds of the people involved in the translation process. Thus, every translation depends on our geographical imagination and on how translators and translation agents relate to these spatial constructions. While not addressing specifically the question of translation, Said’s Orientalism (2003 [1978]) – which is not only a milestone in the foundation of the post- colonial literary theory, but, in particular, one of the most important and influential books of geography of the twentieth century – has taught us that we understand the Other and Otherness by means of preordained spatial constructions. It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call ‘the land of the barbarians.’ In other words, this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs’ is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word ‘arbitrary’ here because imaginative geography of the ‘our land – barbarian land’ variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for ‘us’ to set up these boundaries in our own minds; ‘they’ become ‘they’ accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from ‘ours.’ To a certain extent modern and primitive societies seem thus to derive a sense of their identities negatively. (Said 2003: 54) Geography begins with what Said calls the ‘the universal practice’ of distinguishing what we call ‘our’ familiar space from an unfamiliar space we call ‘theirs’; therefore, geography begins by making distinctions, differentiations, and separations that can be completely haphazard and idiosyncratic. According to Ó Tuathail and Agnew, geography is never ‘a natural, 74

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­

What I have tried to do is a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience, and I have kept in mind the idea that the earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. (Said 1993: 7) Drawing on Said, the geographer and cultural theorist Derek Gregory states that our imaginative geographies are simultaneously global and local, since they do not simply articulate the differences between places, producing images of here and there, ‘ but they also shape the ways in which, from our particular perspectives, we conceive of connections and separation between them’ (Gregory 1994: 203–204). In this sense, geography displays a strong performative character; it ‘produces the effects it names. Its categories, codes and conventions shape the practices of those who draw upon it, actively constituting its object’ (Gregory 2004: 183). As a performative practice, geography is not just an archive of our imaginings, but something that produces spaces. By writing the Earth (­γεωγραφία, geo-graphia), geography performs space. In a sense, geography’s performative character can be considered a form of translation. As Edward Soja argues in his ground-breaking study on Postmodern Geographies, ‘every ambitious exercise in critical geographical description’ is a complex and often despairing ‘translat[ion] into words of encompassing and politicized spatiality of social life’ (Soja 1989: 2). Drawing on Georg Simmel, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, Soja asserts that ‘space itself may be primordially given, but the organization, and meaning of space is a product of social translation, transformation, and experience’ (Soja 1989: 79– 80).

Geography of translation After the so- called ‘spatial turn’ in the cultural studies, prepared by philosophers, geographers and scholars such as Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Michel De Certeau, Edward W. Said, David Harvey and Edward Soja, the paradigm of space has penetrated and shaped the theoretical reflection on translation too. From Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘third space’ ( Rutherford 1990) through Emily Apter’s ‘translation zone’ (2006) and from Sherry Simon’s Cities in Translation (2012) to Federico Italiano’s Translation and Geography (2016), the relationship between space and translation processes has become an important and stable research field in translation studies and translation theory tout court. In Location of Culture, Bhabha defines (cultural) translation as a ‘staging of cultural difference’ that happens in a third space, that is, a space of hybridity that enables newness to enter 75

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the world ( Bhabha 2005: 325). Bhabha’s employment of the concept of ‘space’ is of course metaphorical, since he is not just referring to a spatial dimension but to a sort of modality, a way of articulating cultural productivity and communication. Nevertheless, his whole thinking on liminality, interstices, in-between dimensions and third spaces is inextricably linked to a specific locality of translation, to a determined place on Earth where translation is happening, as he clearly points out in his preface to the edited collection Communicating in the Third Space: ‘To hold, in common, a concept like third space,’ he writes ‘ is to begin to see that thinking and writing are acts of translation. Third space, for me, is unthinkable outside the locality of cultural translation’ ( Bhabha 2009: ix). Less abstract than Bhabha’s ‘third space,’ Emily Apter’s spatial notion of ‘translation zone’ (2006) bears still a metaphorical signature in its general intent. Nevertheless, with an intellectual gesture similar to Edward Said’s, Emily Apter never tires to emphasize in her investigation how crucial is spatial awareness and geography when discussing translation. Drawing on Louise Mary Pratt’s concept of ‘contact zone’ developed in her influential book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Apter employs the term ‘zone’ to denote a ‘ broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the ‘ l’ and the ‘n’ of transLation and transNation’ (Apter 2006: 5). The word ‘zone’ comes from Latin zona, meaning ‘geographical belt’ or ‘celestial zone,’ which, in turn, derives from Ancient Greek zōnē (­ζώνη), that is, the belt or girdle worn by women at the hips. With ‘translation zone’ Emily Apter individuates thus a sort of topographical belt, a spatial girdle, so to speak, by means of which the local and the global are being held together in the translation process, where they co- exist ‘ in-translation’ (ibid.: 6). Considered this way, the translation zone applies to a variety of locations, such as war scenes, news rooms, governmental institutions, transit areas, border controls and several other kinds of heterotopias, where unresolved and conflictual translation processes take place. In a much broader acceptation, the translation zone ‘ defines the epistemological interstices of politics, poetics, logic, cybernetics, linguistics, genetics, media, and environment; its locomotion characterizes both psychic transference and technology of information transfer’ (Apter 2006: 6). With this ‘zonal’ and topographical perspective on translation, Apter actualizes the Bhabhian concept of locating culture and defines what she calls ‘a location- conscious translational transnationalism’ (ibid.: 87). Moreover, she pleads for a critical geography of translation that does not take for granted the ‘where’ of translation, but that aims at investigating how the interaction between topography and technology shapes the translation process. A few years earlier, in 1998, Lawrence Venuti called for an ‘ethics of location’ in translation studies, denouncing how ‘the cultural authority and impact of translation vary according to the position of a particular country in the geopolitical economy’ ( Venuti 1998: 186). Speaking from an ethnographical point of view, Michaela Wolf has also addressed the relevance of the spatial dimension in translation studies, stating that translation is not only a transfer between cultures but much more ‘a place where cultures merge and create new spaces’ ( Wolf 2002: 186). A space where cultures merge, creating new spaces, new topographies, is undoubtedly the city, with its porous and conflictual spatiality, where to orientate oneself means also to recognize the divisions of the past, old liminalities, where to move across space means moving across time and languages. In Cities in Translation, Sherry Simon focusses on the urban intersections of language and memory and, in particular, on the city space as a crucial agent within the translation process. Completing her previous work dedicated to the translational dimensions of Montreal, her 76

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book examines how linguistically divided cities such as Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona and again Simon’s hometown, Montreal, impose their ‘own patterns of interaction’ (ibid.: 2), shaping and modulating the negotiation among languages. Drawing on Simon’s groundbreaking work on the translational spatiality of the cities and on Apter’s concept of the ‘translation zone,’ Cronin and Simon have published a special issue of Translation Studies on what they call ‘the translational city’ (Cronin and Simon 2014: 119). Focussing on five cities in particular, Antwerp, Lviv, Istanbul, Tampere and New Orleans, this special issue investigates the difference between translational and multilingual city and explores ‘ divided and contested urban space, where language relations are regulated by the opposing forces of coercion and resistance, of wilful indifference and engaged interconnection’ (Cronin and Simon 2014: 120).

1884: rough translation On October 13, 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, the representatives of 26 nations agreed to recognize the Greenwich longitude as the prime meridian, that is, the basis, the point zero of the international coordinate system. Before this agreement  – one of the first global agreements in the history of mankind  – a lmost every European country had its own prime meridian, usually the longitude running through the observatory located in its respective capital. However, the exponential growth of the global market, triggered by the new vapour- steamed technology of transport, such as trains and transoceanic steamships, required a standardization and homologation of the systems responsible for indicating time in different zones of the Earth surface. By the middle of the nineteenth century, more than t wo-thirds of the sea-faring countries were already navigating on charts based on the Greenwich longitude out of practicality. The Washington agreement made it a world-w ide convention, officially inscribing ‘Eurocentric assumptions into a hegemonic global image’ (Cosgrove 2001: 221). In this sense, the International Meridian Conference did not only ratify a common maritime praxis, but established ideologically and symbolically the latest major shift in the geographical self-perception of the West, the last translatio imperii et studii – after Jerusalem, Rome and Paris. From this moment on, East and West, North and South would ‘ be fixed hemispheric spaces on a quartered globe centred upon London’ (ibid). The agreement on the prime meridian of Greenwich did not come ex nihilo, but was the result of a progressive encirclement and demythologization of the globe, propelled by the improvement of steady chronometers for calculating the longitude, better survey technologies, the laying of the transoceanic telegraph cables in the Atlantic in 1866 and the building of railroads in every continent. In the last years of the nineteenth century, a ‘pervasive sense that spatial limits had been reached dominated the geographical imagination of many Westerners’ (ibid.). No other novel has probably better captured this sense of closure of the global space as Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours [Around the World in 80 Days] by Jules Verne (1872). Phileas Fogg’s travel around the globe is the perfect metaphor of the time-machine built by the connection between colonization and capitalism – a very real time-machine that translates distance into time and time into money. For Fogg, the globe is a closed system on which he travels without any consideration for what he encounters, for the people he meets, for the autochthone cultures and the spoken languages he comes across: every place is the same place to him. The only thing that matters is the time he invests moving through space. As Jane Suzanne Caroll states, ‘Fogg has internalized time. He becomes a horological man: a man of time and a timely man’ (Carroll 2013: 91). However, if there is no time to stop, to look, to see, there is also no 77

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time for translation. It is almost paradoxical how in this novel translation is almost completely absent. In Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne presents not only a travel backwards through time, made possible by a geographical convention, the Greenwich meridian, but also a world with no need for translation. Fogg does not really need translation, because he does not really leave London. In Fogg’s world, translation does not exist and when it does, it is a rough translation, like every colonial translation. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown, analysing the world of post- colonial scholarship, ‘the problem of capitalist modernity cannot any longer be seen simply as a sociological problem of historical transition […] but as a problem of translation’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 17). Like Phileas Fogg, the imperturbable protagonist of Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, who never thought for a moment to interrupt his globe- encircling travel back to his Londoner club in order to better understand the language and the culture of the people he encountered, no modern reader of a monograph in Asian or area studies – before scholarship became itself g lobalized – ‘was ever seriously expected to interrupt their pleasure of reading by having to turn pages frequently to consult the glossary’ (ibid.). These glossaries, as Chakrabarty explains, ‘reproduced a series of “rough translations” of native terms, often borrowed from the colonialists themselves’ (ibid.). These colonial translations were rough not only in being approximate (and thereby inaccurate) but also in that they were meant to fit the rough-a nd-ready methods of colonial rule. To challenge that model of ‘rough translation’ is to pay critical and unrelenting attention to the very process of translation. (Chakrabarty 2000: 17) Phileas Fogg’s steam-powered time-travel embodies perfectly the way modern capitalism minimizes reciprocal communication producing what Chakrabarty calls ‘rough translations.’ No matter how plausible Fogg’s travel could have been, its itinerary celebrates the geographic order aligned on the Greenwich longitude, that is, an image of the terrestrial globe rotating on a London-centred axis. The self-evidence with which Fogg completes his journey without interacting with the world around him finds its equivalent in the ideological pronouncement with which the International Meridian Conference in Washington projected geometrically on the globe its Western hegemonic self-consciousness.

1968: earthrise On Christmas Eve of 1968, one of the three-manned crew of the Apollo 8, William Anders, took a photograph of the rising Earth, ‘about five degrees above the lunar horizon,’ as documented by the NASA’s official caption of the image. This picture was not scheduled. It was taken spontaneously, when, after three orbits observing the lunar surface, Earth appeared at the horizon. The photograph was shot simply out of an irresistible aesthetic fascination, vividly recorded in Anders’s mission log: ‘Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!’ Afterwards, Anders will comment on his photograph: ‘we came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.’ Bill Anders photograph is now universally known as Earthrise and together with a later image from the last Apollo mission, known as Blue Marble (1972), depicting a frameless Earth floating beautifully in the void, is the inaugurating image of what Benjamin Lazier calls ‘Earthrise era’ (2011: 605), which is still the era in which we live, at least until we will set foot on Mars. 78

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The imaginary generated by the Apollo photographs ‘ has acquired an iconic power that helps organize a myriad of political, moral, scientific, and commercial imaginations as well’ (ibid.: 606). The way we inhabit our world now is inextricably interwoven with these Apollo images that ‘displace local, earthbound horizons with ‘ horizons’ that are planetary in scope – the distinction between earth and sky surmounted by that between Earth and void’ (ibid.). These images even changed the way we speak, our vocabulary. As Lazier convincingly asserts, the word ‘globalization’ and the phrases ‘global environment,’ ‘global economy,’ and ‘global humanity’ simply did not exist before the Earthrise era, and this explosion of globe talk is part and parcel of changes in the Western pictorial imagination that at first glance seem unsuited to it. (Ibid.) However, the most striking effect of this revolutionary gaze on our planet is its iconographic ambiguity and discursive duplicity. While it boosted the contemporary environmentalism ( Poole 2008) and the appreciation of the Earth as a beautiful and fragile organism we should protect, becoming ‘a photographic manifesto for global justice’ (ibid.: 95), it also became the base imagery for suggesting the global reach of news broadcasting, credit cards, airlines, bookstore chains and every kind of companies and travel agencies ( Jasanov, cited in Peoples 2016: 170), whose primal objective is surely not the safeguard of our delicate environment. From a cartographical point of view, these images ‘upset’ the Western spatial imagination, stripping away the ‘graticule, principal signifier of Western knowledge and control’ (Cosgrove 2001: 261); on the other hand, they became the emblems of many US defence agencies, such as the US Strategic Command, the Defence Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency ( Peoples 2016: 170). In the last chapter of Death of a Discipline, following the anti-hegemonic and environmentalist understanding of our planet inspired by the Apollo photographs, Spivak proposes ‘the planet to overwrite the globe’ (Spivak 2003: 72). For Spivak, the globe is a cartographic product that seduces us into thinking that we can control it, an ‘abstract ball covered in latitudes and longitudes, cut by virtual lines,’ on which globalization imposes its undiversified system of exchange (ibid.). ‘The globe,’ she writes is on our computers. No one lives there […] The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe. (ibid.) As the Blue Marble photograph defied the Western cartographic preconception of the planet by showing a decentred Earth, with Africa in the middle and a realistic proportion between waters and lands, so Spivak’s ‘planetarity’ invites us to re-think our position on the planet and our relationship to otherness, to consider ourselves not as global agents but as planetary beings. If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as 79

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it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. We must persistently educate ourselves into this peculiar mindset. (Spivak 2003: 73) Proposing planetarity as a critical alternative to the homogenizing, cartographic concept of globalization, Spivak asks us to embrace all the differences (all the ‘names of alterity’) – not to eradicate them – and to re-think the way we relate to otherness. Drawing on Spivak’s influential counter-g lobal concept of ‘planetarity,’ Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru have edited an engaging collection of essays pleading for a ‘planetary turn’ in the humanities (2015). As the editors assert in the introduction, the discourse of planetarity presents itself ‘as a new structure of awareness, as a methodical receptivity to the geothematics of planetariness characteristic of a fast-expanding series of cultural formations’ ( Elias and Moraru 2015: xi). For them, as for Spivak, planetary is not the contrary of globalization; it is configured from another angle, it is ‘a move away from the totalizing paradigm of modern-age globalization and thus a critique or critical “completion” of globalism’ (ibid.). Within translation studies, this critical shift from the pseudo-totality of globalization towards the transcultural, alterityoriented perspective of planetarity has already offered location- conscious, geo- centred approaches to a variety of translational phenomena, such as the politics of untranslatability (Apter 2013), translational writing ( Pizer 2015) and the relationship between translation and the planet’s ecology (Cronin 2017) among others.

Translation of geographies What has been discussed until now delineates a sort of ‘spatial turn’ within the translation studies that I do not consider just a trend following the general shift in the humanities from the paradigm of time to the paradigm of space. It is one of the most consistent and successful attempts to overcome a view of translation based on the illusion of linguistic reciprocity in the transfer of meaning (Italiano 2016: 3). All these perspectives, theories and approaches I have mentioned above outline a complex and fruitful effort towards a geography of translation, that is, a geocentric, location-conscious analysis of communication patterns and translation processes. What should be briefly sketched out in this last section is another kind of spatial dimension within translation, the translation of geographies, that is, not primarily the ‘where’ of translation, its location or spatial traceability, but how geographical imaginations have been translated across spaces, media and epochs. One of the first attempts to investigate this kind of geographical translation was Michael Cronin’s study on the relationship between travel writing, language and translation, Across the Lines (2000). Arguing that every travel writing implies a form of translation, Cronin examines narratives of space, and in particular of movement in space, from a language- oriented perspective as translational negotiations. Following the pioneering work of Cronin, several articles and books on the relationship between travel, language and translation have been published, such as Loredana Polezzi’s monograph on contemporary Italian travel writing in English translation (2001), Di Biase’s edited collection on travel and translation in the Early Modern Period (2006) and a collection on the translation of non-fictional travel accounts between 1750 and 1830 (Martin and Pickford 2012). But while they all examine the relationship between movement in space, language and translation, they do not primarily investigate the translation of geographical imagination. Translation and Geography (Italiano 2016) focusses on this specific aspect. Drawing on the critical cartography of Harley and Woodward (1987), Wood and Fels (1992) and Pickles 80

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(2004) among others and on the works of literary scholars such as Conley (1996), Padrón (2004), Stockhammer (2007), Smith (2008) and Dünne (2011), it investigates, on the one hand, the relationship between literature, translation and geography, characterizing the process of translation as a negotiation of geographical imaginations. On the other, it ‘spatializes the concept of translation,’ transposing the notion of translation into a context of knowledge/ power relations, that of geography, which transcends the mere verbal and textual horizon (Italiano 2016: 5). In particular, exploring the affinity between literary writing and maps as a performative negotiation across media, it defines the translation process of a map into a text and vice versa as a kind of ‘transmediation’ (Italiano 2016: 35–38). Drawing on case studies ranging from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, Translation and Geography argues that translation has not only profoundly shaped the way the West has mapped the world, but that orientation in space should be considered as ‘a form of translation across cultural differences’ (Italiano 2016: 1). But we do not find translations of geographies only in old travelogues, epic poetry, novels or maps. We constantly translate geographies without probably noticing it by recontextualizing myriads of geographical and topographical data into our daily life and into our different language registers. We do that simply by orientating ourselves in our daily paths to our working place, activating a GPS navigational tool (which is actually a translation device) or finding our way in a city district by roughly pointing towards what we think should be the north-west passage to the city centre or to the market we are looking for. And when we are there, at the market, the translation process goes on, since we are, more or less consciously, migrating from Spanish tomatoes to Norwegian smoked salmon, from Bordeaux wines to Sicilian sea salt, from Indian curry mix to Japanese ramen noodles. This happens of course, if not by pure imagination, by reading the multilingual texts displayed on the package, their essential and concise cartographies, usually introduced by formulas such as ‘product of ’ or ‘made in’ and more or less authenticated by the constellation of addresses locating the places of production, the importer/exporter and the packaging sites. Less obvious is perhaps that, by reading food labels on the products, we are often confronted with a geographical imagination still shaped by the Western colonial past. This is the case of those ‘rough,’ Eurocentric translations, which mark, for instance, the French version of an ingredient list with the country abbreviation ( FR) for France, sometimes even accompanying it with a little tricolour flag, or the English version with the acronym ( UK) and the Union Jack just beside it, as if French and English ‘ belonged’ respectively only to France and the United Kingdom. Considering this very tangible confrontation with the translation of geographies makes clear how important is to reflect on the spatiality of translation not only to understand what is going on at a macro-level or in the complex textualities of literature and the arts, but also at the m icro-level of our daily effort to orientate ourselves on this planet we all inhabit.

Conclusion As the last remarks suggest, the geography of translation and the translation of geographies are complementary perspectives that, when deployed together, help us to better comprehend the multi- d imensional spatiality of translation. In particular, combining these approaches could be very helpful for investigating a series of translational spaces that still need to be discussed. One of them is surely the interstice between digital cartography and machine translation. What is, for example, the relation between satellite-based navigation systems and translation produced by automated software? What kind of power/knowledge relations 81

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emerge, for instance, through the all- encompassing, earth- encircling system created by the interaction of corporate apps like Google Maps and Google Translate? Can we really be ‘ lost’ in translation? Moreover, following the important results obtained by studying the city as a translational space, we should draw our attention towards other physical and cultural translational spaces that still need to be explored, such as rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, deserts, etc. These geographical bodies, probably because of their apparent un-relatedness to language or just because they sound too much like old school geography, have been only marginally taken into account as spaces of translation and even less as translated spaces. But I believe that a combined approach that would analyse both the geography of translation and the translation of geographies of the Brahmaputra river, just to make an example, would help us not only to know better its inherent geography, its spaces of translation, the languages and histories changing along its meandering, the economics of its t rans-boundary course, but also to better understand how translation works tout court, discovering modalities, technologies and tonalities of translation of which we did not have a clue before.

Further reading Apter, E. (2006) The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Apter’s concept of ‘translation zone’ is still one of the most fertile concepts for a spatial understanding of different kinds of translation processes. Cosgrove, D. (2001) Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. This book offers one of the best- documented genealogies of the Western spatial imagination focusing on how the idea of the globe from the antiquity to the space age has shaped what we call globalization and our understanding of the planet we live on. Italiano, F. (2016) Translation and Geography. London: Routledge. In this book, Italiano explores how translation has profoundly shaped the Western cartographic imagination and to what extents geographies can be translated across languages, epochs and different media. Simon, S. (2012) Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. London: Routledge. Sherry Simon’s book on the urban intersection between language and memory is a g round-breaking study for the investigation of the city as a translational space.

References Apter, E. (2006) The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Apter, E. (2013) Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso. Bhabha, H. K. ([1994] 2005) The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Bhabha, H. K (2009) ‘Preface’, in Ikas, K. and Wagner, G. (eds.) Communicating in the Third Space. London: Routledge, pp. ix–xiv. Carroll, J. S. (2013) ‘“You Are Too Slow”: Time in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days’, in Ferguson, T. (ed.), Victorian Time. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 77–94. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Columbus, C. [Colón, Cristóbal] (2006) Diario de a bordo. Ed. L. Arranz Márquez. Madrid: Edaf. Conley, T. (1996) The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cosgrove, D. (2001) Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 82

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Cronin, M. (2000) Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation. Cork: Cork University Press. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalisation. London: Routledge. Cronin, M. (2017) Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge. Cronin, M. and Simon, S. (2014) ‘Introduction: The City as Translation Zone’, in Cronin, M. and Simon, S. (eds.), The City as Translation Zone. Special issue of Translation Studies, 7:2, pp. 119–132. Dalché, P. G. (2015) ‘Maps, Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages: Some Reflections about Anachronism’, The Historical Review/La revue historique, 12, pp. 143–162. Di Biase, C. G. (ed.) (2006) Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Dünne, J. (2011) Die kartographische Imagination. Erinnern, Erzählen und Fingieren in der Frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Fink. Elias, A. J. and Moraru, C. (2015) ‘Introduction: The Planetary Condition’, in Elias, A. J. and Moraru, C. (eds.), The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. xi–2. Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Gregory, D. (2004) ‘Palestine and the “War on Terror” ’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24(1), pp. 183–195. Harley, J. B. and Woodward, D. (eds.) (1987) ‘Preface’, in The History of Cartography. I. Cartography in Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Part 1. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. xv–xxi. Italiano, F. (2016) Translation and Geography. London and New York: Routledge. Koyré, A. (1965) Newtonian Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lazier, B. (2011) ‘Earthrise: Or, the Globalization of the World Picture’, The American Historical Review, 116(3), pp. 602–630. Martin, A. E. and Pickford, S. (eds.) (2012) Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750–1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender. London: Routledge. Ó Tuathail, G. and Agnew, J. (1992) ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy’, Political Geography, 11(2), pp. 190–204. Padrón, R. (2004) The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Peoples, C. (2016) ‘Envisioning “Global Security”? The Earth Viewed from Space as a Motif in Security Discourses’, in van Munster, R. and Sylvest, C. (eds.), The Politics of Globality Since 1945: Assembling the Planet. London: Routledge, pp. 164–187. Pickles, J. (2004) A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the G eo-Coded World. London: Routledge. Pizer, J. D. (2015) ‘Planetary Poetics: World Literature, Goethe, Novalis, and Yoko Tawada’s Translational Writing’, in Elias, A. J. and Moraru, C. (eds.), The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 3–24. Polezzi, L. (2001) Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Poole, R. (2008) Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rutherford, J. (1990) ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Rutherford, J. (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 207–221. Said, E. (1993) Culture and imperialism. New York: Alfred Knopf. Said, E. ([1978] 2003) Orientalism, 2nd ed. London: Penguin. Simon, S. (2012) Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. London: Routledge. Sloterdijk, P. (2011) Bubbles: Spheres, Volume I: Microspherology. Trans. W. Hoban. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Sloterdijk, P. (2013) In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Trans. W. Hoban. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Smith, D. K. (2008) The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re- writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell. Aldershot: Ashgate. Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies. London: Verso. Spivak, G. C. (2003) Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Stockhammer, R. (2007) Kartierung der Erde. Macht und Lust in Karten und Literatur. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. 83

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Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge. Verne, J. (1872) Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. Paris: Hetzel. Wood, D. and Fels, J. (1992) The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press. Wolf, M. (2002) ‘Culture as Translation – A nd Beyond. Ethnographic Models of Representation in Translation Studies’, in Hermans, T. (ed.), Crosscultural Transgressions. Research Models in Translation Studies II. Historical and Ideological Issues. Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 180–192.

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6 Translation and climate change Michael Cronin

Introduction In 2019 the U K-based Institute for Public Policy published a report starkly entitled, This Is a Crisis: Facing up to the Age of Environmental Breakdown. Introducing the report, the authors summarized their conclusions: Mainstream political and policy debates have failed to recognise that human impacts on the environment have reached a critical stage, potentially eroding the conditions upon which socioeconomic stability is possible. Human-induced environmental change is occurring at an unprecedented scale and pace and the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes in societies around the world is rapidly closing. These outcomes include economic instability, large- scale involuntary migration, conflict, famine and the potential collapse of social and economic systems. The historical disregard of environmental considerations in most areas of policy has been a catastrophic mistake. (Laybourn-Langton et al. 2019: 6) The litany of destruction is both unsurprising and alarming. The 20 warmest years since records began in 1850 have been in the past 22 years, with the four years between 2015 and 2019 the warmest ever recorded. Vertebrate populations on the planet have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s. Extinction rates for all species have increased to between 100 and 1,000 times the ‘ background rate’ of extinction. At this stage, more than 75% of the Earth’s land is substantially degraded. Topsoil is now being lost 10– 40 times faster than it is being replenished by natural processes, and, since the mid-t wentieth century, 30% of the world’s arable land has become unproductive due to erosion; 95% of the Earth’s land areas could become degraded by 2050 (ibid.: 6–7). As the statistics show, the extent of the crisis is global. No part of the planet escapes unscathed from the destructive consequences of climate change. In a discussion of translation and globalization, there is also no escaping consideration of climate change and how we might conceptualize both the notion and practice of translation in the age of the A nthropocene – the geological era of irreversible, human-induced changes to our climate. 85

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Concepts In order to see how translation studies might respond to the context of environmental disruption, it is useful to consider a typology of approaches that have roughly characterized the study of translation in recent decades. The first approach is what might be termed the ethnocentric approach, which was largely an offshoot of translation history and was primarily concerned with the impacts of translation on specific national or regional entities. Ethnocentric is to be understood as relating to the object of study and not to any set of ideological assumptions favouring nationalist supremacism. Practitioners of the ethnocentric approach were generally at pains to complicate sui generis narratives of national preeminence. Many of the contributions to Jean Delisle and Judith Woodworth Translators through History (1995) focussed on translation in national settings or in bounded geographical areas. Representative volumes from this period would be Antoine Berman, L’Épreuve de l’étranger. Culture et tradition dans l’Allemagne romantique (1984), Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland (1996), John Corbett, Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: History of Literary Translation into Scots (1999) or Mireille Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: British Women, Translation and Travel Writing (2002). The second approach is what can be termed the geocentric approach, which relates to translation as an integral part of the phenomenon of globalization. The term ‘globalization’ was used to broadly describe the profound nature of changes affecting economies, cultures and societies worldwide from the late twentieth century onwards (Steger 2017). Anthony Giddens had defined globalization as ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (1990: 64). Five main features of the globalization era were the growing frequency, volume and interrelatedness of cultures, commodities, information and peoples across time and space; the increasing capacity of information technologies to reduce and compress time and space; the diffusion of routine practices for processing global flows of information, money, commodities and people; the emergence of institutions and social movements to promote, regulate, oversee or reject globalization; the emergence of new types of global consciousness or ideologies of globalism which give expression to new forms of social connectedness described as cosmopolitanism ( Beckford 2003: 119; Turner and Holton 2016: 10). Important geopolitical contexts for the emergence of globalization were the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the spectacular emergence of the Asian economies – Japan, China, South Korea, Singapore – which led to a fundamental shift in the global basis of economic production. Theories of globalization focussed in the initial phase on economic issues before engaging more broadly with questions around culture and the media and more latterly with the political dimensions of global governance, cosmopolitanism and transnational citizenship ( Turner and Holton 2016: 4–5). The centrality of the information economy in the era of globalization and the emphasis on transnational flows of goods, people and ideas understandably attracted the attention of translation scholars. Translation studies monographs that were influenced by this geocentric approach included Susan Bassnett and Esperança Bielsa, Translation in the Global News (2009), Minako O’Hagan and Carmen Mangiron, Game Localization: Translating for the Global Digital Entertainment Industry (2013), Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization (2003) and Miguel Jimenez-Crespo, Translation and Web Localization (2013). The advent of accelerated climate change demands a third approach, which is neither the bounded enquiry of the ethnocentric approach nor the open-ended, globalizing boundlessness of the geocentric approach but an earth-focussed approach that we might term the 86

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terracentric approach. The terracentric approach assesses translation from the point of view of sustainability and reliance. The objective is to develop a translation practice that can facilitate a transition to a post-carbon society and to identify areas of translation practice that are complicit in cultures of unsustainable resource extractivism. Underpinning this terracentric approach is the contention by Bruno Latour that the utopias of nationalism (redemptive sovereignty) and globalization (redemptive growth) have both exhausted themselves and the planet: to my knowledge, no one has explained clearly enough that globalization is over, and that we urgently need to reestablish ourselves on an Earth that has nothing to do with the protective borders of nation- states any more than the infinite horizon of globalization. The conflict between the utopia of the past and the utopia of the future must not occupy us any longer. (Latour 2016) In advancing an earth-centred praxis for translation we will begin by considering the (absent) role of translation in more recent formulations of the post-human and then proceed to identify areas in translation where a terracentric translation narrative is urgently needed.

Terracentric translation studies Martha Nussbaum has argued that the question ‘What is it to be human?’ is not just narcissistic. It involves a culpable obtuseness. It is rather like asking, ‘What is to be white?’. It contains unearned privileges that have been used to dominate and exploit. But we usually don’t recognise this because our narcissism is so complete. ( Nussbaum 2019: 46) This narcissism has been called into question in the age of the Anthropocene because humans find that as a result of their cumulative actions they are endangering the very basis for their survival. There is the belated realization that it is no longer possible to speak about the ‘environment’ as something out there, as a negligible and dispensable externality. The environment is not exterior to but constitutive of who we are. Furthermore, it is no longer tenable to conceive of humans as a species apart but as one species among many in relationships of increasingly acute interdependency. Therefore, it becomes necessary to think again about what it is to be human and thinking again about what it is to be human inevitably means thinking again about one of the activities that humans engage in, namely, translation. One crucial outcome of the emergence of the Anthropocene – the convergence of the fate of humans and the fate of the planet – is a revisiting of traditional disciplinary divisions or alliances. The findings of biology and geology in the nineteenth century and the greatly expanded timescale of terrestrial existence that ensued led to a division of academic tasks. The geologists concentrated on the physical history of the planet, the biologists looked at the history of organic life on earth and historians devoted themselves to the study of what a subsection of these organisms, humans, got up to in their time on the planet ( Rudwick 2005). With the sole exception of geography, the social and human sciences increasingly defined themselves in isolation from the natural world whether it was social and cultural 87

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anthropology under Durkheim differentiating itself from physical anthropology or psychoanalysis under Freud considering any sensation of deep relation to the natural environment was a belated fusional fantasy from early childhood ( Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013: 49–50). Translation studies, traditionally part of the humanities and social sciences, has shared this general indifference to the more-than-human world. If, however, we take Nussbaum’s criticism seriously and challenge the notion of human exceptionalism, the unearned privilege of indifference, then new perspectives open up for translation studies. The move towards species awareness – humans as one species among others, is a necessary step towards post-anthropocentric identity. For Rosi Braidotti this involves the de- centring of anthropos, ‘the representative of a hierarchical, hegemonic and generally violent species whose centrality is now challenged by a combination of scientific advances and global economic concerns’ ( Braidotti 2013: 65). This critique of humanism and anthropocentrism has been prefigured in the tradition of ‘anti-humanism’ that Braidotti references, ‘ feminism, de- colonization and anti-racism, anti-nuclear and pacifist movements’ (ibid.: 16) where the white, sovereign, male subject of Western techno-imperialist thought was singled out for repeated critique. Out of this vision comes a notion of relationality and ontological equality that does not privilege one life form over another. Braidotti’s notion of the post-human ‘implies the open-ended, inter-relational, multi-sexed and trans-species flows of becoming through interactions with multiple others’ (ibid.: 89). Being ‘matter-realist’, to use her term, is to take seriously humans’ multiple connections to natural and material worlds. Conceiving of the notion of subjectivity as including the non-human means that the task for critical thinking is, as Braidotti herself admits, ‘momentous’. It would involve visualizing the subject as ‘a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language’ ( Braidotti 2013: 82). The missing term in Braidotti’s equation is translation. The transversal entity cannot function if there is no way of establishing a meaningful relationship between the human, our genetic neighbours and the earth as a whole. It is in this context that we have proposed the term of ‘tradosphere’ (Cronin 2017: 70–73). The aim is to suggest that the organic and the inorganic world enter into a relationship through patterns of information that are mediated or more properly translated through various communication systems. Rowan Williams, for example, has critiqued the tendency to perceive matter as ‘dead’ or ‘mindless’, as the passive object of human action. This attitude fails to acknowledge the idea of matter itself as inherently symbolic, ‘ in the sense that it is structured as a complex of patterns inviting recognition and constantly generating new combinations of intelligible structures’ ( Williams 2014: 103). Williams takes the example of the genetic code and the genome and claims that implicit in both is the notion that there are genetic material regularities, which can be identified as significant by other material receptors: A gene is not a small item, not even in the rather refined sense in which we could still just say this of an atom, but a shorthand symbol for a pattern of recurring elements within the ensemble of genetic material activating cell tissues; but it becomes a pattern only when there is a receiving and decoding ‘partner’. (Williams 2014: 102, emphasis added) For Williams, it is no accident that the life sciences in general, and biology in particular, are littered with linguistic metaphors. Language is the natural integrating factor in the evolving material universe. Rather than examining material processes, in a largely mechanical fashion, to establish what language is, it is more useful to attend to language to show us what 88

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matter is. In a different register, Jane Bennett argues for a ‘vital materiality’, contesting the division of the world into dull matter and vibrant life: The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations, such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane as we speak. (Bennett 2010: vii, emphasis in the original) Granting vitality to the material means establishing a relationship across difference, an act that is fundamental to the practice of translation. In other words, arriving at the transversal subjectivity that Braidotti correctly believes to be central to a post-human ecological sensibility means introducing translation into the heart of post-anthropocentric identity. This transversal subjectivity is implicit in the notion of the tradosphere as the sum of all the translation systems on the planet, all the ways in which information circulates between living and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed or understood by the receiving entity. We claim to understand our world or to have access to it and to the beings that inhabit it and constitute it through our ability to be able to translate the information they transmit into a language – a nd this can be the language of mathematics, cosmic physics, molecular chemistry or marine biology – we purport to understand. Kobus Marais and Kalev Kull have begun to explore a dimension to this with their work on biosemiotics and translation studies (Marais and Kull 2016). The tradosphere like the biosphere is in a constant state of evolution and in a time of ecological crisis is susceptible to a series of risks that can threaten its very survival. The biosphere can typically be threatened by climate change, exponential human population growth, biotic impoverishment, reduction of biodiversity or renewable resource depletion. In the case of the tradosphere, the principal danger comes from the collapse of translation systems which allow humans to interact in a viable and sustainable way with other sentient and non- sentient beings on the planet. The use of the term ‘tradosphere’ rather than ‘ infosphere’ is deliberate as the aim is to conceptualize non-anthropocentric forms of communication. In communicating with others, in trying to understand what it is an organism or non- sentient object is expressing, the point is not anthropomorphic projection but communication across and in the full knowledge of radical difference.

Animals According to Elizabeth Kolbert we are now living through the sixth mass extinction of species on planet Earth, much of this as the result of human activity ( Kolbert 2014). The National Academy of Sciences in the United States has estimated that since the dawn of civilization humanity has caused the loss of 83% of wild mammals, 80% of marine mammals, 50% of plants and 15% of fish. This is despite the fact that humans represent just 0.01% of all living beings ( Boag 2019: 38–39). Martha Nussbaum has pointed out that, ‘We share a planet with billions of other sentient beings, and they all have their own complex ways of being whatever they are’ but that, ‘we humans now so dominate the globe that we rarely feel as if we need to live with other animals on reciprocal terms’ ( Nussbaum 2019: 46– 47). What the basis of that reciprocity might be is a question that inevitably involves translation. In order to understand what might constitute sentience or the ‘complex ways of being’ whatever any animals are then, we need to engage in some form of translation, mediating across different 89

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systems of communication. The ethical basis for this translation endeavour is suggested by Aymeric Caron in Antispéciste: L’humanité a toujours progressé en étendant sa sphère de considération morale à des groupes d’individus jusque-là considérés comme des humains de rang inférieur: des peuples que l’on a d’abord qualifiés de ‘ barbares’ou de ‘sauvages’, des populations que l’on a réduites en esclavage, ou des catégories discriminées comme les femmes ou les homosexuels. [Humanity has always progressed through extending its sphere of moral consideration to groups that were previously considered to be inferior; peoples that had hitherto been described as ‘ barbarians’ or ‘savages’, populations that had been enslaved, or groups that were discriminated against such as women or homosexuals]. (Caron 2016: 10) A standard trope of a particular form of imperial discourse was the silencing of the native subject. By refusing to translate what the native had to say into the language of the master, it was assumed that the native had nothing to say. Refusing the subjects’ communicative capacity was a way of denying them political agency. Patricia Palmer in Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (2001) describes in detail how a refusal to translate what the native Irish were saying and writing in their own language became a necessary precondition for unconscionable slaughter and territorial dispossession. A move towards liberation, however, was to give language back to the enslaved, the colonized, the downtrodden. Almost always this involved the move of translation as the subject had to articulate their grievances or their oppression in the language of the master so as to get access to resources or to potential allies or to a wider audience. Words falling on ears deafened by linguistic incomprehension were of little consequence. They require the ally of translation whether through direct textual translation or through the agency of language mediators who brought the news of injustice to a wider or more effective stage. A condition of empathy, of a widening of the sphere of moral consideration invoked by Caron, was the making manifest or vocal of forms of oppression that were often obscured by language difference, an ignorance often knowingly engineered by imperial overlords or slave masters. Roberto A. Valdéon in his Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas documents the ways in which the ‘ individual narratives’ of particular translators in the period of the conquest expressed a ‘ form of resistance against the established order’ and goes on to note that ‘mediators struggled against the invaders in different ways and for different reasons’ ( Valdéon 2014: 39). Therefore, in seeking an equitable or reciprocal co- existence with other species we need to look to translation as a way of resisting human exceptionalism, as a way beyond the unreflective narcissism that bedevils human- centred ‘ humanities’. In doing so, however, it is important not to privilege the ‘ human’ (classically understood as white, male, heteronormative) as the norm against which all others are judged or defined but that the concept of translation itself be fully used to destabilize or de- centre the orthodox human subject. If classic Chomskyan theory has argued that human language is entirely distinct from the communication taking place between animals, linguists from other theoretical backgrounds are less sure. Philip Lieberman has argued, for example, that to discount the communicative abilities of other animals is wholly unscientific. Trying to decide what are necessary and what are contingent traits for human language is only possible if all forms of communication between species are studied ( Lieberman 2006). Border collies, African grey parrots and bonobos have some capacity for perceiving and understanding words within a semi- continuous 90

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speech stream ( Kenneally 2008: 152). The voluntary production of sounds which are meaningful to other creatures is not a skill that is confined to humans. Klaus Zuberbühler and Katie Slocombe in an experiment on chimpanzees in Edinburgh Zoo demonstrated that they emitted very different cries depending on the type of food that they found (Slocombe and Zuberbühler 2005). In effect, they were using a sound-referent connection to make and communicate distinctions which is not wholly dissimilar to what humans do when they communicate. Dolphins use what are known as ‘signature whistles’ to identify themselves to other dolphins. In their first year, they produce a unique sound that is different from other dolphin whistles and which can allow them to be individually recognized ( Janik et al. 2006). Researchers on the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program are compiling an elephant dictionary compiled of the distinct sounds produced by individual elephants for different purposes ( Poole et al. 2005: 455– 456). In all three cases, socially complex species have come up with similar tactics to communicate. Though the vocalizations occur in different social and biophysical contexts (air, water, extended atmospheric and ground pitch range), there is clearly a form of structured and intelligible communication taking place between members of the same species. Animals of different species have also been known to understand the cries other species make. If a predator hears the alarm call of its prey, it often gives up. They know they have been seen. There is no point continuing the hunt (Seyfarth and Cheney 2003). How work on animal communication crosses over into translation is demonstrated by the research of Con Slobodchikoff, a US researcher in animal behaviour. Slobodchikoff is the author of Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Languages of Animals (2012) and has spent more than 30 years decoding animal communication. In one study he had initially wanted to look at the social behaviour of Gunnison prairie dogs but soon became aware of the translational possibilities of the dogs’ alarm calls, ‘the alarm calls turned out to be a Rosetta stone for me, in the sense that I could actually decode what information was contained within the calls’ (Garber 2013). He made extensive recordings and carried out a statistical analysis on the alarm calls of around 100 of these dogs and cross-referenced the acoustic qualities of the animal cries with the circumstances in which they were uttered. The natural contexts would help provide clues as to the meanings of the different sounds. Slobdodchikoff discovered that the prairie dogs have word-l ike phonemes that they combine into sentence-l ike calls. They use vocalizations to distinguish between different kinds of predators based on species, size and colour. The next stage for Slobodchikoff was to cooperate with a colleague with computer science to make a computer record of the different calls, analyse them with AI techniques and then have them rendered into English. The process could then be reversed to produce a call comprehensible to the dog. For Slobodchikoff this research could open up a new future for translation technology: So I think we have the technology now to be able to develop the devices that are, say, the size of a cellphone, that would allow us to talk to our dogs and cats. So the dog says ‘ bark!’ and the device analyzes it and says, ‘I want to eat chicken tonight.’ Or the cat can say ‘meow,’ and it can say, ‘You haven’t cleaned my litterbox recently’. (Garber 2013) The animal communication specialist is suitably humble about the complexities of the underlying research claiming that a decade’s more research might be necessary to allow translation back and forth between ‘ basic animal languages’. Working in a country where 40% 91

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of households have dogs and 33% have cats, he sees the implications of animal translation research as ‘world-changing’: What I’m hoping, actually, is that down the road, we will be forming partnerships with animals, rather than exploiting animals. A lot of people either exploit animals, or they’re afraid of animals, or they have nothing to do with animals because they don’t think that animals have anything to contribute to their lives. And once people get to the point where they can start talking to animals, I think they’ll realize that animals are living, breathing, thinking beings, and that they have a lot to contribute to people’s lives. (Garber 2013) Citing a figure of 4 million dogs that are euthanized each year because of ‘ behavioral problems’, he claims that, ‘most problems are because of the lack of communication between animal and human’. Implicit in the development of the translation technology envisaged here is the creation of a sense of cross-species solidarity, a new kind of transversal subjectivity, which would contribute to a sense of transformative planetary agency. Respect for animals should not, of course, be based on their ability to approximate human language or to be capable of adapting their communication systems to human translation devices. Transversal subjectivity in the age of the Anthropocene means that there is no ontological basis for human claims to ethical primacy in realm of the organic or inorganic. What the translational work of Slobodchikoff and others point to in the realm of animal communication is how the act of interspecies communication itself reveals the crippling narrowness of the human sphere of moral consideration. The perennial danger in any attempt to engage in forms of translation across species is anthropomorphism. From Black Beauty to The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh and from Mickey Mouse to Peter Rabbit and Peppa Pig, anthropomorphism has been a constant feature of writing and cultural production, particularly for children (Markowsky 1975: 460– 466). Animal speech is routinely translated into human speech. We understand these others ‘all too easily’ as we relentlessly domesticate animals for a variety of political, educational and narrative reasons. The figure of anthropomorphism is so widespread in writing for children that it is rarely an occasion for comment that such a degree of radical translation should be so widely accepted. More attention has been paid in recent years to the translation of children’s literature into other languages ( Lathey 2010) but there has been strikingly little commentary in translation studies on the centrality of the trope of translation to the very operation of the anthropomorphic in children’s writing. At one level, it can be argued that what this form of translation does is to develop a sense of compassionate kinship between young humans and other creatures. The strange or the alien or the unfamiliar is reassuringly domesticated and initial forms of rejection give way to expressions of sympathy and understanding (Markowsky 1975: 460). Indeed, it has been argued that the spectacular growth in anthropomorphism in children’s literature in the second half of the nineteenth century was a consequence of the spread of Darwinian ideas about the animal origins of the human species (Magee 1969). Getting to know one’s biological neighbours appeared more pressing as the evolutionary evidence pointed in particular directions. Therefore, the fiction of translation in the form of talking beasts makes the changed circumstances more tolerable. The risk of anthropomorphism does not so much invalidate the act of translation as point to its greater necessity. The foundational act of translation is the attempt to communicate across difference, not to deny difference but to acknowledge its existence if the operation of 92

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translation is to make any sense. Why translate if there is no difference? Maria Tymoczko notes that difficulties relating to underdetermination of meaning are particularly acute in the case of texts from very different cultures, texts from the past and texts in dead languages: Often most difficult to construe are texts that are radically decontextualized in some way, for instance, by having uncertain authorship, provenance or dating. Scholars of antiquity, medievalists and translators of the Bible and other scriptures struggle with underdetermination of meaning all the time, but translators who work with any textual material from a culture that is significantly different from their own are likely to face similar questions. ( Tymoczko 2014: 301) The problem of underdetermination of meaning would appear to be even more problematic when we consider translation between different species. But the problems of underdetermination have not prevented scholars of antiquity, Bible translators and medievalists from doing their work. If the perception of the difficulty was to lead to the cessation of all translation of scriptures, medieval texts, or texts from dead or remote languages, the historical and cultural loss would be immense. It is precisely because the history of translation theory and practice has involved an extended reflection on dealing with and conceptualizing the difficulties of underdetermination of meaning that translation has much to offer to any attempts to construct a paradigm for interspecies translation. More particularly, scholars in translation studies have centuries of expertise in the area of translation that is at present wholly unknown or unrecognized in the field of the life sciences and which could arguably make a significant contribution to broadening understanding in a wide range of disciplines from biology to zoology. The notion of cross- species agency is not simply to forge a new understanding between different species but also to favour a new dialogue between different disciplines.

Machines Ethan Zuckerman, the media scholar and director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, sees translation as an essential feature of a new ‘digital cosmopolitanism’. Zuckerman claims, ‘It is not enough to be enthusiastic about the possibility of connection across cultures, by digital or other means. Digital cosmopolitanism, as distinguished from cyberutopianism, requires us to take responsibility for making these connections real’ (Zuckerman 2013: 30). Digital cosmopolitanism is not a necessary consequence of the globalization of internet connectivity. Only by taking language difference seriously can the internet live up to the utopian promise of global understanding: A connected world is a polyglot world. As we gain access to the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of people around the world, our potential for knowledge and understanding expands. But so does our capacity to misunderstand. As we become more connected, we’re able to comprehend a smaller and smaller fraction of the conversations we encounter without help and interpretation. (Zuckerman 2013: 134) As more and more material becomes available in languages other than English, Anglophones, in Zuckerman’s view, find themselves increasingly provincialized by their linguistic ignorance. Only foreign language acquisition or translation can make the ‘connections real’. 93

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Translation as a medium of circulation is aligned with the circulatory possibilities of the Internet, part of a programme of cultivation and understanding of the multiple perspectives of others. Anjali Joshi, director of product management at Google, offers Zuckerman her own vision of the cosmopolitan possibilities of a translatable Internet, ‘ “Once you can search in every language, and you have perfect translation, you have the best content for everyone on the web. That would be Nirvana” ’ (Zuckerman 2013: 166). Information, connectedness, globality, these would, indeed, seem to be part of a re- orientation of knowledge and the economy towards the mobile, the supra-national, the immaterial. For Zuckerman, translation – whether provided by volunteers or through free, online apps – is the solution to the political impasse where internet users massively consult content in their own language and remain circumscribed within their geographical areas of origin. The MIT scholar is articulating in political terms what has long been argued by the localization industry. Foreign markets can only be opened up through language mediation. Only listening to or talking to people in their own language provides the basis for long-term, meaningful, sustainable relationships. Zuckerman’s translation evangel would seem to be wholly progressive, a non- commercial version of the cultural and linguistic outreach of the localization industry. However, if we look more closely at the material consequences of virtual technologies, the cosmopolitan credo of Zuckerman and others becomes somewhat more unsettling. Whether slaves as a primary energy source of Greco-Roman society or fossil fuels as the main energy staple of the developed world, not many theorists or thinkers in the Western tradition, until recently (Mitchell 2011), have dwelt on the energy sources that power political, economic or social practices. The slave or the steam engine rest in the realm of the unspoken or the unsaid. Slaves, hydrocarbons and nuclear power have the common property of being means. Humans fixated on ends have often been reluctant to speak of them. They remain obscured, concealed in the black box of power. Pascal Chabot in his L’Âge des transitions (2015) has argued for the development of a new discipline or interdiscipline of ‘transitology’, the science and art of managing the transition to more sustainable, resilient and viable economies and societies in order to avoid the irrevocable destruction of the ecosystem. Chabot argues transitional thought has as its aim the opening of the black box, ‘porter au jour l’invisible, montrer l’enfoui, comprendre ce que nous consommons pour n’en être pas les victimes’ [bring to light the invisible, reveal the hidden, understand what we consume so as not to become victims of what we consume] (Chabot 2015: 89). If we are defined, in part, by the type of energy that we consume, we need to think about how translation itself is complicit in particular forms of energy consumption that contribute to climate chaos. The energy dimension to the Information and Communication Technology ( ICT) revolution that drove both globalization and the translation industry is never commented upon. Yet, devices need energy to run and the more sophisticated the devices, the more energy they consume. The devices themselves are more often than not the pure products of resource extractivism. There is nothing virtual about the ecological impact of the virtual. It is damagingly real. Telephones, servers, computers, all contain metals that are difficult to extract and difficult to recycle. In the average desktop tower computer and cathode tube monitor, the following valuable and hazardous metals can be found: Aluminium, Antimony ( hazardous), Arsenic ( hazardous), Bismuth, Cadmium ( hazardous), Chromium, Copper, Ferrite, Gold, Indium, Lead ( hazardous), Nickel, Platinum, Steel, Silver, Tin and Zinc ( Williams 2011: 356). Transmission equipment, aerials, transoceanic cables expand in number and energy consumption to meet the exponential needs of information-hungry applications. Fibre optic cables may have reduced the mining for copper but they contain boron and rare metals such as Germanium which increase the refraction index and help to retain the light within the fibre. 94

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Between 30% and 50% of the world production of Germanium is used in the manufacture of fibre optic cables ( Bihouix 2014: 223–224). The toxicity of ICT is particularly to be found in the externalization of pollution which is a recurrent feature of the global economic system, the tendency to move highly polluting activities to parts of the planet where there are laxer forms of environmental regulation or more authoritarian forms of governance ( Williams 2011: 355). The shift from fixed to nomadic or ubiquitous computing with the ascendancy of smartphones and laptops means energy demands increase apace. The most energy-efficient way of connecting to a network is through a wired connection, whether Digital Subscriber Line ( DSL), cable or fibre. WiFi uses somewhat more energy. Connection through a wireless cellular network tower, however, leads to a dramatic rise in energy consumption. In the case of 3G, energy use compared to a wired connection is 15 times greater and in the case of 4G, 23 times greater (Huang et al. 2012). The rolling out of a 5G network will lead to further multiples of increase in energy usage. This is the other ‘ black box’ of translation in a globalized world, not so much what goes on in the translator’s head, as what happens when their fingers touch the screen or hit the keyboard, the long tail of resource extractivism. In the case of translation and climate change, it is not only a question of the tools we use but what we use them for. The coupling of ICT and the liberalization of markets in the 1980s and 1990s lead to the exponential rise in the localization industry. A typical pitch in the localization industry can be found on the Lionbridge website: Software localization is the process of translating the text and adjusting the functional elements of a software application so it can be used by consumers internationally. At Lionbridge we offer best-in-class methodology and the most advanced localization technologies to ensure that your software is ready for global consumption. According to a recent study by Gartner, by 2017, it’s projected that over 268 billion downloads worldwide will generate $77 billion worth of revenue. The best way to cater to global markets and customers is to offer your app in their native language. A recent survey by Common Sense Advisory found that more than half of global consumers only buy products from websites that provide information in their own language. And more than half of the countries on the top 10 list for application downloads and revenue are non-English speaking countries from Europe and East Asia. (Lionbridge 2016) Production, consumption, translation and technology are carefully combined in the commercial blandishment of a major global purveyor of translation services and technologies. The industry is thriving because the demand for translation, as the figures show, continues to grow worldwide. Indeed, this growth is both a driver of and is facilitated by expanding ICT capacity on the planet. The very rationale for translation investment is bound up with an ideal of endlessly expanding markets for goods and services. The problem is that this culture of infinite growth is no longer sustainable. As the authors of This Is a Crisis note, ‘the actions required to mitigate breakdown [climate catastrophe] are structural, involving deep and rapid economic, social and political change across all of society and every nation on earth’ (Laybourn-Langton et al. 2019: 20). A new ethics for translation technology in the present phase of globalization must critically evaluate the resource implications of current uses of technology and advance alternative scenarios for the development of sustainable technology practices at the level of tool and tool use. From a supply- side perspective, this might involve, for example, the redesigning of ICT devices to radically reduce the consumption of scarce or hazardous materials or producing 95

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devices that optimize their capacity for recycling so putting an end to recycling practices which endanger the lives of men, women and children in developing countries. Modular manufacturing practices could be adopted to allow for easier repairs and the re-usage of different component parts or compatibility could be increased or made mandatory not just in the area of chargers but also for screens, batteries, processors and ports. From a demandside perspective, we will have to begin to think of limits to translation growth. Translation is resource hungry so the need to think about translation as a scarce resource in the light of the ecological mantra – reduce, reuse, recycle – means the inevitable involvement of ethical choice. Do we favour the use of translation to sell another camera or skin cream or to further the provision of health education or instruction in agro- ecology? What is clear is that in a globalized world on the brink of climate chaos, translation studies cannot remain neutral in the debates that concern us all. In John Lanchester’s novel The Wall set in the near future in a Britain adjusting to the effects of severe climate change, Kavanagh, the main character, reflects on the catastrophic legacy of the failure to act on climate change: None of us can talk to our parents. By ‘us’ I mean my generation, people born after the Change. You know that thing where you break up with someone and say, It’s not you, it’s me? This is the opposite. It’s not us, it’s them. Everyone knows what the problem is. The diagnosis isn’t hard – the diagnosis isn’t even controversial. It’s guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it. We know it. Everybody knows it. (Lanchester 2019: 55) In arguing for the development of a terracentric perspective on translation studies, the hope is that whatever the future brings we cannot be accused of knowing and not acting.

Further reading Cronin, M. (2017) Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge. This work focusses on translation from the point of view of political ecology. The four main areas that are investigated in the volume are food, interspecies communication, technology and travel literature. Jiang, X. (2015) ‘ “Eco” and “Adaptation- Selection” in Eco-Translatology Explained’, in Yifeng, S. (ed.), Translation and Academic Journals: The Evolving Landscape of Scholarly Publishing. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, pp. 135–148. This article provides an accessible introduction to an ecological approach to translation which is primarily concerned with a post-Darwinian notion of translations as occupying particular kinds of ecological niches. Scott, C. (2018) The Work of Literary Translation. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. The work is directed at the translation of literary texts and considers the interaction between translator and text as constituting a dynamic, ecological force field.

References Agorni, M. (2002) Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: British Women, Translation and Travel Writing. Manchester: St. Jerome Press. Bassnett, S. and Bielsa, E. (2009) Translation in the Global News. London: Routledge. 96

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Beckford, J. (2003) Social Theory and Religion. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berman, A. (1984) L’Épreuve de l’étranger. Culture et tradition dans l’Allemagne romantique. Paris: Gallimard. Bihouix, P. (2014) L’Âge des low tech: vers une civilisation techniquement soutenable. Paris: Seuil. Boag, Z. (2019) ‘A Fraction of Life’, New Philosopher, 23, pp. 38–39. Bonneuil, C. and Fressoz, J.-B. (2013) L’Événement Anthropocène: La Terre, l’histoire et nous. Paris: Seuil. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Caron, A. (2016) Antispéciste. Paris: Don Quichotte. Chabot, P. (2015) L’âge des transitions. Paris: PUF. Corbett, J. (1999) Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: History of Literary Translation into Scots. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Cronin, M. (1996) Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures. Cork: Cork University Press. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. Cronin, M. (2017) Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge. Delisle, J. and Woodworth, J. (1995) Translators Through History. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Garber, M. (2013) ‘Animal Behaviorist: We’ll Soon Have Devices That Let Us Talk with Our Pets’, The Atlantic, June 4. Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/ animal-behaviorist-well-soon-have-devices-that-let-us-talk-with-our-pets/276532 [Accessed 25 April 2020]. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Huang, J., Qian, F., Gerber, A., Mao, M. Z., Sen, S. and Spatscheck, O. (2012) ‘A Close Examination of Performance and Power Characteristics of 4G LTE Networks’, MobiSys, p. 12, 25–29 June. Available online: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~lierranli/coms6998-7Spring2014/papers/rrclte_ mobisys2012.pdf [Accessed 25 April 2020]. Janik, V. M., Sayigh, L. S. and Wells, R. S. (2006) ‘Signature Whistle Shape Conveys Identity Information to Bottlenose Dolphins’, PNAS, 103, pp. 8293–8297. Jimenez-Crespo, M. (2013) Translation and Web Localization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kenneally, C. (2008) The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. London: Penguin. Kolbert, E. (2014) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury. Lanchester, J. (2019) The Wall. London: Faber and Faber. Latour, B. (2016) ‘Two Bubbles of Unrealism: Learning from the Tragedy of Trump’. Translated by Clara Soudan and Jaeyoon Park. Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 November. Available online: https://lareviewof books.org/article/two-bubbles-unrealism-learning-tragedy-trump [Accessed 19 April 2019] Lathey, G. (2010) The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers. London: Routledge. ­ Lieberman, P. (2006) Towards an Evolutionary Biology of Language. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Lionbridge (2016) ‘Software Localization: Reach a Global Audience with Your Software and Applications’. Available online: http://www.lionbridge.com/solutions/software-localization [Accessed 26 April 2019]. Magee, W. H. (1969) ‘The Animal Story: A Challenge in Technique’, in Egoff, S., Stubbs, G. T., Ashley, L. F. (eds.), Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature. Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press, pp. 58–71. Marais, K. and Kull, K. (2016) ‘Biosemiotics and Translation Studies: Challenging “Translation” ’, in Gambier Y. and van Doorslaer, L. (eds.), Border Crossings: Translation Studies and Other Disciplines. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 169–188. Markowsky, J. K. (1975). ‘Why Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature?’, Elementary English 52(4), pp. 460– 466. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41592646 [Accessed 23 April 2019]. Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso. Nussbaum, M. (2019) ‘All about Us’, New Philosopher, 23, pp. 46–47. O’Hagan, M. and Mangiron, C. (2013) Game Localization: Translating for the Global Digital Entertainment Industry. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Palmer, P. (2001) Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 97

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Poole, J., Tyack, P., Stoeger-Horwath, A. and Watwood, S. (2005) ‘Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning’, Nature, 434, pp. 455–456. Rudwick, M. (2005) Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Seyfarth, R. and Cheney, D. (2003) ‘Signallers and Receivers in Animal Communication’, Annual Review of Psychology, 54, pp. 145–173. Slobodchikoff, C. (2012) Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Languages of Animals. New York: St Martin’s Press. Slocombe, K. E. and Zuberbühler, K. (2005) ‘Functionally Referential Communication in a Chimpanzee’, Current Biology, 15(19), pp. 1779–1784. Steger, Manfred B. (2017) Globalisation: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, B. S. and Holton, R. J. (eds.) (2016) ‘Theories of Globalisation: Issues and Origins’, in The Routledge International Handbook of Globalisation Studies, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, pp. 3–23. Tymoczko, M. (2014) Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. London: Routledge. Valdéon, R. A. (2014) Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Williams, E. (2011, November 17) ‘Environmental Effects of Information and Communications Technologies’, Nature, 479(7373), pp. 354–358. Williams, R. (2014) The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language. London: Bloomsbury. Zuckerman, E. (2013) Digital Cosmopolitans: Why We Think the Internet Connects Us, Why It Doesn’t, and How to Rewire It. New York: Norton.

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7 The internationalization of translation studies Jorge Jiménez-Bellver

Introduction: a success story of the twenty-first century? The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the transformation of translation studies into a global field of research. If book titles are anything to go by, the scope of contemporary translation studies can be gauged from the publication since the late 2000s of a multitude of monographs and collective volumes on translation in a wide variety of places, such as China, India, Japan, Korea and Asia at large (Cheung 2009; Wakabayashi and Kothari 2009; Ricci and Van der Putten 2011; Clements 2015; Kang and Wakabayashi 2019), East Africa and Africa at large ( Bandia 2008; Inggs and Meintjes 2009; Mazrui 2016), Eastern Europe and Russia ( Baer 2011; Schippel and Zwischenberger 2017), Latin America and the Americas at large (Gentzler 2008; Jansen and Müller 2017), and Turkey and the Middle East (Selim 2009; Gürçağlar et al. 2015). At the institutional and teaching level, the early t wenty-first century has also seen translation studies programmes mushroom in countries as geographically distant from each other as Brazil, China, South Africa and Turkey (Gambier 2018: 183). In this regard, the Colombian scholar Álvaro Echeverri (2017: 530) has borrowed the term ‘ imagined community’ from the late historian of nationalism Benedict Anderson to refer to the shared sense of belonging that bonds scholars from around the world to translation studies. According to Echeverri, this has been despite the recent explosion of the discipline into a variety of burgeoning subfields with their own paradigms and methodologies (such as audiovisual translation and localization) and the increasing lack of familiarity of scholars with the work of colleagues who specialize in other areas than their own. Early into the new century the Canadian translation journal Meta celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an international symposium. One of the keynote addresses was delivered by the North American scholar Maria Tymoczko and subsequently appeared as an article ( Tymoczko 2005a). Tymoczko outlined in it the six areas of translation research that she predicted would become the most productive in the near future. One of those areas was identified as ‘The Internationalization of Translation Studies’ and was described as the investigation of ‘the range of forms and practices that translation has assumed throughout the world over the centuries’ (2005a: 1087). 99

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Internationalization had previously entered the vocabulary of translation studies from the field of software localization, where it refers to a preliminary process whereby a programme and its documentation are prepared to become functional and acceptable in foreign markets and easy to localize. Tymoczko went in a different direction: internationalization was intended to convey the urgent need of historical and cross- cultural research in translation studies in order to combat the ‘idées reçues of the dominant (comer[ci]al, governmental, and so forth) powers of contemporary ( Western, globalized) culture’ about ‘what […] [translation] should be’ in the current era of rampant globalization, where translators are key (though often unwitting) actors in the pursuit of ‘multinational economic and military interests’ (2005a: 1087, 1094). Tymoczko revisited her predictions a decade later in another article that appeared in the newly founded journal Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies (APTIS), where she noted with satisfaction that internationalization had been growing steadily since her 2005 article ( Tymoczko 2016). She explained this by reference not only to research initiatives but also to horizontal forms of academic institutionalization, such as the foundation of regional and international associations of translation studies, the organization of translation conferences in venues around the world, and the creation of publication outlets devoted to translation in specific regions, such as APTIS. Although she also made reference to a comparable increase in ‘the depth of theoretical inquiry possible’ (2016: 101), she took no note of the theoretical foundations upon which internationalization was being built. More recently, Tymoczko (2018: 163–165) characterized the degree of internationalization that has been attained so far with the term ‘globalization’. No longer a dirty word linked to expansionism, globalization was equated with ‘ full internationalization’ by way of the worldwide institutionalization of translation studies and the unprecedented growth and demographic diversification of the scholarly community (2018: 165). In contrast to her previous reports, Tymoczko mentioned on this occasion some cases of ‘resistance’ to internationalization that had surfaced through different forms of cultural chauvinism (specifically in China and continental Europe), editorial favouritism (in the case of studies involving European languages) and prohibitive access to knowledge (with regard to the price of translation studies books). Other than these issues (to which any serious-m inded scholar would surely object), she did not mention any kind of intellectually motivated resistance. Reminiscent of Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere’s depiction of the growth of translation studies as ‘a success story of the 1980s’ (1990: n.p.), Tymoczko’s account of the internationalization of the discipline in the early t wenty-fi rst century makes for a great success story of academic globalization. Indeed, the number of publications listed above is a telling sign of the international vibrancy of translation research. What is more, there seems to be a general agreement among scholars about the intrinsic value of drawing on as wide a range of historical and cross- cultural contexts of translation as possible (e.g. Van Doorslaer 2010: 40; Pym 2015: 117; Mossop 2016: 22). Tymoczko has become in this regard the most visible proponent of the internationalization of translation studies, as well as its most persuasive theorist. However, due to the selffulfilling prophetic character of her 2005 article and the lack in its 2016 and 2018 offshoots of an account of the theoretical foundations of internationalization and the criticisms that have been raised, a more detailed and nuanced account is needed to take stock of the success of internationalization. In what follows, I present some key theoretical claims on internationalization as they have been made in a number of publications that appeared over the course of the 2000s and can be seen as building on one another, along with some of the criticisms that have been made along the way. 100

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Setting the scene: escaping the orbit of Eurocentrism by tapping into postcolonialism The 1990s were a genuinely exciting time for translation professionals and translation scholars alike. The unprecedented expansion of cross- cultural communication resulting from the globalization of markets consolidated the localization industry as a major employer of translators, and the number of commercially available computer-aided translation systems exploded. Translation studies was likewise revolutionized by the paradigmatic shift to description propounded by the Israeli scholar Gideon Toury in his 1995 book Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. At the same time, the enhancement of the technical capabilities of corpus research tools led to the emergence of a new paradigm that carried with it the promise of identifying the ‘typical’ features of translation as a distinctive form of language production: corpus-based translation studies. The natural synergy between descriptivism and corpus-based translation studies was noted by Tymoczko in another self-styled prophetic article about the future of translation research in the era of electronic corpora (1998: 1–2). The trouble with descriptive corpusbased research nevertheless lay in her view in the anachronistically positivist epistemology that underpinned it, epitomized in the search for what Toury had termed ‘universal laws’ of translation with the ultimate goal of being able to theorize translation across languages, cultures and times as a cognitive phenomenon. To Tymoczko’s mind, the research programme laid out by Toury was driven by ‘the presupposition of Western rationalism that science should be in the business of discovering natural laws’, which had long been discredited by philosophers of science, who increasingly came to realize ‘the way that the perspective of the observer or the researcher is encoded in every investigation and impinges upon the object and the results of study’ (1998: 2–3). The search for translation universals thus ran the risk of turning out at best to be a ‘positivist chimera’ by identifying commonalities at such a high level that they would not be of any real value and at worst to become a sad reflection of the ‘ hopeless ethnocentrism’ of ( Western) researchers unaware of their own assumptions when it comes to identifying translations and investigating their typical features (1998: 4, 5). The first publication that reflected prospects for anything resembling an international translation studies appeared against this background of growing scepticism about translation universals and an ever more burning interest in the diversity of translation phenomena. Beyond the Western Tradition ( Rose 2000) was a collective volume that was meant to overcome the limitations of an earlier volume titled Translation Horizons: Beyond the Boundaries of Translation Spectrum, which came out in 1996. The editor of both (the late North American scholar Marilyn Gaddis Rose) noted that the earlier volume ‘was obviously Western in scope and perspective’ and that ‘[t]he languages of reference were almost exclusively widely disseminated European languages, each a lingua franca’. By contrast, the new volume featured ‘postcoloniality […] and translation theory, history and practice in languages and cultures outside the chief Eurocentric orbit’ as the main ingredients ( Rose 2000: vii). The opposition between ‘Western/Eurocentric’ and postcolonial perspectives was already well established by the time that Rose made these remarks and would remain fundamental to the theoretical claims upon which internationalization would come to be based (‘deWesternization’ later came to be used synonymously with internationalization, by opposition to the idea that ‘to internationalize is to Westernize’ [Cheung 2011a: 43]). The term ‘Eurocentrism’ had begun to appear here and there in translation studies in the early to mid-1990s (specifically in some of the early works dealing with issues of power and ideology) 101

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and was defined in an introductory volume to postcolonial translation as ‘A collective belief structure […] according to which Europe is the center of the globe and the rest of the world forms its periphery’ ( Robinson 1997: 117). As for ‘postcoloniality’ and the more widespread ‘postcolonialism’, the ambiguity of the prefix post meant that the scope of these terms has been far from clear. For some, postcolonialism deals with the predicament faced by formerly colonized societies in having to forge a new national identity without falling back on their old colonial identity. For others, the postcolonial predicament began with colonization, and postcolonialism should accordingly begin with that fateful moment. Yet, others have used the label ‘postcolonial’ to refer more generally to power relations between ( both colonized and non- colonized) societies. In this last case, postcolonialism is not an object of study per se but a perspective from which to examine power relations across the board. This perspective has come to dominate among translation studies scholars, who have become ‘particularly sensitive to the politico-ethical significance of translation in reference with the building, transforming, disrupting or destroying of power relations’ ( D’hulst and Gambier 2018: 17). Beyond the Western Tradition set the scene in this regard for the collection of arguments on Eurocentrism and postcolonialism that came to coalesce around internationalization. The volume nevertheless lacked the theoretical elaboration and the politico- ethical thrust of the contributions that followed. Conversely, the condemnation of something monolithically called ‘Western translation’ in those same contributions caused a good deal of criticism, as will be seen below (for an overview of the broader debate on scholarly detachment and political commitment, see Brownlie 2008).

The adjective ‘international’ comes on stage: turning the tables on translation studies The tropes of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ were picked up by the scholar who first touched upon internationalization in connection with power: the Turkish Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva (more recently spelt Susam-Saraeva). She nevertheless began by dissociating these tropes from their usual identification with Europe and ‘the rest of the world’, respectively. In a book chapter that appeared in 2002, Susam-Sarajeva stressed the importance of postcolonial theories of translation as ‘the only option […] [available] if one wishes to discuss matters of power’ (2002: 203), thus revealing her reliance on postcolonialism as a perspective. Drawing (albeit indirectly) on the structural theory of imperialism developed by the sociologist Johan Galtung, Susam-Sarajeva placed translation studies in the framework of an international division of scholarly labour whereby a handful of languages (chiefly English) play an instrumental role in the production and dissemination of knowledge. Galtung had famously modelled international cooperation in the era of neocolonialism around the notions of ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ nations. In this regard, Susam- Sarajeva found the spatial yet nonterritorial metaphors of centre and periphery better suited to the understanding of power differentials in translation studies than geopolitical constructs that, although prevalent in the vocabulary of a good many scholars, are questionable from a cultural standpoint (namely, the binary opposites ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’). The general argument of Susam-Sarajeva’s chapter went roughly like this: in translation studies, as in the vast majority of academic disciplines today, the need to be proficient in the dominant languages of scholarly communication ( English, French, German and Spanish) in order to reach an international readership plays to the advantage of native speakers and scholars educated in those languages. Being a field where languages are not only means of 102

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communication and publication but also the very fabric of research, she noted that translation studies is particularly affected by this form of inequality. Dominant languages are in this regard a doubly profitable resource for translation scholars with native or professional proficiency due to the recursive relationship between the basic skills needed to conduct translation research (i.e. command of at least two languages) and the political economy of knowledge with regard to the languages of international dissemination. ‘Central’ scholars theorize translation from a repertory of languages that always includes at least one dominant language by virtue of their proficiency. Moreover, their repertory is often limited to dominant languages due to the privileged position of these languages in foreign language education curricula around the world. ­

Scholars from across the world find themselves having to draw on central theories in order to gain acceptance and recognition. This works to the detriment of ‘indigenous’ discourses about translation that are better suited to the material at hand by virtue of their indigeneity but may not qualify as proper theories because they are devoid of all pretense to universal validity. Susam-Sarajeva proposed to call this body of knowledge ‘theorizing’ (2002: 204)— a term with some history in the field of International Relations (see Reus-Smit and Snidal 2008: 11–16). Her chapter concluded with an invitation for translation scholars to ‘move out of the [imperialistic] structure’ by showing ‘what is being done and what has been done in […] peripheral languages and cultures in terms of translation theory’ (2002: 204)—in other words, to turn their attention away from (central) theories and towards ( peripheral) theorizing. ­

Somewhat ironically, a similar criticism was made by the Belgian scholar Luc van Doorslaer apropos of Tymoczko’s assertion that historical and cross- cultural research should result in ‘a refurbishing of assumptions in [translation] theory itself ’ (van Doorslaer 2010: 42). Van Doorslaer noted that, whatever their geographical location, scholars exert their agency by the mere act of testing universal theories on new data and finding out what their shortcomings are, as well as their strengths, v is-à-v is their intended scope of application. For him, the investigation of indigenous discourses should not be an end in itself, as Susam- Sarajeva seems to imply, but a means to foster greater reciprocity in the formulation of ‘an authentically new intercontinental model’ of translation (van Doorslaer 2010: 42). Van Doorslaer misinterpreted Tymoczko on this point as if she were arguing that nonEurocentric theories (which, besides non-Eurocentric, may be Sinocentric, Indocentric, 103

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Afrocentric, or whatever) should be championed at the expense of Eurocentric ones. As will be seen in the next section, proponents of internationalization are not quite agreed as to what the relationship between peripheral data and central theories should be. Contrary to van Doorslaer’s impression, Tymoczko has staunchly defended integrating ‘non-Western’ data into ‘Western’ theories in order to strip them of their Eurocentric bias (see Tymoczko 2005b), whereas Susam-Sarajeva has been wary of the idea of an ‘all-inclusive theory’ (2002: 205) (for a middle-of-the-road approach between the two, see Marais 2011). The most pointed criticisms of Susam-Sarajeva’s arguments have been made by the Chinese scholar Chang Nam Fung, who has been the most prolific and vocal critic of internationalization (2015, 2017, 2018). Speaking as a Hong Kong-based Chinese scholar, Chang remarked that power is not the exclusive prerogative of central cultures but is also exercised within peripheral ones to enforce loyalty to the dominant ideology by restricting access to foreign information and curtailing freedom of expression, as is the case in China today. He noted in this regard that Susam-Sarajeva eschews the possibility that periphery scholars deliberately choose to draw on theories that lie beyond their own cultural sphere out of dissatisfaction with the stagnant condition of the indigenous stock or simply because they find these theories more sophisticated and altogether superior (2018: 467). To his mind, the call to action in the name of periphery cultures conveniently overlooks the adverse conditions in which periphery scholars often have to go about their business. Its shortcomings notwithstanding, Susam-Sarajeva’s take on the power dynamics of translation studies fell on fertile ground. In a matter of just a few years after its publication, calls to internationalize translation studies started to appear. One of the first to pick up on SusamSarajeva’s ideas was the late Chinese scholar Martha Cheung, who made numerous contributions on the topic of internationalization (2009, 2011a, 2011b) and was the first to call for an ‘ international turn’.

Internationalization travels to (ancient) China: breaking free from the straitjacket of contemporary translation Three years after Susam-Sarajeva’s chapter, Cheung published an article that, as she wrote, had been ‘motivated by a shared aspiration [with Susam- Sarajeva], i.e. the promotion of a non-Eurocentric, international Translation Studies’ (2005: 39). Although Susam-Sarajeva’s chapter did not contain any reference to Eurocentrism, the notion was hardly alien to her arguments. Cheung, in turn, borrowed the term to refer to similar problems to those noted by Susam- Sarajeva (i.e. the universalization of Western translation), but she took them in a different direction by looking at how the Chinese word fanyi came to mean roughly the same as the English translation. Cheung’s contribution specifically took the form of an examination of four different words used in ancient China that could variously be said to correspond with fanyi but fell into disuse. Fanyi is a compound noun that derives from the character yi, which was the name given in ancient China to the tribes located to the north and, by metonymic association, to the Chinese officials in charge of ‘receiving the envoys’ and ‘convey[ing] the words of the King and explain[ing] His meanings to the[m] […] so as to maintain a harmonious relation with these tribes’ (Zhouli, quoted in Cheung 2005: 29). While there were other names ( ji, xiang and Didi) for those officials who had to liaise with the tribes from the other cardinal points, yi became widespread since the middle of the Han dynasty to refer to all of them due to the greater frequency of the ‘dealings China had with the northern tribes’ (2005: 33). Yi later came to be collocated with the character fan to refer specifically to the translation of Buddhist 104

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sutras into Chinese so as to ‘draw a distinction […] [with] the lowly activity of the government functionaries’ (2005: 35). However, fanyi eventually became established in Chinese for translation tout court by ‘ frequency of usage’ (2005: 36). Cheung’s non-Eurocentric agenda was aimed at both the Chinese historiography of translation and translation studies as an international discipline. With regard to the former, she highlighted the crucial importance for the modern understanding of fanyi of an annotation made by the seventh- century commentator Jia Gongyan that signalled a paradigmatic shift of positionality with regard to the activity of translation: ‘ “to translate” [yi] means “to exchange”, that is to say, to change and replace the words of one language by another to achieve mutual understanding’ (2005: 33). Unlike other early definitions, Gongyan’s did not position yi in relation to China as the point of reference but instead depicted it as a form of communicative exchange between any two parties speaking different languages. The reason for this, according to Cheung, was sheer necessity at a time when the transmission of Buddhist sutras had triggered a great deal of translation activity in China and a less restrictive notion of yi had become necessary (one where translation would no longer be carried out exclusively between Chinese officials and the surrounding tribes). Cheung argued in this regard that the reason why Chinese historians have commonly categorized Gongyan’s definition of yi as the earliest form of translation theory in China is that it is amenable to Western views of translation as defined by equivalence (see Chesterman 2016: 4– 6). In her opinion, this has been to the detriment of the associations between yi prior to Gongyan’s definition and the terms ji, xiang and Didi, which form ‘a network of interrelated meanings’ (Cheung 2005: 36) about cross- cultural communication that merits being investigated without recourse to contemporary ‘narrow’ views of translation. With regard to translation studies as an international discipline, Cheung shared with Susam- Sarajeva the intent to diversify what counts as knowledge about translation by looking beyond the contemporary equivalents to translation in peripheral languages. Yet, she also complemented Susam-Sarajeva’s contribution in two important respects. First, while Cheung agreed that Eurocentrism exerts a detrimental influence on the ability of scholars to survey translation in all its diversity, she also warned about the risk of challenging Eurocentrism with other kinds of ethnocentrism (specifically, Sinocentrism) by magnifying the differences with Western translation at the expense of the actual similarities. Furthermore, she emphasized theoretical integration as the ultimate goal of internationalization so as to arrive at ‘the “ being”, as it were, of translation’ (Cheung 2005: 41). She thus concluded that only through ‘a concerted effort to study the conceptualizations of “translation” as they evolved in different cultures’ could ‘a general theory of translation that truly has general relevance’ be formulated (2005: 28). The historical significance that Cheung attributed to Gongyan’s definition of yi has nevertheless been problematized by the Chinese scholar Tan Zaixi (2001) in a notable contribution to the comparative study of the Chinese and Western translation traditions. Tan painted a more complex picture of the reasons why the meaning of yi changed with sutra translation. The shift of positionality noted by Cheung occurred not only because, coming as they did from outside of China, the Buddhist sutras required a broader (i.e. culturally non-positioned) notion of translation. As Tan noted, the Chinese government of the time also had an interest in the spread of Buddhism ‘to consolidate their rule, and they needed the mystical supernatural forces of religion to maintain longevity for themselves, and law and order for society’ (2001: 53). The new meaning of yi was in this regard not necessarily any less ethnocentric or any more neutral than its previous meaning, particularly in view of Tan’s assertion that Buddhism ‘was amalgamated with Confucianism, Taoism and the “Dark Learning” ( Xuan Xue), 105

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domesticated[, ] and became a national religion’ ( 2001: 53). Cheung overlooked the political motivations that lay behind the spread of Buddhism in her discussion of Gongyan’s definition. Furthermore, while this definition may perhaps be taken to be representative of a shift at the level of discourse, it remains to be seen to what extent it was representative of Buddhist translation practices, which according to Tan relied heavily on domestication. This relates more generally to a problem in the attention to indigenous discourses propounded by SusamSarajeva in that such discourses are taken to be somehow representative of translation practice at large just by virtue of their indigeneity. Cheung’s reflections on theoretical integration were closely informed by the work of Tymoczko. The points of convergence between the two scholars were also reflected in their extending the implications of internationalization to translation practice. Cheung expressed her hope that the investigation of a greater variety of translation forms would help to ‘open up what we can or cannot do as a translator and eventually exert an impact on our own practice of translation’ (2005: 41). For her part, Tymoczko delved into this question by laying out a rationale for what she saw as the ultimate goal of internationalization: to empower translators.

Translators take centre stage: repositioning translation back and forth between the Middle Ages and the era of globalization ­

Tymoczko began by noting the growing obsolescence of theoretical notions like ‘source’ and ‘target’ (see Chesterman 2016: 3 – 4) to describe translation in light of contemporary phenomena such as software localization, multilingual language policies and electronic hypertexts. These phenomena had come in her view to pose an unprecedented challenge to practitioners because ‘they seem to undermine all that people have learned about translation as transfer’ over the centuries (2009: 404). By this, Tymoczko was referring to the defining function of translation as coded in Western European languages towards the end of the Middle Ages: to transfer (faithfully, accurately) the semantic content of a text into another language— a function that she argued no longer prevails in the global translation industry, where ‘[t]here is a keen demand for innovation, initiative and creativity […] rather than mastery of a predetermined set of translation skills’ as a result of changes in technology and communication (2009: 412). Tymoczko pointed out in this regard that internationalizing translation studies could ultimately be of help for practitioners to meet the communication needs of today’s society more effectively and responsibly (2009: 406). Due to the metaphorical character of the word translation and its cognates in Western European languages (which variously convey an image of carrying, leading or setting something across geographical space), one way in which Tymoczko suggested that practitioners could find insight is by looking at equivalent words in other languages (such as fanyi) whose underlying image- schemas lack the idea of transfer. Another way that she suggested is to reflect critically on the role of contemporary translators from the perspective of the agency that they have— e.g. in the case of group translation and oral translation, which have become more frequent in professional contexts in recent times, in contrast to that of the individual translator of written texts at the service of ‘ bureaucracies of various sorts, including 106

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commercial organizations, governments, colonial regimes and even religious institutions’ (2009: 405). The conceptual and practical differences that emerge by comparing various models of translation would, in turn, foster awareness of ‘the association of Western models […] with cultural and ideological dominance’ and therefore reveal ‘the ideological frameworks within which translators operate in general’ (2009: 414). Tymoczko went on to note how Western models could suffice neither as foundations for an international discipline nor to practitioners in the current era of globalization, where ‘[t]he world’s diverse ideas about translation are the [cognitive] reserves for dispositions and practices that human beings need […] and […] will need in times to come to meet the demands of communication’ (2009: 417). She concluded that only a truly international discipline could furnish practitioners with the necessary depth of historical and cross- cultural knowledge to become empowered— a fi nal point that takes us back to her inclusion of internationalization among the most promising trajectories of research in 2005. Tymoczko’s article came last in the ( by necessity selective) series of publications presented here on the theoretical foundations of internationalization that appeared during the 2000s: Susam- Sarajeva’s on the power asymmetries thwarting internationalization, Cheung’s on the variety of translation concepts and the circumstances whereby the contemporary meaning of translation crystallized in China, and Tymoczko’s on the agency implications of internationalization for practitioners. Out of these three scholars, Tymoczko is the one whose arguments have most struck a chord with scholars from around the world. Some nevertheless have pointed out that her arguments are fundamentally flawed. Specifically, Chang and the Australian scholar Anthony Pym have made complementary criticisms of her use of the cognitive metaphors underlying fanyi and translation. Chang has taken issue with Tymoczko’s claim that in the Chinese model, ‘[a] translation is not expected to be equivalent in all respects to the original and transfer per se is not the primary goal’ (2009: 406) due to the metaphorical association of fanyi with the art of brocade weaving, where ‘the patterns are the same, only they face opposite directions’, as put by the tenth- century Buddhist monk Zan Ning and discussed by Martha Cheung (2005: 35). Chang argued that, although Cheung characterized Zan’s statement as ‘quite clearly a rhetorical move to elevate Buddhist sutra translations’ (2005: 35, emphasis added), Tymoczko wrongly took it to mean that translations are seen in Chinese as ‘different from but complementary to the original’ (2009: 406, emphasis added). Just what the nature of that difference is was not explained by Tymoczko at any point in her article. Chang, by contrast, noted that Zan was referring to ‘the translation of theoretical works, in which the retention of the original’s form and style is not as important’ and that what underlay his metaphor of brocade weaving was the view that ‘a translated text and its source text are the same in content, but different in form’ (2015: 225), like the two sides of a piece of brocade. Chang went on to point out that Zan’s separation of form and content is identical with the traditional separation of form and meaning in Western discourses on translation, which Tymoczko had elsewhere discredited as ‘Platonic’ and ‘essentialist’ ( Tymoczko 2007: 290). To Chang’s mind, this suggested that, at the level of discourse, fanyi is no less narrow than translation. Pym has offered an incisive counterpart to Chang’s criticism by claiming, in turn, that Tymoczko’s depiction of translation in the West as having been historically guided by the transfer model misconstrues Western translation history from the Middle Ages to the present. Pym’s argument is that translation in medieval Europe had in fact much in common, mutatis mutandis, with the type of translation that Tymoczko observes is currently displacing the transfer model: localization. He thus set out to explore the commonalities between the 107

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two by mapping the characteristics of localization onto the practice of translation in medieval times. Pym found with varying degrees of coincidence with localization that medieval translations combined literalism with explanatory adaptation due to the incomprehensibility of literal translations, that they were catered to highly specific linguistic and social locales, that they were constantly rewritten in the process of copying, that it took a tremendous amount of effort to find reliable manuscripts to be the source texts, and that group translation was very much the order of the day. These features should suffice to do away with, or at least to qualify, the monolithic view of Western translation as involving ‘close transfer of the message ( particularly the semantic meaning) of the source text’, as well as being ‘ focused on the individual’ ( Tymoczko 2009: 405, 415). The most insightful part of Pym’s criticism lies in the reason why he points out that medieval translation and localization could never be the same: technology. He noted that, despite its apparent commonalities, medieval translation and localization fundamentally differ due to the technology that shaped translation practice in each case ( parchment and non-print paper in the former and electronic tools in the latter). The key implication of Pym’s attention to technology is that the transfer model could never have emerged without the printing press insofar as print culture created the conditions for ‘the double illusion of the established start text and the final target text, and thus a regime of relative equivalence […] and of relative individual responsibility for the target text’ (2015: 115). It is in this regard that Tymoczko’s reference to the role of Western translation in ‘disseminating scientific and technical knowledge over a large multilingual culture area’ and to the attractiveness of transfer ‘outside Eurocentric contexts’ (2009: 405) begins to make more sense than by her repeated insistence on transfer tout court.

Conclusion Judging from the various criticisms noted above, the internationalization of translation studies may not after all have been quite as unanimously acclaimed as one might assume from Tymoczko’s reports. To be sure, it has become standard practice for scholars of all persuasions to condemn Eurocentrism, naïve universalism and narrow views of translation. The bone of contention nevertheless is whether these malicious elements lie at the root of all the ails that haunt translation studies in the t wenty-first century. Ever since the publications presented here came out, there have been two main (and in many ways opposite) types of response to the prospects of internationalization. One has been the initiative championed by Susam-Sarajeva: to investigate indigenous theorizing in periphery cultures. Susam-Sarajeva has herself contributed to this line of approach in a recent article where she examines the production of blogs about motherhood in Turkey from the lens of the Ottoman and Turkish conceptualizations of translation (Susam-Saraeva 2017). The other type of response has been to compare different translation traditions in search of common ground. The most recent contribution here has been the edited volume A World Atlas of Translation (Gambier and Stecconi 2019), which features reports about twenty-one different translation traditions with the aim of empirically testing the hypothesis that ‘a workable, trans-cultural, and general notion of translation’ can be identified from the wealth of ‘ historically and culturally determined ideas about translation that can be observed in the different traditions’ (2019: 4). If one may venture to predict the future of internationalization from these responses, it seems clear that there is good reason to be optimistic about its continued success. Susam-Sarajeva’s 108

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attention to blogs as a form of interlingual text production, for instance, is in line with the recent push to include non-professional translation in the purview of translation studies (see Antonini et al. 2017) and, more generally, with the current reorientation of the discipline towards ‘wider segments of society’ as a result of the advent of free translation software ( Pym 2015: 117). Her article may therefore be seen as a promising example of the potential synergy between internationalization and new areas of translation research, such as non-professional and multimedia translation, in the near future. The publication of the World Atlas is momentous in that no other study comparable in scope had been conducted before. The editors ( Yves Gambier and Ubaldo Stecconi) secured the participation of a large number of scholars (thirty in total, including some well-k nown proponents of internationalization), who were selected for having the necessary ‘ inside knowledge, understanding and sensitivity’ (2019: 466) to write synthetic reports on their respective traditions that could be put at the service of testing their hypothesis. This distribution of roles between, as it were, the editors as ‘theorists’ and the reporters as ‘native informants’ may seem suspiciously similar to Susam-Sarajeva’s model of the international division of labour. However, Gambier and Stecconi expressly designed the project with ‘minimal assumptions’ about what translation is and gave the contributors complete freedom to choose the ‘theoretical underpinnings, methods and research agendas’ of their reports (2019: 6, 466). Their decision not to dictate which theories and methods ought to be used is a clear indication that ( Western) scholars have become much more alert to power relations and open to drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological sources. On the downside of things, these responses suggest in different ways that translation studies may not have become as global as it seems—not quite in Tymoczko’s sense of ‘ fully international’, but instead in a cohesive sense. To take Susam- Sarajeva’s recent work as a representative example, her exploration of the Ottoman terceme and its Turkish cognate tercüme reproduces the same logic that Pym criticized about Tymoczko insofar as it ‘reduces Western translation theory to something called “transfer”, which can then be opposed to a wealth of more exciting ideas from elsewhere’ (2015: 117). It is revealing in this regard that the alleged ‘traces of older conceptions of [interlingual] text production’ that Susam- Sarajeva claims ‘erase[…] the difference between “translation”, “adaptation” and “original” writing’ (2017: 76, 78) in the production of blogs in Turkey (which range from reported forms of speech to simplification, adaptation, summary, addition and omission) have all been regarded as translation strategies in contemporary Western theories (e.g. Chesterman 2016: 104–109)— and yet, Susam- Sarajeva keeps portraying Western translation unequivocally as ‘a highly regulated transfer of meaning’ (2017: 70). As for Gambier and Stecconi, their venture sadly comes to a disappointing ending. This is not because they end up finding that ‘a clear-cut notion of translation does not emerge from the reports’ (2019: 465), which would be a perfectly sound conclusion if they did not ascribe it to their initial decision to make use of ‘a broad range of methodologies, approaches and styles that ma[de] synthesis difficult’ (2019: 466– 467) and leave it at that. Nowhere in their conclusions do Gambier and Stecconi reflect on the possible reasons why methodological plurality came at the expense of data comparability and synthesis, or explain why it was necessary to champion methodological plurality in the first place. In this way, an initiative that was explicitly conceived to compare translation traditions empirically on the basis of a verifiable tertium comparationis ends up as a compilation of disparate case studies with no further questions asked. Translation studies thus appears to be still grappling with some serious methodological problems some fifteen years after internationalization was hailed as one of the most promising 109

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research trajectories. One cannot help but wonder if the commendable intentions of the proponents of internationalization may have spuriously resulted in a return to methodological nationalism in the name of difference and a likewise methodological impasse in the search for commonalities across differences. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Tymoczko wrote apropos of corpus-based translation studies that ‘[c]omparison is always implicit or explicit in inquiries about translation, and there is often a tendency to focus on likeness rather than difference and to rest content with similarity’ (1998: 5), adding that ‘C[orpus]T[ranslation]S[tudies] has the potential to be one means of challenging hegemonic, culture-bound views of texts, translation, and cultural transfer. It is a powerful tool for perceiving difference and for valorizing difference as well’ (1998: 6). Clearly, the tables have turned since then. Perhaps the main challenge for the future of translation studies as an international discipline will be to strike a (greater) balance between the valorization of difference and the inescapably comparative basis of translation research.

Further reading Chesterman, A. (2014) ‘Translation Studies Forum: Universalism in Translation Studies’, Translation Studies, 7(1), pp. 82–90, and the responses in that issue (pp. 92–107) and in issue 7(3) (pp. 335–352). An informative and lively debate initiated by the British scholar Andrew Chesterman and continued by eight respondents (including Susam- Sarajeva and Tymoczko) on the issues than have been addressed in this chapter, framed around the opposition between scientific universalism and cultural relativism. Robinson, D. (2017) ‘Towards an Intercivilizational Turn: Naoki Sakai’s Cofigurative Regimes of Translation and the Problem of Eurocentrism’, Translation Studies, 9(1), pp. 51–66. A follow-up to Robinson’s response to Chesterman’s position piece on universalism. Drawing on the work of the Japanese scholar Sakai Naoki, Robinson traces the intellectual genealogy of Eurocentrism and a nti-Eurocentrism and recasts them as part of the larger discourses of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Tymoczko, M. (2007) Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome. The only book-length and the most cogent study of translation from the lens of internationalization as a cross-linguistic, cross- cultural and cross-temporal cluster concept, as well as a spirited manifesto on the politico- ethical implications for translators. Tyulenev, S. and Zheng, B. (eds.) (2017) ‘Toward Comparative Translation and Interpreting Studies’. Special Issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies, 12(2), pp. 197–212. A promising (if perhaps overly ambitious in scope) rationale for the comparative study of translation at the meso- and macro- levels that picks up where most proponents of internationalization leave off or fail to agree: what to do with the wealth of data collected on the diversity of translation practices around the world. van Doorslaer, L. and Flynn, P. (eds.) (2013) Eurocentrism in Translation Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. A collection of criticisms of the use of Eurocentrism in translation studies apropos of Edwin Gentzler’s book Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory from a variety of perspectives, such as scientific logic, linguistic justice theory and colonial historiography.

References Antonini, R., Cirillo, L., Rossato, L. and Torresi, I. (eds.) (2017) Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Baer, B. J. (ed.) (2011) Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Bandia, P. F. (2008) Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa. Manchester: St. Jerome. 110

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Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (eds.) (1990) Translation, History and Culture. London and New York: Pinter. Brownlie, S. (2008) ‘Descriptive vs. Committed Approaches’, in Baker, M. and Saldanha, G. (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, pp. 77– 80. Chang, N. F. (2015) ‘Does “Translation” Reflect a Narrower Concept than “Fanyi”? On the Impact of Western Theories on China and the Concern about Eurocentrism’, Translation and Interpreting Studies 10(2), pp. 223–242. Chang, N. F. (2017) ‘A Polysystemist’s Response to Prescriptive Cultural Relativism and Postcolonialism’, Across Languages and Cultures, 18(1), pp. 133–154. Chang, N. F. (2018) ‘Voices from the Periphery: Further Reflections on Relativism in Translation Studies’, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 26(4), pp. 463–477. Chesterman, A. (2016) Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Revised edition. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Cheung, M. P. Y. (2005) ‘ “To translate” Means “to exchange”? A New Interpretation of the Earliest Chinese Attempts to Define Translation (“ fanyi”)’, Target, 17(1), pp. 27–48. Cheung, M. P. Y. (ed.) (2009) Chinese Discourses on Translation: Positions and Perspectives. Special issue of The Translator 15(2), pp. 223–458. Cheung, M. P. Y. (2011a) ‘The ( Un)Importance of Flagging Chineseness. Making Sense of a Recurrent Theme in Contemporary Chinese Discourses on Translation’, Translation Studies, 4(1), pp. 41–57. Cheung, M. P. Y. (2011b) ‘Reconceptualizing Translation – Some Chinese Endeavours’, Meta, 56(1), pp. 1–19. Clements, R. (2015) A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. D’hulst, L. and Gambier, Y. (2018) ‘Introduction’, in D’hulst, L. and Gambier, Y. (eds.), A History of Modern Translation Knowledge. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 17–18. Echeverri, Á. (2017) ‘About Maps, Versions and Translations of Translation Studies: A Look into the Metaturn of Translatology’, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 25(4), pp. 521–539. Gambier, Y. (2018) ‘Institutionalization of Translation Studies’, in D’hulst, L. and Gambier, Y. (eds.), A History of Modern Translation Knowledge. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 179–194. Gambier, Y. and Stecconi, U. (eds.) (2019) A World Atlas of Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Gentzler, E. (2008) Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. London: Routledge. Gürçağlar, Ş. T., Paker, S. and Milton, J. (eds.) (2015) Tradition, Tension and Translation in Turkey. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Inggs, J. and Meintjes, L. (eds.) (2009) Translation Studies in Africa. London and New York: Continuum. Jansen, S. and Müller, G. (eds.) (2017) La traducción desde, en y hacia Latinoamérica: perspectivas literarias y lingüísticas. Madrid and Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/ Vervuert. Kang, J. and Wakabayashi, J. (eds.) (2019) Translating and Interpreting in Korean Contexts: Engaging with Asian and Western Others. London and New York: Routledge. Marais, K. (2011) ‘Can Tymoczko be Translated into Africa? Refractions of Research Methodology in Translation Studies in African Contexts’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 29(3), pp. 373–380. Mazrui, A. M. (2016) Cultural Politics of Translation: East Africa in a Global Context. London: Routledge. Mossop, B. (2016) ‘ “Intralingual Translation”: A Desirable Concept?’, Across Languages and Cultures, 17(1), pp. 1–24. Patiniotis, M. and Gavroglu, K. (2012) ‘The Sciences in Europe: Transmitting Centers and the Appropriating Peripheries’, in Renn, J. (ed.), The Globalization of Knowledge in History. Berlin: Edition Open Access, pp. 285–303. Pym, A. (2015) ‘The Medieval Postmodern in Translation Studies’, in Fuentes, A. and Torres- Simón, E. (eds.), And Translation Changed the World (and the World Changed Translation). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 105–120. ­ Ricci, R. and Van der Putten, J. (eds.) (2011) Translation in Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories. Manchester: St. Jerome. 111

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Robinson, D. (1997) Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Rose, M. G. (ed.) (1996) Translation Horizons: Beyond the Boundaries of Translation Spectrum. Translation Perspectives IX. Binghamton: Center of Research in Translation, SUNY Binghamton. Rose, M. G. (ed.) (2000) Beyond the Western Tradition. Translation Perspectives XI. Binghamton: Center of Research in Translation, SUNY Binghamton. Schippel, L. and Zwischenberger, C. (eds.) (2017) Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Traditions in Translation Studies. Berlin: Frank und Timme. Selim, S. (ed.) (2009) Nation & Translation in the Middle East. Special issue of The Translator 15(1), pp. 1–220. Susam-Saraeva, Ş. (2017) ‘In Search of an “International” Translation Studies: Tracing Terceme and Tercüme in the Blogosphere’, Translation Studies, 10(1), pp. 69–86. Susam-Sarajeva, Ş. (2002) ‘A “Multilingual” and “International” Translation Studies?’, in Hermans, T. (ed.), Cross-Cultural Transgressions. Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues. Manchester: St. Jerome, pp. 193–207. Tan, Z. (2001) ‘The Chinese and Western Translation Traditions in Comparison’, Across Languages and Cultures, 2(1), pp. 51–72. Tymoczko, M. (1998) ‘Computerized Corpora and the Future of Translation Studies’, Meta, 43(4), pp. 1–9. Tymoczko, M. (2005a) ‘Trajectories of Research in Translation Studies’, Meta, 50(4), pp. 1082–1097. Tymoczko, M. (2005b) ‘Reconceptualizing Western Translation Theory: Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation’, in Hermans T. (ed.), Translating Others, Vol. 1. Manchester: St. Jerome, pp. 13–32. Tymoczko, M. (2009) ‘Why Translators Should Want to Internationalize Translation Studies’, The Translator, 15(2), pp. 401–421. Tymoczko, M. (2016) ‘Trajectories of Research in Translation Studies: An Update with a Case Study in the Neuroscience of Translation’, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 3(2), pp. 99–122. Tymoczko, M. (2018) ‘The History of Internationalization in Translation Studies and its Impact on Translation Theory’, in D’hulst, L. and Gambier, Y. (eds.), A History of Modern Translation Knowledge. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 153–169. van Doorslaer, L. (2010) ‘The Side Effects of the “Eurocentrism” Concept’, in Rao, P. and Peeters, J. (eds.), Socio-Cultural Approaches to Translation: Indian and European Perspectives. New Delhi: Excel India, pp. 39–46. Wakabayashi, J. and Kothari, R. (eds.) (2009) Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing.

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8 Transnational and global approaches in translation studies Methodological observations Mattea Cussel

Introduction This chapter takes a critical position against methodological nationalism and the use of binary categories to represent translation.1 Such methodologies have become so ingrained in certain translation vocabularies that even some ethical and heterogeneous approaches still rely on a dichotomic and/or national organization of languages, texts, cultures, and readers. While Edwin Gentzler (2012) writes that the national period of translation ended in the 1990s and 2000s, I suggest that it persists in the way that we imagine and represent the encounters fostered by translation. I consider the development of the national story of translation to reveal the way in which it has reduced the latter to international exchange, which limits its potential to facilitate much needed social and political solidarities in a globalized world of interdependent fate. I argue that Lawrence Venuti’s ethical strategy of foreignization succumbs to methodological nationalism and is inapplicable in contexts of multiple subject positionings where the domestic/foreign binary does not hold. This leads me to explore and wonder about the other stories of translation that are not being told: different paths of reception and relationships that can be drawn between diverse groups, cultural narratives, and texts. The key to pursuing these stories lies in more sociological approaches to actual readers and the different groups on the sending and receiving end of translation. A transnational and global revision of methodologies is crucial to tackle the difficult task of finding new ways of thinking and framing translation processes that involve multiple and competing selves and solidarities.

Translation as movement between nations In a traditional binary approach to translation, there is a clear distinction between the source and target languages, cultures, texts, and readers. They are separate, homogeneous, and exclusive units between which movement is possible. This movement is from domestic to foreign or vice versa. This understanding of translation is fundamentally challenged by globalization. The availability of goods and immediacy of contact through global markets and communications have brought about the ‘entrenchment of enduring patterns of connectedness across 113

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the globe’ (Held and McGrew 2000: 3). This accelerating interdependence has ruptured links that were previously seen as natural, such as the correspondence between the national territorial unit and society, the economy, and political organization (2000: 8). Social space has been deterritorialized or recast in the global frame, making the separateness of languages, cultures, texts, and readers harder to sustain. This is not to say that a binary understanding of translation has simply lost its former cogency. David Damrosch’s (2009) exploration of the translated original Candide, the multilingual shifting original(s) 1001 Nights, and the multidialectal Lysistrata shows that even the most canonical of translated world literature did not initiate from a single homogeneously foreign original. Yet binary representations have dominated critical imaginaries of translation. This is demonstrated by Friedrich Schleiermacher’s image of the translative act, which is one of the most repeatedly invoked: on one side, the author, and on the other, the reader of the translation; one is to be left in peace while the other is to be moved; either the reader is moved to the foreign position or the author is moved to the domestic position (translated in Lefevere 1977: 74). Venuti’s (2008) landmark criticism of domestication in favour of foreignization to detract from the ethnocentrism of translation practice develops upon this image of translation as enacting movement, in one direction or another, between dichotomies. Where I start my critique is the way in which this representation of translation is unconsciously imbued with national significance: the domestic and the foreign are assumed to be national entities. Sherry Simon argues that during the Renaissance and German Romanticism, translation activity reconfigured the relationship between language and national [or what would evolve into national] culture (2002: 123). In the first period, centuries before the rise of the nation state, translation played a key role in the constitution of vernacular languages, as in the case of Luther who produced a unified German language from various dialects in his translation of the Bible. In Europe, a discourse emerged according to which translations from Greek or Latin into vernaculars were supposed to benefit the birth country, proving its people worthy of knowledge and legitimizing their language ( Philemon Holland, translated in Lefevere 1990: 23). Translators were said to gift foreign speech styles to their nation ( Juan Luis Vives, translated in Lefevere 1990: 51). In the second period, against the backdrop of the rise of nationalism, the German Romantics promoted translation as mutual exchange and dependence between nations. It was seen as a tool to linguistically and culturally enrich the nascent national literary canons, strengthening them in such a way that the nation could come more fully into itself (Simon 2002: 125). This was a fecund time for translation thinking: the plasticity of language and the need for experimentation were reclaimed, and translation was discussed in terms of a preoccupation regarding how to construe the relationship between self and other. However, these reflections were made within the framework of the nation: the spirit of a language was national, and each language had a people to which it belonged, such that the link between language, subjectivity, and national group was solidified. Through translation the great works of a nation’s art and scholarship were traded, and one translation method or another was preferred based on the value it provided to the national project (Schleiermacher, translated in Lefevere 1977). When the discipline of translation studies was established around the 1960s, the limited yet long- standing view of translation as the exchange of texts written in vernacular/national languages between circumscribed groups for the mutual benefit of their respective cultures was accepted as natural. As translation had been enlisted to play a transformative role in the development of national language and culture, the intimate relationship between translation and nation dominated representations. The uncritical adoption of this particular way of 114

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organizing textual subjectivities and translation processes is an indication of methodological nationalism. This term refers to the assumption that the world is naturally divided up into nation- state societies, which are the primary unit of analysis ( Beck 2003: 453). When translation studies was consolidated in the mid-1970s, the descriptive scholars pursued national objects of study such as national languages and literatures, the transfer between them through polysystem theory, and the operation of translation norms in target systems.2 While the descriptive approach made the positive contribution of moving beyond source-target equivalence, promoting translation as a primary activity, and incorporating socio- cultural perspectives, it failed to recognize that ‘systems’ were not containers for reality. Rather, what they did was construct national containers for translation processes. Systems or polysystems, which were conflated with national cultures and literatures, were treated as sentient beings, marking the conspicuous absence of actual agents, institutions, and stakes ( Hermans 1999: 118). False subjecthood and agency is still observed today in relation to cultures, which are described as being able to do things, such as receive texts, or as having, for example, ideological needs (e.g. Tymoczko 2007: 250). Methodological nationalism is not isolated to translation studies; the term itself I am borrowing from sociology. Ulrich Beck argues that sociology was developed under a nationalist paradigm in which society was automatically equated with nation- state society and units of analysis were the state and government (2007: 286–287). However, transnational and globalized experiences of (re)attachment, multiple belongings, belonging-at-a-distance, supranational agreements, diaspora cultures, and global cities reveal the limitations of the national gaze for characterizing twenty-fi rst-century ways of life, as well as facing the challenges of a world steeped in risks with global dimensions ( Beck 2003, 2007). While this is the case, critics have rightly observed that Beck adds a historical gloss to methodological nationalism in which it is supposed to be an optic that was once suitable but has now become obsolete. However, the root problem of methodological nationalism is the same for our times as it was for others: it treats the nation state as an ontology, naturalizing and rationalizing its existence, and locating its development ‘ in a teleological framework as the apex of modern political community’ ( Fine 2007: 10). The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai also identifies a nationalist paradigm in area studies. What has positively set area studies apart from most of the academy is the serious study of foreign languages and genuine enquiry into alternative world views (Appadurai 1996: 17). However, this ability has become something of a disability. Appadurai criticizes the tendency to label difference as a national entity and ‘to refract processes through this sort of nationalcultural map of the world’ (1996: 16). Having gotten used to these old maps, area studies has become ‘too insensitive to transnational processes both today and in the past’ (1996: 17). The virtues and limitations of translation studies are similar. By focussing on the acquisition of profound knowledge of languages and cultures, differences between cultures have been emphasized, while diversity among cultures and shared global phenomena across cultures have tended to be overlooked. While Appadurai emphasizes the failure to recognize the transnational, I suggest that translation studies has explored international more than transnational processes. According to Steven Vertovec, the international refers to the interaction and back-and-forth movement of goods and people between nation states, whereas transnationalism is the sustained relationships, exchanges, and social groupings that span different nation states (2009: 3). If we speak of worlds, the international world is a configuration of particular peoples and their respective national languages (Sakai 1997: 19), while the transnational world is a web of messy entanglements that make collectivity more indeterminate. It is this messiness and indeterminacy that translation studies has lacked the tools to 115

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accommodate. It is not that the national map has become irrelevant, but rather that it must be seen in interaction with local, regional, and global dynamics, which have often been ignored. José Lambert makes this point in one of the earlier critiques of the national gaze from within the discipline. In his article ‘In Quest of Literary World Maps’ (2006), originally published in 1991, he argues that literary scientists and institutions have organized and financed teaching and research around static national— and often anachronistically national—but not dynamic local and regional maps. The most trenchant critique of methodological nationalism, though not termed as such, by a translation theorist comes from Naoki Sakai in Translation and Subjectivity (1997). Sakai and Beck are similar in that they stress the power of our methodology to produce the object we are trying to observe. For Sakai, ‘translation is one of the most important instances in the modern experience of language’ (Cussel 2018) as it has been institutionalized in such a way that it functions as a tool to distinguish between national languages. The only way to perceive languages as discrete entities is to set them off against one another in what Sakai calls the ‘schematism of configuration’ (2010: 28). Translation or our representation of translation is charged with performing this task. This conceptual framework produces the mainstream understanding of translation as communication between one enclosed national language community and another (1997: 6). Such an understanding has had the effect of putting cultural difference, intercultural exchange, and national subjectivity at the heart of research questions in translation studies, at the expense of many others. As Sakai and Neilson write, this profoundly modern representation of translation is not descriptive but prescriptive (2014: 14). When descriptive translation studies sought to do away with value judgements about equivalence by studying norms in target cultures, their descriptive methods were conceptually contradicted by an underlying prescription that language and culture are national, hermetic, countable, and contrastable. Has awareness of methodological nationalism increased in translation studies in the last few decades? Lambert’s suggestions for future research in 1991 were smaller minorities, nonstandard languages, oral traditions, interconnected languages, regions, and cities. If we consider research into translation and migration, postcolonialism, multilingual cities, and hybrid language varieties (see Cronin 2003; Bandia 2014; Gentzler 2008; Simon 2011; Inghilleri 2017), Lambert’s calls have been answered. Much interesting research that does not perpetuate methodological nationalism has been conducted. However, I argue that an overhaul of old vocabularies and the development of alternative methodologies is still needed. In the following, I will show that binary vocabularies such as domestication and foreignization are derived from the national story of translation and are difficult to unpack in transnational and globalized contexts where multiple positionings blur the distinction between us and them. I will also highlight how translation research that introduces heterogeneity into the source/target binaries does not go far enough as it still fails to fully break with an understanding of translation as communication between, in this case, heterogeneous culture A and heterogeneous culture B. What is at stake is a discourse of translation that is capable of producing social and political relationships which are not based on international or intercultural encounter (Sakai 1997: 15). It is not that this view is wrong, but rather that it has become so widely adopted that it is blocking the emergence of other ways of imagining and portraying translation. The oft-repeated phrase ‘translation across languages and cultures’ blocks our view of the other social positionings that are brought into contact. Globalization is shifting frameworks of self and solidarity from nationalism to nonterritorial and hybrid intersections of faith, class, gender, race, age, sexual orientation, bodily condition, etc., along with plurinational and/or

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Of foreign national origin Domestication and foreignization have received significant criticism for being vague, simplistic, and dichotomic. Mona Baker proposes a narrative theory methodology to avoid reducing a translator’s strategy to either domesticating or foreignizing (2007). Anthony Pym argues that the borders of a chronically domesticating A nglo-American culture are difficult to see (1996). Maria Tymoczko suggests that the object of resistance in ethnodeviant translation is extremely vague (2010: 210). While these critiques are important, they overlook the most problematic aspect of Venuti’s dichotomy: its reliance on national paradigms. By historicizing the domestic/foreign binary in German Romantic translation thinking, Venuti (2008) reveals that the initial formulation of foreignization was entwined with nationalist rivalries. This history is particularly significant since nationalized definitions of the foreign, as I will now show, persist to this day. Venuti demonstrates how Schleiermacher promoted foreignizing translation as a cultural weapon in a nationalist and class struggle against France and the Gallicized Prussian aristocracy (2008: 86–90). It is only a small section of society, the educated bourgeois, that determines what is foreign and its inverse, along with its national name and usefulness for a domestic imperialist project. In opposition to France and the domesticating strategies of French neoclassicism, Schleiermacher highlights the essential learnedness and mediating nature of German culture. A less cited example of nationalist sparring taking place through translation discourse can be found in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who argued that the Americans, French [contrary to what Schleiermacher holds], and Germans are much more adaptable and sympathetic to foreign ways of thinking than the English (Gruesz 2002: 85– 86). Venuti suggests that the motivations and effects of Schleiermacher’s willingness to accommodate the foreign, conceived as a kind of treasure in a newly cross-pollinated German language, are dubious. Ultimately it would seem that foreignising translation does not so much introduce the foreign into German culture as use the foreign to confirm and develop a sameness, a process of fashioning an ideal cultural self on the basis of an other, a cultural narcissism, which is endowed, moreover, with historical necessity. (2008: 92) While Schleiermacher’s interest in the foreign as part of a process of national self- definition is vastly different from Goethe’s artistic cosmopolitan desire to translate and be translated ( Bielsa 2014: 400), both envisage the foreign as a foreign nation, foreign national, and foreign national literature. What is more, in Schleiermacher’s famous lecture ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, the method of moving the reader towards the author is proposed in terms of representing what is foreign in one’s mother tongue (translated in Lefevere 1977: 79). As Pym (1995) writes, Schleiermacher’s lecture is more than anything about belonging. It is clear who belongs and who does not, and any sort of non-belonging is eschewed. I argue that such a circumscribed scheme of subjectivity based on the symbiosis of shared language and mutual belonging has endured in Venuti’s foreignization, and is in fact essential to be able to figure out what falls on either side of the domestic/foreign binary.

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To adopt or analyse a foreignizing strategy the translator or researcher must determine what constitutes the domestic and the foreign. This can only be done by making normative judgements about reading practices, including what is known, unknown, acceptable, or unacceptable from the point of view of a single subject position. This single subject position is almost always national, i.e. the French, Chinese, Iranians, A nglo-Americans,3 etc. However, while it may have been beyond Goethe and Schleiermacher’s time to imagine the domestic and the foreign on non-national terms, it is certainly not beyond ours. A slightly exaggerated example that demonstrates the absurdity of the single subject position of the average national reader, or viewer in this case, can be found in the history of Japanese subtitling. To determine how fast Japanese people could read a subtitle, a film was shown to a Shinbashi geisha, whose personal reading speed set the three to four character per second rule ( Nornes 1999: 20). The process of determining the domestic and the foreign does not culminate in the representation of an already existing domesticity and foreignness, it is part of their ongoing construction in a national distribution of subjectivities and meanings. It is in this way that translation is constitutive of cultures (Gentzler 2008: 5), as is how we think and write about it. Venuti is aware that the single subject position is controversial when he writes in ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’: A translator may find that the very concept of the domestic merits interrogation for its concealment of heterogeneity and hybridity which can complicate existing stereotypes, canons, and standards applied in translation. (2000: 469) The domestic is no longer the cultural or academic elite or the status quo in the publishing industry, as it was in The Translator’s Invisibility, but a heterogeneous community of readers (2000: 477). However, this shift makes foreignization impossible. If the domestic is something other than dominant values enforced by powerful agents, how can it be disrupted? All this does not mean that some of the effects associated with foreignization cannot be achieved, we simply need less reductive and non-binaristic vocabularies to explore them.

The addition of heterogeneity does not go far enough In Gentzler’s reading of the English translation of Tres Tristes Tigres, he praises Suzanne Jill Levine’s transcreation of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s ‘ hip, Afro- Cuban, streetwise Havana Cuban- Spanish into an extremely local, equally streetwise, hip, New York City jargony, Afro-A merican, gay-inflected US vernacular’ (2012). Translation, he argues, takes place between two multiply situated and interconnected living-literary languages. Levine plays with Spanglish, the slangs of different regions and minoritized groups, and biblical and popular culture references that are shared by both the context of the writer and the translator (2008, 2012). ‘Her translations both carry a text across from a complex Culture A to and equally complex Culture B and also reveal the multilingual, multicultural, and myriad semiotic sign systems underlying both’ (2012). As with foreignizing translation, Levine disturbs the regime of fluency and standard usage, transforming and expanding the translating language. In his analysis, Gentzler introduces into the domestic the masked heterogeneity and hybridity that Venuti (2000: 469) referred to above. He situates what is different as simultaneously here, within the reader’s macro-community, as well as there, in an alternative spatiotemporality. He claims that Levine asks ‘readers to confront the other from within national borders’ (2008: 35). Consideration of the difference between languages and cultures as well as the 118

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diversity among them is a step in the right direction. However, translation is still imagined as movement from national culture A to national culture B; these sites have merely become multicultural. What still needs to be explored further, as Gentzler also highlights, is the implications for vocabularies and methodologies of the interconnectedness of languages, cultures, and semiotic systems. If we remove the tired image of culture A and culture B altogether, we could empirically construct the complex individuals and groups who read and engage with source texts and translations. The way in which Gentzler analyses Levine’s translation is very similar to the way Venuti formulates foreignization through the example of the work of Victorian translator Francis Newman. In what I will call the ‘Newman formulation’, a foreignizing strategy resists academic literary values and disrupts the elitist concept of national culture by incorporating popular forms and language that span the past and present, poetic and novelistic genres, and English and Scottish ( Venuti 2008: 120–121). Both Gentzler and Venuti ascribe a similarly Newmanesque value to the translations of two very different novels. I refer to Tres Tristes Tigres, a Cuban novel by an exiled male writer from 1968, in the case of Gentzler, and Kitchen, a Japanese novel by Banana Yoshimoto, a young female writer, from 1988, translated by Megan Backus, in the case of Venuti (1998). The latter celebrates Backus’s mix of colloquialism and archaic formality and the way in which the narrator ‘sends [the protagonist’s] language shifting through registers and references, from h igh-tech slang to Hollywood love talk to mystical theology’ (1998: 85). This recalls Gentzler’s praise of Levine’s postmodern potpourri of minoritized voices and high and low cultural tropes. Even though translation in both cases is being conceived as a tool to reimagine the domestic and represent heterogeneity, it is still understood as an activity whose sphere of action and influence is the nation state. Another issue arising in Gentzler and Venuti is that heterogeneity is contemplated in relation to languages, cultures, and semiotic systems, but does not extend to assumptions about audience. In Gentzler, the assumed target readers of Levine’s translation are a homogeneous community of non-othered US readers who are confronted by the difference of the other ‘ from within national borders’. This translation hermeneutic displays a dualistic understanding of who reads the translation and who is read in the translation: the reader comes from the dominant social group while the read comes from minority, marginalized, or migrant groups (see Inghilleri 2017: 25 for a similar critique of an observer/observed dichotomy in multicultural societies). What alternative reading experiences has Levine’s translation created for homosexuals, Afro-A mericans, and New Yorkers the world over or streetwise hip homosexual Afro-A mericans living in New York City or even Havana? To answer this question, we need to implement methodologies that investigate actual readers in real localities. We must broaden our scope beyond the national and the centre and be open to surprises. When conducting fieldwork at an Islamic satellite channel in Egypt, the anthropologist Yasmin Moll remarks that the English subtitling centre imagines its target audience as Europeans and North Americans, yet when reading their fan emails she finds that almost all of them come from anglophone sub-Saharan African countries (2017: 400). Which translation readers and their diverse insights are being systematically forgotten? Though actual readers have seldom been addressed in translation studies, most existing research adopts a national or cross-national comparative approach to test the assumption that target readers from different national groups respond to texts and their cultural material in different ways (see Leppihalme 1997; Carter 2014; D’Egidio 2015; Chesnokova et al. 2017).4 This can also be observed in Venuti (2000) who compares two groups: Italian academics at US universities and ‘a domestic readership that is incommensurable with the interests of the Italian academics’ (2000: 478), who are defined by US nationality, native English proficiency, 119

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and the prerogatives the latter lends to textual interpretation. I argue for a more sociological approach to ‘networks of readers’ that are studied in relation to their localities, intersectional complexity, and relationships to other readers. In the case of the English translation of Tres Tristes Tigres, these networks, like the text, are transnationally distributed. I borrow the term network of readers from Brian James Baer (2006, 2014). His work on the Soviet intelligentsia as an alternative reading public that was defined by its intellect and non-participation in official culture (2006: 539) is an excellent example of the diverse reading practices of different groups within states who interpret and use translations in ways that are conditioned by their social positioning. More research like this is needed to provide empirical evidence on who reads translations and where, along with their particular motivations for and modes of reading. This would increase the frames of encounter opened up by the act of translation, going beyond the frame of nation encountering nation or culture encountering culture. In consequence, the causes of difference and sameness are broadened, as well as the reasons for establishing contact. Translation would become a political labour and a ‘poietic social practice that institutes a relation at the site of incommensurability’ (Sakai 1997: 13). The drawing of new points of relation between readers would exploit the cosmopolitan possibility of globalization: to forge ‘new understandings, commonalities and frames of meaning’ among people from different localities who have never come into direct contact without one another (Held and McGrew 2000: 18). A good example can be found in Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives (2017), which addresses the role of translation in the transformation of transnational feminism, exploring points of relation between different intersectional feminisms in pursuit of the non-ethnocentric goal of justice and equality.

The fate of foreignization I have argued that the domestic/foreign binary has been construed as two circumscribable national cultures, and that foreignization has been pursued within the context of the nation. If cultures were truly viewed as heterogeneous and interconnected, and readers were imagined as diverse networks located across the globe, this would, to borrow Venuti’s (2000: 469) words, seriously complicate the application of certain standards in translation studies. If I adopted the domestic/foreign binary and its derived terms foreignization and domestication in my current research on the translation of US Latina/o migration stories into Spanish, it would force me to ravel out, against the facts, sustained entanglements of the domestic and the foreign. As Pratt et al. argues, ‘[b]ecause it sustains difference, a translation paradigm is too blunt an instrument to grasp the heterodox subjectivities and interfaces that come out of entanglements sustained over time’ (2010: 95–96). In Days of Awe, a novel by CubanAmerican writer Achy Obejas, Barbarita, a red-haired Cuban with a life-long ChineseCuban paramour, translates Bei Dao’s poems, recently read in Tiananmen Square, for a group of young Chinese- Cubans (2001: 41– 42). The latter need the help of a ‘ foreigner’ to China with whom they share their Spanish native language to unlock the present of a world whose memory they have inherited from their migrant families. I am hard pressed to separately map the domestic and the foreign onto this scene. The foreigner and second-language speaker has the key to the ‘domestic’ and red hair and hyphenated selves announce the ghosts of former foreign worlds. Examples such as this abound in US Latina/o migration stories and diasporic literature in general. The identity and location of the readers of the Spanish translations of US Latina/o migration stories are also indeterminate. When a resident of San José de Ocoa opens the short story ‘Ysrael’ from Negocios, the Spanish translation of Drown by Junot Díaz, and finds Yunior 120

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and his hermano running amuck in San José de Ocoa, is that reader having an experience of the foreign? As Rebecca Walkowitz writes, ‘ because languages are not conduits or indices for homes, we can no longer expect that reading should offer access to “ foreignness” ’ (2015: 177). Access to foreignness depends on the translation strategy, but it also depends on reader positioning, which is more of a quagmire than a national monolingual view of literature would have us believe. This has been demonstrated by Walkowitz’s ‘ born translated’ analysis of texts that are written in English for a heterogeneous global audience (2015). Starting in many languages and addressing many places, Walkowitz argues that the relationship between these texts and their cultures or ‘ homes’ is unpredictable, dynamic, and subject to localglobal networks of interdependent meanings and consequences. The same is true of US Latina/o migration stories, making it difficult to identify the hierarchy of values against which Venuti might prescribe resistance. The source texts already disrupt US monolingualism and publishing standards, using translingual syntax, a mélange of local and transamerican argots, and non-italicized foreign words. Which hierarchy of values or publishing standards should the hemispherically and transatlantically distributed translations into Spanish(es) challenge? The ‘target culture’ of the Spanish translations of Junot Díaz is the Dominican Republic, but it is also the rest of Latin America, Spain, the Spanish-reading public in Berlin and New Jersey for that matter—the ‘ foreign’ setting in which much of the source text takes place. What, then, is the fate of foreignization? I have shown that it is inappropriate as an analytical tool in translation contexts where the nation has become what Simon calls a ‘potentially confusing and even dangerous category’ (2002). However, it would be a mistake to reject foreignization without conserving in some form what I understand to be its cosmopolitan purpose: to expose oneself to different ways of life, accepting the other as other and the self as a relative other, and being open to self-criticism and change ( Bielsa 2010, 2018). In Bielsa’s understanding of foreignization, which is closer to Berman’s trial of the foreign than to Venuti, she emphasizes difference but also sharing. In an excellent news translation example borrowed from Roger Silverstone’s Media and Morality (2007), Bielsa and Aguilera (2017) praise a foreignizing strategy in which an Afghani blacksmith speaks simultaneously to us and about us, interpreting on his own unique terms, which are respected in the strange translation, the state of the world that we hold in common. What is at stake is a position of respect towards and a decision to care about the strange voices and ways of life of others in the context of a shared world of interconnected problems. How this is worked out in practice should be empirically shown without resorting to the abstractions of neat binaries or national groups. ‘Foreignness’ will depend on each context and should be measured by distances. This less reifying term does a better job at visualizing the relative and/or reciprocal strangenesses that differing subject positions experience in relation to one another. A less reductive and non-binaristic resignification of foreignization must also consider the distances within the networks of readers of a translation. Such an attitude can be found in Sakai’s theory of heterolingual address. He defends a form of address whereby one writes for multiple readers at the same time. What is key to this attitude towards audience is that it imagines a different sort of ‘us’, a collectivity among which partial comprehension, lack of comprehension, and even misunderstanding are possible (1997: 4). This legitimates different degrees of understanding as genuine reading experiences, while accepting that responses to texts always vary. The heterolingual address shifts writers’ conceptions of their readers and encourages a higher degree of flexibility when reading.5 Readers are asked to become aware not that the original was not written for them, but that the translation was written for them but also for others. For Sakai, the goal of heterolingual address is to produce a new type of community: a non-aggregate community in which the ‘we’ of the subject is unstable and 121

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distances abound (1997: 9; 2010: 33). This community, unlike the one that Venuti imagines in his ‘Newman formulation’ of foreignization, spans multiple nations and includes nonnative and multilingual speakers. I am not suggesting that all translations should be carried out with the form of foreignization that I propose. What is most important is the need to rethink the proper ethical aim of translation. Since the cultural turn, this aim has been respect for the difference of the other. However, I argue that an equally vital and pressing ethical aim is to imagine different forms of collectivity and points of relation among heterogeneous local and transnational groups. This would also broaden the types of encounters we imagine or portray between differently situated readers which are facilitated by translation. In the face of our global ‘overlapping communities of fate’ ( Held and McGrew 2000: 17), this opens up new possibilities for sharing, learning, self-awareness, and feelings of solidarity and responsibility.

A constructivist approach to groups and cultural narratives One of the recurring issues in my critique of the domestic/foreign binary and foreignization is how to constitute the different groups that are on the sending and receiving ends of translation. These groups are often conceived as cultures and, more often than not, national cultures. I have suggested that it would make more sense to consider the reception of translation by actual networks of readers. However, I would still like to reflect in this final section on some of the problems arising from an understanding of culture as the sender or recipient of a translation. What this view does is reify culture, perceiving it as a cohesive whole and attributing it with agency. The source text is treated as containing or belonging to a particular culture, and the target text is expected to open a window onto it. This view is ingrained in the basic language used to describe translation such as ‘source/target culture’ and ‘receiving culture’. I observe this to be the case even in new research that confounds stable source/ target dichotomies, yet still adopts an essentialist approach to culture. I will illustrate this by example. In Translation as Reparation (2008), Bandia explores African intercultural writing and its translation into colonizing tongues such as English and French. Cultures are said to assert their identities (2008: 9), novels belong to peoples and regions (2008: 177), and writers and their works are frequently alluded to as metonyms or porters of African culture. Culture is referred to indiscriminately on essentialist and constructivist terms, conflating the following words: identity, cultural identity, Africanness, essence, authenticity, national conscience, life-world, way of life, world view, thought, and reality. I cite this example because Bandia’s book is otherwise excellent: he considers linguistic and cultural hybridity, the breakdown of binaries, and the complex relationship between language and geography. This leads me to believe that, just as introducing heterogeneity to otherwise nationally delineated cultures does not go far enough, it is insufficient to theorize hybridity and blurred binaries without problematizing the way we approach culture and its relationship to different groups and texts in the context of translation. To problematize culture, the first step is to differentiate it from identity. Benhabib points out that identity and culture have become conflated terms (2002: 1). Groups of people rally around an identity label and demand that the state recognize and protect their cultural particularism. According to this dynamic, a group identity is defined by the culture that its members are supposed to share. In other words, identity is a claim made about people’s culture or, as in Bandia, cultures assert their identities (2008: 9). As a result of the conflation of these terms, the problems associated with certain uses of them have become increasingly similar. 122

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These include: the supposed essential attributes, boundedness, and sharing of the group, and inside/outside distinctions that assume external difference, despite the multiple group positioning of members, internal heterogeneity, and pressure for conformity (see Young 2000: 87–90, on identity; Benhabib 2002: 4, on culture). I will outline an approach to culture, which differs from identity insofar as identity relates to an individual task, ‘something one needs to do something about’ ( Bauman 1996: 19), or a claim, the naming of the ways in which ‘we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past’ (Hall 1994: 225); or a term so used and abused that it refers to nothing and everything ( Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Culture, on the other hand, is a more enduring structure that is already operating before we make a claim about it. To approach groups in translation, some of the problems listed above in relation to culture can be avoided by adopting Benhabib’s sociological constructivist approach that centres on contested cultural narratives. In this approach, the researcher is aware that the boundedness of a cultural group only appears from the perspective of an outside observer. ‘From within, a culture need not appear as a whole; rather, it forms a horizon that recedes each time one approaches it’ ( Benhabib 2002: 5). Thus, the reasons for performing the boundedness of the group must be specified. The ‘culture’ under observation is understood as a site of contested narratives where social agents describe and evaluate the actions or types of activities that are informed by their cultural context (2002: 7). The boundaries of the site are not given or fixed; rather, they are constantly being created, recreated, and negotiated (2002: 8). The cultural, in the sense of patterns of representation and symbolic codes, is considered in interaction with structural factors that are the product of material systems such as the economy or social technologies (2002: 11). This ensures a nexus between these overlapping spheres of social life. By following this approach, complex relationships can be drawn between texts, groups, and cultural narratives. This is necessary as the idea that most texts are produced within a culture for people from that culture ( Tymoczko 2007: 228) is untenable if we consider Walkowitz’s born-t ranslated texts, Sakai’s theory of heterolingual address, transnationally distributed translations, and global media flows. Instead of assuming that there is a one-to- one relationship between a source text and a particular culture based on provenance,6 it must first be asked: how does the source text articulate relationships to contested cultural narratives? The cultural narratives in question may respect the boundaries of the nation state, fall within its frontiers, and/or reach further outwards to the diasporic and the global. To explore these relationships, social agents in the cultures must be identified, along with how they are narrating and judging their actions. This keeps the narration of culture in the present, as opposed to letting it get bogged down in stereotypes and established histories. Writers cease to be representatives of particular cultures. Rather, they become social agents who participate in the construction and contestation of cultural narratives. Works also cease to be the representation or property of a culture, becoming part of the way cultural narratives are negotiated and come into contact with other cultural narratives. With its emphasis on fluidity, contact, and various local to global scales of influence, this approach could be seen to be complicit with the degradation of minoritized cultures in the context of the uneven playing field of globalization. However, views of culture that emphasize travel and borrowing suggest that cultures have always been constituted or changed through contact. In his writings on culture, James Clifford considers travel, understood broadly as ‘ inside- outside connections’ (1997: 28), and contact as fundamental to the production of cultural meanings. Similarly, Walkowitz shows that in an age of world literature local stories are not limited to the local and the particular, but dependent on the global and 123

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the different, including other languages, geographies, and literary histories (2015: 202). The problem is not, as Cronin argues in relation to minority cultures and endangered languages, ‘the fact of contact’ but rather ‘the form of contact’ (2003: 167). He suggests that communities should have control over translation processes and be able to use them as an enabling force. When noting that control can quickly slip into coercion, he sees translation and the ‘outside points of reference’ that it provides as an antidote to exclusionary definitions of community ( p. 168). However, this conclusion seems hasty as exclusionary definitions of community can be written from the inside or the outside and, as Benhabib notes, are often clearer from the outside. A translator can translate based on an exclusionary view of a community represented in the source text, and a researcher can adopt that view when analysing it. This is why it is so important to provide a justification for bounding a group of individuals together, and to address culture as the narration and judgement of actions by different social agents. Nothing is taken for granted and groupness is posited through methodology, not ontology. It is precisely this shift from ontology to methodology that Beck recommended as a way out of the unconscious habits of methodological nationalism.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the ways in which translation is often visualized as movement between binaries whose poles take on a national guise. This is due to the way translation has been mobilized to establish a relationship on national terms between language and culture. Based on previous critiques of methodological nationalism, I have argued for an alternative conceptualization of translation processes that considers the national as one factor among interconnected local/regional/global phenomena, including nonterritorial and hybrid frameworks of self and solidarity. The problem with the national story of translation is that it has become what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously calls a single story. Methodological nationalism unconsciously but systematically excludes other stories of translation that fall outside a national organization of texts, languages, cultures, and readers. As an alternative, I have proposed an approach to readers that empirically addresses who reads translations, where, and how, which opens up the cosmopolitan possibility of imagining and portraying new social and political relationships between differently situated individuals and groups. At a time when globalization has shattered certainties, drawing relationships between texts and groups has become increasingly complex. In response, I have outlined a sociological constructivist methodology to address groupness and the way in which texts manifest relationships to contested cultural narratives. It is only by revising our vocabularies and methodologies that we will be able to fully realize the theoretical implications of the challenge to methodological nationalism and binaries in translation studies.

Further reading Gentzler, E. (2012) ‘Translation Without Borders’. Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal. http:// translation.fusp.it/articles/translation-without-borders This article provides a critical historical overview of translation studies to challenge the system of metaphors and binaries on which the discipline is based, revalorizing semiotic approaches and proposing the study of translation through circuitous textual routes and smaller groups of ‘receivers’. Inghilleri, M. (2017) Translation and Migration. London: Routledge. This book draws on historical, ethnographic, and visual case studies to explore migrants’ multiple attachments and modes of critical self-u nderstanding, and the way in which translating and interpreting practices mediate their relationship to the host society and other migrant groups. 124

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Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On “ Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. This demanding collection of essays critiques the historical and intellectual constructs of nation, national language, and civilization based on schemes of mutually reifying ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ “cofigurations”. Walkowitz, R. (2015) Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. This book offers a study of contemporary anglophone world literature written for heterogeneous global audiences, arguing that to read their literary form Romantic and multiculturalist concepts must be eschewed in favour of global circulation dynamics and multiscalar social histories.

Notes





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Sakai, N. (2010) ‘Translation and the Figure of Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action’, Profession, 10, pp. 24–34. Sakai, N. and Neilson, B. (2014) ‘Introduction’, Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 4, pp. 9–29. Scholte, J. A. (2005) Globalization: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Silverstone, R. (2007) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Simon, S. (2002). ‘Germaine de Staël and Gayatri Spivak: Culture Brokers’, in Tymoczko, M. and Gentzler, E. (eds.), Translation and Power. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 122–140. Simon, S. (2011) Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. London: Routledge. Tymoczko, M. (2007) Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. London: Routledge. Tymoczko, M. (ed.) (2010) Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge. Venuti, L. (2000) ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in Venuti, L. (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 468–488. Venuti, L. (2008) The Tranlator’s Invisibility, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Vertovec, S. (2009) Transnationalism. Abingdon: Routledge. Walkowitz, R. L. (2015) Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Widler, B. (2004) ‘A Survey Among Audiences of Subtitled Films in Viennese Cinemas’, Meta, 49(1), pp. 98–101. Young, I. M. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Part II

People

9 Translation and the semiotics of migrants’ visibility Moira Inghilleri

Introduction The immediate effects of migration on individuals are mostly experienced in synchronic moments – events lived at particular points in time as a cluster of culturally, socially, and linguistically managed encounters and entanglements with others. Migration is at the same time an unfolding diachronic process: a singularly marked instantiation of social life involving movement, transformation, and continuous becoming. Many of the same factors that have historically shaped identities in migrant societies continue to do so, including specific forms of socialization that first-, second-, and even third-generation migrants undergo. Though these may differ across space and time, generally they still occur through interactions in workplaces, schools, communities, or more intimate relationships with individuals from inside or outside of race, class, or ethnic groupings. The willingness of members of one community to recognize perceived outsiders as fellow human is challenged in these encounters, and under certain circumstances, can be fraught with conflict or contradiction. The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) called attention to the ways in which individuals present themselves to others in order to project forms of identity, making a distinction between signs given, the things people do consciously to make a specific impression of themselves in certain contexts, and signs given off, the impressions given to others – the meanings others interpret – that an individual may or may not consciously intend (1959: 2). Goffman’s interest in the presentation of the self was part of his larger aim of investigating society beyond its presumed permanent structures and their different forms of organization. In this endeavour, he was joining other influential sociologists before him including Georg Simmel (1950: 9), for example, who claimed that ‘ if the concept “society” is taken in its most general sense, it refers to the psychological interaction among individual human beings’, however superficial or impermanent these moments might be. Earlier Charles Horton Cooley (1922: 189) had introduced the concept of the ‘ looking glass self ’ to distinguish ‘the imagination of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification’. But whereas Cooley had understood this process to be confined to the mind of individuals, Goffman, following Simmel, viewed this social interactionist approach as ‘anti-system’ as it 131

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ignored the organizational and structural elements involved in how individuals ‘take each other into consideration, the ways in which they construct joint action’ (Goffman 1959: 335– 336). As he would later elaborate, I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another. […] Not then, men and their moments. Rather, moments and their men. (Goffman 1967: 2–3) Goffman left the matter of the more intransigent structural issues affecting what he called ‘the interaction order’ an open question, and made little reference to its function within societies undergoing major population transformations due to migration, shifting demographics, or globalization. Nevertheless, these larger social phenomena contribute significantly to the interpretive shaping of signs given and signs given off.

The incommensurability of cultures and the question of translatability In philosophical and social science debates in the m id-twentieth century the ‘incommensurability of cultures’ argument emerged through the writings of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend (see Kuhn 1970; Feyerabend 1975). In applying the idea of incommensurability to science, Kuhn suggested that scientists involved in competing scientific paradigms ‘practised their trades in different worlds’, i.e. they imposed divergent, non-intertranslatable, and possibly contradictory conceptual frameworks on the same ‘material’ world. The notion of incommensurability would become equally relevant to debates about language, culture, and the possibility of constructing meaningful dialogue across different interpretive or conceptual frameworks. On the one hand, the notion of incommensurability challenged the idea that common measures or sets of standards could come to exist with which to understand and evaluate other cultures or languages. On the other hand, it raised the question of what happens when divergent cultures or languages do come into contact – of how or if it is possible to translate the ideas, beliefs, and values from one culture or language into another (see Geertz 1973, 1983; Gellner 1982; Lukes 1982). The idea that the conceptual frameworks of disparate cultures or languages are incommensurable frequently carries with it the further implication that such frameworks are untranslatable, i.e. that there are no practices or terms used in one culture that can be equated in meaning and reference with any terms or cultural expression in the other ( Putnam 1981: 114) and that, therefore, communication itself is unlikely, if not impossible. This view of incommensurability tends to presume or encourage a view of cultures or language users as integrated wholes. The very idea of the incomparability of conceptual frameworks is based on the belief that cultures and languages are fairly intact, non- evolving entities. This notion, however, downplays the differences between members of the same culture as well as the possibility that the distinctions between different cultures do not necessarily differ in kind from the distinctions between members of a single culture. It is also challengeable on the grounds that it leaves unresolved the question of how individuals from different cultures or linguistic groups determine that they are different or the same if not by communicating with one another. This version of incommensurability has been criticized by a diverse group of scholars as self-refuting (see Chomsky 1965; Gadamer 1975; Apel 1977; Habermas 1979; Putnam 1981; Davidson 1984; Rorty 1991), for the very fact of recognizing conceptual differences would already imply that, to a certain degree, such differences had been overcome. 132

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In the t wenty-fi rst century, the politics of multiculturalism have once again come under scrutiny and interest in the question of (in)commensurability has reemerged, though framed through the discourse of social cohesion and common values. In the belief that communities have become divided and their differences entrenched, the image of unified and cohesive societies in which values remain stable, unchallenged, and non- contradictory, has entered the public discourse and ushered in a new era of contraction with respect to migration. Under these conditions, the cultivation of relationships of mutual respect between the sensibilities of established residents and those of migrants and newer minority cultures becomes especially important in strengthening and protecting the idea of multiculturalism. This idea – the proposal of mutual respect – rests on a number of assumptions that have attracted much elaboration, comment, and critique from within cultural, political, and social discourses, parts of which are not only relevant but remain central to the issue of translation. For migrants attempting to have some agency over their reception, their articulation of familiar discourses and engagement with new ones can bring challenges as they attempt to carve out their place within communities, societies, and nations, possessing and altering them, consciously and unconsciously, in meaningful ways. This chapter takes an historical approach to consider how migrants – through the interplay of signs given and signs given off – engage in the task of cultural and linguistic translation, and the crucial role that communication in all its forms plays in the (re)construction of the interaction order in multicultural societies.

Migrant spectors and the landscape In the field of cultural geography, landscapes have been identified as ‘the discursive terrain across which the struggle between the different, often hostile, codes of meaning construction has been engaged’ ( Daniels and Cosgrove 1993: 59). These authors are referring to their attempts to interpret the worlds they survey, but new migrants are involved in a similar 133

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endeavour in the new places they come to inhabit – situating themselves into a new space, regardless of the degree of assimilation permitted or desired, in which they must manage and meld their identities onto new, unfamiliar settings, a process which involves different forms of translation. Migration has always had an impact on human geography, serving an important function as the ‘eye of history’. Landscapes not only offer evidence of the enduring signs of an earlier presence of migrants whose origins have gone unrecognized or underacknowledged in the public consciousness – an archaeological record of visibility and invisibility in the translation of cultures – they are forever shaped by this presence as well. Of the major public works projects that made the first and second Industrial Revolutions possible, two that remain visible are the canals and railroads built across Britain and the United States. Their construction – a n arduous and sometimes deadly undertaking – was accomplished by tens of thousands of migrants, the largest numbers of whom were Irish and Chinese, both of whom constituted a sizeable part of the migrant labour force in two of the largest burgeoning economies of the nineteenth century. Although accounts of the Irish and Chinese migrants in the American West and on the railroads tend to foreground the conflicts between them, their historic encounter, their labour and the landscape they shared connect them through history and reveal much about the nature and construction of the interaction order in migrant societies (see Inghilleri 2017: 108–148 for a fuller discussion of these issues).

Irish ‘navvies’ and ‘Paddys’ The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are considered the golden age of canal building in Britain. The canals created the infrastructure that linked towns and cities, making the first Industrial Revolution possible. Irish seasonal migrants, due to poverty and lack of employment opportunities in Ireland throughout the year, joined the scores of British men who were known as ‘navigators’ or ‘navvies’. Together they did the laborious work of carving out waterways from rock and soil, blasting tunnels through solid rock using picks, shovels and gunpowder. Despite their major contribution to the British economy, navvies were mostly seen as a source of cheap expendable labour whose lost lives and limbs were viewed largely with indifference (Cowley 2001: 68– 69). Although the navvies came from many regions across Britain and elsewhere, it was the Irish navvies who lodged in the public image because of their numbers and their ‘separateness’. They spoke another language, had a particular cultural identity, different religious practices (80 per cent were Roman Catholic) and, most importantly, were not bound by family or community to England. If they wanted to behave badly, there wasn’t much to stop them. Any settled community would be put out by the sudden appearance of young, unattached men living in makeshift camps, working all day and, so it was said, drinking all night. (McIvor 2015: 162, 164) The behaviour attributed to the Irish navvies who made up just under one-third of the labour force of 16,000 men working on the canals was likely connected to deep-rooted prejudices and latent xenophobia directed towards the Irish by the English in this period. Although the English navvies were as disposed to drink and violence, the ‘settled communities’ of England regarded the Irish alone with a mixture of fear and contempt (Cowley 2001: 44– 48), aided by the tendency for English and Irish workers to monopolize different streets or settlements 134

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with much of the company housing supporting a policy of segregation between the two groups (2001: 65–67). The Irish fared no better in the United States, another major destination for them in the nineteenth century, with respect to the treatment they received by the anti- Catholic Protestant majority. One and a half million arrived before the Famine, another one and a half million during the Famine between 1846 and 1855, and 3 million more from 1855 to 1930 ( Lee 2006: 16). The historian J. J. Lee and others have suggested that Irish migrants in the nineteenth century lived one way or another ‘ in the Famine’s shadow’. Successive generations of migrants would have either lost parents, grandparents, or siblings to the Famine or heard tales of its horrors from others or in the US press (ibid.: 18–19). Francis Wyse, a prosperous Irish landowner, wrote a comprehensive guide for prospective British and Irish emigrants to the United States entitled America, its realities and resources (1846) in which he detailed the state of m id-n ineteenth- century social and political life there. His book is more treatise than travelogue covering some of the major questions affecting the country at the time, including slavery, the state of the union, and immigration. With regard to the latter, he advises Irish immigrants to avoid the ‘vexed and angry feelings that are every day springing up against him in this country’ ( Wyse 1846: 57). He will find it necessary to remodel himself with more becoming care, to the practice, and national peculiarities of the people he is amongst, than to which he has generally been accustomed; to abandon, or at least modify, many of his peculiar notions, and to identify more in spirit, as in his conduct, with the habits, and national feeling, than the generality of those of his countrymen who have preceded him, have deemed it of importance to attend to. (1846: 57) For the contemporary reader, Wyse’s writings provide both a synchronic and a diachronic account of the strategic role that translation and assimilation played for the Irish, particularly the less well off, in negotiating a place for themselves. Wyse’s observations about the signs his fellow Irish nationals both gave and gave off reveal the competing narratives that vied for control in the representations of their history and their character. Wyse also notes how the established political parties were using the Irish immigrants as a political weapon: sympathizing with their treatment, inciting them to act, and then remaining silent when their character, religion, and fitness for self-governance were called into question. Canal construction was one of the principle ways the Irish helped develop the commercial infrastructure required to support the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Though many were highly skilled professional canallers due to their experience in Britain, they were all referred to as ‘ditchdiggers’, perceived as ‘not merely ignorant and poor – which might be their misfortune rather than their f ault – but drunken, dirty, indolent, and riotous’ ( Dearinger 2015: 62). Kirby Miller reports how British visitors to the United States in the 1820s and 1830s remarked ‘with astonishment’ about the resemblances between the congested shanty towns of the Irish excavating the canals in the United States and their villages in Ireland, both characterized by ‘those sterling Irish comforts, a cow, a pig and a “praty garden” ’ (Miller 1985: 274). Canal construction was associated with diseases like Asiatic cholera brought on by the working and living conditions of canallers and their families ( Dearinger 2015: 24). Despite the physical evidence of their hard work across the United States, native-born American Protestants – t ranslating the Irish through their nativist lens – continually criticized 135

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these immigrants for their poverty and manners, their supposed laziness and lack of discipline, their public drinking style, their Catholic religion, and their capacity for criminality and collective violence. The stereotypes of the Irish became so ingrained among individuals about this group that the lines between Protestants’ theatrical or political cartoon parodies of the Irish and the reality of Irish culture became blurred ( Williams 1996: 1). An Irishman taking a drink, getting into a fight, or just generally having a high old time, was not like other men who might drink, fight, or celebrate. He was acting an elaborately scripted role. He was filling a grimly comic prophecy. He was playing the stereotype of himself. (1996: xx) Addressing the Irish immigrants’ propensity towards collective violence, Kevin Kenny writes that, coming from a predominantly rural country divided by territorial boundaries and county loyalties, Irish men (and some women) had traditionally resolved land-related and other types of disputes through both covert activity and violence. During the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants in the United States fought each other not due to some innate temperament, as the stereotypes suggested, but in a context where they were involved in ‘a desperate struggle for access to employment with each side attempting to drive the other off the job’ ( Kenny 2006: 373). The Irish were the first ‘ethnic’ immigrant group to arrive in extremely large numbers and to gain high visibility across the cities and towns along the east coast of the United States where most settled. Ireland in the early nineteenth century remained ‘a colonial appendage to the world’s most advanced industrial economy’ in which the great majority of farmers were tenants at will or tenants on short lease labouring under a ‘grossly inequitable system of landownership’ (Miller 1985: 32). Even before the Famine, for most of those who emigrated, their scant holdings in Ireland were increasingly unable to sustain them or their families where the poorest among them were ‘dressed in cast- off rags, through which naked arms and legs protruded, and lived in one-room, mud-floored cabins without chimneys or windows’ in which ‘ beds were considered luxuries, and many poor families slept huddled together on straw laid on the bare floor’. Many had taken to ‘eating only one meal per day or every other day, and consuming their remaining potatoes “with a bone” in them – that is half raw – to slow their digestion’ (1985: 53). For Irish immigrants of the nineteenth century, like many other newly arrived immigrants, the cultural and physical impressions they gave of themselves were constituted in their country of origin and by the conditions there that compelled them to leave. The signs or impressions they gave off, on the other hand, were created and circulated through the representations of members of the majority Protestant culture who depicted them as dull-w itted but comic and harmless ‘Micks’ or menacing simianized ‘Paddies’, i.e. somewhere between primitive man and monstrous apes ( Kenny 2006: 364). Signs given off also instigated competition between the Irish and two other groups who were situated at the bottom rungs of the social and economic ladder for much of the nineteenth century: free Blacks and Chinese immigrants with whom they shared a place in history for their work in constructing the transcontinental railroad. David Roediger has suggested that the mutually expedient relationship that Irish Americans entered into with the Democratic Party during that time appealed to Irish Catholics largely because the party’s view of American nationality stressed the relevance of ‘race’, which placed them ‘safely within an Anglo- Celtic racial majority’, resolving the matter of their qualifications for citizenship. He adds, ‘Under other circumstances, 136

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Chinese ‘Celestials’ At around the same time the second wave of Irish entered the port of New York, a much smaller number of Chinese immigrants made a similar journey following China’s defeat by the British in the first Opium War in 1842. The relatively small number of Chinese immigrants, especially the merchant class, were greeted with less hostility than their Irish counterparts. New York merchants and traders who had benefited from the China trade approved of the more ‘gentlemanly’ Chinese merchants among the new arrivals, at the same time however they maintained ambivalence towards them due to the perceived resistance of the Chinese to Western notions of progress and modernization. Once admired for its splendors and wisdom, China became increasingly measured by how friendly it was to Western economic and cultural expansion. Chinese workers entering the port of New York at this time not only walked into a spatial hierarchy but were also deemed targets of racial backwardness and ridicule, the perfect foil for progressive, A nglo- Saxon, and Protestant patrician society becoming more and more assured of its self-declared special destiny. ( Tchen 1996: 146) Positive relationships between the Irish and Chinese were not uncommon in the m idn ineteenth century, including marriage. Both groups settled in the lower East side immigrant neighbourhoods of New York where they formed alliances with thousands of other immigrants to whom they sold their goods and with whom, particularly the Irish, they married. One in four Chinese men were married to Irish women during this period (1996: 128–129) in part due to the fact that Chinese male immigrants were few in number, generally single, of marrying age, and there were hardly any Chinese women among them, whereas Irish woman of marrying age in New York far outnumbered Irish men. Relationships between the Irish and Chinese were frequently satirized, however, in political cartoons, popular songs on the minstrel circuit, and in vaudeville acts, most famously, T. S. Denison’s ‘Patsy O’Wang: An Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-Up’ (1895), a play about “Chin Sun”, the son of a Chinese mother and an Irish father, who by the end of the play ‘transforms into “Patsy O’Wang” by drinking from a bottle of brandy’ ( Lee 1999: 78–79). In the play, Chin Sun is hired, much to the chagrin of the two Irish domestics, Mike and Nora, as a cook in the home of Dr. Fluke who runs a ‘modern sanitarium’. When Chin Sun inadvertently drinks some brandy, ‘the spirit of Hibernia’ [the Latin name for Ireland] is released and his Irish self is revealed, much to Dr. Fluke’s chagrin (‘I hired you for a Chinaman. A bargain is a bargain’.) who attempts to turn him back by ‘ feeding him great quantities of tea, measuring progress by how obedient he perceives Patsy to be’ while ‘Patsy siphons off the tea and declares that he has always been and is determined to remain “Irish forever” ’ ( Lee 1999: 79). The play operates on the popular stereotypes of the Chinese and Irish working-class communities and highlights the onus on both groups to prove their capacity to serve as loyal citizens suitable for American democracy, while at the same time underscoring the growing advantage of the Irish in the racialized politics and immigration policies in full force during that period, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As Robert G. Lee describes, 137

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In the schizophrenic m ixed-race Chin Sun/Patsy O’Wang, the ‘wild’ Irish and the ‘docile’ Chinese together represent the duality of working-class nature as simultaneously fearsome and childlike, in need of both training and discipline. Irish wildness is controlled and reformed by the presence of the Chinese. Once his true Irish nature is unleashed by liquor, Patsy becomes potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, the plot must end with Patsy choosing his Irish whiteness, however tainted it may be by ethnic stereotype, because it alone offers a path into America. However divided by class, accent, and religion the Irish might be, whiteness confers upon them the freedom to create a unified ethnic identity as Irish Americans and use it as a vehicle for political power and economic mobility. (ibid.: 80) Many more thousands of Chinese immigrants left China for the west coast of the United States lured by the Gold Rush, fleeing conditions not unlike those suffered by the Irish: social unrest, poverty, and increasing famine caused by the growing British economic penetration of their country and the Taiping Rebellion against the ruling Qing dynasty which by 1864 had claimed the lives of tens of millions ( Dearinger 2015: 153). The majority were men from Guangdong Province in the Pearl River Delta contracted to merchants who advanced them ‘the rate of a ticket plus interest which the labourers contracted to repay’, with the help of Chinese benevolent associations in San Francisco who coordinated their passage (2015: 154). Many of these associations eventually directed Chinese workers to the Central Pacific Railroad which was in competition with the Union Pacific Railroad to lay the most rail lines across the Great Plains. Like canal work, railroad construction was a gruelling and dangerous occupation. Reports of Chinese workers killed by snow slides, freezing to death, and disease, especially smallpox, were not uncommon. A brief report entitled ‘Bones in Transit’ in the Sacramento Union in 1870 describes the transportation of ‘accumulated bones’ of perhaps ‘1,200 Chinamen’ nearly all ‘the remains of the company who were engaged in building the road’. The report also mentions the religious custom of the ‘Celestial Empire’ that ‘wherever possible, the bones of its subjects shall be interred upon its own soil’, a tradition the benevolent societies honoured as best they could (2015: 166). Despite their enormous contribution to United States’ industrial progress throughout the nineteenth century the Chinese remained at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy and, like their Irish counterparts, subjected to denigration in words, images and in the conditions of their labour. Invariably cast as ‘John Chinaman’, epithets targeted male immigrants as a faceless homogeneous mass. A nti- Chinese commentators depicted Chinese immigrant laborers as ‘coolies’ or forced contract laborers, no better off than slaves. The Chinese were considered weak, feminine, and submissive, yet also uncivilized and loathsome. Politicians such as Ohio representative William Mungen condemned them as a ‘poor, miserable, dwarfish race of inferior beings,’ who were ‘ docile…effeminate, pedantic, and … cowardly’. (2015: 155) It was also during this period that the pejorative term ‘Celestials’ came to be used, a term that had been used for thousands of years by China that reflected its view of itself as the Middle Kingdom or Celestial Empire, ‘positioned between heaven above and all the rest of the world 138

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below’ and whose emperor was understood to be the ‘Son of Heaven’ who ruled by divine inspiration ( Dolan 2012: 29).

From John Chinaman to Chinese Americans In a series of plays and short stories produced from the 1970s onwards, the Chinese American writer Frank Chin reclaims a central role for Chinese Americans in the history of American Western expansion, particularly their contribution to the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Chin’s work reveals the attempts made in eighteenth- a nd nineteenth- century narratives of the American West to exclude the Chinese from that history. Highlighting the pioneer spirit of the Chinese railroad workers, gold prospectors, and successful businesses, Chin’s twentieth- century Chinese American characters challenge stereotypes of themselves and their ancestors. In Chin’s novel Donald Duk (1991), the eponymous 11-year-old protagonist tangles with these spectres of history growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown where his father is a celebrated chef in their family owned restaurant. Donald attends a private school which the narrator describes as ‘a place where the Chinese are comfortable hating Chinese’. A visit from his uncle, an internationally renowned opera singer, precipitates a shift in Donald’s perceptions as his uncle reveals that their real last name is not Duk but Lee, most likely referring to the practice used by Chinese migrants to get around the exclusion laws in which Chinese American citizens would claim family members, friends or fellow villagers as their biological sons in order to help them enter the United States. Known as ‘paper sons’ even where no blood ties were shared; the ‘paper kinship’ established a bond and sense of mutual- obligation between the bestower and the recipient of the family name ( Lee 2003: 195). Through his uncle, Donald learns that his g reat-great-grandfather Lee worked on the Central Pacific Railroad. In the novel, through a dream narrative Chin reconstructs an actual event that took place involving the Union Pacific Railroad ( built mostly by Irish immigrants) and the Central Pacific Railroad (constructed primarily by Chinese immigrants). In the historical record the occasion is described as a competition that occurred on 10 May 1869 instigated by James Strobridge, chief engineer and labour boss, and Charles Crocker, Superintendent of Construction for the Central Pacific Railroad over whose workers could lay the most tracks in a single day to achieve the world’s record. The focus of the event was the driving of the ‘Golden Spike’ at Promontory Point, Utah, the spot designated by Congress ‘at which rails shall meet and form one continuous line’ from east to west.1 Taking place just a few years after the end of the Civil War, the event was to serve as a symbol of ‘a nation of diverse sections’ coming together to become ‘one nation, indivisible’ (Arrington 1969: 4) while reinforcing the Western frontier as a place of economic opportunity. In the history of Chinese railroad workers, however, the event has taken on a different meaning due to the notable absence of any Chinese workers in a famous photo taken of the event, Andrew J. Russell’s ‘East and West Shaking Hands at the Laying of Last Rail’, and the omission of their names in a report in the press where eight of the Irish workers are mentioned by name. Chin introduces these facts in the novel, prompting Donald to complain to his father about the injustice of it all, telling him, ‘We made history. Twelve hundred Chinese. And they don’t even put the name of our foreman in the books about the railroad […] It’s not fair’, to which his father responds, ‘Fair? What’s fair? History is war, not sport!’ (Chin 1991: 122–123). He tells his son that Chinese Americans have to write their own history to counter the misconceptions about them that have persisted in histories of the West. If history is war, Chin suggests, the Chinese need to fight back: 139

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We seem to be ashamed of the railroad. And I was always taught to be proud of the railroad because we built it, that the Irish were always leaving the railroad to get drunk and they refused to work with nitroglycerin, which was just invented [laughs] and the Chinese said, ‘Oh, any explosive, we’re not afraid of.’ and the Chinese weren’t afraid, and they’d go out and they mastered it, but the Irish? No. There were accomplishments to be proud of, we won the t rack-laying contest, etcetera. But no one had really gone and looked. The Chinese seemed just to accept what Whites said about us and not look for themselves.2 For Chin the most effective way to challenge these distortions is to re-t ranslate the unreliable signs given off, and in Donald Duk, Chin constructively fills in these signs with historical facts using references to legendary figures in Chinese history. He interprets the absence of Chinese workers in the photo negatively, making the absence itself a crucial feature of the sign, along with the fact that Chinese scholars had not seen fit to remark on it. There is an implication of intentionality or at least neglect on the part of the photographer and/or in the particular function the photograph has served within the dominant narrative. The first reading of intention is materially contradicted, however, by the existence of a number of related images by Russell and other photographers, artists, and illustrators in which Chinese workers do appear in the record of that particular day.3 There is also other strong evidence that, though absent from the one particular photo, the Chinese workers and their foreman were celebrated at a separate more private occasion later the same day. The following was reported in an issue of the San Francisco Newsletter. California Advertiser (May 15, 1869, IX: XV) dedicated to the golden spike ceremony in the Transcontinental Railroad Postscript under the dubious heading HONORS TO JOHN CHINAMAN: Mr. Strowbridge, when work was all over, invited the Chinamen who had been brought over from Victory for the purpose, to dine in his boarding car. When they entered all the guests and officers present cheered the chosen representatives of the race which have greatly helped to build the road – a t ribute they well deserved, and which evidently gave them much pleasure. Just above this section the report reads, ‘The Chinese really laid the last tie and drove the last spike’.4 The second interpretation of the photo as a dismissal of the workers’ significance to the railroad and a sign of broader public anti- Chinese sentiment is more complicated. While the photo could well have contributed to existing sentiment, there are a number of other interpretations given the historical context. Two additional readings are particularly plausible. The golden spike ceremony was primarily intended to demonstrate to the commercial sector and the US government, who had partly subsidized its construction, that the country was open for business. The Pacific Railroad took four years to build with an estimated cost of $500 million to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads (Arrington 1969: 13). The main credit for its completion went to the A merican-born railroad associates, industrialists, financiers, and politicians. While some non- Chinese labourers do appear in the photo in question, no details are given or can be discerned regarding their specific skills, their names, cultures, or countries of origin. In this regard, they are almost as invisible as the Chinese. In fact, the locals viewed the presence of all the migrant workers in their towns, as well as the free Blacks and Mormons, as a necessary evil in the fulfilment of America’s Manifest Destiny. The photo can thus also be translated as a sign of the threat that all immigrants posed 140

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to a growing class of people who feared that these outside-others challenged the norms of behaviour established within what remained a Protestant pluralist hierarchic order.

Spectral signs, seething glances Landscapes as powerful spectral spaces are particularly vulnerable to multiple mappings of meaning and susceptible to what the sociologist Avery F. Gordon has theorized as ‘ haunting’, her proposed method for understanding ‘ how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities…dense sites where history and subjectivity make social life’ (Gordon 1997: 8). The absence of the Chinese workers in the photograph at Promontory Point is a good example. Despite other possible translations of the photograph, the one foregrounding the ‘seething presence’ of the missing Chinese workers produced an opening for distinctly Chinese truths about the railroads to be told. It demanded a proper acknowledgement, by their descendants and the country as a whole, of these men’s place in history, delivering the type of justice to this generation of ghosts to which Derrida refers in Specters of Marx: If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, not presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. (1994: 15) The railroads, like the canals, were constructed during a time when nativist sentiment was high; all the railroad workers were perceived as cultural others by the white Protestant majority. This is evident in the denigrating statements that were frequently uttered about these groups, the invidious comparisons invoked about their characters calculated to create ill will between them, and in the negative, often parodic, representations of more positive relationships that developed between them. Contrastive negative essentializing functioned to avert any common cause among the teams in the same way that in other contexts, Irish whiteness was used to drive a wedge between free Blacks and Irish. But what Chin gives voice to was, in fact, an exaggerated rivalry between the Chinese and the Irish workers ( Dearinger 2015: 188–191), which draws attention away from the effort expended by both groups to accomplish the unforgiving task of laying 10 miles of track in a single day, described by David Haward Bain as follows: One by one, platform cars dumped their iron, two miles of material in each trainload, and teams of Irishmen fairly ran the five-hundred-pound rails and hardware forward; straighteners led the Chinese gangs, shoving the rails into place and keeping them to gauge while spikers walked down the ties, each man driving one particular spike and not stopping for another, moving on to the next rail; levelers and fillers followed, raising ties where needed, shoveling dirt beneath, tamping, and moving on – ‘no man stops’ Charley Crocker directed, ‘nor allows another man to pass’ – and no man, Irish or Chinese, did more than one task, each a cog in that large dusty, sweating machine advancing up the incline toward the summit. (1999: 639, see also 658) None of the workers had as much to gain by the joining of the rails as the men who drove them to complete the task. In fact, for the vast majority, the ceremony meant the end of this 141

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relatively lucrative employment. This is not to deny that the Irish were guilty of demonizing the Chinese to improve their own status at the time, encouraged by the fact that the railroad bosses’ vocal support for the Chinese superior workmanship was often used as a means of demeaning and demonstrating hostility towards the Irish ( Tchen 1996: 132–134). However, reproducing negative stereotypes of one or the other group’s character or courage can end up supporting the nativist attacks on both the Chinese and the Irish workers which was likely calculated to fuel their competition, as both groups fought to change the ‘outsider’ status they occupied in the United States in the nineteenth century. The Chinese workers on the Central Pacific Railroad can be said to have exemplified in their expectation of and insistence on the essence of Chinese food, dress and opium (not alcohol), the way the given can be collectively achieved beyond the competitive nature of migratory life, as described below. The cook obtained food, usually dried, from Chinese merchants in Sacramento and San Francisco, and it was decidedly unlike anything the whites had ever seen before. The cookfires sent up fragrant clouds of peanut oil and garlic of simmering white rice or clear noodles, of stir-f ried cuttlefish, abalone, shrimp, and oysters, of mushrooms, bamboo shoots, bok choy, mung beans, snow peas, and kelp, and, most often on Sundays, of pork or chicken slaughtered on the spot. Seeing this alien cornucopia, the Irishmen shuddered-a nd turned smugly to their unvarying menus of boiled beef, boiled potatoes, boiled beans, boiled coffee, and bread and butter. And the following day the mountainside was waiting for all. (Bain 1999: 221–222) Goffman has observed that, ‘there seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shrivelling up the reality in which one is lodged’ (Goffman 1961: 41). The smug glance and shudder of the Irish workers can also be seen as a moment of what Goffman identified as ‘civil inattention’ in which …one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present…while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design. (1963: 84) There does seem to be more than simple disgust at the unfamiliar Chinese food here in the Irishmen’s shudder and smug relish for their own food and drink (which were known to cause dysentery). Chinese elaborations beyond beans and boiled beef may have seemed at one glance to be merely a neutral sign given but could be taken by the defensive Irish workers as a sign given off, unsettled as they were by racist discourses aimed at them. Where signs given and given off are simultaneously in play, it seems, it can be difficult to extricate one from the other.

Conclusion It is clear that mass migration and the nativist response to certain ethnic groups including the Chinese and the Irish contributed significantly to the interpretive shaping of signs given and given off throughout the nineteenth century. For both the Chinese and Irish immigrants 142

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who arrived during this period, the cultural and physical impressions they gave of themselves were constituted in their countries of origin and by the conditions there that compelled them to leave. The signs or impressions they gave off, on the other hand, were created and circulated through the representations of members of the majority Protestant culture who observed the Irish and the Chinese through a colonialist frame. The different array of cultural markers that demonstrate a migrant presence in a particular space and time play a critical role in the (re)construction of the interaction order in multicultural societies. These markers can be important indicators of which aspects of migrant selves or groups are selected for representation, by whom, for what or for whose purpose, and the local and global factors influencing these. Whether viewed from a distance or in close proximity, these signs create an impression and elicit some type of immediate response. In certain contexts, the public appearance of multilingual signs or the sound of unfamiliar languages unavoidably interrupts prior assumptions of homogeneity, opening them to diverse interpretations or recontextualizations. Such signs have both a social and an interactional function, i.e. they ‘signify’ beyond the particular groups they reference. And like all signifiers there can be gaps between their intention and their interpretation (see Inghilleri 2017: 149–175 for a fuller discussion of these issues). In his essay entitled ‘The Public Realm’,5 the sociologist Richard Sennett suggests that in large cosmopolitan cities where cultural markers of multiple migrant communities abound, most residents are or appear indifferent to the culturally and linguistically diverse environments they inhabit. He describes a walk he took from lower Manhattan to the upper east side where he observed his own and others’ interactions in the diverse neighbourhoods through which he passed. He concludes that what the inhabitants of such spaces, himself included, seemed to prize most was their anonymity which creates a ‘peculiar sort of neutralization’ disturbed only when some unwelcome proximity to an unknown person or unexpected event occurs in which case he writes, one ‘need only keep walking to stop from feeling’. In these comments, Sennett demonstrates a similar understanding of cultures to that implied in Clifford Geertz’s proposed response to the challenge of living in the ‘collage’ of contemporary multicultural societies (Geertz 2000: 87). With respect to the encounters this entails, Geertz suggested that we must ‘ learn to grasp what we cannot embrace’ by strengthening the capacity of our imaginations to see and judge individuals and their cultures that are ‘alien to us and likely to remain so’. He wrote, To live in a collage one must in the first place render oneself capable of sorting out its elements, determining what they are (which usually involves determining where they come from and what they amounted to when they were there) and how, practically, they relate to one another, without at the same time blurring one’s own sense of one’s own location and one’s own identity within it. Sennett seems to follow Geertz’s thinking in the following description included in his essay where he reinforces a ‘we’ and ‘they’ view of social relations in multicultural societies that leaves aside the possibility of a more extended dialogue between diverse others or a role for translation in altering cultural meanings and historical relationships from one social and geographical setting to another. He writes, In the upper Twenties along Lexington Avenue bags of spices lie in ranks with the shops run by Indians and Pakistanis; when the doors are open in spring and fall, the combined scents waft out to the street, but like most of the ethnic enclaves in New York these 143

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sensuous sights and smells are not beacons to the outside world. In the Indian shops few of the bags of spice are identified by explanatory labels; the tourists who, upon asking for an explanation of the mysterious bags, will be smilingly informed by perfectly polite shopkeepers that one is ‘ hot spice’ or another an ‘ imported ingredient.’ The shop owners stand in their doorways in summer, making jokes or comments – could it possibly be about us? – which are met by their neighbors with the faintest parting of the lips, the slight smile that acknowledges more, and perhaps more condemns, than a loud laugh.  Reminiscent of the silent exchange between the Chinese and the Irish workers, the sensuous sights and smells and the shop owners’ use of their impenetrable language – their signs given  – stymy the tourists and raise suspicion in the neighbours that the laughter comes at their expense. What is missing in this account is what comes next, accepting that even seemingly precarious interactional moments can establish the initial conditions for further contact, and thus the possibility of more than a permanent ‘we’ and ‘they’. The essence of interaction is the process of translation. Translation hinges on the search for relevant correspondence between terms and practices understood in their familiar situated meanings, a search for matching nuance, on the one hand, and practical purpose on the other. The work involved for migrants, like all people, in translating space into place, of developing a sense of belonging, is ongoing. For Goffman, the interaction order served as a ‘membrane’ or set of ‘transformational rules’ for the conduct of society (Goffman 1983: 11) that were both pliable and structuring, allowing some things to pass through while stopping others, depending on the existing norms regulating social actors and the social order. Goffman highlighted the ‘potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery’ (Goffman 1959: 8, italics added) present in our encounters with others. This more dialectical view suggests the potential for the growth of mutual understanding between diverse others in their everyday routine encounters – whether fleeting or recurring – and communication and by implication, translation are essential to this process.

Further reading Dearinger, R. (2015) The Filth of Progress. Berkeley: University of California Press. Focusses on the immigrant workers who constructed the canals and railroads that made nineteenthcentury American expansion to the West possible, highlighting the opportunities, hardships, and challenges faced by the different groups involved. Inghilleri, M. (2017) Translation and Migration. New York and London: Routledge. Examines the role translation plays in helping to ensure human rights and justice for migrating individuals across the globe. It analyses and reframes the issues emerging from different forms of translation, covering transnationalism, assimilation, and hybridity. Lee, E. (2003) At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Documents the unjust treatment of Chinese American citizens and their families who lived under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its extension into the mid-t wentieth century drawing on historical sources including immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters.

Notes 1 2 3 4

http://cprr.org/Museum/Done!.html#Shaking_Hands (Accessed July 2019). http://chintalks.blogspot.com/search?q=railroad (Accessed July 2019). http://cprr.org/Museum/Chinese.html (Accessed July 2019). http://cprr.org/Museum/Newspapers/SF_Newsletter_1869.html (Accessed July 2019).

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5 https://www.richardsennett.com/site/senn/templates/general2.aspx?pageid=16&cc=gb (Accessed July 2019).

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Lukes, S. (1982) ‘Relativism in Its Place’, in Hollis, M. and Lukes, S. (eds.), Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 261–305. Malmkjaer, K. (1993) ‘Underpinning Translation Theory’, Target 5(2), pp. 133–148. Malmkjaer, K. (1999) ‘Language and Literature: Englishes in Translation’, in Kribb, T. J. (ed.), Imagined Commonwealths. New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc., pp. 89–104. McIvor, L. (2015) Canals: The Making of Nation. London: BBC Books. Miller, K. A. (1985) Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Putnam, H. (1981) Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Roediger, D. (1991) The Wages of Whiteness. New York: Verso Books. Rorty, R. (1991) Objectivism, Relativism and Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–34. Simmel, G. (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited and with an introduction by Wolff, K.G. New York: The Free Press. Tchen, J. K. W. (1996) ‘Quimbo Appo’s Fear of Fenians: Chinese-Irish-A nglo Relations in New York City’, in Bayor, R. H. and Meagher, T. J. (eds.), The New York Irish. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 125–152. Williams, Williams H. A. (1996) ‘Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Wyse, F. (1846) America, Its Realities and Resources, vol. 1, London: T.C. Newby.

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10 Living in translation Siri Nergaard

Introduction The increased mobility of people is one of the many effects of globalization. More frequently than ever before in human history, people today displace to greater distances, which means that growing number of people live and work away from their birthplace, or travel to and fro, crossing borders, changing homes, unsettling and resettling, establishing relations above and beyond national allegiances. Our present societies are thus characterized by a wide range of diverse people on the move – such as migrants, global businessmen, refugees, tourists, guest workers, travellers, global culture managers, asylum seekers, global academics or victims of human trafficking – to name but a few. Goods, finance, media, trade, commodities and information are all crossing borders even more frequently and faster than people. This exponential growth of mobility, in so many senses, challenges traditional identities based upon the principle of separate and demarcated nationalities with distinct populations, politics, economies and languages. When people, cultural practices, economies and goods transcend traditional boundaries, the world appears more fragmented, since ownership and belongings become blurred and plural. It is a multidimensional phenomenon that radically complicates existing divisions and configurations, both practically and epistemologically, questioning our very definitions of national, cultural and linguistic identities. The globalizing forces go in different, even opposite directions. On the one hand, global flows seem to homogenize the world making people speak the same language, wear the same clothes, eat the same food, use the same goods and communicate through the same channels, erasing differences and, hence, facilitating mobility. Traveling the world you are always still at home, since all that surrounds you is somewhat known and familiar. On the other hand, as an effect, but also as an active response to globalization, a plurality of local dimensions emerges in the many gaps and interstices of these same flows. At the crossroads of centre and periphery, and in the border zones where differences meet, local and alternative interpretations develop in a never- ending process creating new intersections and relations. Plurality, heterogeneity and fragmentation are also strong forces in the global phenomenon.

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Globalization’s two opposing forces – unity and diversity – both question and problematize the paradigms through which the world has been interpreted and categorized in modern times: of these paradigms the category of the nation- state is undoubtedly the most powerful. The principles underlying the political structure of the nation- state, such as territorial sovereignty, autonomy, singular and monolingual national identities, and clearly defined borders separating the included citizen from the excluded other, all of which have shaped our modernity significantly, are challenged by globalization. While translation is undoubtedly a core concept as well as a core practice in the globalized world, for the aforementioned reasons, it is also profoundly challenged by it too. The framework that has dominated is once again that of the nation- state, which has conceptualized translation as a practice that seeks to overcome the linguistic barriers between languageculture-nation A and language-culture-nation B, while confirming the clear distinctions between them. The most powerful ideal, and ideology, underlying translation has the will to create seamless transferences of clear meanings between text A and B. From such a perspective each nation- state unit, comprising one national, distinct identity together with the language, literature and traditions, can communicate through translation with other units, with no loss of integrity or contamination through contact with otherness. For many different reasons alternative perspectives on translation have emerged in the increasingly transdisciplinary field of translation studies, and globalization has clearly transformed the conditions for both the theory and practice of translation: both are haunted by the conflict between the opposing forces of the global and the local (Cronin 2003). But it is a conflict with no winner, since the very premise of translation is rather one of continuous tension: an ambivalence characterized by forces that mutually depend on each other. The ambivalent nature of translation which has probably always been there becomes more evident in the context of globalization since so many contradicting energies and interests come to the surface. In this context, we may say that the very principles of what translation is and how it comes about are being destabilized and replaced by alternative, looser definitions and, more importantly, by a plurality of different and even opposite perspectives. While cultures, languages and texts are considered less often to be expressions of clearly defined identities, be they national, or even individual, translations are increasingly seen as practices that negotiate between textualities, highlighting the hybrid and fragmentary features which connect and overlap. In general, we may say that ‘translation (…) is less something that happens between separate and distinct cultures and more something that is constitutive of those cultures’ (Gentzler 2008: 5). This does not mean of course that globalization is the only reason for the transformation of how translation is practised and considered today, but what interests us here is the countless links between the two phenomena. In a cultural and linguistic setting which is more transnational than national, more diverse than united, more plural than singular, more heterogeneous than uniform, the binary conception of translation as going from A to B is progressively replaced by alternative descriptions of various forms that venture in different directions.

Mobility and displacement Movement is probably the feature that shapes both globalization and translation most profoundly and this shared characteristic creates a particularly strong relationship of mutual influence and transformation. The change in one phenomenon has repercussions on the 148

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other, and vice versa. For instance, the increased numbers of people in movement inherent in globalization necessarily causes changes in translation, both as a practice and as a theory, requiring broader frameworks capable of comprising people’s transcultural and translinguistic crossings and existences, so that their mobility across and among cultures and languages can be seen as a form of translation ( Inghilleri 2017). The global flows of people as well as of goods depend so strongly on translation that they consequently generate new forms of translation, which, in turn, transform, replace and broaden existing definitions. In a world characterized by movement and crossings that intersect cultures and languages across and beyond borders, the translation of written texts remains only one expression of a variegated and heterogeneous landscape of translative processes. So many practices, experiences and lives assume a translative character in their negotiating between differences and distances that for many people their condition is one of living in translation. Our increasingly cosmopolitan cities are, as Sherry Simon argues ‘translational urban spaces’ in which ‘cultural realities are brought into dialogue’ (2006: 7). It might be the case for the refugee seeking protection in a new country, as well as for the transmigrant who grows up plurilingual in a transcultural neighbourhood, for the ‘accidental immigrant’ ( Kelley 2013) who happens to live in a foreign country by chance, but also by choice, and for the transnational subject who never has felt they belonged in one language or in one culture. The experience of transnationalism and transmigrancy is extreme and violent for some, while common and ordinary for others, freely chosen by some, while forced on others. The primary role of mobility in connection with translation is certainly relevant for the increasing numbers of people migrating, displacing and moving to and between new and different places. However, in the globalized world, translation probably affects all people, even those who remain in the same place their entire life, since global communication  – which cannot but rely on translation – affects all people, mobile as well as stable. Through movement and translation, or rather translative movements across and beyond both national borders and transnational border zones, novel forms of belonging, and cultural interaction emerge, stimulating shifts in our understanding. The dynamic translation space we inhabit has blurred borders which mutate through our interventions, negotiations and encounters, with each subject involved in the creation of new relations. And the transformations that occur are so profound that in many cases they change our way of thinking about the other and about ourselves, provoking undoubted consequences for our understanding of translation, as a cultural phenomenon, as a practice, and as a condition. Although translation can thus be said to impact on everybody in the globalized word today, becoming a condition that shapes the lives of the many people in movement, it certainly affects them in radically different ways. The global condition of living in translation comprises all possible declinations, including the impossibility of translation, lack of translation, failed translations, and untranslatability, driven more often – a s we shall see below – by social inequalities, political antagonism and constructed incompatibilities than by incommensurable words and worlds. Moreover, translation is not  – and never is  – a process that exclusively guarantees new and increased comprehension across borders, while on the contrary it may yet underscore and even create discrepancies, contradictions and inequalities between cultures, slippage and non- correspondence between cultural codes, dissonances and residual gaps. Globalization is an uneven process and both the translation processes and movements that people undertake occur in deeply unequal conditions, privileging some and disadvantaging others. Globalization tends to increase the already strong social, political and economic asymmetries, confirming instead of dismantling old paradigms of colonial and national 149

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domination. Investigating how globalizing processes have both social roots and consequences, Zygmunt Bauman (1998) sees mobility as one of its pivotal features, underlining at the same time how the ‘ freedom to move’ is unequally distributed and ‘the main stratifying factor’ of our times. Mobility as a ‘ free choice for some descends as cruel fate upon others’ ( Bauman 1998: 70). The globalizing processes of ‘new freedom of movement’ are divisive, Bauman continues, since they ‘rebound in the redistribution of privileges and deprivations, of wealth and poverty, of resources and impotence, of power and powerlessness, of freedom and constraint’ ( Bauman 1998: 70). Freedom of movement is a privilege reserved for the wealthy citizens of the first world; others, instead of being free to choose are rather forced to move, fleeing war and famine, begging for hospitality in a foreign country which is likely to refuse their request. Paradoxically, in this global era of free flow and movement, over the last 30 years, the right to emigrate has been granted more frequently, for example, in many ex- communist countries, but at the same time border controls have become stricter. There is a completely unequal distribution of the right to migrate which, in turn, exemplifies the porosity of borders: they are closed to some, and open to others (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Some people are permitted to enter while others are excluded: those who are excluded are denied the permission to translate themselves, and even to get translated. According to Article 14 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) ‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’, but in reality migrants today are refused and stopped at borders and checkpoints more frequently than ever, depriving them of this fundamental right. Access to global mobility, the degree of freedom one has over choosing where to be and where to go, is extremely stratified and unequal; the differences which separate the experiences of movement are profound. For the inhabitants of the first world – the increasingly cosmopolitan, extraterritorial world of global businessmen, global culture managers or global academics, state borders are levelled down, as they are dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital and finances. For the inhabitant of the second world, the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws and of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies, grow taller. (Bauman 1998: 89) The same divisive process or power geometry haunts translation: while the travellers of the first world have the freedom to use their global English – Globish – wherever they go, completely ignoring the existence of local languages, they can move and act as if translation were irrelevant or even obsolete, as if their own translation into that global language did not imply any form of transformation, being a sort of continuation of a common global jargon. Their communication flows smoothly, with no obstacles, as they move among protected spaces that have already been translated into the global language for them. Hotels, airports, menus, and tourist sites are presented to the global traveller as items of a world beyond translation. The financial world knows only one language, as do the worlds of science, academia, the media and communications: English, as such, is also beyond, and thus, without translation. On the contrary, the travellers who come from, linguistically, economically and socially more marginal countries encounter myriad forms of translation, which constantly confirm their secondary position: they have to accept being translated as objectified others by the majority culture. They have to translate themselves into the languages of the majority cultures, into the roles and categories imposed on them – m igrant, asylum seeker, refugee or 150

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guest worker. This is, as Jacques Derrida argues, the first act of violence that this traveller has to undergo: He has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc. This personage imposes on him translation into their own language, and that’s the first act of violence. ( Derrida 2000: 15) Having to abandon their language translating themselves into that of the host is the condition of the migrant, the figure that embodies the traveller of the second world, but also the traveller who belongs to an inferior social class or minority community. In their movement, marked by their secondary position, the obstacles to translation are numerous: check points and walls negate any translation, since they exclude them from any contact with the translation zone of negotiation and interconnection. Forced translation into roles and categories that they do not belong to are other expressions of translation for the unwelcomed migrant perceived as, and translated into, an invading and threatening enemy.

Migration and transmigrancy In the space between the extremes of these opposite travellers separated by the freedom, or lack of freedom to choose whether and where to move, we find a variety of intermediate positions in which people experience global movement and translation. M igrants – the political figure of our time, according to Nail (2015) – definitely represent the most significant category, simply because there is more migration today than ever before. We live in The Age of Migration, Castles, Haas and Miller (1993/2013) argue, since we are all, both individually and socially, affected by the phenomenon, even if we have not experienced migration personally. There can be few people in either industrialized or less developed countries today who do not have personal experience of migration and its effects; this universal experience has become the hallmark of the age of migration. (2013: 5) So maybe we can say that it is through the ‘universal experience’ of migration that the condition of living in translation takes place, although it is important to underline that universal does not mean equal, and that the universality of the migrant experience affects people unevenly. Access to mobility, as well as to translation, is never equal. Migrants and refugees flee their countries due to famine, war, persecution and climate change and while the majority displace within the boundaries of their own country, others face long and often dangerous journeys to go to foreign countries. In 2018, the International Organization for Migration ( IOM) estimated that there were 258 million international migrants globally and approximately 25.9 million registered refugees. In addition, the much higher number of internal migrants is estimated at more than 763 million. Those forced to displace internally account for another 40 million people. Altogether, those migrating are thus over a billion – the highest level ever recorded – a nd the number is estimated to increase over the next few years. Each individual experiencing migration has a unique personal story, and it is impossible to register the innumerable experiences of global movement and translation that migrants and 151

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refugees go through. However, we may single out certain distinctive, yet common features in the figure of the transmigrant (Glick Schiller et al. 1995), which coincide with certain typical features of globalization. Transmigrants no longer identify with a nation, but rather with localities, places, as well as displacement, multiple belongings and ties, and move among and between different languages and spaces, developing dynamic and plural identities. Their cultural identity is partly formed by, and in, the transitional experience itself, and is not something formed prior to the very act of movement. The experience of migration, which in our terms is translational, becomes part of the migrant’s own identity. The question of home and belonging becomes utterly problematic due to the fact that many transmigrants do not have one ‘authentic’ home country that they belong to, since they might have one nationality, but have been raised in other countries, and have moved yet again as adults. As global, cosmopolitan citizens, they negotiate different spaces belonging to both each one, and none. Technological innovations regarding transport and communication have facilitated such plural belongings increasing people’s ability to be ‘present’ in more than one place at a time, enabling them to share experiences despite borders and distances, to connect with ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ societies, and to create and maintain social, economic, cultural and political relations across spaces and countries. The transmigrant is actively and simultaneously engaged in diversified and continuously transforming transnational spaces, not located here or there, but in a zone of blurred and porous borders: a ‘translational transnational zone’ (Apter 2006). The notion of transmigrant underscores exactly the nature of in-betweenness which many scholars see as a feature of translation, a state of not belonging, neither here nor there, but connecting to and negotiating a plurality of places and identities. Defining the migrant as a transmigrant, means considering them as a person who intervenes in transnational communities based on migration, which, in turn, means they are negotiating different communities, belonging and not belonging to each. By moving out, it was deemed that the migrant had left the community, since membership of community was conceived in terms of proximity and contact with the centre of that space. Such a concentric and territorial construction of community, based on separations and national borders, presence and absence, centre and periphery, has nevertheless been challenged, with a shift towards the idea of the transmigrant, living in-between sending and receiving societies, and maintaining strong ties to both throughout the migration process ( Papastergiadis 2000). With their multiple allegiances and belongings, the transmigrant is redefining the diasporic space, questioning and reformulating the relationship between origin and destination. The (trans)migrant has, as Rushdie (1991) claims, a stereoscopic vision, which enables them to look at the world from different angles, developing a capacity to undermine totalizing vantage points. This transnational immigrant ‘whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant connections across international borders’ is, according to Glick Schiller et al. (1995: 48), the authors who coined the term transmigrant, actually engaged in ‘the paradox of our times’ caught between transnationalism and nation- state building processes. They argue that transmigrants’ ‘public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation- state’ and to transnationalism, while the dominating political discourse follows a ‘ bunker mentality’, continuing to insist on the necessity of defending national borders (1995: 48). The paradox could not be more striking today, underlining how translational negotiations inevitably take place in a climate of contradiction, ambivalence and even hostility. This is also underscored by Papastergiadis who argues that ‘(d)espite the contradiction between the rhetoric of global connectedness and the practice of exclusionary policies on immigration, complex migration networks are constantly emerging’ (2010: 350).

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Although being a transmigrant is probably the most ordinary state for people in this globalized world, it is nevertheless marked by ambiguity and ambivalence caused by contrasting forces and interests: traditional nation- state ideologies of unity, homogeneity, monolingualism and fixed borders, on the one hand, and the reality of plural heterogeneous, transnational localities and plurilingualism, on the other. Certain approaches only view hybridity and inbetweenness positively, meaning that the image of the transmigrant of multiple attachments risks appearing unproblematic and solved, while for many people living in translation means staying in a constant state of tension between contradicting and conflicting loyalties. There can be no any winning side, since there is no solution, their condition being loaded with ambiguity. The condition of being in translation is frequently precisely this, a precarious tension between conflicting yet connected forces. The condition of living displaced, translingual and transnational lives creates contacts, encounters and connections beyond and across former divisions and borders, but, at the same time, it may also generate loss, marginality and exclusion, together with a sense of distance and rootlessness, which puts the subject in a peripheral zone of insecurity. Is it still true, as Appadurai suggested time ago, that the imagery of nation- state continues to be so powerful that transmigrants are unable to escape it, and thus feel somewhat trapped? No idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations, and postnational identities. Such interests are many and vocal, but they are still entrapped in the linguistic imaginary of the territorial state. The incapacity of many deterritorialized groups to think their way out of the imaginary of the nation- state is itself the cause of much global violence because many movements of emancipation and identity are forced, in their struggles against existing nation- states, to embrace the very imaginary they seek to escape. (1996: 166) While Appadurai touches on the political difficulty of creating an alternative identity for the transmigrant citizen, capturing its transitional nature, there may be another more philosophical-psychological dimension to this condition of being in translation. It is the somewhat unsettling sense of being out of place, of being other to oneself, of being on an unstable terrain where alterities and unbelongings collide. The difficulty of the transmigrant’s condition reminds us of a latent, if not yet radical, ambivalence with no solution. This seems to be what Bauman (1991) concludes when he discusses the stranger’s ambivalent existence, or what Derrida alludes to with the formulation of a constitutive foreignness of any language, positing that ‘our language is always the language of the other’, problematizing thus any possible belonging ( Derrida 1998). Studying the literature of exiled authors, Karpinsky (2012: 22), similarly speaks about the experience of ‘the ‘ foreignness’ of any language, of its structural otherness’. The transmigrants we are discussing here certainly have much in common with the transnationals Ulrich Beck describes (2006) as unsettling beings, since they experience and also remind us of the fundamental and existential foreignness of any individual. Because they contradict the established order, transnationals continually remind us that the world could also be different. Anyone who wants to clarify and demystify the category of ‘transnational’ must in any case reject the current equation of transnationals with foreigners, and hence also the expectations of ‘assimilation’ and ‘ integration’ and

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the denigratory evaluations they imply. Transnationality is a form of integration of what is foreign as one’s own, which is both alarming and enticing. (Beck 2006: 65–66) Let us also avoid the error of overlooking the power relations against which displacement and deterritorialization are set, such power relations lead to the underestimating of the resources necessary for the subject to connect and relate to a place when the options are many and varied, or, on the contrary when the options are non- existent, when the transmigrant, or the ‘want-to- be’ transmigrant, is blocked in their trajectory by different forms of exclusion ( Papastergiadis 2000). Borders, camps and immigration restrictions as well as institutional, linguistic and symbolic exclusion are practices that seek to impede the migrant’s admission to the interactive translation space. Indeed, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben observes (2000), the migrant lives in a fundamental constitutive ambivalence between the capacity to produce and act on the one hand, and of being subject to exploitation and social segregation on the other.

Transmigrant subjectivities Many transmigrants grow up in a different place to where their parents did, learning a different language to that their parents learnt at school, living in and between at least two different languages and cultures. If the condition of multiple attachments and loyalties, as we have seen, is more than common, if not yet almost constitutional in our global world of transmigrancy, what is special, albeit increasingly common, is intergenerational difference between parents and children who do not share a home country or first language, therefore sharing neither background nor memories. The condition of such people is thus one of being in translation at home, between the culture(s) and language(s) of their parents/family and the culture and language(s) of school, education and friends, which might be very different and even distant. Growing up with different standards for human behaviour and relationships, different norms regarding work, l ife-style codes and perspectives on communication are things that may shape individuals’ lives deeply. As different generations of transmigrants both share and do not share these norms and codes, the child’s condition (often more than their parent’s) is that of translating and negotiating between differences that do not always allow for conciliation and sometimes even appear incommensurable. Such translation processes are naturally delicate, since the child, at least during their first years, tends to identify with their parents’ universe, while they are progressively exposed to different, sometimes contrasting, universes. It is in literature, especially so-called migration literature, that we find the most intimate accounts of what it is like to live among and across languages, cultures, places and identities. Literature is where the psychological impact of lives in translation is narrated, a dimension that often transcends more sociologically oriented approaches, often telling of lack and loss, of the difficulty of putting the many different and fragmented lives and belongings together, of the sense of exclusion and uncertainty, and even the sense of betrayal. There seems, thus, to be another ambivalence here, between the ‘ordinariness’ of heterogeneous and plural belongings and the difficulty of experiencing these same heterogeneous and plural belongings as ordinary. In the book In altre parole (In other Words) (2015/2016), written in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri, the American writer of Indian parents, describes why she had to seek a third option stating that she was lacking ‘a language to identify with’ (2016: 111). Unable to identify with either of the languages she grew up with, she feels suspended rather than rooted. She has always 154

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wanted to feel like ‘a whole person, not a fragmented one’, since she has always felt divided, incomplete and in some way deficient. As a girl in America, I tried to speak Bengali perfectly, without a foreign accent, to satisfy my parents, and above all to feel that I was completely their daughter. But it was impossible. On the other hand, I wanted to be considered American, yet, despite the fact that I speak English perfectly, that was impossible, too. I was suspended rather than rooted. I had two sides, neither well defined. The anxiety I felt, and still feel, comes from a sense of inadequacy, of being a disappointment. (2016: 111–112) This feeling of not belonging ‘completely’ to any language is in Karpinsky’s terms a tension between ‘mother tongue and borrowed tongue’ (2012: 21–22) and what Lahiri describes is common to many second generation immigrants. In contrast with what have we until now seen as an ambivalent condition which gives room to new and innovative identifications, relations, and socializations, they appear as a paradox, as a backlash which recalls models of separate and exclusive mono-identities. They are frequently present in migration literature, but why? Is it because such feelings continue to be conditioned by old ideologies? Or maybe the ambivalent condition of living in translation, of being other, is for some psychologically too hard to bear? These authors often experience alienation both towards their parents and their schoolmates; they are different to each, they do not fit in, and translation seems impossible. They feel trapped in a gap, neither understanding nor being understood by either of the groups, and questioning themselves, who they are and where they belong. The difficult negotiation between differences sometimes gives the transmigrant the feeling of being a failure, unable to identify with contradictory expectations and desires. Living in translation in such situations often means living in untranslatability, marked by misunderstandings, incomprehension and incommensurability. Belonging to families characterized by dislocation or displacement, transmigrants appear to be genuine products of a globalized world living across and among languages, cultures and localities. It is therefore somewhat surprising that so many testimonies of migrancy tell of the difficulty of dealing with multiple belongings. It is one of the global world’s paradoxes that the transcultural translational condition, so common and seemingly so ordinary in today’s cosmopolitan metropolises with their mixed neighbourhoods and plurality of languages and communities, is evidently difficult for some to cope with. Or maybe it is only because the many people who live their transcultural translational existences without difficulty simply do not speak of, having nothing to claim, exactly because their condition feels so ordinary? The experience of loss and lack, of not feeling ‘enough’, of not belonging anywhere, are on the contrary richly documented and frequently thematized in so- called immigrant literature, and, in particular, in literature written by the emerging class of second- and third-generation transmigrant authors. Does this mean that only one position – the problematizing one – is expressed, or might there be other, deeper reasons? I suppose that we are again dealing with the fundamental impossibility of belonging completely to any language, place or culture, which some people perceive more than others. Accordingly, Lahiri’s choice of a third language, a language to which by definition she does not ‘ belong’, can be seen as accepting the consequences of the impossibility of belonging to any language. This sense of not belonging, and also impossibility, is a psychological dimension in many senses transcending the transmigrant’s political and social identity, and one which cannot be ignored if we want to understand the complex condition of living in translation. 155

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But the sense of loss and not belonging is undoubtedly strongly related to political issues connected to the ideology of a presupposed homogeneous and monolingual culture of a profoundly binary nation- state that continues to make the separation between same and other, us and them, included and excluded. This ideology shows hostility towards difference and alterity, or rather to certain differences and expressions of alterity, in particular those connected to religion and colour of skin. Jhumpa Lahiri, for instance, reports that there is only one ‘wall that will remain forever between me and Italian, not matter how well I learn it. My physical appearance’ (2016: 137). She comments that even if she ‘were able to speak a polished, impeccable Italian, that wall, for me, would remain’ (2016: 141). Lahiri looks different, her skin is darker that of the Italian people around her, creating an insuperable wall that can never be broken down. She will always be excluded, staying on the outside of a shared language, community and appearance. And this is a condition that follows her everywhere: Those who meet me for the first t ime – when they see me, then learn my name, then hear the way I speak English – a sk me where I’m from. I have to justify the language I speak in, even though I know it perfectly. (2016: 143) Even in India, in Calcutta, where the wall of appearance disappears, that of language emerges again: ‘ in the city of my so- called mother tongue’ (2016: 143), everybody thinks Lahiri speaks only English. ‘No one, anywhere, assumes that I speak the languages that are part of me’ (2016: 143). Similarly, many people with a history of migration, whose names are different and whose skin colour is different, or rather, darker from the majority, are often asked where they really come from, even though they were born in the country and thus speak the majority language perfectly and act and behave in the same way as their peers. This cannot but be the confirmation that transculturalism has, in many cases, not succeeded, haunted as it is by racist politics and discourses which have a strong presence in our societies. The inability to accept plural, transcultural and divided citizens is actually one of the greatest contradictions of globalization. In the recent book Third Culture Kids ( Naqvi 2019), 29 Norwegians with transcultural backgrounds narrate their experiences of growing up in different cultures. The book’s declared ambition is to give space to a variety of narratives that go beyond stereotypical depictions of culture clash, marginality and criminality. While succeeding in this intent, what emerges however is a recurring difficulty in being accepted as different, especially – again – for being browner than average Norwegians, and for belonging to a Muslim culture. There are basically two kinds of problem, one that of being judged and classified as different, the other of the consequent feeling of not belonging, and of being neither Norwegian enough nor foreign enough to be a complete person, and of course never white enough, never ‘authentic’ enough, never Christian enough. It is as if the ‘white gaze’ that Franz Fanon described in 1952 is still haunting the person that differs from the majority, especially when it comes to the colour of their skin. This white gaze is a colonial gaze, it is a racist gaze, it is a gaze that stigmatizes and excludes. Negotiating translation processes between identities and differences is thus suppressed by essentialist binarisms that repeatedly negate the transmigrant’s expression of her plural belongings across blurred boundaries. In the Norwegian writer Zeshan Shakar’s contribution to the above-mentioned book, he writes about being stigmatized in each of the cultures he belongs to: his cousins laugh when he speaks his parents’ language with a heavy accent, 156

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considering him a complete, strange foreigner, and seeing him as totally belonging to the majority culture he lives in. On the other hand, people from the majority culture consider him to be totally part of his parents’ minority culture. Again, there is this feeling of never being enough in either of the communities, and the wish to be included as a member of the majority culture to which he belongs (2019: 283). Aon Raza Naqvi, the book’s editor, eloquently describes how his existence is marked by ‘ feeling like someone I don’t look like ( Norwegians), and of looking like someone I don’t feel like ( Pakistanis)’, and how this is a ‘source of much bewilderment’ (2019: 135, my translation). Expressions like, ‘I have lived here all my life, but don’t feel completely at home’ are extremely frequent among these subjects, representing yet another paradox of the globalized world, where the promises of free movement and plural identities again collapse. Reversing the paradox, one could argue that this sense of not belonging completely to any place in the end is the most genuine translational situation, as it puts you in a kind of limbo where no identity is ‘complete’ while rather mixed, contaminated, plural and provisional. It is once again the necessary to recognize that translation and transcultural negotiations are bound to take place in a state of ambiguity where heterogeneous and contrasting encounters occur in a never-ending tension. The desire to belong to one place, or one identity is contradicted by the impossibility of such exclusive belongings, since translational transcultural belongings are by definition plural. Will this condition of living in translation ever be rid of its negative connotations? Or may it be that this sense of estrangement which is a deep psychologically universal feeling cannot but be perceived negatively? Authors who thematize the condition of living in translation probably deal with these deep questions more than others, not because transmigrants are lacking more than others, but because their condition obliges them to ask questions that many others avoid, or ignore. Yet another dimension of translation emerges among many first generation immigrants who are often considered, and consider themselves as foreigners, even after many years in the host country and after having learned the majority language, or having become ‘naturalized’. For many of these migrants exile is their life condition, which in many ways does not correspond to the condition of the transmigrant, since the life they have left behind tends to be related to a traumatic past of dispersed, cancelled and repressed stories. The American writer Elaine Castillo, born in California and daughter of Philippine immigrants, author of America Is Not the Heart (2018) talks about her parents being so distant from her, not only because of their remote home country, but also because their history of diaspora – like so many of the histories of migration and exile – is marked by the trauma of colonialism. Her parents’ narrations often turned into silence since there were so many pieces of their lives that they were unable to reconcile with their present life. So many hidden and silent pieces, and as such untranslatable. Castillo belongs to the second generation of immigration, which would be able to put together and translate the few remaining fragments of this remote life, however such a translation will always be somewhat inadequate, since the lives her parents live through hers is an archive that goes beyond the logic of archives. The silences, the empty spaces of the parent’s narrations become gaps of incomprehension between generations: untranslatable because incommensurable. For the first generation of these exilic migrants translation assumes yet another dimension, since past and present, homeland and host land, new and old narratives are experienced as completely separate. Instead of linking and interconnecting them through translation processes, as we have seen transmigrants typically do, their solution is rather to keep their memories silent, not attempting to translate them into present narratives. For some, on the contrary, translation is precisely the experience and condition that puts them in connection 157

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with their traumatic migratory past. Translating, being a practice that resembles and somewhat represents migration, connects the subject to their traumatic experiences. This is reflected by translator and editor Madhu H. Kaza’s account: At some point I began to understand that my discomfort with translation was connected to the trauma of immigration. Something went quiet in me when I was brought to the U.S from India as a child. Although I assimilated and lost my accent, a vital part of me got stopped at the border. My inner life remained untranslated, its contours beyond what the receiving culture wanted to or could comprehend. As an immigrant child I felt an aura of illegitimacy about my claim to be an American. At times I lived with radical insecurity. As an adult, when I translated from Telugu, my first language (which I’d learned to read in college), I experienced a repetition of the loss I’d felt as a child. (…) What does it mean to be a translated self, I wondered? What does it mean to live with this untranslatability, this silence between languages within you? (2017: 12–13)

Conclusion The world is haunted by numerous contradicting imageries, one of which is that of a borderless common globe of continuous and uninterrupted flows, and of a world divided into a plurality of localities which spring up out of the necessity to create sites of identification for minority communities and local distinctions. Alas, while the first is a reality only for finance and trade, the latter is very often characterized by binarism, and strict boundaries between those who are included and those who are excluded. Is it the case that even in our globalized, transnational world, having one’s origins, history, or memory in one place, belonging to something local is a human necessity? Does it rather depend on a more conformist desire to be like others, like the majority? Or is it a demonstration of the fact that the ideology of the nation- state still dominates, both despite globalization and, in a certain sense, as a constitutive element of that same globalization? As things stand today, we cannot consider the consequences and effects of globalization and its relationship to translation without viewing it in connection with the current particularly polarized political climate and spread of hate rhetoric, especially regarding the Other, minority communities, immigrants and refugees who are depicted as threatening enemies ‘ invading our spaces’, and ‘menacing the integrity of our identities’. What we currently see is constant border-work trying to separate the wanted from the unwanted, the imagined barbarians from the ‘civilized’, and the global rich from the global poor. Widespread ideology and the politics of separation are increasing the distance between populations, discriminating, excluding, considering immigration as a massive assault, using a rhetoric based on an imagery of ‘waves and floods’ of illegal immigrants attacking Western countries, and their security, their integrity, their identity. Although there are encouraging signals among young people who translate themselves and each other in productive and inventive ways, creating new forms of cohabitation and cosmopolitanism, we have to acknowledge that this occurs somewhat despite a dominating tendency that pulls in the opposite direction. The younger generation is, nevertheless, our hope: the children and grandchildren of migrants are becoming subjects for whom negotiating translations among a plurality of

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differences will be both the most ordinary and reasonable way to live. Behind and beyond the loud polarizing rhetoric, we glimpse a more silent reality of young people who perceive themselves as transmigrants who are perfectly able to convert a sense of not belonging neither here nor there, into a belonging both here and there, creating their own plural belongings and allegiances.

Further reading Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Bauman offers here important instruments to critically consider the effects of globalization on people’s lives. He questions the contradictions of a world in which we are all on the move, insisting on both its dividing and uniting features. Inghilleri, M. (2017) Translation and Migration. London: Routledge. In this book, Inghilleri looks at the many links between translation and migration through multiple examples, from past and present, showing how people in translation create multilingual identities and transcultural communities that present a potential for social disruption and reorganization. Papastergiadis, N. (2000) The Turbulence of Migration. Cambridge, UK: Polity. This book is an important contribution towards a renovated and broader understanding of the turbulent patterns of global migration as constitutive features of the social, leading to hybrid cultural formations, multiple and scattered affiliations, and transformations of community life.

References Agamben, G. (2000) Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Apter, E. (2006) The Translation Zone. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity. Castillo, E. (2018) America Is Not the Heart. London: Viking. Castles, S., Haas, H. and Miller, M. J. (1993/2013) The Age of Migration. London: Red Globe Press. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1998) The Monolingualism of the Other: Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2000) Of Hospitality. Anne Defourmantelle Invites J. Derrida to Respond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fanon, F. (1952/2008) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Gentzler, E. (2008) Translation and Identity in the Americas. New Directions in Translation Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L. and Szanton Blanc, C. (1995) ‘From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration’, Anthropological Quarterly, 68(1), pp. 48–63. Inghilleri, M. (2017) Translation and Migration. London and New York: Routledge. Karpinsky, E. C. (2012) Borrowed Tongues. Life Writing, Migration and Translation. Waterloo, CA: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Kaza, M. H. (ed.) (2017) Kitchen Table Translation: Aster(ix) Journal. Pittsburgh, PA: Blue Sketch Press. Kelley, C. E. (2013) Accidental Immigrants and the Search for Home. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lahiri, J. (2015) In altre parole. Milano: Guanda ( English translation: In Other Words. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Nail, T. (2015) The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Naqvi, A. R. (ed.) (2019) Third Culture Kids. Oslo: Gyldendal. Papastergiadis, N. (2000) The Turbulence of Migration. Cambridge: Polity. Papastergiadis, N. (2010) ‘Wars of Mobility’, European Journal of Social Theory, 13(3), pp. 343–361. Rushdie, S. (1991) Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta. Simon, S. (2006) Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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11 Interpreting in a globalized world Current perspectives and future challenges Paola Gentile

Introduction: global perspectives in the evolution of interpreting Interpreting as an activity originated from the human need to communicate, which has always existed and will continue to exist every time speakers of different languages come into contact. What is generally taken to be the profession of interpreting, however, developed in the twentieth century thanks to specific circumstances (Gaiba 1998; Baigorri Jalón 2004; Baigorri-Jalón 2014) that transformed this “ancestral societal practice into a recognized profession” ( Boéri 2015: 29). If we consider the evolution of interpreting in the last two centuries, it is difficult to identify any time at which developments and changes in the profession have not been determined by the effects of globalization, which is understood as “the process of world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving closer, the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact, to mutual benefit, with somebody on the other side of the world” ( Larsson 2001: 9). In the field of Translation and Interpreting Studies, several authors emphasize the link between globalization and the evolution of the profession, which originated from the need to put in communication companies and organizations that were developing thanks to the intensification of commercial networks, new technologies and a new world order (Cronin 2003). It was precisely the social, political and economic changes in the globalized world that made the profession develop along two tracks. While on the one hand the positive changes of globalization allowed interpreting (conference interpreting) to gain prestige and recognition in the international arena, the other side of g lobalization – which creates yawning gaps between the rich and the poor – is the background against which public service interpreting developed. The two professional specialisms have grown in different ways with different objectives: conference interpreting rose and developed to satisfy the demand for networking in post-industrial societies, which is why it has always been “on the winning side of globalization” (Prunč 2012: 4); whereas public service interpreting “ has been left to deal with the wasted lives and the outcasts of modernity” (ibid.), defined by Bauman (1998) as the collateral damage of globalization. Several scholars (Gaiba 1998; Baigorri Jalón 2004; Takeda and Baigorri Jalón 2016) identify the birth of conference interpretation with the use of simultaneous interpretation in 161

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the Nuremberg trials first and subsequently in international organizations. Interpreting in the Nuremberg trials is a milestone in the history of the profession, not only because it created a clearer division between professional interpreters and amateurs, but also because, after WWII, countries started to cooperate in and join an ever-increasing number of organizations whose main purpose was the safeguarding of international peace and security. Against this backdrop, heads of state and government needed to communicate with each other as quickly and effectively as possible, and simultaneous interpretation was well suited to this need. It can therefore be said that the birth of conference interpretation was determined by two key elements of globalization: technological development and the establishment of international organizations. Public service interpreting developed in a completely different way: in the twentieth century, globalization brought about new waves of migration, which have reached an unprecedented level in recent decades. This has created the need to have language professionals for communication between migrants/immigrants and the public services in host countries ( hospitals, clinics, courtrooms, police stations, schools, refugee camps, etc.). As Bancroft (2015: 221) maintains, “community interpreting has evolved largely in response to two often co- existing needs: the need for interpreters for native-born and indigenous speakers; and the need for interpreters for migrant or immigrant populations, including refugees and asylees. Globalization and migration are strong driving forces as well”. The present chapter – whose theoretical framework sits at the intersection between sociology and interpreting studies – w ill describe not only how conference and community interpreting have been shaped by sweeping changes in an increasingly globalized labor market, but also the way in which they are responding to these changes. A general overview of professional scenarios and the challenges of globalization will be complemented by interpreters’ personal perspectives.

Interpreting and the challenges of globalization An overview of recent studies in Interpreting Studies has revealed that, over the years, much research has focused on three key factors that are closely related to globalization: 1

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Technological developments. The publication of a special issue of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies entitled “Community Interpreting, Translation, and Technology” ( Pokorn and Mellinger 2018) testifies to the growing interest in the impact of technology in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Recent studies have also scrutinized interpreters’ perceptions of challenges in telephone interpreting ( Wang 2018a, 2018b) and the use of technology to train interpreting students ( Ehrlich and Vance 2015; Peterson 2016). Regardless of the topic of study, the pairing “ interpreting and technology” is becoming increasingly frequent in the discipline, with currently 909 entries in the Translation Studies Bibliography ( Translation Studies Bibliography n.d.). English as a lingua franca. The growing pervasiveness of English in the provision of language services is perhaps one of the major changes in the history of the profession – and especially of conference interpreting – for at least three reasons: “for the extent of its diffusion geographically; for the enormous cultural diversity of the speakers who use it; and for the infinitely varied domains in which it is found and purposes it serves” ( Dewey 2007: 333). Some studies in the field of Translation and Interpreting (Gentile and Albl-Mikasa 2017) look at conference interpreters’ perception of the impact of ELF on their profession and the ensuing changes, others analyze the need to establish a new discipline called

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ITELF (A lbl-Mikasa and Ehrensberger-Dow 2019), which points to the areas where interpreting and translation converge with respect to the challenges professional interpreters and translators have to meet when confronted with non-standard spoken and/or written input. Others investigate the implications of ELF for interpreter and translator training (Taviano 2013). Migration flows. Globalization is intimately connected with international migration, since it has made migration much easier through better communications and improved transport, among other things. While ELF has considerably influenced the way in which conference interpreting is practiced, the free movement of people has given momentum to the development of public service interpreting, emphasizing the need for its institutionalization. The need for interpreters in the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe ( Valero Garcés and Tipton 2017), in emergency departments in hospitals (Cox 2017), in cases of migrant children ( Böser and LaRooy 2018) and victims of gender violence ( Valero Garcés 2015) has been studied from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, which combine sociological, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic perspectives.

To better analyze these perspectives, we will draw from the theorizations of sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991). As Giddens maintains, one of the most significant impacts of globalization is that it has brought about an “ intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (1990: 64) and that “the individual’s biography […] must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self ” (2016: 513). Therefore, in order to have a clearer view of the future of the interpreting profession, we have to integrate its past and present narratives by looking at how globalization and all the social, political, and economic events related to it shape the interpreters’ sense of self and how they perceive global developments. A graphic representation of how these theories will be applied to the sociological analysis of the interpreting profession is provided in Figure 11.1.

Major social changes in the 20thcentury

Crucial changes in the profession

Interpreters' perception of the profession

Figure 11.1 Representation of the model of analysis. 163

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A series of external factors influence the current perception that interpreters have of their own profession: the m acro-level (the globalized world) has an impact on the intermediate level of the circumstances and the places in which interpreting has grown and is developing as a profession which, in turn, have determined the way in which the professional category of interpreters perceives its social identity. Although interpreting research has made strides in recent years with unprecedented advancements in insights and scope, we can see a fragmentation of Interpreting Studies, which are focused either on the challenges faced by conference interpreting or on those dealt with by community interpreting. The following sections aim to integrate the two perspectives by discussing them in the light of the three main globalization- driven changes mentioned earlier, i.e. technology, ELF and migration.

Technological developments Technology has affected not only the way in which interpretation has been (and still is) performed, but also the way in which interpreters began to perceive their profession ( BaigorriJalón 2004). Arguably, the most crucial turning point in the history of interpreting is the advent of the simultaneous mode: from the first experiments carried out at the League of Nations in 1926 by Filene and Finlay, the technological turn in the history of the profession “can be seen as a metaphor of ‘modern times’, with microphones and headsets as forerunners of future sophisticated technologies, and as a sign of democratization by giving voice to trade unions representing their own language” ( Baigorri-Jalón 2014: 20). Despite these indisputably positive changes, simultaneous interpreting raised quite a few concerns about the image that others (and interpreters themselves) had of the profession, since the interpreter’s voice was delivered through mechanical equipment, which could have given rise to the impression that the interpreter was only a part of a machine. As BaigorriJalón (2004: 110–111) points out: The feeling of “anonymity” associated with simultaneous interpreting, which according to some interpreters was the cause of their stress, may be related to the change of image of the profession. They felt that the automatism of the translations would deteriorate – this was what they perceived, and compared to the “ brilliance” of consecutive interpreting – until interpreting became no more than a “manual” task, which psychologically for them was degrading, a loss of prestige associated with the feeling of “blue-collarisation” of their work. This historical moment is fundamental to understanding a key passage in the history of the profession: the spatial displacement of interpreters from the center to the periphery of the communicative event  – brought about by a technological revolution  – caused a sense of alienation and estrangement, which was in sharp contrast to the prestige attached to the first generation of interpreters – mainly consecutivists – who were physically placed close to the important personalities of the time. Hence, simultaneous interpreters experienced a sense of powerlessness and self-estrangement, also because they were physically detached from the decision-making center and could not receive adequate feedback on their work. More recently, some studies have confirmed that this sense of alienation is present among conference interpreters still today: in their study on the status of conference interpreters, Dam and Zethsen (2013: 248) showed empirically that although 78% of interpreters declared that they work close to the center of decision- a nd policy-m aking  – i ndicating that their physical visibility rate is rather high – they perceive themselves as professionally 164

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invisible, a result which suggests that there is a lack of feedback on their job. Hence, it could be postulated that the spatial disconnection brought about by technology has lowered the social prestige once associated with conference interpreting, which, in turn, may have shaped conference interpreters’ attitudes toward Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). In Gentile’s global survey about the interpreter’s status (2016), a high number of conference interpreters indicate that there is a great deal of pessimism about ICT among conference interpreters, regardless of gender, age, and work experience. The spread of new technology in the interpreting profession is associated with:

- decreasing demand (“Although not necessarily soon, the demand for interpreters may eventually dwindle, due to IT”), As one of the respondents commented: Video conferencing will increase. Whether that is a valid alternative remains to be seen. My fear is that by eliminating personal contact, messages will become more confusing and interpreters will be seen increasingly as an expensive machine, not as human beings who could contribute to social communication. We'll end up BEING [sic.] machines, like so many of my younger colleagues already are. Brilliant at keeping up with unstoppable floods of words, incapable of or indifferent to understanding the message and therefore incapable of or unwilling to establish whether the message has actually got through! In general, the technological developments in conference interpreting appear to have given rise to mixed feelings: while interpreters acknowledge that the Internet greatly facilitates their work, that the sound quality has improved thanks to cutting- edge consoles and booths, they point out several disadvantages which are liable to jeopardize not only interpreting quality – as Moser-Mercer (2003) and Braun (2013) highlight – but also the survival of the profession itself. In the historical development of public service interpreting, the use of technology in court, police and healthcare interpreting has been often regarded as a necessity, mainly because of “the shortage of qualified interpreters for many of the languages that are required in these settings and the short notice at which many interpreting assignments need to be scheduled” ( Braun 2015: 355). If, on the one hand, technology is sometimes the only way to enable communication in public services, scholars (e.g. Fantinuoli 2019) point out that service providers should resist the temptation to replace interpreting in presentia with video and remote interpreting. Also, as Braun (ibid.: 364) argues, industrialization of interpreters who could be expected to be available “at the push of a button” should be avoided at all costs, because it has an impact on their working conditions and job satisfaction. Gentile’s 165

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survey (2016) pointed out that public service interpreters seem to adopt a slightly more positive attitude toward ICT compared to conference interpreters (“Technology has opened up communication avenues as well”). Gentile also emphasizes that there will always be space in the market for qualified interpreters and translators and that the use of ICT in public service interpreting may be beneficial to the profession (“ but also reduces the costs”). The same differences between conference and public service interpreters in their attitudes toward ICT were found by Mellinger and Hanson (2018): for example, court interpreters were “more technologically averse than medical interpreters” (ibid.: 384). As in Gentile’s survey, the interpreters interviewed by Mellinger and Hanson were concerned about increasing invisibility due to the spread of ICT. These results indicate that there are considerable differences in perceptions and attitudes toward technology between conference and public service interpreters, which can be seen in the difference in the number of comments in the surveys written by the two groups. The rather pessimistic attitude shown by conference interpreters in their comments, which lean toward an outright rejection of ICT in their professional practice, could derive from certain biases against the use of technology. Moreover, the recurring theme of the disappearance of the profession because of ICT may conceal a certain fear of losing their status quo, as was already shown in the historical analysis conducted by Baigorri-Jalón (2014) and partly confirmed by the surveys carried out by Dam and Zethsen (2013) and Gentile (2016). On the contrary, public service interpreters do not seem to be as hostile to technological changes: some of the comments in the surveys displayed a certain curiosity about toward ICT in their professional practice. Since the data shown and discussed herein cannot be said to be exhaustive, further investigations into interpreters’ perceptions and attitudes toward technological changes may offer interesting insights into the way interpreters believe that technology will shape the profession in the future.

English as a lingua franca The extraordinary spread of English as a lingua franca is one of the most significant developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The predominance of Anglo-American culture, the multiplication and diversification of cultural products in English (films, TV series, books, music, etc.) and the intensification of English courses at all educational levels has resulted in a greater knowledge of English, especially among the generations born since the 1980s. In a context in which the (supposed) knowledge of English is spreading (Görlach 2002) not only in international institutions and in private companies but also in public services, where migrants often use English to communicate with officials, what scenarios are to be expected for the future development of the interpreting profession? Historically, the “ battle of the languages” at the United Nations described by BaigorriJalón ushered in an era in which English began to be used as a lingua franca, and this struggle represented the watershed from the mythical perception of interpreting as a “marvel” to its more ordinary and unexceptional perception as a “profession”. As Albl-Mikasa (2010: 142) points out: “In the 21st Century, interpreters have had to come down a bit from such lofty ideals and positions. There is a decline in the prestige of the profession, the glamour and glitter have vanished, the “diplomat’s aura” is no longer part of the interpreter’s image”. This evolution is to be partly attributed to the spread of English as a global lingua franca. What is commonly accepted to be a better knowledge of English and the financial pressure resulting from the 2008 crisis have led to a situation where the participants in a meeting – be

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it institutional or in the private sector – speak in English. Therefore, interpreting from and into English and other languages is increasingly being dispensed with. Even though several studies have analyzed the implications of the use of ELF in pedagogy, politics, business ( Jenkins et al. 2017) and sociolinguistics (Seidlhofer 2009), the impact of ELF on the interpreting profession (especially on conference and business interpreting) has only recently become an object of study. One of the first interpreting scholars, Danica Seleskovitch, speculated that interpreters would become redundant with the global spread of ELF: “In future it can be expected that to a large degree interpreting will disappear from the international scene. With time the universal use of a single language in international conferences will make resorting to interpreters less necessary” (1996: 306). This hypothesis has been investigated empirically by means of questionnaires. Albl-M ikasa (2010), who surveyed 32 German- speaking interpreting cases and freelance private market interpreters, found that “69% of respondents report a decrease in the number of assignments due to an increase in English- only events” (ibid.: 129), with 82% replying yes to the question “Does globalisation and the spread of English as a lingua franca have a noticeable effect on your work as an interpreter?”. Moreover, 78% of respondents agree that foreign accents make their work more stressful and demanding, with considerable decrease of overall job satisfaction due, as one interpreter replied, to “ increased strain and annoyance at having to submit oneself to more and more subpar levels of English” (ibid.: 141). More recently, the special issue of Cultus entitled Multilingualism, Lingua Franca or What? included two papers exploring the implications of the use of English in conference settings. The paper by Tieber (2017) interviewed young participants in the Model European Union, a simulation of EU policymaking, and asked them the reasons why they preferred to use English. The results showed that familiarity with the subject in English and the impression that the message is better conveyed in a more widely spoken language were the main arguments used by respondents. The prestige of English was another interesting reason given by the interviewees (“I have to admit that the language choice at these kinds of events is also a question of status. You get the impression that many speakers want to show the others how good their English is when they take the floor”, ibid.: 47). Nevertheless, the advantages of using the first language ( L1) are also discussed: the use of the mother tongue allows better development of concepts and a greater focus on the content (the message) rather than on the form ( perfect English). In addition, some respondents admit that if there are no interpreters and a participant does not feel confident about his/her level of English, the likelihood of him/her taking the floor is greatly reduced. Tieber enhanced awareness of the potential advantages and disadvantages of using ELF and interpreting in the context of international conferences. The paper by Gentile and Mikasa (2017) in the same Cultus issue analyzed the 51 introspective comments made on ELF in Gentile’s global survey (2016) on interpreters’ perceptions of their professional status. The remarks made by the conference interpreters surveyed are particularly interesting because they mentioned ELF without any explicit reference to this topic in the survey questions. The factors addressed in the answers fell into three broad categories: 1 2

ELF and market conditions (“Many international organizations now have English as their only working language as opposed to several working languages”), a decline in interpreter status (“Many potential users see interpreters as a necessary evil, so most people would prefer to communicate directly in bad English rather than to pay for an interpreter”),

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These studies show that the tendency to use ELF in communicative situations is present not only in the private market, but also in the European Institutions. However, research has shown empirically that language policies fostering monolingualism based on the exclusive use of English would be unfair, since “50% of EU citizens aged 15 or more do not speak English” (Gazzola and Grin 2013: 102). The scholars therefore conclude that “a multilingual, translation-based language regime is more effective and fairer than a unilingual regime based on English – even if it is dressed up as ELF” (ibid.: 104). Other studies offer a silver lining, because they have shown that interpreters are adapting to changes imposed by ELF and are demonstrating that the use of the mother tongue is still more effective. For example, Reithofer (2010) carried out an experimental study involving 58 native German subject-matter experts who said that they could understand a speech in English just as well as in their L1. They were divided into two groups: one listened to an English non-native speaker and the other listened to the interpretation into German. The results showed that the group listening to the interpretation into their mother tongue understood the content significantly better than the group listening to the non-native original speech. A study by Chang and Wu (2014) showed that interpreters adopt several strategies to familiarize themselves with different accents and ways of speaking. Moreover, “as for the concern that use of ELF may make conference interpreters redundant, the Chinese/English interpreters in Taiwan who were interviewed here seem at present to see no such prospect” (ibid.: 187), a statement that suggests that perceptions about the professions may vary from country to country. Some scholars have also pointed to the need to train interpreting students to understand Globish (A lbl-M ikasa 2013) based on the fact that ELF mostly affects the interpreters’ tasks, and call for an ELF pedagogy in interpreter training. Exposing students to a wide range of different accents may indeed be a useful solution to get them used to interpreting discourses in situations where accent and speed are major obstacles to text comprehension. Even though the use of ELF seems to be a matter of more urgent concern in conference settings (and has been the object of little study in the field of public service interpreting), the growing importance of ELF is also underlined by public service interpreters in Gentile’s survey (“In Denmark, I could envision a future where more users of interpreters request interpreting in languages that are their second or third languages ( English, French...) rather than their first native language”). This makes us reflect on the fact that recent migration flows, the lack of qualified public service interpreters or the lack of a common language to be used even in the presence of a qualified interpreter has created different situations in which the participants in the interaction turn to ELF in order to be able to communicate.

Migration flows International and domestic inequalities, combined with the demand for migrant labor in Western societies, the lack of opportunities, poverty, oppression, and violent conflicts in developing countries, have contributed to giving momentum to migration flows. In the words of Castles et al. (2009: 11–12): 168

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The widely assumed acceleration of global migration would have occurred along with a diversification of migration in terms of composition of immigrant populations not only in terms of countries of origin, but also in terms of migration categories, in which labor, student, family, and asylum migration as well as temporary and permanent migration would increasingly coexist (italics in the original text). Public service interpreting is the branch of the profession that has been most affected by the recent migratory flows. Interpreting research in migration contexts after the “social turn” of the 1990s ( Pöchhacker 2016) – w ith the consequent shift of focus from the neuroscientific to the interactional approach – has hardly touched upon conference settings. As Bancroft points out, public service interpreting aims at “giving a voice to those who seek access to basic services but do not speak the societal language” (2015: 217). Several researchers illustrate that public service interpreting arose from the need to satisfy the communication requirements of immigrants, who very often do not speak (at least at the outset) the language of the host country. These societal changes brought about by globalization have led to a rapid growth of interpretation activities in public services, which are more often than not still carried out by ad hoc interpreters. There has therefore been an urgent need in recent years to train qualified public service interpreters, whose presence becomes essential to fulfilling the need to communicate, not only because they can bridge linguistic gaps, but also because they are an instrument facilitating the integration process and at the same time safeguarding democracy. In the Final Report drawn up by the Special Interest Group of Translation and Interpreting for Public Services ( hereinafter SIGTIPS), the connection between interpreters and the protection of language rights (also enshrined in national legislations all over the world) is expressed very clearly. The study underlines that when interpreters have a huge impact on the lives of individuals and may even become crucial to the point of deciding questions of life or death, interpreting is “not just a matter of communication, but a matter of natural rights, of human rights: rights to be promoted, defended and guaranteed” (SIGTIPS 2011: 7). A growing body of literature in the field of interpreting ( Bischoff and Loutan 2004; Valero Garcés 2014a, 2014b) points out that there is a connection between open access to public services and an increased sense of acceptance and integration of immigrants, and that adequate language assistance is beneficial not only to the allochthonous people  – thereby providing equal access to hospitals, courts, etc. – but also to the service providers, because poor communication can jeopardize patient safety or can sentence the wrong people to jail. Indeed, several studies demonstrate that the use of qualified interpreters in the medical sector “ lowers admission and readmission rates, shortens hospital stays, decreases referrals for unnecessary diagnostic tests, and increases clinic through-put, all of which have implications for the cost of care” ( Roat and Crezee 2015: 242). Another study carried out by Flores et al. (2012) analyzed 57 encounters including 20 with professional interpreters 27 with ad hoc interpreters, and 10 with no interpreters. 1,884 interpreter errors were noted, and 18% had potential clinical consequences. The authors’ conclusion was that “professional interpreters result in a significantly lower likelihood of errors of potential consequence than ad hoc and no interpreters” (ibid). In hospital emergency departments, Cox and Lázaro Gutiérrez (2016) discuss the pitfalls of working with non-professional interpreters or no interpreters at all, while pointing to the main reasons why they are often not used. These include, among others, overestimation of the patient’s language skills or difficulties in identifying patients’ languages: in a context in which communication is already difficult in itself due to very emotional and stressful 169

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situations, in which the suffering patient has difficulty expressing him/herself in the language of the host country, professional interpreters help not to waste precious time through an accurate and rapid translation which, in some cases, can make a difference between life and death (Cox and Lázaro Gutiérrez 2016). In the field of justice, several cases of unqualified interpreters who fail to show up in court and whose wrong interpretations result in severe miscarriages of justice are increasingly hitting the news. Also in this case, the need for professional interpreters is acutely felt. For example, while describing the interaction between the English monolingual border patrol and the Spanish monolingual detainee at the Tijuana (Mexico)- San Ysidro (San Diego County, CA) international border through an ad hoc interpreter, Angelelli (2015) calls attention to the fact that when qualified interpreters are not provided, access to justice is hindered. Several other cases of miscarriage of justice due to ineffective interpreting are reported by other studies. One carried out by Martinsen and Dubslaff (2010) cites the instance of a Frenchspeaking defendant in a Danish court where one of the judges declared that “during the questioning of the witness the interpretation was criticized” (ibid.: 153), then pointing out that another interpreter should be hired in case of appeal. In gender violence contexts, the SOS-VICS project data ( Toledano-Buendía and Del Pozo-Triviño 2015) in police and court settings shows that interpretation for victims of gender violence has special characteristics that are distinct from other types of interpretation, whereby interpreters “must be trained to handle emotionally- charged situations, since they can lead them to either reject the victim or over- empathize with her” ( Del Pozo-Triviño and Toledano-Buendía 2016: 199). Large- scale studies have been conducted by Valero Garcés (2015) and by Valero Garcés and Lázaro Gutiérrez (2016) among the main agents involved in the communication process with foreign victims of gender violence who do not speak Spanish with the aim of understanding the service providers’ experience with interpreters and the interpreters’ role(s). The results showed that professional interpreters are hardly ever used in these situations and that there is a severe lack of awareness of institutional ethical conduct: “[victims] are attended in corridors where the family members of the aggressor or the aggressor himself are present” (ibid.: 88). The effect of socio-political changes on the professionalization of public service interpreting is clearly visible in recent years, since the resurgence of xenophobic parties that advocate the closure of national borders has taken hold in various countries in the Western world. The consequence of these policies is cuts in public interpretation services, already implemented in the UK long before Brexit (Gentile 2017) and in the USA, where a 2016 survey of 4,586 hospitals by the American Hospital Association (American Hospital Association 2016), suggested that only 56% offered some sort of linguistic and translation services, but 97% of physicians see patients who have difficulty understanding English. Over the years, several authors in the field of interpreting and translation studies (Ozolins 2000; Hertog 2003; Hertog and Van Gucht 2008) have indicated that these institutional constraints are hindering the development of the profession. As Ozolins (2000: 21) points out, “unlike conference interpreting, which grew as a profession- driven field, public service interpreting has grown essentially as an institution- d riven field, with important consequences for status and professional issues”. The survey on the status quaestionis of the provision of legal interpreting in the EU (Hertog and Van Gucht 2008: 189) showed that in most European Member States, “sufficient legal interpreting and translation skills and structures are not yet in place” (emphasis in the original), which is why in 2009 the non-profit association EULITA was established under the Criminal Justice Programme of the Directorate- General Justice, Freedom, Security of the European Commission. Among other things, EULITA “ is further 170

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committed to promoting quality in legal interpreting and translation through the recognition of the professional status of legal interpreters and translators” ( EULITA 2015). In this respect, the implementation of the European Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings marks a turning point in the implementation of a consistent and adequate provision of legal interpreting services in all EU Member States. As a resource whose development largely depends on national constraints and welfare policies, public service interpreting is a sector in which the status of practitioners is more likely to vary at national level than is that of conference interpreters. Some countries (such as Australia, Norway, Denmark, Canada, the UK, and Sweden) have succeeded in establishing a National Register of Interpreters, with the consequent enhancement of the interpreters’ social recognition. A recent survey carried out in Norway – addressed to the interpreters of the Norwegian National Register – indicates that most interpreters are proud of their profession. “They find that the job offers interesting challenges and they accept most assignments. Most interpreters wish to continue working as interpreters as long as there is a demand for their language” (IMDI 2015: 12). The findings demonstrate that where the relevant educational and legal provisions are implemented, public service interpreting can become professionalized. Besides legal interpreting, a field in which steps forward have been t aken – at least at institutional level – the professionalization of public service interpreters appears to be largely uneven, undocumented and understudied, especially in healthcare settings. Nevertheless, the recent publication of the special issues of MonTI (“Legal Interpreting at a Turning Point” 2015) on the status of the interpreting profession and of JoSTrans (“Professional Translation” 2016) dedicated to the status of translators have shown that the trend is beginning to be reversed.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to illustrate how the interpreting profession is changing in the light of recent socio-political developments caused by globalization: technology, ELF, and migration flows. The studies quoted in this chapter show that the spread of English as a lingua franca, the pervasiveness of technology, the growing need for less widely spoken languages in migration contexts, and the slow professionalization of public service interpreting – which is compounded by national policies aiming to cut costs or to dispose of language services altogether – are only some of the hindrances currently working against the recognition of the profession. Therefore, in- depth empirical studies of the socio- economic situation of the translation and interpreting market are needed now more than ever before, for they may propose concrete and feasible ways to regulate it. Although the surveys quoted indicate that interpreters seem to be wary of technology, more congresses and focus groups can be organized between service providers and interpreters to establish points of convergence. More information on the possibilities offered by new applications and technological devices could clarify some doubts held by interpreters, who may then more favorable to their introduction in their working lives. The first part of the previous section has also shown that interpreting does not develop in a social or, above all, political vacuum, with shifting political forces deciding on the implementation of language policies. An EU language regime slowly moving toward a linguistic oligarchy (Gazzola 2016) and national governments implementing cuts in interpreting services are only a few examples which demonstrate that the impact of language policies should not be underestimated when it comes to foreseeing possible developments in the profession. 171

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As a result, an analysis, within the EU, of the actual costs and benefits of professional interpretation services could demonstrate that investing in professional interpreters creates longterm benefits. As for ELF in particular, the academic community should focus more persistently on the use and the opinions of practitioners and laypeople alike on this phenomenon. In addition, an analysis of the use and impact of ELF in public services is fundamental to obtain a broader picture of this phenomenon in a hitherto understudied communication setting. To conclude, since recent research reveals that in several Arab countries ( Taibi 2014) and in China (Setton and Guo 2011) interpreting is a thriving profession, future research could focus on the comparison between Eastern and Western perspectives on professional developments and on possible new markets where interpreters can offer their services in the future.

Further reading Dal Fovo, E. and Gentile, P. (2019) (eds.) Translation and Interpreting: Convergence, Contact, Interaction. Oxford: Peter Lang. This volume combines translation and interpreting in relations of overlap, hybridity, and contiguity in professional practices, strategies, and translation/interpreting processes. Dam, H. V., Brøgger, M. N. and Zethsen, K. K. (2018) (eds.) Moving Boundaries in Translation Studies. London: Routledge. This volume offers a w ide-ranging overview of recent developments in translation and interpreting practice/research through the lens of globalization. Federici, F. (2016) (ed.) Mediating Emergencies and Conflicts. Frontline Translating and Interpreting. London: Palgrave Macmillan. This book calls for enhanced focus on the role of translators and interpreters in emergencies by discussing existing research and offering innovative empirical studies. Contributions in this volume demonstrate the need for interdisciplinarity in multilingual contexts.

References ­ ­ Albl-Mikasa, M. and Ehrensberger-Dow, M. (2019) ‘ITELF – (E)merging Interests in Translation and Interpreting Studies’, in Dal Fovo, E. and Gentile, P. (eds.), Translation and Interpreting: Convergence, Contact, Interaction. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 45–62. American Hospital Association. (2016) ‘AHA Hospital Statistics, 2018 Edition.’ Available online: https://www.aha.org/statistics/2016-12-27-aha-hospital-statistics-2018-edition [Accessed 2 March 2019]. Angelelli, C. (2015) ‘Justice for All? Issues Faced by Linguistic Minorities and Border Patrol Agents during Interpreted Arraignment Interviews’, MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, 7, pp. 181–205. doi: 10.6035/MonTI.2015.7.7 Baigorri Jalón, J. (2004) Interpreters at the United Nations. A History. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Baigorri-Jalón, J. (2014) From Paris to Nuremberg: The Birth of Conference Interpreting. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Bancroft, M. (2015) ‘Community Interpreting. A Profession Rooted in Social Justice’, in Mikkelson, H. and Jourdenais, R. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting. London: Routledge, pp. 217–235. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bischoff, A. and Loutan, L. (2004) ‘Interpreting in Swiss Hospitals’, Interpreting, 6(2), pp. 181–204. Boéri, J. (2015) ‘Key Internal Players in the Development of the Interpreting Profession’, in Mikkelson, H. and Jourdenais, R. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting. London: Routledge, pp. 29–43. 172

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Böser, U. and LaRooy, D. (2018) ‘Interpreter-mediated Investigative Interviews with Minors’, Translation and Interpreting Studies, 13(2), pp. 208–229. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.00012.bos Braun, S. (2013) ‘Keep your Distance? Remote Interpreting in Legal Proceedings: A Critical Assessment of Growing Practice’, Interpreting, 15(2), 200–228. Braun, S. (2015) ‘Remote Interpreting’, in Mikkelson, H. and Jourdenais, R. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting. London: Routledge, pp. 352–367. Castles, S. de Haas, H., and Miller, ‎ M. J. (2013). The Age of Migration. London: MacMillan Press. Chang, C. and Wu, M. M. (2014). ‘Non-Native English at International Conferences: Perspectives from Chinese–English Conference Interpreters in Taiwan’, Interpreting, 16(2), 169–190. https://doi. org/10.1075/intp.16.2.02cha Cox, A. (2017) The Dynamics of Misunderstandings in Language Discordant Multi-party Consultations in the Emergency Department. Brussels: VUB. Cox, A. and Lázaro Gutiérrez, R. (2016) ‘Interpreting in the Emergency Department: How Context Matters for Practice’, in Federici, F. (ed.), Mediating Emergencies and Conflicts. Frontline Translating and Interpreting. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 33–58. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. Dam, H. V. and Zethsen, K. K. (2013) ‘Conference Interpreters - The Stars of the Translation Profession? A Study of the Occupational Status of Danish EU Interpreters as Compared to Danish EU Translators’, Interpreting, 15(2), pp. 229–259. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.15.2.04dam Del Pozo-Triviño, M. and Toledano-Buendía, C. (2016) ‘Training Interpreters to Work with Foreign Gender Violence Victims in Police and Court settings’, Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito, 32(2), 192–203. Dewey, M. (2007) ‘English as a Lingua Franca and Globalization: An Interconnected Perspective’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17(3), pp.  332–354. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192. 2007.00177.x Ehrlich, S. and Vance, K. (2015) ‘Innovative Interpreting: iPad Technology as a Bridge to Interpreting Services in a Post- Secondary Setting’, Translation and Interpreting, 7(2), pp. 60–74. https://doi.org/ 10.12807/T&I.V7I2.333 EULITA. (2015) Mission Statement. Available online: http://www.eulita.eu/sites/default/files/Katschinka_ text.pdf [Accessed 17 April 2020]. Fantinuoli, C. (ed.) (2019) Interpreting and Technology. Berlin: Language Science Press. Flores, G., Abreu, M., Barone, C. P., Bachur, R, and Lin, H. (2012) ‘Errors of Medical Interpretation and Their Potential Clinical Consequences: A Comparison of Professional Versus Ad Hoc Versus No Interpreters’, Annals of Emergency Medicine, 60(5), pp.  545–553. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. annemergmed.2012.01.025 Gaiba, F. (1998) The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial. Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press. Gazzola, M., and Grin, F. (2013). ‘Is ELF More Effective and Fair than Translation? An Evaluation of the EU’s Multilingual Regime’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23(1), pp. 93–107. Gazzola, M. (2016). ‘Multilingual Communication for Whom? Language Policy and Fairness in the European Union’, European Union Politics, 17(4), pp. 546–569. Gentile, P. (2016) The Interpreter’s Professional Status. A Sociological Investigation into the Profession. Trieste: University of Trieste. Gentile, P. (2017) ‘Political Ideology and the De-Professionalisation of Public Service Interpreting: The Netherlands and the UK as Case Studies’, in Valero Garcés, C. and Tipton, R. (eds.), Translating Conflict: Ethics and Ideology in Public Service Interpreting and Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 63–83. Gentile, P. and A lbl-M ikasa, M. (2017) ‘ “Everybody Speaks English Nowadays”. Conference Interpreters’ Perception of the Impact of English as a Lingua Franca on a Changing Profession’, Cultus, 5(10), pp. 53–66. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. London: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (2016) ‘Modernity and Self-Identity’, in Longhofer, W. and Winchester, D. (eds.), Social Theory Re-Wired: New Connections to Classical and Contemporary Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 512–522. Görlach, M. (ed.) (2002) English in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hertog, E. (2003) Aequalitas. Equal Access to Justice across Languages and Cultures in the EU. Grotius Project 2001/GRP/015. Antwerp: Lessius Hogeschool, Departement Vertaler-Tolk. 173

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Hertog, E. and Van Gucht, J. (2008) Status Quaestionis. Questionnaire on the Provision of Legal Interpreting and Translation in the EU. Antwerp: Intersentia. IMDI. (2015) Public Service Interpreting in Norway. Available online: https://www.regjeringen.no/ contentassets/a47e34bc4d7344a18192e28ce8b95b7b/no/pdfs/nou201420140008000dddpdfs.pdf Jenkins, J., Baker, W. and Dewey, M. (eds.) (2017) The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca. London: Routledge. Larsson, T. (2001) The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization. Washington, DC: CATO Institute. ‘Legal Interpreting at a Turning Point - La traducción en el ámbito judicial en un momento de cambio’. (2015) (special issue) MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación. Available online: https://dti. ua.es/es/documentos/monti/indice-y-resumenes-de-monti-7-2015.pdf [Accessed 17 April 2020]. Martinsen, B. and Dubslaff, F. (2010) ‘The Cooperative Courtroom. A Case Study of Interpreting Gone Wrong’, in Pöchhacker, F. and Shlesinger, M. (eds.), Doing Justice to Court Interpreting. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 125–163. Mellinger, C. D. and Hanson, T. A. (2018) ‘Interpreter Traits and the Relationship with Technology and Visibility’, Translation and Interpreting Studies, 13(3), pp. 366–392. https://doi.org/10.1075/ tis.00021.mel ­ Ozolins, U. (2000) ‘Communication Needs and Interpreting in Multilingual Settings: The International Spectrum of Response’, in Roberts, R. P., Carr, S. E., Abraham, D. and Dufour, A. (eds.), The Critical Link 2. Interpreters in the Community: Selected Papers from the 2nd International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health and Social Service Settings. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 21–33. Peterson, M. (2016) ‘Virtual Worlds and Language Learning: An Analysis of Research’, in F. Farr and L. Murray (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language Learning and Technology. London: Routledge, pp. 308–319. Pöchhacker, F. (2016) Introducing Interpreting Studies. London: Routledge. Pokorn, N. and Mellinger, C. (2018) ‘Community Interpreting, Translation, and Technology’, Translation and Interpreting Studies, 13(3), pp. 337–341. ‘Professional Translation’ (special issue). (2016) Journal of Specialised Translation, 25. Available online: http://www.jostrans.org/archive.php?display=25 [Accessed 17 April 2020]. Prunč, E. (2012) ‘Rights, Realities and Responsibilities in Community Interpreting’, The Interpreter’s Newsletter, 17, 1–12. Reithofer, K. (2010) ‘English as a Lingua Franca vs. Interpreting: Battleground or Peaceful Coexistence?’, The Interpreter’s Newsletter, 15, pp. 143–157. Roat, C. E. and Crezee, I. H. M. (2015) ‘Healthcare Interpreting’, in Mikkelson, H. and Jourdenais, R. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting. London: Routledge, pp. 236–253. Seidlhofer, B. (2009) ‘Accommodation and the Idiom Principle in English as a Lingua Franca’, Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(2), pp. 195–215. Seleskovitch, D. (1996) ‘Interpretation and Verbal Communication’, in Lauer, A., GerzymischA rbogast, H., Haller, J. and Steiner, E. (eds.), Übersetzungswissenschaft im Umbruch. Festschrift für Wolfram Wilss zum 70. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 301–306. Setton, R. and Guo, A. L. (2011) ‘Attitudes to Role, Status and Professional Identity in Interpreters and Translators with Chinese in Shanghai and Taipei’, in Sela- Sheffy, R. and Shlesinger, M. (eds.), Identity and Status in the Translational Professions. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 89–118. ­ Sigtips. (2011) Special Interest Group for Translation and Interpreting for Public Services Final Report. Available ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­ online: http://www.celelc.org/archive/Projects-and-Reports/038-Vassiliou-Final-report/index. html [Accessed 17 April 2020]. Taibi, M. (2014) ‘Community Interpreting and Translation in the Arab World’, Babel, 60(1), ­ pp. 52–69. ­ ­ ​­ ­ Takeda, K. and Baigorri Jalón, J. (2016) New Insights in the History of Interpreting. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Taviano, S. (2013) ‘English as a Lingua Franca: Implications for Translator and Interpreter Education’, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 7(2), ­ pp. 155–167. ­ ­ ​­ Tieber, M. (2017) ‘English as a Lingua Franca vs. Interpreting – Perspectives of Young Conference Participants on Two Competing Means of Communication’, Cultus, 10(1), ­ pp. 39–52. ­ ­ ​­ 174

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12 Translation in contexts of crisis Federico M. Federici

Introduction The t wenty-fi rst century sees a tangible overlap between the constant feeling of crisis and the cascading effects of crises on a global scale. Whether perceived, represented, or real these contexts of crisis have grown in prominence. The impact of global warming has determined extreme weather phenomena thus making natural hazards more widely distributed and seemingly more recurrent, as triggers of cascading crises ( Pescaroli and Alexander 2016). The unrelenting speed of economic globalization has been accompanied by a growth of awareness that people have equally become subject to unpredictable risks due to changing natural hazards, which, in turn, have an impact on larger social and economic geographical areas. The interconnectedness of societies and the limited capacities of regions and countries to deal with large- scale events contribute to heightening socio- economic vulnerabilities and stretching the sense of continuous crisis on a global scale, as it often entails large displacement of people among its effects. The increasingly global nature of the impact of crises calls for global responses even when very specific regions are affected. In this landscape, two initiatives of the United Nations emerged that underpin current commitments in international collaboration to support crisis-affected communities. First, the international commitment to reduce inequalities before disasters was adopted at the Third UN World Conference in Sendai, Japan, on March 18, 2015. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) with its Sendai Framework aims to change the supra-governmental, international, and humanitarian perspective on engagement with affected communities (UNDRR 2015). Second, the United Nations General Assembly committed its members to achieving 17 Sustainable Development Goals (2015) by the year 2030 to reduce inequality and enhance quality of life world-wide, while engaging with climate change. Community engagement has become the key operational word to revisit power relations between developed and lesser developed countries, as much as between the entities supporting humanitarian and developmental actions and the populations they are intended to serve. The chapter will argue that through these changed conceptualizations of collaboration in crises and in development, both the international humanitarian and developmental sectors have shifted towards a preventative and risk reduction paradigm. Remaining involved in 176

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emergency response, most organizations focus on culturally appropriate cycles of work on preparedness, mitigation, response, recovery, and reconstruction via community engagement practices. Translation is here broadly intended, in all its multimodal facets – f rom audiovisual translation and sign language, via interpreting and speech recognition, to leaflet translation; in short, all forms of language translation (oral/written/multimodal/multisemiotic). Subdivided into four parts, the chapter starts by defining multilingual crises in a globalized world. Then, it focusses on areas of crisis communication in which translation ought to become more central. It continues by focussing on the relevant literature that engages with healthcare and risk communication in multilingual crises. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the paradoxes surrounding multilingual communication in crisis settings, as well as promising signs of growing awareness of the role of language in multilingual cascading crises.

Accommodating language needs in crises For Sellnow and Seeger (2013: 4–20), three conditions must be present for a situation to be considered as a crisis: the situation (1) violates social expectations of daily routines; (2) poses threats; and (3) requires responses. O’Brien (2016) adapted the term ‘crisis’ to contexts of translation by specifying that a crisis is an event or series of events that are non-routine, pose a significant threat, and require a response to mitigate the harm often involving communication across multilingual barriers, or crisis translation (see O’Brien and Federici 2019). Crisis is here preferred to ‘disaster’. Definitions of ‘disaster’ abound and extensively ponder the multifaceted factors that have an impact when an event disrupts the ordinary routines of a society. From Quarantelli’s landmark definitions (Quarantelli 1978, 2005) to UNDDR’s definition, the characterization depends on duration, resources needed, geographical impact, consequences, and so on. Crises require extensive, efficient, and effective communication of information. Access to and circulation of information are of central importance to support crisis-affected populations, even more so in multilingual contexts. This section defines the relationship between language-related issues and general principles of crisis communication, which has until recently predominantly focussed on monolingual issues of communication (Coombs and Holladay 2012; Steelman and McCaffrey 2013; Littlefield and Sellnow 2015). Schwarz et  al. (2016) provide a broader, international outlook. However, for linguists and translation and interpreting scholars, the focus of these studies very rarely engaged with significant evidence, case studies, and concerns in relation to crisis management in multilingual contexts. The conceptualization here proposed draws on O’Brien and Federici (2019) and focusses on two common denominators of crisis and risk communication: (1) appropriate perception of risks to improve societal resilience (risk perception); (2) clear information on risk to diminish morbidity and mortality ( healthcare risk communication). Many natural hazards are unpredictable (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes) or only partially predictable (storms, floods, droughts) but people create (some avoidable) vulnerabilities in their societies, hence no disaster is a natural disaster ( Birkmann et al. 2013; Kelman 2020). Poor communication in multilingual contexts is one of such avoidable vulnerabilities (Federici 2020). Accommodating language needs can be planned around available information – which languages are spoken locally, how they are distributed, which language minorities are particularly at risk, what the literacy levels look like, and so on – if there is awareness that communication in multilingual crises poses risks for responders and affected populations. Focussing on cascading crises, it becomes easier to see how translation has a role to play when the effects of a disaster are worsened by the increased complexity of the context of 177

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communication (see Alexander and Pescaroli 2019). The definitions nevertheless matter at legal and operational levels: ‘emergency’, ‘crisis’, ‘disaster’, and their near equivalents in local languages often initiate different response protocols. Triggering one response protocol rather than another has social, economic, and organizational consequences after a disaster. Different budgets can be released, different donors become involved, different response organizations enter or exit the context, as the initial event may remain a socio-economic crisis for decades (Alexander 2014; Cornia et al. 2014). This complexity amplifies, depending on the size of the event, the processes that need to be activated and the crisis’ impact on civil society. Once the protocols for large international crises are activated, the ‘ international community’ can be called on to support the response to the crisis. As soon as a large- scale event occurs, resources are needed from outside the local areas and the public become more involved (Alexander 2016b), communication needs soon emerge between local affected populations and the relief operations, or for the local vulnerable groups such as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. In the t wenty-fi rst century, large- scale international collaborations have brought to the fore the importance of multilingual communication. However, the focus was initially on interpreting as ‘a problem’ that delayed efficient communication strategies (Crowley and Chan 2011). From 2016 onward, additional focus on community engagement for d isaster-affected regions raised awareness of the fact that translation and interpreting are necessary and not just an unexpected problem. On translation of needs from the local communities to international humanitarian aid organizations rests successful activation of suitable protocols. In turn, protocols entail emergency planning (Alexander 2002, 2016a), so that coordination, collaboration, and communication strategies mitigate the ‘cascading effects’ of any crisis. Yet these plans consider language translation in part, even when they are plans for action world-wide. The more international the response, the more multilingual the communication; the next section discusses how poorly served multilingual needs become global risks, before considering the positive signals coming from the formal recognition of the role of translation and interpreting in The Sphere Project: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response ( Project Sphere 2018).

Communicating in crisis contexts: a succinct literature review The cascading crisis definition means that conflict- specific situations of translation and interpreting can be studied as a form of crisis translation (e.g. Ebola awareness campaigns in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019 cannot ignore the ongoing civil conflict). It is fair to say that translation and interpreting in contexts of conflict have received more attention, and issues and concerns about interpreting and translating in such contexts have been under investigation for longer than problems and challenges concerning written translation in disaster and crisis settings. Conflict contexts for translators and interpreters rely on a richer bibliography (a non-exhaustive list includes Baker 2006; Dragovic-Drouet 2007; Palmer 2007; Salama- Carr 2007; Inghilleri 2008, 2009; Footitt and Kelly 2012a, 2012b; Footitt and Tobia 2013; Kelly and Baker 2013). The study of interpreters in humanitarian contexts has been pioneered by the activities of the InZone Centre (Moser-Mercer and Bali 2007; Moser-Mercer et al. 2014; Moser-Mercer 2015) and case studies have focussed on disaster and refugee interpreters (e.g. Tipton 2011; Todorova 2016, 2017). A steadily growing body of evidence focussing on the role of translators and interpreters in Non- Governmental Organizations is emerging demonstrating the complex relationships between conflict, communication, development, and the humanitarian sector (Footitt et al. 2018; Tesseur 2018, 2019). 178

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The distinction between conflict and crisis becomes irrelevant however when we look at who the interpreters and translators in the different contexts of crisis are. All crises include language mediation that involves trained, untrained, paid, unpaid, professional, nonprofessional, family/non-family language brokers, community, citizen, and many other forms of translators and interpreters. This plethora of language services is at the same time a characteristic and one of the major problems of translation in crisis contexts. Furthermore, if we take stock of emergency plans as designed to deal with cascading crises, then the distinction based on triggers (natural hazards vs conflict, mass displacement, and so on) is even more irrelevant. As the different language services entail different levels of attainable and expected quality of translation, those who use the services of these language mediators ought to be aware that not everybody who translates is a translator and not everybody who interprets between two languages is an interpreter. Major problems include risks to public health due to lower quality forms of language translation, short-term and long-term mental and physical effects on the linguists involved, ethical concerns regarding quality of product, and concerns about managing expectations. These are only the macroscopic problems. The range and seriousness of each language-related communication issue varies from causing loss of life (in the USA, studies on badly setup interpreting provision in emergency healthcare make grim readings, see Ng et al. 2017) to endangering the linguists’ own and their families’ lives, with a raft of issues ­in-between. ​­ Regardless of defining risks as global events, the perception of risk remains culturebound, and so do the shapes and features that risk perception and risk avoidance assume ( Wisner et  al. 2003). Language barriers hamper evacuation at the time of response ( Field 2017; Howard et al. 2017) and so language-related issues become visible. Language barriers hamper in more than one way the collection of data when international disasters and catastrophes are assessed (Cadag 2019). Pioneering work on interpreting in disasters ( Bulut and Kurultay 2001; Moser-Mercer and Bali 2007; Kurultay and Bulut 2012; Moser-Mercer et al. 2014) highlighted the legal, humane, and practical necessity for accommodating CALD language mediators. The role of pre-prepared or written translation in supporting accessibility for impaired audiences (such as sign language, Makaton, audio- description) is widely accepted in translation studies. Yet knowledge of, or references to, these solutions to support access to information in a format and language that is understandable was very scattered when assessing debates on crisis contexts at the beginning of the t wenty-fi rst century. Arguably, the extremely narrow focus on response could be considered partially responsible for the limited use of translation to pre-record warning messages, to create subtitled warning videos, to record signed evacuation procedures, or to educate recently arrived members of CALD communities (as advocated, for instance, in Shackleton 2018). Translation and interpreting scholars would presume that many forms of language translation, as well as interpreting, have roles to play in enhancing the resilience of multilingual societies by reducing exposure to risks and also mitigating the impact of natural and local hazards, yet this awareness is not as noticeable for crisis managers, or disaster experts, operating in global contexts. Awareness of anthropological differences in conceptualizing risk emerged in the 1980s (Oliver- Smith 1996). But their impact on crisis communication did not entail a preoccupation with effective communication strategies to support CALD communities until much later – with dominant US-focussed publications, as shown above, prompted by the CALDspecific impact of Hurricane Katrina (Muñiz 2006; Pastor et al. 2006; Tierney 2008). Ethnic minorities and multilingual language g roups – which are not always one and the same – m ay become vulnerable groups when there has been little or no planning, or no awareness of 179

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the impact of limited access to trustworthy information when the disaster strikes. Access to reliable information has been discussed in a human-rights-based paradigm (Greenwood et al. 2017). Only in 2018, however, the need of language translation for the humanitarian sector was embedded in the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response. Its 2011 predecessor barely mentioned the multilingual operational contexts of the humanitarian sector: the 2018 revisions leaped forward. The 2018 Charter includes pertinent references to connecting language needs to core principles of humanitarian action. According to the charter, language awareness in the sector is needed for impartiality towards affected populations (ibid.: 12), for training of local communities (ibid.: 24), for reducing barriers to access (ibid.: 41, 43), for communication strategies and modes (ibid.: 63, 98–99), for coordination (ibid.: 72), for distribution of goods (ibid.: 201, 207), and for healthcare measures (ibid.: 301– 304, 329). The 2018 Humanitarian Charter recognized among its common principles, rights, and duties that crisis-affected populations cannot be discriminated because of their language (ibid.: 29–31, 77, 376), hence translation has to be used for documentary information to engage the community (ibid.: 25, 175). The role of translation and interpreting in community engagement is recognized by including commitment 6.4 to enhance practices in the sector: Share necessary information with partners, coordination groups, and other relevant actors through appropriate communication channels. • • •

Respect the use of local language(s) in meetings and other communications. Examine barriers to communication so that local stakeholders are enabled to participate. Communicate clearly and avoid jargon and colloquialisms, especially when other participants do not speak the same language. Provide interpreters and translators if needed. (2018: 71)

Language needs in disasters represent incremental factors of vulnerability.1 The more multilingual the society, especially if its social groups are partially integrated, the harder to educate and prepare most members of that society to the natural hazards or social risks (e.g. terrorism) that could trigger a crisis in the area. With access to information considered a human right in crises (Greenwood et al. 2017), then translation is also a human right (O’Brien et al. 2018) to avoid discrimination because of language on the basis of UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948; Art. 2 (equality) and Art. 3 (right to security). In turn, lack of support to accommodate language needs ought to be viewed as discriminatory ( Uekusa 2019). Lack of integration, lack of participation, lack of access to information expands vulnerabilities for CALD communities. Translation would mitigate some of these pre-existing vulnerabilities, by enabling crisis managers to rely on efficient multilingual communication. However, the impact of translation is underestimated, as noted in the World Disasters Report 2018 of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC): ‘Speakers of minority languages who are not fluent in the official national language(s) are at a structural disadvantage in many countries’ (IFRC 2018: 103); lingua francas (especially English) remain default positions of limiting efficacy. As a result, language translation rarely, if ever, features among plans to increase resilience but its absence increases the cascading effects of crises. Paradoxically, it is almost a common place to consider communication strategies in crisis contexts as vital. Or, as Lundgren and McMakin (2018: 433) put it, ‘planning for communication before, and during an emergency is especially important, for vulnerable or at risk populations’. As reduced access to information on risks and on actions to perform to mitigate such risks is determined by the means (radio, television, internet, text messages, leaflets, and word of mouth) as much as the 180

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modes of communication (oral, signed, written, multimodal, etc.), translation into a language and a mode that is understood by the affected communities ought to be central to planning for communication. Currently, it is not central. Thus, language barriers in the context of multidimensional cascading crises widen existing vulnerabilities or engender new ones by means of miscommunication. Miscommunication entails misconceptions on risk perception, which give rise to further dangers, when such miscommunication takes place in healthcare contexts or for health-related matters, as it will be discussed in the next section.

Cascading effects and risk communication With 7,000 plus languages spoken daily and 50% of the world population being at least bilingual (Eberhard et al. 2019), most societies are multilingual. In cross-boundary cascading crises, the multilingual needs increase. Also, it could be argued that migration further emphasizes the multicultural and multilingual needs of the globalized world. An increase in people displacement and migration illustrates how crises cascade in further disruptive events. Unparalleled numbers of people have become forced migrants in the last decade (over 70.8 million, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, henceforth UNHCR 2019); a decade in which countries that were migrants’ destinations were afflicted by the worst economic crisis in recent history. The 2014–2016 European Migrant Crisis was a phenomenon linked to many different causes, a proper cascading crisis. It exposed the problem of migrants becoming exposed to known risks, which demand concerted efforts by the society to ensure recently displaced communities are educated to the risks of their new area of residence, thus increasing overall local resilience (Guadagno 2016; Guadagno et al. 2017). Superdiverse societies, in a way, engender a risk of developing super- exposed vulnerable groups. The new linguistic contexts for migrants becoming members of (or creating new) CALD communities might, and generally do, heighten vulnerabilities as displaced populations may find themselves in new contexts, with different rights and exposed to different viruses, and acquire new statuses of citizenship (from migrant to refugees, to the generic ‘displaced’). People falling in these categories often experience more directly linguistic differences and cultural barriers that could affect access to information – they are not necessarily more vulnerable, as often forced migrants develop and possess resilience, however limited access to information might cause temporal or partial vulnerabilities. One of the domains in which the barriers are very visible is that of public health. Depicting risks to health caused by imminent hazards or contagious contexts in multilingual societies is getting harder. The complexity of multilingual communication rose to prominence in the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, when linguistic and cultural factors diminished the impact of a well-resourced response. ‘Good communications and community engagement are urgently needed to combat denial, rumors, and behaviors that fan new transmission chains’ (Chan 2014: 1184); the effects of preventive measures to public health had lesser impact because of ‘minimal community engagement; poor awareness of the people about the different aspects of the disease’ (Shrivastava et al. 2015; see also Bastide 2018). These are problems of trust in communication with affected communities (Cadwell 2015). The Global Humanitarian Summit of 2016 stressed the centrality of community engagement and accountability to affected communities through the Grand Bargain Commitment ( WHO 2016). The Sendai Framework finds its extension in the Grand Bargain Commitment that acknowledges the duty to interact with local cultures and communities when providing aid. Recent analysis of this commitment shows that awareness is growing but the international humanitarian sector needs more time to be able (or plan) to accommodate language needs ( Federici et al. 2019). 181

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Focussing explicitly on crisis-related healthcare and multilingual communication, there are studies about the USA (Andrulis et al. 2016; Schwei et al. 2016), with illustrations also coming from the emergency services in Australia (Coles and Buckle 2004; Slade et al. 2011; Ryan et al. 2017), in the UK ( El Ansari et al. 2009), and in New Zealand (Zorn et al. 2016). There are substantial differences among the healthcare systems of the countries in which these studies were conducted, as well as in their multilingual contexts, and the institutional support to accommodate language needs. Nevertheless, there is evidence that emergency procedures and mortality rates can be linked to poor language support ( Ng et  al. 2017). For instance, increased rates of fatality are recorded in CALD women and they are associated to socio-economic factors including linguistic difficulties in accessing healthcare and support ( Keygnaert et al. 2016; Semenzato et al. 2018). In the European Union, directive 2011/24/EU acknowledges the patient’s right to access information in a language they understand in any member state they travel to or reside in. However, the available language provisions of member states in ordinary contexts fall short of this commitment (Angelelli 2015); it is fair to deduct that the same limitations exist in crisis contexts. When the focus moves onto pandemic on a world- scale then programme plans of the World Health Organization indeed consider multilingualism in crisis settings ( WHO 2003, 2012; Drabek 2010). However, WHO has also recognized its own deficiencies in underestimating the role of language- specific and culture- specific healthcare communication ( Bastide 2018; Federici et  al. 2019). There are also related issues when it comes to regional crises, with evidence of poorer public health in migrant camps in Europe ( Keygnaert et al. 2016; Puthoopparambil and Parente 2018). When these crises happen in lesser developed countries, the global response adds to the ordinary complexity of supporting the language needs of local CALD or multilingual communities, the additional need to communicate with international humanitarian aid workers. The multi-agency dialogue among these stakeholders requires effective access to information as well as efficient exchange and sharing of information. These communicative interactions presume understanding of one (or multiple) languages accepted and used ( lingua francas) by all the stakeholders. These interactions must have recourse to language translation, thus delaying and altering the message. For the populations at risk, it is crucial to understand and react to relevant messages from evacuation warnings, to drills and training exercises to build resilience and reduce risk by increasing preparedness and mitigating health risks from immediate physical risks (collapsing building) to risks of contagion (e.g. cholera or Ebola outbreaks). These interactions hinge on continued and sustained multidirectional engagement between all the stakeholders when working on risk reduction, as well as when responding to the disaster, and later cooperating in the reconstruction phase.

Conclusion It is accepted that accommodating language needs in cascading crises is extremely complex (Federici et al. 2019). It is necessary to ensure complex systems are in place to support communication in multilingual crises; even some of the solutions adopted in the globalized translation industry (24/7 agency work) are underused in global crises. Yet the awareness of multilingual communication and its significance is often confined to last-m inute requests for language services from anybody who could offer them. Those interpreting (and at times translating) in crisis contexts may be professional and trained. Their efforts however are too often hidden, and their activity is invisible, time-pressed, and underpaid. Their tasks and activities are often defined as fundamental in the continuum of commercial exchange driven by the interests of corporations and multinationals to trade peacefully (read, regularly, and 182

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profitably) across the world – even though such significance dos not entail appropriate remuneration for the impact that translation and interpreting have on trading. Regardless of one’s own views of economic globalization, its economic success in the form it took in the first two decades of the twenty-fi rst century rested on much activity of translators and interpreters to circumvent the very cultural and linguistic barriers that create, feed, and aggravate crisis contexts. Hence, in many multilingual and multicultural contexts, linguistic and cultural mediation by translators and interpreters is expected in ordinary times. Interpreters and translators enable social, cultural, and economic interactions and transactions in multilingual societies. The very same needs however seem to represent a surprise when a crisis occurs. So, for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, ‘the people we unintentionally exclude’ in crisis response tend to be those more vulnerable and marginalized. The report continues by saying that: Generic programming approaches often fail to meet the specific needs of particular groups. For example, they often use language and communication tools that work for humanitarians but are not understood by the people in need, or assistance may be provided in a way that is easiest for humanitarians but cannot be physically accessed due to physical, cultural, social or political limitations affecting the target population. (IFRC ­ 2018: ­11–12) ​­ These situations are endemic and, in multilingual countries, are predictable. Multilingual resources ( pre-t ranslated materials, videos, and so on) could be prepared as part of ordinary emergency planning activities; yet the report continues by saying that ‘People most at risk do not always receive the assistance and information they need in a manner that meets their need’. Linguistic support in crisis contexts for multilingual populations has to be viewed in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Lack of access to information in a language that is understood is to be recognized as a form of discrimination and marginalization; the SDGs aim to address these issues as CALD communities within populations affected by disasters became classified as vulnerable; as a result, the Grand Bargain commitment recognizes the centrality of accountability to affected populations and community engagement to build up resilience, reduce risk, and mitigate the impact of crises. There are examples of structured, concerted, and (intended as) sustainable ways of developing resources that will enable communities to be engaged with central messages from civil protection agencies. These perspectives presuppose a gradual growth of human resources, human networks that culturally and linguistically mediate for their own groups. They do not replace, substitute, or antagonize other technology-led solutions (for an overview, see O’Brien 2019). Development of an ad hoc machine translation solution was crucial in Haiti (Munro 2010, 2013; Lewis et al. 2011; Munro and Manning 2012). The use of machine translation systems and even of pivot machine translation engines cannot be ruled out as a poor-quality option, as it could represent an excellent point of departure for post- editing and crowdsourcing alternatives to no translation at all ( Liu et  al. 2019; Silva et al. 2018). Response simulations have engaged with machine translation solutions to enable communication among responders working remotely in cross-border simulations of response (Howe et al. 2013). New practices of citizen participation include crowdsourcing translation (Sutherlin 2013), crowdsourcing language resources to create machine translation for rare language combinations ( Lewis 2010; Lewis et  al. 2011), translations of geographical data sources (Mulder et al. 2016), and developing long-term CALD resources through training (Federici and Cadwell 2018). The lists are bound to grow; the question that remains open 183

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is whether the number of skilled translators and interpreters in low-resourced languages in combinations outside the market will grow in proportion to the growth of globalized, multilingual societies. After having considered the significance of the global perspective for risk reduction and cascading crises, this chapter discussed how discourse on translation and interpreting in crisis contexts remain disjoint from major conceptualizations of crisis communication in disaster research. Possibly it is not as fragmented as described in Federici (2016) but certainly no robust and coherent communication strategy to support CALD communities in cascading crises exists. The limited perception of the role played by translation and interpreting in risk communication during crisis situations has to be challenged. The option that must be avoided is expecting to be able to oversimplify the importance of accessible information in a language that crisis-affected populations understand because somebody will pick up the pieces of poor risk communication ( Bredenkamp and Ansari 2017). Responses are multi-agency and depend on communication to function. There is a clear need and there are new roles to play for translation. One significant shift would be to include linguists in training scenarios for crisis managers. Humanitarian personnel who have seen the difference that language translation makes should lobby politicians and decision-makers to ensure that the role of translation is better understood, so to enhance risk communication. This enhancement might start with better awareness, but it needs to move to direct collaboration and training with crisis managers, and translation and interpreting experts and professionals should then educate crisis response experts on what translators and interpreters can and cannot do, and how and why, so as to avoid a mechanistic conceptualization of language translation. Focusing on the mechanics of translation justifies limited efforts at planning by simultaneously considering language translation as too complex to include in planning and ‘easy’ to achieve so that anybody who knows two languages can do it.

Further reading Mercer, J. (2012) ‘Culture, Hazard and Disaster’, in Wisner, B., Gaillard, J. and Kelman I. (eds.), The ­ ­ ​­ Routledge Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction. London: Routledge, pp. 97–108. This chapter offers an overview of perception of cultural differences in disaster risk reduction research and is accessible to people new to this discipline; it offers excellent ground for comparison with notions of context and culture in translation and interpreting. ­ ­ This particular paper focusses on creating resources for humanitarian interpreters. It reports the findings of a course that set the standards for conducting research over humanitarian interpreting by including also details about typology of students and fieldwork, as much as life experience of the interpreters. O’Brien, S. (2019) ‘Translation Technology and Disaster Management’, in O’Hagan, M. (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Technologies. London: Routledge, pp. 304–318. ­ ­ ​­ The international humanitarian sector seeks solutions to multilingual crisis communication in technologies; O’Brien’s chapter is an accurate overview of the state of play for translation technologies in crisis and disaster settings. Schwarz, A., Seeger, M. W. and Auer, C. (2016) The Handbook of International Crisis Communication Research. Oxford and Malden: John Wiley & Sons. Edited by the most prominent experts in crisis and risk communication, leading a team of contributors from across the world and the disciplinary spectrum, this is the reference volume for the field. Furthermore, it is one of the first publications to acknowledge the dangers of using only anglophone paradigms and Western conceptualizations to discuss communication of risks and crisis communication. 184

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13 ­Non-professional ​­ translators in the context of globalization Michał Borodo

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On the one hand, this is related to the maturing of translation studies as a discipline, currently preoccupied with the examination of the subjects so far considered of marginal interest; on the other, this is connected with the awareness of and growing interest in ‘the rapidly developing and ever- densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize modern social life’ ( Tomlinson 2004: 2). Such interconnectedness is observable in numerous spheres of communication and exchange and can be understood in terms of global networks and flows ( Held et al. 2004: 16). In the Information Age, networks constitute ‘the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, 190

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power, and culture’ (Castells 2000: 500). Flows pertain to the multidirectional distribution of, among other things, Internet content, software, information, media entertainment, infotainment, blockbuster films, bestselling books, calls for action and political manifestos occurring in what Appadurai (1990) refers to as mediascapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes. Networks and flows can also be discerned behind non-professional translators’ practices. Equipped with new technologies and organized into networks, Internet users respond to and intervene in the globally circulating content, facilitating, strengthening, remoulding or redirecting global cultural flows and generating their own informational flows. Their actions challenge the mechanisms of power, production, mediation, and distribution and may be perceived, depending on the perspective, as a form of empowerment, for example in the case of fan initiatives and social activist communities, or as a form of exploitation, especially with regard to non-professionals collaborating with social media companies. This chapter begins with a discussion of some of the key concepts related to nonprofessional translation: it will discuss terminological issues, the categories and characteristics of this kind of translation, its relation with new technologies, and the professional world. The chapter will then concentrate in more detail on three types of non-professional translation activities, distinguishing grass-roots ­ ​­ ­entertainment-oriented ​­ translation projects, ­grass-roots ​­ social activist translation initiatives, and top- down crowdsourcing translation enterprises. They will be illustrated with examples drawn from practices related to scanlating, fansubbing, and the translation of Harry Potter, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, TED Talks, and social activist groups such as Babels, Translator Brigades, or Tlaxcala. The chapter will also hypothesize on the future directions in which non-professional translation may develop.

Key concepts and major characteristics of non-professional translation Depending on the context, agenda, and research perspective, non-professional translation has been defined and referred to with different names by translation and interpreting scholars. This ‘terminological ambiguity’ is mentioned by O’Hagan (2011: 13–14), who points to such partly overlapping terms as community translation, translation crowdsourcing, usergenerated translation, or collaborative translation. According to O’Hagan (2011: 14), whose preferred term is community translation, what all these labels have in common is that they refer to ‘translation performed voluntarily by Internet users and (…) usually produced in some form of collaboration often on specific platforms by a group of people forming an online community’. Pym (2011: 5) and Olohan (2013), on the other hand, use the term volunteer translation, which highlights the willingness to perform translation tasks by people who are sufficiently motivated to devote their free time and creative energies to translation of their own accord. Other names include pro bono translation, social translation, amateur translation, fan translation, pirate translation, wiki-t ranslation, activist translation, and more specific terms, such as scanlating (the translation of comics), romhacking (the translation of video games), fansubbing, and fandubbing (the creation of subtitles and dubbing by fans). Depending on the context, all of them may be legitimate terms that either draw attention to the specific type of material that is translated or metonymically refer to different aspects of translation activity. In the world of interpreting, which is beyond the scope of this chapter, there are still other terms, such as natural translation, a long- standing term introduced by Harris (1976: 96) to denote ‘the translation done in everyday circumstances by bilinguals who have no special training for it’, ad-hoc interpreting or child language brokering. All these terms ‘serve as a powerful reminder of the fact that non-professional translation and 191

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interpreting are as widely established and diversified, if not more so, than professional translation and interpreting’ (Susam-Saraeva and Pérez-González 2012: 157). ­­ ​­ ­ ​­ The terms interchangeably used in this chapter are non-professional translation, in line with Susam-Saraeva and Pérez- González (2012) and Antonini et  al. (2017), and volunteer translation, in line with Olohan (2013). Non-professional translation is a broad term covering a wide range of translation practices. As pointed out by Antonini et al. (2017: 7), unlike the word ‘unprofessional’, ‘non-professional’ focusses on ‘who’ rather than on ‘ how’. Rather than drawing attention to the allegedly poor quality of the translated product and the supposed lack of translation skills, it draws attention to ‘who’ performs translation, that is, to translators characterized by a specific socio-cultural positioning who do not possess formal training, institutionally and educationally sanctioned qualifications or an affiliation with a professional association or institution. Volunteer translation, which may be defined as ‘translation conducted by people exercising their free will to perform translation work which is not remunerated, which is formally organized and for the benefit of others’ (Olohan 2013: 3), is another term which adequately describes the nature of many translation activities. It is even broader than non-professional translation, also encompassing practising translators with professional background and some formal training, who may decide to voluntarily take part in collaborative translation projects, if they are motivated enough to translate for free. It should also be clarified that it would be misleading to assume that there is a clear- cut demarcation line between professional and non-professional translation, as they may in fact share a number of characteristics. A standard set of attributes ascribed to professionals include being recruited for a job, receiving remuneration for translation services, abiding by a specific code of conduct, enjoying a certain degree of prestige, but non-professionals may possess some of these attributes as well (Antonini et al. 2017: 7– 8). For example, they may be recruited by an online translation community before they are admitted as members, they may be required to abide by a set of linguistic, technical and ethical rules generally accepted by this community, for their actions they may receive symbolic capital or, in some cases, their actions may translate into making a profit. The lack of remuneration is not, after all, an essential prerequisite for non-professional translation (O’Hagan 2011: 14). Professional translators, on the other hand, do not always enjoy the cultural prestige that is sometimes ascribed to them, and certainly not of the same kind across different cultures. As mentioned above, they may also occasionally decide to voluntarily participate in (fan, crowdsourcing, activist) translation projects for free. The list could go on. It could be perhaps inferred from the above that non-professional translation is a fairly recent phenomenon. It should rather be viewed, however, as a long- standing human activity. Involved in a variety of cultural and commercial exchanges, translators and interpreters with no formal training and institutionally sanctioned qualifications have been with us for ages. Susam- Saraeva and Pérez- González (2012: 157) even posit that perhaps ‘ it is professional – rather than non-professional – translation that should be taken as the exception within the wider context of translation’, constituting ‘merely one sub-type of translation, rather than the norm- setting, prototypical form’. The scale and diversity of non-professional translation seem indeed to indicate that perceiving translation as a predominantly professional activity may be too narrow. It rather seems to be an essential and deeply ingrained aspect of human activity that surfaces in favourable conditions. What is new in the historical development of non-professional translation is exactly that it has been recently provided with such favourable conditions, materially facilitated by technological tools widely and easily accessible in the context of Web 2.0. In the sphere of information, communication and entertainment, Internet users are no longer simply recipients 192

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but are generating content in the form of Wikipedia encyclopaedic entries, WordPress blogs, YouTube video clips, Amazon reviews, etc. They have taken over some of the tasks previously reserved for professionals and are actively involved in creating the Web, which may be viewed as a new promising stage in the evolution of the Internet (O’Reilly 2005), or as a negative phenomenon, an invasion of untrained, and often anonymous, amateurs making inroads into the territories traditionally dominated by professionals ( Keen 2007). Such content is generated thanks to social networking and the Internet, a rich source of texts and media products, an environment offering software tools and online MT services, a space for collaborating, sharing resource, hosting websites, and an efficient distribution network. From this angle, present-d ay non-professional translation is radically different from how it was practised in the past. Are volunteer translators a threat for professionals? According to Susam-Saraeva and PérezGonzález (2012: 151), it is translating and interpreting non-professionals ‘without formal training in linguistic mediation but also working for free, who have always represented the biggest threat to labour market structures, as well as to the identity and livelihood of translation professionals’. This may be even more true today, when a non-professional, in symbiosis with advanced computer technology, penetrates the territories of a professional translator, similarly equipped with new technologies, when one ‘translational cyborg’ (Cronin 2003: 116) competes against the other. In the case of non-professional subtitling or such crowdsourcing projects as the translation of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn the interests of professionals and non-professionals may indeed conflict, as these are alternative ways of obtaining translations, which bypass professionals. On the other hand, crowdsourcing is only possible when the Internet crowd is sufficiently motivated to devote their time to working on a project. This may be considered worthwhile in the case of some fashionable social networking platforms and desirable media products, but not necessarily with many other products and businesses. It may contribute, however, to the image of translation as an activity that anyone with an even average knowledge of a foreign language, but possessing advanced technological skills, can do. A pertinent question asked in this context by McDonough Dolmaya (2012: 187) is: ‘how does this affect the perception of translation by the general public, if translation becomes an activity performed for commercial organizations by volunteers without formal training in the field?’ This could be potentially damaging for the translation profession, may lead to the underestimating of professional translators and to the undervaluing of professional translators’ services. ­

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In some cases, they take legal action against translating volunteers, although this does not seem to be common practice (see the next sections for a more detailed discussion). In what follows, three types of non-professional translation will be discussed. They are to some extent overlapping with those suggested by Susam- Saraeva and Pérez- González (2012: 152), who distinguish the categories of (a) forms of civic engagement in the public sphere and public services in the face of the dwindling financial commitment of the state, ( b) forms of engagement in the re-configuration of the media and publishing sector in today’s digital culture, and (c) forms of non-professional linguistic and cultural mediation related to migration, resettlement, and displacement. The categories discussed below mainly overlap with ( b), that is with non-professionals’ activities in the media and publishing sector (referred to below as ­grass-roots ​­ ­entertainment-oriented ​­ translation projects and ­top-down ​­ crowdsourcing translation enterprises), but also include activist translation initiatives in public life (referred to as grass-roots social activist translation initiatives). This division is based on who initiates the translation process: g rass-roots projects are initiated and implemented cooperatively by volunteer translators themselves, whereas top- down crowdsourcing enterprises, though largely carried out by non-professionals, are usually initiated by business.

­Grass-roots ​­ ­entertainment-oriented ​­ translation projects This is a broad category of non-professional translation performed by fans, which includes such forms as scanlating, fansubbing, fandubbing, romhacking, and the translations of fantasy fiction, most notably of the Harry Potter series. Initiated at a grass-roots level, they are fuelled by the creativity of fans, who devote their time to making popular culture products available in translation for free. Created without the consent of the original author, publisher or distributor, such projects may sometimes conflict with the commercial interests of copyright holders, who may nevertheless tolerate them for the long-term benefit of wider dissemination of their products. According to Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez (2006: 37–38) it is fansubbing that is ‘nowadays the most important manifestation of fan translation, having turned into a mass social phenomenon on the Internet, as proved by the vast virtual community surrounding them such as websites, chat rooms, and forums’. Its origins may be traced to the mid-1990s, when fansubbing communities, dissatisfied with the officially released, commercial translations of culturally suppressed anime, started to circulate their own amateur subtitled versions ( PérezGonzález 2007: 265). Just like other forms of fan translation, fansubbing is based on teamwork. Fansubbers perform a variety of roles, acting not only as translators, but also ‘raw’ providers, typesetters, timers, encoders, editors, and proofreaders ( Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006: 38–39), being responsible for either linguistic transfer or graphic and technical issues. Their translations may sometimes differ from professional versions, being more foreignizing and interventionist, ‘more creative and individualistic’ and ‘far less dogmatic’, lying ‘at the margin of market imperatives’ ( Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006: 51). For example, fansubbers may use colours to differentiate between various characters, introduce different font types within the same programme, use non-standard subtitles that are longer than two lines or insert notes at the top of the screen ( Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006: 47). Fansubbers not only intervene in the accepted standard methods of audiovisual translation, but also ‘ in the traditional dynamics of the audiovisual industry by acting as self-appointed translation commissioners’ ( Pérez- González 2007: 265). As noted by Bogucki (2009: 49), they ‘rarely work with classics, as the intention behind their work is to make local viewers familiar with recent film productions’, which may have a negative impact on official film 194

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distribution. In some cases, distributors and copyright holders may even take legal steps towards volunteer translators. For example, several people running a popular subtitling website were arrested by Polish police in 2007 on the charge of illegal distribution of translations for pirate films ( Borodo 2017: 192–195). However, the relationship between fansubbers and copyright holders does not always lead to a conflict of interests. It may also be a symbiosis. Firstly, some fansubbers will stop distributing their versions when it is announced that officially licensed translations will be launched on the market ( Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006: 44). Secondly, their illegal, unofficial versions may in fact increase the popularity of a given title before it is officially released. Thus, despite the fact that producers and distributors sometimes warn fansubbers about the consequences, they will usually not take legal action. It is possible to find certain similarities between fansubbers and scanlators, that is, nonprofessional translators of comics. Their translations are also created cooperatively. Specific group members are responsible for concrete stages of the translation process, adopting the roles of scanners, translators, proofreaders and graphic artists ( Deppey 2005). For scanlators, translating is also above all a creative pastime. They are enthusiasts of comics who enjoy sharing their favourite manga or super hero comic books and often wish to fill the gap by focussing on the titles overlooked or unlikely to be released in translation by official publishers. Many of them try not to interfere with official publishers’ interests and abide by an unofficial code of ethics, which delineates the boundaries of their activities with regard to the publishing sector ( Deppey 2005; Borodo 2017: 190). This ethical code stipulates that scanlating groups do not translate comics officially available on the market and remove completed scanlations from their websites or abandon projects in progress when they find out that a given title or series has been licensed by official publishers. In such situations, scanlators may also inform comic book fans about publishers’ plans and encourage readers to purchase the official translation ( Borodo 2017: 191). Scanlators even argue that they have developed a symbiotic relationship with official publishers ( Deppey 2005; Borodo 2017: 191), claiming that their actions may contribute to the popularization of particular titles before their official publication. To some extent, this may be true, as after scanlators withdraw a partially translated series from their platform some readers may indeed purchase official translations to continue reading. It is also possible, however, that some of them will develop a habit of reading at no cost and lose interest in a series no longer available on a scanlation website. Still other grass-roots non-professional translation projects were initiated by Harry Potter fans. Commenting on this phenomenon, Nogueira and Semolini (2010) note that ‘[d]ozens of Harry Potter enthusiasts will band together to beat the publishers to the bookshelves – but this is more of a teenager prank than crowdsourcing proper’. Such initiatives are not necessarily simply a teenage prank, however, but may be viewed as an angry local response to the global publishing industry, a form of dissatisfaction and protest against being treated as a ‘second-rate readership’ ( Borodo 2017: 196). It may be viewed as an attempt to redirect, remould and accelerate global cultural flows of a highly desirable text by networking fans in a situation when they can officially read the series translated into their own languages long after the privileged English-speaking audience. Such initiatives took place on an international scale. In Germany (‘Harry Potter Speaks German’ 2003), the unofficial translation was collaboratively created by some 1,000 networking fans responsible for a variety of tasks, such as translating, proofreading, editing, coordinating emails, managing the project website, and receiving email messages with copies of successive chapters as a reward. In Poland, thousands of irritated fans took part in translation-related actions, such as ‘The Emerald Revolution’ and ‘Harry Potter for Everyone’, while teams of networking fans released their own unofficial translations within less than a month, and several months before the official 195

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translation was published ( Borodo 2017: 195–196). Such translations were dismissed by official publishers as violation of copyright. However, as a rule, no punitive measures were taken against non-professional translators involved in these projects, although a Harry Potter fan was arrested by police on charge of posting an unofficial translation on the Internet in France (Willsher 2007). ­

­Top-down ​­ crowdsourcing translation enterprises ­

One of the earliest translation crowdsourcing enterprises, which started at the end of 2007, was the translation of Facebook: Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, so it may come as a surprise to some that up until early 2008, it didn’t offer any localized versions of the site at all. The company managed to jumpstart its international presence with an application fittingly called Translations, which took the t ime-consuming and costly task of translating the site and crowd- sourced it, asking the network’s millions of users to lend a hand. (Kincaid ­ 2009) In practice, Facebook registered users were invited to submit versions of words and expressions in their own languages and then had a chance to vote for the best translations. Thanks to this massive, combined effort of the Internet crowd, first contributing ideas, then critically examining a set of available alternatives and filtering out less successful options through voting mechanisms, the company obtained free translations ‘that were not simply technically accurate, but this also helped to eliminate awkward and excessively formal expressions’ ( Kincaid 2009). Twitter followed in Facebook’s footsteps, introducing their Twitter Translation Center in 2011: Today we’re announcing a product that is a major step toward making Twitter more easily accessible by people around the world  – the Twitter Translation Center. The Translation Center allows us to crowdsource translations from our passionate users in order to more quickly launch Twitter in additional languages. (Parfeni 2011) ­ As in the case of Facebook, registered users could contribute to creating localized versions of Twitter websites in their language for free. This raises a number of ethical questions, especially from the perspective of professional translators. Facebook or Twitter could have commissioned professionals to translate their websites into numerous world languages, but they didn’t. Volunteer translators thus made inroads into the territory that could potentially belong to professionals. It may also be asked whether in such a configuration Internet users are empowered individuals, given a voice and opportunity to actively shape their social media and networking platforms, or are they members of local communities exploited by profit-making global companies? As noted by O’Hagan (2011: 15), while it would be simplistic to perceive such user-generated translations as ‘dilettante, 196

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In the case of Wikipedia, most of the texts contributed to the 300 language versions of the online encyclopaedia are non-translations, but some are translated articles. These articles are selected for translation by Wikipedians themselves, who may decide what article to translate, whether to translate all of it or only part of it, and who may then revise it, using Wikipedia’s open- editing platform, achieving fairly positive results (McDonough Dolmaya 2014). According to an online survey carried out among translating Wikipedians by McDonough Dolmaya (2012: 173), about 70% of them did not have formal training in translation. When enquired about their motivations, they mentioned such reasons for involvement as disseminating information for the benefit of other language users, participating in an intellectually stimulating activity, developing translation skills and supporting the organization (McDonough Dolmaya 2012: 187). Volunteer translators possessing some translation training were less altruistic, sometimes perceiving their translations as potential career enhancement options (McDonough Dolmaya 2012: 188). What differentiates the translation of Wikipedia from translating TED Talks is not only the form of translation, that is translating articles versus translating videos using the subtitling platforms offered in the TED Open Translation Project. The latter is also perceived as a more prestigious activity, with greater symbolic capital, and it is not anonymous (McDonough Dolmaya 2012: 188). The motivation behind participating in both these projects are partly overlapping, as they both aim at facilitating global flows of information or infotainment through extensive networks of cooperating volunteers, but they also differ. Based on volunteer subtitlers’ blog entries, Olohan (2013: 8) identified six categories of motivation, including ‘(1) sharing TED benefits; (2) effecting social change; (3) deriving warm glow; (4) participating in communities; (5) enhancing learning; and (6) deriving enjoyment’, referring to TED’s recruitment campaign, appealing to these very motives, as ‘persuasive and effective’ (Olohan 2013: 13). The successfulness of the campaign is also confirmed by figures: the project was launched in 2009 with 300 translations and 200 translating volunteers, reaching, in mid-2012, about 30,000 translations and about 8,000 translators (Olohan 2013: 6), and rising to more than 120,000 translations and more than 33,000 translators in 2020 ( based on TED Translators 2019). The international community of volunteer translators have apparently found the project devoted to ‘ideas worth spreading’ worth their time.

­ It is not only such g rass-roots initiatives as fansubbing or translation crowdsourcing that have attracted the attention of translation studies scholars, but also grass-roots social activist translation initiatives. According to Olohan (2013: 1) the studies concerned with such initiatives ‘tend to focus on the narratives of communities of translators and to foreground the relationship between translation or interpreting and social movements, particularly with anti-m ilitary and alterglobalization stances’. The functioning and social positioning of these 197

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groups, collectively engaged in different forms of political activism, was described in some detail by Mona Baker (2013). Recognizing that translation and language ‘constitute a space of resistance’, and relying on Internet technology to communicate, coordinate work and circulate translated materials, translating activists use their language skills to ‘empower voices made invisible by the global power of English and the politics of language’ ( Baker 2013: 25). Baker (2013: 26) distinguishes between two categories of activist translation groups, depending on the translated materials and the setting where translation is performed, that is those concerned with written materials circulated via mailing lists and websites, as well as those who engage in interpreting activities at organized events. Examples of such groups of networking activist translators examined by Baker include: Babels, Translators for Peace, Translators United for Peace, ECOS, Translator Brigades, and Tlaxcala, that is the International Network of Translators for Linguistic Diversity. These communities differ with regard to their size and scale of operation. Some of them are restricted to specific countries, while others operate on a global scale. With regard to membership, in 2005 the activist group Babels consisted of 9,000 volunteers, constituting ‘an impressive coalition of translators and interpreters, or people with the requisite language skills’ ( Baker 2013: 35), whereas other groups, such as Translation for Peace and Translators United for Peace, consisted of several dozen members ( Baker 2013: 27). The networking communities in question concentrate on different themes, such as military conflicts in ‘Kosovo in the case of Translators for Peace and Iraq in the case of TUP’ ( Baker 2013: 26) or are responsible for disseminating materials presenting alternative sociopolitical views, countering mainstream narratives on ‘the siege of Gaza, continued poverty in Africa and drug trafficking in Latin America’ ( Baker 2013: 32). As argued by Baker (2013: 36), even when they focus on specific local events, this is done within a larger framework of globality, as ‘[t]heir aims and praxis are fundamentally global in reach, even when they make space for specific local struggles’. This is also noticeable in these communities’ charters, constitutions or manifestos. For example, members of Tlaxcala describe themselves as ‘a ntim ilitarists’ and ‘anti-imperialists’ who ‘stand against “neoliberal” corporate globalization’, while Translator Brigades state: ‘We come from different contexts but have a common concern for global inequality and human suffering’, adding ‘We believe our creative use of social networking and commitment to translating will serve to spread valuable ideas and empower struggles for justice by creating and reinforcing bonds among social movements across the globe’ (as cited in Baker 2013: 27–28). Many activist translators are professional translators and interpreters, translation students and lecturers, which gives rise to some tensions with the professional world. Volunteer translators’ may be treated with suspicion or even perceived as a threat by professional commercial translators. They may be associated with undermining the profession, depriving professionals of potential work, offering low-quality interpretation services and undermining the trust of potential clients, especially in view of the fact that the politically engaged activities run counter to such values as neutrality and partiality, traditionally ascribed to professional translators (2013: 37). As observed by Baker (ibid.) such communities of volunteer translators ‘are caught between the world of activism and the politics of professional competition and ethos of the service economy’.

Conclusion ­

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level, some are initiated by global non-profit or for-profit entities. Some are concerned with the circulation of information, other with facilitating access to entertainment. Some of them treat translation activities as a creative hobby, a linguistic exercise or intellectually stimulating pastime, others translate because they identify with a particular organization and its goals, still others hope that their m icro- scale activities may effect macro- scale social change. Volunteer translators’ actions create tensions with the professional world, both with translators and copyright holders, challenging certain well- established practices. Offering their translations for free, translators cooperating with profit-m aking organizations, such as Facebook, are making inroads into the territories traditionally belonging to professional translators. Social activist translators are treated with suspicion as their actions stand in opposition to the neutrality and non- engagement, traditionally regarded as professional behaviour, and because they also offer their translation skills for free. Non-professionals’ actions may also be problematic from the perspective of copyright holders, as they call into question wellestablished mechanisms of distribution. It is no longer the publisher, producer, and distributor who decide about how a given text or product should be made available to the public, but also the communities of fansubbers, harrypotterians, and scanlators. Of these, it is perhaps scanlators in particular who seem to comply with market rules, refraining from distributing the works in the sphere of interest of official publishers, whereas fansubbers and harrypotterians have displayed more subversive attitudes towards the professional world. This was particularly noticeable in the case of harrypotterians, who exhibited the most radical attitude, throwing down the gauntlet to the publishing world and competing with professional translators since the professional world did not meet their expectations. It is possible that under the influence of non-professional translators’ actions professional translation and publishing practices will undergo certain changes. For example, in the sphere of entertainment, the non-standard, innovative conventions of unofficial anime fansubs may influence the professional translation practices on the audiovisual market ( Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006: 51; Pérez- González 2007: 276). The same processes may be found in the professional translations of comic books under the influence of scanlations ( Rampant 2010). With regard to the latter it may also be hypothesized that certain controversies may arise between official comic book distributors and scanlating groups in the face of the ongoing shift from print versions to digital formats and the advent of such portals as comiXology. Scanlators, and publishers will increasingly compete on the same ground making use of the same comic book medium. It is also possible, however, that translating fans, often with excellent knowledge of the comic book worlds, will be in some way embraced by the industry. Then, although Harry Potter was certainly atypical with regard to its extraordinary popularity, one may hypothesize that the actions of translating harrypotterians will influence the world of professional publishing. After all, in some countries Harry Potter books were not translated by individual literary translators but by teams of professionals translators ( Borodo 2017: 30). Will a shift from individuals to teams take place on a larger scale in the future, especially in the context of global bestsellers for young readers, who are not only increasingly competent in their use of English, but also capable of networking and spontaneously generating their own unofficial translations ahead of professionals? The question of the relation and impact of non-professional translation on the professional world is generally one of the most interesting questions in this context. Some influences of volunteer translators on professionals are noticeable already, others may be hypothesized about. For example, according to Pym (2011: 6–7) it is possible to ‘envisage workflow scenarios where the serious advantages of voluntary translators coexist with services by language professionals: volunteer translators might postedit MT output, then have their work revised 199

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by professionals’. This leads Pym (2011: 7) to assert that ‘there is no need to choose between one and the other; the electronic world becomes big enough for both’. Katan (2015), on the other hand, is less optimistic, predicting that non-professionals equipped in new technologies will not necessarily develop a symbiotic relationship with professionals. He argues that ‘[i]f we move to the year 2025 (or thereabouts), the Google Translator apps will have improved to the extent that technical, low-r isk, low ambiguity, translating and interpreting can be safely delivered with minimal human intervention’, and that ‘[c]rowd- sourcing will have increased in both quantity and quality so that most social media and much audiovisual translation will bypass the professional T/Is’( Katan 2015: 12). Whatever the future will bring, rather than being excessively preoccupied with the issues of professional status and adherence to professional norms, professional translators and translation scholars should approach non-professionals with an open mind and can possibly learn something from translating volunteers, often members of the audiences they address, often unconventional, creative, and innovative in their translation practices (Susam- Saraeva and Pérez- González 2012: 158).

Further reading Baker, M. (2013) ‘Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action’, Social Movement Studies: ­ pp. 23–47. ­ ­ ​­ Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 12(1), An in- depth analysis of social activist anti-war and alter-g lobalization translation communities in the context of globalization. O’Hagan, M. (ed.) (2011) Translation as a Social Activity. Community Translation 2.0, Linguistica Antverpi­ ­ ​­ ensia New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 10, pp. 11–23. A collection of articles presenting a variety of perspectives on community translation, from translation studies researchers as well as industry and platform designers, with a comprehensive introduction by Minako O’Hagan. ­Susam-Saraeva, Ş. and Pérez-González, ​­ ­ ​­ ­ ­­ ​­ L. (2012) ‘Non-professionals Translating and Interpreting: ­ pp. 149–165. ­ ­ ​­ Participatory and Engaged Perspectives’, The Translator, 18(2), An analysis of non-professional translation and interpreting in today’s informational networked so­ ​­ and Luis ciety shaped by global flows, with an insightful introduction by Şebnem Susam-Saraeva ­Pérez-González. ​­

References Antonini, R., Cirillo, L., Rossato, L. and Torresi, I. (2017) ­Non-Professional ​­ Interpreting and Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory Culture Society, 7, pp. 295–310. ­ ­ ​­ Baker, M. (2013) ‘Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action’, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 12(1), ­ pp. 23–47. ­ ­ ​­ Bogucki, Ł. (2009) ‘Amateur Subtitling on the Internet’, in Díaz Cintas, J. and Anderman, G. (eds.), Audiovisual Translation: Language Transfer on Screen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 48–57. ­ ­ ​­ Borodo, M. (2017) Translation, Globalization and Younger Audiences. The Situation in Poland. Oxford: Peter Lang. Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. Deppey, D. (2005) ‘Scanlation Nation: Amateur Manga Translators Tell Their Stories’, The Comics ­Journal, 269. Available online: https://www.insidescanlation.com/etc/tcj/n_scan [Accessed 25 April 2020]. Díaz Cintas, J. and Muñoz Sánchez, P. (2006) ‘Fansubs: Audiovisual Translation in an Amateur Environment’, Journal of Specialised Translation, 6, pp. 37–52. ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ Available online: http://www.jostrans.org/ issue06/art_diaz_munoz.pdf [Accessed 25 April 2020]. Harris, B. (1976) ‘The Importance of Natural Translation’, Working Papers in Bilingualism, 12, pp. 96–114. ­ ­ ​­ 200

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‘Harry Potter Speaks German’ (2003) Deutsche Welle World, 6 July. Available online: http://www. dw.com/en/harry-potter-speaks-german/a-913160 ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­­ ​­ [Accessed 25 April 2020]. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and J. Perraton (2004) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Katan, D. (2015) ‘Translation at the Cross-roads: Time for the Transcreational Turn?’ Perspectives, 24(3), ­ pp. 1–16. ­ ­ ​­ Keen, A. (2007) The Cult of the Amateur. New York: Doubleday. Kincaid, J. (2009) ‘Facebook Wants to Own Idea of Crowdsourced Translations’, Techcrunch. Avail­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​ able online: https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/26/facebook-files-for-patent-on-crowdsourcedtranslations [Accessed 25 April 2020]. McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2012) ‘Analyzing the Crowdsourcing Model and Its Impact on Public Perceptions of Translation’, The Translator, 18(2), ­ pp. 167–191. ­ ­ ​­ McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2014) ‘Revision History: Translation Trends in Wikipedia’, Translation Studies, 8(1), ­ pp. 1–19. ­ ­ ​­ Nogueira, D. and Semolini, K. (2010) ‘Crowdsourcing’, Translation Journal, 14(2), Available online: http://translationjournal.net/journal/52crowd.htm [Accessed 25 April 2020]. O’Hagan, M. (2011) ‘Community Translation: Translation as a Social Activity and Its Possible Consequences in the Advent of Web 2.0 and Beyond’, Linguistica Antverpiensia New Series – T hemes in Translation Studies, 10, pp. 11–23. ­ ­ ​­ Olohan, M. (2013) ‘Why Do you Translate? Motivation to Volunteer and TED Translation’, Translation Studies, 7(1), ­ pp. 1–17. ­ ­ ​­ O’Reilly, T. (2005) ‘What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed of Software’. Available online: http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html 25 April 2020]. Parfeni, L. (2011) ‘Twitter to Crowdsource Translations, Like Facebook’, Softpedia. Available online: ­ ­ ­­ https://news.softpedia.com/news/Twitter-to-Crowdsource-Translations-Like-Facebook-184306. ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­​­­ ­​­­ shtml [Accessed 25 April 2020]. ­ ­ ­ ­ ​­ Pym, A. (2011) ‘What Technology Does to Translating’, Translation & Interpreting, 3(1), ­ pp. 1–9. ­ ­ ​­ Rampant, J. (2010) ‘The Manga Polysystem: What Fans Want, Fans Get’, in Johnson-Woods, T. (ed.), ­ ­ ​­ Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. New York: Continuum. pp. 221–232. ­Susam-Saraeva, Ş. and ­Pérez-González, L. (2012) ‘Non-professionals Translating and Interpreting: ​­ ​­ ­ ­­ ​­ Participatory and Engaged Perspectives’, The Translator, 18(2), ­ pp. 149–165. ­ ­ ​­ TED Translators. (2019) TED. Available online: www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/ted­ ­­ ​­ ­­ ​ t ranslators [Accessed 15 December 2019]. Tomlinson, J. (2004) Globalization and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Willsher, K. (2007) ‘Harry Potter and the Boy Wizard Translator’, The Guardian, 8 August. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/08/france.harrypotter [Accessed 25 April 2020].

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14 The impact of globalization on translator and interpreter education Marc Orlando and Leah Gerber

Introduction ­

In this article, we discuss how globalization has affected the T&I industry at large, and T&I education in particular. We will first present a macro analysis of the international impact of globalization on T&I, followed by a case study, illustrating how postgraduate T&I programmes can adapt to these new educational realities as well as respond to industry needs and demands at the same time. Here, we will discuss how we have adapted our teaching approach in the Master of Interpreting and Translation Studies (MITS) programme at an Australian tertiary institution with a view to meeting the recommendations highlighted by the Bologna Process implementation and the Australian Qualifications Framework. The case study highlights how student-learning outcomes were enhanced, particularly in the articulation of theory into practice, through the wider implementation of metacognitive and problemsolving strategies, blended and situated learning, innovative assessment practices, the use of new technologies, as well as industry readiness activities.

The effect of globalization on the T&I industry Before discussing the elements mentioned in the introduction, we will provide a snapshot of the current T&I profession. The world in which translators and interpreters operate today is 202

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vastly different to that of the 1980s or 1990s. Economic, societal and technological changes have affected both practice and training in recent decades, at a global level. Market growth and an increase in demand and reach in the T&I field have been evidenced in various surveys ( Kelly et al. 2010; Drugan 2013). Although growth figures are difficult to firmly establish and compare globally, Drugan reports that the average annual growth of the language service provision ( LSP) sector between 1950 and 2004 (5%) was higher than that of international trade (4%). She also notes: From US $9 billion in 2006, the market for outsourced language services grew by onethird in a single year, reaching US $12 billion by 2007, and further compound annual growth rate of 14.6 per cent between 2008 and 2012 [was predicted]. The largest recent European study estimated annual compound rate at 10 per cent minimum from 2009– 15, giving a European language industry valued at a conservative 16.5 billion € by 2015, with the real value likely to be above 20 billion €. ( Drugan 2013: 9) According to the survey undertaken by Kelly et  al. (2010), the global language services industry was worth more than US$26 billion in 2010. The Annual Review of the Translation, Localization, and Interpreting Services and Technology Industry carried out every year by Common Sense Advisory analysts report that the language services market and the translation industry have continued to grow in complexity and extension because of an apparently ongoing global demand for information sharing (Common Sense Advisory 2015). The industry is estimated to be worth over US$46 billion globally in 2018, with experts predicting it could reach $56 billion by 2021 (Common Sense Advisory 2018). Such predictions have also impacted on the career outlook for T&I professionals. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts an 18% job growth in this industry between 2016 and 2026, compared with an average 7% growth for all other careers ( US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018). These large- scale studies clearly show that the sector is not affected by economic downturns. The reasons behind this growth and for the industry’s relatively stable position are multiple; the purpose here is not to draw up an exhaustive list of reasons, but two main causes of these changes that can be singled out are the globalization and technologization of our contemporary world. Globalization enables the circulation of people, goods, services, ideas and cultures  – sometimes f reely  – and the internationalization of the economy. This may also occur as a result of forced migration following conflicts or disasters. In the last two decades, it has resulted in an increasing number of exchanges between people from different regions of the world who would not have been in contact before. A globalized world with facilitated communication has imposed massive challenges on populations and governments, and a fortiori on the mediators who help them communicate. Market growth in translation has therefore been an important outcome of the penetration of free- or mixed-m arket economies across the globe. And despite the widespread use of English as a lingua franca, or of global English, the demand for translation has increased, particularly since large new markets opened in Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil, India and China since the early 1990s ( Drugan 2013). Most highlevel communication needs (e.g. data reports, business contracts, international meetings) or ­migration-related ​­ services (immigration ­ and ­community-related ​­ assignments) require the services of professional communicators with sound linguistic and cultural skills: translators and interpreters. The way in which international business is conducted has also had an effect on the growth of translation volumes: anyone involved in global business operations needs 203

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to stay informed of developments in markets and therefore requires translated information round the clock. Moreover, increased migration flows have increased the demand for translated materials. For example, international cooperation in fields like drug or people trafficking, immigration, counter-terrorism or peacekeeping, means that more and more international multilingual organizations require translators and interpreters to assist with communication. In 1909, the world had 37 intergovernmental and 176 non-governmental international organizations; by 1989, there were 300 and 4,200 respectively (Cronin 2003: 109), and by 2006, the number of international non-governmental organizations ( INGOs) exceeded 27,000 ( Turner 2010: 84). The scope of the work carried out by these organizations has also broadened due to the need for international collaboration in areas like environmental protection and conservation, natural resources exploitation and renewable energies development, climate change management, human rights, health, education, etc. In terms of reach, it is remarkable that multilingual translations are in such high demand ( Drugan 2013: 10) given that one of the outcomes of globalization is an increased use of English. This can be explained by the fact that web users often prefer and expect online content to be available in their mother tongue and, as a consequence, translated online materials are in increasingly high demand ( Drugan 2013: 12; Taviano 2013: 161). As shown by these researchers, online expansion in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East in recent years also explains such developments. In many countries in these regions, a larger, wealthier middle class will access commercial and tourism products online. These new web buyers are more likely to ‘consume’ from their digital devices and computers if the sites and platforms they visit are multilingual. As for the non-commercial sector, one can explain the rise in translation needs as follows: as the number of international multilingual organizations has grown, their membership has grown too, and the need for more language combinations has followed this trend. Other developments that might have affected translation reach are the trend towards the protection of cultures, and therefore of languages, and the increased visibility of translations. This protective urge may be motivated by a desire to counter the fear that the English language will dominate global communication. As Drugan notes, ‘ irrespective to the use of the English language as lingua franca, a further development is also becoming apparent – the protection of cultures and languages. The translation market will without a doubt profit from this tendency’ (2013: 14). Pym echoes this by suggesting that ‘ localisation might actively participate in the saving of difference’ (2010: 140). As far as translation visibility is concerned, many factors may have contributed to increased awareness of its existence. With facilitated communication and transport, increased accessibility to the Internet, the global reach of media, the lowering of international trade barriers, and greater travel opportunities, people have been more and more exposed to multilingualism and multiculturalism. This has promoted translation in its various forms. As Drugan reports (2013: 16), even a nti-g lobalization movements, by mobilizing activists and disseminating their arguments at local, regional and global levels, have contributed to an increased awareness of translation. As shown by Juris (2005: 191), activists easily communicate internationally and across language barriers in the Internet Age. In all cases, these changes have substantially affected the way professional translators and interpreters work. For all t wenty-first-century T&I practitioners, adaptability is a key element. Today’s professionals must be aware of the differing norms and standards of the markets in which they work, whether local or global. They have to accept to work in different contexts and environments and be at the same time global and local – glocal – professionals. ​­ 204

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For example, in the twentieth century, professional translators and interpreters would often work in-house in their companies’ translation departments. Today, this is rare. The majority of professionals are freelancers who work directly for clients or language service providers, and are in direct competition with practitioners from all over the world. Anthony Pym’s report on the status of the translation profession in the European Union (2012) shows that the proportion of freelancers in the profession ‘would generally appear to have grown since the 1990s when many large companies took to outsourcing their translation demands’. According to the report, the average proportion of freelancers globally is around 78%, ranging from 50% in China to 89% in the UK ( Pym et al. 2012: 88). Professionals understand that the geographical region in which they reside does not necessarily determine their only area of work. Translators in the t wenty-first century can work for agencies or clients from various parts of the world ( Katan 2009; Pym et al. 2012). Today translation services operations are managed 24/7 by shifts from different platforms based in different parts of the globe. Different time zones are no longer a problem but can become an asset when the deadlines to submit a translated piece are getting stricter and shorter. Translators of the twenty-first century can be based more or less where they want, provided they have an internet connection and a computer at hand. Thanks to recent advances in digital technology and videoconference facilities and platforms, and to a broader acceptance of the modality, interpreters can also be asked to interpret remotely, provided acceptable working conditions are respected (see, e.g. a 2018 position paper by the International Association of Conference Interpreters on Remote Simultaneous Interpreting: AIIC 2018). Practitioners of the t wenty-first century have undoubtedly become translators and interpreters without borders (Orlando 2016).

The effect of globalization on higher education and on T&I training Because of the abovementioned professional demands and expectations, and as a result of shifts in the profession, the twenty-first-century T&I practitioner is subjected to pressures that their predecessors would not have known. Logically, such changes have affected the training of future professionals. Training contexts are also different today, compared to what they were one or two decades ago (Hurtado Albir 2007). It is relevant to mention that globalization and changing market needs have also had an impact on location of T&I training courses, as well as training programmes developed for these locations ( Pöchhacker 2016: 46). As identified by Gouadec, there are two types of countries: Those where there is a real dearth of properly trained specialised professional translators (i.e. China, Cambodia, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Mozambique…) and where there is a vital need for translator training courses in the national languages; and those where the question is mainly training those who will take over from the outgoing generation of translators and who will be able to meet the new market needs and challenges. (Gouadec 2007: 330) T&I training today is provided mainly by universities, and Masters programmes are offered all over the world ( Pöchhacker 2016: 46), as the broadening membership of CIUTI (The Conférence Internationale permanente d’Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interprètes) over the recent years indicates (CIUTI 2019). Founded in the early 1960s to represent a select group of T&I institutions in Europe, CIUTI now includes universities in Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region. In the 205

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past, T&I professionals were commonly trained within T&I schools based mainly in Europe: Geneva, Heidelberg, Paris, Trieste, Vienna ( Pöchhacker 2004: 31). However, most of these schools have now been absorbed into the greater university system and ‘ have been more closely integrated with research oriented departmental structures’ ( Pöchhacker 2016: 47). Even if the basis of their curricula remains – to a certain extent – the same, they are now structured as Masters degrees, in line with new qualification frameworks, appropriate to the country in which they are based. These frameworks have also imposed another change to a specialized training: it is no longer solely vocational and, today, most T&I students are ‘ increasingly exposed to theoretical analysis and reflection’ ( Pöchhacker 2016: 47) and are required to fulfil a research component of the degree. As reported by Torres- Simón and Pym (2017: 17), ‘at least 85 percent of the [EMT] programmes offer theory courses and 90 percent include research work of some kind’. Consequently, the nature of T&I studies has changed and is not focussed only on professional competence and skills. Research- oriented activities that complement the more practical elements of the training help students and staff to theorize and conceptualize some aspects of the profession. This ‘academization’ of the field means that students of T&I Studies today are much more exposed to theory and research in their field than T&I students of the past ( Pöchhacker 2016: 32). The multiplication of training programmes worldwide has induced researchers, trainers and educators, in collaboration with the professional associations and representatives of T&I employers or institutions that hire translators and interpreters, to develop benchmarks and recognizable labels to ensure that courses teach the necessary aptitudes and skills, and to differentiate and classify masters’ degrees and postgraduate courses offered in T&I. It is in this context that frameworks and labels like the European Master’s in Translation ( EMT) or the European Masters in Conference Interpreting ( EMCI) have been developed for European programmes in T&I to apply for, to show how they comply with standardized training and research norms. The EMT project, for example, was established as ‘a quality label for university translation programmes that meet agreed professional standards and market demands’ in order ‘to improve the quality of translator training’ ( EMT n.d., European commission website). The EMCI is a programme designed to equip young graduates with the professional skills and knowledge required for conference interpreting. It seeks to meet the demand for h ighlyqualified conference interpreters, in the area of both widely and the less widely-used and ­less-taught ​­ languages. ( EMCI n.d., website) As briefly mentioned earlier, to respond to the need to benchmark excellence in training and research in university T&I programmes internationally, CIUTI has broadened and diversified its membership to reach a more global audience and to recognize that high-level training, education and research in T&I exist in various parts of the world and contexts of work. Full membership of CIUTI is restricted to institutions of higher education offering degrees in translation, interpretation and multilingual or intercultural communication and is acquired upon successful completion of a quality-based admission procedure. The ‘membership requires fulfilment of strict quality criteria and is a distinct seal of quality’ (CIUTI website 2019). Translator trainer scholars like Kelly (2005) or Gouadec (2007) were somewhat hostile to the idea of translators being trained in a specific kind of university environment – and even more against translators being taught by academics only (a ‘preposterous’ idea, Gouadec 2007: 355). Their argument is based on the notion that universities cultivate academic 206

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rationalism/conservatism and do not respond to today’s society training needs. Despite such views, translator training will very likely remain in university environments. Even if translator training is an activity ‘ falling firmly within the purview of vocational technical colleges’, Kearns rightly pointed out that the ‘ harmonization of higher education under the Bologna Process will inevitably involve re-conceiving undergraduate and graduate studies in many ways’ and will ‘challenge directly many of the preconceptions of academic rationalism’ ( Kearns 2008: 186). The 1999 Bologna Convention ( known as the Bologna Process) laid foundations for education to be homogenized and offered in such a way that Europe could be more competitive in a globalized educational environment ( European Higher Education Area 1999). Participating universities committed to structure higher education according to specific frameworks and cycles, to adopt a system of credits transfer (the ECTS), and to develop highly transparent and student- centred curricula ( European Higher Education Area 2007). For more than 20 years now, its implementation has allowed for more homogenization in teaching and has facilitated students’ mobility in Europe and globally. It has ensured and enhanced ‘quality and relevance of learning and teaching’ and strengthened ‘cooperation in innovative learning and teaching practices’ but also focussed on the importance of lifelong learning, staff and student mobility, or employability ( European Higher Education Area, Paris Communiqué 2018). Forty- eight European full members (and the European Commission) have implemented the Bologna Process so far, and several consultative members are also involved in its efforts at recognizing qualifications and degrees (through the EQF, the European Qualifications Framework) and at promoting students’ mobility. Globally, some non-European countries have decided to amend their higher education systems to enhance and facilitate cooperation and mobility opportunities with Europe. For example, Australia has engaged with the Bologna Process reforms and reshaped its qualifications framework ( The AQF) accordingly (Australian Department of Education 2016). The directions recommended by the reform have affected curricular structures and content in T&I training and education. Even if the focus on student- centred learning or the concept of competence in T&I education was nothing new at the time, the Bologna Process required ‘a profound transformation of the higher education system as we have known it’ ( Rico 2010: 92). Following the implementation of the Bologna Process and of its framework, even beyond European boundaries, as well as the desire to internationalize the activities of universities and to establish cross-border transparency of qualifications, transnational improvement of quality assurance and interregional mobility of scholars and students, many institutions have had to re-evaluate their practices in T&I training and education. Especially when most vocational institutions have been merged into university institutional models ( Kearns 2008; Pöchhacker 2016). Today’s T&I curricula are designed to reflect the need for both the vocational and the academic. The vocational/academic dichotomy in T&I courses has been already discussed (Orlando 2016: 48–54), and it is essential to note that universities today have to respond to societal demands and to include vocational, experiential components in their programmes ( Kiraly et al. 2016). Training in T&I must be market- oriented, and still focus on specific competence, skills, and specializations ( Liu and Hale 2018). Tertiary education institutions are expected to provide graduates with skills that can be applied immediately in specific work environments ( Way 2008; González-Davies and EnríquezRaído 2016; Echeverri 2017). On top of that, universities also have to ensure they teach transferable skills, seen as preparing the student to be mobile and adaptable between various jobs, whereas traditional vocational skills equip the student for a more specific job (Calvo 2011: 11; Orlando 2016: 68). 207

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Responding to changes within T&I programmes As discussed in the previous sections, the impact of globalization within the T&I industry and educational shifts have directly affected T&I training programmes globally. Programmes are now pushed to face the challenges presented by the profession, and address them directly within the teaching and learning context. The MA in Interpreting and Translation Studies (MITS) at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), established in 2004, presents an example of a Master course responding directly to such needs. The course is a t wo-year one, the first year (M1) focussing mainly on academic content (more ­ ­process-oriented ​­ and formative, more theoretical) and the second year (M2) on vocational content (more practical and summative, more product and market- oriented). The curriculum is scaffolded with various units that follow the different streams. With a diverse student cohort – students from as many as 15 countries are enrolled in the same suite of units – the MITS engages directly with the idea that students are, more than likely, going to practise in a range of different global environments. Like many other postgraduate programmes offered throughout the world, the MITS must not only provide the necessary cultural and linguistic training to future professional translators and interpreters, but respond to the reality that its graduates will be working in an array of markets, as well as linguistic and geographical spheres. A recent CIUTI study on T&I Graduate Employability Strategies, carried out among the members of the association, showed that 89% of the 27 responding institutions took various curricular and/or organizational measures to meet the contemporary challenges their graduates face ( global competition, diversity of work contexts, range of required skills and competence, etc.) The curricular measures consist of training in technologies, in pre- and post- editing, in writing and editing, in localization, in entrepreneurship, in broader awareness of contexts of interpreting; the organizational measures offer more opportunities for access to technology or for experiential, collaborative or independent learning (Massey et  al. 2018). Additionally, many universities are moving towards blended modes of delivery, thus significantly improving their outreach, and potentially saving space, time and money. Here, the effects of globalization (and technologization), as much as T&I specific training, are at the fore of curriculum design. Moreover, and again responding to the impact of globalization and technologization within the tertiary training sector, one of the major shifts in twenty-fi rst- century teaching and learning has been driven by so- called ‘virtual learning environments’, operated by ‘ learning management systems’, which are being used by universities to drive more studentcentred learning. These platforms have become key access points for both students and academics: students access teaching and learning resources, while academics deposit lecture material and readings online, post to forums and provide online video content. Moodle powered by Blackboard is the primary Virtual Learning Environment ( VLE) utilized by Monash University. With over 70,000 students university wide and teaching spaces in great demand, the effective utilization of Moodle as a VLE rather than a file repository is important to recognize, allowing the VLE to act as an ‘extension’ of the classroom. At Monash University, globalization has meant increased student mobility and greater numbers of fee-paying students, mainly from South East Asia (Gardner 2016). This, coupled with the so-called ‘massification of higher education’ and the ‘shift to provide higher education to a larger proportion of the population in recognition of the need for higher skills for future employment’ (Gardner 2016), has drastically changed the teaching and learning landscape in Australia and, arguably, much of the Western world. In many universities, digital platforms are now being pushed as a way of moving towards a more student- centred learning model. 208

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A crucial point to make here is that changes to teaching and learning practices in the globalized world need not be radical. Instead, if shifts to teaching approaches are done with pedagogies in mind that change according to the unique needs of the learners (Osguthorpe and Graham 2003: 227), aiming for a ‘ blend that favours the learner and plays to the strengths of different media in different contexts’ ( Donnelly and McAvinia 2012: 6), then academic adoption of technology- enhanced delivery becomes more attractive. The idea is to promote blended learning principles that complement existing teaching practices, instead of radically altering personal teaching approaches. Though the notion of what constitutes blended learning in terms of technologyenhanced delivery (e.g. pre/in/post- class learning activities) is well researched ( Laurillard 2012; Gleadow et al. 2015), it is important to emphasize that academic adoption – as shown in all cases – is reliant on moulding the technology to the units’ specific needs, and by providing tailored solutions for individual areas of study. Most importantly, innovators need to be supported to share their practice with others (Gleadow et al. 2015), through the publication of their experiences in academic journals. The proliferation of information technology in the tertiary education setting is by no means a new phenomenon ( Warren and Holloman 2005; Richardson 2009; Toni Mohr et al. 2012; Porter et al. 2014), and it seems like it is here to stay.

The Monash MITS In the MITS, we combined this new educational philosophy with challenges posed by the globalization and technologization of the profession: our aim was to trial blended learning approaches across three core units, forcing students to increase their interaction with online spaces and to drive their own learning. In these units, we replaced the traditional lecture with online seminars, which were pre-recorded ­ ​­ by the academic in a state-of-the-art ­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ studio at the university, released week by week to students. Removing the face-to-face lecture allowed for more practical, hands- on workshops, directly benefitting students’ translation and interpreting skills training. In such cases, the online seminar acts as a ‘pre-class activity’, and students are expected to come to class prepared to put into action their prior learning. Across the MITS, major curricular changes were also made to respond to contemporary training and education new realities, in particular around metacognitive activities and feedback, assessment, or the consideration of English as a lingua franca ( ELF) in the course. The issue of teaching and of supporting student learning and empowerment in T&I has been dealt with in depth by various trainers such as Kiraly (2000), González-Davies (2004) or Choi (2006) who have indicated that the emancipation of trainees depends on their capacity to reflect on their progress and their practice and to become actors in the learning process. The programme team thought that to gain this aptitude, metacognitive and self-regulation strategies needed to be introduced into our MITS curriculum. The rationale is that trainees will better understand and conceptualize the practice of T&I if they understand the learning and acquisition process of T&I competence and skills, and how theory participates in the acquisition of such competence and skills. In a classroom where students come from different continents, countries and academic backgrounds, and have different languages, such a strategy is seen a way to make them all learn ‘ from a clean slate’. Metacognition is the awareness of the learning process by the learner and the ability to adapt to challenges that occur during this process through effective strategies. Metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive skills are complementary components of the broader notion of metacognition ( Veenman 2006). Metacognitive knowledge refers to the information learners 209

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acquire about their learning, while metacognitive skills, i.e. strategies for planning, monitoring and evaluating, are general skills through which learners manage, direct, regulate and guide their learning. The interest for students in developing their metacognitive knowledge and skills is for them to better understand their personal difficulties for specific tasks (metacognitive knowledge) and to adopt a strategy (metacognitive skills) to monitor and improve their performance. Feedback being central to any metacognitive approach, teaching and learning activities are most effective when organized around metacognitive skills (as opposed to metacognitive knowledge) which ‘ have a feedback mechanism built-in’ ( Veenman 2006: 5). In the MITS curriculum, this is done through collective, peer or individual assessment and feedback activities that facilitate and improve remediation strategies, using, for example, process- oriented activities with digital pen technology in interpreting practice (Orlando 2010), or rubric-based formative/process-oriented and summative/product­ ­ ​­ ­­ ​­ ­­ ​ oriented evaluations grids in translation practice (Orlando 2011). Some changes were also introduced for our assessment tasks: except in the case of the practical translation and interpreting units, exams have been removed. Traditional essays have been replaced with reflective pieces, podcast and vodcast assignments, research masterclasses, collaborative translations, student-led project management assignments, as well as interdisciplinary situated learning activities with students from Medicine and Health Sciences, Law, Journalism and Social Work. The challenges pertaining to the use of English as a lingua franca ( ELF) compel T&I curricula to prepare students to the variety of ‘Englishes’ they would have to deal with in their future professional practice. This implies considering ELF as ‘a dynamic and hybrid language whose complexity cannot be fully grasped without taking into account its interaction with other languages and cultures’ ( Taviano 2013: 156). For Taviano, ‘the spread of English, combined with globalization processes and practices, should encourage us to reflect on what translating means today and to rethink our pedagogical approaches from new and more challenging perspectives’ (2013: 156). One way to do so is to balance equally practice and theory in T&I curricula as ‘students need to become aware of and reflect on the rapidly changing nature of their future profession’. We share Taviano’s view that one major consequence of the impact of ELF and globalization on translation is that traditional notions of texts written in a clearly identified language and addressed to a specific culture and readership are no longer valid, and translators are hence more often than not required to translate hybrid texts. ( Taviano 2013: 160) In the MITS, dealing with such considerations was facilitated by the fact students come from various countries, that instructors are not all English native speakers, and that the course is taught in languages groups always paired with English. Collective T&I activities in English allow therefore an exposure to all sorts of accents, writing styles, syntactic and grammatical particularities, etc. At a course design level, two new units were consequently added, which again responded directly to current professional needs: Global Translation and Interpreting Professional Practices, which teaches vital project management and business skills, applicable in different global contexts, and places translation and interpreting students together with various industry representatives and stakeholders at various touch-points over the semester. Translation Trends in the Digital Age, which not only teaches students to use CAT tools, MT and translation memory software, but explores the challenges and ethical dilemmas of translating in the online sphere. It includes 210

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collaborative translation practice, international and technological frameworks for translation in a digital age, knowledge about the localization industry, and it helps students develop expertise in multimodal translation and the associated requirements, sensitivities and opportunities. So-called ‘Work Integrated Learning’ ( WIL) also forms part of the MITS curriculum for all students, who are required to undertake 50 hours of professional (remote or on-site) practical work experience alongside the degree. Students are encouraged to source out WIL opportunities by themselves from potential future employers not only in Australia but also in their native country, or in countries where T&I work in their language combination(s) is required.

Case study: Introduction to Interpreting and Translation Studies As a core unit in the MITS, Introduction to Interpreting and Translation Studies provides students with a comprehensive overview of theoretical approaches to translation studies within one 12-week semester. As mentioned earlier, new educational frameworks have meant that T&I training is no longer viewed as solely vocational, with most T&I students required to fulfil a research component of the degree. Most T&I training courses include an introduction to the area of ‘translation studies’, which includes a study of both pure and applied branches of translation studies research, as well as professional ethics. At Monash, this unit is taught to students in their first semester of study, which allows for the vital contextualization of their practice into a theoretical study area. Students are not only exposed to a range of historical and twentieth-century ­ ​­ theories, including many recent ‘shifts’ ­ in twenty-first-century ­ ­​­­ ​­ translation studies, but asked to practically apply these approaches to their own translation practice or experience. Writing in 2013, Saldanha and O’Brien note that with the ‘ increase in the number of translation training programmes across the world’, there has been an ‘explosion in the number of masters and doctoral students and […] a concomitant move towards explicit forms of research training in Translation Studies’ (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013: 1). Theoretical units are therefore vital in helping to form the basis of students’ exposure to relevant theories, debates and discussions in the area of translation studies. Like many similar postgraduate programmes in T&I Studies, the MITS attracts a highly diverse local and international student cohort, which results in great cultural and linguistic diversity, and varied learning styles. Moreover, such MA programmes are now marketed to students from an array of different academic backgrounds: Engineering, Law, Medicine, Fine Art, Accounting, Business, Education, as well as Humanities. No doubt, with the aforementioned massification of education, T&I training programmes all over the world find themselves in similar waters: student learning styles and preferences can be vastly different, creating great challenges to delivery of content according to the needs of all students. Given this diversity, as well as the often complex content of theoretical units, we had previously struggled with student engagement and performance in this unit. As with other units taught in the MITS, this unit had previously been delivered in the traditional mode of a weekly two-hour seminar and two-hour workshop. We decided to implement a blended approach in this unit, moving the ‘seminar’ ( lecture) content to an onlinemode, while maintaining weekly face-to-face workshops. The pedagogical premise behind this shift was very clear: to consolidate a wealth of complex material into a more compact 45minute online seminar, allowing students to watch, pause and replay at any time, to take notes at their own self-determined speed, and to view the material as many times as needed for clarification if required (this ­ would particularly benefit non-English-speaking-background ­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ students). The approach would then encourage more active learning in the workshop, allowing the lecturer more productive group or one-on-one time with struggling students. The first 211

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hour would be spent on activities completed during the online seminar, asking students to form discussion groups. The second hour was used to undertake additional activities prepared and lead by the Lecturer, which are also undertaken in pairs or groups. We traced responses from students in the first three semesters of implementation, and found that students were overwhelmingly positive about the blended approach. They liked the flexibility provided by the online content, the ease with which they could review content after their initial viewing (and again over the semester), as well as the engaging and ‘ fun’ workshops, which offered them the chance to actively participate in engaging theoretical discussions and practical activities ( Feedback on Teaching Approach for APG5875, Arts Faculty Education Designers 2017). Students also responded well to changes made to assessments, especially the removal of a final exam and various essays in place of a series of innovative formative tasks that were directly relevant to the learning objectives of the unit, and spread out over the semester (Monash University, Faculty of Arts, SETU, s2 2017). Negative comments were few, with a small number of students expressing the need for more detailed explanations of theoretical content (Monash University, Faculty of Arts, SETU, s1 2017). After the initial two semesters using this blended approach, two changes were made: the first was to extend the workshop to 2.5 hours per week, and the second was to use this extra 30 minutes to revise and re- explain the key theories addressed in the online seminar, before beginning the activities (responding to negative student feedback). It is clear that the incorporation of activities into the online seminar has worked extremely well, providing students with the opportunity to practise applying theories and problems on their own, before discussing them with classmates in the workshop. It also made the workshop more active and enjoyable. The lecturer noticed that students were overwhelmingly presenting handwritten (rather than typed) notes, and that their performance in assessment tasks was improving. After the success of the blended approach in the introductory theory unit, it was implemented in two other units from the M1: Applied Translation and Translation for Special Purposes.

Conclusion In this article, we have discussed how globalization has affected the T&I industry at large, and T&I training and education in particular. We have indicated that, in order to respond to current industry needs and to the many challenges it is facing, T&I programmes will continually need to adapt and rethink their pedagogical approaches. When programmes enrol trainees who come from different continents, or different countries, and have different academic backgrounds, they need to ensure their training responds to such diversity. To do so, most use English as a lingua franca either as language of instruction or for teaching materials (as source or target language of the trainees). Therefore, we are of the view that today’s training and education of future T&I professionals demand shifts in teaching practice to be considered and require student- centred curricula and syllabi that include a well-balanced mix of practical and theoretical elements, of vocational and academic activities, and blended learning, thus mirroring the contemporary realities of today’s globalized T&I industry. Future practitioners must be able to work beyond geographical boundaries and adapt to global and local market demands and expectations, and be made aware of the diversity of standards and norms in their profession. They must also be able to deal with the hybridity of global/international English. The case study presented in this article may provide T&I instructors and course designers with concepts and ideas that will help them to respond to the needs of our globalized industry and globalized student population.

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Further reading Jenkins, J., Baker, W. and Dewey, M. (2018) The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca. ­London: Routledge. This large volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research field of ELF over many research areas, including T&I Studies. The 47 chapters discuss the multi-f aceted scope of ELF worldwide, from the perspective of educationalists, researchers, professionals and industry stakeholders. Laurillard, D. (2012) Teaching as a Design Science, Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. London: Routledge. Taking teaching as a ‘design science’, Laurillard discusses the challenges to teachers in the twenty-first century, who are faced with an ever- changing cultural and technological environment. Laurillard argues that a t wenty-first- century education system needs teachers who work collaboratively to design effective and innovative teaching. Schnell, B. and Rodriguez, N. (2017) ‘Ivory Tower vs. Workplace Reality: Employability and the T&I Curriculum. Balancing Academic Education and Vocational Requirements: A Study from the ­ ­ ​­ Employers’ Perspective’, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 11, pp. 160–183. Drawing on the Spanish higher education context, the authors discuss issues relating to the tense balance between academic and professional practice knowledge in curricular development and the embedding of employability enhancing contents and activities into the T&I curriculum.

References AIIC. (2018) ‘AIIC Position on Distance Interpreting’. Available online: http://aiic.net/p/8538 [Accessed 23 September 2019]. Australian Department of Education (2016) Comparative Analysis of the Australian Qualifications Framework and the European Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning: Joint Technical Report. Available online: https://internationaleducation.gov.au/News/Latest-News/Documents/ED16-0165%20­ ­ ­­ ​­ ­ ­­ ​­ ­ ​ ­%20693040%20-%20Joint%20Technical%20Report_ACC.pdf ­ ​­ [Accessed 8 September 2019]. Calvo, E. (2011) ‘Translation and/or Translator Skills as Organising Principles for Curriculum Development Practice’, Journal of Specialised Translation, 16, pp. 5–25. ­ ­ ​­ Choi, J. Y. (2006) ‘Metacognitive Evaluation Method in Consecutive Interpretation for Novice Learn­ pp. 273–283. ­ ­ ​­ ers’, Meta, 51(2), CIUTI Conférence internationale permanente d’instituts universitaires de traducteurs et interprètes (2019). ‘Members’.Available online: https://www.ciuti.org/members/ [Accessed 2 February 2019]. Common Sense Advisory Global Customer Experience Study (2015). ‘Global Customer Experience Comes Down to Content but Not Just in English’. Available online: https://csa-research. com/More/Media/Press-Releases/ArticleID/24/Global-Customer-Experience-Increasingly­ ­ ­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ ­​­­ [Accessed 10 May 2020]. ­­Comes-Down-to-Content%E2%80%94But-Not-Just-in-English ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Common Sense Advisory Annual Language Industry Study (2018). ‘Global Market for Outsourced Translation and Interpreting Services and Technology to Reach US$46.52 Billion in 2018’. Available online: https://csa-research.com/More/Media/Press-Releases/ArticleID/7/Global-Market-for-Outsourced­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ ­­Translation-and-Interpreting-Services-and-Technology-to-Reach-US-46-52-Billion-in-2018 ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed 6 January 2019]. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. Donnelly, R. and McAvinia, C. (2012) ‘Academic Development Perspectives of Blended Learning’, in Anastasiades, P. S. (ed.), Blended Learning Environments for Adults: Evaluations and Frameworks. Hershey, ­ PA: IGI Global, pp. 1–18. ­ ­ ​­ Drugan, J. (2013) Quality in Professional Translation. New York: Bloomsbury. Echeverri, Á. (2017) ‘Le discours sur la formation des traducteurs’, in Belle, M.-A. and Echeverri, Á. (eds.), ­ Pour une interdisciplinarité réciproque, recherches actuelles en traductologie. Arras Canada: Artois Presse Université, pp. 155–178. ­ ­ ​­ EMCI. (n.d.) ­ European Masters in Conference Interpreting. Available online: www.emcinterpreting.org [Accessed 6 January 2019]. EMT. (n.d.) ­ European Master’s in Translation. Available online: https://ec.europa.eu/info/resources­ ­ ­­ ​ ­partners/european-masters-translation-emt_en ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed 10 May 2020].

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European Higher Education Area. (2018) Paris Communiqué. Available online: http://www.ehea. info/Upload/document/ministerial_declarations/EHEAParis2018_Communique_final_95277 ­ ­ ­ ­ 1. pdf [Accessed 2 September 2019]. European Higher Education Area. (1999) Bologna Declaration. Available online: http://www.ehea. info/Upload/document/ministerial_declarations/1999_Bologna_Declaration_English_553028. ­ ­ ­ ­ pdf [Accessed 2 September 2019]. European Higher Education Area. (2007) London Communiqué: Towards the European Higher Education Area: Responding to Challenges in a Globalised World. Available online: http://www.ehea.info/Upload/ document/ministerial_declarations/2007_London_Communique_English_588697.pdf ­ ­ [Accessed 2 September 2019]. Feedback on Teaching Approach for APG5875, Arts Faculty Education Designers 2017. Gardner, M. (2016) ‘Education in the Age of Disruption’, Address to the Melbourne Press Club, 8 June. ­ ­ ­ ­­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​ Available  online:  https://www.monash.edu/about/structure/senior-staff/president-and-vice­chancellor/profile/vice-chancellors-speeches/education-in-the-age-of-disruption ­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed 22 February 2019]. Gleadow, R., Macfarlan, B. and Honeydew, M. (2015) ‘Design for Learning: A Case Study of Blended ­ ­ ­ ​­ Learning in a Science Unit’, F1000Research, 4(898), pp. 1–17. ­González-Davies, M. (2004) Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom. Amsterdam: John Benjamins ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ​­ Gouadec, D. (2007) Translation as a Profession. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Hurtado Albir, A. (2007) ‘Competence-Based Curriculum Design for Training Translators’, The Inter­ pp. 163–195. ­ ­ ​­ preter and Translator Trainer, 1(2), Juris, J. (2005) ‘The New Digital Media and Activist Networking Within A nti- corporate Globalization Movements’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597, pp. 189–208. ­ ­ ​­ Katan, D. (2009) ‘Occupation or Profession: A Survey of the Translators’ World’, Translation & Interpreting Studies: The Journal of the American Translation & Interpreting Studies Association, 4(2), ­ pp. 187–209. ­ ­ ​­ Kearns, J. (ed.) (2008) ‘The Academic and the Vocational in Translator Education’, in Translator and Interpreter Training. London: Continuum, pp. 185–214. ­ ­ ​­ Kelly, D. (2005) A Handbook for Translator Trainers. Manchester: St Jerome. Kelly, N., Stewart, R. G. and Hegde, V. (2010) The Interpreting Marketplace: A Study of Interpreting in North America Commissioned by Interpret America. Lowell, MA: Common Sense Advisory. Kiraly, D. (2000) A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education: Empowerment from Theory to Practice. Manchester: St Jerome. Kiraly, D., et al. (2016) Towards Authentic Experiential Learning in Translator Education. Mainz: Mainz University Press. Laurillard, D. (2012) Teaching as a Design Science, Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. London: Routledge. Liu, X. and Hale, S. (2018) ‘Achieving Accuracy in a Bilingual Courtroom: The Effectiveness of Specialised ­ Legal Interpreter Training’, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer. doi:10.1080/1750399X.2018.1501649 Massey, G., Orlando, M. and Rösener, C. (2018) ‘T&I Graduate Employability Strategies in the 21st Century ( TIGES 21)’. Available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326805718_ TI_graduate_employability_strategies_in_the_21st_century [Accessed 22 June 2020]. Monash University, Faculty of Arts, SETU, s1 2017. Monash University, Faculty of Arts, SETU, s2 2017. Orlando, M. (2010) ‘Digital Pen Technology and Consecutive Interpreting: Another Dimension in ­Note-taking ​­ Training and Assessment’, The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 15, pp. 71–86. ­ ­ ​­ Orlando, M. (2011) ‘Evaluations of Translations in the Training of Professional Translators: At the Crossroads between Theoretical, Professional and Pedagogical Practices’, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 5(2), ­ pp. 293–308. ­ ­ ​­ Orlando, M. (2016) Training 21st Century Translators and Interpreters: At the Crossroads of Practice, Research and Pedagogy. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Osguthorpe, R. and Graham, C. (2003) ‘Blended Learning Environments: Definitions and Directions’, Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 4, pp. 227–233. ­ ­ ​­ Pym, A. (2010) Exploring Translation Theories. London: Routledge.

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Pym, A., Grin, F., Sfreddo, C. and Chan, A. L. J. (2012) The Status of the Translation Profession in the European Union. European Commission, Luxembourg. Available online: https://op.europa.eu/en/​­ ​­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ publication-detail/-/publication/4e126174-ea20-4338-a349-ea4a73e0d850 [Accessed 10 May 2020]. Pöchhacker, F. (2004) Introducing Interpreting Studies. London: Routledge. Pöchhacker, F. (2016) Introducing Interpreting Studies, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Porter, W. W., Graham, C. R., Spring, K. A. and Welch, K. R. (2014) ‘Blended Learning in Higher ­ ­ ​­ Education: Institutional Adoption and Implementation’, Computers & Education, 75, pp. 185–195. Richardson, J. T. (2009) ‘Face-to-f ace versus Online Tutoring Support in Humanities Courses in Distance Education’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 8(1), ­ pp. 69–85. ­ ­ ​­ Rico, C. (2010) ‘Translator Training in the European Higher Education Area’, The Interpreter and Trans­ pp. 89–114. ­ ­ ​­ ­ doi: 10.1080/1750399X.2010.10798798 lator Trainer, 4(1), Saldanha, G. and O’Brien, S. (2013) Research Methods in Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Taviano, S. (2013) ‘English as a Lingua Franca and Translation’, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 7(2), ­ pp. 155–167. ­ ­ ​­ Toni Mohr, A., Holtbrügge, D. and Berg, N. (2012) ‘Learning Style Preferences and the Perceived Usefulness of E-Learning’, ­ ​­ ­ pp. 309–322. ­ ­ ​­ Teaching in Higher Education, 17(3), ­ ­ ­ ­­ ​­ ­ ­ Turner, E. A. L. (2010) ‘Why Has the Number of International Non- Governmental Organizations ­ ­ ​­ Exploded Since 1960?’, Cliodynamics, 1, pp. 81–91. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2018) ‘Interpreters and Translators’. Available online: https://www.bls. ­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­ ​­ [Accessed 6 January gov/ooh/media-and-communication/interpreters-and-translators.htm#tab-6 2019]. Veenman, M. V. J. (2006) ‘Metacognition and Learning: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations’, Metacognition and Learning, 1, pp. 3–14. ­ ­ ​­ Way, C. (2008) ‘Systematic Assessment of Translator Competence: In Search of Achilles’ Heel’, in Kearns, J. (ed.), Translator and Interpreter Training. London: Continuum, pp. 88–103. ­ ­ ​­ Warren, L. L. and Holloman Jr, H. L. (2005) ‘On-Line Instruction: Are the Outcomes the Same?’, Journal of Instructional Psychology, 32(2), ­ pp. 148–152. ­ ­ ​­

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Part III

Culture

15 Globalization, cultural hegemony, and translation The paradoxical complexity of translation theory and practice in the emerging world order Maria Tymoczko

Introduction It is frequently said that ‘the world is getting smaller’. This aphorism is often used to indicate that during the past several decades fewer cultures are isolated and most countries have a good deal of access to information about many other cultures. Almost every culture in the world is connected to a network of other cultures that touches all the individuals in the network even if minimally and in indirect ways. Trade, technology, religion, development, increased travel, the media, and many other factors bring populations into contact whether those contacts are direct or indirect via the reports of others, representations in the media, and so forth. Both large and small countries – many of which are themselves multilingual and multicultural – are increasingly intertwined in cultural networks. These changed relations are true of cultures with a great deal of power and also those with little global influence and power. Networking as a type of interconnection is characteristic of both wealthy and poor countries, as well as big and little nations. Today’s networking has been in the making for more than 200 years, and some of it is a legacy of more than a millennium.

Globalization and the nature of cultural networks As a result of the various possible parameters of difference between nations, we can say that nations in such a network are of different ‘value’ to the network. That is, there are not just similarities and differences between the nations within a network, but there are also clear differences in the roles played by the various countries in each network. Those differences can range from food production and technical skills, to religious practices, arts, natural resources, and more, all of which can influence status and power within the network. One result of globalization and the current patterns taking shape in the world is that the changes bring both benefits and losses to many cultures. The benefits are considerable. An important strength of the networks associated with globalization is that small or poor 219

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countries in a network potentially have access to advances taken for granted by the larger, more powerful, and wealthier nations in the network. Thus, for example, they might be beneficiaries of medical advances and practices that are taken for granted in many areas of the world. Such medical advances are often provided to a small or poor nation by others in the network: vaccinations for children to prevent deadly diseases, water purification systems, medicines that cure diseases, operations that correct birth defects, and more. Similarly the network might give access to technologies, information, education, lifeways, and so forth that the more powerful or wealthy nations take for granted and can either model or supply for other nations in the networks. Benefits of this sort include such things as literacy, skills with machines that afford better employment, advanced methods that result in greater agricultural production, and more secure conditions of life that lower child mortality rates, provide more comforts, and so forth. In addition to the benefits of globalization, there are also risks and problems that can result. The globalized interconnections of nations and cultures in a network can exert hegemonic pressures on vulnerable, small, less wealthy, but resource rich countries and cultural groups. As a result the beneficial promises inherent in networking might be vacuous, requiring conformity to both the demands and the practices of cultures with more power and wealth. Those demands might also be designed to keep a less powerful nation in a network subservient and thus vulnerable to the needs and desires of those with power. This robs a less powerful country of the ability to be focused on the internal needs of its own population, and it can lead to the corruption, malfeasance, and misallocation of resources and funds by its leaders as well.1 Thus the demands of powerful nations in a globalized network might actually result in patterns of dominance that could undermine the sovereignty of less wealthy and smaller countries linked together by the network. We can note that in some ways the beneficial aspects of globalized networks are similar to and grow out of the networks created during the last two centuries that were associated with colonization. Those benefits were touted by the colonizers as ‘civilizing’ and offering ‘improvements’ to a colonized country, a claim that was generally self-serving. In many if not most colonial contexts, the claim was also bankrupt in comparison with cultural losses suffered by the colony. The same risks are present in the current networks and patterns of globalization. Although we could pursue this line of inquiry about problems of globalized networks at some length, these issues will be set aside in order to focus on aspects of globalized connectivity that are most relevant to the theory and practice of translation.

Network practices Practices that tend to become generalized in a globalized network are those that are widespread in networked cultural blocs. A good example is the commonality of many practices in the European Union that all members of the EU are required to subscribe to, ranging from rules pertaining to agriculture and crops to rules dealing with transportation and sanitation. These practices tend to be normalized to the standards of the powerful and wealthy countries in the network, to have a long life, to be generally durable, and to benefit most countries, though some countries benefit more than others. Practices that become normative are also often keyed to the power of specific dominant nations that might be high in the pyramid of power, for example, the United States, Russia, or China in many circumstances. Again examples of these effects of globalization are easy to supply. Political favors, concessions to a powerful nation, and so forth are often apparent. 220

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Thus, not only has Donald Trump, President of the United States, asked for concessions and tried to pressure nations for political favors and deference, Russia has also expected various kinds of concessions from its satellites. Similarly China has built sea ports and other facilities that enable more complex trade for African countries lacking the expertise or the wealth to develop these assets, but then has insisted on exercising control of those same assets, thus interfering with the sovereignty nations have over their territories. Links in globalized networks can thus bind nations together within a structure and hierarchy of power. A widespread example is the supply chains of weapons provided by many of the most powerful nations to other nations in their networks. The weapons link and obligate recipient countries to the providers of those weapons. In this case often it is almost impossible for a dependent nation to exit the network because of technical incompatibilities with the weaponry of other potential suppliers. As a result, once an obligation begins, a recipient country can find it exceedingly difficult to regain sovereignty in this domain and to change networks. Thus globalized networks often make it very difficult for a small country to leave a network because of vectors of power and influence that are associated with food supplies, medical expertise, industry, technical know-how, weapons, and so forth.2 Such benefits come to shape practices in recipient nations, are supply lines for expertise and resources, serve as models of research and technical development, and often become the frameworks for education, skills, and learning. Networks also establish lines of obligation that sustain globalization and structure a country’s orientation within the context of the globalized networks of the world. This is particularly the case for nations that play a small role on the world stage and that have limited resources. Rather than an inclusive universal form of globalization or universal globalizing networks, what we have thus far created is a system of limited networks or ‘silos’ of globalization. These silos are often heirs to the networks created by colonization: they are improved and broader, less oppressive and less exploitative, but nonetheless it is clear that many if not most current forms of globalization are a legacy inherited from the past and many are inherited from colonialism with only minor differences.3

Cultural asymmetry in a globalized world The term globalization suggests that in a globalized world, there will be a great deal of uniformity of knowledge, awareness, customs, values, and so forth. That is, the implicit assertion is that globalization will open the world to knowledge of the practices, skills, advances, values, and conditions of the world’s nations and that a gradual (or sudden in some views) convergence will result to the improvement of all. Moreover, differences will be respected in many areas including art, religion, customs, and so forth. The implication is that comity will also be increased. Thus far, globalization has failed to deliver on these diverse promises. It is probably more accurate to say that thus far globalization has highlighted and contributed to awareness of gradients of cultural asymmetry in both general and specific domains. This is the case in part because as globalization makes world culture more transparent, nations and peoples cease to use neighboring people as their primary standards of comparison. The result is that nations, leaders, and citizens around the world – particularly in less powerful and less privileged countries – become much more aware of the pyramidal structure of wealth, privilege, and power in the world as an entirety. Thus, as the world globalizes, citizens of most countries – particularly those not in the upper echelons of the world order – look further afield for standards supplied by other nations and cultures. They also become much more aware of asymmetries of standards of living and structures of culture. 221

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One result is that conceptions of power are shifted away from a focus on the local, particularly in the case of smaller and less wealthy countries. Awareness of the larger globalized contexts of a nation’s standing and a person’s life sets a framework for perceiving cultural matters, but also for understanding ecological standards, social conditions, cultural practices, material indices, and so forth. Far from leveling the playing field among cultures, thus far globalization has highlighted global inequities and differences. It makes visible the asymmetries and privileges enjoyed by specific cultures with wealth and power.4 Globalization privileges specific languages as well, particularly those associated with the powerful nations of world networks. As such, globalization also implicitly establishes a hierarchy of texts and a gradient of informational materials that get disseminated or published for global circulation.5 The utopian hopes for globalization are not yet within reach, nor do the indices of that utopian vision seem to be under construction.

Globalization necessitates a strong web of communication networks Although many of the hopes for globalization and many of the anticipated or desired features of globalization are not yet within grasp, in fact there has been an increase in the number of cultures that are in contact with each other as a result of initiatives associated with larger cultural frameworks. There has also been a demonstrable increase in communication around the world, particularly since the development of the Internet. With increased communication, the number of cultures and individuals networking and in contact with each other has risen. Although much of this increase in communication takes place in the pinnacle languages most commonly used globally, digital communication has invigorated communication across the globe in many minority languages as well. As a result more languages are being used and interfaced in global communication. It follows as well that there is a larger number of interactions and types of interactions that entail increased multilingualism and translation globally. The interactions of our globalizing world depend thus far on the multilingual facilities of specific key members of the societies being networked. This includes not just multilinguals but translators as well.

Translation as an essential and complex feature of globalized communication Clearly translation is an essential element that will support networks of communication as the world becomes globalized. Translation networking, however, is an enormously complex feature of human culture globally. The mathematics alone of possible vectors of translation and types of mediations across languages and cultures that are required in fully globalized communication can serve as an index of the complexity. If we consider that there is a minimum of 6,000 human languages globally to be connected with each of the others, the interface of languages alone is an immense number of types of translation mediations required simply as a result of language asymmetries. Moreover, because there are different types of translation tasks, that huge number must, in turn, be multiplied by the number of task types (e.g. literary translation, scientific translation, legal translation, and so on). In addition there is no single correct method of translating with respect to each task: every culture has its own traditions of translation and each translator practices those methods in a somewhat different manner. Here we also want to add cultural 222

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constraints on and formal requirements for translation, ranging from censorship to the templates of government. In turn, all these variations within a single language tradition change with respect to time, place, and cultural evolution. Variations are also driven by the ‘technologies’ of translation; thus, for example, oral translation, written translation, and machine translation all differ. We will return to the question of the complexity of globalized translation below.

Changing parameters of translation in a globalizing context The parameters of translation practices are changing to meet the demands of globalization. Locally oriented multilinguals and oral interpreters who work primarily between two neighboring languages no longer suffice to support the vast globalized networks of languages that are now developing and becoming intertwined. Increasingly such globalized language networking continues to grow, and networks constitute very complex agglomerations that require different frameworks from earlier patterns of both translation management and theoretical analysis. Languages at the pinnacle of what we can call the pyramid of languages internationally often serve as vehicles of communication and transfer between two countries, neither of which depends on the particular languages used by its native populations. Thus, a document in language A is translated into, for example, English, Spanish, French, Chinese, or Russian, and then, in turn, it is translated from such a pinnacle language into language B, rather than moving between languages A and B directly. As a result languages of top pyramid cultures are becoming the serial intermediaries for much of global communication and dissemination of knowledge in the world.6 It is important to acknowledge the vectors of power implicit in these patterns. Translations both into and out of the languages of power are becoming increasingly essential for many if not most transactions in globalized contexts. Paradoxically at the same time that global communication is increasing, the languages used in many forms of information exchange, negotiations, and other types of international communication are becoming more restricted in number primarily because the principal mediating language between two cultures is typically one of the international pinnacle languages. Thus, for example, languages A and B which are the native languages used in a small network might communicate via language X which is one of the pinnacle languages used to mediate communication globally, as follows. Text in language A is translated to language X which is a widely known or translated language in the culture of language B. International and global discourse of this sort tends to require education and training in a fairly narrow range of pinnacle languages rather than promoting more inclusive and direct communication between local cultures. The result is that globalization has both increased the complexity of translation and decreased the flexibility in the channels of global and international communication in many cultures. Globalization also privileges far-distant connections over local ones. Formal training in foreign languages around the world supports these trends. The top pinnacle languages that have become the vehicles for most international communication (and that serve to mediate between many minority languages and the rest of the globalized world) are increasingly the medium of information transfer around the world. As a result, to have independent access to new and relevant information and knowledge, most people in 223

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our globalizing world will have to learn one of those international pinnacle languages in order to be full citizens and participants in the global community that is networked together. In relying on a relatively limited number of transfer languages in translation, our emerging world increasingly turns on normative frameworks and standards of translation practice for global translation and information dissemination. The volume of these essential translations is increasing as the world globalizes and, in turn, the increased need for translation is thus spurring the increased importance internationally of a relatively limited number of the 6,000 or more languages still in use, as well as the use of machine translation for producing translations in the key pinnacle languages. It seems likely, moreover, that insofar as translation standards can be normalized through machine translation, they will conform to the needs of the dominant power structures of the world to a significant extent. Note as well that one advantage of machine translation is that it is much easier to control machines (and thus to be certain about the meaning and tenor of the translation produced) than to control individuals who can decide to set their own norms of translation. Such individual norms range from personal decisions to censor certain materials, on the one hand, to decisions to contravene established rules for censorship on the other. By contrast machine translation norms are generally keyed to the values of the programmers who usually are citizens of the cultures that speak the pinnacle languages used in translation internationally.

Globalization and indigenous languages As a result of the dependence on pinnacle languages, globalization can undermine the ‘value’ of indigenous or minority languages. This can occur because ‘foreign’ languages can acquire greater prestige and value than minority native languages, particularly in circumstances related to knowledge transfer. Thus, for example, a particular language might be in common use in a culture, specifically in public and domestic contexts such as marketing and neighborhood communication, even as formal education and government speech are conducted in a ‘world’ language, often the dominant language of an earlier colonial regime. In many instances the ‘world’ language acquires prestige because it is associated with formal systems of education that are often a legacy of colonization. This sort of linguistic hegemony is found, for example, in former colonies where textbooks are still primarily available in the language of the former colonizers (e.g. French, English, German, or Italian) rather than in the native languages of the students.7 The result is that native languages paradoxically can come to have diminished value and be seen as of less importance and prestige than foreign ones. Formal education and knowledge of foreign languages, specifically pinnacle languages, generally bring status with them in most countries, and as a result the educated tend to marry the educated who also know these languages.8 In a former colony that is a multilingual nation, when young people speak different local languages at home but are educated in a language inherited from a colonial authority, they often speak the foreign language together at school. Thus people raised in different native languages often communicate in the dominant language of education. When a couple of this sort marries, the dominant language of the home often becomes the former colonial language because it is the common language that both parents are equally proficient in. Children raised in a family that has a legacy of more than one local language, as well as a language associated with a former colonizer, usually become multilingual in the family’s two native languages and generally also learn the language of the educational structure at home as well. The result can be the effacement of local languages in public speech.9 224

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Although this sort of effect is common in former colonies, it is also a side effect in countries that are disadvantaged in the frameworks of globalization in terms of power and prestige, as well as size or wealth. Such perceived disadvantages pertaining to local culture and language undermine the prestige of native languages. Recursively the perceived status and importance of the native languages are diminished in a global context, undermining the status of the native languages in the native context as well. These are merely some of the factors that can result in native languages being seen as characteristic of speakers who are ‘uneducated’, a common phenomenon throughout the world. The trajectory is often found both among Native American populations and immigrants in the United States, for example.10 Note that this sort of shift in cultural values is not restricted to the present. It was almost surely associated with the ascendancy of many ancient empires including Babylon, Egypt, Rome, and so forth. It is also often associated with the migrations of populations. Thus groups that have immigrated to the United States since the late nineteenth century have generally given up their legacy languages by the second or third generation after immigration.11

The diversity of translation practices globally Translation practices can and generally do diverge across almost all cultural contexts. Although this was already apparent in translation practice when translation studies focused primarily on Eurocentric languages, as translation studies has expanded beyond its Eurocentric focus, such divergences have attracted more scholarly attention, examination, and acknowledgment. This wider range of translation norms and practices is generally assumed among translation studies scholars at present. Because each language and nation has a somewhat distinct concept of ‘translation’ (often reflected in the terms used for ‘translation’ as well as in normative practices), the understanding of translation and the theory of translation have expanded significantly as translation studies has increased its purview beyond Eurocentric cultures and languages. There is now consensus that a huge variety of modes of translation have been used in human cultures, many of which have been discussed in descriptive studies of translation. In many cultures the heritage practices of translation derive from oral traditions rather than norms associated with literacy. Such heritage practices often reflect traditional expectations of formal speech including such things as its ability to hold interest, to be striking, to have artistic qualities, to incorporate music and song, and more. Often the form of a translation is as important as the precise rendering of the content: adjustment of content is at times permissible in order to hold the attention and interest of the recipients of the translation. Textual and cultural representations in translation often display cultural adherence to receptor standards of communication.12 Divergence and specific adaptations to the receivers of translations of a text are common as information travels. This is not only able to be documented in materials from earlier centuries: descriptive studies have repeatedly shown that translators in the modern period often take significant liberties in their translations of source materials in order to gain the acceptance of a translation in the target culture.

The complexity of translation and the current global context Complexity theory is a useful tool for exploring questions and issues raised by the globalization of translation. In earlier work I’ve argued that the heritage translation practices of cultures around the globe – as well as idiosyncratic and creative practices of individuals – make translation theory and practice extremely complex and diverse.13 225

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Cognitive generativity is one of the principal features that distinguish human beings from animals, and it is foundational to human language, which developed minimally between 350,000 and 600,000 years ago (see Tymoczko 2019: 239; Tymoczko forthcoming: chapter 2). Generativity in thought and language has facilitated the adaptation of human beings to all the inhabited parts of the globe and the development of all the variations of human cultures related to those adaptations through time. In turn, generativity has resulted in the divergence of human languages, which at present number between 6,000 and 7,000.14 The complexity of translation practices is evident with respect to the basics of communication among populations that speak diverse languages. This complexity can be posited as a challenge to human communication as far back in time as human language has existed and human languages began to diverge in response to diverse habitats that required new terms and new types of articulation. Thus the complexity of translation is not specific to written communication, to translation in academic and scholarly fields of any type, or to professional contexts, though specialized translation skills pertaining to language can be required in some contexts.15 Thus it follows that the complexity of issues related to translation at present is not simply a result of globalization. Nonetheless, it is also clear that globalization has introduced additional parameters that contribute to the complexity of translation and that the complexity of translation will accelerate as globalization continues and the process intertwines populations speaking many of the thousands of languages still used in human cultures. In a global context the complexity of translation is extreme and globalization is making that complexity inescapable.

The ascendency of foreign translation practices over native practices: hub translations Globalization is resulting in paradoxical effects in emerging practices of translation that will require important shifts in the theory of translation. A major paradoxical change that has already emerged is apparent in widely disseminated globalized exchanges: although more nations are part of such globalized exchanges and are communicating via translation, translation practice is also being simplified and normalized in significant ways. Already because more cultures are being included in nets of communication, vectors of translation between a source text and each receiving language are often becoming less direct. The practice of translating communications for a related group of cultures is often simplified, with a translation into one pinnacle language (e.g. English) serving as the proxy source text for translations of the text into the other languages in the group. Substituting for the source text in the original language, the use of a proxy text for translation into a broad range of receiving languages can be called ‘hub translation’. The result is a type of ‘normalization’ of translation practice that ensues with respect to translation of the text, such that the interpretation of the actual source text (found in the hub translation) is standardized to the norms of the primary receiving culture and often to its cultural or political reception context. Thus, hub translation narrows the possible interpretations of the source text, as well as the dispersion of meanings that can be attributed to the text in its primary context. The practice of depending on hub translations already occurs in situations that vary widely, ranging from translations of formal documents that are, for example, outsourced to professional translators by the European Union (e.g. new regulations being promulgated that must be translated in lesser used languages) to translations of popular novels written in languages that are less widely known than the dominant European languages. 226

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An example of the use of a hub translation for a literary work might be the translation of a novel in Polish into English. In turn, this translation into the language of a dominant culture becomes the functional ‘source text’ for further translations of the novel that are disseminated across the globe. The use of a hub translation simplifies the representation of the source text because it has already been processed through the interpretations of a dominant culture (English in this case) and has been adapted textually to the norms of a dominant language and culture. Translations of the hub text – an English translation of the Polish text in this case – are then created and disseminated in a dozen languages that purport to ‘represent’ the original text. Inevitably the English translator has made choices that other translators might contest, but nonetheless those choices inevitably shape the further reception of the text and become so to speak ‘canonical’ in understanding the text in translation internationally in subsequent target cultures. Translation patterns of this sort require an immense shift in the conceptual understanding of the theory and practice of translation. The ascendancy and normalization of hub translations associated with dominant languages and cultures is both a form of simplification and a redistribution of power in cultural exchanges. Via translations from the hub language, the intermediary culture in effect normalizes texts and discourse to its own standards; as a result these practices, in turn, buttress the hegemony of a culture that has a hub language as its native language. Thus the practice of using hub translations contributes obliquely to the prestige and status of a hub culture and the views of the culture as normative.16 Shifts of this sort in the practice of translation will almost certainly become more common as the world globalizes, particularly in the case of source texts from small and less powerful cultures in the global hierarchy. This form of translation is implicitly framed by the hegemony of the cultures central to hub translation, potentially resulting in diminished allegiance that translators normally accord to frameworks of reception of their own cultures, including social practices, perspectives on life, and specific linguistic meanings. Thus such practices can lead to the abandonment in receiving cultures of historical norms established through habit, pedagogy, and so forth, undercutting cultural autonomy and severing cultural traditions. Such results and cultural shifts will not necessarily be easy, productive, or fruitful for subordinate cultures in a globalized framework. They could in fact be culturally destructive in many situations. Moreover, awareness of such cultural hegemony and dominance can result in a translator’s abandonment of the privilege that would normally be accorded to her own target culture’s linguistic meanings, social practices, and perspectives on life.

Conclusion: globalization, translation practices, and translation theory The beginnings of globalization are apparent, but we cannot yet claim that we live in a globalized world: there are too many nations, peoples, and languages that still remain peripheral to global inclusion and too many networks that are alienated and antagonistic rather than cooperative, intertwined, and unified at a globalized level. Our nations and our lives still play out in silos with important areas of essential global concerns failing to benefit from actual and essential global attention and agreement. The perils of climate change and the inability of nations to agree on and execute necessary steps to block ecological disaster are perhaps the most glaring examples of the distance between current conditions and the necessary conditions of globalization. The failures to cooperate globally are to a large extent attributable to the most powerful nations of the world who resist globalization in favor of their own interests and dominance and to their leaders such as the presidents of the United States and Brazil at present who deny the dangers of climate change. Nonetheless, although globalization is structurally quite different from the social contexts we live in at present, we can already begin to see some of the directions it will take. 227

Maria Tymoczko

In this essay I have argued that hegemony and dominance remain a major concern in the practices of our shrinking world. There can be no true globalization unless we can address those issues and find solutions that will not exclude small cultures, languages with relatively few speakers, and people with fewer resources, among many other factors essential to bringing us together as one world. The question of gender is a major issue that must be addressed on a global scale so that it will no longer be true in any culture of the world that only half the population has a voice, education, and an equal place in the polity. Globalization will bring new contexts and new patterns for translation practice; in turn, it will shift translation theory as well. In many ways we have begun to perceive this new context. We are already taking up new translation practices that fit with contexts prefiguring globalization and that demand revision of past translation theory and practices. With full globalization, however, we will construct a new context for translation theory and practice, hopefully with egalitarian commitments of globalization shaping both.

Further reading All of the following volumes give a broad variety of translation strategies in minority cultures or cultures that are not Indo-European: Hung, E. and Wakabayashi, J. (eds.) (2005) Asian Translation Traditions. Manchester: St. Jerome. Sato-Rossberg, N. and Wakabayashi, J. (eds.) (2012) Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context. London: Continuum. Tymoczko, M. (1999) Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Wakabayashi, J. and Kothari, R. (eds.) (2009) Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Notes







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References Aarne, A. and Thompson, S. (1964) The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Marais, K. and Meylaerts R. (eds.) (2019) Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies: Methodological Considerations. New York and London: Routledge. Tymoczko, M. (1999) Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Tymoczko, M. (2019) ‘Translation as Organized Complexity: Implications for Translation Theory’, in Marais, K. and Meylaerts R. (eds.), Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies: Methodological Considerations. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 238–258. Tymoczko, M. (2020) Neuroscience and Translation. Tartu: Tartu Semiotics Library.

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16 World translation flows Preferred languages and subjects Annie Brisset and Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez

Introduction In his famous work, The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti (1995: 14) emphasized the predominance of English as a language of translation – about 43% of all the books listed in UNESCO’s Index Translationum were translated from English. A few years later, the proportion of translations from English rose to 49% (Venuti 1998: 160).1 The prevalence of English no longer needs to be proven (De Swaan 2001; Barré 2010; Crystal 2012 [1997]), but to take stock of its evolution and to better understand the volume and nature of exchanges between languages and regions of the world, we based our research on the latest data available from the Index.2 The present study begins in 1979, coinciding with the launch of the electronic database, and ends in 2009, spanning a period of 30 years.3 The Index is far from exhaustive considering that it only includes 150 countries and not all the 228 countries of the world, nor all the 193 Member States of the United Nations. In addition, of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken around the world, only 1,100 are mentioned.4 This disparity must be nuanced. According to Ethnologue, only about half of the world’s languages have developed a writing system (3,995) and for those with writing systems, very little is known about the extent to which they are actually used – depending on literacy rates among speakers.5 According to Abram de Swaan (2001), proponent of a sociological hierarchy of the languages of the world, about a hundred ‘central’ languages have the privilege of being used in education, law and administration, media, industry, or technology, unlike the ‘peripheral’ languages, which nevertheless constitute 98% of all languages. Among these 100 languages, only 13 are said to be ‘supercentral’. Among the 13 are the 6 UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Russian) to which are added two other European languages (German, Portuguese) as well as Japanese, Malay, Hindi, Swahili and Turkish. Many countries do not have copyright, and books in original language or in translation are not systematically recorded. Or sometimes countries, do not have the human, technical or financial resources to establish an annual list of publications or to transmit one to UNESCO. Other countries are at war and the official listing of publications, if any exists, is suspended. As a result, there are gaps in the Index, but these mostly relate to less widely translated languages. The Index also does not reflect all translation activities since only books are listed, 230

World translation flows

to the exclusion of any other document. As an indication, translation’s market share in the global economy is estimated at 40 billion US dollars, which greatly exceeds the market share of translated books. This figure includes machine translation, which is becoming increasingly widespread, and whose projected growth approached 25% per year between 2014 and 2019 according to the prospective and marketing firm Wintergreen Research (2015, 2011).6 It is also difficult to assess the volume of machine translation that is carried out confidentially within certain public or private organizations for scientific, financial or state security monitoring operations. Added to these activities is the translation of documents written in foreign languages, in particular the translation of web pages, using free online software by many ordinary users.7 Over a decade ago, Gaspari and Hutchins (2007: 3–5) estimated that 50 million words, especially single words and phrases, were translated every day by users, of which only between 3% and 7% were translators. Finally, both the formal and informal translations that have spread across social networks, for example, in the context of activist communications (Bogenç Demirel and Görgüler 2019; Colón Rodríguez 2019), are unaccounted for. The Index is a database meant to gather data on all translated books in the world and is a repository that is available worldwide. It is constantly updated with information provided by the various countries, which sometimes do not submit data for certain years.8 Updates are therefore not at the same level for all languages, and some figures may vary from day to day. Furthermore, the Index is limited to translated books. It does not report the total number of books published in each country, which calls for a prudent interpretation of the percentages indicated (Pym 1999). Even though the figures are disparate or lack precision, over the long term, they reveal trends. The Index’s forte lies in the fact that it indicates the author, translator, publishing references for both the original and translation, the country of origin, the source and target languages as well as the subjects treated according to detailed categories. Despite its shortcomings, it therefore remains the best indicator of translation flows on a global and regional scale, even within multilingual states, and, overall, it is a good indicator of literary, functional and knowledge translations.

Preferred source and target languages In the first instance, we wanted to check the source and target languages the most in demand. Given that these languages are predominantly European languages, it seemed necessary to widen the spectrum and to match the tables with graphs depicting the distribution of the six UN languages, namely English, Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, French and Russian, as source and target languages. The six ‘supercentral’ languages are a first and second language for close to half of the world’s population, and an official language in close to a 100 countries. Secondly, we sought to identify the most translated genres by reducing the numerous UNESCO categories to four only (literature, humanities and social sciences, sciences, miscellaneous), reverting to the details whenever we deemed it useful. According to the Index, the total number of translations stood at around 2 million.9 Table 16.1 shows, in descending order, the 20 languages from which we translate the most. The second column indicates the total number of books translated from each language, while the third column gives the percentage calculated in relation to the 50 most popular source languages.10 The following graph (Figure 16.1) highlights the significant gap between English and the languages immediately following it as the original languages of the translated books listed in the database. 231

Annie Brisset and Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez Table 16.1 Top 20 source languages

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Figure 16.1

Language

No. of translations

Percent of top 20 SL

English French German Russian Italian Spanish Swedish Japanese Danish Latin Dutch Greek, Ancient (to 1453) Czech Polish Norwegian Chinese Arabic Portuguese Hungarian Hebrew Total Other source languages

1,266,110 226,123 208,240 103,624 69,555 54,588 39,984 29,246 21,252 19,972 19,667 18,077 17,161 14,663 14,276 14,071 12,410 11,583 11,297 10,279 2,182,178 105,070

55.35 9.88 9.10 4.53 3.04 2.38 1.74 1.27 0.92 0.87 0.85 0.79 0.75 0.64 0.62 0.61 0.54 0.50 0.49 0.44 95.4 4.59

Top five source languages.

English continues to be the source language of more than half of the translated books in the Index (over 55%). Far behind, in second place, comes French (barely 10%), and in third place, German (9%). According to the Index, these languages alone are the source languages 232

World translation flows Table 16.2 Speakers of the world’s languages (L1) 201711 Rank

Language (L1)

Millions

Main country spoken

1 2 3 4 5 8 9 10 11 17 18 24

Chinese (Mandarin) Spanish English Hindi/Urdu Arabic Russian Punjabi Japanese Hausa French German Italian

897 436 371 329 290 153 148 128 85 76 76 63

China Mexico USA India/Pakistan Egypt Russia India Japan Nigeria France Germany Italy

of almost 75% of all translated books worldwide. When Russian (4.5%) and Italian (3%) are added, the top five source languages represent close to 82% of all translated books worldwide. All five are European languages.12 Latin and Ancient Greek are in tenth and twelfth position respectively, each with a score close to 1% (0.85% and 0.79%). Japanese ( just over 1%), Chinese (0.61%), Arabic (0.54%) and Hebrew (0.44%) are the only non-European languages that appear among the first 20 source languages.13 Japanese, with a very small share, is the only non-European language belonging to the top ten. However, a language which appears to be a minority as a language of translation on a global level can change status at the regional level and appear as a ‘central language’ or even a ‘supercentral’ language to use Abram de Swaan’s terminology. This is particularly the case for Japanese, the source language of almost 6% of translations into Korean, and especially of more than 25% of translations into Chinese.14 Particularly noteworthy is the minute portion (4.59%) of languages that do not appear among the top 20 original languages, which is to say, the vast majority. Despite the shortcomings of the Index, this proportion signals the extent of the gap that separates the world’s languages as exporters of works of art and knowledge. The importance of a language due to its number of speakers has little effect on its status as a language of translation, source language or target language, at least if we stick to the listed books. A study carried out in 2017 by the Chair for the development of research on culture (CEFAN, Laval University, Canada) drew up a table of the most spoken languages in the world (Table 16.2). A comparison of this table with the graph showing the relative importance of the six UN languages as source languages (Figure 16.2) reveals the disparity between the two factors. Although Mandarin comes first in terms of the number of speakers for whom it is the first language (L1), it only ranks sixteenth among the source languages (0.61%). Conversely, English is the most translated language, but only comes third (Table 16.2), in terms of the number of speakers for whom it is the dominant language. Let’s turn for the moment to the top target languages (Table 16.3; Figure 16.3). When compared to the difference observed for source languages, the difference for target languages is less spectacular. However, mostly the same languages are involved, that is, European languages. German (301,935 translations or 13.27%) comes first as target language, 233

Annie Brisset and Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez

Figure 16.2

Distribution of the six UN languages as source languages (SL).

Table 16.3 Top 20 target languages Language 1

German

2 3

Percent of top 50 TL

301,935

13.27

French

240,045

10.55

Spanish

228,559

10.05

4

English

164,509

7.23

5

Japanese

130,649

5.74

6

Dutch

111,270

4.89

7

Russian

100,806

4.43

8

Portuguese

78,904

3.46

9

Polish

76,706

3.37

Swedish

71,209

3.13

10 11

Czech

68,921

3.03

12

Danish

64,864

2.85

13

Chinese

63,123

2.77

14

Italian

61,087

2.68

15

Hungarian

55,214

2.42

16

Finnish

48,311

2.12

17

Norwegian

35,161

1.54

18

Greek, Modern (1453–)

30,459

1.33

19

Korean

28,168

1.23

20

Bulgarian Total Other target languages

234

No. of translations

27,457

1.07

1,987,356

87.39

286,729

12.60

World translation flows

Figure 16.3

Top five target languages.

Figure 16.4 Respective shares of the six UN languages (TL).

English comes in fourth place with almost half the total number of books translated (164,509 translations or 7.23%). Even though the number of books translated into English is on the rise, the percentage remains disproportionate for translations from English into other languages (slightly above 55%). Given that English speakers (L1 and L2) are spread out, it would be interesting to find out the countries responsible for translations both from and into English. When the list is limited to the six UN languages, the position of each language changes (Figure 16.4). With 897 million speakers (L1), Chinese (Mandarin) comes first as the most spoken language in the world but comes second to last as a target language. The reported number of books translated into Mandarin totals 63,123 or 2.77%. On the other hand, with 436 million speakers (L1), Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world. Along with French (240,045 translations or 10.55%), Spanish (228,559 translations or 10.05%) is clearly ahead of the other four UN languages as target language.15 As such, for the different 235

Annie Brisset and Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez

languages, geographical distribution rather than the total number of speakers should be taken into consideration.

Preferred subjects Because of its predominance and geographical distribution, it is necessary to examine the countries of origin and the nature of translations done from and into English.16 With English as a source language, French would serve as an example of a target language. This choice might seem random given that German is the top target language in the Index – about 13% of all the translated books listed. German (L1) is however limited to a few countries, mainly Germany, Austria and Switzerland. French is spoken in the 57 Member States of the Organisation internationale de la francophonie (OIF), and even though it comes in second place as a target language (10%), it has long overtaken German in terms of world diffusion. And, borrowing from Abram de Swaan’s terminology, French has overtaken German in ‘communication value’. Which countries translate books from English to French and what is the nature of the books they translate? To keep things simple, the 19 subjects in the Index are grouped into four categories: (1) Literature; (2) Humanities and Social Sciences (history, geography, biography, law, social sciences, education, philosophy, psychology, religion, theology); (3) Sciences (natural, exact, applied); (4) Miscellaneous (arts, games, sports, generalities, bibliography).17 It is not surprising that France translates the most from English to French in all four categories (Table 16.4). It is however noteworthy that France clearly translates many more literary works than works of knowledge from English to French. Literature alone accounts for about 63% of all the books translated from English to French (122,271), while sciences and humanities and social sciences (including law and education) account for 11% and a little over 16% respectively. France is immediately followed by Canada, Switzerland and Belgium, countries in which French is one of the official languages. Of these three countries, Canada is the only one in which English is an official language and that, with equal status with French. About 80% of translations are done from English, the dominant language, to French,

Table 16.4 Translating country and subject of books translated from English to French18

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8 9 10 11 12

236

Translating country

Literature

Humanities & Social sciences Sciences

France Canada Switzerland Belgium Germany UK Monaco Spain USA Algeria Cameroon Luxemburg Total/Subject %/Subject

76,705 20,349 6,712 7,206 717 1,366 2,026 1,049 26 129 94 99 145 115 14 30 16 36 2 13 2 4 2 0 86,461 30,393 56.67 14.11

Miscellaneous Total

13,736 11,481 62,71 1,665 524 315 1,037 301 54 135 67 35 10 10 21 18 5 9 9 3 4 0 0 0 21,538 13,972 28.23 9.15

122,271 21,854 2,922 4,413 344 295 280 83 66 27 10 2 152,567 100

World translation flows

a minority language.19 In comparison, in Cameroon where English and French coexist as official languages in similar proportions but in the reverse order (Echu 2004; Anchimbe 2010: 132), the volume of translations toward the minority language is far from comparable. While Canada recorded 21,854 books translated from French to English, Cameroon registered only ten books translated from English to French (Table 16.4).20 Countries that are neither anglophone nor francophone like Germany or Spain mainly translate books in the humanities and social sciences from English to French. In the opposite combination (Table 16.5), 9 out of the first 15 countries have English as a dominant language like the UK, the USA and certain Commonwealth countries (Australia, Cameroon, Canada, India, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa). Most often inherited from colonization, this language is spoken by most of the population (Mufwene 2004). The USA and the UK are the anglophone countries that translate from French the most. They mainly translate books in the humanities and social sciences (more than 40%) and literature (34%). The number of books translated from French in the domains of anthropology, philosophy, semiotics, sociology, psychoanalysis, etc., or in women’s studies (Beauvoir, Cixous, Irigaray, etc.) in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s–1980s, when French Theory (Barthes, Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, etc.) became popular might explain why the numbers are higher in this category when compared to the others.21 In the French to English combination (Table 16.5), there are some non-English-speaking European countries where English (L2) is widely spoken by the population. Canada’s ranking could be expected given its official language bilingualism policies (English and French) and the way translation is sustained by numerous institutional instruments to ensure equality between the two linguistic communities. Curiously, France ranks third, coming immediately after the USA and the UK, on the list of countries that translate the most into English. By the 1970s, a French sociolinguist had already begun to decry the fact that English was fast gaining grounds becoming the dominant language of publication in French publishing houses (Gobard 1976).22 Table 16.5 Origin of French to English translations23

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Translating country

Literature

Humanities & social sciences

Sciences

Miscellaneous Total

USA UK France Canada Germany Belgium Australia India Netherlands Sweden New Zealand South Africa Cameroon Nigeria Kenya Total/Subject %/Subject

3,484 3,400 357 1,439 42 30 56 12 10 4 0 0 1 0 0 8,835 27.27

4,562 3,619 2,033 1,424 60 54 69 104 14 8 6 2 0 0 0 11,955 36.90

1,364 1,426 924 776 247 16 14 7 11 3 0 0 0 0 0 4,788 14.78

1,319 1,069 3,804 292 196 100 23 6 4 2 1 0 0 0 0 6,816 21.04

10,729 9,514 7,118 3,931 545 200 162 129 39 17 7 2 1 0 0 32,394 100

237

Annie Brisset and Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez Table 16.6 UN languages (TL): subjects24 Language

Literature

Humanities & social sciences

Sciences

Miscellaneous

Total

Arabic Chinese English French Russian Spanish

4,574 16,937 42,638 127,639 56,641 106,431

6,366 30,168 66,307 59,490 22,829 68,384

2,225 14,460 29,306 30,696 16,755 40,385

624 3,731 30,649 25,305 4,781 15,844

13,789 65,296 163,556 243,130 101,006 231,044

As shown in the Index, literature is the favorite subject for translations into Russian and Spanish, and especially into French (Table 16.6). Humanities and social sciences win the favor of Arab, Chinese and especially English. In the field of literature, the statistics indicate that translations into French triple the number of translations into English. For the six most widely used languages, French is the top target language for literature books. There is however a major gap between the first and second categories that raise the most translation (literature and humanities and social sciences). Seemingly, China has shown less interest in literature – the total number of literature books translated into Chinese is less than half the total number of literature books translated into English. Arab comes in last in all categories with particularly low figures for the sciences in general, and even lower figures for pure sciences (689 books translated compared to 1,535 for natural and applied sciences). A UNDP report published in 2003 highlighted the generally low numbers of books translated in the Arab world.25 On the one hand, these figures were based on obsolete data. On the other hand, the low figures provided above include figures from certain countries that have experienced the civil wars and other armed conflicts that have been disturbing the Middle East for decades now. In addition, as is the case for many other languages, the list of translations submitted to UNESCO is, without a doubt, below the reality.26 Still, it remains that the gap between Arab and the other languages is paradoxical given the numerous translation policies that these regions have put in place. In the Maghreb and the Middle East, these policies are old and diverse. They fall under two categories depending on the nature of the initiative, whether regional or national, or whether they stem from foreign countries (France, the UK, the USA). Established in partnership with various countries in the Middle East (Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc.), these bilateral programs aim to disseminate literary and intellectual works from donor countries, with or without reciprocity. All these countries seek to maintain or expand their sphere of influence on the region.27 Apart from literature, the translation of works on Western thought on politics, economics and society aligns with this project – to spread Western values, modernize the Arab world, transform their conception of the world and the image of the West that they made for themselves. Translation policies driven by a concern for equality are relatively recent.28 The 22 Member States of the Arab League are linked by a common language, Classical Arabic (Fusha). It is a written-only language that is not understood by everyone. Promoting classical Arabic means promoting the production and dissemination of knowledge, which, in turn, influences the development of societies. In other words, translation is part of an Arabization policy officially launched in the early 1960s, but which dates as far back as the 1920s. Various entities were created with a mission to Arabize subjects taught in post-secondary

238

World translation flows

education, enrich Arabic culture and, on the other hand, to make the Arabic culture known. In the same light, certain Member States of the Arab League (Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, etc.) established their own translation policy. Along with literature, most of the works translated within this context belong to the humanities and social sciences and are translated from English. There is also growing interest in translation in the Gulf States, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. Almost all translations done in these states are functional translations from English. Dominant subjects of these translations include marketing and business administration, economics, political science or information technology, while domains like the humanities and social sciences are neglected, except for history – most often essays on the Muslim world or essays on issues of local interest.29 To ensure that a greater number of countries were represented, the study was extended to include other non-European languages (Hindi, Malay, Swahili, Turkish) which, according to Abram de Swaan’s Global Language System Theory, belong to the restricted group of the supercentral languages (Table 16.7).30 For Hindi and especially Turkish, literature raises more interest than the humanities and social sciences. Swahili is an exception – the numbers are reversed in a two-to-one proportion in favor of the humanities and social sciences. Everywhere else, these two categories raise far more interest than sciences. Of these four languages, the greatest number of books are translated into Turkish. Almost all translations into Turkish are done in Turkey (94%). The country imports a few books in modern Greek (59), and almost double that number of books in ancient Greek (110). The other translations into Turkish mostly come from Germany (1.2%). As a reminder, Germany imports the greatest number of foreign books ( Table 16.3). It also has a large Turkish population (about 5%). As for translations from Turkish, Germany is followed from far behind by Greece and Bulgaria and from even further behind by Cyprus.31 Books translated from Turkish reveal that Turkey (candidate country to the European Union) sees the need to export its works of knowledge and especially its literature, into foreign languages (Table 16.8). Hindi, the fourth most spoken language in the world, is the common language for a large proportion of India’s population (41%). And this, along with English, the official language of the central government of India, and Urdu, one of the 22 official languages at the regional level. Even though often considered to be similar, Hindi differs from Urdu in writing and in its vocabulary derived from Sanskrit, while Urdu bears the imprint of Arabic and Persian. As shown in Table 16.9, India is the source of almost half of all the books translated from Hindi (921 out of 1,621). This can be explained by the country’s linguistic diversity. Also, almost all the foreign books translated into Hindi (3,142 out of 3,751) are translated in India. Hindi and Urdu are both regional languages in India, but Hindi, along with English, is the only central official language. It is the lingua franca of most of the population of the Union. Urdu, spoken in the north of India, is also the official language in neighboring Pakistan. Table 16.7 Non-European supercentral languages (TL): subjects32 Language

Literature

Humanities & social science

Sciences

Miscellaneous

Total

Turkish Hindi Malay Swahili

7,007 1,933 538 99

4,121 1,584 550 218

1,009 191 323 8

363 42 54 4

12,500 3,75133 1,465 329

239

Annie Brisset and Raúl E. Colón Rodríguez Table 16.8 Origin of translations from Turkish (SL) Main countries

No. of translations

Germany Turkey Greece Bulgaria Cyprus Total

683 109 109 87 6 2,910

Table 16.9 Hindi and Urdu Main countries

Hindi SL

Urdu SL

Hindi TL

Urdu TL

India Pakistan Total globally

921 2 1,621

412 95 1,198

3,142 0 3,751

341 641 1,247

Table 16.10 Malay Main countries

SL

TL

Malaysia Indonesia Singapore France Netherlands China Ex-USSR Total globally

151 7 6 12 9 0 5 231

1,339 0 112 1 1 3 5 1,465

Given the respective statuses and distribution of these two languages, it is not surprising that India translated about four times more titles into Urdu than Pakistan (412 books compared to 95) and that India translated twice less in the opposite combination (341 compared to 641). India and Pakistan favor different subjects. India prefers literature (52%) while Pakistan, a Muslim country, translates religious and theological works the most (44.6%). Malaysia (Table 16.10) is responsible for the greatest number of translations into Malay (91%), followed from very far behind by Singapore (7.6%). Indonesia does not report any translations into Malay meanwhile it has a population of close to 9 million Malaysians. Outside the Malay geographical zone (Malaysia and Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand), France (5.2%) translates the most from Malay. However, only 12 titles are reported. Next comes the Netherlands with nine works translated from Malay. There is no recorded translation from Malay to Chinese. In the opposite combination, from Chinese to Malay, only three books are reported (Table 16.11). Among the books selected for translation into Malay, literature occupies the same position in Malaysia (36.6%) as in Singapore (36.5%). However, in Malaysia, it is closely followed by sciences (23%), while in Singapore, it is closely followed by works on religion and theology 240

World translation flows Table 16.11 Malay (TL): subjects

Country

Literature

Sciences

Religion & theology

Social sciences, law & education

No. of translations

Malaysia Singapore

489 41

307 16

200 35

198 17

1,339 112

Table 16.12 Swahili and Hausa Swahili

Hausa

Main countries

SL

TL

Main countries

SL

TL

Tanzania Kenya Uganda South Africa Mozambique Burundi D. R. of Congo Total Germany France USA USSR Japan UK Sweden China Total Total globally

1 0 n/a 0 0 n/a 0 1 13 13 9 8 4 2 2 1 52 67

0 4 n/a 0 0

Nigeria Niger Cameroon Chad Sudan Côte d’Ivoire

1 0 0 0 n/a 0

23 3 0 0 n/a 0

Total Germany Poland USA USSR UK Japan Sweden China Total Total globally

1 1 2 7 0 0 0 0 0 10 11

26 0 0 0 30 1 0 0 0 31 57

4 8 5 5 0 296 0 5 3 0 314 329

(31.25%). This percentage is way higher than the percentage for sciences (14.28%). The percentage for sciences in Singapore is almost identical to the percentage for religion in Malaysia (15%). The main countries that speak Swahili (East Africa) are not the ones that translate the greatest number of books into (2.4%) nor from (1.5%) that language. The countries that publish translations from and into Swahili are located outside Africa (Table 16.12). Germany and France record the same number of imported books from Swahili (19.4%). In the opposite combination, the USA reports nine titles while the former USSR published 296 out of the 329 books, or 90% of the books translated into Swahili. The majority of these books (Table 16.13) fall under the humanities and social sciences (198 titles, including philosophy and psychology, history and geography). They are mainly the founding writings of Marxism. They also narrate World War II, define capitalism and communism, or explain issues pertaining to the non-aligned countries. They describe the Soviet youth and boast about the various possibilities for studies in the USSR that are open to foreigners. Literature comes in second place (91 titles). These works are produced by great Russian authors or authors from different Soviet republics of that era. Children’s literature occupies a significant position. On the other hand, pure or applied sciences are almost 241

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nonexistent (4 out of 296 titles). The translations are essentially one-sided: eight titles translated from Swahili out of a moreover small total (57 translations). After the fall of the Soviet regime, translations from Swahili to Russian and from Russian to Swahili disappeared completely. The USA and the UK combined translated 11 books from Swahili, while Germany and France translated 26 books from Swahili and 5 and 10 books into Swahili respectively. Hausa, spoken in West Africa, has more speakers than Swahili. Hausa speakers are mainly concentrated in Nigeria. Statistics on the number of books translated into Hausa are more modest, but the trend is more or less the same. Nigeria reports almost half of the titles translated into Hausa. About half of all the translations into this language stem from the USSR (30 out of 57). These all fall within the same categories as the translations into Swahili. No Hausa books have been translated into Russian. During the period under study (1979–2009), China seems to also be as indifferent to Swahili as it is to Hausa.

Translation flows and societal changes The data above leads us to look closely at the translation flows surrounding certain historical events. In Europe for example, 1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union. In Asia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed in 1949. At the end of 1978, Deng Xiaoping came to power with a policy of reform and opening. What were the reactions, through translation, to these events? When the Soviet regime collapsed in December 1991, the number and the nature of books selected for translation in Russia changed radically (Table 16.14). Natural and exact sciences were abandoned (−62.1%) in favor of philosophy and psychology (+278%). In ten years, the number of translated books went from 423 to 1,602. However, religion and theology show the most spectacular increase (+429%).

Table 16.13 Russian translations into swahili: subjects (1979–1991)

USSR

Literature

Social sciences, law, education

Philo Psychol.

History Geography

Religion, theology

Sciences

Miscellaneous

91

173

15

10

0

4

3

Table 16.14 Russian (TL): subjects before and after 1991 Subjects

1982–1991

1992–2001

Increase/Decrease (%)

Religion, theology Philosophy, psychology Social sciences, education, law Generalities, bibliography History, geography, biography Literature Natural and exact sciences Applied sciences Arts, games, sports Total number of books translated

256 423 1,892 122 920 16,825 2,153 2,851 699 26,141

1,356 1,602 2,046 131 922 17,827 815 2,679 459 27,298

429 278 8.13 7.37 0.21 2.74 −62.1 −6.00 −34.3 4.42

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From the beginning of the Soviet era, religion was considered superstition and there was a massive suppression of the clergy and of believers – churches were destroyed, monasteries confiscated, priests were killed or imprisoned (Pospielovsky 1988). The return of the religious shows an aspect of identity that the Soviet regime had not succeeded in eradicating.34 ‘Scientific atheism’ had failed. To the number of books on religion and theology should be added the books on oriental spirituality, particularly Hinduism, which are listed under philosophy and psychology. Apart from these books, we find Freud’s works and other works by authors that had been forbidden by the regime, or that promoted ideas that would have been considered a threat to the communist doctrine. In its early days, the young People’s Republic of China (1949) was concerned with the establishment of its legitimacy in the eyes of the whole world. Within the context of the Cold War the ‘new China’ chose cultural diplomacy as its tool for the conquest of minds. To this end, during the first 17 years of its existence, it set up a translation and publishing program with the aim of translating its own literature into foreign languages. Set on the Soviet model established in the 1930s, the Foreign Language Press based in Beijing functioned both as a translation office and publishing house. It also served as a censorship tool, used to first of all tailor original works such that they presented a smooth image of the regime and portrayed the revolutionary as the perfect hero. Classics of Chinese literature and of young revolutionary literature were translated. Between 1949 and 1966, more than 4,000 books were translated and published in 22 languages (Ni 2017). During the same period, China imported and translated the classics of Marxist thought (Zhong 2003). A few years after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping took over and ruled China from 1978 to 1992. He promoted an ‘Opening’ policy. The nation entered a new era of economic reforms. Trade and diplomatic relations with the outside world intensified. During the ten years (1979–1989) that followed, more than 2,000 Mandarin books were translated abroad. Of this total, ten countries translated almost 75% of these books directly from Mandarin into their own languages (Table 16.15). The other translations into foreign languages were done in third-party countries such as the USA and France, where a dozen translations from Mandarin to Vietnamese had been done at the time. The USA, which officially recognized China in 1979, and the UK translated about a third of these books. English was therefore the language into which the most translations were done. The two Germanys translated more than a quarter of the books imported from Table 16.15 Mandarin SL (1979–1989)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Main countries

No. of translations

Germany (West) USA France Japan UK Spain USSR Germany (GDR) Italy India Total of first ten countries

385 376 209 152 149 120 108 65 39 2 1,605

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China, with the number of books translated varying between the east and the west. The Federal Republic translated about six times more books than the GDR and even a little more than the USA. Judging from the number of translations registered during the decade that ended with the repression of Tiananmen, West Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the UK, and the USA were the Western countries the most interested in China. These countries registered almost 80% of the books reported by the top ten translating countries. The Communist USSR and GDR put together translated just over 10%. The contrast between the USA (23.4%) and the USSR (6.7%) is striking. In Asia, Japan imported the most Chinese books (9.47%), while South Korea reported none. About 40% of the books selected fall under literature and about 12% under sciences (natural, exact and applied) as well as social sciences. As for China, there was a high demand for scientific works (25.5%), followed by literature (23%) and social sciences (22.7%), but there was no great difference between the three categories. The subjects that drew the most interest varied depending on the source language. As for translations from English, a main source language, in part, China borrowed works on economics or related disciplines such as accounting or management. At the end of the cultural revolution (1966–1976), China deemed it necessary to join Western theoretical schools of thought such as Poststructuralism or Postcolonial criticism.35 Almost the same number of scientific books and literature books were translated from Japanese, and about double that number were translated in the humanities and social sciences. Meanwhile, China translated almost as many books from Russian in the three categories (literature, humanities and social sciences, sciences). Certain foreign countries (mainly Singapore, Malaysia, the USSR) also translated into Mandarin. English (114 titles) and Russian (128 titles) were the main source languages of these translations. For these countries that translated directly from and into Mandarin, interest in China was apparently coupled with a desire to draw attention to their own literature and works of knowledge. The PRC continued to translate a lot from Mandarin (Table 16.16), but its objectives seemed to differ from those pursued in its early days. This country’s other official languages, like Uyghur spoken in the Muslim province of Xinjiang, became the main target languages. These are languages spoken by groups that are not part of the majority Han Chinese ethnic group.36 What subjects did the central State choose for the use of linguistic minorities? In addition to mathematics and science textbooks, popular literature or practical books on business and accounting, most of the books translated from Mandarin to the minority languages of the country are works that fall under law and social sciences. There are almost no translations that fall under religion and theology. Also, translations from Mandarin to minority Table 16.16 Mandarin (SL) to minority languages of China (1979–1989)

244

Main target languages

No. of translations

Mongolian-Peripheral Korean Uyghur Tibetan-Central Kazakh Zhuang Total

1,003 591 432 254 124 81 2,485

World translation flows

languages are one-way. During the decade under review, China translated 1,000 books into peripheral Mongolian, but did not translate any book from that language. Similarly, it exported more than 400 books translated from Mandarin to Uyghur, but only translated two from Uyghur.37 Available data reveals that there has been an internal sinicization project carried out alongside as they open up to foreign knowledge.

Conclusion As shown by the increasing curve that went from 43% in the mid-1980s to more than 55% within three decades, English continues to reinforce itself. These figures give more weight to sociologist Johan Heilbron’s (2010) observation that English holds the largest part of the global translation market. English is visibly the origin of main literary works and works of knowledge. Additionally, the percentage of English works published in non-English- speaking countries shows that more than every other language, English guarantees publication and ensures the circulation of works on the global scale. English is the only ‘hyper-central’ language within Abram de Swaan’s hierarchy of languages. It is the first reference language for literature, sciences, technical subjects, diplomacy and commerce. The countries of origin of translations into English and the fact that not only anglophone countries publish and translate in this language call into question the ‘linguistic imperialism’ attributed to the Anglo-American world. Clearly, and while it is not its only function, English is the ‘reference’ language, the cultural language or simply put, the lingua franca through which literary and knowledge exchanges take place at the international level. English’s hyper-centrality is accentuated by the monopoly of some publishing houses which essentially publish in this language. Translation research for example, is built on paradigms, models and concepts that draw from different traditions and conjunctures. However, there exists a global translation research disseminated in English, which de facto imposes its supremacy. The different issues researched tend to come together around the same models and references that mainly originate in the anglophone world. This world is nonetheless polycentric, and its different strongholds are not equal; the USA and the UK are at the top of the Index’s quantitative list. Without a doubt, it is necessary to distinguish between the supremacy of a given language and the supremacy of a country or group of countries that are said to exercise power over others. The two are conflated. In effect, we are confronted with a sociological phenomenon, namely the possible development of a doxa within our discipline or its subfields. Four major publishers share the translation research global market (encyclopedias, books and journals). These publishers are all European and, at least in our discipline, they all publish in English. Thanks to their network of branches around the world and to their presence on the Internet, they instantly reach universities and knowledge communities spread out on all continents. At the end, books hardly circulate outside their linguistic sphere and tend to not get distributed worldwide unless they are published in English, and preferably, by one of these major publishing houses, capable of organizing the marketing and review of these publications. A bibliometric sample revealed that their references are more of less limited to works published in English.38 Although Translation Studies lays claim to internationalization, that is, even though it has opened up to non-Western traditions, it remains surrounded by unnoticed and ignored works, promoted by unheard voices. 39 Ironically, the translation of theoretical works in the discipline seems to be a weak link in Translation Studies. World consecration mechanisms through translation are well known in the field of literature (Casanova 2007). Besides literature, several studies on translation flows have been 245

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carried throughout history. Recently, of particular relevance is that of Barré (2010), in which the author proposes ‘a questioning on cultural diversity through the study of translation flows from 1979 to 2002’ (2010: 1). Barré applies Network Analysis to measure cultural diversity and to assess language recognition through translation. The focus is on the changing structure, that is, the dynamics of world translation flows, with Russian losing its centrality in favor of English after the fall of the Berlin wall. This and other studies, including investigations drawing from cultural sociology (Bielsa 2016) contribute to a better understanding of the socio-historical, geographical, political, economic or scientific conditions of literary and knowledge translation. Post-colonialist critique has widened the geographical space but confined the research questions to the representation of the ‘Other’ and the power differentials between the cultures that translate and the cultures that are translated. The sociological approach extends this reflection by studying the institutional, symbolic or market regulation of translation. It examines the effects of translation on the transformation of certain societies or of certain fields within these societies at given moments in their history: the modernization of eighteenth-century Russia (Tyulenev 2012), Nietzsche and the shaping of political thought in the USA (Giroux 2003), literary theories in Turkey and feminist criticism in the USA (Susam-Saraeva 2006), philosophy in Mexico and the role of the translations by exiled philosophers fleeing the Spanish Civil War (Castro-Ramirez 2018), just to name a few such case studies. Whether they dwell on interlinguistic exchanges in past eras or on cutting-edge information and communication technologies, sociological approaches in Translation Studies are enriched by borrowings from Network Studies or from the different brands of Complexity Theory. A look at translation flows reveals phenomena that open new paths for research. The direction of translation flows and the subjects that either take forefront or are relegated to the back are an indication of different agendas. Other than within the post-colonialist framework, more attention must be paid to indirect or intermediary translations, translations exported abroad or to regional minorities within the same country. Some of these translations, during certain periods and in certain countries, have had a social engineering agenda while others reveal atypical linguistic combinations that might be explained by the diaspora resulting from the massive population movements. Translated by Dorine Ndobe Sosso

Further reading Cronin, M. (2014) Translation and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Examines how the new economic and technological context is affecting translation and translators, while drawing attention to the need for promoting cultural and linguistic diversity. Marais, K. (2019) ‘Effects Causing Effects. Considering Constraints in Translation’, in Marais, K. and Meylaerts, R. (eds.) Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies. Methodological Considerations. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 53–72. Drawing from Narrative Theory and Complexity Theory, Marais examines the constraining role of social and human trajectories on translators and translations. Gambier, Y. and Doorslaer, L. (eds.) (2016) Border Crossings. Translation Studies and Other Disciplines. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Addresses the bridging function of the translation concept and the exchange or input between translation studies and various disciplines such as history, information and communication studies, biosemiotics or cognitive neurosciences. Simon, S. (2012). Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. London: Routledge. A socio-historical and cultural perspective on multilingual, multiethnic urban space as translation space. 246

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Notes

The













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dp-pd/dv-vd/lang/index-fra.cfm; Statistics on official languages in Canada. https://www.canada. ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/official-languages-bilingualism/publications/statistics.html.











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References Anchimbe, E. A. (2010) ‘Constructing a Diaspora. Anglophone Cameroonian Identity Online’, in Taiwo, R. (ed.), Handbook of Research on Discourse Behavior and Digital Communication: Language Structures and Social Interaction. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 130–144. UNDP. (2003) Arab Human Development Report. Available online: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/ arab-human-development-report-2003 [Accessed 13 June 2020]. Barré, G. (2010) ‘La globalización de la cultura y la cuestión de la diversidad cultural: estudio de los flujos mundiales de traducciones entre 1979 y 2002’, REDES. Revista hispana para el análisis de redes sociales, 18(1), pp. 183–217. Available online: http://revista-redes.rediris.es [Accessed 13 June 2020]. Bielsa, E. (2016) Cosmopolitanism and Translation. Investigations in the Experience of the Foreign. London and New York: Routledge. Bogenç Demirel, E. and Görgüler, Z. (2019) ‘Traduction dans les réseaux sociaux: nouvelles pratiques traductives en Turquie’, Des Mots aux Actes, 8(13), pp. 271–288. Brady, A. M. (2012) ‘We Are All Part of the Same Family: China’s Ethnic Propaganda’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 4, pp. 159–181. Brisset, A. (2017a) ‘Globalization, Translation, and Cultural Diversity’, Translation and Interpreting Studies, 12(2), pp. 254–277. Brisset, A. (2017b) ‘Traductologies: des mondes qui s’ignorent’ (First Global Conference on Translation Studies, Université de Paris-Ouest-Nanterre, April 2017, 10–17), in Lautel-Ribstein, F. (ed.), État des lieux de la traductologie dans le monde. Paris: Garnier (Forthcoming). Casanova, P. (2007) The World Republic of Letters, M.B. DeBevoise (tr.), Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Castro-Ramirez, N. (2018) Hacerse de palabras. Traducción y filosofía en México, 1940–1970. Ciudad de México: Bonilla Artigas. Cheung, M. P.Y. (2011) ‘The (Un)Importance of Flagging Chineseness. Making Sense of a Recurrent Theme in Contemporary Chinese Discourse on Translation’, Translation Studies, 4(1), pp. 41–57. Colón Rodríguez, R. E. (2019) ‘A Complex and Transdisciplinary Approach to Slow Collaborative Activist Translation’, in Marais, K. and Meylaerts, R. (eds.), Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies. Methodological Considerations. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 152–179. Available online: https://www.routledge.com/Complexity-Thinking-in-Translation-Studies-Methodological-Considerations/Marais-Meylaerts/p/book/9781138572485. [Accessed 13 June 2020]. Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue. (2009). Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue: UNESCO World Report. Paris: UNESCO. Available online: https://en.unesco.org/ interculturaldialogue/resources/130 [Accessed 24 August 2020] Crystal, D. (2012) [1997] English as a Global Language. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. De Swaan, A. (2001) Words of the World: The Global Language System. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Echu, G. (2004) The Language Question in Cameroon. Yaounde, Bloomington. Available online: https:// bop.unibe.ch/linguistik-online/article/download/765/1309?inline=1 [Accessed 13 June 2020]. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. (2017). 21st edition. Available online: https://www.ethnologue. com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0. [Accessed 13 June 2020]. 249

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Gaspari, F. and Hutchins, J. (2007) ‘Online and Free! Ten Years of Online Machine Translation: Origins, Developments, Current Use and Future Prospects’, Proceedings of the MT Summit XI, 10–14 September 2007. Copenhagen, pp. 199–206. Gobard, H. (1976) L’Aliénation linguistique. Paris: Flammarion. Giroux, D. (2003) Fascisme et magie en Amérique: lectures politiques contemporaines de Nietzsche, PhD thesis. Montreal: UQAM (unpublished). Heilbron, J. (2010) ‘Structure and Dynamics of the World System of Translation’, UNESCO, International Symposium on Translation and Cultural Mediation, February 2010, 22–23. Available online: https://ddd. uab.cat/pub/1611/1611_a2015n9/1611_a2015n9a4/Heilbron.pdf. [Accessed 13 June 2020]. Index Translationum. Available online: http://www.unesco.org/xtrans/ [Accessed 13 June 2020]. Jacquemond, R. (2014) ‘Translation Policies in the Arab world’, The Translator, 15(1), pp. 15–35. Les 80 premières langues du monde. (2017) CEFAN. Available online: www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/ Langues/2vital_expansion_tablo1.htm [Accessed 13 June 2020]. LITPROM (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Literatur aus Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika). Available online: http://www.litprom.de. Lost or Found in Translation. Translation’s Support Policies in the Arab World (2004). A study commissioned by the Next Page Foundation, Thalassa Consulting/Gregor Meiering. Mufwene, S. S. (2004) ‘Language Birth and Death’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33(1), pp. 201–222. Ni, X. (2017) ‘Translating the Socialist Nation. Exporting Chinese Literature under the New People’s Republic of China (1949–966)’, Forum, 15(1), pp. 27–49. Paker, S. and Yilmaz, M. (2004) ‘A Chronological Bibliography of Turkish Literature in English Translation: 1949–2004’, Translation Review, 68(1), pp. 15–18. Pospielovsky, D. (1988). A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice, and the Believer, vol. 2, Soviet Anti-Religious Campaigns and Persecutions. New York: St Martin’s Press. Pym, A. (1999). “Scandalous Statistics? A Note on the Percentages of Translations in English,” Source. The Newsletter of the Literary Division of the American Translators Association, 29, pp. 7–9. Available online: http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/research_methods/venuti_scandals.pdf Qvortrup, L. (2003) The Hypercomplex Society. New York: Peter Lang. Sapiro, G. (2009a) ‘L’Europe, centre du marché mondial de la traduction,’ in Sapiro, G. (ed.), L’Espace intellectuel en Europe. Paris: La Découverte, pp. 249–300. Sapiro, G. (2009b) Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale. Paris: Éditions du Nouveau Monde. Susam-Saraeva, S. (2006) Theories on the Move. Translation Role in the Travel of Literary Theories. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Tyulenev, S. (2012) Translation and the Westernization of Eighteenth Century Russia. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Uslu, M. (2012) ‘Representation of the Turkish Literature in English: Translations of Short Stories as a Case’, Journal of Translation Studies, 5(1), pp. 1–38. Venuti, L. (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge. Von Bergen, J. (2011) ‘Translating and Interpreting is a Growing, but Uneven Industry’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 May. Available online: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/business/20110508_Translating_and_interpreting_is_a_growing__but_uneven__industry.html?arc404=true [Accessed 24 August 2020]. Wintergreen Research, Inc. (2011) Language Translation: Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2011–2017. Available online: http://salisonline.org/market-research/language-translationsoftware-market-shares-and-forecasts-worlwide-2011-2017. Wintergreen Research, Inc. (2015) Global Machine Translation Market, 2015–2019. Available online: https://www.reportlinker.com/p01079085/Global-Machine-Translation-Market.html [Accessed 24 August 2020]. Zhong, W. (2003) ‘An Overview of Translation in China: Practice and Theory’, Translation Journal, 7(2). Available online: https://translationjournal.net/journal/24china.htm. [Accessed 13 June 2020].

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17 Translation and authorship in a globalized world Salah Basalamah

Introduction For as long as translation has been practiced in many parts of the world, the issue of who the author of the translation or even of the original text is has never been the object of great concern, except for genealogical purposes ( Pollock et al. 2015). Philologists and attributionists are interested in tracing back the individualities of authors, as enacted in their writings, and in establishing the authenticity of their authorship with the purview of contributing to writing the history of texts and their authors. In particular, attribution studies scholars ( Love 2002; Juola 2008) have reported that authorship attribution is an issue that dates back to Antiquity and that has developed beyond mere internal stylistic evidence to encompass the biographical and sociohistorical circumstances under which works were produced. However, the scope of the attribution of authorship as a field has extended to include the modern notion of property introduced in the eighteenth century, when plagiarism increasingly became an economic issue ( Rose 1993; Love 2002). Although translation authorship attribution had not been the object of much investigation until the Western Renaissance ( Foz 1998; Delisle and Woodsworth 2012), translators and their work attracted more interest with the advent of literary authors rights during the eighteenth century ( Venuti 1998, 2008). At the peak of colonization at the end of the nineteenth century, translation was even characterized as the ­ ‘international question par excellence’ according to Louis Renault (quoted in Basalamah 2009). In fact, mechanized reproduction of works, appropriative translations and piracy across borders became so pervasive that they prompted the beginning of the internationalization of copyright and hence triggered the birth of the ‘Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works’ ( WIPO 1986). The late nineteenth century was to be of great significance for the legal and doxic development of the notions of authorship and translation during the next century and beyond, as it represented the historical conjunction of the colonial era—with the extension of the spatial influence of the European powers over the rest of the globe. It also produced the construction of the figure of the artist as a prophet or a new secular god ( Bénichou 1977, 1996). This conjunction would solidify the notion which has been accepted since then that authors and authorship are of a higher status than translators and translation, based on the pretext that the 251

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former are essentially similar to the way the European colonizers saw themselves in comparison to all other people ( Basalamah 2007). Since that time, translation has been internationally recognized as secondary to authorship and administered by authors’ rights (civil law) and copyright (common law) (Goldstein 2001). From the middle of the twentieth century onwards, with the advent of independence from the colonial powers, translation (and reproduction for that matter) has even become the centre of a legal battle pitting the newly liberated nation- state members of the Berne Convention ( BC)—who had become members by default because of their colonizers’ previous membership— against the publishing lobbies of the industrialized colonial powers ( Ricketson 1987). As a form of compensation for the spoliation of their cultural development during the colonial era, newly independent countries claimed free rights (i.e. no licencing) on the translation and reproduction of books for educational purposes ( UNESCO 1995). But the final issue was fought back in favour of copyright holders in industrialized countries who made a few limited concessions in the 1971 Paris Convention, in an appendix for developing countries. That Appendix has never been implemented because of the heavy administrative load the implementation of the process would entail ( Basalamah 2000; Silva 2012). In the current era of globalization and as the spatial extension of humanity over the globe is paradoxically shrinking the planet and in which the sudden progress of the technologies of information are converging, reshaping cultures and identities (Morley and Robins 1995; Tomlinson 1999), the notion of authorship— a nd its presumed originality—is the locus of a global economic exploitation of immaterial goods and cultural imperialism through the legal instruments of intellectual property (IP). That legal regime administers both cultural/ cognitive contents and technological means of diffusion, including multinational translation publishing ( Wirtén 2004; Basalamah 2009). However, the fast-paced developments of information technologies ( IT) have also put into question the notions of authorship and originality and started to become even more contested than previously—not only under pressures from developing countries for access to content, but also from within industrialized countries, with a growing global consciousness of the ability and need of users to participate in the construction of the noosphere, or the ‘collective intelligence’ ( Vaidhyanathan 2001; Broussard 2007; Berry 2008; Tovey 2008). With this historical background in mind, this chapter aims first at delineating a concise outline of the philosophical, legal and sociopolitical issues pertaining to the relationship between authorship and translation; second, at summarizing current research in translation studies with reference to globalization and digitization; and third, at drawing broad outlines of future research, especially in taking stock of the expanding digital era, including the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growing contestation of power concentration and the reclaiming of more ethical public policies.

Understanding the tensions: originality in authorship and translation The perspective of translation studies is a privileged locus for the observation and study of the various possible relations between the status of the original and the translation, as well as the author and the translator. Whether from the point of view of philosophy, legal studies or social, political and cultural studies, the relationship between the poles of the binary can be quite indicative, on the one hand, of the advancement of the thought and ideologies that are fostered by their respective literatures and, on the other hand, of the economic and political interests that they cater to. The following subsections will start with the most abstract vantage point ( philosophy) to the most concrete (social, political and cultural dimensions) 252

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and will carry on through the legal (copyright law) which is disciplinarily situated at the intersection of both perspectives.

The philosophical dimension One of the most influential philosophical reflections translation studies has encountered over the double binary in question (i.e. original/translation and author/translator) is the one initiated by Walter Benjamin. In his seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923/1996), which prefaces his own translation of Baudelaire’s Petits Poëmes en Prose, Benjamin expounds his messianic conception of translation and develops a series of metaphors that represent the relationship between original and translation. Besides how the fruit is linked to its skin and the tangent to the circle, the most powerful of them is the filiation metaphor whereby translation is portrayed as the ‘afterlife’ or the ‘survival’ of the original. Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life. (Benjamin ­ 1996: ­254–255) ​­ Although translation in the eyes of Benjamin seems to transcend its traditional dependence on the original, it shows nonetheless that it can serve the latter by extending its life and, as a result, its geocultural borders. So much so that Jacques Derrida further advanced Benjamin’s reading by demonstrating the ‘ indebtedness’ of the original to translation in so far as the former ‘survives’ through the latter thus emphasizing the double-bind of the relationship, a reciprocal dependence (1985). For Derrida, contrary to its past state of completeness and perfection, the original now ‘calls for a complement’, its translation(s), and it is to the latter that falls the onus of returning its debts (1985: 188). The hierarchical relationship has been restabilized into that of interdependence and equality and of each one’s indebtedness towards the other. This stance should demonstrate, however, that despite Roland Barthes’ postmodernist claim about the ‘Death of the Author’ (1977), the questioning of the transcendence of the original and its author does not necessarily amount to the disappearance of the origin and the subject. The ‘ birth of the reader’ (and the translator by the same token) does not dispense with the survival of the author’s ‘signature’ ( Derrida 1986) and its legal and ethical functions as a necessary link that recalls any textual production back to its producer ( Burke 1995). In a vibrant revision of the ‘anti-authorial’ movement in modern literary criticism, Sean Burke (1998) revisits the texts and philosophical contexts of the main founders of poststructuralism ( Barthes, Foucault and Derrida) to demonstrate that their a nti-authorialism was misread by showing their inner contradictions. He does that, for example, by exposing that the death of the author can only be performed through his/her reinstatement, especially through the author’s body and his/her historicity. The virtual and textualized author cannot coexist with the claim of his/her concreteness and subjectivity. Beyond the polemical dimension of Burke’s radical criticism of a movement that extended its influence into feminist and postcolonial studies, it indicates the continuity and relevance of authorship not only for critical theory, but even more so for the law. The issue, however, becomes whether the pronouncement of the death of the author affects the persistence of the original’s hegemony over ‘derivative works’ such as translation, according to the language of copyright law. 253

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The legal dimension The inclusion of translation rights in multilateral discussions on authors’ rights in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has marked the growing international concern about the issue of piracy and works crossing state borders without retribution nor attribution to the stakeholders, namely the publishers and the authors. Just when Mallarmé (1980) was chanting the erasure of the poet in his poems, international literary figures such as Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman and Ivan Tourgeniev were advocating for the recognition of their rights at the annual conferences of the International Literary and Artistic Association (ALAI 1889). For these influential authors, the right to translation is not about the translator’s prerogatives, but those of the author to authorize or not authorize the translations of their works as well as to retain their rights in these translations. At that time, authors consider translators as pirates and near impersonators of the authors. This kind of representation of translation may have been the reason for the alternative paths that copyright (common law) and author’s rights (civil law) have followed. While Anglo-Saxon copyright is an eminently utilitarian economic right in that it considers any kind of intellectual or artistic production as a monopolized commodity (albeit at the same time meeting the needs of the public), by contrast, author’s rights in civil law is a personalist body of law that includes the moral dimension (i.e. the attribution of a work to its author is inalienable) and was conceived of as a guarantee of the French cultural exception’s brand (i.e. a political concept meant to treat culture not as a commodity). Although this difference between the two legal regimes may have seemed distinctive at face value, it was nonetheless reduced in the 1995 TRIPS agreement of the World Trade Organization ( WTO) with the exclusion of article 6( bis) of the Berne Convention addressing the civilist notion of ‘moral rights’, which considered the relationship between the author and his/her work as inalienable. This exclusion seems to support translation rights by disconnecting the personality of the author from their work and apparently relativizing this relationship that moral rights are reinforcing. It is worth noting, nevertheless, that the right to translate does not autonomize the translator to the point that they are liberated from the prevalence and control of the author. Before the translation, a licence needs to be obtained from the author. After the translation, translators only retain rights in their translation at the exclusion of the ‘underlying work’ that remains in the dominion of the author ( UNESCO 1976: art. II.3). With the advent of the new IT and a rampant global digitization of knowledge and culture, authors and artistic creators started to have new concerns. In some ways similar to the concerns that were expressed a century earlier when translation was viewed as an equivalent to reproduction ( Pouillet 1879), under the pressure of lobbying property-rights holders, governments have sided with the 1995 TRIPS Agreement as the internet became the vehicle for the growing production of translations and subtitles by non-professionals, amateurs and fansubbers outside the old-t rodden paths of copyright laws ( Pérez González and Susam- Saraeva 2012). While authors’ rights are used by publishers and copyright owners to campaign in favour of establishing barriers and legal measures to reinforce national and international laws ( WIPO 1996; DMCA 1998; ISD 2001), a whole movement of resistance against copyright laws has appeared to denounce the monopoly and commodification of culture and knowledge by media conglomerates and multinational publishers. Whether with the support of an activist agenda against inequalities, an unbounded world-wide web horizon of human interaction or an ecological culture of creation and innovation in the public domain, all these streams of thought are motivated by the promises of mutual cooperation 254

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for knowledge and culture creation thanks to the interconnected virtual world ( DiBona et al. 1999; Levy 1997; Vaidhyanathan 2001; Stallman 2002; Lessig 2004). Like any legally classified ‘derivative work’ in the digital age of a borderless world, translation represents a potential space of resistance allowing to negotiate the issue of its right to exist freed from the shackles of the original and aspiring to the same freedom of movement between nations and cultures as those advocated for material goods.

The sociopolitical dimension From a public policy-making perspective, it may be helpful to understand that the major obstacle pitting copyright laws of authorship against the basic function of translation lies essentially in the fact that both have opposite vocations (Sadek 2018). On the one hand, although the legal protection of authors’ rights to their works is meant to encourage creation and innovation, it is also conceived of as the recognition and attribution of a cultural artefact to a proprietor whose power over their property is not limited to the actual work but extends to 1 forms of derivatives (such as translation and adaptation). In order to ensure ­ ​­ all its non-critical exclusivity of ownership to the author (and/or publisher), copyright law puts limitations over the uses that may be extended from the original. On the other hand, translation works as an agent of diffusion and distribution that reaches beyond the cultural and linguistic borders of the original. Translation is by definition an outreach activity that can bridge remote cultures, help rebuild nations damaged or alienated by colonialism and introduce new aesthetic forms in arts and literatures, whereas copyright law raises legal and financial barriers between more industrialized and powerful knowledge economies and less developed countries that are in need of translated and/or adapted educational materials. The barriers facing developing and least developed countries can be explained by the fact that international copyright law requires them to apply for translation licences; even if the latter are ‘compulsory’ for countries qualifying for the concessions of the Berne Convention Appendix, they still have to pay for them and accept other temporal and administrative limitations ( Ricketson 1987; Basalamah 2000). This overarching divergence of purposes between translation and copyright indicates at the same time that the subservience of the former to the latter is socio-politically oriented towards the economic interests of the powerful media conglomerates and multinational publishing companies (Smith and Ramdarshan Bold 2018). But resistance to this state of affairs is not inexistent. On the contrary, it can be noted that translation as an interlinguistic activity is used by the activist translator network Babels2 with an egalitarian political agenda in the European and World Social Forums as a statement in the resistance against language inequality resulting from colonization ( Boéri 2008). Translation can also be used as a heuristic concept to address and articulate cultural, legal and political differences among grassroots movements around the world in order to face the same capitalist adversary (Santos 2014). This is a further indication that the politics of translation reveals its vocational bend towards a sociopolitical project committed to embracing the democratization of culture, knowledge and education. In this sense, translation positions itself, on a local and global scale, as a necessary complement to authorship by representing in some capacity the consciousness of the public interest against the exclusive one of the owners ( Basalamah 2009). As a matter of fact, this way of conceptualizing translation conditions it to symbolize a form of writing that, although appearing as a competing one to authorship, only highlights the paradoxically primary role of what has for a long time been held secondary. 255

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Translation and authorship in current translation studies If one browses database collections of translation studies research, it is remarkable to find that the treatment—let alone a questioning— of the status of authorship and the original does not seem to take a centre stage. A search sample on the 80,000 plus references in the Bibliography of interpreting and translation ( BITRA 2020) demonstrates the paucity of translation studies research on the topic, and an even greater paucity of theoretical discussions pertaining to the question of the translator and the translation’s position v is-à-v is the author and the original. The few references in translation studies dealing with the latter subject have, for the most part, drawn their inspiration and empirical studies from either comparative literature, postcolonial studies or philosophy. Under which translation studies key theme(s) the question of authorship has been so far researched? And how does it relate to globalization?

The issue of status A key issue widely tackled in translation studies and other related fields (such as comparative literature, postcolonial studies and philosophy) is the one pertaining to the status of the translator, and by extension, the translation. This issue is negotiated whether by raising the problems encountered by professionals (Gouadec 2007; Van Dam and Zethsen 2008, 2010; Ruokonen 2013; Cabanellas 2014), by discussing the imbalance of the power relations between translating and translated languages ( Venuti 1998, 2008, 2019; Casanova 2004) or by conceptually debating or fictionalizing the position of translators in light of the questioning of authorship and originality ( Ungaretti 1946; Paz 1992; Borges 1999; Waisman 2005; Venuti 2008). There are mainly three potential sources for the discourse on the representation of translation and translators. The first comes from an external perception according to which the social discourse obviously ignores what the activity of translation entails until one experiences it ( Robinson 2003). Not surprisingly, this second perception stems from translators themselves in relation to their own self-effacement as the best service provided to the original text (Sela-Sheffy and Shlesinger 2011). This self-image of the ‘ invisible translator’ for the sake of a more transparent translation ( Venuti 2008) feeds into their identity formation and status in society. The third potential source of the discourse on translator/translation status arises from a group of social agents who can be historically identified as authors (who launched the movement towards making laws to protect their works), publishers and lawmakers ( Basalamah 2009). Over the last three centuries, all these related actors have greatly contributed to the development of today’s legal discourse about authorship, within which translation ended up being recognized as a ‘derivative work’. Facing this socially grounded discourse on translation and authorship, literature, literary theory, as well as cultural, postcolonial and translation studies have produced a number of works that attempted to resist the apparent fatality of the translator/translation’s erasure. A first example can be found in Octavio Paz (1992), who defined translation in the widest sense, including the process of a child learning to speak ( Paz 1992: 152)— comparable in this to Steiner’s representation of the cognitive process of encoding- decoding where translation, ‘properly understood, is a special case of the arc of communication’ (Steiner 1975: 47). Following this vein of enlarging the meaning of translation, Paz recounts a broad picture of human development since Babel and portrays humanity’s textual production as ‘a growing heap of texts, each slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet, at the same time, it is the translation of another 256

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text’ ( Paz 1992: 154). Here translation appears as a producer of difference while ensuring at the same time a community of origin. Such a radical vision of translation implies a no-less radical notion of the original: No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: first, of the non-verbal world and then, because every sign and phrase is a translation of another sign and phrase. But this rationale may be inverted without losing validity: all texts are original because each translation is distinct. (Paz 1992: 154) If all texts are translations of each other or all are originals due to being distinct, then it follows according to this conception that authorship and translatorship would be equalized, in opposition to the common view that subsumes the status of the latter to the authority of the former. One of the most prominent figures of the dethronement of authorship to the benefit of translation remains Jorge Luis Borges. Since the early 2000s, several translation studies scholars have picked up on Borges’ highly unique take on literary translation ( Kristal 2002; Fraser 2004; Waisman 2005; Servini 2007). Not only does Borges believe that a ‘good translator… might choose to treat the original as a good writer treats the draft of a work in progress’ (Servini 2007: 106), he actually implemented his views as exemplified by his relationship and collaboration with his translator Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, whose translations led Borges to make many changes to his poems and short stories (Fraser 2004: 56–59). Moreover, some of his works of fiction have symbolized this postmodern stance towards authorship and translation. The case of ‘Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote’ ( Borges 1999: 88–95), one of the most quoted in translation studies, who allegedly rewrote better than Cervantes parts of his Don Quixote, albeit literally the exact same text, shows that the historical position of Ménard in the twentieth century in comparison to that of the original author in the seventeenth century made it possible to take advantage of all the cultural accumulations separating Cervantes’ version from Ménard’s: [T]he real lesson of Pierre Menard is radically a nti-historical: no author, no text can ever lay claim to originality. The very notion that texts are anomalous events dependent on time, place, circumstance, the ingenious subject, is a massive delusion. Texts, all texts, are nothing more than the exercise of a t rans-historical, self- sustaining and selfrepeating human intelligence. (Fraser 2004: 64) As a result, translation, like the rewriting performed by Ménard, becomes by definition an inscription of difference that could amount to full-fledged originality and, through its compounded cognitive, geographical and historical displacements, results in a substantial gain despite its apparent sameness to the original. Again, the example of Borges demonstrates that the status of translator/translation could be conceived of away from the beaten paths of common knowledge and—paradoxically—brings authorship to the same level as translationship. Finally, the notion of the status of translator/translation in contrast with authorship can also be understood from a postcolonial perspective. Among the multiple works by Borges that elaborate his literary theorization of translation, reading and writing, A Universal History of Inequity (1935/1999) is worth mentioning as a vivid example of the reclaim by the Empire to write back (Ashcroft et al. 2002). In these short stories, Borges uses US pre-texts by Mark 257

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Twain to recontextualize them into the Argentinian culture. This cultural appropriation of Anglo- Saxon sources and their displacement to a Latin-American context is an attempt to reverse the power relations not only between the centre and the periphery but also between the contested original pre-texts and their rewritings or deliberate mistranslations. In his comment on the short stories, Waisman observes that Borges’ ‘transformations that create the displacement toward the margins are a recoding akin to translation’ (2005: 91).Translating British and US fictions into indigenized Latin-A merican ones is exactly the irreverence Borges intends towards the universalized models he is distorting. So much so that even the characters are transformed: …the other villains of Historia universal de la infamia are not the only thieving imposters who invert traditional roles and expectations in these texts. It is Borges himself, through the masks of his narrators, who steals and distorts, who misreads and mistranslates, to invert previously accepted North- South and center-periphery mappings. (Waisman ­ 2005: ­91–92) ​­ This example illustrates that the peripheral position of translation can play a symbolic role in the resistance against the double hegemony of the North/centre and against authorship as more commonly recognized. In an increasingly globalized world, the rewriting/ mistranslation of some symbols of hegemonic cultures acts as an attempt to undermine power imbalances and at the same time to develop peripheral literature.

The issue of ethics Lawrence Venuti’s The Scandals of Translation (1998) has addressed a similar concern as Borges, but instead of speaking from the more creative perspective of the author—because it is ethically more accepted when authors manipulate their own works or use the masks of their respective fictional narrators—Venuti performed his postcolonial undertaking from the standpoint of the translator. The difference, however, is that the practical experiments and the advocacy fostered by Venuti in favour of ‘an ethics of difference’ (1998: 82) for the purpose of questioning Anglo-A merican global cultural hegemony runs against the unequal trends of the dominant social discourse about translation. This resisting bent by Venuti is however balanced with a discourse that, while claiming more visibility for the translator, does not question radically enough the position of the author. Nevertheless, Venuti’s Scandals did just as much to stir the debate about the current asymmetries between translation and authorship, explain the intricacies of language and publishing dominations at the global level and suggest a translation- ethics-based political agenda for the resistance against cultural hegemonies. For example, in his chapter ‘Formation of cultural identities’, Venuti shows how the Japanese literature translated into English in the 1950–1960s was very selective, ethnocentric and homogenizing with the intent to shape a literary canon in the shadow of the Second World War. The result was that the representation of Japan and its culture was the reflection of an ideological ‘ domestic cultural support for American diplomatic relations with Japan’ ( Venuti 1998: 73). The next generation of translators of Americanized Japanese authors, all born after the war, produced a very different representation of Japan and led to the formation of a radical departure from the previous canon whereby Japan’s afterwar prosperity could be explained by the influence of American culture. This shows the substantial power of translation in cultural representation and in reflecting the state of a translating culture/nation in the unfolding of its own historical 258

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evolution. But it also demonstrates how ethnocentric cultural identity formation can be the product of the reshaping of original works. However, Venuti’s point is— especially from a dominant vantage point—that translation has the power to do the reverse of its ethnocentric orientation by adopting an ‘ethics of difference that can change the domestic culture’ ( Venuti 1998: 82) and represent the diversity of Japanese culture, not only out of concern for fidelity, but more so as to account for the heterogeneity of the receiving constituency. This ethical consciousness is further developed in the last chapter: ‘Globalization’. There, not only does Venuti display the unbalance of translation fluxes between countries, languages and regions of the world; he also points to an ‘ethics of location’ ( Venuti 1998: 186 sq.) that sheds a new light on domesticating practices of translation, which appear less questionable for the accrual of cultural, educational and economic capital. He considers that subordinate or ‘minority situations redefine what constitutes the “domestic” and the “ foreign”’ ( Venuti 1998: 187). In this kind of locales, the ethics of difference (foreignizing) in translation transforms into an ethics of location (domesticating) in the sense that the translated original is not anymore meant to contribute to the reshaping of the host culture but rather to foster the development and seeding of a hybridized new literary or cultural tradition. This differential ethics ( both of difference and location) can be grounded in the consciousness of the existing power differentials that divide the mapping of the global economic, linguistic and cultural subjugations. In the ethics of difference, translation takes up the function of decentring the hegemonic languages and cultures from within, whereas in the ethics of location it plays the role of a ‘critical resourcefulness attuned to the linguistic and cultural differences that comprise the local scene’ of the postcolony (1998: 189).

Future perspectives If, for the founders of poststructuralism, the prophetic role of romantic authors ( Bénichou 1996) has evolved towards ‘the redistribution of authorial subjectivity within a textual mise en scène which it does not command entirely’ ( Burke 1998: 184), their role was even more transformed by the hypertext and the explosion of digital culture in the era of the internet (Skains ­ 2019). At this juncture of time with the far-reaching affordances of the technologies of communication, the nineteenth to twentieth centuries’ model of publishing, where the romantic solitary figure of authorship faces the crowd of readership (Laquintano 2016), has yielded to a new one that enables almost every individual to become an author and level the old power structure in favour of a more democratic and horizontal configuration— so much so that twenty-first-century society, supported by online digital and social media, transitioned from ‘a reading-literate culture…into a writing-dominant ­ ​­ culture’ (Skains ­ 2019: 2). In a user-generated-content ­ ­​­­ ​­ context, the representation of the author’s mode of communication has radically changed by discarding traditional intermediaries in favour of more direct methods of appealing to audiences, and even allowing for interactions and content exchanges. Skains called this new breed of author the demotic author: one who is ‘of the people,’ participating in a community of writers and readers, often in genres considered ‘popular,’ common or even denounced as derivative or of a lesser worth…The demotic author eschews the topdown flow…in favor of publishing platforms that permit and encourage feedback and conversation…They proliferate and thrive in a w riting-literate culture. (Skains ­ 2019: ­2–3) ​­ 259

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Paralleling Hardt and Negri’s political notion of ‘multitude’ (2004), the demotic author symbolizes the reclaiming of cultural production power by the people and furthers the blurring of the borders between authorship and ‘derivative works’ such as translation. In such a context, instead of the peripheral form in which it has commonly been depicted, translation becomes the norm and reference where ‘mass authorship’ (Laquintano 2016: 6) ‘is afforded by technologies that evolve the book from a ­read-only ​­ medium to a ­read-write ​­ medium, converting a static object into a conceptual foundation for a community to converse, share, and respond creatively to its ideas, characters, and environs’ (Skains 2019: 3). In fact, this new form of authorship seems to mirror the same basic activities found in translation: reading and writing. This commonality between translation and technologies represents no less than the opening framework of Cronin’s Translation in the Digital Age (2013), where he states that the ‘radical changes that have been wrought in all areas of life as a result of the advent of information technology are to be placed under the sign of convertibility or translation’ (Cronin 2013: 3). This means that the pervasiveness of the new technologies is cutting across not only all domains of life but also all the material and symbolic borders encompassing the entire world, as well as all forms of conversion and translation: It is precisely the metamorphic or transformative effects of the convertible which are at the heart of the digital revolution that makes translation the most appropriate standpoint from which to view critically what happens to languages, societies, and cultures under a regime of advanced convertibility, and to understand what happens when that convertibility breaks down or reaches its limits. (Cronin 2013: 3) Using the historical perspective of the cultural evolution of Western societies to explain the more recent advances in the production and distribution of material culture, Cronin further claims that ‘trade, technology and translation are inseparable in their development, and that any balanced history of these cultures must take into account the close interaction between all three’ (ibid.). This convergence paradigm, which Cronin characterizes as no less than being epitomized by the all- encompassing title of ‘The translation age’ (2013: 1), underscores the leading role translation is expected to play as a multidimensional practice and concept beyond the verbal and even the semiotic ( Basalamah 2018). Although dissidence and resistance against existing copyright laws in the present digital environment have moved towards more creative ways of encouraging content production and attribution (e.g. Creative Commons), it is worth noting that the very epistemological infrastructure that organizes our digital all-convertible world is still incompatible with that of the legal economic- driven frame of copyright. However, some progress may be achieved following the example of Ost and van de Kerchove (2002), who situate the current legal framework in a zone of transitional crisis that makes possible the dialectical coexistence of structures of hierarchy, monism and transcendence (which rely on a pyramid model), with structures that are entangled, immanent, fragmented and hybrid (stemming from a network model). This change in paradigm is dictated not only by the realization of the existence of a multitude of normative sources besides the State, or by the presence of alternative, entangled and complex structures of order or conflict resolution that have become social realities, but also by the transformation of knowledge from a positivist and mechanistic rationality to a ‘communicational and intersubjective rationality’ (Ost and van de Kerchove 2002: 18). In the same vein, the contrast between the author (as producer of transcendent meaning and a quasi-absolute focal point in copyright law) and the translator (the symbol of a new 260

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conception of creative logic that is secondary, immanent and recursive, all at once) represents the confrontation taking place, at the same time, on the epistemological level. That same contrast is even more acute in the context of the cultural practices of user-generated content. In a world ruled by the internet, contemporary thinking is paying increasing attention to themes such as decentralization, networks, immanence, recursion, secondarity (or derivation), recycling and plurality ( Basalamah and Sadek 2014). Thus, at the latest t wenty-firstcentury phase of globalization ( Pieterse 2012), a wider understanding of translation would enable an economy of connections, displacements and transformations that would match the challenges of the all- digital age that is unfolding in the present moment.

Conclusion In this framework of ‘micro-modernity’ (Cronin 2012), highly digital and hyper-heterogeneous globalization, the discourse on a plurality of coexisting epistemologies concurs not only with the struggles befalling between disciplinary cultures but also with those pitting the North against the South. Throughout his works, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018) provides a critical view of the effects of globalization on the recognition of ‘the diverse contexts and sites of knowing and the diversity of the knowledges they give rise to’ (Santos 2018: 53). According to Santos, the Western ‘paradigm of authorial individualism privileged by the epistemologies of the North’ (ibid.) is not compatible with those of the South, where he identified at least two categories of alternative authorship: the authorship of ‘collective knowledges’, and that of ‘superauthors’ (Santos 2018: 54). The first category refers to the community’s overall bulk of accumulated knowledge conveyed through the local oral culture of transmission; the second, oral as well, is conveyed through ‘those whose knowledge carry special authority in a given community’ (ibid.: 55). Interestingly, Santos considers that these forms of authorship— especially the latter— a mount to an actual translational process. Inspired by the African philosopher Oruka who distinguished between the figures of the ‘ folk sage’ and the ‘philosopher sage’ (1990), Santos assimilates these sages to be ‘creative translators of their own culture’ (Santos 2018: 55). This apparently metaphoric use of the translation concept is not a haphazard choice, as Santos has used it throughout several of his previous works, especially in his magnum opus The Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (2014), in which he dedicated a full chapter to the notion of ‘cultural translation’ as a conceptual tool to articulate different knowledges and cultural practices among grassroots activist movements such as those gathering at the World Social Forum ( WSF). Whether in the classic form of publishing, or in audio-v isual or online forms, at a microor macro-level or even conceived from an epistemological perspective, this account of translation and authorship in the context of globalization shows not only that authorship is a notion that has encountered consequential advances in the last few decades but also that translation has been no less transformed. In fact, it shows that the ‘enlargement of translation’ ( Tymoczko 2007) is as much spatial, through its increasing weight over the global dynamics of the intersections of culture, knowledge and education, as it is conceptual through its primary role in the shaping of epistemic pluralism.

Further reading Fochi, A. (2012) ­ ‘Deconstructing ­ Authorship-in-Translation: ­ ­​­­ ​­ “With-ness” ­­ ​­ and “Polilogue” ­ in Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Writings on Translation’, inTRAlinea, 14. Available online: http://www.intralinea.org/ archive/article/deconstructing_authorship_in_translation [Accessed 15 May 2020]. 261

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This article provides an example where the poet-t ranslator Ungaretti gives visibility to his translation by acknowledging multiple appropriations of a single author—in this case Shakespeare. Jansen, H. (2019) ‘I’m a Translator and I’m Proud: How Literary Translators View Authors and Author­ ​­ ­ ship’, Perspectives, 27(5), pp. 675–688, doi: 10.1080/0907676X.2018.1530268. Jansen’s article provides a case study performed among Scandinavian professional translators to shed a different light on the scholarly calls for translational emancipation and demonstrates that respondents to the study do not perceive the translated text as theirs. Woods, M. (ed.) (2016) Authorizing Translation. London: Routledge. This edited volume gathers papers by translation and comparative literary studies scholars who reflect about the translator’s authority on their literary translations from a hermeneutic standpoint. From the perspective of their various case studies and experiences as translators, they reflect on the relationship between literary criticism and t ranslation-a s- criticism whereby the translator is provided with an ­ ‘exegetical authority’.

Notes

References ALAI. (1889) Association littéraire et artistique internationale: Son histoire, ses travaux 1878–1889. Paris: Bibliothèque Chacornac. Ashcroft, B., Griffith, G. and Tiffin, H. (2002) The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Barthes, R. (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. S. Heath. London: Fontana, pp. 142–148. Basalamah, S. (2000) ‘Compulsory Licensing for Translation: An Instrument for Development’, IDEA The Journal of Law and Technology, 40(4), pp. 503–547. Basalamah, S. (2007) ‘Translation Rights and the Philosophy of Translation: Remembering the Debts of the Original’, in St Pierre, P. and Profulla C. K. (eds.), In Translation – Reflections, Refractions, Transformation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 117–132. Basalamah, S. (2009) Le droit de traduire: une politique culturelle pour la mondialisation. Ottawa-Arras: The University of Ottawa Press & Artois Presses Université. Basalamah, S. (2018) ‘Toward a Philosophy of Translation’, in Rawling, P. and Wilson, P. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy. London: Routledge, pp. 478–491. Basalamah, S. and Sadek, G. (2014) ‘Copyright and Translation: Crossing Epistemologies’, The Translator, 20(3), pp. 396–410, doi: 10.1080/13556509.2014.931020 Bénichou, P. (1977) Le temps des prophètes. Doctrines de l’âge romantique. Paris: Gallimard. Bénichou, P. (1996) Le sacre de l’écrivain (1750–1830). Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel laïc dans la France moderne, 4th ed. Paris: José Corti.Benjamin, W. (1923/1996) ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Bullock, M. and Jennings, M. W. (eds.), Selected Writings, Volume 1, trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken, pp. 253–263. Berry, D. (2008) Copy, Rip, Burn. The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source. London: Pluto Press. BITRA. (2020) Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation. Available online: https://aplicacionesua.cpd. ua.es/tra_int/usu/ buscar.asp [Accessed 15 May 2020]. Boéri, J. (2008) ‘A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy’, The Translator, 14(1), pp. 21–50. Borges, J. L. (1999) Collected Fictions, trans. A. Hurley. London: Penguin Press. Broussard, S. L. (2007) ‘The Copyleft Movement: Creative Commons Licensing’, Communication Research Trends, 26(3). Available online: http://cscc.scu.edu/trends/v26/v26_n3.pdf [Accessed 15 May 2020]. Burke, S. (1995) Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 262

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Burke, S. (1998) The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cabanellas, G. (2014) The Legal Environment of Translation. London: Routledge. Casanova, P. (2004) The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cronin, M. (2012) The Expanding World. Towards a Politics of Microspection. Alesford, UK: Zero Books. Cronin, M. (2013) Translation in the Digital Age. London: Routledge. Delisle, J. and Woodsworth, J. (eds). (2012) Translation through History. Revised ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Derrida, J. (1985) ‘Des tours de Babel’, in Difference and Translation, ed. and trans. J. F. Graham. Ithaca: State University of New York Press, pp. 219–230. Derrida, J. (1986) The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, trans. P. Kamuf and A. Ronell. New York: Schocken Books. DiBona, C., Ockman, S. and Stone, M. (eds.). (1999) Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O’Reilly Online Catalog. Available online: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/ ­ ­ ­ ­ book/ [Accessed 15 May 2020]. DMCA. (1998) ­ The Digital Millennium Copyright Act ( US Copyright Office). Available online: https:// www.copyright.gov/ legislation/dmca.pdf [Accessed 15 May 2020]. Foz, C. (1998) Le Traducteur, l’Église et le Roi. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Fraser, R. (2004) ‘Past Lives of Knives: On Borges, Translation and Sticking Old Texts’, TTR: traduction, terminologie, traduction, 17(1), ­ pp. 55–80. ­ ­ ​­ Goldstein, P. (2001). International Copyright: Principles, Law, Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gouadec, D. (2007) Translation as a Profession. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin Press. Hemmungs Wirtén, E. (2004) No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. ­ ISD. (2001) Information Society Directive on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society. ( EU Parliament and the Council of the EU.) Available online: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32001L0029:EN:HTML ­­ ​­ ­ ­ [Accessed 15 May 2020]. Juola, P. (2008) Authorship Attribution. Hanover, MA: Now Publishers. Kristal, E. (2002) Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Laquintano, T. (2016) Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Lessig, L. (2004) Free Culture. How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. London: The Penguin Press. Lévy, P. (1997) Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Transl. by R. Bononno. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. Love, H. (2002) Attributing Authorship. An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Mallarmé, S. (1980) ‘Crisis in Verse’, in Symbolism. An Anthology, trans. and ed. T. G. West. London: Methuen, pp. 1–12. ­ ­ ​­ Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995) Spaces of Identity Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge. Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2012) ‘Periodizing Globalization/Histories of Globalization’, New Global Studies, doi: 10.1515/1940–0004.1174 ­ pp. 1–25. ­ ­ ​­ ­­ ​­ 6(2), Oruka, O. (ed.) (1990) Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Ost, F. and van de Kerchove, M. (2002) De la pyramide au réseau? Pour une théorie dialectique du droit. Brussels: Publications des Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis. Paz, O. (1992) ‘Translation: Literature and Letters’, in Biguenet, J. and Schulte, R. (eds.), Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, trans. I. del Corral. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press , pp. 152–162. Pérez González, L. and Susam- Saraeva, Ş. (2012) ‘Non-Professionals Translating and Interpreting’, ­ ­­ ​­ The Translator, 18(2): ­ ­149–165. ​­ Pollock, S., Elman, B. A. and Chang, K. K. (eds.) (2015) World Philology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 263

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Pouillet, E. (1879) Traité théorique et pratique de la propriété littéraire et artistique et du droit de représentation. Paris: Imprimerie et librairie générale de jurisprudence. Ricketson, S. (1987) The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works: 1886–1986. London: Queen Mary College/ University of London Press. Robinson, D. (2003) Becoming a Translator. An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation. London: Routledge. Rose, M. (1993) Authors and Owners. The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ruokonen, M. (2013) ‘Studying Translator Status: Three Points of View’, in Eronen, M. and RodiRisberg, M. (eds.), Haasteena näkökulma, Perspektivet som utmaning, Point of view as challenge, Per­ ­ ­ ​­ ​­ spektivität als Herausforderung. VAKKI-symposiumi XXXIII ­7–8.2.2013. Vaasa, Finland: VAKKI ­ ­ ​­ Publications, pp. 327–338. Sadek, G. (2018) Translation: Rights and Agency - A Public Policy Perspective for Knowledge, Technology and Globalization. PhD Thesis, University of Ottawa. Available online: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/ 10393/37362?mode=full [Accessed 15 May 2020]. Santos, B. De Sousa. (2014) Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide. London: Routledge. Santos, B. De Sousa. (2018) The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sela- Sheffy, R. and Shlesinger, M. (eds.) (2011) Identity and Status in the Translational Professions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Servini, ­ T. (­ 2007) ­ ​­ ‘Writing and Translation. Perspectives from Latin America’, Translation Today, 4(1&2), pp. 101–112. Silva, A. C. (2012) ‘Beyond the Unrealistic Solution for Development Provided by the Appendix of the Berne Convention on Copyright’, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property Research Paper Series, No. 2012– 08, American University Washington College of Law, Washington, DC. Available online: https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/research/30/ [Accessed 15 May 2020]. Skains, R. L. (2019) Digital Authorship. Publishing in the Attention Economy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Smith, K. J. and Ramdarshan Bold, M. (2018) The Publishing Business. A Guide to Starting Out and Getting on. London: Bloomsbury. Stallman, ­ R. M.​­ (2002) Free Software, Free Society. Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, MA: GNU Press-Free Software Foundation. Steiner, G. (1975) After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Tovey, M. (ed.) (2008) Collective Intelligence. Creating a Prosperous World at Peace. Oakton, VA: Earth Intelligence Network. Tymoczko, M. ­ (2007) Enlarging Translation. Empowering Translators. London: Routledge. UNESCO. (1995) The Cultural Dimension of Development: Towards a Practical Approach. Paris: UNESCO. Ungaretti, G. (1946) Vita d’un uomo. 40 sonetti di Shakespeare. Milano: Mondadori. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2001) Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press. Van Dam, H. and Zethsen, ­ ­ K. ­ K. ​­ (2008) ‘Translator Status. A Study of Danish Company Translators’, The Translator, 14(1), pp. 71–96. ­ ­ Status ­ ​­ Helpers and Opponents ­ Van Dam, H. and Zethsen, K. K. (2010) ‘Translator in the Ongoing Battle of an Emerging Profession’, Target, 22(2), pp. 194–211. Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation. For an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge. Venuti, L. (2008) The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Venuti, L. (2019) Contra Instrumentalism. A Translation Polemic. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Waisman, S. (2005) Borges and Translation. The Irreverence of the Periphery. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. ­ ­ ­ for ­ the­ Protection of Literary and Artistic Works’. Available online: WIPO. (1986) ‘Berne Convention ­ https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/ ­ ­ WIPO ­ WIPO. (1996) Copyright Treaty. Geneva: WIPO. Available online: https://www.wipo.int/ treaties/en/ip/wct/

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18 Literature and translation Global confluences and meaningful asymmetries1 M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera ­ ​­

Introduction: world literature and translation In his The Routledge Concise History of World Literature, Theo D’haen argues that the awareness of a new ‘global’ world which emerged in the United States after 9/11 gave rise to the need to ‘ better understand the world beyond the nation’s borders and that nation’s interconnectedness to the world’ ( D’haen 2012: 25) and he concludes that in this new context of shock, in which the country realized that other cultures could not be ignored, much greater attention was paid to translation. The suggestion that both the emergence of a renewed interest in gaining access to the world’s cultures and the development of new approach to American literature and culture, beyond its immediate local context, increased the sensitivity towards translation intriguingly hints at ways in which the concept of ‘world literature’ itself must be carefully reconsidered through the lens of translation studies. Situated between different linguistic and cultural contexts, the phenomena associated with ‘world literature’ are part of complex processes in which boundaries are transgressed and contingencies propitiate unsuspected connections. Paradoxically, though, despite the celebrated internationalism which welcomed the emergence of ‘world literature’, the truth is that the very structure of academic disciplines, the compartmentalization of university departments of national literatures and their unequal power relations have not fostered the study of the literature/s of the world and/in translation outside of local specializations. As J. Hillis Miller writes in his ‘Globalization and Literature’: The narrowness and parochialism of segregated national literature study is just what the redevelopment of World Literature was trying to escape […] The new discipline of World Literature, I conclude, problematizes itself, or ought to problematize itself, through rigorous investigation of the presuppositions that made the development of World Literature as an academic discipline possible and desirable in the first place. ( Hillis Miller 2011: 255) This is why, as Hillis Miller argues, in the course of developing ‘the new World Literature’, important challenges like ‘the challenge of translation’ (Hillis Miller 2011: 254) must be faced. Whereas discussions of world literature have traditionally elaborated a genealogy of 265

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the concept which leads back to Goethe’s Weltliteratur, in general, interpretations ‘ have mostly tended to vacillate between the aesthetic and the archival, between an exclusive canon of what is deemed aesthetically more valuable in, and as comprehensive a coverage as possible of, “all” literature’ ( D’haen 2012: 9) and have, thus, neglected Goethe’s own assumptions concerning the circulation of ideas, themes and forms across the territories and peoples of Europe and beyond ( D’haen et al. 2013: 9–15). And yet, as John Pizer explains in his contribution to The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Goethe’s Weltliteratur paradigm anticipates many of the concerns in contemporary debates about transnational and translational issues in world literature: The centrality of translation, international marketing networks, border-crossing interchange among authors and critics both influencing discrete national literatures and helping to give rise to a body of works transnational in purport, style, and even language: all of these constituent factors in today’s discussions are anticipated by Goethe’s pronouncements. (Pizer 2012: 10) Certainly, contemporary debates over the meaning of world literature in the context of globalization have focused on questions of difference, mobility and multilingualism which clearly underlie the concept of translation. Thus, in his ‘World Literature and Globalization’, also in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Eric Hayot contends that ‘though we may not want to think of world literature and globalization in any simple way, we may not be able to conceive of world literature without globalization’ ( Hayot 2012: 224). For Hayot, world literature and globalization go hand in hand since they are both part of a larger cultural awareness of phenomena associated with circulation and exchange which are intrinsically contemporary and, we could argue, deeply ‘translational’: The attention they draw to these forms of circulation and exchange allows us to break out of our national, monolingual, or even purely inter-national models for the study of everyday life and of the history of literature—producing a new emphasis on local-g lobal interactions, contact zones, regional formations, and multilingual literatures, among other things. ( Hayot 2012: 224) Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch and Franco Moretti, for a long time the most recurrent points of reference in discussions of world literature, together with other scholars such as Emily Apter (2013), Christopher Prendergast and Gayatri Spivak (2003), have played a central role in the consolidation and reconfiguration of the discipline as an institutional field in an age of globalization. Among them, Casanova and Damrosch stand out for their vital engagement with translation. In What Is World Literature? Damrosch identifies his object of study as follows, ‘world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading’ ( Damrosch 2003: 5) and appropriately argues that ‘A work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out in a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin’ ( Damrosch 2003: 6). For Damrosch, who observes that ‘a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture’ ( Damrosch 2003: 4, emphasis in the original), world literature is always constructed in a specific cultural space and, thus, is necessarily dependent 266

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on a perspective from somewhere: ‘global patterns of the circulation of world literature take shape in their local manifestations’ ( Damrosch 2003: 27). Damrosch, who underlines the risks of a monolithic understanding of world literature, stresses the relevance of translation through a discussion of the transhistorical and transcultural manoeuvres at work in the circulation of works as they move from national to global contexts across different borders, ‘not only geographical and temporal but social as well, including the boundaries of gender’ ( Damrosch 2003: 170). Through an exploration of case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs, from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction and from canonical modernists like Kaf ka to the Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú, Damrosch discusses the ways in which translations become afterlives of a published text, with successive versions, retranslations, providing the possibility for fresh approaches to the original. Unsurprisingly, in the context of his sensitivity to translation and his awareness of cultural mobility the critic concludes that ‘the study of world literature should embrace translation far more actively than it has usually done to date’ ( Damrosch 2003: 289). If what characterizes world literature for Casanova is ‘the opposition between the great national spaces, which are also the oldest - and, accordingly, the best endowed - and those literary spaces that have more recently appeared and that are poor by comparison’ (Casanova 2004: 83), translation, the critic reminds us, ‘rather than a mere exchange of one language for another or a purely horizontal transfer that provides a useful measure of the volume of publishing transactions in the world’ (Casanova 2004: 133) clearly functions as a form of ‘consecration in the literary world’ (Casanova 2004: 133). Her book The World Republic of Letters, consecrated internationally precisely through a Harvard University Press translation and critically acclaimed as an influential study when it was first published, has more recently been questioned and read as an ‘unsatisfactory account of world literature in general’ ( Damrosch 2003: 27) where the terms ‘nation’ and ‘ literature’ function ‘as a kind of a priori’ ( Prendergast 2004: 14) and in which ‘a single, unchanging metropolitan centre [Paris] dominates a globalized field’( Dimock 2017: 37). The truth is that Casanova provides an inescapably Eurocentric ‘world republic of letters’ based on relations of rivalry and competition which also presumes that literature is merely an institutional artefact and nations battle to control the rhythms of literary time. Despite her appropriate reflections on the relevance of translation for world literature—‘the translator, having become the indispensable intermediary for crossing the borders of the literary world, is an essential figure in the history of writing. The great translators of the central literary countries are the true architects of the universal’ (Casanova 2004: 142)— as will be discussed in the next sections, Casanova’s paradigm edits out the many complexities attached to the circulation of literary texts in transnational contexts. In particular, her centreperiphery model misses inter-peripheral connections and inter-d iscursive readings and, thus, cannot explain the ways in which specific literary texts travel through different time and space and are adapted differently across different cultures and geopolitical scenarios. Lawrence Venuti, one of the most lucid commentators on the intersections between translation and perspectives on world literature, has appropriately referred to the way in which translation patterns may become complicated as intermediary practices defy straightforward notions of translation as mere importation or transference of texts from one language and culture to another. In ‘Globalization’, the concluding chapter of his book The Scandals of Translation, Venuti refers to translation as ‘uniquely revealing of the asymmetries that have structured international affairs for centuries’ ( Venuti 1998b: 158) as he explains that translation can produce a range of diverse and contradictory effects. If in the so called developing countries ‘translation fashions images of their hegemonic others and themselves that can variously solicit submission, collaboration or resistance’ ( Venuti 1998b: 159), in the case of the 267

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dominant countries in the global economy, translation can either activate narcissism or selfcriticism, ‘confirming or interrogating dominant domestic values, reinforcing or revising the ethnic stereotypes, literary canons, trade patterns, and foreign policies’ ( Venuti 1998b: 159). In his own recent contribution to The Routledge Companion to World Literature, Venuti questions the assumption of world literature as a special kind of textuality that combines foreign and local materials in the way in which Moretti, who claims that the study of world literature is ‘a study of the struggle for symbolic hegemony across the world’, argues that ‘after 1750 the novel arises just about everywhere as a compromise between West European patterns and local reality’ (Moretti 2004: 158). As Venuti contends, Moretti’s approach marginalizes translation; if literary texts are themselves heterogeneous cultural artefacts, translation increases this heterogeneity and, thus, the variations in translation may be determined not simply by the imprint of ‘ local’ languages and cultures but rather ‘ by a reading of the source text that incorporates knowledge of the source culture as well’ ( Venuti 2012: 182). In what follows, I want first to place translation at the centre of the approaches to the study of the modes of circulation and reading of (world) literature. Drawing on Venuti’s concern with translation as an intermediary practice, I argue that, since literary translators become agents who often activate complex discourses of historical and political affiliation, they necessarily produce different versions and interpretations through which ‘universal’ literary texts and authors exist in a fluid space of global connectedness where confluences arise and yet, simultaneously, meaningful asymmetries are revealed. It is, thus, how views which remain ignored in one particular historical or geographical context may encounter a more hospitable reception as they journey across time and space through literary translation. Likewise, ideas imagined to be representative of one particular community may in fact be identified as shared when transposed and reshaped in translation across the fluid space of world literature, redefined through the semantics and politics of diverse interpretive communities. By focusing on the translation and circulation of James Joyce, one of the most famous writers of world literature, I will explore this fluid space of fruitful negotiation in relation to two specific and very different contexts of reception. As will be discussed, clearly, the same writer, Joyce, experiences multiple and diverse afterlives as he and his works engage in diverse transhistorical and transcultural dialogues in the process of moving across the different geographical and linguistic borders of the ( literary) world.

Beyond the centre/periphery dichotomy In the Preface to The World Republic of Letters Casanova emphasizes the relevance of translation as ‘one of the principal means by which texts circulate in the literary world’ (Casanova 2004: xiii) and she later reminds us that it was the writer and translator Valery Larbaud (whose 1921 lecture on Ulysses prompted Joyce’s interest in a French translation) the first to have called ‘ for a global approach to literary criticism’ (Casanova 2004: 5). Larbaud was indeed crucial in propagating the international fame of Ulysses, as one of the most influential supporters in a heterogeneous group of early admirers which included the American bookseller Sylvia Beach responsible for the publication of Ulysses on 2 February 1922. Thanks also to Larbaud’s enthusiastic involvement, the complete French translation saw the light seven years later, in February 1929, as a ‘traduction integrale par Auguste Morel, assisté de Stuart Gilbert, enteriement revue par Valery Larbaud avec la collaboration de l’auteur’ ( Patrick O’Neill 2005: 41) (‘unabridged translation by Auguste Morel, with the assistance of Stuart Gilbert, completely reviewed by Valery Larbaud with the collaboration of the author’). Certainly, this cooperative translation, with Joyce’s own participation strategically publicized, 268

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became essential as an authoritative reference beyond the French borders and the boundaries of the French literary system. Yet, in her insistence to turn Paris into the centre of the international literary order, Casanova goes as far as to suggest that, if it had not been for the French translation, Joyce would have never become a ‘universal’ writer: James Joyce, rejected and even banned in Dublin, was welcomed and consecrated by Paris, which made him an artist who revolutionized universal literature rather than merely an Irish national writer […] Thus, Larbaud, whose translation established Joyce as one of the greatest writers of the century, managed to rescue him from an invisible provincialism and to universalize him. (Casanova 2004: 128) As discussed in the introduction, despite her appropriate reflections on the relevance of translation for conceptualizations of world literature, Casanova’s paradigm disregards the complexities attached to the circulation of literary texts in transnational contexts. In particular, her ­centre-periphery model misses ­inter-peripheral connections and inter-discursive read​­ ​­ ­ ​­ ings and, thus, cannot explain the ways in which specific literary texts travel through time and space and are adapted differently across different cultures. Likewise, her dogmatism about a ‘world republic of letters’ based on relations of rivalry and competition which simply presumes that ‘translation into French, owing to Paris’ unique power of consecration, occupies a special place in the literary world’ (Casanova 2004: 146) can hardly be maintained in relation to Joyce. In the early 1920s, far removed from cosmopolitan Paris and the other renowned cultural capitals of European modernism, a group of intellectuals and writers known as the ‘Nós ­ Generation’ based in the rural region of Galicia, in peripheral northwestern Spain, turned to their Irish contemporaries as emblematic role models. Significantly, the political aspirations and cultural practices of the Irish Literary Revival were enthusiastically followed and frequently invoked by the men of Nós whose interest in what was at stake in Ireland symptomatically spoke of their desire to legitimize their own cultural and political agenda. It is thus how in the autumn of 1926, the translation of an untitled selection of fragments from Joyce’s Ulysses saw the light in the journal of the Nós Generation under the title of ‘Ulysses, Anacos da soadísima novela de James Joyce, postos en galego do texto Inglés’ ­ (Ulysses: Pieces of the Very Famous Novel by James Joyce, Put Down into Galician from ­ the English Text).2 The translator, the prolific writer Ramón Otero Pedrayo, one of the outstanding intellectual figures of his time, provides no explanation regarding his choice of unidentified excerpts, sections extracted from the ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Cyclops’ episodes which have been acclaimed by critics as crucial testing grounds for theories of the modern novel. Since the Nós Generation was instrumental in the consolidation of a collective notion of cultural nationalism which aimed at elevating the peripheral Galician language to the status of an appropriate international literary language for the development of the modern novel, one must conclude that Otero’s choice of fragments was anything but random. Rather, the selection evinces the translator’s deep awareness of the implications of Joyce’s Ulysses in the international scene of contemporary European literature and the urge to actively engage with one of the most emblematic texts of modern world literature. Otero selects a stylistically complex section of ‘Ithaca’ and one of the most clearly parodic pieces of ‘Cyclops’ significantly foregrounding two questions: Joyce’s modernist experimentation with narrative techniques and his self-critical analysis of available nationalist ( literary) discourses. Moreover, the translator’s strategies rely on a calculated use of semantic choices through which Joyce is represented 269

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essentially as an Irish writer whose mode of expression can be easily recreated in the Galician language with transparency. The translator reshapes meanings conveniently, first by lowering the register so that in opposition to the scientific and formal tone of the original fragments a much more familiar tone is used and, as a consequence, the translation remains closer to the vernacular everyday speech. Second, in his effort to familiarize and ‘domesticate’ Ulysses, the translator consciously avoids lexical choices which would have been closer to the original yet would have shown an inconvenient similarity to the hegemonic Spanish language, opting instead for more divergent yet more ‘authentically’ Galician linguistic variants (Millán-Varela 1997). Since Galician and Spanish are both Romance languages, it would have been natural that, in many occasions, the literal translation of Latin forms from the source text would have exhibited the closeness between the two linguistic systems. Otero, however, deliberately avoids literal translations and chooses instead vernacular Galician expressions which prevent readers from identifying the common links between Joyce’s uses of English and similar Spanish forms. The Nós intellectuals, who had referred to Joyce as a sort of ‘universal Celt’, rewrote Ulysses in a language that they chose to present essentially at odds with the hegemonic Spanish culture. Clearly, the translation fashions an image of Joyce which solicits collaboration as it conveniently reinforces domestic values through a strategy of linguistic naturalization which insists on cultural self-affirmation. The men of Nós aimed at turning Galician literature into an active participant in the modern international scene through a sort of embrace which they envisioned, not in terms of the cultural dependence of ‘peripheral’ writers of a minor literature on an international writer consecrated in Paris, as Casanova would have it, but rather as a dialogue in search of complicity among equals. Their programmatic poetics stressed the need for a novel written in Galician, and at the same time universal, ‘as famous as to overcome borders’ (Caneda Cabrera 2009: 122). In this respect, the members of the Nós Generation, conscious of the transcendental implications of Joyce’s ‘universal’ novel, wished to be among the first to publish a translation. The fact that Ulysses would not be translated completely into any language until 1927, when the German version appears, the only previous attempt being the already mentioned publication of excerpts (from ‘Telemachus’, ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’) translated into French in 1924, has often been emphasized by Galician literary historians and critics who have traditionally remarked, not without pride, that this became the first translation initiative of Joyce’s novel in the Iberian Peninsula. Frequently invoked as an act of literary heroism, this pioneering translation stands to this day as an extraordinary landmark for the Galician literary system. Moreover, this fragmentary translation of Ulysses lends itself to be interpreted as an interesting example of the many complexities of translation functioning as an intermediary practice when attached to the global circulation of literary texts in minority language contexts. Thus, in the short preface to the complete Galician translation of Ulysses, published only in 2013, significantly entitled, ‘James Joyce in the Galician Language’, the general editor explains the project’s indebtedness to the early translation and proclaims that this complete version of Ulysses is but a final demonstration of ‘our being contemporary’ (Freixanes 2013: 14). Ironically, though, the editor avoids to acknowledge that since 1926 there has been a vast constellation of translations of Joyce’s Ulysses in many other languages which, ultimately, this new one joins. Whereas the Nós Generation had shown their concern with the modernization and internationalization of Galician letters by translating fragments of a major text from a major contemporary figure of world literature into their native minority language, in the case of the 2013 complete version (at a time when Joyce is no longer ‘our contemporary’) the choice to ignore the role of this 270

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translation within the global network of world literature symptomatically speaks of a sort of nostalgic antiquarianism and a rather uncritical cultural narcissism on part of the publishing house responsible for the translation. Clearly, this recent initiative is more concerned with commercial success by targeting its readership for this ( belated) insertion of Joyce in the Galician literary market among cultural nationalists than with providing all potential readers with a critical understanding of the relevance of Joyce within world literature. At stake here is the fact that the production, circulation and reception of translations of literature do not simply involve crossing national boundaries and languages in a literary space that can easily be accounted for in terms of antagonism and rivalry between centre and periphery. More importantly, what this publishing initiative demonstrates is that translations must often negotiate hierarchies originated in deep-seated cultural traditions, political pressures, publishing policies and market strategies within the culture of reception. As has been remarked, ‘translation into minority languages can be seen as the quintessential and emblematic expression of the local in the era of globalization’ (Cronin 2003: 164); however, as I have been suggesting, these dichotomies may not be so clearly established. Translation, which is mainly about exchanges and connections, always involves ‘outside points of reference’ and necessarily stands as the ultimate reminder that ‘exclusionary definitions’ of community are no longer possible (Cronin 2003: 168). Paradoxically, though, in their journey across the borders of peripheral cultural sites and minority languages, translations of ‘universal’ literature simultaneously embrace and resist global connectedness. As discussed, when produced to comply with strategies of self-protective ethnocentrism and local specificity, translations are expected to emphasize distinctiveness and they often seek to suppress notions of relatedness to the global, ultimately turning into partial (mis)representations of the ( literary) world.

The geopolitics of literary translation In the introduction to his Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics, Michael G. Malouf argues that rewritings of Irish writers such as Joyce as developed by the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott contrast with Casanova’s assumptions for the ‘Irish Paradigm’ because her emphasis on ‘ literary consecration’ within such sites as Paris misses the interperipheral connections and inter- d iscursive readings suggested in Walcott’s (ambivalent) poetic revision of Joyce. Thus, Malouf contends: ‘Her center-periphery model cannot explain the way in which forms of Irishness travel and are adapted across cultures within sites that do not offer ‘consecration’ or promise of the autonomy of literature from politics’ (Malouf 2009: 15). Although he does not refer specifically to translation, his reflections on how Joyce and other Irish writers are read in the Caribbean do invoke the reshaping of cultural production through movement, migration and travel and aim at discussing the role of Irish literature in a wider global frame, understood ‘ in terms of the larger world’ and through the lens of ‘the hybridization of contemporary Irish cultural forms […] being reinvented within a global culture’ (Malouf 2009: 16). In particular, his notion of ‘transatlantic solidarity’ created by ‘cross- cultural strategies of reading and appropriation’ (Malouf 2009: 4) that are ‘contingent, performative and transitory’ (Malouf 2009: 6) invokes forms of circulation and exchange in the context of local-global interactions which, as I have discussed, ultimately account for the phenomena associated with the translation of literature. The invocation of solidarity between formerly oppressed Atlantic nations was indeed one of the major reasons that accounted for the publication of the translation of Joyce’s early novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Havana in 1964 by the Editora Nacional de Cuba, 271

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the ‘State Press’ which, apart from promoting Cuban books, was also committed to popularizing universal literature in translation. Significantly, although a canonical translation in the Spanish language by the acclaimed writer Dámaso Alonso already existed, the Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes chose to translate Joyce’s A Portrait into Spanish again. Alonso’s translation, which had circulated widely in the Hispanic world, had become a canonical text since its publication in Madrid in 1926 as El retrato del artista adolescente. Admittedly, the new version printed in Havana was presented as a ‘revised translation’, a gesture which, only five years after the triumph of the revolution of 1959, symbolically expressed the Cubans’ right to contest impositions through the rewriting of their own versions of the canon of world literature, thus reaffirming Cuba’s political and cultural independence. It is, thus, how Desnoes not only reinterpreted the Spanish canonical text through the insertion of a new prologue, which, thus, functioned as a revolutionary manifesto for readers on the island, but also modified Alonso’s choice of words in order to intentionally diverge from the version published in the former imperial metropolis. Unsurprisingly, the Cuban translation opted for a more ideologically charged vocabulary which encouraged readers to discover analogies between two revolutionary scenarios, the Cuba of the 1960s and the Ireland of 1916, the emphasis being on the existence of shared forms of resistance before a common history of oppression. Perhaps one of the most striking examples can be found in the translation of the passage from chapter V when, just before his talk with Cranly on his Easter duty, the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, stands waiting for his friend and ‘stares angrily’ at a hotel ‘ in which he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm’ ( Joyce 1916: 238). Stephen wonders how he might be able to liberate the conscience of the Irish race: ‘How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before the squires begat upon them, that they may breed a race less ignoble than their own?’ ( Joyce 1916: 238). The noun ‘squires’, which Alonso, the first Spanish translator, renders as ‘galanes’ ( Joyce 1926: 270), thus, literally referring in the plural form to ‘a man who escorts a woman’, is translated in the Cuban version as ‘ hacendados’ ( Joyce 1964: 253), i.e. the owners of ‘ haciendas’, vast landed states. As I have discussed elsewhere (Caneda Cabrera 2015), this shift is extremely relevant since ‘ hacienda’ and ‘ hacendado’ are very popular terms in the Spanish-American cultural imaginary, particularly in relation to the social revolutions and the agrarian movements. In Cuba the term ‘ hacendados’ specifically refers to the sugar planters, export- oriented landowners whose pursuit of profit through free trade reinforced the dominance of foreign (colonial) power. Significantly, with this new lexical choice, the translation automatically brings to mind a form of landed oligarchy and a system of agrarian (capitalist) exploitation which the Cuban revolutionaries sought to abolish. Likewise, what emerges from a close look at the 14-page Prologue to the Cuban translation of Joyce’s early novel, significantly titled ‘Al lector’ (‘To the reader’) is an effort to pair Cuban and Ireland’s anti- colonial struggles and, likewise, to connect the two nation’s histories of fight for freedom and emancipation with the revolutionary present of the 1960s. Primary among Desnoes’s objectives in the Prologue is to revisit Joyce’s Portrait through a solidarian contextualization of the transatlantic encounter between Cuba and Ireland which the translation is called to enact. This contextualization takes place through a careful combination of paratexts, mainly the Prologue and also the blurbs of the back cover, whose main function is to turn Joyce into a role model for aspiring revolutionary writers. Throughout the Prologue, Desnoes’s ‘revolutionary’ portrait of Joyce is repeatedly emphasized with the establishment of similarities between Joyce’s having to forge the uncreated conscience for colonial Ireland and ‘the situation’ of the Spanish-American writer. Desnoes 272

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insists that Joyce’s Ireland ‘does remind us, to a certain extent, of our situation during the Republic’ ( Joyce 1964: xv) and quotes from his own translation of the passage in which Stephen Dedalus bitterly reflects on the power of the Irish ‘squires’ which he transforms into (Cuban) ‘ hacendados’. In this respect, through his use of meaningful words with a specifically political significance in the context of Cuba’s own history Desnoes makes Irish history relevant for a larger and more global context. By foregrounding the relevance of agrarian movements in relation to the revolutionary processes in Latin American and particularly to the Cuban revolution, the translation becomes a form of ‘transatlantic solidarity’ in the context of the local-global interactions of colonial cultures, ultimately relying on strategies of reading and appropriation which are contingent and performative and are made to function as a global critique of imperialism. The ‘National Union of Writers and Artists’, in which Desnoes participated actively, had enthusiastically endorsed a declaration which chose to place Cuba at the heart of the alliance of formerly colonized countries as the leading force against imperialism. ‘Joyce’s experience has many points of contact with the social circumstances of Spanish-American writers. In his time, Ireland was an underdeveloped English colony. Even the language was imposed by the conqueror’ ( Joyce 1964: xiv) writes Desnoes, thus establishing a parallelism between the two countries’ common colonial past which is further emphasized in his decisions as a translator. Interestingly, in the case of the translation of the so often quoted passage in chapter V reproduced below (when Stephen argues with the English Dean of studies over the right word for the utensil ‘through which you pour the oil into your lamp’), Desnoes encourages Cuban readers to approach the translation in the context of their own situation as colonial subjects. He significantly bypasses the Spanish translator’s previous decision to provide synonyms for each term, ‘ funnel’ and ‘tundish’, and preserves the HibernoEnglish ‘tundish’ untranslated as if alerting his readers towards linguistic tensions which speak of unequal colonial encounters and forms of imperial domination. Ultimately, Desnoes’s translation functions as a form of instrumentalization which Venuti has appropriately described in the following terms: In creating stereotypes, translation may attach esteem or stigma to specific ethnic, racial, and national groupings […] In the long run, translation figures in geopolitical relations by establishing the cultural grounds of diplomacy, reinforcing alliances, antagonisms and hegemonies between nations. (Venuti ­ 1998a: ­67–68) ​­ On 16 February 2017, when the Spanish translation of the 2004 novel Star of the Sea by Irish author Joseph O’Connor was formally launched by President Michael D. Higgins (2017) during his three- day state visit to Cuba, newspapers both in Ireland and Cuba provided an enthusiastic coverage of the book launch. Echoing the President’s own words, headlines referred to this literary event as a historic moment since, as they highlighted, O’Connor became the first Irish writer published in post-revolutionary Cuba, with the exception of Joyce. Thus, before a crowded auditorium flanked by a hulking portrait of the late Fidel Castro and in the presence of the Cuban Minister for Culture, representatives of the Venezuelan 273

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government and the writer himself, described in his speech ‘as one of the great Irish diplomats of Literature’, the President of Ireland referred to this ‘great occasion for Irish Cuban literary exchange for writers and translators’ as a way of ‘deepening cultural links between our two countries’ (Higgins 2017). Although he mentioned that the novel had been published in 2004 and had been greeted by a ‘wide and international readership’, no references were made to the question that El Crimen del Estrella del Mar had first been published in Spain in 2005 (O’Connor 2005) and that, in fact, the Cuban edition was actually a reprint of that early Spanish translation. Since the Irish writer was conspicuously declared an inheritor of Joyce’s universal Irishness and, thus, turned into a representative of the discourse of ‘transatlantic solidarity’, the 2016 Cuban edition of the 2005 Spanish translation (O’Connor 2016) was privileged to enter the world republic of (Cuban) letters where it was welcomed with honours. As discussed, translations often function as afterlives of a published text, with successive versions providing the possibility for fresh and unsuspected approaches to the original. It is thus how the circulation of ‘world literature’ is complicated through intermediary practices which defy straightforward notions of translation as a mere importation or transference of literary works from one language and culture to another. Clearly appropriated by strategies of reading that are contingent, performative and transitory, the Cuban edition of Star of the Sea illustrates how the translation of literature may be informed and even determined by phenomena associated with the geopolitics of circulation and exchange in the context of interactions. ­local-global ​­

Conclusion In 2006 I reviewed the study The Reception of James Joyce in Europe ( Lernout and Van Mierlo 2004), a collection of 29 essays devoted to exploring the reception of Joyce in different territories of Europe, for the James Joyce Quarterly. As I intimated with the title of my essay, ‘The Sameness of Difference: Joyce’s Kaleidoscopic Odyssey(s) throughout Europe’, since the national cultures of Europe are far from uniform, the encounter of European modernist artists and intellectuals with Joyce was shaped by the forms and idioms of the diverse geography of European modernism(s). I argued that each of the individual essays highlighted the transnational character of Joyce’s modernism as it travelled across the different European nations, transformed by encounters with the cultural and literary practices of other modernisms located within specific spaces and times. Among other things, The Reception of James Joyce in Europe revealed that the recognition of the heterogeneous sites that have produced their own modernism is essential for a more comprehensive approach to the culture of modernity, thus objecting to the inappropriateness of the inherited framework pervasive in modernist studies in the larger context of explorations of world literature. The problem is that for most scholars of modernism, who are themselves monolinguals, the web of transcultural and translational connections and their effects more often than not remain out of sight. In this respect, I claimed that through the incorporation of perspectives from reception studies, comparative literature and, specifically, translation studies, The Reception of James Joyce in Europe made a major contribution to literary studies mainly because it undermined critical tendencies that have turned Joyce and modernism into the patrimony of an exclusive ‘Anglo-American club’. The centrality of transnational circulation and translation for the study of modernist literature in the context of cultural globalization has been discussed by scholars who have argued for ‘a broad and continuing historical investigation of global currents of thought, tracing the complexities and thus the choices that animate the multidirectional experience of living in an interdependent, interactive world’ (Cuddy-Keane 2003: 541). Yet, the concern with ‘the 274

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complexities and contradictions of cultural crossings’ and ‘the paradoxical entanglements of hostilities and indebtedness that define our relations in the globe’ (Cuddy-Keane 2003: 553) are not only specific to specialists in literary modernism. As discussed in the introduction, numerous scholars of world literature have focused on questions of difference, mobility and multilingualism which clearly underlie the concept of translation and have warned that the study of literature should embrace translation more actively since it is precisely through interpretive acts of mediation, profoundly bound up in aspects of culture and acts of rewriting, that a work of literature will enter ‘the global informational flow’ (Henitiuk 2012: 31). Likewise, authors who have examined the complex intersection between translation and globalization have denounced that ‘While mobility, by necessity, generates the need for translation between different cultural and linguistic contexts, theories focused on the global circulation of flows deny or minimise its very existence’ to the extent that ‘translation has been made invisible in literary critical commentary’ ( Bielsa 2005: 135). Precisely in relation to contemporary debates over the relevance of translation in discussions on the circulation, dissemination and consumption of literature in the global marketplace, Venuti has appropriately remarked that: To understand the impact of translation in the creation of world literature, we need to examine the canons developed by translation patterns within the receiving situation as well as the interpretations that translations inscribe in the source texts. To be productive, to yield the most incisive findings, this sort of examination must combine distant and close reading of translations to explore the relations between canons and interpretations. (Venuti 2012: 191) For most readers, the actual texts of world literature are de facto translated texts which have been inserted ‘ into global networks that are inflected by national literary traditions’ and yet ‘reveal the national as constructed by international affiliations’ ( Venuti 2012: 191). As we have seen, since world literature is always constructed in a specific cultural space and, thus, is necessarily dependent on a perspective from somewhere, the examination of translation choices and strategies and the exploration of the idiosyncrasy of forms of circulation and contexts of reception ultimately reveal that, paradoxically, universal literary texts exist in a fluid space of global connectedness constituted precisely by the singularity of contingencies, asymmetries and contradictions.

Further reading Greenblatt, S. et al. (2010) Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. New York: Cambridge University Press. A collection of six insightful chapters which focus on specific cases of cultural mobility and cultural transmission across different disciplines and illustrate the set of principles introduced in the ‘manifesto’ authored by Greenblatt arguing for cultural analyses that must bear in mind the relevance of varied yet pervasive forms of mobility such as translation. Venuti, L. (2013) Translation Changes Everything. New York: Routledge. A compilation of 14 interrelated essays arranged chronologically dealing with sociological, philosophical, cultural and political aspects of translation as an interpretive act which include case studies of various genres and text-t ypes, reflect on cutting edge theoretical issues and argue for a ‘translation culture’. Walkowitz, R. L. (2015) Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. A powerfully written study which, combining close reading and theoretical insight, subverts reductive notions of translation and dismantles pessimistic views of world literature in the context of globalized forms of consumption by focusing on an account of contemporary works of fiction in which translation functions thematically, structurally and conceptually. 275

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Notes

References Apter, E. (2013) Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso. Bielsa, E. (2005) ‘Globalisation and Translation: A Theoretical Approach’, Language and Intercultural Communication: An Intercultural Approach, 5(2), ­ pp. 131–143. ­ ­ ​­ Caneda Cabrera, M. T. (2006) ‘The Sameness of Difference: Joyce’s Kaleidoscopic Odyssey(s) Throug hout Europe’, James Joyce Quarterly, 44(1), ­ pp. 139–150. ­ ­ ​­ Caneda Cabrera, M. T. (2009) ‘“The Loveliness Which Has Not Yet Come Into the World”: Translation as a Revisitation of Irish Modernism’, in McGarrity, M. and Culleton, C. (eds.), Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 115–132. Caneda Cabrera, M. T. (2015) ‘Trans/Atlantic Mobilities: Translating Narratives of Irish Resistance’, in Crosson, S. and Huber, W. (eds.), Towards 2016: 1916 in Irish Literature, Culture & Society (Irish ­ Studies in Europe: vol. 6). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, pp. 83–96. Casanova, P. (2004) The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. 10(3), ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­Cuddy-Keane, M. (2003) ‘Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization’, Modernism/Modernity, pp. 539–558. ­ ­ ​­ Damrosch, D. (2003) What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. D’haen, T. (2012) The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. London and New York: Routledge. D’haen, T., Domínguez, C. and Thomsen, M. (2013) World Literature: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Dimock, W. C. (2017) ‘American Literature, World Literature’, in Goyal, Y. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37–52. Freixanes, V. F. (2013) ‘James Joyce en lingua galega’, in Almazán, E. et al. (trans.), Ulises. Vigo: Galaxia. Hayot, E. (2012) ‘World Literature and Globalization’, in D’haen, T., Damrosch D. and Kadir D. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 223–231. Henitiuk, V. (2012) The Single, Shared Text? Translation and World Literature. World Literature Today, 86(1), ­ pp. 30–34. ­ ­ ​­ Higgins, P. D. (2017) Address at the Launch of Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor. Morro Cabaña, Havana, Cuba. ­ ­ ­­ ​­ ­ ­­ Web 17, October 2018. Available online: https://www.president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ address-at-the-launch-of-star-of-the-sea-by-joseph-oconnor Hillis Miller, J. (2011) ‘Globalization and World Literature’, Neohelicon, 38, pp. 251–265. ­ ­ ​­ Joyce, J. [1916] (1968) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Viking Press. Joyce, J. [1926] (1978) Retrato del Artista Adolescente, trans. Dámaso Alonso. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Joyce, J. (1964) Retrato del Artista Adolescente, trans. Edmundo Desnoes. La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba. Lernout, G. and Van Mierlo, W. (2004) The Reception of James Joyce in Europe. Vols. I and II. London and New York: Continuum. Malouf, M. G. (2009) Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. ­ Moretti, F. (2004) ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, in Prendergast, C. (ed.), Debating World Literature. London and New York: Verso, pp. 148–162. O’Connor, J. (2004) Star of the Sea. London: Vintage. O’ Connor, J. (2005) El crimen del Estrella del Mar. Barcelona: Seix Barral. O’ Connor, J. (2016) El crimen del Estrella del Mar. La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura. O’Neill, P. (2005) Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Otero Pedrayo, R. (1926) ‘Ulysses. (Anacos da soadísima novela de James Joyce postos en galego do texto inglés)’, Nós, 32, pp. 3–11. ­ ­ ​­ 276

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Pizer, J. (2012) ‘Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Origins and Relevance of Weltliteratur’, in D’haen, T., Damrosch, D. and Kadir, D. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature. London and New ­ ­ ​­ York: Routledge, pp. 3–11. Prendergast, C. (2004) ‘The World Republic of Letters’, in Prendergast, C. (ed.), Debating World Literature. London and New York: Verso, pp. 1–25. Spivak, G. C. (2003) Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Venuti, L. (ed.) (1998a) ‘The Formation of Cultural Identities’, in The Scandals of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 67–87. ­ ­ ​­ Venuti, L. (ed.) (1998b) ‘Globalization’, in The Scandals of Translation. London and New York: Rout­ ­ ​­ ledge, pp. 158–189. Venuti, L. (2012) ‘World Literature and Translation’, in D’haen, T., Damrosch, D. and Kadir, D. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 180–193.

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19 ‘The ­ ­one-inch ​­ barrier’ The translation hurdle of world cinema ˇ urovicˇová Nataša D

Introduction: the matter of disciplines On the face of it, the proposition that translation is an unnegotiable feature of world cinema seems an unproblematic, almost banal, claim, intuitively corroborated by each new globespanning simultaneous release of a (Hollywood) blockbuster received as enthusiastically in Chennai as in Kyiv. As scholars arguing for translation’s infrastructure-like function in a globalized world (Cronin 2003; Bielsa 2005) have pointed out, its ‘invisible’ presence is the prerequisite for both its ubiquity and its pervasiveness, in cinema as much as it is in other pathways of the globalized world. Yet, as the South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho said (in Korean) when receiving his 2020 Oscar for Parasite—a​­ ­first-ever ​­ ‘foreign’ ­ film so recognized—the ­ ​­ ‘one-inch ­­ ​­ barrier’ of a subtitle at the bottom of the frame has under some circumstances been an unsurmountable obstacle to a film’s global circulation. Studying world cinema under the sign of translation will thus entail charting the mechanisms needed to move films across linguistic fault lines, as well as the pathways determining those flows. We can consider this disciplinary split in a Venn diagram: translation studies scholarship has long engaged with cinema, but tended to do so through the prism of linguistically or semiotically grounded textual analyses, giving by default priority to single texts or their aggregates. Film scholarship on the other hand, in its media- specific or industry-facing orientations, has until fairly recently been indifferent to this problematic. In their overlap, where the confrontation of two languages in the form of a translation supplement must adapt to the mediatic ground rules of the global institution of cinema, lies the focus of this essay. The relevance of film for translation studies dates at least to Roman Jacobson’s 1958 foundational inclusion of non-verbal material into his triad of interlingual/intralingual/ intersemiotic translation ( Jakobson 1958) opening the theoretical path. By the late 1980s, scholars began to attend to what was initially called multimedia translation studies and evolved into audiovisual translation studies (e.g. Gambier 1992; Pérez- Gonzáles 2011; Chaume 2018). The literature is now solid and multifaceted, with topics ranging from corpus-based comparative, linguistically oriented case studies of dubbed or subtitled versions through skoposoriented topics such as literature-film adaptation and cognitive research on eye-movement in reading subtitles to sociological approaches, such as the impact of machine translation on 278

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the labour of subtitlers, or audiovisual policy issues (O’Sullivan 2016). A recent, excellent survey of the history and approaches to audiovisual translation can be found in Cornu and O’Sullivan (2018). ­ In film studies’ theory- dominant, model-building boom years of 1960s through 1990s, meanwhile, the research super-paradigm was comprised of two basic data sets, (a) national cinema (i.e. with zero degree of translation) and ( b) ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’ as a ‘universal’ prototype, equally understood and accepted everywhere. Together these two formations were then taken as the discipline’s core historiographic model, against which all ‘other’ types of cinematic production and reception were defined— often as a generic other of ‘world cinema’ ( hence for instance a category like the political internationalist ‘Third World cinema’, neither classical nor national). In both these units, the national and the ‘classical’, the activity of reading subtitles or watching a dubbed film was taken as a ‘ functional equivalent’ of the original version, a distinction without difference. Studies of cinema’s global circulation and distribution thus took, and often still take, the essential complement of translation for granted, as one technical, un-problematic post-production modification among many others, similar to, say, the difference between showing a film in a 35 mm and 16 mm print— as a material factor of distribution and exhibition, certainly, but one unremarkable in the regime of assumed equivalency. In the last two decades, several film-studies- centric volumes have meanwhile begun to consider the medial modification of cinema on larger scales, if with different centres of gravity. Most prominently, from the late 1980s on, Sound Studies drew attention to the separate component of sound accompanying moving pictures from their very beginning in the socalled ‘silent era’, and its role in shaping both the cinematic experience and the cinematic apparatus, linking it, beyond photography, to tele- and radiophony and the recording industry and further out, to ways in which a viewer’s physical and cognitive experience is shaped by sound waves, proposing for instance a model of sound cinema as a form of ventriloquism— d irectly relevant for understanding the experience of watching a dubbed film (Altman 1992; Chion 1999). Another transmedial approach placed cinema on a continuum with other screen formations: the collection Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film ( Balfour and Egoyan 2004) took as its through-line the cinematic image frame incorporating written text, so linking cinema backward to modernist painting and forward to the electronic televisual mix of a stream of images. Here, the stock market ticker line at the bottom of the frame accompanying unrelated news was proposed as a training ground for a new generation of previously reluctant subtitle readers, especially in the United States (Cazdyn 2004). Beyond these media-theoretical reframings of the cinematic apparatus, a key text, Cinema Babel, took up the question of film translation head- on. Drawing on a pairing borrowed from translation studies, Marcus Nornes surveyed the history of film translation through the ethical prism of the binary ‘abusive’ vs ‘corrupt’ practices—the latter a term designating attempts to achieve translation supplement’s (relative) invisibility by concealing presence in conventions, while the former term, ‘abusive’ ( borrowed from translation theory), instead highlighted efforts to bring attention to that process. On the fi lm- studies- centric list belongs for instance also the bilingual volume Dubbing: Übersetzung im Kino/La traduction audiovisuelle ( Boillat and Weber Henking 2014), the definitive technological history of pre-1950 subtitling and dubbing by Jean-François Cornu (2014), and the collection The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference (2016), edited by Tijana Mamula and Lisa Patti, which covers a broad spectrum of language issues in cinema that challenge the rule of monolingualism and show cinema as a medium uniquely caught between a ‘ babelian’ polylinguality and the need to ‘understand’, hence, translate. Robert Stam’s ambitiously scoped World Literature, 279

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Transnational Cinema, and Global Media: Towards a Transatlantic Commons (2019) tracks translation as one of the operative border-crossing processes among regions, languages, arts, media and disciplines. Most comprehensively, Tessa Dwyer’s Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation (2017) positions itself at the intersection of screen and translation studies, surveys a wide range of literature in great detail to argue for ‘revaluing screen translation’ ( Dwyer 2017: 3) and coins the term ‘errancy’ to advocate for openness to a wide variety of translation strategies as the most productive stance in the t wenty-first- century global media landscape. Finally, the archivally grounded and oriented Translation in Cinema 1900–1950, edited by ­ ​­ Carol O’Sullivan and Jean François Cornu (2019), compiles thoroughly researched specialist essays on key topics in film translation history, technology and production practices, with a unique focus on archival research challenges and preservation. What largely remains missing, however, is the acknowledgement of translation as a constitutive, standard, generic, component of global histories and theories of cinema, i.e. as a basic feature of its circulation, its politics, as well as its experience: after all, watching a film with some supplement of translation has quantitatively been the baseline viewing situation for most film audiences in the world—with some important geopolitical exceptions, where domestic cinema was powerful or popular enough to keep imports at bay ( People’s Republic of China during certain periods, India, Japan, United States). And even these historically exceptional translation-averse zones are currently eroding as digitalization makes audiovisual material accessible near- simultaneously to near-everyone with a smartphone and a credit line, on a near-global scale. Atom Egoyan’s quip that ‘every film is foreign somewhere’ goes today for everywhere. Insofar as both translation and cinema inherently operate on a worldwide scale, they are in constant, parallel, relationship both when a film is and when it isn’t translated, remaining in a ‘zero-degree’, ­­ ​­ merely potential, state of translation ( Ďurovičová 2009). Approaching film translation in the context of world cinema, then, entails studying— equipped with the languagecentric toolkit developed by translation studies—larger-scale formations, such as for instance film translation as it relates to regional alliances across political borders such as US-Mexico ( Jarvinen 2012) or the cinematic soft diplomacy the People’s Republic of China conducts along its expansive Belt-and-Road project (Gambier 2018), to cultural or stylistic paradigms, for instance impulses to transcreation (Adamu 2018), national audiovisual policies (O’Sullivan 2016; Mingant 2019) or more generally movies as pivotal conduits for various lingua francas. After all, the question of whether— and if so, how— a film will circulate beyond the borders of its country of provenance is nearly never not asked. The matter of a film’s national origin and its linguistic as well as cultural ‘understandability’ was of prime importance from cinema’s earliest years (Abel 2013); in the 1930s, as synchronized sound was reconfiguring international film flows, Universal’s horrors and UFA’s high-production value films were, for instance, planned precisely to anticipate and meet the challenge of the translation supplement (Garncarz 2006). The global reach of the Disney powerhouse output rests historically on the studio’s earliest, meticulous merger of animation and post- synchronization of all sound, speech included, delivered today in a remarkable array of 30+ languages. Inversely, dialogueheavy, i.e. t ranslation-resistant comedies have historically been the core of national, i.e. nonexport domestic production (Moretti 2001). In sum, the m ark-up of language has tracked the circulating moving image from the earliest years, determining the reach of any given film. This general approach to film translation signals also how the concept of ‘world cinema’ will be approached here. In the past two decades of ‘the contemporary period’ ( Deshpande and Mazaj 2018: 4), as the long-standing divide between state monopolies and market democracies was weakened by social and technological upheavals, nation- state units were 280

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increasingly confronted with transnational forces of globalization. In contrast to the adjective ‘ international’, i.e. an aggregate of sovereign national units, the prefix ‘world-’ ups the geopolitical scale at which an object is studied or tracked. If ‘ international cinema’ is a list, ‘world cinema’ entails an underlying whole, an abstract, relational, concept of a totality. In this framework films are studied primarily not as stable formal texts but as aesthetic, economic, cultural objects dependent on circulation, and whose value is therefore dynamic, variable in space and time, altered in each new configuration (Stam 2019: 20–23), To borrow from literary theorist David Damrosch: ‘I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’ ( Damrosch 2002: 4). The advantage here of Damrosch’s definition (developed in a vigorous debate about the concept of ‘world literature’ in comparative literature and adjacent disciplines) is twofold: it avoids the common exoticizing binary in which, along the lines of ‘world music’, ‘world cinema’ would refer to all that isn’t the dominant, Hollywoodstyle, cinema (Gelardi 2016). Moreover, the Damrosch literary model helpfully highlights the structural role translation plays in ‘worlding’ a media object as a mechanism of circulation. As proposed here, a historical pattern in translation’s constant, inevitable presence in ​­ ‘worlding’ cinema can be tracked from (1) the initial ­expansion-driving rhetorical trope of motion pictures as a ‘universal language’, through (2) a cultural contraction and movies’ worldwide ‘nationalization’ brought about by the general adaption of synchronized speech from ca. 1930 on, to then, (3) some four decades later, starting in late 1970s, cinema’s ­de-collectivization ​­ ​­ combined with a ­re-globalization brought about by the new proto/digital technologies of video, DVD and VOD (video on demand).

The translation factor in worlding cinema: a historical sketch The ‘silent’ period: cinema as universal language The foundational question yoking the topic of translation and world cinema is then: if the medium’s initial boom and first growth rested on its responding to the modern desire for universal and global access or—to draw on a foundational West-centric concept (Allen 2019)— on ‘overcoming Babel’, how did this impulse align with the machinery of translation attempting that same effect? From a media-h istorical perspective, motion pictures can be argued to belong to nineteenthcentury proliferation of symbolic languages—be they mathematical (Frege), technical (Morse) or semantic ( Esperanto, Volapük). Photography itself was already associated with ‘universal language’, and sometimes seen as the perfection of older forms of pictographic writing (Sekula 1981); contemporary commentators commonly interpreted movies’ popularity via the metaphor of the photographic image as a ‘universal language’ (Metz 1964; Hansen 2009: 77) as well as a response to the ‘utopian-universalist’ dream of instant communication (Friedman 2019: 8). Cinema was the newest stage of the universal history of writing-as-visual communication, comprehensible everywhere and by everyone, cognitively unfiltered, with images organized into a grammar of hieroglyphs as the first iteration of mankind’s hope for universal understanding—that was for instance the conceit at the heart of D. W. Griffith’s ​­ 1916 ­mega-production Intolerance which sought to align ‘all’ world history and civilization, from ancient Babylon through French Reformation, to contemporary America as a quest for ­all-human ​­ ­ ­ ‘understanding’ (Hansen 2009). Meanwhile, Griffith’s narrative of total communication was being produced even as the First World War was decimating the successful commercial circulation of European films 281

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in the US market. Far from eliminating the need for translation, this ‘universalist-utopian’ epic, and the internationally burgeoning narrative form it advanced, nonetheless depended on a supplementary apparatus of localization, of which translation was an important if not exclusive feature. Hence the presence of explanator-lecturers in East and South Asian context ( Lacasse 2006; Nornes 2007), the adaptation of the titles of the films and the editing of the narrative for censorship or cultural purposes (Hansen 2009); more generally, Claire Dupré La Tour (2019) has documented in detail the system of titling exchanges required for the worldwide circulation of early moving pictures. Such labour processes of translation demonstrate that what at the beginning of the century was celebrated as a ‘universal’ communication tool rested equally on the opposite conditions, non-identity and seriality, two fundamental premises of modernist aesthetics: in order to provide ‘the same’ experience for a film’s audiences in many different locations, prints had to differ from each other linguistically yet be accepted as all being ‘the same film’ ( Ďurovičová 2004).

Synchronized speech and cinema’s ‘nationalization’ The premises of non-identity and seriality became very apparent with the commercial introduction, in 1927 in the United States, of synchronized sound, both with regard to the industrial/material and the aesthetic parameters of what effectively was a new medium, ‘the talkies’ replacing ‘the movies’ (Gomery 2005). If cinema had in the first three decades benefited from its unique material as well as cultural mobility, sound synchronized to the image can be said to have weighed down the moving image in so many ways. For while sound synchronization gave the moving image a new materiality, appearing to secure its provenance in a specific physical space, that same effect thereby also impugned its universality. As long as the sound was ‘emitted by’, meaning, visually synchronized with the image of an object, this was simply exhilarating, as for instance in the celebrated airplane engine noise of Wings ( W. Wellman 1927) or the sound of tapping accompanying the image of a row of cabaret dancers’ legs on a stage. When, however, the sound of human voice was shaped into speech, as in Al Jolson’s famous exclamation ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’ in The Jazz Singer (1927), the geopolitical grid of linguistic difference— a Babel of sorts, per that ubiquitous contemporary press cliché—was dropped over the relatively fluid, mobile, spatiality of the ‘mute’ moving image. In this sense, the establishing of synchronous speech functioned in the transitional period as one key regulator (alongside the companion issue of sound equipment patents) and a key determinant of the pathways cinema had to take in order to again flow ‘ freely’ on the global markets. Despite occasional efforts to resist it, ‘silent’ American films had during the post-First World War decade come to effectively dominate the key competitors’ markets in Europe, Latin America and South Asia ( Butsch 2019: 44– 46, 62). The introduction of synchronized sound gave many national film industries, which in that preceding decade had sought but failed to contest Hollywood’s dominance, a new opportunity to reassert themselves. The national language (sometimes, as in the case of Italy, also used to suppress and replace local and regional dialects) (Sisto 2001) became thus a kind of political sound barrier against the threat of American linguistic and cultural barrage. In the 1930s, roughly the decade between the introduction of sound and the beginning of the Second World War, the supplement of synchronized speech thus had two related effects: film trade’s growth domestically and its contraction internationally, in an effect of ‘deglobalization’ ( Bakke 2008; Andrew 2009). The causes were several: legal ( patents, taxes, quotas), economic (markets, currency) and cultural/linguistic, all of which were related to 282

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the new challenge of moving films across borders, themselves reinforced by national responses to the Great Depression. As the transitional phase ( late 1928 to mid-1933) was getting underway, film production worldwide was characterized by a variety of experiments—formal, institutional, industrial and economic— during which acoustic and performance rules regulating the possible uses of dialogue were tested in the various countries’ media ecosystems: did the viewer always have to be shown the supposed source of the sound? Did speech have to be fully lip- synchronized? Did voice have to match the body in specific culturally appropriate ways? ( Bhattacharya 2019). In broad terms, these rules eventually congealed into a collective ‘ habitus’ (rather than ‘audience preference’, as is sometimes lazily claimed) and, unless there was a radical political intervention such as a war ( Taylor-Jones 2016), remained generally stable for the next four decades, until the 1970s, articulating a national audience’s relationship to the rest of the film world. Thus for the German or Indian viewer a film always speaks in their own language regardless of whether the character on screen is a cowboy or a samurai, while in France a viewer can generally opt for a (subtitle-) reading experience over a dubbed one depending on her self-understanding as a cinephile (who puts a premium on the original soundtrack). The transitional period was when the paradigm of ‘ dubbing countries’ and ‘subtitling countries’ was established. The upending of these rules would only begin in the mid-1970s, as the arrival of VHS technology signalled the approaching conversion of cinema from an analogue to a digital medium and with it the dislodging of spectators from their public, collective, stable viewing spaces of movie theatres to more private and more portable screens— a development coming to full fruition at the present day. If around 1930 talkies were thus to regain general circulation, become readily exportable, they would have to be translated. But which component exactly had to be translated? This topic was subject to vigorous debates, both in specialized technical and trade journals, and in popular press—indeed, street riots were reported in some European cities in response to the sound of a particular foreign language in a local movie theatre ( Ďurovičová 1992). Was this strictly a matter of linguistic comprehension? Or was there something to, in, a person speaking a (foreign) language that could not be reduced to semantic content and thus resolved by voice replacement alone? Objecting to dubbing on such grounds, certain critics thus decried an imported film dubbed into the local language as ‘theft’ of cultural identity ( Ďurovičová 2003). Conversely, would adding a band of writing inside or even adjacent to the image frame inalterably alter the immersive screen experience of a ‘ fourth wall’? In confronting the problem of what exactly understanding the dialogue entailed, what elements carried sense-making weight, i.e. were properly signifiers, film industries were undertaking a kind of collective ontological palpation, trying to ascertain what exactly was locally unnegotiable in the cinematic experience so that altering it in service of understanding the dialogue wouldn’t destroy it. And it was in confronting the challenge of translation that this ontological ‘essence’ of cinema revealed itself as not self-identical, but rather ‘near- equivalent’, so that ‘what cinema is’ (Andrew 2010) came to be constructed differently in different regimes of translation, i.e. in different regions of the world. Technologically, the replacing of a voice recording with another voice recording even while retaining synchronicity appeared like an obvious solution: this was a strategy of the German major UFA in its earliest sound experiments in early 1929, when the German silent movie star Harry Liedtke’s face was ‘ improved’ by the German singing star Richard Tauber’s voice ( Kreimeier 1996) for what was hoped to be an ideal ‘total sound film’ experience. Modifying this combination further, by making the replacement voice be in another language, i.e. dubbing, was thus both technologically possible and congruent with ‘cinema’, provided the medium was thought of as not a simple recording of reality but a machine for simulacra, what 283

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we today might call ‘special effects cinema’. In that case, translation would not stand in the way of a return to a globally circulating medium, as was clear from the early worldwide popularity of Disney’s animated characters. If, however, cinema’s specificity was proclaimed to reside in its observational, ‘realist’ capacity, then the voice and the body, recorded though they may be by two different apparatuses, should retain some fundamental, contractual relationship of fidelity (to use a term shared by film studies and translation studies), a convention of realism. When thus a little girl opens her mouth and speaks Latin in a deep male voice, as famously happens in The Exorcist ( W. Friedkin 1973), we must on this understanding of cinema conclude that we are in the presence of Satan himself; or, as the French director Jean Renoir is supposed to have said, had dubbing been invented in the Middle Ages, its practitioners would have been burned as witches. If, however, the contract of realism is looser, whether on the model of other arts, such as magic, or puppet shows, or video games or accepted as a machine for novel (art) experiences, then voice replacement—which may or may not include language replacement— could be compatible with what cinema is. These divergent views about sound cinema’s principal appeal were in one way or another present in all the mediascapes in which it was embedded. Studying this situation from the vantage point of translation must therefore also include formats devised to reject, or more accurately to avoid ­translation—meaning, ​­ domestic films. To summarize the strategies of how the new forms of translation supplement were handled in the global cinematic system so that talkies could circulate worldwide, two broad trends emerge: either the mark of linguistic difference could remain apparent, or the trace of translation had to remain invisible. The first approach, accepting film in translation, meant exhibiting films with subtitles or dubbed, or in some combination in countries when a national exhibition policy allowed both ‘original versions’ (i.e. subtitled prints, where the original soundtrack was heard) and dubbed versions (e.g. in France and in Czechoslovakia), or mixed techniques of translation supplement, e.g. the voice-over spoken by a live or a recorded narrator alongside with or over the original language soundtrack ( Japan, Poland), or mixing dialogue and song scenes, as the early Indian sound cinema did ( Bhattacharya 2019: 60– 61). In any country that had any significant number of movie theatres but no powerful domestic film industry, one of these three strategies of exhibiting imports— dubbed, subtitled or screened with some mixed translation supplement—was unavoidable in order to secure a regular screening schedule. Which specific strategy would be adapted was dependent not on some spontaneous national ‘preference’. Rather, as Carol O’Sullivan usefully laid out, these decisions were to a high degree political, determined by an interplay of national language policies, the interests of local exhibitors and national distributors and the lobbying clout of the national film industry (O’Sullivan 2016). And, having been established by 1932– 1933, these policies then remained largely in place, gradually mutating into the vaunted national ‘ habitus’, in the process also shaping local or regional media ecosystem(s). Thus the high cost of dubbing tended to prime transborder film circulation, with the strength of one national identity diluting the other one (e.g. Farsi in Afghanistan ( Rekabtalaei 2019: 158–163), or, today, the Slovaks’ continued relationship with the Czechs ( Dabing Forum n.d.), or the dubbing of Mandarin-language dialogues into minority languages, which then expand beyond the borders of the People’s Republic of China (Gambier 2018)). Inversely, it is to the absence of dubbing and the presence of subtitles that so much of the world owes its pervasive absorption of American English, with considerable consequences ( Williams 2009). These are the conditions on the ground that histories of transnational or ‘world’ cinemas, as well as of individual national cinemas should study and describe. 284

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In some countries, however, no visible translation supplement in any form was accepted, for reasons that remain to a degree open to discussion and research. These are the cases when, in an early instance of what contemporary translation industry calls localization, all traces of a film’s foreign provenance from abroad or more generally, of motion pictures’ inherently global, circulating, nature were stripped, to attempt to make a film appear entirely domestic. One formula for this stripping took the format of the so- called foreign language versions ( FLVs). In this model, first devised in late 1928, a film was produced in more than one language version, either simultaneously (for instance by the German film giant UFA) or sequentially (first a Hollywood original, followed by ‘secondary’ versions in other languages). What translating there was thus occurred ahead of the production itself, on the level of the screenplay, with the ‘ foreign’ language version then shot following extremely closely the original mise en scène as well as editing. Shown unsubtitled and un- dubbed, the ‘versioned’ film was thus intended to be taken for a domestic original—which often happened, especially if the performers in the version were national stars ( Rossholm 2006). The other strategy of making the translation supplement invisible— and one central to understanding the concept of world cinema—was the production of remakes. A given in cinema’s medial ‘copying machine’, remakes are the most radical solution to the challenge of translation. With some important exceptions, the pre-filmic material has been stripped of the markers of its provenance and re-worked to rid it of the elements of the ‘ foreign’ film text deemed to be unsuitable for a given market. The reason for a remake can be strictly economic— a producer owns rights to material they deem reusable after a period of ‘cooling off’, or cultural— a producer acquires foreign material they consider reusable provided it can be culturally adapted for local acceptance, language included ( Rosewarne 2020). It is in the latter sense that remakes became an ideal strategy for Hollywood studios in the interwar years to refresh their source materials, pre-empt potential competition from imports and become more cosmopolitan, without incurring a domestic ‘translation penalty’ ( Vasey 1997; Moine 2007; Stegic 2014). Even while there still was a substantive fi rst-generation ethnic population in the United States comfortable with languages other than English, Hollywood’s policy of remakes preserved the American movie theatre as an English- only, translation-free zone, devoid of all trace of a foreign language, whether in the form of dubbing or subtitles—fenced in, to use Bong Joon-Ho’s phrase, by the same one-inch barrier that still surrounds the basic movie theatre in a US shopping mall in 2020 (Mowitt 2005). Some recent scholarship has, interestingly, drawn extensive parallels between the fundamental monolingualism, relative domestic isolationism, its strategy of using remakes to displace imports, strong dependency on exports and even ‘cultural imperialism’ of Hollywood and its main serious competitor, Bollywood, which vastly outperforms Hollywood in the number of films produced ( Hirji 2005; Lorenzen 2009; Shah 2012; UNESCO 2016). A parallel might further be the considerable influence of Hindi-language films circulating far outside of the Hindi-Urdu linguistic zone; here, however, in contrast to the ubiquitous pivot status of English, Hindi’s radical linguistic otherness brought with it the need for a wide range of transcreation strategies, as discussed further below ( Deshpande and Mazaj 2018: 135–157). ­ ​­ If the First World War had given American producers a global export advantage in the form of industrial consolidation and safe shipping lanes, the effect of the Second World War was the reverse: some Hollywood studios opened for the first time since the early 1930s dubbing studios on US soil to prepare for exporting US films, on behalf of Office of War Information, in the immediate wake of advancing US troops, deemed essential for capturing hearts and minds in Europe’s post-war rubble ( Encyclopedia 2020). And on the side of 285

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exhibition, the solidly monolingual environment of American movie landscape was cracked open by the New York success of Italian neorealist films in the immediate post-war years, often depicting precisely the Allies reconquering of Europe via Italy (Matsnews.blogspot. com 2015). This breach of the translation wall then set in motion a vigorous debate (still ongoing today) about the merits of subtitling vs dubbing for the American audiences, for which ‘ foreign’ had since the 1920s been made, in the US film trade discourse, equal to ‘art’—in the ideology of the entertainment industry the very antonym of ‘ fun’. When in the 1950s the break-up of exhibition monopolies and competition from TV began driving the US film industry into its next large- scale globalizing effort, via the so- called runaway productions ( Betz 2009; Steinhard 2019), Hollywood’s monolingual environment started to crack open as producers left California to shoot on cheaper locations overseas, most often in the Mediterranean, and indeed Italy in particular. Commingling American production machinery with select ‘ foreign’ talent, runaway productions yielded films unusually cosmopolitan in setting and cast, if fully Hollywood in terms of style and mode of production, opening thus doors for a new generation of non-Anglophone actors and directors into the Hollywood system. Here necessity yielded several translation apparatuses: first, the layer of multilingual labour needed for interpreting during a film’s production and post-production; second, the post-synchronization apparatus that made it possible to merge actors speaking ‘native’ English with actors speaking heavily accented English who had to be post-synchronized into standard English; and third, actors who spoke no English at all and were dubbed in the traditional manner ( Nornes 2007: 29– 65; Steinhard 2019). The heavy reliance on post-synchronized dialogue was one of the key features of the sub-genre of spaghetti Westerns cast by a roster of iconic international actors, whose signature music and sound effects offset the ‘ imperfect’ post-synchronization of the dialogue track— a production and distribution strategy Hong Kong martial arts films, beginning to circulate globally at roughly the same time, developed to its fullest as ‘dubbese-fu’ (Magnan-Park 2018). As if in response, Woody Allen’s notorious 1966 What’s Up, Tiger Lily? was composed of a Japanese gangster B-film image track dubbed by American English dialogue barely related to the plot and synchronized ‘dubbese-f u’ style, drawing the unacknowledged translation supplement into the American cinematic mainstream via a passageway of comedy/parody.

Towards new regimes of translation: cinema re-globalized As television, the medium of national domesticities, altered in the 1960s and 1970s cinema’s place in media ecology in an era of increased internationalization (Andrew 2009), dovetailing with resurgent globalization in 1990s, the impact of cinematic translation grew. That development might hypothetically be charted in two overlapping conceptual streams: on the one hand, translation yielded a new cross-medial supplement in that it could enrich a film through an additional expressive media layer— of a ( layered) voice track or (supplementary) writing; let’s call this turn ‘art’ or ‘provocation’. On the other hand, once the VHS tape in early 1980s broke the celluloid/light contract with a linguistically homogenous collective of viewers in a movie theatre, a pathway was opened towards cinema as an ever-more distributed, that is, ever more globalized, and therefore by necessity ever more localized form(at); ­ here language translation, broadly defined, is first among equals, alongside other forms of ­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ cultural and technological adaptation, in a regime of mass variability—‘same-but-different’ (Cronin 2013: 88– 89). The earlier ‘art’ stream encompasses the full range of translation phenomena brilliantly outlined and analysed by Tessa Dwyer (2017) under the umbrella term ‘screen errancy’. This 286

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neologism designates and even celebrates a stance, both in the making of screen translations ( by professionals as well as by fans/amateurs) and in the reception and encouragement of films in translation, i.e. as an open stance shared by filmmakers, fansubbers, exhibitors, on crowdsourced platforms. Expanding and modifying Markus Nornes’ classic polemic ‘toward an abusive subtitling’ ( Nornes 1999), Dwyer’s ‘errancy’ updates screen translation closer to the spirit of adaptation, circulation, play and openness, discarding the elusive and misused criterion of ‘fidelity’, i.e. equivalency only ( Dwyer 2017: 7). A prime example of this revisionist use of the translation supplement would be the full body of work of Jean-Luc Godard, but notably his 2010 Film socialisme, released with what the filmmaker called ‘Navajo subtitles’, and whose fragmented non-English fundamentally ‘abused’ the very idea of ‘ interpreting’. While the bulk of Dwyer’s examples comes from the late 1960s to the present 2010s, the age of movies re-globalized, her term ‘screen errancy’ also has a revisionist potential, revaluing the great variety of ways in which translation has allowed cinema to circulate from its beginning. On this view, graphic subtitles redesigned for different markets, titles projected on side screens, or the many varieties of lecturers, bonimenteurs, katsuben accompanying silent films were not simply ‘early’ forms waiting for the talkies’ perfected l ip- sync or perfectly compressed subtitles but are by the term ‘errancy’ granted a generalized value placed on aesthetics and ethics of difference, adaptability and transcreation. Precisely as a contrast to the invisibility effect that localization aims for, Dwyer’s ‘screen errancy’ tracks and highlights translation’s transformative potential. This proliferation towards creativity instead of towards fidelity has been especially productive when the need for translation accompanied the process of dubbing in the sense of ‘duping’ (to use a standard 1920s term), i.e. physical copying of support material, initially of the VHS magnetic tape and somewhat later digital files, e.g. CDRoms, DVDs and USB keys. This trend has been documented for instance in West (Adamu 2018: 159–160) and East Africa ( Krings 2010), where the necessary translation supplement ( between Hindi and Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba in Nigeria and Hindi and Kiswahili in eastern Africa, sometimes with English subtitling as a pivot language) was compounded by other region- specific barriers to circulation such as a significant gap between written and spoken modes of a given regional language, unrecoverable cost of dubbing or pervasive piracy/lack of IP enforcement. In these regional markets, the long- standing preference for Bollywood films then led beyond (unauthorized) physical duplication to ‘appropriation’ in the form of a wide range of local innovations of formal translation processes, e.g. various forms of acoustic and visual dubbing, narrative hybridization, sound overlays, or language mixing ( Luedi 2018). However, while technology made it possible for screen translation to proliferate in such open linguistic or rather, semiotic forms, it also laid the infrastructure for the opposite trend—that is, an ever greater coordination/consolidation of screen translation, on an industrial scale ( Díaz Cintas and Massidda 2019). To use translation studies terminology, if ‘errancy’ is a ­one-to-one ­​­­ ​­ screen translation process, closer to the cognitive and social labour of literary translation, the model for industrial translation, i.e. localization (understood broadly as adaptation of digital object for local uses and consumption of screen objects, delivered by language service providers ( LSPs), commonly supported by CAT tools, from translation memories to, increasingly, artificial intelligence) is ­one-to-many ( Pym 2006). In the industrial ­​­­ ​­ regimen, by contrast to the ‘errant’ translation aesthetic, the key criteria that apply for all digital products are equivalence, seriality, and efficiency/speed or ‘the triangle of good, fast and cheap’ (Carey n.d.). Subtitling may thus be done without seeing the film itself, often from a ‘master’/‘genesis’ file, which is most likely to be in English ( Díaz Cintas and Remael 2014: 36–37). 287

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Similarly, dubbing studios—which may be local or multinational— are no longer local but are centred regionally or globally ( Bhatt 2020; Netflix Post Partner Program 2020). In this production mode, language ( long used as a local asset to protect the target-language’s film industry) has been detached from its geographical/cultural/geopolitical base, the talkies’ initial asset of ‘ linguistic realism’ becoming like any other transferable skill, deployed to service content producers on global streaming platforms ( Roettgers 2018). While human judgement still plays a considerable role (Stojanov 2011), the practice of voice replacement in the widest sense is ontologically related to the increasing loss of cinema’s ‘realist’ dimension as it erodes in the digital environment (indeed, localization is especially studied in conjunction with video games). Again, the trend here echoes the transition phase of late 1920s- early 1930s, when post- synchronizing speech, especially for purposes of translation, was in the film-industrial production chain understood as related not only to sound recording but also to the development of special effects (Cornu 2014).

Conclusion Technological utopianism has long evangelized a future of ubiquitously present machine translation, repeating on a higher level what the ‘universal language’ of cinema was imagined to be a century ago ( Lehman-Wiltzig 2000). There is no question that either crowdsourced or ­automation-assisted, ​­ ­well-supported ​­ translation functions on cloud-based ­ ​­ distribution platforms, viewed on a proliferation of devices, regardless of the source and the target language have today made the world’s cinema rather more accessible in most parts of the world ( Deshpande and Mazaj 2018: 37– 69; Stam 2019: 75– 83). Concurrently, a debate has been ongoing in film studies for nearly two decades about whether the very idea of ‘cinema’ should be held on to in a ‘post- cinematic’, fully distributed phase (Åkervall 2018). An argument can be made that the textual manipulation introduced by the translation supplement, which inevitably entailed a commingling of graphic and sound layering, was one of the vanguard processes that prepared the way to cinema’s dis/integration into the flow of screen material consumed today worldwide. In that sense, then, translation is paradoxically one of the factors that will have thereby rendered the concept of ‘world cinema’ as an aesthetic category outdated, in the very long term at least: on your phone any film equals any other clip from any source, in effect all falling into the category of image enhanced with sound or text in any language. Meanwhile, however, in the current political economy of world cinema, relations of power will not disappear but will be redistributed and redefined as access to energy, bandwidth and attention. The most obvious and necessary area of further research in the overlap of translation and world cinema is archival. As the contributions in O’Sullivan and Cornu’s (2019) volume sketch out, locating, identifying and analysing the actual source m aterial—i.e. subtitled and dubbed film prints—poses a range of unique difficulties, analogue to the process of historical editing in literary studies, bearing on authorship, revisions, production and distribution. From a geopolitical perspective, meanwhile, mapping the circulation and exhibition of translated versions, authorized as well as informal, would produce a world atlas of films refining or perhaps even subverting box office statistics as well as accounts of stylistic influence.

Further reading Cornu, J.-F. ​­ (2014) ­ Le Doublage et le sous-titrage: histoire et esthétique. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. 288

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The most exhaustive account so far of technologies, techniques, practices and politics of translation from transition to sound through early 1950s, centred on France, with some attention to American and German practices. Deshpande, S. and Mazaj, M. (2018) World Cinema: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. A comprehensive approach to world cinemas, methodologically informed by translation’s refractive effect. Dwyer, T. (2017) Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. A theorization of the intervention any translation makes into screen material, developed to show the wide range of possible approaches to the process of translation, from subtitling and dubbing through crowdsourcing and its effects, e.g. piracy. Nornes, M. A. (2007) Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. The first English-language survey of the history of film translation, pivoting from a theoretical critique of conventional screen translation as ‘corrupt’, and with special attention to less- studied non- screen practices such as the labour and effects of translation during co-productions and at film festivals. O’Sullivan, C. and Cornu, J.-F. (2019) The Translation of Films 1900–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A pioneering collection of essays analysing issues in historical research, archival practices and film restoration.

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20 Translation and the globalization/ localization of news Claire Scammell

Introduction In the m id-n ineteenth century, the invention of the telegraph vastly accelerated the pace at which news could be transmitted internationally. A century later, the arrival of satellite communication exponentially increased the amount of news crossing national (and linguistic) borders. Given the long history of international news transmission, and that translation studies was first established as a scholarly discipline in the late 1970s, it is remarkable that news translation only emerged as a subarea of translation research in the m id-2000s. Early contributions have described the fundamental involvement of translation in a variety of journalistic practices, and in doing so have paved the way for research into a multitude of media contexts and phenomena. The continually evolving nature of the news media system (in particular the multiplication of platforms through which audiences receive visual/radio/written reporting on news events around the globe) and the continued non-attention to translation among practitioners, audiences and scholars outside of translation studies mean that there is an ongoing need for research that highlights and describes the involvement of translation in the production of news content. This chapter looks at how, in an era when audiences are immediately informed about (and impacted by) events in distant places, the translation practices of global news organizations shape what we know and understand about these events and places, in significant yet invisible ways. The first part describes the complex and crucial part played by translation as the interlingual element of the ‘news domestication’ process and highlights the dominant role of the global agencies as the main providers of news content. The second part reviews arguments for and against adopting the term localization, in place of translation, to describe its involvement in the news. The third part then examines the potential of translation in the news as a key tool of intercultural communication that can either hinder or facilitate the connections audiences make with culturally and geographically distant peoples and places.

Translation in the global news system The news translation literature, by virtue of the many different contexts examined (see Valdeón 2015 for an overview), underscores that whenever news is communicated across linguistic 293

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borders, an element of interlingual translation is necessarily involved. It also shows that journalistic translation practices – and thus what this element of translation looks like – can vary considerably across media and news organizations. Let us compare, for instance, the case of a news magazine that expressly publishes translations of news reports originating in a particular national press or language (for example, see Bani 2006; Franjié 2009) with the case of radio news bulletins in a multilingual country (van Rooyen 2018). In the example of the news magazines, translation occupies a primary and explicit role in the news production process. From the perspective of the researcher, there is a clear source language/text and a clear target language/text to study. In the example of the radio news bulletins, texts do exist in the form of the sources used by the journalists and the news bulletins read out on air, but the involvement of translation is far less clear-cut and may be relatively minor (if, for example, the bulletin comprises information sourced primarily but not exclusively in the broadcast language). A key finding of the emerging body of news translation research has been that the translation involved in news production is largely invisible. Bielsa (2007) describes it as ‘doubly invisible’, referring to the fact that translation is invisible both as a process and as a product. Examining the translation practices of Agence France-Presse (AFP), Reuters and Inter Press Service, she finds translation to be invisible as a process on the basis that (a) journalists do not consider their newswriting task to involve translation, and ( b) the agencies’ style guides do not treat translation as a distinct activity/process. In addition to being invisible in the newswriting process in this way, translation is found to be invisible in the ‘product’ as a result of the use of domesticating translation strategies ( Venuti 2008) which conceal the journalisttranslator’s intervention in the text. Bielsa’s findings are echoed by researchers who have studied translation practices in other news media contexts and language pairs. Examining the case of a television news station in Taiwan, Tsai (2012) finds that even the translators employed to perform the interlingual element of the news production process do not regard their task as translation: ‘all five senior TV news translators interviewed in this study agree that TV news translation is something other than translation as we understood the term’ (2012: 1076). Through ethnographic observation and interviews conducted at news agencies in Switzerland, Davier (2014: 9) finds a tendency for journalists to use the term ‘editing’ to refer to the interlingual element of their newswriting task, seeming to wish to ‘distance’ themselves from the activity of translation. Similarly, Wilke and Rosenberger (1994) report that ‘writers’ in Associated Press’ (AP) Frankfurt bureau, whose task is to translate content sourced from English-language news reports into German for AP’s German service, ‘deny that they are merely translators’ (1994: 422). Ethnographic methods, such as those used in the abovementioned studies, which allow the detailed examination of the translation process, require the collaboration of ( busy) journalists and are therefore uncommon in the literature. There is instead a significant body of research that uses textual analysis to examine news translation as a product. As a result, there are a greater number of accounts of the invisibility of translation in news products than in newswriting processes. Textual analyses involving a variety of news contexts and language pairs collectively identify a norm for domesticating news translation practices ( Holland 2013). This includes in the pair German-English in the German news magazine Der Spiegel (Schäffner 2005), Italian-English in the Italian news magazine Internazionale ( Bani 2006), Arabic-French in the French news magazine Courrier International (Franjié 2009) and FrenchEnglish in reporting by Reuters (Scammell 2018). The domestication norm has been described as necessary to the newswriting goal of clear and concise communication ( Bielsa and Bassnett 2009), with Bassnett (2005: 127) going as far as stating that ‘ foreignisation is detrimental to understanding’. 294

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As well as obscuring the fact that translation has occurred, the domesticating translation strategies described by researchers are part of a wider norm in operation in the globalized media system – the intra-lingual news ‘domestication’ process, as it is known in journalism studies, which involves tailoring foreign news information to meet the needs and expectations of domestic audiences. The term was first used in a paper by Gurevitch et al. (1991) who describe how domestication works to create culturally relevant content in the case of television news: This is accomplished, first, by casting far-away events in frameworks that render these events comprehensible, appealing and ‘relevant’ to domestic audiences; and second, by constructing the meanings of these events in ways that are compatible with the culture and the ‘dominant ideology’ of the societies they serve. (1991: 206) ­ In a paper examining international news flows, Clausen describes domestication as the ‘processes of making information comprehensible to audiences in a given culture’ (2004: 29), and later as ‘a process of framing: recognising, defining, selecting and organising news in a way judged to be appropriate for the intended audiences’ (2009: 132). Domestication is recognized in the journalism studies literature as a standard feature of globalized news (Cheesman and Nohl 2011). It is, however, at odds with accounts of news ‘ homogenization’ (MacGregor 2013). National media organizations publish news content aimed at national audiences but in doing so they rely heavily on content produced by a handful of global news agencies, namely AP, AFP and Reuters, who play an invisible role as ‘news wholesalers’ ( Boyd-Barrett 1997) providing news information to subscribers via newswires in multiple languages. The agencies produce ready-to-publish content that subscribers can reproduce in part or in full and in verbatim or edited form. In addition to text services, this includes photo and video content: ‘turn to any television news bulletin, and you are likely to see film footage that originated from, or was procured by, one of the three international news agencies’ (MacGregor 2013: 35). The dominance of the global news agencies, who are recognized as ‘agents’ of globalization ( Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 1998), has thereby led to the homogenization of news content ( Bielsa 2005; MacGregor 2013). In the context of budgetary restrictions, ‘ investing in international reportage can be perceived as a risky and costly strategy for news organisations’ (Gerodimos 2013: 484– 485). The result is a decline in original reporting, an increased reliance on news content provided by a few news providers and an ‘ever more homogenised news agenda’ ( Jukes 2013: 2). While globalization has increased the speed at which and the number of platforms through which audiences are accessing textual and visual reporting online (including via prolific portal news websites such as Yahoo! News and Google News), it has not led to a diversity of content. In analysis of online news, Paterson (2007: 63) finds that the only national news organization to fall into the category of producing ‘extensive international reporting’ is the BBC. MacGregor (2013: 44) observes a tendency for agency content to be published online in ‘unchanged’ rather than domesticated form, arguing that ‘when you scratch beneath the surface there is little more than clever presentation that conceals an absence of any original reporting’ (see Scammell 2018 for evidence in support of this finding). While the dominance of a handful of global news agencies seems to make the homogenization of global news in some form inevitable, the agencies also tailor content to their target audiences. However, rather than producing news stories for national audiences, the task of the agency journalist is to communicate news events in a way that is relevant and intelligible for 295

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all markets where the reporting language is spoken. Bielsa and Bassnett (2009) analyse agency news reporting in order to identify the intra-lingual editing practices that occur alongside interlingual translation when global news is tailored to different audiences. They categorize five types of ‘textual intervention’ changes. The interventions identified are those that a news story undergoes when it is reported for a new audience, whether that audience speaks a different language or not, for example, the removal of unnecessary information. Scholars examining how translation is involved in the repackaging of global news for national audiences have identified similar sets of modifications ( Kang 2007; Hernández Guerrero 2010; Schäffner 2012). These accounts describe a process of ‘recontextualization’ in which (interlingual) translation is obscured by the intra-lingual editing practices that occur alongside it. While there are cases of full texts being translated and published in another language – predominantly national news magazines (see, for instance, Schäffner 2005; Bani 2006; Franjié 2009) – research on translation in global media production typically involves pinpointing the interlingual aspects of a predominantly intra-l ingual process. Crucially, the intended result of this process, rather than a ‘translation’ in the traditional sense, is a new text ( Wilke and Rosenberger 1994; Orengo 2005; Bielsa 2007; Tsai 2012). This has led scholars writing on news translation to question if a different name is needed for their object of investigation, which is distinct in character from forms of translation that involve the translation of a singular source text and where loyalty to that source text (i.e. faithfully reproducing its content) is paramount. The closest the field has come to adopting a new label for news translation is Stetting’s ‘transediting’ (1989). While some scholars have found the term helpful (van Doorslaer 2009; Hernández Guerrero 2010; Lu and Chen 2011), others have raised objections ( Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Schäffner 2012). There is, on one hand, motivation to keep the word translation as part of efforts to highlight the involvement of translation in the news. On the other hand, there is motivation to abandon the term in order to find one that speaks to scholars outside of translation studies, who overlook the role of translation ( Bielsa 2016; Conway 2017; Schäffner 2017), and journalists themselves, who, as discussed earlier, tend not to recognize the interlingual element of their newswriting as translation. Valdeón’s (2018) analysis of articles published in the field of journalism studies finds that ‘ journalism researchers seem to view ‘translation’ as the literal inter-linguistic rendition of a foreign text, a process that tends to be rare in news production involving translation’ (2018: 258). Arguments have been made for widening the definition of translation in order to fit news translation and other cases that challenge the traditional conception of translation but that are forms of interlingual translation nonetheless ( Valdeón 2016). The next part of the chapter asks whether insisting upon the label ‘translation’ may be unproductive for news translation research, given that the forms of translation that occur in the global news system do not fit with the prevalent understanding of ‘translation’ among non- experts (including both news practitioners and consumers) and considers the potential usefulness of localization as an alternative. The case for adopting localization was first made by Orengo (2005) when news translation had only just emerged as an area of investigation; it is revisited below in the context of more recent debates and in light of parallels with a burgeoning localization industry where translation is one element of a process of adapting global products for national markets.

Approaching news translation as ‘localization’: arguments for and against The translation studies literature offers several definitions of localization. In a monograph dedicated to the subject, Pym (2004: 1) states: ‘ localization is the adaptation and translation 296

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of a text ( like a software programme) to suit a particular reception situation’ and dates the emergence of localization as a language industry to the 1990s (2004: xv). Its emergence can be seen as a response to the birth of the software localization industry a decade earlier (Cronin 2010: 135) and the demand this created for specialized language services to facilitate the global marketing of software products. Gambier’s definition below, coming 12 years after Pym’s, reflects developments in the conceptualization of localization both professionally and academically. Not least because it avoids the word text: Localization refers not only to the professional procedure of adapting content linguistically, culturally, and technically; it also is used more loosely to refer to the entire industry that has emerged around localization. (2016: 891) ­ Gambier’s (suitably) broad definition identifies three forms of transformation  – l inguistic, cultural and technical – that global products undergo in order to be sold in different markets. As part of his arguments in favour of the application of localization to the case of news translation, Orengo (2005: 175) underlines the need to view news as a ‘global product’ that ‘needs to be translated especially in order to be sold’. In news production, as in software localization, the goal is definitively a new product rather than a translation of a source text. Another parallel between the news media and localization industries is that they each respond to a demand, brought about by globalization, for the rapid and concurrent release of different language versions tailored to different markets ( Bielsa 2005). Gambier (2016: 891) describes how, in the localization industry – a ‘ highly competitive market’ – ‘software and hardware products with short shelf lives must be regularly and quickly updated and launched at the same time’. Similarly, in their efforts to be the first to break global news stories, the agencies publish different language versions of a story onto their newswires, produced by different journalists working simultaneously, as quickly as possible (newly sourced quotations and/or corrections are added in ‘update’ reports later). In both cases, the speed at which audiences across the globe have access to information in their own language creates the illusion that information can pass readily from one linguistic and cultural context to another, thus obscuring the crucial part played by translation in facilitating this process ( Bielsa 2005). However, while translation is not recognized as a distinct part of global news production, in the localization industry, the outsourcing of translation to specialist language localization agencies (or more generalist translation agencies) means that translation enjoys greater visibility. On the website of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA 2019), localization is defined as: the process of adapting a product or content to a specific locale or market. Translation is only one of several elements of the localization process […] The aim of localization is to give a product the look and feel of having been created specifically for a target market, no matter their language, culture, or location. Among the examples given of the other elements of the process are ‘adapting graphics to target markets’ and ‘modifying content to suit the tastes and consumption habits of other markets’. Even though translation occurs alongside other non-l inguistic adaptations, as it does in news production processes, these do not detract attention from the translation part. This is no doubt helped by the fact that the translation part is typically performed by language professionals advertising their services as translators or localization specialists. While this is 297

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not the case in a news translation context (as the translating is typically done by journalists), perhaps by insisting on parallels with the localization industry, and approaching the news production process as the localization of global news products, researchers can benefit from the clear identification of translation as part of the process. Existing uses of ‘ localization’ in the news translation literature tend to use the term as a synonym for what journalism scholars term news ‘domestication’ (see part 1) and, as such, do not have the effect of demarcating the part played by translation. Samuel-Azran et al. use localization to refer to the additional role journalists perform as cultural mediators when translating international news: For the journalist, in order to truly translate a story, the ‘message’ must be translated, more so than the actual text. As such, the text will have to be ‘ localized’ in order to make it relevant to the receiving culture. (2014: ­ 274) In this usage, localization involves translation, but also extends beyond translation to cultural adaptation. A similar meaning is attributed by Gambier (2016: 901), whose example of the localization of global news is US diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks being ‘distributed and explained to Spanish readers’. In this example, translation is necessarily involved in making the text accessible to Spanish readers, but the localization process additionally involves ‘explaining’ the content. In a paper that looks at the globalization of local news (in the case ​­ of the ­English-language publication Vietnam News), van Leeuwen (2006) also appears to use ‘ localization’ to describe what happens in the other direction, that is, what journalism studies describes as the ‘domestication’ of global news for local audiences. The above uses are consistent with Pym’s conception of the ‘ localization’ of foreign news: The foreign news we read in the local press can legitimately be seen as a localization of foreign-language texts, at some point transformed by the international agencies, and transformed in ways that go beyond endemic notions of translation. ­ (2004: 4) Davier (2017: 14), meanwhile, points to two important differences between software and news localization. The first of these distinctions relates to the multi-source nature of news reporting. Unlike in software localization, in a news context, there is not typically a single source text to translate. As Davier describes elsewhere (2014: 6), news agency reports are ‘patchworks of many different sources, many of which were originally in a different language’. The second distinction relates to the fact that the news agencies produce texts aimed at all speakers of a particular language around the globe, while in the localization industry, a separate version is produced for each m arket – for example, separate English versions for the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and any other country, India for example, where a large share of the market may require an English version. Related to the latter of Davier’s two distinctions, Károly (2018: 391) points to the ‘ highly heterogeneous’ nature of the global audiences addressed by the media. The news agencies respond to this heterogeneity by avoiding the use of language that does not travel well. For instance, the Reuters Handbook of Journalism advises journalists to ‘[a]void quotes in colloquial or parochial language not easily translated or understood in other countries’ (2014: 390). Certainly, as some scholars have observed (van Leeuwen 2006; Cheesman and Nohl 2011; Gambier 2016), local news stories must be globalized for a broad, global audience 298

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(typically by the global news agencies) and may later be localized ( by subscribing news organizations) for target readers in a particular country. However, this practice has parallels with ‘ internationalization’ in the localization industry, whereby local versions are preceded by an ‘ internationalized’ master (see Jiménez- Crespo, this volume). Moreover, Davier’s second distinction does not apply to the multitude of national news organizations around the globe, who produce reporting for readers in a specific country. ­One – ​­perhaps the ­strongest – ​­argument against adopting localization to describe translation in the news is that it can undermine efforts to expand the definition of translation. Since the ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies (see Snell-Hornby 2006 for a discussion), the focus of attention has moved away from literary translation and relationships of equivalence between source and target texts/segments to describing forms of translation in a wide variety of contexts. Social and cultural considerations have taken centre stage (Gambier 2016). As Gambier observes, the translation practices of journalists do not challenge the term as it is used today: ‘The transformations identified in news translation (e.g., restructuring the source text with a new focus, deleting and/or adding items, borrowing) are characteristic of translation more generally’ (2016: 901). In light of developments in the definition and use of the term translation, some scholars have argued that using other labels for news translation can be detrimental to understandings of translation itself (Schäffner 2012). Gambier (2016: 888) argues that the use of localization (and other labels) ‘can complicate the purview of the discipline’. Others, meanwhile, continue to argue that translation does not fit the case of news translation ( Tsai 2012). Yet, the fact that news translation research – despite having demonstrated the crucial part played by translation in global media flows – has so far failed to gain an audience beyond translation studies provides convincing grounds for relabelling the object of investigation in a way that fits with practitioners’ understandings of the interlingual element of the news production process. The final part of this chapter looks at the importance and potential of translation in the news as a tool of intercultural communication, and thus points to the need to increase awareness among media organizations of the responsibility their journalists hold as news translators.

The making of global connections through (translated) news Processes and agents of globalization, among those the media, have led to a cosmopolitan reality ( Beck 2006), in which audiences regularly come into contact with geographically distant cultures, whether or not they seek out this contact. Events in remote places impact audience members’ daily lives, meaning that along with access to global products and the opportunity to ‘armchair travel’ through film, television and internet channels comes the responsibility to engage with foreign cultural contexts. Global news offers an opportunity to do so, by providing a ‘window to the world’ ( Tuchman 1978: 1). Journalists assume the role of cultural mediator ( Beliveau et al. 2011; Bielsa 2016), responsible for making foreign realities intelligible to their target audiences, and thus determining what audiences see and understand of that world. Since translation necessarily involves interpretation (Gentzler and Tymoczko 2002: xvi; Conway 2017), those parts of the news story that originate in a foreign language are doubly mediated ( Hernando 1999; Hernández Guerrero 2010; Károly 2010). Translated versions of quotations authored by agency journalists are picked up and reproduced by subscribers (who rely on the agencies for quotation in particular) and become embedded in global news flows as fact. In addition, since new concepts enter languages and cultures via translation (Schäffner 299

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2000: 4), the global agencies, as the first to report on breaking news, are regularly responsible for defining and labelling new realities. The AP Stylebook known as the ‘ journalists’ bible’ (Cotter 2010: 192) is one formal medium through which terms used to describe foreign cultural realities enter the global media system. It is possible to observe this process on the @APStylebook Twitter handle. For example, a two-part Tweet on 1 September 2017 summarizes the significance of the Islamic festival Eid al-Adha and gives an English translation of ­ ​­ the name as its ‘meaning’: Muslims around the world are celebrating the Eid al-Adha holiday on Friday. (1/2) Meaning “Feast of Sacrifice,” it marks the willingness of the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham to Christians and Jews) to sacrifice his son. (2/2) The Spanish version of the AP Stylebook also has a dedicated Twitter handle (@AP_ManualEstilo), which regularly calls for terms originating in English – such as Black Friday, bitcoin and nugget (in the translation for ‘chicken nugget’) – to be kept in the original language. The English words do not require a translation since they enter the t arget-language system as the labels for existing (and therefore familiar) globalized cultural concepts. When journalists need to describe new, non-globalized realities originating in a foreign language, however, translation is more likely to be involved, particularly when the source and target languages and cultures are more distant from one another than the example of Spanish and English. Given the dominance of AFP, AP and Reuters, the responsibility of deciding how emerging global realities are defined and labelled is held above all by these agencies. National news organizations also play their part, either by attaching their own label, or by localizing the label attached by the agencies, but the wide reach of the news agencies means that their translations of foreign cultural concepts become embedded in the global media system and thus play an important part in determining how readers come to know and understand these realities. In their role as cultural mediators – which involves deciding both what information is relevant to the target audience, and how to make that information intelligible in the target language – journalists also hold the responsibility of shaping readers’ encounters with foreign cultures. Beliveau et al. (2011: 155) describe foreign correspondents as ‘empowering’ audiences by transmitting information across the ‘cultural border’. Within sociology, in the context of debates on globalization and cosmopolitanism, the need for national citizens to possess the cultural ‘competence’ (Hannerz 1990) to engage with geographically and culturally distant others is seen as necessitated by the fact that we are already living in a cosmopolitan world ( Beck 2006). Robertson (2010) underlines that the media have the potential to equip audiences with a cosmopolitan competence, but that this potential is not necessarily being fulfilled. Robertson’s account does not, however, address the part played by translation in either limiting or maximizing the extent to which audiences are empowered by their encounters with foreign cultures. Bielsa (2016) argues that translation in the news has the potential to facilitate global interconnectedness, but only through the use of foreignizing rather than domesticating translation strategies. Samuel-Azran et al. (2014) use a questionnaire to examine the impact of branding on US viewers’ perceptions of the credibility and professionalism of reporting by Al-Jazeera English. The study finds that when the network’s logo is removed from news items, its connection to the Arab world is still revealed by the pronunciation of Arab names, leading viewers to assign lower credibility and professionalism scores. The finding prompts the authors to ask: ‘where is the line in making news relatable to one culture while preserving the ideals and voice of the original?’ (2014: 282). They underline that overly domesticating 300

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translation practices would undermine the network’s aim of offering a non-Anglo-American news source, and the conflicting need to avoid foreignizing effects in order to be trusted by its target audience. In a critical examination of the role played by translators and translation studies scholars in a globalizing world, Tymoczko underlines that translation ‘obviously contributes to the ability of diverse people to understand each other, but it can also construct stereotypes, confirm and harden cultural oppositions, and inflame violence’ (2009: 187). At the same time as allowing audiences to come into contact with foreign cultures, the translation practised by journalists moderates that contact as part of the news domestication process, restricting the extent to which the experience of reading the news can equip readers with cosmopolitan competence. Herein lies a paradox of news translation today. Translation has enormous potential as a tool of intercultural communication in the news, but this potential is fundamentally limited by its primary aim – to communicate news information clearly and concisely across linguistic borders. While it may not be possible to resolve this paradox, researchers can hope to raise awareness of the yet unfulfilled potential of translation in terms of facilitating global connections. This can be an important step towards inviting media actors to re-examine their translation practices and to placing translation at the centre of interdisciplinary debates.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the part played by translation in the global news system. In the first part, it has highlighted complexities relating to translation in the news as an object of investigation – the multi- source characteristics of news texts, the lack of a source and target text, and the interrelated yet distinct uses of domestication in journalism and in translation studies. It has also, in this first part, underlined the dominant role of AP, AFP and Reuters as providers of (translated) news content that is widely reproduced by subscribers across the globe. The chapter’s second part has examined parallels between news production and the localization industry. From a perspective which views news texts as global products, it has asked if approaching news translation as localization may help translation studies researchers to engage practitioners and scholars outside of the discipline. The third and final part of the chapter has briefly discussed sociological debates related to the role of the media in promoting global awareness and pointed to the role played by translation in shaping audiences’ encounters with foreign realities. A common thread through these discussions is the challenge news translation researchers face in attracting the attention of scholars outside of the discipline. Given that translation is bound up in other intra-lingual newswriting practices, there is both significant scope for, and value in, interdisciplinary debate. The chapter has suggested that adopting localization may help to engage a non-expert audience, by making use of an existing and relevant concept that is better aligned with journalists’ (and therefore journalism researchers’) perceptions of the interlingual element of the newswriting task. For the same reason of terminological alignment, news translation researchers may find it productive to engage the concept of domestication, as it is used in journalism studies, rather than the alternative recontextualization generated in the literature, in order to highlight the significance of translation in news domestication processes, and of domesticating translation strategies. Among the findings of the news translation literature published to date, the chapter has highlighted the double invisibility of translation in the news. The invisibility of translation in newswriting processes reflects a lack of consciousness of translation on the part of practitioners, inviting research that directly engages journalists as an audience or as active participants. 301

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The invisibility of translation in global news products, connected to the norm for domesticating translation practices, has two implications of relevance to debates in journalism studies on news domestication more widely, and to sociological debates on cosmopolitanism and the media. First, the use of a domesticating approach means that readers’ interpretations of foreign realities are immediately limited by translations which prioritize communicating foreign-language information in terms that the reader will immediately recognize and understand. Second, a domesticating approach to translation obscures the journalist’s interlinguistic intervention in the text, and thus the aforementioned impact of the translation process on the reporting of global events and the local contexts they occur within. Contributions from translation studies can recognize the need for news content, as a global product, to undergo a process of domestication but also draw interdisciplinary attention to the impact of domesticating translations as part of this process. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the continually evolving global media landscape presents opportunities for research that specifies the involvement of translation in a multitude of developing news contexts. This includes, but is not limited to, research examining the involvement of translation in citizen journalism, news reported via social media platforms, and news content published on dedicated news websites, all of which reach global audiences. In the latter category, in addition to the websites of long- standing national newspapers (that may or may not still exist in print form – with potential for comparisons if they do), are portal websites (such as Yahoo! News and Google News) offering news content aggregated from other news providers, and so-called ‘viral’ news sites (such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy). In each of these contexts, the research can take either or both a text-based approach (where the reporting itself is examined) or an audience-based approach (where the reader’s experience of the reporting is the focus). The latter approach, despite gaining in popularity in the subarea of audiovisual translation (see di Giovanni and Gambier 2018), remains under-used in translation studies generally and thus presents opportunities for news translation scholars to contribute to methodological advancements in the discipline.

Further reading Bielsa, E. and Bassnett, S. (2009) Translation in Global News. London: Routledge. A detailed examination of the translation involved in the production of news by the global news agencies. Davier, L., van Doorslaer, L. and Schäffner, C. (eds.) (2018) Across Languages and Cultures, 19(2), ­ pp. 155–278. ­ ­ ​­ A special edition focused on methodological approaches to news translation research. Scammell, C. (2018) Translation Strategies in Global News: What Sarkozy Said in the Suburbs. Cham: Palgrave Pivot. A short monograph investigating the translation strategies employed by journalists when reporting foreign news events to home audiences. Valdeón, R. A. (2015) ‘Fifteen Years of Journalistic Translation Research and More’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 23(4), ­ pp. 634–662. ­ ­ ​­ A survey of the contributions made to the subarea of news translation research in its first 15 years.

References Bani, S. (2006) ‘An Analysis of Press Translation Process’, in Conway, K. and Bassnett, S. (eds.), Translation in Global News (Conference Proceedings). Warwick, UK: University of Warwick, pp. 35– 45. Bassnett, S. (2005) ‘Bringing the News Back Home: Strategies of Acculturation and Foreignisation’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 5(2), ­ pp. 120–130. ­ ­ ​­ 302

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Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Beliveau, R., Hahn, O. and Guido, I. (2011) ‘Foreign Correspondents as Mediators and Translators’, in Gross, P. and Kopper, G. G. (eds.), Understanding Foreign Correspondence: A Euro-American Perspective of Concepts, Methodologies, and Theories. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 129–163. Bielsa, E. (2005) ‘Globalisation and Translation: A Theoretical Approach’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 5(2), ­ pp. 131–144. ­ ­ ​­ Bielsa, E. (2007) ‘Translation in Global News Agencies’, Target, 19(1), ­ pp. 135–155. ­ ­ ​­ Bielsa, E. (2016) ‘News Translation: Global or Cosmopolitan Connections?’, Media, Culture and Society, 38(2), ­ pp. 196–211. ­ ­ ​­ Bielsa, E. and Bassnett, S. (2009) Translation in Global News. London: Routledge. ­ ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ ​­ Cheesman, T. and Nohl, A. M. (2011) ‘Many Voices, One BBC World Service? The 2008 US Elections, Gatekeeping and ­Trans-Editing’, ​­ ­ pp. 217–233. ­ ­ ​­ Journalism, 12(2), Clausen, L. (2004) ‘Localizing the Global: “Domestication” Processes in International News Production’, Media, Culture and Society, 26(1), ­ pp. 25–44. ­ ­ ​­ Clausen, L. (2009) ‘International News Flow’, in Allan, S. (ed.), The Routledge Companion to News and ­ ­ ​­ Journalism. London: Routledge, pp. 127–136. Conway, K. (2017) ‘Encoding/ Decoding as Translation’, International Journal of Communication, 11, ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ pp. 710–727. Available online: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5922/1928 [Accessed 4 July 2018]. Cotter, C. (2010) News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge ­University Press. Cronin, M. (2010) ‘Globalization and Translation’, in van Doorslaer, L. and Gambier, Y. (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 134–140. ­ ­ ​­ Davier, L. (2014) ‘The Paradoxical Invisibility of Translation in the Highly Multilingual Context of News Agencies’, Global Media and Communication, 10(1), ­ pp. 53–72. ­ ­ ​­ Davier, L. (2017) Les enjeux de la traduction dans les agences de presse. Presses Universitaires de Septentrion. di Giovanni, E. and Gambier, Y. (eds.) (2018) Reception Studies and Audiovisual Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Franjié, L. (2009) ‘Quand la traduction devient un moyen de communication orientée: le cas du Courrier International pendant la guerre du Liban de 2006’, in Guidère, M. (ed.), Traduction et communi­ ­ ​­ cation orientée. Paris: Le Manuscrit, pp. 61–86. GALA. (2019) What Is Localization? Available online: https://www.gala-global.org/industry/intro­ ­ ​­ ­ ­­ ­​ ­ ­­ ​­ ­­ ​­ language-industry/what-localization [Accessed 10 June 2019]. Gambier, Y. (2016) ‘Rapid and Radical Changes in Translation and Translation Studies’, International Journal of Communication, 10, pp. 887–906. Available online: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/ ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ view/3824 [Accessed 4 July 2018]. Gentzler, E. and Tymoczko, M. (2002) Translation and Power. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gerodimos, R. (2013) ‘Global News, Global Challenges’, in Fowler-Watt, K. and Allan, S. (eds.), Journalism: New Challenges. Bournemouth, UK: Bournemouth University, Centre for Journalism & Communication Research, pp. 476–498. ­ ­ ​­ Gurevitch, M., Levy, M. R. and Roeh, I. (1991) ‘The Global Newsroom: Convergences and Diversities in the Globalisation of Television News’, in Dahlgren, P. and Sparks, C. (eds.), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere in the New Media Age. London: Routledge, pp. 195–216. ­ ­ ​­ Hannerz, U. (1990) ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture  & Society, 7, pp. 237–251. ­ ­ ​­ Hernández Guerrero, M. J. (2010) ‘Translated Interviews in Printed Media  – A Case Study of the Spanish Daily El Mundo’, Across Languages and Cultures, 11(2), ­ pp. 217–232. ­ ­ ​­ Hernando, B. M. (1999) ‘Traducción y periodismo o el doble y misterioso escepticismo’, Estudios sobre el mensaje periodístico, 5, pp. 129–141. ­ ­ ​­ Holland, R. (2013) ‘News Translation’, in Millan, C. and Bartrina, F. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 332–346. ­ ­ ​­ 303

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Jukes, S. (2013) ‘A Perfect Storm’, in Fowler-Watt, K. and Allan, S. (eds.), Journalism: New Challenges. Bournemouth, UK: Bournemouth University, Centre for Journalism & Communication Research, ­ ­ ​­ pp. 1–18. Kang, J.-H. (2007) ‘Recontextualization of News Discourse: A Case Study of Translation of News Discourse on North Korea’, The Translator, 13(2), ­ pp. 219–242. ­ ­ ​­ Károly, K. (2010) ‘News Discourse in Translation: Topical Structure and News Content in the Analytical ­ pp. 884–908. ­ ­ ​­ News Article’, Meta: Translators’ Journal, 57(4), Károly, K. (2018) ‘Media and Translation’, in Cotter, C. and Perrin, D. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 388–402. ­ ­ ​­ Lu, G.-H. and Chen. Y.- M. (2011) ‘The Mediation of Reader Involvement in Soft News Transediting’, ­ pp. 48–66. ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ Available online: http://www.trans-int.org/index.php/ Translation and Interpreting, 3(2), transint/article/view/148 [Accessed 4 July 2018]. MacGregor, P. (2013) ‘International News Agencies: Global Eyes that Never Blink’, in Fowler-Watt, K. and Allan, S. (eds.), Journalism: New Challenges. Bournemouth, UK: Bournemouth University, ­ ­ ​­ Centre for Journalism & Communication Research, pp. 35–63. Orengo, A. (2005) ‘Localising News: Translation and the “Global-National” Dichotomy’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 5(2), ­ pp. 168–187. ­ ­ ​­ Paterson, C. (2007) ‘International News on the Internet: Why More Is Less’, Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics, 4(1/2), ­ ­ pp. 57–66. ­ ­ ​­ Available online: http://www.communication ­ ethics.net/journal/v4n1-2/v4n1-2_12.pdf ­ ­­ ​­ ­­ ​­ [Accessed 4 July 2018]. Pym, A. (2004) The Moving Text: Localization, Translation, and Distribution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Reuters. (2014) ­ A Handbook of Reuters Journalism. Available online: http://handbook.reuters.com/ index.php?title=Main_Page. [Accessed 2 October 2014]. Robertson, A. (2010) Mediated Cosmopolitanism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. ­ ­ ­ ​­ Scammell, C. (2018) Translation Strategies in Global News: What Sarkozy Said in the Suburbs. Cham: Palgrave Pivot. Schäffner, C. (ed.) (2000) ‘Introduction: Globalisation, Communication, Translation’, in Translation in the Global Village. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 1–10. ­ ­ ​­ Schäffner, C. (2005) ‘Bringing a German Voice to English- speaking Readers: Spiegel International’, ­ pp. 154–167. ­ ­ ​­ Language and Intercultural Communication, 5(2), ­ pp. 866–883. ­ ­ ​­ Schäffner, C. (2012) ‘Rethinking Transediting’, Meta: Translators’ Journal, 57(4), Schäffner, C. (2017) ‘Language, Interpreting, and Translation in the News Media’, in Malmkjær, K. (ed.), ­ ­ ­ ​­ The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 327–341. ­Snell-Hornby, ​­ M. (2006) ­ The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Stetting, K. (1989) ‘Transediting. A New Term for Coping with the Grey Area between Editing and Translating’, in Caie, G., Haastrup, K., Jakobsen, A. L., Nielsen, A. L., Sevaldsen, J., Specht, H. and Zettersten, A. (eds.), Proceedings from the Fourth Nordic Conference for English Studies. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, pp. 371–382. ­ ­ ​­ Tsai, C. (2012) ‘Television News Translation in the Era of Market- d riven Journalism’, Meta: Translators’ Journal, 57(4), ­ pp. 1060–1080. ­ ­ ​­ Tuchman, G. (1978) Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: The Free Press. Tymoczko, M. (2009) ‘Translation, Ethics and Ideology in a Violent Globalizing World’, in Bielsa, E. and Hughes, C. W. (eds.), Globalization, Political Violence and Translation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 171–194. ­ ­ ​­ Valdeón, R. A. (2015) ‘Fifteen Years of Journalistic Translation Research and More’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 23(4), ­ pp. 634–662. ­ ­ ​­ Valdeón, R. A. (2016) ‘The Construction of National Images through News Translation: Self-Framing in El País English Edition’, in van Doorslaer, L., Flynn, P. and Leerssen, J. (eds.), Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 219–237. ­ ­ ​­ Valdeón, R. A. (2018) ‘On the Use of the Term “Translation” in Journalism Studies’, Journalism, 19(2), ­ ­ ­ ​­ pp. 252–269. van Doorslaer, L. (2009) ‘How Language and ( Non-)Translation Impact on Media Newsrooms: The Case of Newspapers in Belgium’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 17(2), ­ pp. 83–92. ­ ­ ​­ 304

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van Leeuwen, T. (2006) ‘Translation, Adaptation, Globalization: The Vietnam News’, Journalism, 7(2), ­ pp. 217–237. ­ ­ ​­ van Rooyen, M. (2018) ‘Investigating Translation Flows: Community Radio News in South Africa’, Across Languages and Cultures, 19(2), ­ pp. 259–278. ­ ­ ​­ 
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21 Museums as translation zones Robert Neather

Introduction Museums are important sites of cultural representation in which translation plays a crucial part. Translation here may be understood as both cultural translation and interlingual translation. This distinction is neatly captured in the idea of ‘museums as translations’ versus ‘translations in the museum’ (Sturge 2007), a formulation that echoes the similar distinction made between ‘museums as texts’ and ‘texts in the museum’ ( Ravelli 2006). In the first sense, all museums, whatever publics they engage with, may be said to be involved in an act of translation, a representation and refraction of culture in which as Bennett (discussed in Hall 2006) reminds us, the viewer’s access to knowledge is always mediated. In the second, more specific sense of translation, interlingual translations of texts in the museum space work together to construct this cultural translation through a complex multi-semiotic interaction with objects, visuals and secondary signifiers such as lighting. In addition, the museum environment is also characterized by intralingual translation, involving intertextual reworkings of similar information across texts. These differing levels of translation apply when we consider the notion of museums as translation zones: translation may take place at the level of cultural representation, or of textual translation. The term ‘translation zone’ is derived from the idea of the ‘contact zone’, first proposed by Marie Louise Pratt and subsequently developed by Clifford (1997). Clifford’s work, in particular his chapter ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, has led to a significant amount of theorization regarding the museum as contact zone and the nature of ‘contact work’ in the museum, in such aspects as community inclusion in the planning of exhibitions, ritual access to objects in the museum by indigenous communities, and repatriation of objects acquired under colonial rule. Of particular interest for Clifford is the way that ‘asymmetrical power relationships’ (1997: 194) between colonizers and colonized can be addressed through attempts at building reciprocity. A case in point is that of the Northwest Coast Indian collection of the Portland Museum of Art. In an attempt to foster reciprocity and inclusion, a group of Tlingit elders were invited to the museum, where they sat with museum professionals, handling and talking about objects in the museum’s possession that were originally part of the Tlingit cultural patrimony. Such encounters may be viewed as cases of cultural translation in action, 306

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but they also frequently include specifically interlingual activity. Thus in the Tlingit case, the elders were ‘accompanied by a couple of younger Tlingit translators’ (1997: 188). As Sturge (2007: 164) notes, the museum in this conception thus becomes ‘a space where different languages meet and struggle to be heard’. In such a case, then, the museum is both contact zone and translation zone: the latter is an inextricable part of the former. Or as Simon (2013: 181) observes, ‘Translation is logically one of the major activities in the contact zone’. If the term ‘translation zone’ clearly shares considerable overlap – in some instances even identity – with that of ‘contact zone’, translation studies scholars have developed the term to denote a more specifically cross-l inguistic intercultural interaction. Such zones have been described as ‘areas of intense interaction across languages, spaces defined by an acute consciousness of cultural negotiations’ (Cronin and Simon 2014: 182), or by ‘a relentless toand-fro of language, […] by the kinds of polymorphous translation practices characteristic of multilingual milieus’ (Simon 2013: 181). Cities are one such space that has been extensively approached through the lens of the translation zone (e.g. Cronin and Simon 2014, and contributions to their special issue of Translation Studies), while more recently the term has been extended to spaces such as the theatre, as in Marinetti (2018: 19), who explores ‘the way in which multiple languages on the stage interact with the performing body of the actor’. The term has also been used beyond the Translation Studies discipline, as by Rantisi and Leslie (2015), who analyse the performance company Cirque du Soleil as a translation zone, but drawing on an Actor Network Theory understanding of translation, in which the zone becomes ‘an open and unbounded space that accommodates fluid exchanges between actants’ (147). In addition to contact zone and translation zone, it is worth rehearsing a third term, developed in detail by Onciul (2015), namely ‘engagement zone’. Onciul proposes diagrammatic models for how engagement works differently depending on whether the museum is ­community-run ​­ rather than ­non-community-run. ­​­­ ​­ Several points in Onciul’s models are useful for our thinking about forms of contact – or translation – in the museum. First, Onciul ­ ­­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ introduces the distinction, borrowed from Shryock (2004) of ‘off-stage’ (behind-the-scenes) work that is not publicly visible and ‘on-stage’ representations that are publicly presented in the final exhibition. Community engagement occurs as an off- stage activity, for instance in the course of consulting with source communities. Second, institution, community and audience overlap in various ways. In community-r un museums, the institutional practices of the museum are embedded within the community in question, where in non- communityr un museums they are separate. Likewise, the community, whether engaged or not in the exhibition planning process, will also overlap with the audience, though not fully: a significant tranche of visitors will be from outside the community in question. Third, the engagement zone is not the same as the whole museum: rather, in Onciul’s conceptualization, only those exhibitions or other activities of the museum that were generated through off- stage community engagement belong to the engagement zone. This last point reminds us as to the level of interaction under consideration: exhibition or museum level. For present purposes we may still argue that the whole museum is an engagement (or contact) zone, whether or not the off- stage processes have involved engagement, if we extend the conception of engagement to involve the on-stage engagement of the broader visiting public with a given community or culture through the exhibition. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that for most analysis, the unit is the exhibition. When considering museums as translation zones, then, we need to take in a whole range of different activities that encompass both off-stage and on- stage aspects of cultural interaction and translation: from ethnographic exchanges between museum professionals and indigenous peoples (whether involving interlingual translation or not), to attempts at encouraging 307

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inclusivity in multicultural societies and at representing the experience of minorities more sensitively, to catering for different foreign language audiences during the museum visit through the provision of adequate multilingual explanatory resources such as labels. These different exchanges are, in turn, underpinned by a series of considerations that include the following: cross-cultural differences in attitudes to objects and collecting; differing ‘museum epistemologies’, i.e. understandings as to how knowledge should be produced and presented in the museum (Guillot 2014); the perceived purpose of particular museums; the type of museum involved (e.g. national or local?), and the particular space in which a visit takes place – for example, does the museum take the form of a heritage site such as a castle or temple, a memorial site, or a historic house? Again, how can one reconcile the potential need to incorporate different narratives and voices across different languages in the museum space, for different visitor groups? Moreover, these issues must increasingly be considered in the context of globalization, a context that raises further questions which include, amongst others: how museums respond to the demands of the global heritage tourism industry, how they negotiate ‘the tensions and paradoxes between simultaneous homogenizing and differentiating tendencies’ ( Rectanus 2006/2011: 382), for instance in the representation of knowledge within the museum space, and how they translate the local into the global or vice versa.

Contact, community and inclusivity in the museum: processes of ­ ­off-stage ​­ ‘translation’ Traditional representational practices in the museum have tended to involve the construction of a unified message over which the curator has authority, a didacticism which has its roots in the beginnings of the modern museum in the nineteenth century. As Hall, discussing Bennett, notes, the modern museum functioned as a technology of social regulation ‘ by promoting a public morality of education and improvement’ ( Hall 2006: 74) as part of what Bennett styles the ‘exhibitionary complex’. Such curatorial didacticism can still be found in museums today, and as Bennett elaborates: The challenge now is to reinvent the museum as an institution that can orchestrate new relations and perceptions of difference that both break free from the hierarchically organized forms of stigmatic othering that characterized the exhibitionary complex and provide more socially invigorating and, from a civic perspective, more beneficial interfaces between different cultures. (Bennett 2006: 59) In this vein, contemporary museum practice and research have increasingly been preoccupied with the question of community engagement and the establishment of new relationships that seek to break down the traditional institutional power structures of the museum and recognize a multiplicity of alternative interpretations. Hooper- Greenhill (2000) refers to this more community- oriented, pluralistic museum environment as the ‘post-museum’. Collaboration has increasingly been viewed as central to such community engagement, to the extent that Karp and Kratz (2015: 281) observe a ‘collaborative turn in museum and heritage practice’. In its introduction of difference into the dynamics of the museum, collaboration, they note, can be an important way to destabilize traditional categories underpinning museum representation, for instance by forcing us to reconsider established ontological and epistemological conceptions surrounding objects: i.e. what they are, what they mean and how we can construct knowledge from them through display (2015: 288–289). This leads us beyond even 308

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the notion of the post-museum, to one in which the questioning of our preconceptions is at the core: the ‘ interrogative museum’, where exhibits are presented as ‘essentially contested, debatable’ (ibid.: 281). Such a destabilizing is not always appreciated by museum visitors expecting a more traditionally unified curatorial message. The introduction of this more provisional approach to exhibitionary practice, in which everything is open to question, necessarily entails dialogue: questions invite possible answers, which, in turn, invite further counter-responses. In this way, museum exhibition becomes less about the presentation of a finalized message than an invitation to take part in an ongoing process of cultural engagement, a conception encapsulated in the title of Silverman’s (2015) ­ volume Museum as Process, to which Karp and Kratz’s work provides the conclusion. This importance of the processual in intercultural encounters within the museum milieu is echoed by Bennett (2006: 62), who speaks of moving beyond ‘diversity as a possession’ (that is, something that can be instantiated through presentation of a collection informed by a ‘controlling ethnographic gaze’ (2006: 61)) to ‘an ongoing process of intercultural dialogue’. Bodo’s (2012) notion of the museum as an ‘ intercultural space’ similarly stresses the dialogic, participative and dynamic nature of intercultural understanding, in which the third space of the contact zone invites the questioning of preconceptions in an open-minded encounter with the other. A particularly interesting example of the processual nature of intercultural interaction in the museum, and one that brings the above into a more interlingual frame, is discussed by Cimoli (2014, 2015), who documents the presentation of immigration as a theme in Italian museums, as well as examining how such museums seek to engage with a population whose demographic is changing through the arrival of an increased number of immigrants from the Middle East and elsewhere. Cimoli (2014: 85) identifies a shift from an emphasis on multiculturalism to interculturalism, i.e. from the simple co-existence of different cultural groups in Italian society to ‘an active attitude […] in which shared spaces, languages and horizons are creatively sought by all the actors concerned’, and in which interlingual translation therefore serves what Simon (2013: 184) calls a ‘ furthering’ effect, facilitating the interchange and cross-fertilization of cultures and languages within the translation zone. Various techniques are employed, including storytelling and autobiographical approaches to the interpretation of certain works by migrant- origin mediators who are trained to ‘translate’ the exhibition ‘not only linguistically but also culturally, for a specific community, by discovering common elements and shared features’ (Cimoli 2014: 94). Contact work such as collaboration with museum stakeholder communities can often be a messy business, involving the challenging of cultural and epistemological assumptions, the questioning of existing power relations, and the cultivation of an openness to negotiation and hybridity. The unease that can arise from such a process may be felt by both sides of the collaboration  – museum professionals and the members of the particular community in question – as well as by the broader visiting public. Lynch cites several examples of how ‘consultation’ with stakeholder communities can easily degenerate into a box-ticking diversity exercise that seeks to give legitimacy to the resultant exhibition, while only offering ‘empowerment-l ite’ (2014: 70) to the community involved. A case in point is the 2007 Bicentenary of Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, where black communities were brought in for consultation in a last-m inute fashion after the main messages, design and objects for the exhibition had already been decided by museum staff. In a second case, the Manchester Museum established a Collective Conversations programme housed in a space explicitly labelled ‘Contact Zone’, a means to try and give physical form to Clifford’s ideal. While the programme was award-winning and innovative in its involvement of refugee (e.g. 309

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Somali) communities in dialogue, it nevertheless was limited in the scope it offered for genuine contestation of museum authority: Lynch observes how participants quickly ‘ learn[ed] the prohibitive culture of the museum’ and where curatorial authority was contested, the museum exerted a ‘subtle but concerted effort to regain control’ (ibid: 72). This issue of ‘empowerment-lite’ (or as Lynch also describes it, ‘participation-lite’), or alternatively the sense of over-zealous pursuit of community engagement, is evident in various cases where the community has, so to speak, bitten back. Karp and Kratz (2015: 287) highlight the issue of resistance, a theme that runs through a number of case studies. Lynch (2014: 71), for instance, cites the experiences of a curator at Hackney Museum in East London, in which there was a furious backlash on the part of certain community members, who experienced ‘weariness, … disappointment, [and] frustration’ with the consultation process. A similar situation is highlighted by Johansson (2014: 127), who discusses the case of the Rosengård Project, an attempt by Malmö Museums (the body responsible for overseeing museums in Malmö) to plan and deliver exhibitions in collaboration with the district of Rosengård, a community comprised of 80% immigrants. While museum staff saw themselves as helping the community and giving the residents a voice, they encountered ‘project exhaustion’ and a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the adult inhabitants, which meant the whole project had to be reconfigured through engagement with schools. As Johansson notes, while there were subsequently positive outcomes in terms of improving the negative image of the district in question, ‘ its limitations with respect to unequal power relations within the contact zone’ (ibid.: 128) were clear. Such questions of empowerment are particularly prominent in ‘settler societies’ such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which have seen concerted efforts in the museum milieu – partly driven by national policies (e.g. McCarthy 2011/2016: 6; Nettelbeck 2012: 46) – to redress power imbalances, for instance in what constitute accepted national narratives and how objects are treated. McCarthy, for instance, notes a ‘growing Māori impatience with the compromises of biculturalism, having to balance Māori and Pākehā [i.e. white European] cultures within a bicameral national framework’ (2018: 46), notwithstanding the significant steps taken in New Zealand museums such as the Te Papa Tongarewa museum, towards inclusion of the Māori community. Onciul similarly discusses problems in the representation and involvement of First Nation peoples in Canadian museums. She notes that while engagement can take many forms, ‘none of [these] solve the problems associated with representing complex, multifaceted communities’ (2015: 71). Developing the idea of the ‘engagement zone’ as a means to map these complexities, her work also calls for a greater indigenization of museum practice, a call echoed by McCarthy, who advocates a ‘Māori museology’. As mentioned earlier, the results of collaboration in the museum contact zone can sometimes be controversial in their questioning of existing sanctioned interpretations, or can be confusing to readers expecting a ‘safer’ or more traditional exhibitionary epistemology. Again, ‘settler societies’ are a particular case in point. A frequently cited case is the National Museum of Australia ( Bennett 2006; Nettelbeck 2012), which included a ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit dealing with the dispossession of indigenous communities by white settlers. Claims were made by Conservative historians that in taking an indigenous perspective, the museum was giving excessive credence to aboriginal oral history and institutionally sanctioning ‘an undocumented myth lacking in historical verification’ ( Nettelbeck 2012: 47), a dichotomy that Bennett (2006: 60) frames in terms of ‘mediating the relations between the authority of memory and that of documented history’. The museum’s aim had been to present ‘the national story as “a dynamic forum for discussion and reflection”’ ( Nettelbeck 2012: 47); yet the presentation of diverse and alternative perspectives may be seen as undermining 310

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the narrative cohesion that many visitors – and indeed critics – m ight expect from a national museum. Similar problems have arisen in the extensively researched Te Papa Tongarewa museum in New Zealand and the Canadian Museum of Civilization ( Nettelbeck 2012).

Language, translation and representation: on-stage issues Having considered how broad issues of intercultural contact and community engagement shape the conception and work of the museum as a contact zone, particularly in the ‘off- stage’ process, we now turn to examine more specific questions of how language and interlingual translation work within the museum to shape representation and facilitate intercultural contact ‘on- stage’, that is, how they operate in the domain of public consumption, whether that viewing public includes members of the community involved in and represented by the contact work undertaken, or whether they are members of the broader public. The museum environment may be viewed as a multi- semiotic milieu in which different sets of resources – what Whitehead (2012) calls ‘registers’ – interact with the objects displayed to produce meaning. The first of these is the ‘verbal register’, which comprises the various forms of interpretive texts available, from wall panels to individual labels, to non- displayed texts such as audio guides and the oral explanations delivered by museum docents (see Dean 1994 for one influential typology). In a given exhibition, such texts can be conceptualized as working together to form a ‘m acro-genre’ ( Ravelli 2006), in which different texts within and across different sections of an exhibition complement each other to deliver the exhibition’s central message. A common aspect of textual construction in the exhibition space is what Neather (2012a) styles ‘ intergeneric intertextuality’: various forms of repetition and cross-reference are used to create texts that echo and reinforce one another. The second of Whitehead’s registers is the ‘environmental register’, and denotes other, non-verbal resources such as lighting and spatial layout, and even aspects such as the colour of given walls in the exhibition space. To this, we may also add visual resources such as pictures and diagrams, which provide further interpretive framing. Both the verbal and environmental registers are curatorially controlled. Finally there is what Whitehead terms the ‘experiential register’, which is, by contrast, visitor- controlled. This includes an extensive range of elements that influence how – and whether – the curatorially controlled registers are received and consumed, and thus, Whitehead argues, this is the most important influence on meaning making in the museum. These elements include the cultural capital of the visitor, their existing level of subject knowledge and the extent of their pre-v isit preparation, but also such seemingly trivial or random factors as how much time the visitor has, whether the visit is made alone or with children in tow and whether an available toilet can be found. Also of importance here are the extent to which the broader accessibility needs of the visitor are catered for, e.g. whether audio- description ( Perego 2019) is available. When considered in a bilingual or multilingual environment, the interaction of verbal and environmental registers becomes increasingly complex. In addition to a whole Source Text system, we now have one or more Target Text systems, whose inclusion entails several considerations. First, there is the question of available space. If, for example, two, three or more languages are to be included on a wall panel, this necessarily imposes physical restrictions on what can be said. There is also the additional spatial factor that some languages translate to very different physical lengths on the page: Chinese, for example, is spatially highly compact, but its English translation will take considerably more space. In the case of the Chinese/English pair, this frequently raises questions as to what material can or should be cut in the English translation. Neather (2008) observes that one approach may be to cut 311

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material that is perceived as already ‘visually available’: where a teapot in Hong Kong’s Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware has a pattern that obviously features flowers and birds, the translator has cut that from the English translation (where it is present in the Chinese source). Equally, in the same museum, where another teapot is described as being modelled on an ancient drum, this is retained in translation as this aspect of the design is visually unavailable to all but the most specialist viewer. The intertextual nature of the Source and Target Text systems provides another way of handling the cutting of information, allowing the reprioritization of information across different textual resources. Neather (2012a) provides a detailed account of how information is reapportioned in a display in Wuhan Municipal Museum presenting the famous nineteenth- century official Lin Zexu, whose role in destroying opium during the Opium War has made him a national hero. Material in the Chinese label, such as the name of Lin’s treatise on prohibition, is excised from the English, but it is made available in the optional audio guide for those who wish for additional information. Spatial restrictions are only one reason for presentational differences in the verbal register. Others range from the practical to the ideological. On the practical side, limitations on financial resources are one key problem, coupled with perceptions as to how necessary it may be to have a translation, and the extent to which a qualified translator can be found. Neather (2012b), in a survey of museum curators in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou, finds that funds may sometimes not be available, or that translation may be seen as an afterthought that is not factored into the overall planning process, and thus deprioritized as of limited importance. Likewise, anxieties over the accuracy of translation output may lead to simplified translations or simply a provision of minimal text, thus giving foreign language visitors insufficient information to decode the cultural significance of the objects on view. The simultaneous presence of both Source and Target Texts also raises the question of how audiences from two (or more) different linguacultural groups are addressed within the same physical space and in relation to the same objects. A particularly interesting area for examining interlingual adjustments (or the effects of their absence) is memorial museums or heritage sites of importance for the collective memory of the Source Culture. Neather (2012c) examines the case of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou, which commemorates a key figure in modern Chinese history. Sun is interesting since he is regarded as the ‘ father of the nation’ by both the communist People’s Republic of China ( PRC) and the nationalist Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan). Drawing on House’s (1976) model of translation quality assessment, analysis of certain texts in the exhibition housed within the Hall reveals some attempt to tone down the revolutionary hyperbole of the Source Texts, perhaps in an effort not to alienate foreign readers. Nevertheless, in its retaining of the Source Text’s ‘we’orientation (e.g. ‘… will help us recall Sun Yat- sen’s glorious course of revolution’), the Target Text acts, in Nord’s terms, more as a documentary translation than an instrumental one, documenting the Source Culture’s mode of address to Source Culture visitors rather than addressing Target readers directly in a presentational idiom adjusted to their own needs. The approach is a common exhibitionary tactic in Mainland Chinese museums more generally, where revolutionary rhetoric is involved. Thus, Neather (2012a) finds a similar reduction of revolutionary intensity in texts in Wuhan Municipal Museum, while these nevertheless still retain a clear ideological line. Such approaches, then, seek to find an acceptable tenor while equally not deviating from the carefully calibrated rhetoric of the source. The issue of how source and target voices – and narratives – converge or diverge is also taken up by Liao. Liao (2016) uses social narrative theory to analyse the 228 Museum in Taipei, a museum presenting and memorializing an instance of political persecution that is still highly emotive for many Taiwanese people. She shows how aspects such as reframing 312

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and deixis are used to construct different spatio-temporal relations to the 228 Incident for Taiwan Chinese and English-speaking foreign visitors, so that the latter ‘are constantly reminded that they are viewing the memory of another – d ifferent – g roup of people’ (2016: 195). ( The same museum is analysed again, this time through the lens of critical discourse analysis, in Chen and Liao 2017.) Liao (2015) examines the case of an exhibition showcasing the photography of a nineteenth- century British orientalist photographer. The photographer’s oeuvre, which consists principally of posed portraits of Chinese people, might be construed in two opposing, but potentially equally valid ways: as perpetuating an orientalist and somewhat negative vision of the East, or as helping to catalogue the experience of the Chinese and increase Western awareness. Liao shows how these two contradictory accounts are presented in parallel through the English and Chinese explanatory texts according to the curator’s perception of the needs of the two different linguacultural groups of visitors. Thus while English- speaking viewers are presented with a critique of the photographer’s ‘cold, imperialist gaze’ (2015: 185), Chinese readers read the photos through the textual framing of the photographer as a friend of China, whose photos convey his ‘ humanitarian approach’ (2015: 187). This raises a question that has hitherto been seldom researched: how do bilingual visitors, with equal access to both Source and Target Texts, use and respond to such a dual narrative. As Liao demonstrates from analysis of the comments in visitor books (again, a hitherto underused methodology) not all such readers are comfortable with the duality, which at worst may even be seen as a form of curatorial duplicity or unreliability. Again, such reactions recall our earlier discussion regarding the unease sometimes encountered by visitors in the contact zone of the museum exhibition, when faced with a more self-reflexive mode of display that calls attention to and interrogates (to recall Karp and Kratz’s term) the constructed nature of knowledge and provisionality of museum epistemologies. Two further studies of divergent narrative practices deserve mention here. Witcomb (2003) provides an account of an exhibition that involved members of the Portuguese diaspora in Australia. For this source community, who provided the objects to be displayed, the objects were very much bound up with their own life experiences and their personal and collective memory, and as such were touchstones to life stories, rather than artefacts requiring ‘objective’ interpretation. This recalls the issue, raised earlier, of objects having fundamentally different ontological status for different groups. Witcomb details how language and text were used in a more radical form of interlingual practice that moved well beyond more traditionally conceived forms of translation. Strategies included: the use of Portuguese in the titles for many of the labels, a catalogue which, while mainly in English, also included extracts from the oral histories in Portuguese, and a compact disc, with edited extracts from the oral histories which was played in the background on a continuous loop for those visitors who could not read English. ­ ​­ (Witcomb 2003: ­93–94) A second study, by Deganutti, Parish and Rowley (2018), offers one of the very few examinations to date of the modalities and politics of multilingual (in this case quadrilingual) display. Examining multilingual museums of the First World War, they conceptualize representation in war museums as either ‘antagonistic’, where the experience of the victors is emphasized, or ‘agonistic’, where representation instead aims at encouraging empathy and inclusivity. In terms of creating an effective contact zone, the ‘agonistic’ would seem the preferable mode here, since it ‘promotes the cosmopolitan message that the First World War was a senseless war without justification for all involved’ (2018: 71). An example is the Kobarid Museum, located in Slovenia 313

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close to the Italian border near the site of a major battle. This area may itself be thought of as a geographically defined translation zone similar to the spaces identified by Cronin and Simon (2014), and in its use of multiple display languages, with still further languages available in audio guide form, the museum seeks to some extent to echo the complexities of this linguistic contact zone. Three levels of multilingual resources are discerned: original objects that include script (e.g. multilingual postcards) or photos in which script appears, interpretive labels and wall panels in the exhibition, and other resources such as audio guides and an introductory film. Deganutti, Parish and Rowley dissect the different polarities of visitor experience – from full linguistic inclusion to exclusion – that may occur depending on the intricate interplay of these three different levels and on what is included in the Target Texts (e.g. whether the wording in a photo is translated). As they suggest, slips in the linguistic handling of the agonistic mode can lead to a swing back towards antagonism for certain linguacultural visitor groups. Deganutti, Parish and Rowley’s work highlights a major gap in research in the museum translation field that is particularly germane to the understanding of museums as translation zones, namely the visitor experience. For one of the two museums the authors discuss, they refer to visitor comments books, a methodology also used by Liao (2015), as discussed earlier. However, one is struck by the fact that, where research in the field of museum translation has been expanding, such that there is a growing body of cases analysing what we earlier referred to, after Whitehead, as the curatorially controlled registers of interpretation, little empirical evidence exists regarding the use of bilingual and multilingual resources by museum visitors. This is in stark contrast to work in the museum studies community, where Visitor Studies is a well- established sub- discipline that incorporates a range of ethnographic methodologies from surveys, questionnaires, interviews and pre-/post-v isit focus groups, to the remote tracking of conversations between pairs of visitors and the use of detailed self-reflective visit journals. A possible issue for researchers may be that such methodologies would seem far more easily implementable by museum staff – many of whom are also conducting research in museum studies – than for those in the translation studies community. Needless to say, few if any studies of bi/multilingual museum visitors exist that attempt to conceptualize the visitor experience in terms of the contact zone.

Globalization and the museum translation zone When these issues are more explicitly placed in the context of globalization, several key considerations arise. First, if the museum creates a space for engagement and understanding between communities and cultures, how might this understanding be theorized? Schorch (2013: ­ 77) suggests that the ­museum-as-contact-zone ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ creates a ‘pluralist ­ cosmopolitan space’, in which visitors move through three key stages as they undergo a kind of cosmopolitanizing transformation of their existing views. The first stage involves the production of ‘ bicultural meanings’, when the visitor’s pre-existing views are exposed to the other in the space of the exhibition. In the second stage, the visitor moves to ‘cross- cultural dialogue’, as he or she begins to engage with and accept the world presented, overcoming any ‘ initial reluctance’ (2014: 72). Finally, stage three moves from this dialogic engagement to one of ‘cross-cultural hermeneutics’, in which the visitor experiences a ‘shifting sense of self ’ (2014: 77) and is able to see the world through the eyes of the other; Schorch suggests that the role of the museum docent is particularly important in facilitating this shift. Schorch’s work is one of only a few studies from an explicitly contact-zone perspective to focus on the on- stage visitor experience of the contact zone, and to use an ethnographic methodology to gauge the cosmopolitanizing effect on the visitor experience. 314

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Other studies have questioned the possibilities of the contact zone as a cosmopolitan space. Dibley (2005) argues that Clifford’s work espouses a ‘redemptive’ agenda which, while showing an admirable concern for righting the wrongs of colonial interactions, is nevertheless still rooted in the same power structures and inequalities of the traditional museum: inviting colonized or indigenous peoples into the museum to share their own perspectives on objects previously acquired from them – legally or otherwise – ensures that contact still operates on the colonizer’s terms. A similar point is developed by Boast (2011), who cites the case of the New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford University, a collaboration between Stanford and a group of Papuan artists. Both sides had ‘ fundamentally different sets of assumptions about what the engagements were for’ (2011: 63). While such incommensurability underlies ‘all contact zone engagements’, Boast argues, ‘ in an incommensurable context, dominance wins’ (2011: 63), and oppositional discourses are ultimately supressed. For the same reasons, Dibley (2011) finds in the idea of the British Museum as ‘a repository of the heritage … of the world’ (Appiah, quoted at Dibley 2011: 156) a false cosmopolitanism that he styles, after Andrew McClellan, ‘cosmocharlatanism’. ­ These issues surrounding cosmopolitanism, such as the notion of a shared world heritage and who has the right to present it, are especially important in regard to memorial museums and trauma sites. The Holocaust is a prime example of a tragedy that has become a site of ‘cosmopolitan memory’, a form of memory that stresses the suffering of the victims and the universal lessons for humankind as a whole. Holocaust museums play a crucial role in fostering this memory, and have become a point of reference for memorial museums elsewhere, as Denton (2014) notes in relation to the Memorial to Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by the Japanese Invaders. This memorial is an important site for constructing a sense of national identity, in which the Chinese people can unite around the collective memory of the atrocities carried out by the Japanese army. At the same time, it seeks to produce the kind of cosmopolitan memory engendered by Holocaust museums, in part as a means to gain greater international recognition of the true horror of the event and silence Japanese counter- claims as to the historical facts. Such appeals to both the local and the global can sometimes be a delicate balance. Soh and Connolly (2014) highlight how the case of the Korean ‘Comfort Women’, who suffered at the hands of the Japanese as sex slaves, has become a focus of cosmopolitan memory through the building of memorials in the United States and elsewhere. Yet, important as such globalizing efforts are, they note, there equally remains anxiety about losing the local aspects of remembrance of this tragedy. Anxieties over the place of the local within the global also bring in considerations surrounding the global consumption of culture. As Hancock puts it in her study of DakshinaChitra, a South Indian cultural park housing reconstructed regional architecture and live displays of folk customs, a site must ‘[ensure] that its authenticity, its pastness, remains legible within global cultures of consumption’ (2015: 201). The ‘spatial syntax’ of the site, including such facilities as a snack bar, shop and theatre, is only one of several ways in which the site’s director seeks to meet the expectations of a global cosmopolitan audience (and to raise funds from them), although its detractors see in it a ‘Disneyfied version of southern India’s past (2015: 188). Rectanus (2006/2011: 390) similarly picks up on the question of the ‘“Disneyfication” of museum spaces’, highlighting several aspects that lead to this, one of which is architecture. Speaking of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin, Rectanus notes how its architectural aspect ‘shifted attention to audience interaction with the structure, as a quasi-touristic experience, rather than engaging the contents’ (ibid.). Equally, the imprimatur of global heritage organizations such as UNESCO can also lead to anxiety over commodification: Denton (2014), for instance, notes how the Unit 731 Museum in Northeast 315

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China, a site of Japanese wartime atrocities, was considering applying for UNESCO World Heritage status: but concerns were raised that this move would water down the commemorative value of the site, while turning it into another stop on the global heritage itinerary. Such attempts to plug into the global heritage sphere can also drive isomorphic tendencies in exhibitionary practice. Neather (2012a: 211) borrows the term ‘coercive isomorphism’ from Dimaggio and Powell, for whom it denotes ‘ both formal and informal pressures exerted on organizations by other organizations upon which they are dependent and by cultural expectations in the society…’ (quoted at ibid.: 211–212). Such isomorphism, Neather finds, is present not only in museums’ presentation but also in what he refers to as ‘meta-presentation’, i.e. the approaches and strategies used in transferring museum resources interlingually. Soh and Connolly (2014) likewise invoke similar terms when they observe ‘mimetic isomorphism’ at work in the way that national museums in Japan, Korea and China approach the presentation of the Second World War: while the interpretations presented differ greatly, the strategy of using the war to present a totalizing nationalist narrative is shared. While these discussions reflect concerns over the potential for the local to become subsumed within the global, it is important to remember that interaction also works in the other direction, from the global to the local. Rectanus (2006/2011) notes, for example, how the exchange of objects that is an essential part of exhibitionary and institutional culture in the contemporary museum is ‘conducted globally’ but ‘recontextualized locally’ (382), and he discusses how a global enterprise such as the Guggenheim Museum is variously ‘translated’ into the local context – for instance when the Guggenheim’s Art of the Motorcycle exhibition moved to Bilbao. The notion of local here, Rectanus observes, is complicated by the fact that ‘a significant percentage of the audience is visiting the museum as part of cultural tourism’ (383). Bringing the discussion back to the case of memorial museums, Muzaini and Yeoh (2005) discuss the Changi Chapel and Museum in Singapore, which is dedicated to the thousands of predominantly foreign prisoners of war who lost their lives in the notorious Changi jail. Despite its location in Singapore, the site is one whose predominant significance has been as part of the global remembrance of the Second World War, and as a site of pilgrimage for foreign visitors. The authors document the Singapore Government’s attempts to ‘“nationalise” its memories of the Second World War by extracting the “ local” out of what was essentially a “global” war’ (2005: 2) and creating a place not of pilgrimage but rather of national reflection. While this has been generally appreciated, the difficulty of reconciling the needs of global and local visitors is strikingly illustrated by the very different behaviours they show in the museum space, with international visitors shocked by the loud and irreverent attitude of the locals. The project also highlights a further difficulty, namely how to define ‘the local’: even the name ‘chapel’ is enough to invoke a Christian orientation that is offputting or even offensive to locals of other faiths (ibid.: 10).

Conclusion: looking forward We have seen that the concept of museums as translation zones may be understood in different ways. Translation may refer in a broad sense to the translation of cultures within the exhibition space, whether or not that involves interlingual transfer, while at a more specific level it involves the interlingual translation of materials to create a bi/multilingual exhibition space. Equally, in addition to these more explicit forms of on- stage activity, translation may also occur off-stage, for instance in consultation with source communities, again frequently but not always involving interlingual translation. We have also seen that this distinction between off- stage and on- stage informs the nature of ‘contact’  – or as Onciul terms it, 316

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‘engagement’. While engagement in Onciul’s model refers to essentially off- stage activity, we have proposed that visitor interactions with displayed materials in the contact zone of a given exhibition can also be seen as a form of engagement, but one that is on- stage. Museum studies has seen considerable research in regard to contact work, as the earlier discussion has shown. On the global stage, the opportunities and challenges of intercommunity engagement and its onstage representation play out in the broader interplay of the global and the local, giving rise to a number of important questions, some of which have been rehearsed earlier. These include (i) the extent to which the museum as translation zone creates a space for cosmopolitan understanding, (ii) how far such a cosmopolitanism allows for the co-existence and presentation of potentially incommensurable viewpoints, (iii) the homogenizing effects of the global on the local, and the localization of the global (as in the Changi case) and (iv) the trend towards isomorphism in representational approaches as the ‘ homogenous discursive space’ ( Neather 2012a: 212) in which museums operate has taken on a global dimension. As a growing number of case studies illustrate, contact work of any sort is often imperfect and messy in nature: each exhibition will pose different challenges for engagement, and in each case, the interactions and collisions involved – the translations between institutions, between museum epistemologies, between global and local forces – will produce what Karp and Kratz (2015: 280) term ‘translational wrinkles’. In each case the sense of working things out collaboratively, of encounter as process (Silverman 2015), is key. In the translation studies discipline, museum translation has attracted increasing scholarly interest, and we now know much more about how interlingual translations are produced, and the multimodal and ideological considerations in their construction. Yet considerable further research is required. First, there is the need, as Guillot (2014) notes, to simply ‘take stock’: the variety of translation work and forms of translation being undertaken for and in the museum community is immense, and we lack a comprehensive understanding of how these types intersect in museum practice. Second, there are a range of genres and textual practices that require further inquiry. Audio guides are just one example of a genre which has seen little study, at least in the translation context, while the way that contact takes place in situ between foreign language visitors and museum guides and docents also awaits our attention. Finally, as mentioned earlier, our understanding of visitor engagement with and experience of bi/multilingual texts in the exhibition space and how that affects issues of on-stage engagement have been little studied. In this regard, an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to research is essential. The kind of empirical data required for such studies can perhaps only be gleaned in cooperation with museums, which need in their turn to recognize the importance of studying target language visitors. This last area is perhaps the most important to understanding how the museum as translation zone can most effectively serve its different linguistic publics.

Further reading Karp, I., Kratz, C. A., Szwaja, L. and Y barra-Frausto, T. (eds.) (2006) Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/ Global Transformations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. The third volume in a trilogy that also comprises Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities; this is a seminal collection of museological research that examines the museum in an increasingly globalized context. Silverman, R. A. (ed.) (2015) Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges. London and New York: Routledge. An important work for understanding the processual nature of intercultural encounters in the museum, issues of museum engagement with source communities and how knowledge is translated (in the broad sense of the term) and reconstructed through collaboration. 317

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Sturge, S. (2007) Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum. Manchester: St. Jerome. Still the only book-length work to date on translation and the museum, and essential reading.

References Bennett, T. (2006) ‘Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture’, in Karp, I. Kratz, C. A. Szwaja, L. and ­Ybarra-Frausto, ​­ T. (eds.), ­ Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham, ­ ­ ​­ NC: Duke University Press, pp. 46–69. Boast, R. (2011) ‘Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited’, Museum Anthropology, 34(1), ­ pp. 56–70. ­ ­ ​­ Bodo, S. (2012) ‘Museums as Intercultural Spaces’, in Sandell, R. and Nightingale, E. (eds.), Museums, Equality and Social Justice. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 181–191. Chen, C.-L. and Liao, M.-H. (2017) ‘National Identity, International Visitors: Narration and Transla­ pp. 56–68. ­ ­ ​­ tion of the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum’, Museum and Society, 15(1), Cimoli, A. C. (2014) ‘Immigration: Politics, Rhetoric and Participatory Practices in Italian Museums’, in Gouriévidis, L. (ed.), Museums and Migration: History, Memory and Politics. London and New York: ­ ­ ​­ Routledge, pp. 84–102. Cimoli, A. C. (2015) ‘Identity, Complexity, Immigration: Staging the Present in Italian Migration Museums’, in Whitehead, C. Lloyd, K. Eckersley, S. and Mason, R. (eds.), Museums, Migration and ­ ­ ​­ Identity in Europe: Peoples, Places and Identities. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 285–315. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cronin, M. and Simon, S. (2014) ‘Introduction: The City as Translation Zone’, Translation Studies, 7(2), ­ pp. 119–132. ­ ­ ​­ Dean, D. (1994) Museum Exhibition: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Deganutti, M., Parish, N. and Rowley, R. (2018) ‘Representing Multilingual Difficult History: Voices of the First World War in the Kobarid Museum (Slovenia) and the Historial de la Grande Guerre (France)’, Journal of Specialised Translation, 29, pp. 63–80. ­ ­ ­ ​­ Denton, K. (2014) Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Dibley, B. (2005) ‘The Museum’s Redemption: Contact Zones, Government and the Limits of ­ pp. 5–27. ­ ­ ​­ Reform’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(1), Dibley, B. (2011) ‘Museums and a Common World: Climate Change, Cosmopolitics, Museum Practice’, Museum and Society, 9(2), ­ pp. 154–165. ­ ­ ​­ Guillot, M.-N. (2014) ‘Cross- cultural Pragmatics and Translation: The Case of Museum Texts as Interlingual Representation’, in J. House (ed.), Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 73–95. ­ ­ ​­ Hall, M. (2006) ‘The Reappearance of the Authentic’, in Karp, I., Kratz, C. A., Szwaja, L. Y barra­Frausto, T. (eds.), ­ Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ ­ ​­ versity Press, pp. 70–101. Hancock, M. (2015) ‘Remembering the Rural in Suburban Chennai: The Artisanal Pasts of DakshinaChitra’, in Mathur, S. and Singh, K. (eds.), No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia. London, New York and New Delhi: Routledge, pp. 184–202. ­Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000) Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London and New York: ​­ ­ Routledge. Johansson, C. (2014) ‘The Museum in a Multicultural Setting: The Case of Malmö Museums’, in Gouriévidis, L. (ed.), Museums and Migration: History, Memory and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 122–137. ­ ­ ​­ Karp, I. and Kratz, C. A. (2015) ‘The Interrogative Museum’, in Silverman, R.A (ed.), Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 279–298. Liao, M.-H. (2015) ‘One Photo, Two Stories: Chinese Photos in British Museums’, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 1(2), ­ pp. 177–191. ­ ­ ​­ ­ Liao, M.-H. (2016) ‘Translating Time and Space in the Memorial Museum’, Translation Spaces, 5(2), ­ ​­ pp.181–199. Lynch, B. (2014) ‘Whose Cake is it Anyway?’: Museums, Civil Society and the Changing Reality of Public Engagement’, in Gouriévidis, L. (ed.), Museums and Migration: History, Memory and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 67– 80. 318

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Marinetti, C. (2018) ‘Theatre as a “Translation Zone”: Multilingualism, Identity and the Performing Body in the Work of Teatro delle Albe’, The Translator, 24(2), ­ pp. 129–146. ­ ­ ​­ McCarthy, C. (2011/2016) ­ ­ Museums and Maori: Heritage Professionals, Indigenous Collections, Current Practice. Left Coast Press, reprinted London and New York: Routledge. McCarthy, C. (2018) ‘Indigenization: Reconceptualizing Museology’, in Knell, S. (ed.), The Contemporary Museum: Shaping Museums for the Global Now. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 37–54. Muzaini, H. and Yeoh, B. S. A. (2005) ‘Contesting “Local” Commemoration of the Second World War: The Case of the Changi Chapel and Museum in Singapore’, Australian Geographer, 36(1), ­ pp. 1–17. ­ ­ ​­ Neather, R. (2008) ‘Translating Tea: On the Semiotics of Interlingual Practice in the Hong Kong ­ pp. 218–240. ­ ­ ​­ Museum of Tea Ware’, META: Translators’ Journal, 53(1), Neather, R. (2012a) ‘Intertextuality, Translation and the Semiotics of Museum Presentation: The Case ­ ­ ​­ of Bilingual Texts in Chinese Museums.’ Semiotica, 192, pp. 197–218. Neather, R. (2012b) ‘“Non- expert” Translators in a Professional Community: Identity, Anxiety and Perceptions of Translator Expertise in the Chinese Museum Community.’ The Translator, 18, ­ ­ ​­ pp. 245–268. Neather, R. (2012c) ‘Communicating Identity in the Bilingual Heritage Site: Presentations of Sun Yat- sen in Guangzhou and Macau’, in Tan, Z. and Hu, G. (eds.), Fānyì yŭ kuàwénhuà jiāoliú: jīdiàn yŭ shìjué 翻譯與跨文化交流：積澱與視覺 [Translation and Intercultural Communication: Impacts and Perspectives]. Shanghai: Shanghai Waiyu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, pp. 163–180. Nettelbeck, A. (2012) ‘Remembering Indigenous Dispossession in the National Museum: The National Museum of Australia and the Canadian Museum of Civilization’, Time and Society, 21(1), ­ pp. 39–54. ­ ­ ​­ Onciul, B. (2015) Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonizing Engagement. London and New York: Routledge. Perego, E., (2019) ‘Into the Language of Museum Audio Descriptions: A Corpus-based Study.’ Perspectives, 27(3), ­ pp. 333–349. ­ ­ ​­ Rantisi, N. M. and Leslie, D. (2015) ‘Circus in Action: Exploring the Role of a Translation Zone in ­ pp. 147–164. ­ ­ ​­ the Cirque du Soleil’s Creative Practices’, Economic Geography, 91(2), Ravelli, L. (2006) Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. London and New York: Routledge. Rectanus, M. W. (2006/2011) ‘Globalization: Incorporating the Museum’, in MacDonald, S. (ed.), A ­ ​­ ­ ­ ​­ Companion to Museum Studies. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 381–397. Schorch, P. (2013) ‘Contact Zones, Third Spaces, and the Act of Interpretation’, Museum and Society, 11(1), ­ pp. 68–81. ­ ­ ​­ Shryock, A. (ed.) (2004) Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Silverman, R. A. (ed.) (2015) Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges. London and New York: Routledge. Simon, S. (2013) ‘Translation Zone’, in Gambier, Y. and van Doorslaer, L. (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, vol 4. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 181–185. Soh, C. and Connolly, D. (2014) ‘Cosmopolitan Memories in East Asia: Revisiting and Reinventing the Second World War’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 8(3), ­ pp. 383–340. ­ ­ ​­ Sturge, S. (2007) Representing Others: Translation, Ethnography and the Museum. Manchester: St. Jerome. Whitehead, C. (2012) Interpreting Art in Museums and Galleries. London and New York: Routledge. Witcomb, A. (2003) Reimagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London and New York: Routledge.

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Part IV

Economics

22 Translation in the neoliberal era Joss Moorkens

Introduction In recent years we have seen an explosion of digital content. In 2007, humans had created capacity for 264 exabytes of data ( Hilbert and López 2011). By 2018, we had capacity for 33,000 exabytes across multiple modes and media, with predictions for this to reach 175,000 by 2025 ( Reinsel et al. 2018). Consequently, there is more material than ever before being translated by a growing number of human translators and by a growing number of machines. The outlook for both human and machine translation (MT) appears bright, and one might think that this situation would result in rising payment for translators. However, the political and economic climate has combined with application of technologies to inhibit price growth in the translation industry. These pressures are not applied equally, and some translators have found themselves to be more vulnerable to the vagaries of the translation marketplace. In this chapter, I look first at the economic and political context in which neoliberal economic policies and globalization have served to depress prices in many markets, translation included. MT and leveraging technologies were initially envisaged with lofty humanitarian and human-centred goals, although these appear to have changed a little over time as economic imperatives have encouraged pragmatism. I consider the profile of contemporary professional and paraprofessional translators, some of whom are thriving while carrying out the multiple roles expected in the current marketplace while others struggle to make a decent living. In examining translation in the neoliberal era, I use the 3D quality model as proposed by Abdallah (2014), beginning with the growing complexity of the translation process and its inherent communication difficulties, considering the changing product quality expectations, and finally looking at social quality for translators.1 The changes described in this chapter are part of a continuing trend within and beyond the translation industry. I suggest some possible disruptions to this trend in the final section of this chapter.

Economic context In this section I will introduce the interconnected and influential concepts of neoliberalism and austerity. Konzelmann (2012: 2) defines economic austerity as a series of measures 323

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(usually tax increases and/or public expenditure reductions) with the aim of reducing a country’s deficit, i.e. ‘the difference between what the government spends and the revenues it earns’. Blyth (2012: 2) explains that this ‘voluntary deflation’ is intended to restore competitiveness but has had substantial negative effects. Internationally, governments have imposed periods of austerity following war efforts, or as a control measure for overheating or underperforming economies. By the 1960s, many governments had begun to grow their public debts while increasing public spending and, in some cases, social welfare systems, and in 1971 the US dollar was decoupled from the gold standard, loosening the control that the United States and other governments had over their finances. In response, the application of austerity became ideological, and the US and Europe increased their focus on managing inflation, reducing government spending and reducing taxes that might be perceived to deter trade. New economic liberalism, or neoliberalism, adopting austerity policies as part of minimization of state control, became conventional wisdom, crossing political party and institutional lines (McNamara 1999), encouraged by OECD reports and sometimes imposed via the International Monetary Fund (IMF; Broome and Seabrooke 2007: 9). This policy redoubled in the 1980s under leaders such as Reagan and Thatcher in the United States and United Kingdom, leading to increased liberalization of trade and the requirement of flexibility in the labour markets. The shrinking role of the state in neoliberal economies has more recently led to a move towards ‘greater personal responsibility for economic and financial well-being’ ( Neff 2012: 9) rather than a responsibility weighing on companies or the state. As barriers to trade have become fewer, international markets have grown – g lobalization – and we now have a situation whereby product creation is geographically displaced within a ‘global value chain’, with associated trends of ‘ intensification, speedup, and standardisation of work’ ( Huws 2014: 116). Following the economic crisis of 2007/2008, several countries required financial assistance from the IMF, who demanded ‘fiscal consolidation plans’, restricting spending relative to GDP and encouraging easing of employment protection rules ( Teague 2016), aside from the exceptional case of Iceland, where a more consultative approach was taken ( Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir 2012). This encouraged a growth in non- standard rather than permanent employment. Non-standard or contingent work has been growing worldwide for many years, with numbers more than doubling in the United States between 1969 and 1993, and reaching 40.4% in 2010 (Cummings and Kreiss 2008). Broughton et al. (2016) estimate the rate of standard employment in the European Union ( EU) to be at roughly 59% and dropping, with 7.6% of EU workers at risk if wages are further driven down by outsourcing. Rubery (2013) has highlighted how women tend to suffer disproportionately in times of austerity, and there are disparities of gender within the numbers reported here, as women are more likely to work on a part-t ime or freelance basis across the EU ( Broughton et al. 2016), with large gender differences noticeable in countries such as Switzerland, where 59% of women work part-t ime, as compared to 18% of men ( Federal Statistical Office 2019). 26.4% of EU workers (including over 70% of Greek workers) work on an involuntary part-time basis as they are unable to find full-t ime employment, with a tendency for these workers to be female (Chiripanhura and Zhang 2019). These statistics are relevant to the translation industry, where estimates of the number of professional translators begin at 330,000 worldwide, of whom 70% are women ( Pym et al. 2012). Roughly 75% of translators are thought to work on a freelance basis, a far greater proportion than among employees generally ( Pym et al. 2012; Moorkens 2017). It can be difficult to estimate the number of professional translators accurately, as many freelance workers (and teleworkers) work in isolation, without membership of professional organizations.2 324

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Many translators work on a part-time basis, some as part of the gig economy, and the occupational boundaries are i ll- defined. To be a professional translator, one does not require any particular formal training or accreditation ( Katan 2011). Translator numbers have grown during a time when there has been a trend towards freelance and contingent work. The neoliberal era has enabled globalization, and the increased speed and prevalence of international communication has led to an increased demand for translated material in recent years. The number of translators and interpreters in the United States, for example, grew from 15,190 in 2000 to 53,150 in 2017 ( Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018) and continues to expand. Similarly, the size of the language service industry as reported by CSA Research ( DePalma et al. 2018) continues to grow year on year. Translation companies have become reliant on scaling to meet demand by outsourcing to freelance translators, with pricing for external clients based on this ‘vendor model’ of employment without the extraneous costs incurred by direct employees. This model of employment has not tended to empower translators. Harvey (2006: 154) wrote about a wave of financialization post-1980, ‘marked by its speculative and predatory style’. This too has had an effect on translation, as the largest translation companies are publicly traded, and thus subject to the vagaries of the financial markets ( justification for unilateral translator rate cuts such as that imposed by Lionbridge in 2010; Bavington 2010). The number of mergers and acquisitions in the translation industry has increased, with at least 48 transactions in 2018 (Slator 2019). Kronenberg (2018) has compiled a timeline of acquisitions by the company RWS since 2014, noting the increases in profits while tightly limiting rates and payment terms to freelance translators that fits with Brennan’s (2009) summary of a ‘regime of privatisation’ involved in ‘ lowering the price of adversarial intellectual work’. Rushkoff (2016: 17) notes that large companies tend to prioritize shortterm returns to shareholders by lowering costs, ‘no matter what it means for top-line growth or long-term profitability’, the speed and scale of this process exacerbated by digital processes. While technology is an enabler of global communication, requiring more translation, it also means that production networks can be globally dispersed, with many large language service providers spreading their offices across time zones. The technological context for translation in the age of austerity is discussed in the following section.

Technological context From the outset, the development of MT had lofty rather than pragmatic goals. Weaver’s 1947 letter to Wiener, cyberneticist and enthusiast of interdisciplinary research, stressed the necessity of MT ‘ for the constructive and peaceful future of the planet’ ( Weaver 1947: 1). Inherent in translation automation, however, was a threat to human translators. By 1951 BarHillel concluded (‘ for the time being’) that fully automatic high-quality MT was not feasible, and rather that a ‘mixed MT’ ‘ in which a human brain intervenes’ before and/or after the MT process would be necessary for optimal accuracy ( Weaver 1947: 230). The spectre of automation was also raised in the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) report of 1966: ‘Someday, perhaps, the machines will make it, but I as a translator do not yet believe that I must throw my monkey wrench into the machinery in order to prevent my technological unemployment’ (ibid.: 28). Translation was far from the only industry where the threat of automation was felt. Strom (1975) was one of several authors in the 1960s and 1970s who suggested that, in the light of jobs being replaced (contemporarily) by automation at the rate of 40,000 per week, it was time for workers to labour for fewer hours and to prepare themselves for a leisure-focused 325

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society. This has not transpired, although we have seen a gradual reduction in average working hours ( Lee et al. 2007). More recently, Frey and Osborne estimated that 47% of total US employment was at risk of being replaced due to automation, with computerization due to ‘substitute for low- skill and low-wage jobs in the near future’ (2013: 42). With this in mind, the situation for translators looks comparatively positive. The demand for human translation is still increasing ( Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018), despite predictions of automation of the translator’s role ( Katan 2016) and widespread automation anxiety among translators ( Vieira 2018). MT was still rarely used in production when, in 1980, Kay suggested the development of a Translator’s Amanuensis, a tool with source and target windows presented in the user interface, which would suggest ‘statistically significant words and phrases’ that had appeared in previous stored translations ( Kay 1980: 16). Kay stressed that his tool would always be ‘under the tight control of a human translator’ and was intended to ‘ help increase his productivity and not to supplant him’ (1980: 18). Kay intended his Amanuensis to free the translator from work that was ‘mechanical and routine’ in order to make the work ‘more rewarding, more exciting, more human’ (1980: 1). Although tools capable of multilingual word processing appeared earlier, the first tools to feature translation memories ( TM) were released in the early 1990s. Early adopters of these tools had the opportunity to increase productivity once past the initial learning curve, but as TM tools came to be more widely used, the power shifted to (especially larger) clients as discounts based on fuzzy matches began to be applied by translation buyers with ‘very little grounds for negotiation’ (García 2006: 102). Specialized translators who had invested in TM tools expecting to gain a competitive advantage found instead that expected throughput had increased as word rates had decreased. For directly employed translators such as those at the European Commission Directorate General for Translation, expectations for productivity tended to rise (Strandvik 2019). As Lafargue observed in 1883, as technology enables ‘an ever-increasing rapidity and exactness’, the worker, ‘ instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine’ ( Lafargue 2011: 20). The widespread use of TM tools has allowed translation buyers to build up a repository of human translations. When these were first shared by translators on an ad-hoc basis, there was industry concern ( Topping 2000), but it is now commonplace for translators to work on a large networked TM, with translators benefiting from the prior work of others just as future translators will benefit from their work (Gough 2011). This tacit agreement to share TM data led to a precedent whereby TMs are returned to the translation buyer, even though the ownership of copyright for a translation is complex and less clear- cut. Although the original author (or their assigned copyright owner) also owns a translation of their work according to the Berne Convention (1886), there should also be rights accrued for the translator when work is creative or original. The original author may not use a translation as the basis for a further translation without permission or royalty payment (Cabanellas 2015), and creators of a database (such as a TM) may have rights depending on the jurisdiction and their efforts in creating and maintaining that database ( Troussel and Debussche 2014). The most popular MT paradigms since the 1990s have been data- d riven, relying on human translation for training and testing. The aligned source and target segments held in a TM file are ideal raw materials for MT training, and are commonly put to this secondary use, without the consent of or compensation to the human translator. This is in keeping with trends in digitally mediated work beyond translation and a ‘sharing economy that is more extractive than it is circulatory’ ( Rushkoff 2016: 218). The metaphor of data as oil suggests that data is naturally occurring and therefore free to use rather than 326

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the product of valuable human effort. Zoboff (2019: 105) writes of extractive companies ‘simultaneously ignoring, evading, contesting, reshaping, or otherwise vanquishing laws’ that threaten their access to data. This data dispossession is increasingly problematic as machine learning techniques are applied to huge data sets in order to extract patterns without explicit operator instruction. Translation data sets, once extracted, are valued highly ( Diño 2018); yet curiously at a granular scale they are often expected as a cost-free bonus for a translation job. A handful of research papers were published on the application of machine learning to translation using neural networks in 2014 ( Bahdanau et al. 2014 contains a short review), but by 2016 it had become clear that neural MT ( NMT) was the new state of the art in MT (Castilho et  al. 2017). In common with other applications of machine learning, there are regular media stories about impending technological unemployment and leaps in quality, and while these are often overblown, the improvement in MT quality for general domain texts in language pairs for which there are large data sets available has been impressive. Evaluations have found increased fluency and lower numbers of errors, although these have not been associated with significant increases in productivity when NMT is used in the production of publishable texts (Castilho et al. 2019). The increase in output quality and the media attention on NMT mean that more translation agencies are offering products using NMT in response to client demand, and a wider variety of use cases are being found for raw and post- edited MT ( Way 2018). Aside from gist translation, raw NMT is being used for low-risk, perishable content such as online reviews and auctions, access to information from foreign-language academic articles, for e- discovery to identify which legal documents are worth having humans translate, and for some localization work. Post- editing, although not popular with many translators, is the fastest growing sector of the translation market, and is used in cases where employers want to cut costs and raw MT would be considered too risky ( Lommel and DePalma 2016). Automation is being applied to translation in other ways, such as in lights- out project management systems that can automate workflow steps, assigning jobs to translators based on cost and reputation scores without human input (Sakamoto 2018). Modern translation editing tools and proprietary translation portals in which translators interact with TM, MT and terminology suggestions in the production of a translated text can also save details of user interaction in the form of telemetry or logs of user activity data for potential reuse and surveillance. This data could be used to identify the user based on typing patterns and, if combined with data from other sources, could be used to make inferences or predictions about the user that may be useful to the receiver in negotiations or may affect business decisions ( Wachter and Mittelstadt 2019), particularly if associated with translation quality evaluation. The EU are at the forefront of legal efforts to protect personal data, and the General Data Protection Regulation offers safeguards to such data, but inferred data may not be covered by such regulations and the law will inevitably be a step or two behind technology. This is the dynamic technological environment in which translators will need to successfully negotiate varied expectations in order to thrive. The profile and requirements of a translator in this context will be discussed in the following section.

Translators’ profile According to Pym et  al. (2012), most professional translators are female and work on a freelance basis. In Moorkens and O’Brien’s (2017) survey of over 400 translators, most respondents aged 20–30 work directly for a company and the majority over 30, with the share 327

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growing progressively, work on a freelance basis. 31% said that they work with a single agency, putting them at risk if there is a change in that agency. Some translators prefer freelance work, as they gain autonomy that they may not otherwise enjoy when working for a language service provider, where career progression is likely to entail a move away from translation into administration or management. As most translation is outsourced, many translators have little choice but to work on a freelance basis (Moorkens 2017). While there may be short-term gains for the worker for avoiding tax or to earn a higher basic wage, the employer manages to save on many obligations including continued employment, evading regulations for minimum rates of pay, annual leave, sick leave, pension contributions, aside from the cost of light, heat, hardware, software, desks, seating and office space (Campbell et al. 2004). This situation is exacerbated when translators are employed via a crowdsourcing platform. The low-trust nature of crowdwork means that workers and employers rely on reputational systems on the crowdsourcing platforms, with high-reputation workers flooded with work, which they may subcontract within the crowd, and low-reputation workers subject to sudden deactivation ( Prassl 2018). Crowdworkers spend a lot of unpaid time searching for jobs and, like freelancers, do not receive benefits of direct employment. In addition, their low rates of pay often inhibit access to healthcare ( Wood et al. 2019). The expectations of translators in the neoliberal era are varied. Where early discussions on translator competence considered concepts such as self-awareness and self-confidence ( Kussmaul 1995), a growing list of sub-competences have been suggested by various authors and groups ( EMT Network 2009; Göpferich 2009; PACTE 2017) that incorporate strategic and instrumental competence to do with language, text, terminology, subject matter expertise and others. The most recent European Master’s in Translation network competences ( EMT Network 2017) recommended and required for accredited translation Master’s programmes, incorporates categories of competence such as ‘Language and Culture’, ‘Translation’ and technical competences such as knowledge of MT paradigms, their training and pre- or post-processing. Moving beyond the textual and technical, the ‘Personal and Interpersonal’ category incorporates planning, social media, communication and reflective practice. The ‘Service Provision’ category includes sub- competences involving project management, negotiation, marketing and strategizing. In practice, translator practices, skills, motivations and abilities are massively varied (Gouadec 2007) and some commentators have criticized long lists of competences ( Pym 2003), but the EMT Network, particularly with their interpersonal and service provision categories, attempt to address what Jemielity (2018: 535) calls ‘ ideological and behavioural “disconnects” between translator-culture and businessperson-culture’ that might lead translators to undersell themselves and their unique skill-sets. While Jemielity and others (such as Durban 2004; Drugan 2013) make the case for the highly specialized, business-savvy translator as an exemplar of financial and professional success, there are many variants of translators who make a comfortable living and choose work that they enjoy for direct clients and agencies with whom they have a mutually respectful working relationship. Some h igh-profile translators have been proactive in encouraging translators to specialize and market themselves to maximize their value ( Durban 2011; McKay 2011). Not all translators have the ability, language pair, area of speciality, opportunity or skill-set required to follow these examples, or indeed, many may not wish to aim for high-end markets (those who Jemielity (2018: 535) considers ‘economically unambitious’). There may be reasons beyond ambition for translators to report disempowerment (Abdallah 2010), low professional visibility ( Dam and Zethsen 2011) and low degrees of influence, although despite relatively meagre average rates of pay translators appear overall to be quite satisfied with their job ( Dam and Zethsen 2016; Ruokinen and Mäkisalo 2018). 328

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The requirement for freelance translators to spend time on the elements of their role identified in the interpersonal and service provision competence categories indicates that the amount of time actually translating must be lessened, which may be off-putting for those with little interest in activities beyond translation. Those paid at word rates are often not directly paid for related work such as on terminology or in solving formatting problems. The average word rate in many regions has not risen in line with inflation, meaning that many translators may be earning less per word in real terms in 2018 than they were at the close of the previous millennium ( Dunne 2012). Surveys such as Moorkens (2020a) have reported on translators who are carving out a successful career, maintaining skills and morale, and fi net uning their abilities, and others for whom the various requirements of the contemporary translator are a grind, such as the person who responded that they have been ‘actively moving out of the career for some time now. Isolation of self-employed working from home [was] literally killing me, as was RSI (repetitive strain injury) and stress related to tight deadlines and the cut throat market’ (64). Hendzel (2014) considers that the conditions, pay rates and marketability of translators are massively varied across a ‘quality continuum’, with the majority of translators catering to the lower end of the market (lower in terms of price, risk and quality), and the high end, in which translators are highly paid for specialized work, ignored in most reports and analysis. Abdallah (2014) believes that the product, process and social quality of translation cannot be considered in isolation, and that each is likely to differ based on the economic value associated with a translation and the risk of failure.

Translation quality Translation quality is increasingly considered based on fitness for purpose. The ASTM International (formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials) definition of translation quality states that ‘A quality translation demonstrates required accuracy and fluency for the audience and purpose and complies with all other specifications negotiated between the requester and provider, taking into account end-user needs’ ( Koby et al. 2014: 416). If the value of the product or the risk of translation error is high, then the quality will need to be carefully calibrated. Quality control in the Directorate- General for Translation in the European Commission, for example, is particularly involved, as texts in each language may be considered legally binding and thus require h igh-quality translation ( Drugan et al. 2018). Canfora and Ottmann (2018) identify several types of risks in the case of mistranslation, such as risk of injury or death, legal or reputational risk, risk of impaired communication, financial risk and risk to property. Exposure to such risk is affected by circulation, number of language pairs and technology employed (including MT). The variables of time, cost and quality are often invoked in discussions of translation project management and workflow decisions. In some quarters, there is a tendency to place a short-term focus on cost, ‘contracting the work to the lowest bidder ignoring quality and downplaying the consequent costs that poor quality may entail’ (Sosoni and Rogers 2013: 8). For translators who have established an area of specialization working with direct clients, they may be able to effectively demonstrate their value and expertise. An intermediary may be less successful in communicating the risks to translation buyers or in helping them to differentiate high from low quality. Dunne (2012: 154) suggests that when ‘clients cannot distinguish between quality, and thus value, price becomes the primary differentiating feature’. If a text is considered to be low-risk or of low value, the process is likely to change accordingly, with fewer resources put into creating a quality source text, increased attempts to maximize leverage or to introduce MT and fewer review and quality assurance steps after translation. As the 329

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product is less likely to be considered unique, each step (or person) in the process is considered replaceable ( Dunne 2012) or the tasks split into microtasks to be carried out anonymously via a crowdsourcing platform ( Jiménez- Crespo 2018). This has the effect of increasing the number of nodes in the production network, without encouraging communication between them. There may be no opportunity for the crowdworker or the freelance translator outsourced automatically in a lights-out project management scenario to reach a point of contact at all. For texts considered to be perishable or low-r isk, the level of automation is likely to increase ( Way 2018), as noted in the Section ‘Technological context’. Translation buyers assume that use of MT will generate large cost savings, but that may not be the case, depending on the required translation quality and the quality of the MT output. In addition, there may be pushback from translators, who tend not to enjoy the task of post- editing MT output (Moorkens and O’Brien 2017; Kazlauskas 2018). Post- editing is latterly becoming more common in audiovisual translation, an area of translation for which TM was not considered useful ( Pidchamook 2018). The increased quality expectations of NMT do not necessarily equate to improved post- editing productivity, as fluency has been found to make errors difficult to spot (Castilho et al. 2017). Use of interactive and adaptive NMT rather than post- editing appears to improve the usability of MT-a ssisted translation, without a statistically significant increase in throughput when compared with using statistical MT ( Daems and Macken 2019). Moorkens and O’Brien (2017) found that translators were generally dissatisfied with the usability of their translation editing environments, despite many years of development, so improved usability is welcome as a way of improving social quality of the translation process. Abdallah (2014) believes that considerations of translation quality must include social quality in addition to product and process quality. Similarly, Risku and Windhager (2013) proposes investigation of the effects of the social and spatial characteristics of translators’ working environments. Pressure on cost and stress caused by short deadlines impact negatively on social quality, but there are many other factors beyond time, cost and product quality. It is very common for translators to work in isolation, even those within companies ( Jemielity 2018). This has implications for their agency, for perceived respect within an organization and for organizational identification ( Bartel et al. 2012). Freelance translators often have no access to the production network beyond a single point of contact, who may leave or change roles, or who may not be supportive in the first place. Freelance respondents in Moorkens (2020a) reported a weak sense of purpose in work, a strong factor in job dissatisfaction (see also Krifa 2016), along with negative perceptions of fairness in work. Their responses to questions relating to payment, colleagues and job security compared poorly to their securely employed public service colleagues. Freelance translators tend to focus less on ergonomic well-being using laptop computers at desks and in seats that are not built for longterm use ( Ehrensberger-Dow et al. 2014), whereas company employees may have ergonomic assessments in the workplace and more appropriate workstations. These factors of social quality, Abdallah (2014) argues, affect process quality, which, in turn, affects product quality, and as such should be a strong consideration in a translation production network, particularly in light of the increasing popularity of highly collaborative and platform-mediated work that requires near-live turnaround times (Moorkens 2020b).

Conclusion The translation industry has grown massively in the neoliberal era, in which the trend has been towards freelance or contingent work that is ‘flexible, scalable, or cost- effective enough

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to respond to market demands’ ( Kelly et al., 2012: 2). At the highest level, language service providers are shareholder owned and subject to acquisition by larger conglomerates, in whose shareholders’ interest, short-term economic decisions are commonplace. Technology affords the possibility to cut costs using troves of previous translations for leverage or for training of MT systems, although the cost reduction when incorporating MT into translation workflows is rarely as significant as anticipated ( Kazlauskas 2018). Artificial intelligence may be used in other ways in translation workflows, such as for lights-out project management, where employment decisions are left to an algorithm. This ideally means that decisions are based on aggregated data rather than subjective human judgement ( Bodie et al. 2016). The way that this affects the translator’s profile and translation quality depends very much on the type of employer and their trust relationship with the translator, the economic value of the text, the risk of mistranslation and the extent to which the value and risk are understood by the translation buyer. At the higher end of the translation marketplace, translators’ pay and conditions reflect their unique and specialized skills that are difficult for the buyer, whether direct clients or agencies, to replace. At the other end, each part of the production network, whether human or machine, may be considered replaceable by another for reasons of cost, time or quality, and the quality target may be lower to reflect the value, risk or perishability of the content to be translated. These translators are more likely to work with MT, whether post- editing or otherwise post-processing, and the lack of payment for annual leave, sick leave, pension contributions, along with office, hardware and software costs, is more pressing due to constant pressure on cost and stress due to tight deadlines. The poor social quality of translation at the lower end of the market, despite the fact that translation needs are growing and more human translators are required, represents a potential disruption to the industry. If the occupation of translator is not appealing, fewer students will study translation and workers will leave the industry. There are sporadic reports of translators exiting in studies such as Abdallah (2014) and Moorkens (2020a), and Moorkens (2020b) proposes foregrounding sustainability within translation work systems. A further threat of disruption is in translation copyright. At present, translations and TMs are usually given to translation buyers, but Troussel and Debussche (2014), Cabanellas (2015) and others believe that translators may have some claim to copyright. Due to their creative contributions, they can assert translation copyright so that retranslations of their work will require permission and possible royalties, and they may claim copyright over the TM database, depending on the efforts to create and maintain it. If the copyrights of the original author, employer and translator were asserted, this could create an anticommons, whereby the competing claims render the data unusable for leverage and for MT training (Moorkens and Lewis 2019). Finally, there could be further moves towards collective action on the part of freelance and even crowdworkers. The most likely avenue for this appears to be national and international translator organizations. An example of this is collective bargaining agreements in place for Medicaid translators and interpreters in Washington State, US (Moorkens 2017), or in the standard terms and conditions of the Netherlands Association of Interpreters and Translators for translation work, which states that unless it is ‘expressly stated otherwise in writing, the translator reserves the copyright on translations and other texts produced by the translator’ ( NGTV 2017). These types of collective action are considered vital by De Stefano (2019), and are part of an active discussion within the EU, where the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe recommended a lifting of restrictions on collective bargaining for the self- employed ( European Trade Union Confederation 2018).

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Further reading Abdallah, K. (2010) ‘Translators’ Agency in Production Networks’, in Kinnunen, T. and Koskinen, K. (eds.), ­ Translators’ Agency. Tampere: Tampere University Press, pp. 11– 46. This book chapter analyses agency as perceived by translators in a production network, and looks at their coping strategies when cooperation and trust break down. Dunne, K. (2012) ‘The Industrialization of Translation: Causes, Consequences and Challenges’, Translation Spaces, 1, pp. 143–168. ­ ­ ​­ This article considers the causes, consequences and challenges of the industrialization of translation, suggesting some reasons for commodification and related topics for research. Jemielity, D. (2018) ‘Translation in Intercultural Business and Economic Environments’, in Harding, S. and Carbondell Cortés, O. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 533–557. ­ ­ ​­ This chapter offers an alternative viewpoint of the industry from the perspective of specialist translators who have internalized the business ethos, demonstrating that some sectors of the freelance workforce are operating successfully. Moorkens, J. (2017) ‘Under Pressure: Translation in Times of Austerity’, Perspectives, 25(3), ­ pp. 464–477. ­ ­ ​­ This article presents an overview of freelance work in the lower- end translation market, placing translation work in the context of other forms of cultural and knowledge work that are similarly subject to commodification. Ruokonen, M. (2013) ‘Studying Translator Status: Three Points of View’, in Eronen, M. and Rodi­Risberg, M. (eds.), ­ Haasteena näkökulma: Point of View as Challenge. VAKKI Publications 2. Vaasa: University of Vaasa, pp. 327–338. ­ ­ ​­ A comprehensive review of works relating to the professionalization of translation and of the perceptions of prestige associated with the role, reviewing work on the topic by Dam and Zethsen, Katan, Koskinen and many others.

Notes



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23 Translating tourism David Katan

Introduction One of the pillars of globalization is the facilitation of multidirectional flows of people, which Ritzer (2010: 24), following Bauman (1998), divides into two groups: those that ‘ have to’ such as migrants, and tourists: ‘People who move about the world because they want to; because they are “ light”’. This light movement is ‘an intensely social and communicative business’ ( Thurlow and Jaworski 2011: 289), and translation (including self-t ranslation and the use of a lingua franca) is vital to it being a ‘truly global cultural industry’ (Heller et al. 2014a: 427). We will look at some of the issues concerning tourism translation, what it includes and how the topic has been approached within tourism and translation studies. In particular, we will investigate how translation affects key areas in international tourism: accessibility, authenticity, sustainability and the tourist gaze.

Tourism and translation Tourism translation is big business, accounting possibly for well over a quarter of translated material ( Katan 2011: 69). Also, Sulaiman and Wilson (2018: 1) claim that tourism promotional material is one of the most translated genres globally. What is to be included in tourism translation is clearly listed by commercial providers as: ‘ brochures, holiday guides, hotel information, contracts, press releases and promotional materials’ ( Kwintessential 2019). Though tourism translation is clearly part of commercial translation, there is also increasing demand for translation from government departments and NGOs involved in providing tourism material for natural and cultural heritage sites, now attracting an increasing share of visits from international tourists ( Richards 2018). In terms of globalization, mass tourism is characterized by what Cohen termed ‘the environmental bubble’: ‘the [low] degree to which a tourist exposes himself to the strangeness of the host society’ (Cohen and Cooper 1986: 539), while, at the same time, satisfying ‘accessibility’ and the instant gratification needs inherent in friction-f ree communication across borders. This parallels the domesticating norm ( Venuti 1998) in translation. ‘Travel’, 337

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on the other hand, may be seen as part of the ‘slow’ movement (Gardner 2009; Oh et al. 2016), with a focus on ‘the authentic’, and on enjoying the challenge of perceptible barriers. In translation, this is the domain of foreignization ( Venuti 1998), where the reader seeks out the ‘ local’, is wilfully alienated and gratification is delayed. ‘Travel writing’ as a genre is considered part of literary translation ( Katan 2014), while ‘tourism writing’  – being more concerned with pragmatics than stylistics  – is considered non-l iterary, technical or commercial translation. That said, the lines dividing travel and tourism are also blurred, given that though tourism may be global, the ‘ local’ must manifest itself as different to motivate the journey in the first place. Moreover, as MacCannell suggests, this difference should contain at least an element of ‘staged authenticity’ (1973) or ‘strangerhood’ (Cohen 1972: 165), which ‘excites, titillates and gratifies’. It seems evident that the tourism industry in general is moving towards a slower ‘travel’ position, due to a general increase in cultural tourism ( Richards 2018), and what has been called a shift towards a ‘post’ or ‘anti’ tourism stance (Francesconi 2007). This suggests that tourism translation will also require an understanding of the literary aspects of texts. One of the first translation questions is ‘which language combination(s)?’. As English is the default ‘auxiliary language’ of international tourism and travel (Crystal 2003: 89), it makes economic sense for non-Anglo countries to translate primarily into English too. But of course, this pragmatism may equally well be interpreted as ideological, and may be seen as pandering to a neo-colonial, neo-Babelian (Cronin 2000: 122, 2003: 59– 60) thesis of global accessibility, whereby English asserts itself as the only language of tourism to the detriment of the local or national language. It should also be remembered that globally, Mandarin Chinese is not only the second most popular language on the internet (Sitsanis 2018), but ‘The unstoppable rise of the Chinese Traveller’ means that by 2030 Chinese tourists may well account for a quarter of all international tourism (Smith 2019). Also, though English may be the lingua franca, research shows that visitors whose first language is not English clearly appreciate being addressed in their own language: they have fewer problems finding websites, spend up to double the time on the sites, ‘ feel welcomed’ and derive ‘positive bonding’ (Arlt 2007). Clearly, this research refers to those sites that go beyond what might be called ‘ language dressing’, where only the home page has been translated (or machine translated as a formal gesture), and where further links/pages remain untranslated or not updated. The phenomenon is extremely common. For example, an English guide to Salento ( Italy), translated from the Italian, offers links to 22 websites: 65% have information in Italian only, while the rest bar one have only limited information in English ( Danese 2013; see also Arlt 2007). In the case of ‘English plus’ multilingual translations, other political needs and symbolic values may come to the fore. For example, Heller et  al. (2014b: 557) examine a Spanish museum’s multilingual website, which also contains versions in Galician and Basque. They argue that the additional languages have been added ‘as a gesture to political solidarities with regions of Spain that also have a minority language’, given that a maximum of 5% speak Basque, and 2% speak Galician – and these speakers would also be bilingual. Once the language(s) have been chosen, there is the question of who will translate. Ideally, tourism translation is carried out ‘ by professional translators working into their language of habitual use’ ( Kelly 1998: 34; also Sulaiman and Wilson 2018: 637). In reality, there is anecdotal evidence which suggests that much tourism translation is done into the second language, and the quality may not be so different (Stewart 2008; Pokorn 2016), especially if the translation is into a lingua franca. The real issue, though, is that evidence points to a marked lack of interest in quality control, even at national level. For example, Napu’s (2016) study of the Indonesian Tourist Board’s control assurance process is a damning: ‘anyone with English 338

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language skills who happens to be in the office’. (See also Yang’s 2018 criticism of tourism translation in China.) There is also the issue of neuro-machine translation. The seamless ‘Hey, Google, be my interpreter’ ( Kohn 2019) phone App currently speaks across 44 languages, and is no longer a novelty. Accommodation and travel booking is already carried out seamlessly using multilingual platforms that ‘auto-m agically’ substitute the translator. The availability and ease of use of the software at a personal level provide the perfect partner for what Friedman calls ‘Globalization 3.0’. Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 relate to the eras of nation states and then of multinational organizations dominating world trade, while 3.0 ushers in ‘the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally’ ( Friedman 2006: 10). So, the miriad of small tourist enterprises, from B&Bs to cooking schools and wine tasting events, that once were only able to attract local tourists, now at the click of an app can (and do) promote internationally cost free. At the same time though, ‘ booking.com’ (Huston 2016) boasts an undefined ‘ large group’ of in-house translators for their websites because ‘ it will be years before a computer can do perfect translations’. However, professional translators are not necessarily tasked with the job, due to the translators’ perceived deontological constraints (Sulaiman 2016: 62; Agorni 2019: 68). In short, communication with the new reader is not part of the remit. Indeed, non-professional cultural informers, such as travelblog compatriots who have gained insider knowledge, are able to align point of view with that of their reader much better than professional translators ( Katan 2016b). Cronin (2013: 197) also uses the term ‘ interpreter/informant’, suggesting that it is native (rather than acquired) insidership that confers, at least, prima facie legitimacy. Sulaiman and Wilson (2019: 196) also note that target-language copy writers rather than professionally qualified translators are often preferred.

Tourism studies and translation studies Tourism translation still remains marginal and little understood in tourism studies (Cronin 2000; 157; Hall-Lew and Lew 2014; Agorni 2018, 2019). The impact of linguistic acculturation in tourism began to be discussed in the 1970s in terms of host-guest assymetry, whereby ‘the usually less literate host population produces numbers of bilingual individuals, while the tourist population generally refrains from learning the host’s language’ (Nuňez 1989: 266). As Cohen and Cooper (1986) note, this self-translation accentuates the assymetries between the host community that works to provide a service, and the leasured community of tourists who will have paid for it. In the 1980s, Cohen and Cooper (1986) introduced the issue of language mediation into tourism studies (see also Agorni 2018). They divided the ‘mediators’ into two basic groups. The first group are the translators and interpreters ‘concerned exclusively with linguistic exactitude [and] to reproduce the communication value of the source text’. The second group are ‘ language brokers’ or ‘go betweens’ (quoting Shanklin 1980). For the brokers, language ‘ is only incidental to a wider range of tasks’. The non-professional tourist guide will also provide ‘social mediation with the local population and the dissemination of information, explanation and interpretation of sites visited’ (1986: 556). The authors also mention a blurring of roles when ‘even professional guides do not consider the ability for correct simultaneous translations of conversations between tourists and locals an important professional skill’. Though there is some terminological confusion, Cohen and Cooper’s conclusion is clear: interpreters in the tourism field do more than interpret. There appears to be extremely limited tourism research on translation, and comments such as ‘a reader-oriented translation is popular’ ( Yang 2018: 297) are not helpful, given 339

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that translation scholars have been underlining for some time that tourism translation tends towards maintaining source text patterns ( Lorés 2004: 142) or at best to what Mason (2004: 166) calls ‘a­ hesitancy’ between a source-text-oriented and a ­reader-oriented approach. This ­ ­​­­ ​­ ​­ hesitancy has, if anything, become more pronounced as Globalization 3.0 encourages more small enterprises to use ­off-the-peg translation software or, at best, ­low-cost and hence low­​­­ ​­ ​­ ­ ​ amateurs. ­risk ­source-text-oriented, ­​­­ ​­ If we look at translation studies, courses in the translation of tourism are noticeably absent ( Durán Muñoz 2011). For example, out of 43 universities (in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Hadley 2015) offering an MA in Translation, only one specializes in tourism, while Agorni (2019) finds only one specialized course in the rest of Europe. And translation scholars have not been slow to lament the lack of academic research in the area ( Durán Muñoz 2012; Hogg et al. 2014; Agorni 2019). That said, much has been published; see Magris and Ross’ (2018: 266) detailed overview of tourism translation, mainly on promotional material. Traditionally, published work has been prescriptive, criticizing the lack of professional (i.e. language) competencies in the translation of informational and promotional texts. The focus has been on source language interference and t arget-language errors, a criticism that continues unabated today (e.g. Howcroft 2015; Skibitska 2015; Quin et al. 2017). With the arrival of the skopos theory and the functional approach, studies heralded by Kelly (1998) and Snell-Hornby (1999: 103) began to move research on from discussions of ‘ bungled linguistic products’ to investigations of focus, information load, relevance and the loss of persuasive features in translation (e.g. Navarro Errasti et al. 2004). Further, more descriptive, sub-strands may also be traced. First, we have the rise of comparable and parallel corpora to investigate ‘equivalences’ based either on Nida’s (1964) or Hui and Triandis’ (1985) understanding of the concept. Researchers here use collocations, keywords and word frequency lists to identify functional equivalents across languages, and also the extent that translated texts capture these equivalences at a linguistic level (e.g. Tognini Bonelli and Manca 2004; Cappelli 2008; Manca 2018) and at the level of genre ( Hogg et al. 2014; Manca 2016). Moving away from a language-centred focus, a number of researchers (following Katan 2004) link the effectiveness of tourism translation to cultural orientations (e.g. Manca 2012; Navarro 2016; Sulaiman and Wilson 2018, 2019). Indeed, tourism translation, unlike many other fields, is inherently culture-bound; and the translation of culture specific items using a taxonomy of procedures or strategies, such as those provided by Aixela (1997), has been well studied (e.g. Agorni 2016). A further particularity of tourism translation is its inherent focus on the visual (as exemplified by ‘The Tourist Gaze’, Urry and Larsen 2011). So, of particular interest among scholars today is the multimodal analysis of texts (following Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Francesconi 2014) with an accent on contrastive analysis (e.g. Manca 2016; Fina 2018; see also Arlt 2007). For the future, Magris and Ross (2018: 286) suggest that tourism translation could focus on cultural stereotypical images of destinations and cultures (imagology), and how they are translated (see also Flynn et al. 2016). Reader reception of translated tourism texts is still extremely under studied, though small focus groups have been used (e.g. Cómitre Narváez 2014; Sulaiman 2016; Sulaiman and Wilson 2019) to discuss the attractiveness of translated promotional material, while Cranmer (2016) discusses international museum-visitor reception of culturally customized material such as adapting the formatting as well as the images. Museum translation, and the whole area of the cultural or heritage tourism industry, is also a growing area of interest by translation scholars ( Liao 2018), due in no little part to the increase in visits from international tourists ( Richards 2018). Little appears to have been researched in tourism interpreting, but 340

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see Gavioli (2015), whose survey of interpreters for tourist guides supports Cohen and Cooper’s (1986) claim that interpreters tend to be mindful (see below), and expand on what the local guides say for the benefit of the international visitors. A more sociological area is also being pursued such as the study of tourism translation commissioning and quality assurance mentioned earlier. And, given that much of tourism translation may be classified as marketing, there has also been discussion on the blurred lines dividing translation and rewriting ( Kelly 1998; Agorni 2012), as well as the non use of translators, also mentioned earlier. Finally, more political questions regarding tourism translation in rendering the exotic familiar ( Jaworski et al. 2003: 16), its effect on minority languages and the broadening (or narrowing) of the mind are also the object of study (e.g. Cronin 2000, 2003; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010b, 2011), and will be discussed below.

Accessibility and authenticity These two arguments dominate the tourism debate. The United Nations promotion of ‘accessible tourism’ as a basic human right includes the need for clarity of information ‘ in tourism literature and other promotional material used in tourism […to] be used by everyone’ ( UNWTO 2013). This coincides with more recent tourism translation scholar attention on skopos and the reader’s ‘out-group’ ( Bell 1984) or ‘outsider’ status ( Katan 2012; Agorni 2018). In general, original language tourism texts are written to explain or promote what is unknown for readers, i.e. for those with low epistemic status (Heritage 2015). So, these readers are per se epistemic outsiders. The content discussed will refer explicitly to knowledge that they have limited access to ( Dillon 1992), whether this knowledge regard a specialist theme (such as archeology or art), local procedures (such as transportation) or to local customs and traditions. At the same time, this readership will have open access to the language, and also to a similar culture-bound model of the world ( Katan 2004) as the writer (such as tacit knowledge regarding local geography, history and religious practices). So, we have two levels of insider/outsidership: epistemic and languacultural. There will be rare cases where texts are written ‘to be translated’ (internationalized or localization-ready; see Cranmer 2016). In general, tourism translation is a particular case of ‘entextualization’ ( Bauman and Briggs 1990) or creating a text for an unforseen, secondary, communication situation ( Pilar Navarro 2004: 202). If we take the ‘ langua’ part first, the first question will concern readership, which begs questions of appropriate variety and style. In the special case of translating into a lingua franca (such as a Spanish guide published in Venice for all Spanish speakers) local varieties need to be avoided, and Katan (2016a) suggests a KISSy ( Keep It Short and Simple) ‘ low context communication’ approach. Kelly (1998: 36) points out, however, that though this may work for English, this cannot be an approach for all languages, given the fact that many outsider readerships appear to be comfortable being addressed as specialists (Mason 2004: 165). Tourism material translated for a local market, on the other hand, requires the understanding that ‘National ideologies and cultural borders are still with us’ ( Flynn et al. 2016: 1). Similarly, Magris and Ross’ (2018: 285) analysis of generic structures of Dutch, German and Italian tourist promotion websites demonstrates that ‘even in the globalisation era the world is not yet globalised’. So culture-boundness remains a key issue (Agorni 2016: 19), suggesting that tourism translators need to be creative, and adapt, localize or transcreate (e.g. Katan 2016b; Manca 2016: 173; Cranmer 2019). Katan (2012; also Agorni 2018) suggests adapting Greimas’ concept of ‘pouvoir faire’ when the prime purpose of the text is accessibility to enable readers to act as if they were langua and 341

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cultural insiders. This suggests that non-commercial tourism translation could be included in Public Service Interpreting and Translation ( PSIT), given its focus on translation to ‘permit [reader] participation and, therefore, empowerment’ ( Taibi 2011). This approach requires what Bell (1984: 184; see also Mason 2004: 164–166) calls an ‘ initiative shift’, a redefinition of the relationship between the addresser and addressee ( by in this case the translator). This also means the translator being ‘mindful’ of the perspective and sensitivity of the new audience of outsiders. Mindfulness was first discussed in museum translation in terms of considering the connections visitors make when reading interpreted material (Moscardo 2017), while Katan (2019) suggests that a mindless translation is one that focuses exclusively (or at best) on the langua features of the source text. A mindful approach is essential if we take into consideration the cultural boundness of ‘the tourist gaze’, a much studied concept in tourism studies ( Urry and Larsen 2011). It is a tourist model of the world, a limited and generally distorted outsider view of the other, and is an essential component of imagology. The distortion can easily become visible when the gaze is entextualized without audience resynching. Clear cases are those where countries without the resources to produce their own original language guides to foreign destinations translate already published guides. So, for example, Dybiec (2011: 6) finds that a Polish guide to Portugal, in the section ‘Travellers’ Stories’, focuses exclusively on Byron and other, less well-known Anglo writers, thus reproducing ‘the Anglo- Saxon gaze’ for a Polish audience. A related development is that of the translation of travel guides ‘ back’ into the language of the tourist destination. Wheeler and Wheeler (2007: 286–287) tell us that the first French translation of their English ‘Lonely Planet’ guide to France was ‘a mistake’ because it was ‘not totally aligned with French demands’. The new guide needed more on cinema and cuisine, and clearly less on how to get there or where the various consulates were. Little research, however, appears to have been done on what strategies have been used to mediate the differing accessibility needs and authenticity concerns, and to what extent the tourist gaze in these newer guides has been resynched ( but see Maher 2012). This distortion may well be ideological. The very first French Michelin Guides were overtly anti- German (Harp 2001: 118), and present- day tourist guides continue to delete and distort according to their own national interests. For example, the Marble Boat at the Bejing Summer Palace symbolizes the Empress’ embezzling and profiligate spending – according to the Anglo ‘Rough Guides’ (2017: 96). Whereas the informative panel at the boat itself faithfully translates the Chinese stance: ‘Marble Boat, its Chinese style structure has nothing left, which silently accused Anglo-French forces of their guilty (sic). Empress Dowager Cixi had it restored with a European style’ (in Katan 2016b: 80). The guilt refers to the systematic pillaging and burning of the Palace in 1860 carried out by British and French forces. It is now ‘a place that tells a story of cultural destruction that everyone in China knows about, but hardly anyone outside … and which causes China great pain’ ( Bowlby 2015). Unfortunately, though, the translation does nothing to render for the outsider what is implicit for the languacultural insider, and so finds itself out-of- sync with its new audience. Resynching requires manipulation, which may of course result not only in opening up reader horisons, but equally may result in further exoticization, pandering to outsider stereotypes. For example, Dijkstra (2016: 207) notes how certain translation choices made in the German translation of a Welsh guidebook ‘exoticized Wales as a “ fairytale” land of sorcerers and druids which lacked a vibrant contemporary culture’. Counterpoised to accessibility is the quest for the ‘authentic’ experience (Fodde 2017): the need for self- discovery and bodily immersion in the foreign. What counts as foreign and hence part of strangerhood, though, changes according to languacultural readership. For example, 342

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while every Anglo and German travelblog report regarding Puglia praised the (simple, traditional, genuine) food and wine, only 16% of the Italian bloggers did so ( D’Egidio 2014: 65). Translation without intervention cannot direct the reader to the ‘authentic’ food and wine if it is only implicit in the original text. At the same time, though, slow travel theory has it that mindful intervention actually detracts. As Steiner and Reisinger (2006: 302) state: ‘Tourists being authentic would be uninterested in a tour guide’s explanation’. Authenticity in translation certainly includes the enshrining and sacralization (MacCannell 1999) of the foreign language itself within translation, called ‘ languaging’ ( Potter 1970; Dann 1996: 184; Cappelli et  al. 2013; Zummo 2018), ‘translanguaging’ (Garcia and Wei 2014), ‘ language crossing’ ( Jaworski et al. 2003: 17) or ‘mimesis’ (Cronin 2003: 159). Here, rather than the language difference creating a barrier, it is a positive ‘ feature’ (Heller et al. 2014a: 431), as a way of both enriching cultural tourism (Heller et al. 2014b) and revitalizing indigenous languages (Greathouse-A mador 2005; Whitney- Gould et al. 2018). Indeed, Farry (2015) suggests that gazing (in staged doses) at the foreign language itself might be the only authentic experience left. Issues regarding languaging abound, and range from criticism of the haphazard nature in the way it is applied in travel/tourism guides (Christiansen 2016; Cesiri 2016) to the idea of languaging as commodification ( Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a) or fetishism (Cronin 2000: 90; Kelly-Holmes 2014, 2016), whereby the original language is retained for decoration rather than for communication. The net result may well be an ‘eccentricizing’ and ‘exoticizing’ effect (Shamma 2005: 63), or that of banalization ( Thurlow and Jaworski 2011), where specific local practices and languages are appropriated. So, through a mixture of over-generalization, distortion and linguistic deletion, it is not difficult to be convinced that latte (outside of Italy) is a type of coffee, or that sushi is Japanese for raw fish. This is where translation rather than languaging would actually direct the tourist to a more authentic experience. The focus of the ‘authentic’ slow travel credo closely follows the WTO recommendations regarding sustainable tourism, which includes the tourist’s engagement with the host community to improve ‘ inter-cultural understanding and tolerance’ ( UNWTO n.d.). Along with the languaging, we may say that guidebook translation tips, glossaries and accompanying phrase books are a nod in this direction. Unfortunately, though, the translations are one-way transactions that in practice, according to a postmodernist view: ‘exoticise the destination, to provide the tourist with a frisson of dépaysement’ ( Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a: 219), resulting in more of a ludic than authentic experience ( Wilson 2018: 135–137). The critics point out that the appropriacy of the language of the discourse fragments is never explained; so the self-interested questions such as ‘ how old are you’ and ‘are you married’ cannot encourage actual engagement given the default presumption of high epistemic status ( Heritage 2015), i.e. the tourist’s right to know. Thurlow and Jaworski conclude: ‘ languages … are inevitably and unavoidably caught up in the political economy of global capitalism. And the same is true of the seemingly innocent guidebook glossary’ ( Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a: 222; see also Schaff 2013: 324). In interlingual tourism discourse, though the receiving destination and its community will be central, there will be little agency involved in being host. In addition, as Farr (2007: 616) points out, it is not only the discourse that the host community is rarely party to, but also ‘cultural images of tourist destinations in developing countries (and the often sexualized and racialized native ‘others’ who inhabit them) are commonly culled by foreign marketers, without any local input or control’. Indeed, as accessibility improves thanks to effective translation, and to the fact that tourists can ‘do 7 countries in 7 days’, so communication with ‘the other’ necessarily decreases (Cronin 2000: 196). Hence, though tourism is grounded in 343

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discourse, it is not discourse with the destination community. Instead, translation is absolutely vital to maintaining the environmental bubble, allowing the global tourist, away from home, to ‘ function and interact in much the same way as he does in his own habitat’ (Cohen 1972: 166). This has been the expected state of affairs ever since the ‘ jet set’ took to the air, with the self-t ranslating ‘attractive Miss Dietland von Schonfeldt – a t ypical Lufthansa stewardess [who] of course, speaks fluent English’ ( Boorstin 1961: 95). Thurlow (2003) adds the importance of translating the inflight magazine in completing the airline’s global cosmopolitan image. Translation also further eases access without engagement in the transformation from cosmopolitan to denizen. Bagley’s (2015: 39) study of retiree Germans in Majorca concludes that ‘since translators abound … creating a Heimat [homely home] abroad does not involve integration into the host country’s lifestyle and culture’. This seameless access to host destinations seriously affects the sustainability of destinations, such as Venice, where over-tourism has led to anti-tourism (Seraphin et al. 2018). So, translation is also now being used to foster a more sustainable tourism. The ‘#EnjoyRespectVenezia’ (Città di Venezia 2017) campaign, for example, has ‘Good rules for the responsible visitor’ in 11 languages. To what extent they are read or followed is not (yet) known. It is not only the sustainability of the host community that can suffer through (irresponsible) translation. The values of the guests may also be ignored. For example, Tognini Bonelli and Manca (2004) note the offensiveness in Italian of the ubiquitous ‘children and dogs welcome’ in British tourism promotional material. The Australian 2006 tourism promotional campaign, ‘Where the bloody hell are you’, highlighting Australian informality as an attractive feature, had unsurprisingly the opposite affect for a number of potential guest cultures ( Yang 2018). Similarly, Sulaiman’s (2016) survey of reception of Australian brochures in Malaysian, of ‘attractive’ language such as earthly ‘ beauty’ and ‘paradise’, was regarded as profane for Muslim readers. The advice given regarding ‘audiencing’ to authors interested in religiously motivated tourism can be generalized for all tourism translation issues: ‘ be mindful of who it is [you] are writing for … whose voice are you using?’ ( Jamal and Qayum 2019: 31). The authors focus on semantics and illustrate how Western non-Muslim discourse tends to treat ‘Islamic tourism’ and ‘Halal tourism’ as value-free descriptors, ignoring the strongly different emotive connotations when adressed to a Muslim audience. So, what can work well in the host destination language, where the religious presence is negligable, can boomerang when translated. Indeed, in an article entitled ‘Dear Spain: Want to attract Jews?’ Levy (2017) notes that a Spanish kosher- style menu includes a sparkling wine entitled ‘Christmas cava’. This works in Spanish given that the audience will be predominantly Spanish and Catholic, and is unlikely to notice that ‘Christmas’ is not an obvious attractor for Jews. Katan (forthcoming) notices a similar issue translating the Italian Guide to Jewish Salento, and its explanation of ‘Pesach’ as ‘La pasqua ebriaca/Jewish Easter’. The analogy is useful for the primary Italian, non-Jewish, audience, given there is no translation in Italian. But it is unnecessary (if not mildly offensive) when translated for the new audience, given the commonly used English term ‘Passover’. ­

Conclusion Global tourism presupposes accessibility and accounting for tourist outsider pouvoir faire needs. However, ‘ frictionless accessibility’ mindlessly steamrolls tourists into and through the destination community in encapsuled environmental bubbles, doing little to promote 344

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sustainability. Translation is vital to providing access and facilitating travel across borders; yet the quality of the product demonstrates an alarming lack of investment in the process. Also the subject area has yet to be taken seriously in tourism studies or in translation training. This situation has been compounded by the rise of Globalization 3.0, enabling cost-f ree ‘translation’ into and out of almost any language, while increasing the extent of un- synched translations. ­auto-magic ​­ At the same time, the same Globalization 3.0 can help translators dip into the wealth of natural-translator and cultural-informer ( Katan 2016b) examples of recontextualizing for the new audience, creating ‘ just enough’ friction to allow the tourist to appreciate and value differences. As Agorni (2016: 20) says, ‘ it is this lack of correspondence between the destination and the tourist that keeps the process of signification alive’. Indeed it is the translator’s mindful initiative shift and ability to re-audience either for total epistemic and languacultural outsiders or for particular epistemic readerships (such as those interested in religious tourism) that should constitute the translator’s added value in mediating accessibility and sustainability. For the future, sustainability is clearly key, and with that research into how mindful translation may have a bearing, beyond the deontologically constrained multilingual translations of, for example, ‘#EnjoyRespectVenezia’. As Globalization 3.0 consolidates so it should also become imperative that research focuses on the longer-term cost of mindless translation on the success of promotion, on quality of stay, on strengthening the ethnocentric tourist gaze (the imagology) and on relations with the host community.

Further reading Agorni, M. (2018) ‘Cultural Representation Through Translation: An Insider- Outsider Perspective on the Translation of Tourism Promotional Discourse’, Altre Modernità/Other Modernities, 20, pp. 253–275. ­ ­ ​­ Dicusses tourism translation as requiring intercultural mediation, and provides an overview of current work both from translation scholars and from tourism studies. Altre Modernità (2019) ­ Mind the Gap in Tourism Discourse: traduzione, mediazione, inclusione, 21. A multilingual special issue focussing on contrastive linguistic and translation issues when mediating ( physical as well as communicative) accessibility and inclusion in tourism texts across languages. Cronin, M. (2000) Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation. Cork: Cork University Press. An engaging philosophical look at how (change of ) language affects travel, and how international travel is affecting language use. Cultus (2016) ­ Tourism Across Cultures: Accessibility in Tourist Communication, 9(1), edited by Manca, E. and Spinzi, C.; 9(2) edited by Katan, D. and Spinzi, C. A Cultus double issue providing a wide-ranging overview of recent research addressing issues in heritage and tourism discourse with a strong focus on contrastive linguistics and translation. Sulaiman, Z. and Wilson, R. (2019). Translation and Tourism: Strategies for Effective Cross-Cultural Promotion. Singapore: Springer. Focuses on the translating tourism promotional materials ( TPMs) and through experimental research identifies effective translation guidelines for stakeholders in the industry and strategies for the translator.

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Napu, N. (2016) ‘Translating Tourism Promotional Texts: Translation Quality and its Relationship to the Commissioning Process. Cultus, 9(2), ­ pp. 47–62. ­ ­ ​­ Navarro Errasti, M. P., Lorés Sanz, R. and Murillo Ornat, S. (eds.) (2004) Pragmatics at Work: The Translation of Tourist Literature. Bern: Peter Lang. Navarro, S. (2016) ‘‘Not up to American Standards’: A Corpus-based Analysis’, Cultus, 9(2), ­ pp. 173–189. ­ ­ ​­ Nida, E. (1964) Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Nuňez, T. (1989) ‘Touristic Studies in Anthropological Perspective’, in Smith, V. L. (ed.), Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 265–280. Oh, H., Assaf, G. and Baloglu, S. (2016) ‘Motivations and Goals of Slow Tourism’, Journal of Travel Research, 55(2), ­ pp. 205–219. ­ ­ ​­ Pilar Navarro, M. (2004) ‘Identification of the Right Propositional Form and the Translator’, in Navarro Errasti, M. P., Lorés Sanz, R. and Murillo Ornat, S. (eds.), Pragmatics at Work: The Translation of Tourist Literature. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 199–242. ­ ­ ​­ Pokorn, N. (2016) ‘Is It So Different? Competences of Teachers and Students in L2 Translation Classes’, ­ ­ ​­ Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione/International Journal of Translation, 18, pp. 31–48. Potter, S. (1970) The Complete Upmanship. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. ­ ​­ Quin, J., Law, R. and Wei, J. (2017) ‘An Exploratory Study on the Readability of Hotel Websites in China’, in Vopava, J., Douda, V., Kratcochvil, R. and Konecki, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 10th MAC 2017. Prague: MAC Prague Consulting, pp. 215–221. Richards, G. (2018) ‘Cultural Tourism: A Review of Recent Research and Trends. Journal of Hospitality ­ ­ ​­ and Tourism Management, 36, pp. 12–21. Ritzer, G. (2010) Globalization: A Basic Text. Chichester: ­Wiley-Blackwell. ​­ Rough Guides (2017) The Rough Guide to China. London: Rough Guides. Schaff, B. (2013) ‘‘Andate a farvi benedire’ and Other Useful Phrases for the English Traveller in John ­ ​­ Murray’s Handbooks of Travel-Talk’, in Yarrington, A. (ed.), Travels and Translations: Anglo-Italian Cultural Translations. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 323–325. ­ ­ ​­ Seraphin, H., Sheeran, P. and Pilato, M. (2018) ‘O ver-tourism and the Fall of Venice as a Destination’, Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 9, pp. 374–376. ­ ­ ​­ Shamma, T. (2005) ‘The Exotic Dimension of Foreignizing Strategies: Burton’s Translation of the Arabian Nights’, The Translator, 11(1), ­ pp. 51–67. ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ​­ ­ pp. 162–172. ­ ­ ​­ Shanklin, E. (1980) ‘The Irish ­Go-between’, Anthropological Quarterly, 53(3), Sitsanis, N. (2018) ‘Top 10 Languages Used on the Internet for 2020’. Available online: https://speakt. com/top-10-languages-used-internet/ [Accessed 24 November 2019]. ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Skibitska, O. (2015) ‘The Language of Tourism: Translating Terms in Tourist Texts’, Translation ­ ­­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ Journal. Available online: https://translationjournal.net/October-2015/the-language-of-tourism­­translating-terms-in-tourist-texts.html. ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed 30 January 2020]. Smith, O. (2019) ‘The Unstoppable Rise of the Chinese Traveller: Where Are They Going and What Does It mean for Overtourism?’ Available online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/rise-of-the-chinese-tourist/ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed 11 November 2019]. ­ ­ ­ ​­ Steiner, C. and Reisinger, Y. (2006) ‘Understanding Existential Authenticity’, Annals of Tourism ­ pp. 299–318. ­ ­ ​­ Research, 33(2), Stewart, D. (2008) ‘Vocational Translation Training Into a Foreign Language’, inTRAlinea, 10. Available online: http://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/Vocational_translation_training_into_a_ ­ ­ ­ ­ foreign_language [Accesed 5 May 2020]. Sulaiman, M. Z. (2016) ‘The Misunderstood Concept of Translation in Tourism Promotion’, Transla­ pp. 53–68. ­ ­ ​­ tion and Interpreting, 8(1), Sulaiman, Z. and Wilson, R. (2018) ‘Translating Tourism Promotional Materials: A Cultural­Conceptual Model’, Perspectives, 26(5), ­ pp. 629–645. ­ ­ ​­ Sulaiman, Z. and Wilson, R. (2019) Translation and Tourism: Strategies for Effective Cross-Cultural Promotion. Singapore: Springer. Taibi, M. (2011) ‘Public Service Translation’, in Malmkjær, K. and Windle, K. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 214–227. Thurlow, G. (2003) ‘Communicating a Global Reach: Inflight Magazines as a Globalizing Genre in Tourism’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), ­ pp. 579–606. ­ ­ ​­ 349

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Thurlow, C. and Jaworski, A. (2010a) ‘The Commodification of Local Linguacultures: Guidebook glossaries’, in Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C. and Ylänne, V. (eds.), Tourism Discourse. Language and Global Mobility. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 191–223. Thurlow, C. and Jaworski, A. (2010b) Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thurlow, C. and Jaworski, A. (2011) ‘Tourism Discourse: Languages and Banal Globalization’, Applied ­ ­ ​­ Linguistics Review, 2, pp. 285–312. Tognini Bonelli, E. and Manca, E. (2004) ‘‘Welcoming Children, Pets and Guests: Towards Functional Equivalence in the Languages of ‘Agriturismo’ and ‘Farmhouse Holidays’’, in Aijmer, K. and Alten­ ­ ​­ berg, B. (eds.) Advances in Corpus Linguistics. ( ICAME 23). Amsterdam: Brill, p. 371–385. UNWTO. (2013) ‘Recommendations on Accessible Tourism for All’. Available online: https://­ ­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ webunwto.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/imported_images/43206/unwto_recommendations_ on_accessible_tourism.pdf [Accessed 6 May 2020]. ­ UNWTO (n.d.). Sustainable Development of Tourism. Available online: https://www.unwto.org/ sustainable- development [Accessed 6 May 2020]. Urry, J. and Larsen, J. (2011) The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage Publications. Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge. Wheeler, T. and Wheeler, M. (2007) Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story. Singapore: Periplus. ­ ­ ­ ​­ Wilson, A. (2018) ‘The Local Language of Tourism in International Tourist Information Encounters: Adapting the What and the How’, in Held, G. (ed.) Strategies of Adaptation in Tourist Communication: ­ ­ ​­ Linguistic Insights. Leiden: Brill, pp. 123–144. Yang, P. (2018) ‘Addressing Translation Issues as Intercultural Communication Barriers in Tourism: Language, Culture, and Communication at Play’, in Bielenia- Grajewska, M. (ed.) Innovative Perspectives on Tourism Discourse. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 292–311. Zummo, M. L. (2018) ‘On the Discursive Self- construction of Expats, Behavior and Values’, Scripta Manent, 12, pp. 6–20. ­ ­ ​­

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24 Globalization, advertising and promotional translation Ira Torresi

Introduction The translation of advertising and promotional discourse is closely linked to globalization. Commercial advertising and promotional genres have the specific purpose of persuading buyers to buy more of a given product or service. Not too dissimilarly, the purpose of noncommercial advertising and promotion (such as awareness-raising, institutional or political campaigns) is to influence people’s attitudes about a given institution, or issue or candidate. The purpose of translated promotional and advertising texts, then, is to reach out to more prospective buyers, or people to be influenced, in other language communities. One might oversimplify the latter statement by arguing that ‘advertising and promotion are translated to sell more (or persuade more people) internationally’. The equation between ‘ in other language communities’ and ‘ internationally’, however, has become increasingly complicated, whether one looks at it from the angle of marketing, culture or language use. Let us start from the marketing aspect of the matter. Since international trade is increasingly seen as a global affair rather than a mere sum of the business exchanges between each individual seller and their respective target markets, it only seems logical for international advertising and promotion (and their translation) to become globalized as well. A promotional text or campaign may now be shared and circulated by users of social media and other forms of instant communication across national, class, and age boundaries, thus reaching beyond the market it was originally intended for. For marketers to maximize this kind of effect, however, addressees must be able to understand the text or campaign – which is where translation comes in. The globalization of markets, understood as the removal of boundaries between the places – whether physical or v irtual – where business exchanges occur, does not erase local languages and cultures. More likely, it increases the participation of people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in the same loci of business, as businesspeople or as customers (or both). These people may find a common language and a common market culture to share their common business experiences, but such experiences will inevitably be influenced by the participants’ languages and cultural identities, as well as by the linguistic, social and cultural settings in which these experiences happen. 351

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Moreover, end-users and retail consumers may be unaware of the workings of market economics, and react only to those promotional stimuli that touch their own emotions by relying on familiar social and cultural values that are culture- a nd tradition-bound. Pervasive advertising can gradually and collectively push new values through, but in order to do so, it needs to leverage the familiar value system, grafting the new values in, rather than uprooting and replacing the old ones. This accounts for the fact that, even in the face of trade globalization, much advertising and promotion are still translated or recreated ( pick any of the terms discussed in the next section) into target languages and cultures that may or may not outline separate markets. Rather than with markets as abstractions, promotional genres deal with people, their addressees, and with largely pre-logical behaviours that compel them to buy a product, a service, or an idea. A retrospective meta-analysis of 880 advertising campaigns that received an IPA Effectiveness Award suggests that one of the strategies underlying their long-term success was to rely on emotional rather than rational or logical claims ( Binet and Field 2009, 2013). At present, it seems that such pre-logical, emotional consumer behaviours are not going to be unifiable into universals soon: ‘although there is a worldwide convergence of technology, media, and financial systems, desires and behaviours of consumers are not converging’ (de Mooij 2013: 2). In order for promotion to be effective across boundaries, then, translation is still key, with scholars tracing the very possibility of market globalization to translation: ‘without translation, the global capitalist consumer- oriented and growth-fixated economy would not be possible’ ( House 2015: 102); ‘translation [...] is what makes globalization a reality’ (Cronin 2013: 21). For the time being, then, the translation (or localization, transcreation) of advertising and promotional texts remains useful for the purposes of influencing retail consumption or end-user behaviour, and non-translation remains a deliberate translation choice that actually presupposes a pre-translation of the source text so as to tailor it to a t rans-national consumer ­ base (Sections ‘Localizing, adapting, transcreating, rewriting: the terminology of advertising translation in the era of global trade’ and ‘Advertising translation and cultural variation – an accelerator of globalization?’). In any case, however, advertising and promotional translation tends to deal with the cross- cultural variation of social norms and values that are not confined by geographical and political boundaries, but travel with the people who carry them along with their language pools.

Localizing, adapting, transcreating, rewriting: the terminology of advertising translation in the era of global trade The translation of promotional and advertising texts has traditionally been recognized as a highly ‘creative’ or ‘ free’ kind of translation, both in academic and professional circles. This is all the more true for the translation of business-to-consumer ( B2C) advertisements, a short text genre ( Eco 2002) that is fraught with ‘g iven-for-g ranted’ cultural and social values and stereotypes ( Torresi 2004, 2007). Such stereotypes tend to be invisible to addressees, including translators themselves. Yet, the failure to identify them and replace them, if necessary, with other stereotypes that are more relevant for the target consumer group may result in a target text that, however linguistically correct and faithful to the apparent text functions of the original, defies a persuasive purpose that is measured in terms of actual purchases ( Torresi 2017: 19; ‘se traduit par des actes réels d’achat’, Guidère 2000: 62). In an attempt to clearly set it apart from translation realms that focus on the more or less ‘ faithful’ interlingual rendition of the source message, advertising and promotional translation, 352

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whose loyalty lies more with the persuasive function of the text than with the information content of the message, has been variously termed ‘ localization’ ( Valdés 2008; Declercq 2011), ‘adaptation’ (Cruz- García 2018) or, especially in professional practice, ‘rewriting’ or ‘transcreation’ ( Ray and Kelly 2010; Katan 2016; Benetello 2018). Agencies specializing in the translation of promotional and advertising texts may actually circulate job announcements looking for copywriters in the target languages with good reading skills in the source language, rather than professional translators, probably following the tenet that in advertising as well as in the language industry, ‘the most effective way to make a product truly international is to make it look and feel like a product in the target country’ (Sprung 2000: xiv). It should be mentioned that the terms ‘adaptation’, ‘rewriting’, ‘ localization’, ‘transcreation’ mentioned earlier are actually listed as separate ‘value added’ services that can be offered by translation service providers under the 2015 ISO 17100 standard (Annex F). What all such terms have in common, however, is that they refer to a translation approach that transcends the interlinguistic translation of the verbal copy and embraces all the semiotic modes of expression in which the text is encoded (including print images, video, website structure, voices) as well as the cultural stereotypes it conveys. Whether described as localizer, adapter, transcreator or re-(copy)writer, the advertising translator is clearly one that is able to produce a target text that works as an advertisement in its own right and is capable of achieving the desired effect on the target consumer groups ( Fuentes Luque and Kelly 2000, Smith 2008). Accordingly, advertising translation classroom practices are often described as transcending the merely linguistic elements of the text while embracing multimodality and intersemioticity, as well as cultural awareness and consumer orientation (González Davies 2004: 124 and ­133–134; ​­ Laviosa 2007; Kong 2012; ­Enríquez-Aranda ​­ and ­Jiménez-Carra ​­ 2016).

Advertising translation and cultural variation – an accelerator of globalization? The burden of transforming the text in the way described earlier, however, does not rest solely on the advertising translators, meant as the persons or teams who produce a target text in a different language. Within large corporations, the source texts for advertising and communication campaigns are increasingly designed with a global audience in mind. Such texts are usually in English and avoid culture-specificity as much as possible. They may be designed to be circulated worldwide without changes (or with minor ones), in what is termed a ‘global’ marketing approach that requires keeping verbal messages short and simple ( Valdés 2016: 136–137), classic examples being Coca-Cola’s ‘Happiness’ or ‘Enjoy’ campaigns or – before the ban on cigarette advertising – Philip Morris’s ‘Welcome to Marlboro Country’ commercials. Or conversely, they may function as raw materials to be transcreated locally in order to best suit local markets, in so-called ‘glocal’ marketing. Glocalization may happen irrespective of whether the local language is the same that is used in the source text. For instance, the ­English-language ​­ Ur-text of an ad created globally for the sole purpose of localization would need transcreating into the British and US markets, respectively, especially if the product being advertised has a different market positioning in the two countries. This is what happened, for instance, with advertisements for Oil of Olay’s Total Effects A nti-Blemish Moisturizer circulated simultaneously in the British and US versions of Marie Claire in December 2005 (Torresi 2008), which used different visuals and referred to completely different sets of values in connection with women’s beauty and ageing. While the British version, whose visual embodied elegance and perfection, mentioned ‘ blemishes and the signs of ageing’, the American one played on humour, musing on ‘wrinkles and pimples’ and ‘split-personality skin’. 353

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In this process, which mirrors the ‘think globally, act locally’ motto (Adab 2000: 224), the preparation of the original ‘multitext’ (Guidère 2009, 2011) may also be regarded as a form of translation or pre-t ranslation. For this reason, the marketing and advertising teams that design the source campaign may largely benefit from the inclusion of translators as advisors on how to best avoid culture specificity in the source text, in order to ensure easier translation to different locales (Vandal-Sirois 2013: 142–143). ­­ ​­ ­ ​­ It should be pointed out that the global (i.e. untranslated) and glocal advertising approaches are possible only for corporations with local marketing offices that are capable of, respectively, monitoring the reception of the global campaign, or suiting the non- culturespecific source text to their respective local markets. These approaches are also relatively recent. In older times, long before the concept of globalization came to the fore (approximately until the 1980s), Western corporations did not show such a high sensitivity towards cultural diversity, arguably because non-Western markets were considered to have marginal buying capacity. Still, their promotional and advertising texts were translated to reach out to those largely ‘virgin’ markets, thus selling Western values and imagery along with Western products. In fact, diachronic studies in advertising and promotional translation show how the introduction of the advertising and promotional genres, largely translated from other languages, has helped shape local cultures in many ways, paving the way for the presentd ay ‘global’ base of knowledges, values and images that one takes largely for granted today. Huang (2014), for instance, describes how advertisements for Western or Western-l ike medicines introduced Western medical concepts into the early t wentieth- century Chinese popular culture, where they mingled with the traditional Chinese conceptualizations of the human body, its ailments and possible treatments. Ločmele (2016) points out that positively connoted foreign cultural values were introduced in the Latvian collective imagination through translated promotional texts in the 1920s and 1930s, before commercial advertising ceased to exist in the Second World War and then Soviet periods of Latvian history. More examples of this kind will be presented in Section ‘Critiques of advertising translation as an instrument of colonialism(s)’, because they adopt a distinctively critical, feminist or postcolonial stance. If the globalizing effect of advertising on the recipient social value system has been pointed out for interlingually translated texts, then some reflections are also in order in the light of the relatively recent trend towards non-translation ( Prieto del Pozo 2009; Nemčoková 2011; Páez Rodríguez 2013; Comitre Narváez 2015). We have already mentioned earlier that the choice of non-translation is the result of a translation process in its own r ight – albeit the process is initiated within marketing departments rather than by translators. Shifting to the end-user’s point of view, however, the very spread of non-t ranslated ads whose verbal texts are in English, and the evidence of English being the first (or only) choice whenever a promotional website is made available in a second language for international audiences, seems to consolidate the status of English as the global language. The association is never explicitly argued for; it is taken for granted and has a normative effect, just like the cultural stereotypes and social values so heavily relied upon in advertising ( Torresi 2005). Thus, the choice not to translate may be perceived by addressees as a reinforcement of the stereotype of English being, having to be, the language that should be used and understood by all humankind. One might think about other languages that could claim global primacy over English, at least in certain domains usually linked to country- of- origin (COO) effect, as in the case of French for perfume advertising. This use of languages other than English linked to cultural connotations, however, has been dwindling since the 1990s (Snell-Hornby 2006: 140). When one looks in depth at the countries where such languages are used, moreover, one finds that 354

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there, too, advertisers have recently been relying on English language and A nglo-world imagery to appeal to local consumers (Martin 2006). Similar usages of English or Western non-translated brand names are spreading and becoming the preferred option even in China, a market traditionally reliant on heavy cultural adaptation to boost product sales ( Xuechuan He 2018: 507). The very presence of the same advertising texts in English across different language, social and cultural communities is far from being a neutral fact whose effects pertain only to the linguistic domain. It is something that changes our very way of thinking – a small shift in what Blommaert (2005: 73) calls ‘orders of indexicality’ that shape our perception of normalcy. Cumulatively taken, such shifts may facilitate the gradual homogenizing of discourses and values across cultures, which some scholars have linked to colonial and postcolonial ethnocentric attitudes towards Otherness. They may also lead to an increasing normalization of translanguaging practices. One should not forget, however, that even when campaigns are designed to be circulated globally in the same language through all media (including the internet, in-app advertising and social media), they ‘reveal social representations and certain investments in the collective imaginary [...] They forge worlds in the realm of the imaginary’ (Hoff and Anzanello Carrascoza 2013: 152–3). This power to shape collective imagination may lead to forms of cultural colonization, which the feminist, critical or postcolonial translation studies that are the foci of the following section usually identify as proceeding from hegemonic agents rooted in capitalist Western cultures to substantially less empowered consumers living across the planet.

Critiques of advertising translation as an instrument of colonialism(s) As mentioned earlier, globalizing advertising strategies that circulate the same campaign worldwide, as well as translations of commercial campaigns that carry non-indigenous cultural values, have been exposed as instruments of colonialism by a relatively recent strand of translation scholars. Such critical readings of advertising translation focus on the cultural and gender stereotyping it may promote in addressees, highlighting how it can turn into an instrument of corporations’ hegemonic power over individuals and their value systems. Critical discursive studies explicitly or implicitly make reference to the Critical Discourse Analysis tradition that is championed by Fairclough (1989, 1995) and is based on the concepts of hegemony (Gramsci 1977: 2346) and voice ( Bakhtin 1981, 1986; Blommaert 2005: 68). Examples of similarly critical studies include Calzada Pérez (2005) on the ideological implications of Coca Cola and McDonald advertising in Africa; Mao Sihui (2009) on orientalizing advertisements for real estate in the Guangdong area; del Saz-Rubio and Pennock- Speck (2008, 2009), Torresi (2004, 2012) on gender stereotyping; and Lotfollahi et al. (2015) for a critical discursive analysis of cosmetic and hygiene product advertising translated into Persian. Smith (2010: 53–54), conversely, identifies the translator as the agent that is colonized by the Western corporations that advertise their products in Russia. This view implicitly acknowledges translators’ status as the first recipients of the texts they translate and as disadvantaged members of the market, rather than highlighting their alleged responsibility or agency in perpetuating a hegemonic power that they do not, after all, partake in. In some of the studies that use translated advertising as materials carrying cultural or ethnic representations, a critical stance may not be openly stated, but the influence of postcolonial studies or Orientalism may still be traced. Orientalism (Said 1978; Sardar 1999) exposes ethnic Otherness as a social and cultural product of a gaze that is grounded within the gazer’s culture. Instances of this critical stance are the works of Chiaro (2004, 2009) or Chiaro and 355

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Rossato (2015) on the representation of Italianness, and Di Giovanni (2008: 38– 40) on the portrayal of India and Indians in Italian advertising. An interesting subset of critical and feminist readings of advertising translation refers to classroom practices where translated or comparative advertising is used for practical applications of Critical Discourse Analysis ( Vid and Kučiš 2015), to expose gender images as socially and culturally constructed (Corrius Gimbert et al. 2016a), and as a means to stimulate reflection on situated learning and situated knowledges (Corrius Gimbert et al. 2016b).

The globalization of advertising translation studies Globalization has made an additional contribution to advertising translation studies. The opening of traditionally closed state economies to Western- style capitalism, with their coda of booming promotional translation mainly between English and Chinese, has led to an emerging Asian ‘school’ of translation scholars. Typically, this group of researchers deal with issues that specifically relate to the translation of Western brand names into ideograms and the reverse – translation of ideogram-based Chinese brands to non-Asian countries. Both processes carry deep semiotic and cultural implications and offer plenty of food for thought, as witnessed by the abundance of studies on brand name translation into and from Chinese – to mention only a few English-language examples that may be easily accessed by an international readership ( Dong and Helms 2001; He Chuansheng and Xiao Yunnan 2003; Qiong Wang 2003; Jing Wang 2009; Hwang 2011; Kum et al. 2011; Ying Cui 2017). Several more studies may be available to readers of Chinese. Research on the translation of advertising carried out by Asian scholars is typically published in m arketing- centred Asian journals and edited books, pioneering a multidisciplinary trend that is not equally popular outside of Asia (see Section ‘Areas of interdisciplinary interest’). To detail one example, Jing Jiang and Ran Wei (2012), published in the International Marketing Review, collected a corpus of 210 print advertisements of products of Asian, European and North American multinational corporations. The authors conducted content analysis, with special focus on the use of Western versus non-Western cultural cues, to compare their varying degrees of standardization in creative strategy and execution (i.e. whether the campaign could be conceived as global, glocal or local). Even when it is solidly focused on the translators’ rather than marketers’ perspective, Asian research on the translation of promotional texts seems more open to incorporating marketing concepts and concerns, as in George Ho’s (2008) call for a (monetary) valuedriven theory of translation. According to Ho, only by speaking their employers’ language – money – w ill commercial translators be able to have their hard work and talents recognized. Since successful translations bring an increased profit to the end client, the translator should charge accordingly higher prices for promotional translation work, which would, in turn, make its value more relevant for the commissioner.

Areas of interdisciplinary interest So far, we have discussed the impact of globalization within the realm of translation studies. It should be pointed out, however, that the practice of advertising translation (and translation in general) is likely to be impacted by globalization phenomena taking place outside its traditional boundaries, and that may demand further points of interdisciplinary contact. I will mention here two areas whose progress may deserve advertising translation scholars’ particular attention – international marketing and translanguaging. 356

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With the exception of the Asian school of advertising translation studies briefly mentioned earlier, and of Hofstede’s and De Mooij’s studies in the cultural aspects of international marketing (Hofstede 1991, 2001; Hofstede and Hofstede 2005; De Mooij 2003, 2004, 2013), much needs to be done to secure a firm grounding of marketing principles within advertising translation studies. Key concepts such as COO effect ( Klein et al. 1998; Johnson 2009; Maher and Carter 2011; Oberecker and Diamantopoulos 2011; Amatulli et al. 2019), for instance, are seldom taken into account in translation studies, even when analysing case studies that clearly relate to such concepts. COO is the set of qualities that consumers typically a ssociate – or are led to associate – with a product or brand only because that product or brand (actually or allegedly) comes from a certain country. The qualities stereotypically associated with that country (e.g. being ‘ in fashion’ for France or Italy; mechanic or engineering precision for Germany or Japan) are therefore transferred to those products or brands that come or are said (or implied) to come from that country. In translation discourse about products or tourist destinations being presented as ‘the real thing’, however, COO is seldom explicitly mentioned as such, while similar considerations stemming from linguistic and semiotic cues, following the example of the Panzani ad mentioned by Barthes (1957), may come more readily to the researcher’s mind. This, however, risks making research circular within the realm of translation studies and its cognate disciplines, rather than expanding outside the humanities and learning to use more synthetic and fruitful concepts belonging to international marketing. Another concept that could be similarly useful for advertising and promotional translation studies, but is not systematically referred to, is consumer ethnocentrism ( Usunier and Lee 2013: 18–19). Introduced by Shimp and Sharma (1987), consumer ethnocentrism refers to consumers’ positive bias towards products coming from their own country, culture, community or locale as opposed to foreign products ( Bizumic 2019). Apparently, it is one of the most powerful drives against globalization, although the very fact that it is a globally recognized trend raises doubts about its anti-global nature. Its focus on localities also tends to relate well with another concept that looks particularly promising for future interdisciplinary directions in advertising translation research, this time borrowed from linguistics – translanguaging. As laid out by García and Li Wei (2014: 3, emphasis in the original), translanguaging defines ‘fluid practices that go between and beyond socially constructed language [...] systems, structures and practices to engage [...] multiple meaning-making systems and subjectivities’. In other words, the notion of translanguaging questions the identity between nationality and language, highlighting how in multilingual, multicultural environments individuals may freely pick elements from their full array of meaning-making resources, including all the named languages they have variously come in contact with (whether formally recognized or not) and non-verbal resources (Mazzaferro 2018: 5). The centre of the translanguaging perspective is the language user and his/her individual linguistic resources rather than the languages s/he uses. Translanguaging practices are increasingly observed, due to both an increase and diversification of migration flows, and the political or de facto acknowledgement of multilingualism in multiethnic or multinational states across the world. As a result, ‘the relationship between language and the nation-state [is] being constantly reassessed’ ( Li Wei 2018: 15). It would be interesting for future research, then, but also for future translation practice and teaching, to put the ‘practical theory’ of translanguaging ( Li Wei 2018) to the test of promotional translation. Translanguaging practices may be purposefully used as a means to increase consumer identification within minority or multi-language communities, as aptly described by Mensah (2018). When the purpose to sell or promote becomes pressing, the promoter or advertiser might well resort to all resources at hand, whether professional or non-professional. Style or translation quality – as assessed against standard named language varieties – may then 357

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become secondary concerns, if the final result is effective for marketing a product or promoting a lifestyle. The translanguaging perspective appears particularly promising when working with self-promotional texts meant for the social media, whose communication spaces are potentially more ‘ intimate’ for both authors and intended audience and offer more room for a kind of communication that is less concerned with grammatical correctness than with effective customer identification ( Torresi 2021).

Conclusion We have seen in the previous section that there is significant room for interdisciplinary research that looks at advertising and promotional translation using concepts belonging to other fields such as international marketing or linguistics (in particular, through the lens of translanguaging). Conversely, translation studies could at least in part inform research into advertising and promotion that is rooted into other disciplinary traditions – for instance, social, cultural or gender studies. To mention but one example, Weinbaum et al. (2008) discuss translated ads as shapers of a globalized gender imagery in the ‘Modern Girl’ discourse that was popular in the interwar period (1919–1939) across the world, and still permeates women’s globalized self-image. This study, however, does not delve into the translation processes that led to the creation of a specific gender image. Of course it was quite legitimately out of the scope of Weinbaum et al.’s study to investigate advertising translation as a social practice, or to discuss advertising translators’ ‘ethical and socio-political responsibilities [and thus] challeng[e] traditional perspectives on the translator’s role in society’ ( Wolf 2010: 34). But the time may be ripe to take the ‘sociological turn’ or the ‘sociology of translation studies’ ( Wolf 2007) a step forward, and actively seek social and cultural scholars’ collaboration to acknowledge that translation is an agent of sociological change and globalization at large (see Section ‘Advertising translation and cultural variation – an accelerator of globalization?’). While almost trite within translation studies circles, the not-so-marginal role of translation in general, and of advertising and promotional translation in particular, in shaping individual and collective values and role models appears to be rather neglected out of the boundaries of translation studies. Further interdisciplinary collaborative projects, then, might facilitate a ‘translational turn’ in other fields of research, such as – but not limited to – social or gender studies, similar to what appears to have already started within cultural studies ( Bachmann-Medick 2014). After all, interdisciplinarity itself can be conceptualized ‘as a form of translation across differences’, and translation ‘as a metaphor for thinking about the challenges of researching across differences more generally – be they linguistic, disciplinary, or cultural differences’ ( Bhambra and Holmwood 2011: 4). With its sharp intercultural focus, embedded in the very persuasive purpose of the texts it deals with (see Sections ‘Advertising translation and cultural variation – an accelerator of globalization?’ and ‘Critiques of advertising translation as an instrument of colonialism(s)’), the study of advertising and promotional translation promises to be a particularly fruitful area of translation studies for such interdisciplinary translational research.

Further reading Morón, M. and Calvo E. (2018) ‘Introducing Transcreation Skills in Translator Training Contexts: A Situated Project-based ­ ​­ Approach’, Journal of Specialised Translation, 29, pp. 126–148. ­ ­ ​­ In addition to introducing the topic with a well-informed diachronic examination of the term and practice of transcreation, the paper illustrates in detail a professional training project in transcreation involving translation students and agencies. It thus offers useful input for advertising translation class design. 358

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Risku, H., Pichler, T. and Wieser, V. (2017) ‘Transcreation as a Translation Service: Process Requirements and Client Expectations’, Across Languages and Cultures, 18(1), ­ ­p. 53–77. ­ ​­ The paper presents the results of the authors’ interviews with Austrian, German, Italian and Swiss clients of an Austrian translation agency regarding their expectations about the translation or transcreation of promotional materials. The presentation of the empirical study is complemented with an in- depth diachronic exploration of transcreation, both in the translation/copywriting market and in advertising translation studies. An interesting intersection between the standpoints of marketing practice and applied translation studies. Valdés, C. (2016) ‘Globalization and Localization in Advertising: A Love-Hate Relationship?’, Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, 22(2), ­ pp. 130–153. ­ ­ ​­ A very well informed and detailed account on how advertisers’ international marketing choices impact translation choices. Real-life examples include instances of non- translation of the advertising copy complemented with mandatory legal statements in the local language, outlining how globalizing strategies can successfully coexist with specific local needs. Fraught with material and reflections on the ‘pre- t ranslation’ of ads within marketing offices in order to make them more suitable for multiple consumer bases with different national identities, languages, social and cultural backgrounds.

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25 Language demand and supply Donald A. DePalma

Introduction: the language industry enables communication, commerce, and community This chapter describes the demand driving the language services and technology market, the supply chain that satisfies it, and the opportunities and challenges faced by the providers. It references reports written by CSA Research, which are based on primary qualitative and quantitative research conducted with buyers of language services, suppliers of these services and technologies, mainstream IT and business providers, and investors in the industry.1 Most people don’t recognize the value of translation until they can’t read the language in which something they need or want is available – and they can’t find a version in their language. That lack of language support is a very common occurrence at websites. CSA Research annually measures enterprise and government support and their commitment to multilingualism, using website analysis as a proxy to gauge year-over-year changes in language support. Its 2019 annual analysis studied more than 2,700 high-traffic commercial websites across a range of industries such as retail, travel, gaming, and consumer electronics ( Lommel 2019). CSA Research found that many of these websites in that study support only a handful of languages and thus can reach only a fraction of the world’s online economic opportunity. The average heavily trafficked site in this analysis supports about five languages or locales and most offer just a fraction – 15% or less – of the source-language content ( Lommel and Sargent 2018). However, our research shows that it takes 14 languages to reach 90% of the world’s online economic opportunity (Sargent and Lommel 2019). And because most companies on the planet provide just a small fraction of content from their headquarters’ country website in other languages, they jeopardize or simply block the customer experience (CX) in other countries ( DePalma and Ray 2020). It’s often the result of business analysis showing limited revenue potential that causes companies not to translate their websites. What that means is that for many less economically interesting countries, there’s no localized information at all at many business-to- consumer ( B2C) and businessto-business ( B2B) websites. When there’s no content in a given language, most visitors who speak that language leave while some turn to machine translation (MT) at sites such as Alibaba, Google, and Yandex. 363

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Why is multilingual communications such an important issue for business or government? For business, it’s a question of revenue and CX. Not supporting the right languages excludes many prospects from starting the customer journey because they have a huge but not surprising preference for consuming information in their native language ( DePalma and O’Mara 2020). This isn’t just a multinational issue – many companies have large domestic populations that use languages other than the majority or official ones (Sargent 2015). For governments it means ensuring rights and equal opportunity for citizens that choose to communicate in languages other than the official or majority ones. Supporting languages of lesser distribution such as those favored by immigrant or indigenous people means that government agencies and civil servants can better interact with and serve all of their constituents ( DePalma, April 2004). Without government content available to them in a form they can easily understand, citizens reliant on those languages are underserved. And during times of natural disaster, pandemics, war, recessions, and other disruptions, having timely information available for everyone in your company’s or government’s community becomes even more important to keep people informed and safe.

Most buyers rely on language service outsourcers How commercial organizations and the public sector respond to and support multilingual needs varies. Some businesses have corporate strategies for market entry, choosing which languages make the most sense and money for their shareholders. Many add language support reactively in response to rising market demand or economic analysis ( Lommel and Ray 2020). Governments are less driven by economics and more by constituent need, but just a few nations worldwide actively advocate minority and indigenous languages across all of their agencies, and decisions about what to translate may be subject to political pressures such as nativism, desire to appeal to voters, or competing budgetary pressures. When they add language or locale support, some companies employ internal resources, asking bilingual staff to do the work. A few bring in translators or interpreters as full-t ime employees. However, the vast majority of companies and governments contract language support to third-party language service providers ( LSPs).2 This business process outsourcing ( BPO) or knowledge process outsourcing ( KPO) model makes sense because translation and interpreting divert businesses and governments from their mission. Commercial enterprises are in the business of marketing, selling, and supporting goods and services. The resources required for providing language support add much business overhead. The infrastructure needed to support the production of language services involves staff to translate or interpret, people to manage them, technology, human resources, and more. Taking the BPO or KPO route lets businesses and governments offload this management and production overhead to suppliers and convert the fixed cost of language services to a variable cost. In turn, language-focused BPOs and KPOs – we call them “ language service providers” or L SPs – have fixed costs for their project managers ( PMs) and other staff members, but most turn to freelance contractors or smaller firms to do the majority of the work ( Pielmeier and O’Mara January 2020).

The ecosystem of demand and supply for language services The language service and technology sectors as they exist today are the product of a global ecosystem of demand generators and suppliers ( Figure  25.1). At the top of that chart is a simplified depiction of the demand chain with information consumers – the ultimate users 364

Language demand and supply

­Figure 25.1 The ecosystem of language services and technology. Source: CSA Research.

and readers of multilingual content – a nd the organizations that publish this content for their customers and constituents. Below them we see the supply chain with humans at the center – linguists and LSPs  – a long with the technology foundation that supports their work, the educational system that trains them, and the research organizations and media that inform them. And supporting the service and technology providers is the financial foundation of any commercial activity – the capital that funds the businesses.

The demand for language originates in multiple places Demand for information in other languages is unending. Every day, several quintillion bytes of digitized data come into being – a quintillion is 1,000 trillions (that’s 3 × 10 to the 18th) ( DePalma 2016). This daily infusion of content supports interactions and transactions across the entire spectrum of human activity and industry – a nd localizing some portion of it is essential for many international business, governmental, and humanitarian activities. This number does not include spoken language that needs to be presented in other languages, in person or remotely, transcribed, or via sign language. Demand for having this content translated, interpreted, localized, or otherwise linguistically or culturally transformed comes from billions of people around the world who need 365

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written and spoken content in their languages. Commercial firms, non-profits, or government agencies pay to have it adapted for domestic multicultural or international consumption. The suppliers and consumers of this multilingual content range from information consumers to commercial buyers to machines to public sector and non-profit organizations ( NPOs). The typical point of consumption for translated or interpreted content is information consumers. They could be anywhere – someone buying a product with multilingual packaging at a retailer, a witness in a courtroom using an interpreter, an assembly line worker reading a service bulletin, or an employee messaging a team member, colleague, or supplier in another country. In all these cases, the ultimate beneficiaries of language services are end- consumers who expect immediate access to information in their languages. Those consumers often don’t typically pay to have content translated. Instead, businesses in every sector of the global economy produce written or verbal information to market, sell, and support their products and services in multiple languages. Individual consumers may also have their own requirements for translated birth certificates, foreign-language research for a thesis, communication while traveling abroad, or for purchases on a foreign website. Looking beyond the consumer and commercial sectors, we see demand from governments and NPOs. In the public sector, we find that local, municipal, state and provincial, and national governments, as well as non-governmental organizations, and international and multilateral organizations such as the European Union and United Nations, all require language services. Multilingual needs may be within the scope of constituent services, public safety, courts, diplomacy, military, intelligence, and operations. On the non-profit front, we see that NPOs serve domestic multicultural, regional, and global venues. They often deliver services in multiple languages and communicate with donors, government agencies, and partners. This is not a huge sector, but it accounts for very visible activity, especially during disasters when non-profits such as Translators without Borders provide services to relief agencies, governments, and other NPOs such as Action Against Hunger, UN Global Health, the Praekelt Foundation, and Partners in Health. In addition to people consuming information, machines require it as well  – they receive and interpret language. Everyday computing and communication devices are driven by conversational assistants such as Alexa or Siri lock screens, mice, trackpads, keyboards, buttons, and other traditional input- output apparatuses. Today these headless devices support a handful of languages, but to succeed they will need access to hundreds or even thousands of tongues – m any of which are spoken by less-l iterate or even illiterate audiences. This reality will require smarter conversational interfaces, robust MT, and the extension of semantic networks to a hitherto unseen scale. Machines will converse with humans and each other and then act upon this dialogue. Enabling localization processes for these devices will be vital to extending the benefits of information access for commerce, communication, and community to several billion more people. Looking to the near future, we see several factors driving more demand for language services – new business requirements for more translation into more languages, a changing buyer population, and access to information anywhere ( Table 25.1). As the nature of their work changes, providers face new challenges. For example, they must deal with client expectations for delivery – what was once a long- duration project has morphed into the continuous delivery model of Agile development methodologies. Along with that shift, translation projects that once had several large deliverables are being replaced by much smaller projects in higher volumes. Whatever the tempo and volume of translation demand and delivery, the mission is to reach vast new audiences of information consumers with new language and content requirements 366

Language demand and supply ­Table 25.1 Changing ecosystem demographics that will drive language industry growth Changing demand-side demographics that will drive language industry growth Phenomenon

What it means

More content in more languages in new functions

Global enterprises face growing content volumes and an increasing number of languages to meet or generate global demand. Today’s four or five languages have the potential to become 40, 50, and even 100 over time. That growth will affect other business functions that will require translation for their markets, drive more companies to localize in order to be competitive, and with omnichannel outreach increase the number of written and spoken ways they use to communicate. Enterprises are globalizing programs that originated in their headquarters country with the goal of improving the customer experience for their international customers, as well as bring other digitalization projects to their top markets. Growing middle classes in many countries and the economic coming- of-age of the millennial generation (one-third of the world’s population) mean responding to new market demands in multiple languages on multiple spoken and written means. A few billion people are already digitally connected via the web and mobile devices. Economic benefit will come from getting the rest of the world’s population connected. Governments will realize the importance of communicating with all their citizens in both their official and languages of lesser demand. Many new decision-makers grew up buying everything on the web and through their smartphones. Language service buyers are no different as they gravitate to ­Amazon-like ​­ ​­ ­ ­ ​­ providers with ­one-click “translate now” buttons for on-demand access. Many countries share languages but are separated by the dialects that they use. Smart marketers establish a policy for how and when to support them. Delivering spoken language poses a bigger challenge than delivering written translation. Long in development and acceptance, remote interpreting via smartphones and other commercial ­off-the-shelf ​­ technologies vastly increases access for minority-language speakers, travelers, and hearing-impaired people. A large portion of the demand remains untapped but will get a big boost from the move away from ­face-to-face ​­ interpreting driven by the ­COVID-2019 ​­ pandemic. Looking to the future, widescale adoption of 5G communications technology will further enhance cost and availability benefits of remote delivery.

Business initiatives

Changing demographics

Any device anywhere in any language

Retail translation

Dialect support Remote interpreting

Source: CSA Research.

in different socioeconomic, geographic, and generational strata than the typical LSP customer. Globalizing CX and digital transformation ( DX) initiatives will drive mainstream business awareness and visibility of the importance of spoken and written language services.

Suppliers range from freelancers to large providers to machines Tens of thousands of LSPs and hundreds of thousands of freelancers serve the multilingual written and spoken content needs of billions of people around the planet. LSPs contract with freelancers and sometimes with each other, buying and selling services. 367

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CSA Research defines LSPs as translation, interpreting, and localization suppliers consisting of two or more f ull-t ime employees. Commercial organizations are focused on providing outsourced language services. There are three traditional types: (1) single-language vendors (SLVs) that specialize in translation to or from a single language, (2) regional-language vendors ( RLVs) that deal with a geographic or linguistic cluster of language pairs, and (3) multi-language vendors (MLVs) that transcend such boundaries. Some offer a limited range of services and languages, while others provide a one- stop solution for multilingual services and many languages. Freelancer contractors make up the largest single group of industry stakeholders, with hundreds of thousands throughout the world. Freelancers usually sit at the very end of the supply chain. Some work for direct clients, a seemingly increasing trend among newer buyers that sometimes bypass LSPs in favor of freelancers. As such, they represent competition for SLVs and RLVs in offering their services to both MLVs and end clients. Traditional freelancers today are joined by gig workers. CSA Research surveyed more than 7,000 linguists in 2019, both employees and contractors, and found expectations of growing productivity, increased pressure on pricing and turnaround times, as well as a sense of feeling like cogs in a machine ( Pielmeier and O’Mara, January 2020). These issues raise concerns with the supply chain.

Services span written and spoken language The market for language services in 2019 was US$49.6 billion, split among four categories that CSA Research uses for analysis and market sizing – translation, interpreting, localization and engineering, and supporting services. Translation is the biggest of these four categories. It refers to plain translation, MT post editing, and transcreation. It remains the dominant service accounting for two-thirds of LSP language service revenue. Since it began its annual analysis of the market in 2010, CSA Research has found that most LSPs don’t track the linguistic services they provide with pinpoint precision. Instead, they often lump all work on a project into one category such as translation – for example, a complex website globalization project may have required integration with a customer relationship management system and other localization engineering work, but since the project description was initially “website translation” it becomes simply a “translation” project. Interpreting entails face-to-face and remote delivery modes. More than one- sixth of the overall LSP service revenue comes from spoken language. Such services are often delivered by specialist providers that focus on one or multiple interpreting modalities, although translation- centric providers often provide the service too, if the opportunity arises. The dominant delivery method for years has been on- site for healthcare, public safety, judicial, and for business meetings and conferences. On the rise have been on-the-phone, video remote, and remote simultaneous modalities, all of which have grown in usage during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. With suppliers offering more remote access and users becoming accustomed to it, we expect it to become a more widely accepted approach to delivering ­spoken-language ​­ services. The third sector is localization and engineering services, which cover development and operational functions. These include internationalization and localization for software, mobile, multimedia, game, and websites. With nearly one-tenth of the LSP language service revenue share, such services remain a strong offering from specialist LSPs and translationcentric providers that evolved their service portfolio to handle more complex projects. Finally, LSPs and specialty outsourcers offer other language-related and supporting services to meet business requirements. They combine digital marketing functions such as search 368

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engine optimization (SEO) ­ and pay-per-click ­ ­​­­ ​­ (PPC) ­ advice, testing, transcription, DTP, project management, dubbing, narration, subtitling, and voiceover. Such services account for less than one-tenth of the overall language service revenue. Most LSPs provide multiple of these services and some specialize in individual ones such as multilingual transcriptions or multilingual ­desktop-publishing. ​­ Along with the industry drivers, plain old translation and face-to-face interpreting are very difficult to differentiate and thus very competitive. Providers that have invested in technology and training to manage, monitor, and analyze the content and data they collect in the course of their work will have an advantage over less d ata- savvy competitors. Their understanding of data flows, what the data means, and understanding of cultural and other locale-based nuance position them to assist with an array of corporate initiatives ranging from digital marketing programs to big data and machine learning to environmental, social, and corporate governance ( ESG) projects ( Table 25.2).

Associations, educators, investors, and researchers support industry efforts The language service industry calls on additional constituents to be successful. These partners in education include industry and trade associations, academic and institutions devoted to research and development, investors both public and private, and analysts and journalists. Industry associations such as American Translators Association (ATA), Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer ( BDÜ), Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), ­Table 25.2 Technology platform changes that will drive language industry growth Technology platform changes that will drive language industry growth Phenomenon

What it means

Big data and neural ­network-​ ­driven software

The late 1990s embrace of “big data” led to the statistics- driven machine translation and analytics of the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the back of that technology evolution came a resurgence in artificial intelligence along with machine learning and predictive analytics, all of which is being built into an increasing array of mainstream and translation software. Goodenough machine translation will spawn more development in spoken-language machine interpreting. Agile and continuous development has become standard practice and expectation for a wide range of disciplines, including translation and interpreting. For example, the need for continuous translation revolves around ad hoc teams, small volumes, lots of files, an increasing number of content types, and immediate demands. The rollout of 5G communications will supercharge smartphones and other devices, raising new localization challenges for organizations that thought they were close to solving the multilingual web problems. Growing demand for a rich customer experience on any device will drive more translation and content adaptation. The expectation will be that everything we touch or interact with will be marketed, documented, and supported in every language where it’s used. Video content will be a big part of that, so organizations will have to process new file types and work with their LSPs to adapt production models to support multilingual versions.

Rapid development

Ubiquitous communication

Source: CSA Research.

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International Federation of Translators ( FIT), and Translators Association of China ( TAC) provide venues for networking, information sharing, and development of best practices and standards for their LSPs and technology vendor members. Among investors, private equity groups and venture capitalists and angel investors fund individual companies either to grow on their own or to consolidate this fragmented service market. In addition, some independent software vendors (ISVs) have received grants from the European Commission’s Framework Programmes, while others are working on other EC priorities. Finally, like any important market sector, the language industry has attracted the attention of market researchers such as CSA Research, specialized newsletters such as The Tool Box Newsletters, news outlets, and innumerable blogs published by LSPs, technology vendors, freelancers, and other observers.

Technology enables translation scalability to huge volumes Both buyers of language services and their outsourcers – direct and subcontracted – rely on specialized language technologies to do their work. That software, in turn, complements corporate systems of record such as content management systems, social engagement software such as marketing systems, and productivity tools for content creation and adaptation. On the interpreting front, software vendors and interpreting- centric LSPs are developing management tools to optimize matching of jobs with talent, scheduling, payment, and other operational aspects of delivering spoken-language content.

­ Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technology are disrupting the language sector on two fronts: (1) automation decreases the number of human touches required for language operations – for example, LSPs have taken advantage of r ule-based and expert-system automation to remove unnecessary project manager activity from workflows ( Pielmeier and Lommel 2017); and (2) data-driven language technology changes the content playing field. Besides automating project management activities, innovative LSPs and ISVs benefit from their troves of data and content – they apply it to machine-learning projects such as identifying and tagging the grammatical gender of strings for translation more accurately than humans can. These small applications of AI lessen the cognitive load on linguists and project managers, letting them instead concentrate on higher value and hopefully more meaningful tasks. MT ubiquity underlies an existential threat to LSPs, but already powers the workflow of many ( Pielmeier and Lommel 2019). Looking forward, other natural language processing ( NLP) solutions such as augmented translation (which combines human workflows with MT that learns in real time) ( Lommel 2017), semantic enrichment (which links content to information about it) ( Lommel and DePalma 2018), and conversational interfaces offer more service possibilities for LSPs and in-house capabilities for organizations that do their own translation and global content management.

Specialized software supports service delivery at large volumes Technology for language services comes from a few sources: language technology developers, hybrid technology and service solution providers, and mainstream technology vendors. Language technology developers are ISVs that provide solutions to support translation activity (such as translation memory, MT, translation management, and terminology 370

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management), localization (engineering, visual localization aids, proxy servers, and website tools), and interpreting (interpreter scheduling and management and mobile apps). These tools typically work in conjunction with enterprise solutions for creating and managing content, customer and vendor relationships, and employees. Many of these ISVs are building in support for machine learning and predictive analytics as they apply AI technology to translation, interpretation, localization, and supporting services. In addition to these ISVs, the language sector is served by a hybrid group of LSPs that sells their own software along with services. Some of these LSPs earn substantial revenue from the technology that they sell to end-buyers and to their competitors. SDL, Smartling, STAR, and TransPerfect are examples of such hybrids that provide full- service solutions – translation services by themselves or with all the supporting technology such as translation management, terminology, MT, and quality checkers. All are taking advantage of the massive amounts of content they process to build in smarter, d ata- driven capabilities enabled by neural networks. Besides ISVs and hybrid LSPs, mainstream technology vendors provide enabling software to the language sector. LSPs, freelancers, and corporate and governmental teams responsible for translation use a variety of commercial content, database, enterprise resource planning ( ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and AI and machine learning software provided by commercial ISVs such as Adobe, Marketo, and SAP. They also use search, marketing, publishing, and operating systems from suppliers such as Apple and Microsoft to get their work done. All developers – commercial, in-house, LSP, and mainstream – h ave been iterating their products in response to ever- changing technology. Over the last few years the momentum has shifted to cloud-based solutions, micro- services, and d ata- driven statistical and then neural platforms for development (Sargent and DePalma 2018). At the same time consumers and business users have embraced smartphones, tablets, and specialized devices empowered by faster communication networks and ubiquitous WIFI. Planners see new opportunities tied to vast cadres of device-toting and - obsessed smartphone users, the rapid growth of video as a content type, and the vast interconnectivity of the internet of things ( IoT) ( Table 25.2). Each platform shift opens up new opportunities for spoken and written language services.

Displacement and expansion drive the language market Despite CSA Research’s projections for market growth and the growing demand, service needs, and technology foundation, nothing is ever certain as market disruptions such as recession and pandemics can attest. The language service market is in a constantly evolving state, forcing its various stakeholders to adapt to the flow. Two business factors push the services and technology sectors in different directions: displacement and expansion. Entrepreneurs pushing technology and business model innovations seek to disrupt the current market by replacing traditional tools and suppliers with alternatives such as translation buttons, marketplaces, and MT – and an array of competitors such as software from mainstream developers, business process outsourcers, and business and IT consultancies. They could displace substantial volumes of current demand, especially when we factor in changing requirements for quality. Disruptive innovators aim to convince buyers that currently do business with traditional LSPs to use their services or software to eliminate overhead. In relation to expansion, content and language growth are like the big bang – there’s a constant enlargement due to the increasing amount of information desired in ever more 371

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languages, dialects, and even idiolects (that is, personal modes of speaking). Theoretically, it could increase demand by orders of magnitude, but the physics of the market – cost and complexity – inevitably limit the scope of the expansion. With those forces at work, CSA Research forecasts both opportunities and challenges for the language services and technology sectors. In many cases, an opportunity for one LSP may pose a challenge to others ( Table 25.3). As business process outsourcers, LSPs suffer from the same challenge as any service provider – identifying new trends and requirements, fending off competition, and dealing with fundamental changes to both the demand and supply chains. Because it’s a global industry, rivals can be anywhere in the world. ­Table 25.3  Challenges faced by the language sector Challenges faced by language service providers

Business

Challenge

Examples

Business model

•

•

• Business direction

• •

Business development

• • • •

Service delivery

Client services

•

Production

•

• • • • Vendor management

372

•

The global online economy has spawned an array of lowcost, quick-turnaround language services, replacements for traditional tools and services, and innovators not bound by the usual models LSPs need the funds to invest in competitive new services and solutions while servicing their current clients and managing today’s operations Buyers may turn to gig workers, freelancers, and machine translation Many executives lack the business management background to grow their business and innovate It’s difficult to differentiate from the masses of competitors, including MT, freelancers, SLVs, RLVs, and MLVs Competitors from other sectors threaten to displace LSPs Client budgets are shrinking, and timelines are getting shorter Buyers are adopting a portfolio approach to quality, requiring various grades based on audience, timing, and market needs On- demand capability is becoming increasingly important to buyers, and sales reps are superfluous on one-touch translation sites Clients expect their vendors to customize client service approaches to their way of working LSPs have to sustain top performance in terms of services that match buyer expectations in the right time span and for the right price Building scalability and production capacity requires investment in time and resources. Waste occurs in the process, and providers need to continuously improve their production models. Buyers expect ­post-edited ​­ MT as a cost­ ​­ and ­time-saving ​­ option Short time-frames require ruthless optimization, automation, and elimination of waste Smart sourcing and negotiations are necessary to find qualified resources at the right rates

Language demand and supply

Resources

Challenge

Examples

Technology

•

• Human capital

• •

• Business processes

• •

•

LSPs need to offer a broad range of technology solutions and integrations and deliver a seamless environment to order a variety of language needs Clients take control of the basic infrastructure for translation, interpreting, and localization Staffing models evolve, and LSPs have to provide round-the- clock coverage and source workers in low- cost countries Human resource management is energy- consuming from filling positions, getting new employees operational fast, increasing staff retention, or aligning staff to company goals Decreasing numbers of language graduates threaten long-term viability Buyers take ever longer to pay; yet LSPs have to pay their vendors sooner Providers juggle various currencies for client payments and vendor invoices with the relevant foreign exchange fluctuations and funds transfer issues LSPs need to build risk management into their disaster recovery, data security, and privacy protection plans in order to limit liability

Source: CSA Research.

Conclusion The language industry plays a vital, if often under-appreciated, role in international business and in the daily function of governmental and non-governmental organizations. LSPs have evolved from simple “translation bureaus” to complex, technology- driven providers of outsourced business processes. They face many challenges – from intense pressure to lower prices to MT to long-term threats to their supply chain – yet consistently rise to the need to process ever-increasing volumes of digital and non- d igital content. Increasing customer expectation that companies and governments will communicate with them in their own languages in real time will ensure that demand for their services will continue to increase. Temporary setbacks, such as disasters, pandemics, or recessions, may blunt some demand, but the long-term trajectory is clear. LSPs that can adapt to new technologies, develop new services, and assist their clients in anticipating and meeting new demands will succeed and thrive despite these headwinds.

Notes

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­

​­

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References DePalma, D. A. (2004) ‘Translation: It’s the Law.’ (April). CSA Research. Out of print. DePalma, D. A. (2016) ‘The Calculus of Global Content.’ (May) CSA Research. Available online: ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/36512/Toc [Accessed 8 May 2020]. DePalma, D. A. and Pielmeier, H. (2020), ‘Market Segmentation Primer.’ (August) CSA Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/305013163/Toc ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ [Accessed 26 August 2020]. DePalma, D. A. (2020) ‘Small AI for Language Technology.’ ( June) CSA Research. Available online: [Accessed 26 August 2020]. ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/305013134/Toc DePalma, D. A. and O’Mara, P. (2020) ‘Can’t Read, Won’t Buy – B2C.’ ( June) CSA Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/305013126/Toc ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ [Accessed 26 August 2020]. DePalma, D. A. and Ray, R. (2020) ‘The ROI of Customer Engagement.’ (May) CSA Research. Avail[Accessed 8 May 2020]. ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ able online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/47238/Toc Lommel, A. (2017) ‘How AI Will Augment Human Translation.’ (October) CSA Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/47867/Toc [Accessed 8 May 2020]. ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ Lommel, A. and DePalma, D. A. (2018) ‘Four Futures for Intelligent Content.’ (September) CSA ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/48636/Toc [Accessed 8 May 2020]. Lommel, A. and Sargent, B. B. (2018) ‘Localization Depth and Language Choice.’ (September) CSA [Accessed 8 ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/48657/Toc May 2020]. Lommel, A. (2019) ‘Multilingual Digital Opportunity 2019.’ (September) CSA Research. Available [Accessed 8 May 2020]. ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/305013073/Toc Lommel, A. and Ray, R. (2020) ‘Calculating the ROI of Localization.’ ( January) CSA Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/305013102/Toc ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ [Accessed 8 May 2020]. Pielmeier, H. (2016) ‘The Paths to Differentiation.’ ( June) CSA Research. Available online: https:// insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/36537/Toc ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ [Accessed 8 May 2020]. Pielmeier, H. and Lommel, A. (2017) ‘Will AI Eliminate the Need for Project Managers?’ ( December) ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ CSA Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/48488/Toc [Accessed 8 May 2020]. Pielmeier, H. (2019) ‘LSP Growth Factors.’ CSA Research. ( February) Available online: https:// [Accessed 8 May 2020]. ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/305013015/Toc Pielmeier, H. and Lommel, A. (2019) ‘M achine Translation Use at LSPs.’ (May) CSA Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/305013037/Toc ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ [Accessed 8 May 2020]. Pielmeier, H. and O’Mara, P. (2020) ‘The State of the Linguist Supply Chain.’ ( January) CSA Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/305013106/Toc ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ [Accessed 8 May 2020]. Sargent, B. B. (2015) ‘Making the Switch from Neutral to Regional Spanish.’ (April) CSA Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/24122/Toc ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ [Accessed DD (8­ May 2020]. Sargent, B. B. and DePalma, D. A. (2018) ‘Translation Management at the Crossroads.’ (August) CSA [Accessed 8 ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/48620/Toc May 2020]. Sargent, B. B. and Lommel, A. (2019) ‘Global Website Assessment Index 2019.’ ( January) CSA [Accessed 8 ­ ­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ Research. Available online: https://insights.csa-research.com/reportaction/48682/Toc May 2020].

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26 Localization Miguel A. ­Jiménez-Crespo ​­

Introduction Technological advances have enabled the ever-increasing transnational movement of goods, services and people across the globe. They have also enabled the flow of digital texts across the world at lightning speeds, a paradigm change similar to invention of the press in the fifteenth century ( Lockwood and Scott 1999). This ‘digital revolution’ has resulted in radical and impactful changes in modern societies, with landmarks such as the emergence of the Internet in the 1970s, personal computing in the 1980s, World Wide Web ( WWW) in the 1990s or the social network revolution in the 2000s. The impact of this revolution has also reached the world of translation and Translation and Interpreting Studies ( TIS). In the age of globalization, the need to deliver information quickly and efficiently has ‘put translation at the heart of diverse international cultural, economic, and military enterprises’ ( Tymoczko 2014: 4). Nowadays translation plays a key role in the development of this ‘global village’, primarily because ‘translation has substantially grown in importance in the globalized, de-territorialized space’ (House 2015: 5). Nevertheless, their relationship is not as straightforward as it might seem. Translation cannot simply be considered as a simple ‘ byproduct of this globalization, but an integral part of it’ (ibid.: 5). In fact, these phenomena are closely intertwined and mutually dependent, because as House indicates, without translation ‘the global capitalist consumer-oriented and growth-fi xated economy would not be possible’ (ibid.: 102). Among the many translational phenomena at the heart of globalization, it can be argued that ‘ localization’ of websites, apps, software or videogames is highly representative of this intersection. The chapter delves into the symbiotic relationship between translation, localization and globalization, critically analyzing the impact of globalization on TIS research. The chapter starts by defining all key concepts in the literature such as ‘ localization’, ‘globalization’, ‘ internationalization’ or ‘glo-calization’. It then moves on to a brief historical account of the emergence of localization and the so- called ‘Localization Studies’. The chapter then describes the interdisciplinary connections between localization in TIS and International Business and Marketing ( Jiménez- Crespo and Singh 2017). It then revises one of the most prolific research trends in TIS, quality in localization, as well as other research trends of interest in the discipline. It ends with the conclusions and future outlook, including issues 375

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such as impact of post- editing machine translation (MT) or the emergence of localization crowdsourcing.

Defining localization, globalization, and ‘glocalization’ Localization in its broadest sense refers to a complex process by which goods or services are adapted to specific local ‘markets’, ‘audiences’ or ‘sociocultural contexts of reception’. It has over the years helped expand the reach of digital content across sociocultural and sociolinguistic borders. This term emerged in the 1980s from the notion of ‘ locale’ ( Esselink 2006), the combination of sociocultural region and language for business, production and marketing purposes. ‘Locales’ can include any information related to geographical regions including cultural, legal, ethical, technical (i.e. keyboard layout), representational, ideological or political elements ( Dunne 2014). The most popular definition of localization appeared in a publication by the now extinct Localization and Internationalization Standardization Association ( LISA): ‘[l]ocalization involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold’ ( LISA 2003: 13). This definition has been characterized as an attempt to separate or differentiate localization, a process understood here as ‘more sophisticated than translation’ ( Pym 2004: 25), from other translation practices. It has also been described as an attempt to stress the added value component for the industry ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a). This definition shows that for the industry, the notion of ‘ language’ was too broad a concept in the quest for global expansion, and therefore the m arket-based notion of ‘ locale’, the combination of language/region, was more productive. It also shows how the focus on cultural adaptation in International Business and Marketing (Singh 2011), as well as the focus on technological and management processes in the language industry ( Esselink 2000), has resulted in discourses that separate localization from translation understood as the transfer of ‘text’ ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a, 2018). In a subsequent primer on globalization, LISA modified this definition in an attempt to situate the localization paradigm within the broader context of international and business circles. This definition highlights four key components of the localization process: linguistic, cultural, physical and technical ones. It thus highlighted that localization includes several physical and technical stages that cannot be accounted for if it is described solely in terms of ‘ linguistic’ or ‘cultural’ interventions. As a counterbalance to the predominant industry-based discourse on localization, TIS scholars have also approached the definition of localization, either from a more ‘technocentric’ and industry approach (Schäler 2010; Dunne 2006, 2014) or from a theoretical one (i.e. Pym 2004; Jiménez- Crespo 2013a, 2016; Achkasov 2016). ‘Localization’ has been defined from a TIS perspective as a ‘complex technological, textual, communicative and cognitive process’ that enables ‘ interactive digital texts’ for use or consumption in different linguistic and sociocultural contexts from those of original production and ‘guided by the expectations of the target audience’ ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a: 20). It involves exclusively ‘digital genres’ (Mehler et al. 2011) such as word processing software, smartphone apps or corporate websites.

The GILT process: globalization, internationalization, localization and translation The so- called GILT cycle (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation) interrelates in the industry the different components of the overall cycle to deliver good 376

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and/or services across the world. ‘Globalization’ or ‘G11n’ is the wider component and it represents a set of processes that restructure organizations to operate globally and/or multilingually. Globalization can be defined as: all of the business decisions and activities required to make an organization truly international in scope and outlook. Globalization is the transformation of business and processes to support customers around the world, in whatever language, country, or culture they require. (LISA 2007a: 1) This notion entails the adaptation of organizations to cope with the demands of going ‘global’, both in terms of conducting business and offering services to diverse world markets. These modifications cover aspects such as ‘technical, financial, managerial, personnel, marketing, and other enterprise decisions’ ( LISA 2004: 14). Globalization is a cyclical process that occurs both before and after the localization/translation process. It includes early stages such as structuring organizations and products to operate globally, as well as post- stages such as handling distribution or multilingual customer support after products or services are delivered. Therefore, the goals of this process range from supporting the localization process to setting mechanisms to handle a multiplicity of bilateral or multilingual interactions. For example, if a website is localized and the Japanese version indicates ‘please contact us if you have any further questions at @…’, the organization should have mechanisms set in place to efficiently respond to this email in this language. This can be considered as the narrower approach to the notion of globalization within the language industry. From a wider theoretical and epistemological standpoint, globalization has become a ‘ buzzword used to describe the flow of goods, people, capital, symbols and images around the world, facilitated by modern technological advances in the media and in information and communication technology’ ( House 2015: 96–97). Globalization can then be understood as a process that results as personalization/uniformity or difference in global initiatives of whichever kind. In some cases, it is understood as a means to achieve ‘personalization on a global scale’ ( Bytelevel Research 2007), while in other cases it is considered as the opposite: ‘the Internet spells the end of localized collective identities in favour of a new planetary internationalism’ (Cronin 2003: 58). Nevertheless, recent approaches incorporate both ends of the continuum when discussing globalization. Coupland (2010: 5), for example, indicates that globalization should be conceptualized as a ‘complex process through which difference as well as uniformity is generated, but in relation to each other’. This duality between uniformity and difference will be explored later in connection with web localization from the perspective of International Business and Marketing and the ‘standardization’ vs ‘ localization’ debate (Singh 2011). Internationalization has been defined by the language industry as ‘the process of enabling a product at a technical level for localization’ ( LISA 2007a: 17). It normally refers to a set of processes to secure that the product does not need to be reengineered once the localization process starts. This is achieved by developing the product independent of both the language and culture of production. In this sense internationalization …primarily consists of abstracting the functionality of a product away from any particular language so that language support can be added back in simply, without worry that language- specific features will pose a problem when the product is localized. (LISA 2004: 14) 377

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This means, for example, that a software program or website can properly display during localization different scripts or right-to-left languages such as Hebrew or Arabic. After a successful internationalization process during the development stage, the localization process starts. In the language industry literature it refers to preparation, management, engineering and quality testing of digital products ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a). The GILT process separates localization from the translation stage, the translation or processing of textual elements. Translation and localization providers often perform tasks related to management, quality control and business-related issues ( Dunne and Dunne 2011), while the translation itself is often outsourced to freelance translators or other language providers. Currently, the emergence of cloud-based approaches to facilitate localization has widened the gap between the management and the translation of the textual content (García 2015, 2017). These services have also further helped globalize the localization market, with different stages of the process often carried out in different countries. For example, in the case of Spanish it is common to have localization management and engineering tasks carried out in the United States, while the translation itself might be carried out in Argentina, Spain or a combination of multiple locations.

Localization and glo-calization: conceptual overlaps The emergence of new phenomena requires the integration of new realities into existing conceptual systems. This process often results in the blurring of conceptual borders, often leading to intradisciplinary discussions and debate (i.e. Dam et al. 2018). In the specific case of localization, shifting conceptualizations have often been a topic of research in the industry and in TIS ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a, 2016, 2018; Achkasov 2016). For example, the notion of ‘ localization’ caused the most disagreement among participating subjects, professional translators, localizers and managers, in a study on how the industry perceived different translation concepts ( Dam et al. 2018).­1 This was also one of the concepts where the most friction and disagreement between subjects arose. In this context, the constellation of phenomena related to the intersection of localization and globalization has resulted in the proposal of different concepts and notions that deserve further analysis such as ‘glocalization’, ‘reverse localization’, ‘de-localized / internationalized texts’ or ‘website globalization’. The first one, the notion of ‘g lo-calization’, is primarily used in marketing and business circles, but it is also used in translation studies. Over the years, some different conceptualizations have emerged in the discipline. Anastasiou and Schäler (2009), for example, introduce the works of Wellman (2001: 13) that states that ‘glocal’ shows the human capacity to bridge scales (from local to global) and to help overcome ‘ littlebox’ thinking. ‘Glocalization’ is a concept ‘that expresses the interaction of globalizing and localizing shifts’ (Coupland 2010: 5). It is a notion that attempts to reconcile the two ends of a continuum: in cultural studies, as well as international marketing and business approaches, the notion of localization is seen as a top-bottom process to reach the ‘ local’, while there is also a ‘globalization’ process that attempts to erase the local through standardization or to localize for the global market ( Bernal-Merino 2016). This last process is sometimes seen as the imposition of Western values (Tymoczko 2014). The focus here is therefore on the suppression of elements of the culture in which the product is developed in favor of supposedly neutral ‘ international’ standard. Other scholars have used ‘globalization’ to refer to the common use around the world of global English in localization processes to be used for creating ‘ international’ versions targeted at a global audience. According to Musacchio and Panizzon (2017) in their study of localization of software for global crises and emergencies, English is often here used as a lingua franca to grant access to an international audience. 378

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‘Reverse localization’ refers in the literature to two distinct phenomena. For Schäler (2008) this term is used to define products intended for specific locales that incorporate on purpose foreign features. Here, the adaptation is not to a local context, but rather, products such as advertisements are adapted to purposefully include foreignizing elements. This would be the case of an advertisement that would purposefully incorporate a foreign person or accent to denote refinement or modernity. It is somewhat different from the ‘foreignization’ approach advocated by Venuti (1995), in that it is not the elements of the source text that are maintained, but rather non-local elements are intentionally inserted to create the intended effect. The second use of the notion of ‘reverse localization’ is described in the context of videogames by O’Hagan (2009b). It denotes instances of Japanese videogames that once adapted and localized for the North American market, they are sold back in Japan in English, with Japanese subtitles. These games let original Japanese users enjoy a version that includes adapted elements for foreign markets, a common phenomenon that can be placed within the notion of ‘ fandom cultures’. Another concept of interest was proposed by Pym (2004, 2010: 123–124), who discusses the impact of ‘de-localization’ or ‘ internationalization’ in translation studies conceptualization of localization. He argues that rather than the much-hyped move towards the ‘ local’, the language industry often mediates the localization process through an intermediary version referred to as the ‘ internationalized version’. The purposeful creation of a ‘de-localized’ or ‘glocalized’ source version intends to remove features that are language and culture dependent. This is intended to facilitate the subsequent translation process, and ultimately, to speed and facilitate the simultaneous translation of different language versions. This is known as ‘simship’, a common industry practice to ensure the simultaneous release of different language versions of software or videogames. Pym even suggests that working with intermediary versions in translating might not be new in translation history: relay interpreters in international organizations work using the English version as an interlingua. In the thirteenth century Castile texts were translated from Arabic into Castilian, and subsequently the Castilian version served as source text for Latin and French translations. Nevertheless, the author suggests that source texts have never before been consciously prepared for translation/localization: ‘ internationalized texts’ are therefore thought of from the very beginning of the production cycle. It is also thought of during the technical internationalization stage previously described. Nevertheless, Pym at the same time criticizes the ideology of internationalization and globalization behind this practice that supposedly creates the illusion of a culture-less technical world. This view is also shared by Tymoczko (2014: 4), who, from a post-colonial and cultural perspective, asks: To what extent will cultural exchange be multidirectional in the age of globalization, and to what extent will asymmetries of power, resources, and technologies mean that ‘cultural exchange’ will become a euphemism for the acculturation to Western or dominant international standards of many peoples around the world who have heretofore led their lives within local frameworks of knowledge, belief, and values? All in all, internationalization intends to facilitate localization processes through technical, cultural and/or linguistic perspectives. Industry discourses associate successful internationalization with the maximum possible cultural neutrality (Cronin 2003: 18). Nevertheless, scholars agree that innumerable linguistic, cultural and discursive conventions or worldviews remain in this ‘ intermediary’, ‘de-localized’ or ‘global’ version intended for subsequent localization. In fact, it has been shown that it is virtually impossible to make a text completely culturally neutral both in translation ( House 2001) and localization ( Jiménez- Crespo 2009a). 379

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The emergence of localization and localization studies Localization processes, as understood in TIS, emerged in the United States in the context of software for the first personal computers in the 1980s ( Esselink 2006). Companies such as Microsoft or Adobe started their expansion to global markets, and the first processes revolved around popular software and videogames that were localized into the so- called FIGS-J (French, Italian, German, Spanish plus Japanese), the languages with the largest market shares. A decade after, localization grew exponentially thanks to the Internet and the WWW. For example, in Europe, Internet access is available to 85% of the population, while the penetration rate in North America is 95%, and in Asia it is 48% (InternetWorldStats 2018). English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic represent the languages with the most users in the Internet (InternetWorldStats 2018), while the rest of languages represent 41.8%. In this context, consumption of web content such as websites, tweets or apps and their associated localization processes continue to increase, becoming the fastest growing sector in the language industry ( DePalma et al. 2015). Overall, the language industry is estimated to amount to $46.52 billion in 2017 according to CSA ( DePalma et  al. 2018). The current status of English as the de facto lingua franca (House 2010, 2014) means that since the 1990s digital content from around the world has also been localized or glo-calized into global English for international audiences ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a). This is the case of videogames (O’Hagan 2009a, b), software (Musacchio and Panizzon 2017) or websites ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a). Localization processes that emerged in the realm of software ( Esselink 2000) have progressively expanded over the years to include websites ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a), videogames (O’Hagan and Mangiron 2014), smartphone/tablet apps ( Roturier 2015; Serón- Ordoñez and Martin-Mor 2017) and other small devices such as smart watches or intelligent appliances. The study of all these interrelated areas within TIS makes up a subdiscipline that has been referred to as ‘Localization Studies’ ( Remael 2010; Jiménez- Crespo 2013a), and it includes the different subareas mentioned in Figure 26.1. This subdiscipline represents an interdisciplinary field that interfaces with a range of distinct fields of study such as Media Studies, Web Usability, Web Accessibility, Cultural Studies, Internet Studies, Web Science and International Business and Marketing. It is part of what Snell-Hornby referred to as the ‘globalization turn’ in translation studies, a process that combines the unprecedented impact of technologies in translation processes with the powerful influence of globalization. This new direction within the discipline is thus caused by: [the] outside influence of globalization, along with the breath-taking developments in information technology and hence worldwide communication, which have revolutionized many aspects of modern life and brought radical changes for language industries. (Snell-Hornby ­­ ​­ 2010: 368)

­Figure 26.1 Different areas of research in localization studies. Adapted from Jiménez-Crespo ­ ​­ (2011a: ­ 4).

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Localization thus represents a consolidated area within translation studies research with publications dating back to the late 1990s (i.e. Freigang 1996; Parra 1999), journals such as the Journal of Internationalization and Localization ( JIAL) or Localization Focus devoted to research in this field. In addition, several monographs have been devoted to the different subtypes of localization ( Pym 2004; Dunne 2006; Jiménez- Crespo 2013a; O’Hagan and Mangiron 2014; Roturier 2015).

Research topics The nexus of globalization and localization appears in a number of research topics from highly interdisciplinary approaches. Among others, these topics cover the intersection of translation, localization and marketing/international business, the economics aspects of localization related to the notion of ‘degree of localization’ and localization and quality.

Localization and globalization: International Business and Marketing perspectives The study of localization has stimulated fruitful interdisciplinary connections between TIS and International Business and Marketing or Contrastive Cultural Studies ( Jiménez- Crespo and Singh 2016). The most relevant topic in this context is the debate on ‘standardization’ vs ‘ localization’ to reach global markets. From the perspective of international business research, it is acknowledged that the debate over ‘standardization versus adaptation (or localization)’ is at its ‘very heart’ ( Yalcin et al. 2011: 97). Standardization is defined here as a ‘strategy wherein marketers assume global homogeneous markets and in response offer standardized products and services using a standardized marketing mix’ (Singh 2011: 85). The objective of these standardized approaches is to minimize cultural distance through the encroachment of technology around the world, ‘ leading to convergence of national cultures into a homogenous global culture’ (Singh and Pereira 2005: 5). Nevertheless, research efforts and international corporations have realized that proper localization and translation of marketing communications, rather than standardization, can lead to significant cost savings, primarily because translation and other localization blunders are avoided (Singh 2011). In addition, even companies that are born to be global have shown that ‘standardization instead of localization may not be effective in tapping global markets as they have global reach’ ( Yalcin et al. 2011: 97). This debate also resonates in translation studies when discussing globalization: ‘translation plays a central role in negotiating cultural difference and in shaping the dialectics between homogeneity and diversity’ ( Bielsa 2005: 131). In this context, website localization in globalization strategies emerged as a key area through the work of international business scholars such as Singh (2011) and Pereira (Singh and Pereira 2005). Website localization has become a necessary area of interest in global marketing and business due to the above mentioned debate between localization vs standardization, This research trend departs from the premise that ‘the web is not a culturally neutral medium; instead, websites from different countries are impregnated with the cultural markers of that country’s culture’ (Singh 2011: 9). These cultural differences across nations/ regions can potentially impact the bottom line of companies engaged in global business, and therefore, the efficient deployment of localization strategies for global success requires careful consideration of the cultural dimension (Singh and Pereira 2005). All these studies are based on an adaptation of the framework by cultural anthropologist Hofstede (1991) to study culture. In his model, perception, symbolism and behavior are the key elements that define any culture. They also help establish shared values and structured patterns of 381

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behavior. The different dimensions under study are: individualism- collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, low-high context. Singh and Pereira’s (2005) adopted and adapted these dimensions to research how cultural values are represented on corporate websites, resulting in a framework to contrastively study original vs localized sites. A number of subsequent qualitative and quantitative studies have been conducted to study how consumers worldwide interact with different websites within the standardization/ globalization continuum. For example, Singh et  al. (2004) and Singh et  al. (2006) found that online users from Brazil, Germany, Italy, India, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and Taiwan preferred websites that were culturally customized to their locale- specific cultural expectations. They found that consumers tend to express better ratings, ease of use attitudes and, higher purchase intentions on websites that have been culturally customized to specific locale targeted. They also show that users can spend up to double the time visiting the website if it is properly localized into their native language, and they are three times more likely to make a purchase or hire a service (Singh and Pereira 2005; Baack and Singh 2007). The impact of this framework can be seen in the proliferation of studies in different regions spanning several countries around the world, from Western Europe and North America, to Arab to Asian countries (i.e. Singh et al. 2003, 2005). They have also been instrumental to study specific web genres such as tourism websites of World Heritage Site cities (Mele et al. 2015), among others. The results of these studies have shown that successful cultural adaptations in web localization relate to improvements in navigation, interaction and user evaluation of localized websites, making them less cognitively texting and facilitating interaction ( Luna et al. 2002; Singh et al. 2004). These contrastive studies have also been key to the study of localization from a translation studies perspective. They have been used to research localization strategies adopted by multinationals in their deployment of Spanish versions of their websites ( Jiménez- Crespo 2010). They have also been instrumental to explain the differences identified between localized and non-localized websites through comparable and parallel corpora ( Jiménez- Crespo 2009a, 2011a; Medina Reguera and Ramírez Delgado 2015).

Localization levels and economic constraints Despite the fact that cultural adaptations are the main focus of much of the industry-based discourse, localization research also stresses the role of economic constrains. This is often described in terms of Return on Investment ( ROI), a key factor on translation strategies for initiators of translation projects. Industry best practices guides indicate that ‘a common problem in planning for localization is the failure to consider the business context in which localization occurs’ ( LISA 2007b). For its part, translation studies has recently been immersed in the so- called ‘economic turn’ ( Biel and Sosoni 2017). This represents a new trend or direction in order to include economic factors in theorizations and research of translation. This approach owes its emergence to the fact that ‘economic and financial dimensions can no longer be ignored. There are [economic] factors that orient, and even determine, specific choices and decisions’ (Gambier 2014: 8). Research on localization has stressed economic factors from the early days in the macro and micro level of analysis. Among others, one of the main issues related to economic issues is the notion of ‘ localization level’ or ‘degree of localization’. It has been defined in software localization as ‘the amount of translation and customization necessary to create different language editions’ (Microsoft 2003: 15). It has also been defined in regard to web localization as ‘the extent to which websites are localised [that] varies according to the translation or commission, from a simple page with the contact information to a fully localised site’ ( Jiménez- Crespo 2012: 140). In the first publication that 382

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mentioned the notion of localization level, Brooks (2000: 49–50) described the practices of Microsoft, where the software products were localized according to three distinct levels depending on ROI strategies:

In the case of web localization, Yunker (2004) and Singh and Pereira (2005: 10–15) proposed complementary categorizations based on the degree of cultural adaptation:

To complement these proposals, Jiménez- Crespo (2012) also proposed a categorization of degree of localization based on a study of web localization used in non-profit settings to reach minority languages within any given country. This categorization includes a 0 level for those websites that include localized PDF or .doc texts as well as a MT engine, given that at least the need for translation is acknowledged by the organization. ­ ​­ In any case, it should be mentioned that levels 0 and 1 might not be considered web localization per se as they might not represent a case of localized web content, but rather simply posting a link to an existing document prepared for print or, in the case of Level 1, including in an existing website the contact information. In these levels, a translator might not work directly on any digital texts per se. Studies have used these levels to study the localization strategies of companies in their international expansion. For example, the study by Singh and Pereira (2005), using their localization level framework, analyzed the localization strategies of 307 multinationals. They found that 383

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17% of the companies used their ‘standardized site’ strategies without any translation and none of them were characterized as ‘culturally customized’ websites, even when they indicate that the IKEA website comes close. A similar approach has been taken to study the localization of websites of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) in Spain by Medina Reguera and Ramírez Delgado (2015). They analyzed 2,177 small companies and their corpus included 1,284 corporate websites. The ultimate objective of their project was to identify, after a multidimensional analysis of their websites and their localization strategies, whether the adoption of each strategy might have an impact on the overall volume of business abroad. The study has shown that English is the language of choice to globalize small businesses, with 673 (52.4%) websites using English as a lingua franca, while French (244, 19%) and German (197, 15.3%) were also common.

Globalization, localization and quality The previous sections have reviewed the main m arket- d riven localization strategies in the industry: cultural adaptation, localization levels, adequate textual translation, careful structuring and staging of the GILT process. The final objectives is a ‘successful localization’, since it is assumed that this correlates to objectives such as increase in the volume of sales, the improvement of user satisfaction, usability, users’ time spent on the website. All these different components are ultimately conceptualized in terms of ‘ localization quality’, one of the most recurring research topics in the literature ( Bass 2006; Dunne 2006, 2009; JiménezCrespo 2009a, 2011b, c, 2012; Medina Reguera and Ramírez Delgado 2015). Nevertheless, translation quality as such, and by extension localization quality, represents a highly debated issue, primarily because, to date, ‘translation quality assessment has always been and still is a challenge for translation studies’ ( House 2013: 546). Localization encompasses a wide range of processes, from software localization by large corporations such as Apple or Microsoft to Free and Open Software, from videogame localization by the powerful Japanese industry to the localization of apps or websites for humanitarian emergencies. This is why localization quality ‘represents a dynamic abstract notion defined according to a wide range of parameters, such as clients’ goals, end-users, perishability of the information, clarity, accuracy, etc.’ ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013a: 104). This has also resulted in a wide range of approaches in the localization industry, with experts indicating that the ‘ industry view on quality is highly fragmented, in part because different kinds of translation projects require very different evaluation methods’ ( Lommel et  al. 2014: 455). In addition, new processes such as the emergence of Human Assisted MT, the MT Post-Editing ( PT) paradigm or novel crowdsourcing approaches add to the complexity of the issue, especially in localization: ‘the boundaries between HT and MT […] are increasingly blurring: this is apparent, in particular, in software and web localization […] where MT (often supported by PT) is becoming widely used’ (Castilho et al. 2018: 11). Literature on the topic has explored different issues, both descriptive and theoretical, but normally they tend to focus on different components that could improve quality. This is the case of localization quality management ( Dunne 2009), the implementation of functionalist perspectives ( Jiménez- Crespo 2009b) or the proposal of error typologies ( Jiménez- Crespo 2011b). In addition, specific quality models have been proposed for localization such as Dunne’s model for software localization quality assessment (2009b) or Jiménez- Crespo’s dynamic quality evaluation model (2013a: 127–131). Probably one of the most significant research areas in this context has been studies on web localization quality in different combinations of web genres and languages such as the case of tourist websites in Italy ( Pierini 2007), Spain (Suau Jiménez 2015) or China ( Jiangbo and Ying 2010), corporate websites of Spanish large 384

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corporations ( Jiménez- Crespo 2008; Diéguez Morales and Rodríguez 2011) or small companies websites (Sánchez-Nieto 2009; Medina Reguera and Ramírez Delgado 2015), non-profit websites ( Jiménez- Crespo 2012), advertising/promotional sites ( Valdés 2009; Sidiropoulou 2018) or social networking sites ( Jiménez- Crespo 2013b). All these studies bear witness to the kaleidoscope of practices and approaches associated to the study of quality in localization.

Conclusion The development of localization and globalization go hand in hand in our interconnected digital world. Two basic features of ‘globalisation are the overcoming of spatial barriers and the centrality of knowledge and information’ ( Bielsa 2005: 131). In this context, there is ‘ increased mobility of people and objects and a heightened contact between different linguistic communities’, and an ‘exponential growth of the importance of translation’ as a ‘ key mediator in a globalized world’ ( Bielsa 2005: 131). Localization has emerged as a key translational phenomenon to enable globalization, since the adaptation of products and services to the specifics of end-users is key in achieving global success. This chapter has reviewed the different areas of research at the intersection of localization and globalization, definitions, the interdisciplinary connections between TIS and International Business and Marketing, economic considerations that result in the notion of ‘degree of localization’, quality, localization crowdsourcing and a small review of other significant topics in localization research. As previously mentioned, the so-called ‘economic turn’ attempts to bring business considerations into the theorization and empirical research into translation in general, and into localization in particular. This will continue to be part of the research agenda in TIS, as economic constraints play a key role in basic issues such as localization quality. The need for instant communication across the globe, together with new developments such as MT, Human Assisted MT, Interactive MT will continue to push the limits of localization quality and the dynamic set of components it is dependent on. Research into the implementation of MT approaches will continue to be part of the research agenda (i.e. Bowker and Buitrago 2018), especially in combination with human post- editing to account for the role of culture and globalization strategies in this area. Similarly, as previously mentioned, the so- called ‘economic turn’ attempts to bring business considerations into the theorization and empirical research into translation in general, and into localization in particular. This will continue to be part of future research, as economic constraints play a key role in basic issues such as localization quality, ‘a time, resource and financially constrained process’ ( Jiménez- Crespo 2018: 78–79). Similarly, some issues that require further studies are cultural ( Dong and Mangiron 2018) political (i.e. Wu 2017; McDonough-Dolmaya 2018) or social (i.e. Austermühl and Mirwald 2010) aspects of localization. Humanitarian issues will continue to be part of the research agenda (Schäler 2010; Federici 2016), including the need for ‘development’ or ‘nonmarket localization’ (Schäler 2010). Finally, a special mention should be made of the intersection of localization and crowdsourcing in the age of globalization. The flattening of the world now allows tapping on the cognitive capital of volunteers for the translation and globalization of digital content. Normally, in the age of globalization and global instant interconnectedness the members of the targeted crowd can be spread throughout the world. This crowd completes collaboratively ‘a job traditionally performed by a designated agent’ that is outsourced ‘ in the form of an open call’ ( Howe 2006: np). Crowdsourcing has been successfully applied to translation and localization tasks since the m id-2000s, and it would not have been possible without the global reach of the Internet and the communicative capabilities attached to it. It is often argued that 385

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it ‘ has far reaching consequences for the profession of the translator in an age of globalization’ (Cronin 2013: 99). In this new paradigm, global users have moved beyond the passive consumption of all types of content mediated through the web, partaking in content creation and translation ( Jiménez- Crespo 2017). The success of crowdsourcing in localization and other translation tasks highlights a key issue in a globalized world: nowadays, professional and volunteers that operate in global networks around the world ( Risku et al. 2016) have created a globalized translation marketplace. This, to sum it all up, represents the future of translation and localization: a global collaboration for a global audience.

Further reading Bernal-Merino, M. A. (2016) ‘Glocalization and Co- Creation: Trends in International Game Production’, in Esser, A., Smith, I. R. and Bernal-Merino, M. A. (eds.), Media across Borders: Localising TV, ­ ­ ​­ Film and Video Games. London: Routledge, pp. 202–220. This chapter discusses the notion of localization in the light of ‘glocalization’ in videogame localization. It argues that ‘glocalization’, or the development and co- creation of videogames from the start with in- country partners, offers global and local gamers a more immersive experience than those games that are developed in one country/region and then localized for others. Cronin, M. (2013) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. Theoretical monograph on the challenges faced by translation and translation studies in the era of globalization. ­Jiménez-Crespo, ​­ ­ M. A. (2013) Translation and Web Localization. London: Routledge. The first monograph exclusively dedicated to web localization. It offers a comprehensive approach to this phenomenon and a foundation for students and researchers interested in researching web localization. It includes a dynamic framework to assess quality in web localization and a didactic proposal for web localization training. ­Jiménez-Crespo, ​­ ­ M. A. (2017a) Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits ​­ of Translation Studies. ­Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. The first monograph dedicated to crowdsourcing and online collaborative translation. Since the first object of crowdsourcing practices were websites, software and videogame localization, this publication offers a comprehensive theoretical framework to study collaborative localization processes.

Note 1 The other notion that sparked the most intense debate and was perceived as the most fuzzy notion among professionals was ‘transcreation’ ( Pedersen 2014).

References Achkasov, A. (2016) ‘Rethinking the Scope of Localization’, Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities and Social Sciences, 3(10), ­ pp. 288–297. ­ ­ ​­ Anastasiou, D. and Reinhard, S. (2009) ‘Translating Vital Information: Localisation, Internationalisation, and Globalisation’, Synthèses, 3, pp. 11–25. ­ ­ ​­ Austermühl, F. and Mirwald, C. (2010) ‘Images of Translators in Localization Discourse’, in Austermühl, F. and Kornelius, J. (eds.), Learning Theories and Practice in Translation Studies. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, pp. 99–138. ­ ­ ​­ Baack, D. W. and Singh, N. (2007) ‘Culture and Web Communications’, Journal of Business Research, 60(3), ­ pp. 181–188. ­ ­ ​­ Bass, S. (2006) ‘Quality in the Real World’, in Dunne, K. (ed.), Perspectives on Localization. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 69– 84. Bernal-Merino, M. A. (2016) ‘Glocalization and Co- Creation: Trends in International Game Production’, in Esser, A., Smith, I. R. and Bernal-Merino, M. A. (eds.), Media across Borders: Localising TV, Film and Video Games. New York: Routledge, pp. 202–220. ­ ­ ​­ 386

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House, J. (2013) ‘Quality in Translation Studies’, in Millan, C. and Batrina, F. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 534–547. ­ ­ ​­ House, J. (2014) ‘English as a Global Lingua Franca: A Threat to Multilingual Communication and Translation?’, Language Teaching, 47(3), ­ pp. 363–376. ­ ­ ​­ House, J. (2015) Translation Quality Assessment: Past and Present. London: Routledge. Howe, J. (2006) Crowdsourcing: A Definition. Crowdsourcing: Tracking the Rise of the Amateur. Available ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ online: http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html. [Accessed 18 April 2020]. InternetWorldStats. (2018) ‘Internet Usage and Statistics’. Available online: https://www.internetworld stats.com/stats.htm ­ Jiangbo, H. and Ying, T. (2010) ‘Study of the Translation Errors in the Light of the Skopostheorie. Samples from the Websites of Some Tourist Attractions in China’, Babel, 56 (1): ­ ­35–46. ​­ ­Jiménez-Crespo ​­ (2008) ­ ‘M. ­ A. El proceso de localización web: estudio contrastivo de un corpus comparable del género sitio web corporativo’, Doctoral Thesis, University of Granada, Spain. Available online: https:// hera.ugr.es/tesisugr/17515324.pdf ­ ­ Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2009a). ‘Conventions in Localisation: A Corpus Study of Original vs. Trans­ ­ ​­ lated Web Texts’, Journal of Specialised Translation, 12, pp. 79–102. Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2009b) ‘The Evaluation of Pragmatic and Functionalist Aspects in Localization: Towards a Holistic Approach to Quality Assurance’, The Journal of Internationalization and Localization, 1, pp. 60–93. ­ ­ ​­ Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2010) ‘Web Internationalization Strategies and Translation Quality: Researching the Case of “International” Spanish’, Localization Focus—T he International Journal of Localization, 8, pp. 13–25. ­ ­ ​­ Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2011a) ‘To Adapt or not to Adapt in Web Localization: A Contrastive Genrebased Study of Original and Localized Legal Sections in Corporate Websites’, Journal of Specialised Translation, 15, pp. 2–27. ­ ­ ​­ Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2011b) “A Corpus-based Error Typology: Towards a More Objective Approach to Measuring Quality in Localization’, Perspectives, Studies in Translatology, 19(4), ­ pp. 315–338. ­ ­ ​­ Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2011c) ‘From Many One: Novel Approaches to Translation Quality in a Social Network Era’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series 10, pp. 131–152. ­ ­ ​­ Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2012) ‘Web Localization in US Non-Profit Websites: A Descriptive Study of Localization Strategies’, in García, I. and Monzó, E. (eds.), Iberian Studies on Translation and Interpreting. ­Oxford-Berlin: ​­ Peter Lang, pp. 243–268. ­ ­ ​­ ­Jiménez-Crespo, ​­ M. A. (2013a) ­ Translation and Web Localization. London: Routledge. Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2013b). ‘Crowdsourcing, Corpus Use, and the Search for Translation Naturalness: A Comparable Corpus Study of Facebook and Non-translated Social Networking Sites’, TIS: Translation and Interpreting Studies, 8, pp. 23–49. ­ ­ ​­ Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2016) ‘What is (not) Web Localization in Translation Studies: A Prototype Approach’, JIAL. Journal of Internationalization and Localization, 3(1), ­ pp. 38–60. ­ ­ ​­ Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. and Singh, N. (2016) ‘International Business, Marketing and Translation Studies: Impacting Research Into Web Localization’. in Gambier, Y. and van Doorslaer, L. (eds.), Border Crossings. Translation Studies and Other Disciplines. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 245–262. ­ ­ ​­ ­Jiménez-Crespo, ​­ M. A. (2017) ­ Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translation: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Jiménez- Crespo, M. A. (2018) ‘Localisation Research in Translation Studies: Expanding the Limits or Blurring the Line’, in Dam, V. H., Brøgger, M. and Zethsen, K. K. (eds.), Moving Boundaries in Translation Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 12–25. ­ ­ ​­ LISA. (2003) ­ Localization Industry Primer. Fry, D. (ed.). Geneva: The Localization Industry Standards Association. LISA. (2004) ­ Localization Industry Primer, 2nd ed. Geneva: The Localization Industry Standards Association. LISA. (2007a) ­ LISA Globalization Industry Primer. Romainmôtier, Switzerland: Localization Industry Standards Association. LISA. (2007b) ­ Best Practice Guide. Quality A ssurance – T he Client Perspective. Romainmôtier, Switzerland: Localization Industry Standards Association. Lockwood, T. and Scott, K. (1999) A Writer’s Guide to the Internet. London: Allison and Busby. 388

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27 The impact of technology on the role of the translator in globalized production workflows Elisa Alonso and Lucas Nunes Vieira

Introduction Over the past decades, information and communication technologies have redefined the limits of most human activities and translation has not been an exception. Globalization has increased the demand for translations particularly in terms of volume and speed, and technology has been a crucial factor in attempts to cope with this. As a result of the mutual interplay between technology, globalization and translation, the latter has experienced significant changes in the way it is carried out, managed, structured and delivered (Abdallah 2007). Since the advent of computers, translation has been considered an activity where automation could yield fruitful results. As generic and translation- specific technologies are incorporated into translation production chains, the role played by translators is undergoing a series of shifts. Technologies have triggered an intense technicalization of the translation profession and altered the traditional concept of the translator’s habitus ( Biel and Sosoni 2017: 355–356), which has become apparent even in literary translation ( Youdale 2020). Computer-a ssisted (or aided) translation (CAT) tools and machine translation (MT) are now common components of the translator’s workstation. MT’s goal is to produce a fully automated translated output, whereas in the CAT paradigm human translators are assisted by machines, including MT itself, in the process of crafting translations. The origins of MT date to the late 1940s. Since then several developments have favoured (and even pushed for) an increasing demand for translations (see Bowker 2015: 89): • • • • •

The shift to an information society with a knowledge-based economy The creation and expansion of political and economic unions and agreements (e.g. the European Union) The development of new and increasingly sophisticated products (e.g. smart phones, medical equipment) The globalization of commerce and the rise of e- commerce And the growth of the World Wide Web coupled with the desire for localized content

In this chapter, we will explore how globalization and technological development have been shaping and re- shaping the role of the translator since the m id-twentieth century. First, 391

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following a chronological outline of translation automation development, we will discuss the impact of technology on human translators. We will then review different theories or approaches that have been used to analyse the interface between translators and technology. Next, two sections will examine the impact of technology on the translation profession and on translator training, respectively. Finally, we conclude with final remarks and suggestions for further reading.

The impact of technology on human translators: a historical account The discussion of the human-m achine interface is often framed as a matter of humans and machines being either allies or rivals. However, it is worth noting that technological progress cannot be decoupled from its human dimensions. The perception of what it means to be human is itself in many ways shaped by technology ( Vázquez Medel 2003; Cronin 2017). Indeed, in human evolution, the ability to create tools (extensions of human capacities) and language development are correlated (Morgan et al. 2015). Since ancient Greece, communication, technique and technology have been interlinked and associated with the concept of techne, which stands for practical art and practical knowledge (Sterne 2006: 97). The history of humankind largely relies on the feedback loop and the creative dialogue established between humans and different forms of techne such as writing, printing, computers, the Internet and modern telecommunications. In the field of translation, MT and CAT are critical elements of the relationship between translators and technology. However, the automation of translation has not been a linear process. High expectations have been repeatedly followed by the realization that, due to technological limitations or the complexity of languages, translation automation was more challenging than originally envisaged ( Hutchins 2015). Nevertheless, technologies have gradually and in varied ways been infiltrating the translation process. Different phases have been identified in the history of MT ( Hutchins 2015; Qun and Xiaojun 2015) and of CAT (Chan 2015a; Garcia 2015). The aforementioned works offer a detailed account of the facts from the 1940s to 2015, their year of publication. Since then, a new phase can be identified with the introduction of neural MT. We therefore structure the chronology of this section as follows: • • • •

1949–1966: MT Pioneers ­ ​­ 1967 to the 1990s: MT and CAT Development 2000–2015: New trends in MT/Enhancement of CAT systems Since 2015: Neural MT

­1949–1966: ​­ MT pioneers The pioneers’ period begins in 1949 with Warren Weaver’s memorandum – which establishes a research agenda for MT – a nd finishes in 1996 with the publication of the ALPAC report (Hutchins 2015: 120). An atmosphere of optimism raised by the initial success of MT prevailed in this period. Soon after the invention of computers and with the Cold War as a background, translating natural languages was regarded as an automatable activity. Then and now, in most dissemination contexts the output of MT systems requires human post- editing. In fact, given the scarcity of bilingual translators, post- editing was often carried out by nonprofessionals based just on the target text ( Bar-Hillel 1951: 230).

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Indeed, according to Hutchins (2001: 6), the initial reluctance to regard translation as a form of human- computer interaction led to failures in the deployment of translation systems, and contributed to misconceptions about translation technology and its impact on the professional translator. In the way we structured the present overview, the pioneers’ period ends in 1966 with the ALPAC report issued by the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee of the US government. The report pointed out that, since fully automatic high- quality MT would not be achieved for a long time, efforts should shift from MT to the support of the human translation process (ALPAC 1966). We discuss developments of this new phase below.

1967 to the 1990s: MT and CAT development The ALPAC report had negative repercussions for MT, but research in this area gradually saw an incipient revival. It was also during this period that CAT systems started to develop. More MT systems were marketed, and the first computer-based translation aids were launched (Hutchins 2015: 133–134). In addition, since the early 1990s, corpus-based technologies (such as translation memories (TMs), example-based MT and statistical MT) acquired increasing importance. ALPAC’s recommendations called for greater efforts to speed up the human translation process, to adapt the then mechanized translation editing and production processes, and to produce adequate reference works (e.g. glossaries) for the translator (ALPAC 1966: 34). The development of CAT tools and TM systems followed these recommendations. The functioning of these tools can be described as follows: At its core, every CAT system divides a text into ‘segments’ (normally sentences, as defined by punctuation marks) and searches a bilingual memory for identical (exact match) ­ or similar ( ­fuzzy match) source and translation segments. Search and recognition of terminology in analogous bilingual glossaries are also standard. The corresponding search results are then offered to the human translator as prompts for adaptation and reuse. ( Hutchins 2015: 68) The article published in 1980 by Martin Kay ‘The Proper Place of Men [sic.] and Machines in Language Translation’ is considered a key inspiration for CAT systems (Chan 2015a: 5). However, hardware and software limitations of the time delayed the launch of a commercial CAT tool. In the 1990s, the use of commercially available CAT tools, including word processors, TM systems, text aligners (see Garcia 2015 for details) and electronic dictionaries, increased and this trend continued throughout the 2000s.

2000–2015: new trends in MT/enhancement of CAT systems From the 2000s to 2015, translation technologies went through an intense phase of development (Chan 2015a: 13–22). CAT tools became more sophisticated and incorporated server components (web- or cloud-based) that helped to manage TMs and projects collaboratively. This enhanced data sharing, which was also favoured by increasing efforts to facilitate interoperability with standard formats such as Translation Memory eXchange ( TMX), XML Localization Interchange File format ( XLIFF) and Term-Base eXchange ( TBX).

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As a result of the higher mobility, connectivity and immediacy of translation technology ( Enríquez Raído 2016), translation turned into a ubiquitous activity (Cronin 2013) that could be carried out virtually anywhere. Another sign of the times was the increasing importance of translation data. In the 15 years between 2000 and 2015, phrase-based statistical MT (a type of corpus-based MT) was the main type of MT architecture. In the statistical MT paradigm, the key to developing successful systems is the volume (number of words) and the quality of bilingual data for system training. Consequently, in these 15 years it became increasingly common for large companies and major language service providers to compile and curate their own TMs. In addition, initiatives like Translation Automation User Society ( TAUS) and MyMemory emerged to gather as much TM content as possible (Garcia 2015: 82). In 2006, the first web-based CAT tool to integrate a mainframe MT system (Garcia 2015: 81) was launched. This path would soon be followed by other software manufacturers. For decades, MT and CAT had offered separate functionalities. From the translator’s point of view, the possibility of post-editing MT in their workstations marked the opening of a new phase. The use of MT as a CAT feature brought MT technology to the centre of translators’ working environment ( Vieira et al. 2019: 3). Just as translators embraced TM systems, MT would pose new challenges to humanm achine integration (Garcia 2009). After decades of post- editing being treated as a mere step in MT development, the use of MT in the human translation process acquired a negative reputation among many translators (Moorkens and O’Brien 2015; Läubli and Orrego- Carmona 2017). Translators started to voice concerns about a likely connection between higher automation and decreasing rates or standards ( Vieira 2020). For the general public, due to the increasing availability of free MT services on the Internet during this period, the use of unedited MT content grew to the point of becoming the ‘principal form in which people encounter translation from any source’ ( Hutchins 2015: 132).

Since 2015: Neural MT The emergence of neural MT ( Bahdanau et al. 2014), a corpus-based MT training method based on artificial neural networks, has been a landmark in the history of translation technology and of the translation industry (Forcada 2017). Since 2014, workspaces have incorporated neural, adaptive and interactive MT ( Lilt n.d.). Despite the increased quality that neural MT systems can offer, it still has limitations. Human post- editing is therefore still needed for dissemination purposes ( Vieira et al. 2019: 2). MT is developed, fed, evaluated and trained by humans, who, in turn, can use MT technology to increase productivity. MT performs well in certain tasks (e.g. translation speed) but struggles with others, which tend to be precisely those where humans excel (e.g. pragmatic translation, domain expertise and research skills) ( Lumeras and Way 2017: 25). Growing price and time pressures on language service providers and on translators have increased the demand for post- editing according to a Common Sense Advisory 2016 report ( DePalma et  al. 2016). A by-product of the adoption of MT as a professional tool is that clients expect lower translation rates. As pointed out by Vieira (2020: 5– 6), this does not necessarily mean a systematic reduction of translators’ income, possibly because lower rates are compensated by higher volumes or because lower rates are more likely to affect just the less professionalized sectors of the market. Whatever the case, any analysis of technology’s impact on a profession or occupation should focus not just on the technology itself but also on the economic practices attached to its implementation ( Leblanc 2017; Vieira 2020). Both in the 394

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industry (O’Dowd 2019) and in the popular press (Marr 2019), there are high expectations for neural MT and the new possibilities of deep learning. Computer processing capacity has increased (McBride 2019) and deploying MT has become cheaper. Consequently, MT use has been democratized and is now increasingly common among freelancers and small vendors ( Lommel and DePalma 2016: 6 –7). An important bottleneck to neural MT is the availability and quality of multilingual data. However, it should be noted that high- quality data require human effort and expertise. As expressed by Lumeras and Way (2017: 38), it is essential for MT developers to foster collaboration with human translators to improve MT performance.

Technology and the epistemology of translation Translation technology has affected translation practice, translation studies, translator training and the translation industry (Chan 2015b: xxvii). Its impact has been so profound that it is largely accepted that from 2004 a ‘technological turn’ has dominated translation studies and translation practice (Cronin 2010; O’Hagan 2013; Chan 2017: 262). Translation has also been deeply influenced by teletranslation (i.e. Internet-based language services) (O’Hagan 1996; O’Hagan and Ashworth 2002) and the use of generic tools such as Internet search engines and spell checkers ( Biau- Gil and Pym 2006). Given the current degree of automation in translation, it is undeniable that translation is a form of human-computer interaction (O’Brien 2012). O’Brien addresses translation as a ­ ‘significant global economic activity’ (102, emphasis in original) characterized by high volumes, high incidence of repetitions and reliance on computer resources. Chan (2017: 269) goes a step further and argues that, in the future, any definition of translation will invariably have to incorporate a technological dimension. According to Christensen et al. (2017: 8), translation technology has become so prominent that its research should be addressed as a subdiscipline of translation studies. Conversely, the omnipresence of technology in translation might provide sufficient reason to consider technology the pivot joint of the discipline’s research system. As expressed by Biau- Gil and Pym (2006), even the term computer-aided translation seems redundant today, because virtually all acts of translation are aided by computers. As a result, contemporary definitions of translation would not need to incorporate any technological dimension, as the use of technology is taken for granted in translation like in other fields such as medicine or architecture. For certain areas of specializations such as literary translation, technology is not as prominent ( Katan and Spinzi 2014). There is evidence that this could rapidly change (e.g. Toral et al. 2018) but, in any case, technology is an important sociological factor: Translation is done not only by the brain, but also by complex systems, systems which include people, their specific social and physical environments and all their cultural artefacts. (Risku 2002: 529) In the paradigm of situated, embodied cognition ( Risku and Windhager 2013), translation tools cannot be understood as isolated auxiliary artefacts. Rather, they should be considered part of a complex network where computers are actual extensions of human memory and knowledge. Elaborating on this same idea, Alonso and Calvo (2015) claim that the impact of technology on translation has represented an epistemological transformation of the concept of translation. The interplay between translators and machines has shaped the activity of translating as ‘an extended cognitive, anthropological and social system or network, which 395

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integrates human translators and technology, whether specific to translation or not, and acknowledges the collective dimension of many translation workflows today’ (Alonso and Calvo 2015: 158). As expressed earlier, the term ­post-editing dates to the origins of MT, but the recent incor​­ poration of MT into translation toolkits and workflows has brought post-editing to the fore. Post-editing is today a fully-fledged service that has its own international standard (ISO 18587 2017). However, the way in which post-editing is carried out has changed. Translators can now interact on the fly with MT systems, which can learn in real time from human edits. Therefore, the use of MT in the human translation process can now be associated with different terms, such as ‘augmented translation’ ( Lommel 2018), which expresses the idea that artificial intelligence will augment human translation. Terminological considerations aside ( Vieira et al. 2019), the use of MT in the human translation process is likely to become even more prominent. Outside translation studies, economic and socio-political stakeholders are probably interested in translation as an instrumental means to foster globalization, internationalization and worldwide communication. There is increasing interest in initiatives that might help to overcome language barriers with the purpose of contributing to a global economy, favouring the circulation of goods and people. TAUS, for instance, an organization whose membership includes buyers and providers of translation services, envisages that in the (near) future translation will be a sort of utility, like electricity or water. With this aim in mind, they support translation automation and multilingual data sharing ( TAUS 2014). For its part, the European Union recognized since its foundation that translation was one of its pillars, and for decades invested in the development of MT and CAT tools that could improve translation quality and productivity in their internal translation processes. In 2017, it went a step further putting its MT tool (eTranslation) at the disposal of any public administration of their member states ( European Commission n.d.).

Different conceptualizations of the interface between translators and technology The relationship between translators and the techno- sphere (Austermühl 2001; Bowker 2002; Somers 2003) has been for years a productive field of research. There is also abundant research focused on translators’ perceptions of and attitudes to the use of technology in the form of surveys or ethnographic studies (e.g. Lagoudaki 2006; Leblanc 2013; Pérez Macías 2018, among others). Thanks to these studies, translators’ scepticism about the value of translation- specific software (Fulford and Granell-Zafra 2005) has been documented, as well as translators’ mixed opinions about how post- editing tasks were organized and remunerated (Guerberof Arenas 2013). Conversely, positive perceptions of CAT have been documented too, for example, in terms of increased productivity and consistency, and the elimination of repetitive tasks ( Leblanc 2013). More recently, in order to fully understand the complex implementation of humancomputer interaction in translation practice, translation studies has turned to other fields, such as psychology, cognitive science and sociology, and often borrowed their theories and concepts (O’Brien 2013). Some proposals from sociology, focusing on the translator’s habitus (Chesterman 2007), argue that technology is present in the social context of translation workflows as a non-human agent or artefact ( Buzelin 2005). Stemming from actor-network theory ( Latour 1986) and situated and embodied cognition, extended translation theory ( Risku and Windhager 2013) stresses the importance of research on subjects and technologies in real-life ­ ​­ contexts. 396

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Another concept borrowed from sociology has been that of the ‘dance of agency’ as developed by Pickering (1993), who explains the dynamics of resistance and accommodation that humans experience in their interaction with non-human agents (machines). The impact of technology on translators’ agency has been a popular topic and a matter of concern in translation studies. Olohan (2011) drew on this construct to study, through discussion threads posted on an online forum, the extent to which translators felt in control or offered resistance when using the then recently launched SDL Trados Studio 2009. Relying on the same concept, Ruokonen and Koskinen (2017) stress the importance of emotions and the narratives that evidence translators’ experiences with technology. In order to explore the physical, cognitive and organizational ergonomic issues related to the activity of professional translators, several multidisciplinary studies have been conducted in production settings ( Ehrensberger-Dow and O’Brien 2015). It has been demonstrated that even after decades of refinement, CAT tools still irritate professional translators (O’Brien et al. 2017). Finally, post- editing has flourished as a professional activity and service closely related to globalization demands for multilingual communication. Post- editing is also a sub-field of research, where the effort necessary to bring the MT output up to the desired quality standard is a key factor of interest. Studies on post-editing effort often involve cognitive and processbased methods such as eye tracking, screen recording and keystroke logging (see Vieira et al. 2019). Translation quality – whether MT or t arget-text quality – is also a central variable in this field given the ways in which quality is related to post- editing effort and productivity (see Vieira 2019; O’Brien 2012).

Technology and the translation profession Technology is also present in the debate about the consideration of translation as a profession, an activity or an expertise (Séguinot 2007; Jääskeläinen 2010; Katan 2011; Pym et al. 2014). Following Dam and Koskinen (2016), and in accordance with the current convention in translation studies, we call it a profession, though we note it probably still does not have all the features that a formally recognized profession would. Work fragmentation has been one of the problems of translation as a profession ( Katan 2009; Dam and Zethsen 2010; Pym et al. 2014). From a general perspective, fragmentation of any labour force – which among other things can be characterized by a narrowing of what specific roles are perceived to comprise – is related to the advent of a global economy and the diversification of forms of work and employment. As a result of this diversification, ‘standard’ forms of employment (full time, socially secure) are now complemented by less stable jobs (part-time, temporary agency work, homeworking, self-employment) (EurWORK 2017). ­­ ​­ ­ ​­ ­ Particularly in the case of translators, work is fragmented when tasks that were once carried out by the same person are split into several stages and conducted across multiples roles. While a combination of factors is behind these developments, information and communication technologies such as e-m ail and cloud servers cannot be ignored as important elements of what translation as a profession is currently undergoing. Indeed, technology may be an important factor of what can be referred to as a reductionist view of the occupation, that of ‘a largely female, freelance, part-time, fragmented, unregulated cohort, who have an arguably problematic, or at least fledging, status as “professionals”’ (Seddon 2019: 113). To research the social complexities of translation, Seddon argues that we should resort to an ontological approach where translators, along with non-human actors (not only texts but also technologies), are an assembled identity, ‘the product of distributed agency, processes and interactions 397

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within specific contexts’ ( p. 114). With this in mind, technology itself, as strictly understood, is not responsible for the fragmentation of translators’ profession, but rather how it is being implemented, by whom and to what purposes. In any case, the increasing technicalization of translation workflows has been considered to have a negative impact both on the translator’s status ( Dam and Zethsen 2010: 206) and on the translation process ( Pym 2011). Sometimes, this impact has been described as ‘market disorder’, which results from several factors including globalization of translator- client interactions, higher volumes of volunteer translation and free access to online MT ( Pym et al. 2016). Other authors stress that technology has devaluated the status of the translator to that of a ‘fixer’ of machine-generated outputs (Christensen and Schjoldager 2016). Conversely, translation tools have been used to embolden the identity of the translator as a professional (Gouadec 2007). The present digital age demands an increasing modernization of the translators’ role while translation shifts from profession to business (Chan 2017: 270–273). In Dam and Koskinen’s view (2016: 3), technology is an agent of the translation profession that has moved from the periphery to the centre. Productivity is one of the reasons behind the increasing centrality of technology in translation. According to Koponen (2016), post- editing of MT is ‘worth the effort’, because not only does it increase productivity but, at least in some scenarios and for certain genres and language pairs, also quality. While technology has in many ways positively influenced translation, it is also linked to factors that may negatively affect processual and affective aspects of translation tasks. Below we discuss two such factors: segmentation and dehumanization. At production level, segmentation is the process of splitting source texts into chunks or bits of information ( like a sentence or shorter) that can be processed by translation technologies such as TM systems ( Bowker 2002: 94). While this increases productivity, it also prevents translators from having an overall grasp of the text ( Biau- Gil and Pym 2006: 12, 18, 40; Leblanc 2013; Bundgaard et al. 2016). Moreover, segmentation might undermine the process of identifying the text’s real-world purpose or skopos ( Vermeer 1996) by forcing translators to adopt a sentence-by-sentence approach to the task. Indeed, the segment-focused interface of most CAT tools arguably does not stimulate a holistic translation strategy. On the other hand, segmentation may facilitate collaborative practices in some contexts, like volunteer translation, where segments of human and machine-generated translations can be shared and distributed across networks of translators (O’Brien 2012: 11). Segmentation practices have been particularly evident in the localization industry, where documents are split into chunks of text that are eventually reused by content management systems to produce different texts such as user manuals, online help systems and websites (Sandrini 2005: 136; Biau- Gil and Pym 2006: 11). Dehumanization is related to translators’ emotions and their self-perception. It is one of the consequences of automation and fragmentation. Like Little Tramp, the character created by Charlie Chaplin who feels alienated by having to perform a repetitive task and is eventually swallowed by the machinic assembly line in Modern Times (1936), technology might negatively affect translators’ emotions and self-perception ( Pym 2003, 2011; O’Brien 2012; Alonso and Calvo 2015). According to O’Brien (2012: 10), the status of MT ‘fixer’ that translators might assume in automated workflows, coupled with the fact that they may be paid lower rates, contributes to negative feelings towards technology. In addition, she argues that translators perceive MT as a black box (cf. Karamanis et al. 2011) with which they are not allowed to collaborate, which, in turn, can lead to mistrust and rejection of the technology. Interestingly, this perception might be changing thanks to initiatives that try to empower translators with the integration of MT into their training ( Kenny and Doherty 2014). 398

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There may also be a perception that, after years of training, translators are somehow undermined by the fact that a machine can perform their task in a reasonably satisfactory manner (O’Brien 2012: 11). According to Alonso and Calvo (2015: 148–151), following the initial dehumanization tendencies translators have been subjected to over the last decades, we might witness a trans-humanization of the translation process. Translating will be driven by the creative and learning dimensions that are inherent to technologies in so far that they are instruments with the potential of creating a dialogue with their users. This might result in more versatile roles for translators, who will be interacting with technology in a more creative manner.

Technology in translator training In parallel to professional considerations, translator training is also influenced by technology. A combination of factors is putting translators under enormous pressure and encouraging them and their employers to embrace translation technologies ( Bowker 2015: 89–90). These factors include: a) societal, economic and technological trends that are increasing the demand for translations; b) the fact that the volume of text to be translated has grown significantly in recent decades; c) tighter deadlines; and d) an increasing shortage of qualified workers (see Introduction). As a result, most translator education programmes have incorporated some form of technology training into their syllabus. Indeed, technology skills are present in translation competence models. Most models gravitate towards a central super-competence or strategic competence that orchestrates other sub- competences such as the communicative sub- competence in two or more languages, or domain or extra-linguistic sub-competence, among others (e.g. PACTE 2003; Kelly 2007; Göpferich 2009; EMT Expert Group 2009; Kiraly 2013; EMT Board 2017). The ability to manage tools and other technological resources is often placed under the instrumental heading of said competence models. An example of the increasing presence of technology in translator training is the number and level of competences identified by the European Master’s in Translation ( EMT) expert group. The EMT is a network of master’s degree programmes that has agreed certain quality standards for translator training. The 2009 version of the EMT competence framework had the following technological competences: […] being able to effectively use search engines, corpus analysis tools and term extractors for information mining; knowing how to produce and prepare a translation in different file formats and for different technical media; knowing how to use a range of CAT tools; understanding the possibilities and limits of machine translation; and being able to learn and adapt to new and emerging tools. (Bowker 2015: 90) Plaza Lara (2019: 264) has pointed out that the 2009 EMT skill set also included, under intercultural competence, the need to draft, rephrase, restructure, condense and post- edit rapidly and well ( EMT Expert Group 2009: 6). She has noted, however, that the 2017 version of the EMT framework envisages a wider set of technological competences, particularly in the field of MT and post- editing, and workflow software and support technologies ( Plaza Lara 2019: 264). Under the 2017 framework the translator is not a mere user of these technologies, but rather an ‘ implementer’ and ‘consultant’ whose competences must include pre-editing source material, applying different levels of post- editing to MT output, mastering the basics of MT, assessing the relevance of MT systems and implementing the appropriate MT system where relevant ( EMT Board 2017: 8–9 cit. Plaza Lara 264). 399

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An interesting approach to the incorporation of MT into translator training takes as a starting point the idea that MT is not a product but a process ( Rico 2017). Every step of the process (data compilation, training and evaluation of MT engines, post- editing, recycling of TM systems) requires human expertise. According to Rico (2017), if properly trained, translators would occupy the very heart of the process and would be able to control and master it in all its facets.

Conclusion This chapter provided an overview of how technology has influenced the work of translators in globalized production networks. It has discussed how technologies that are specific to translation and those that concern information and communication more generally have served to streamline processes and improve translators’ productivity. The chapter has also reviewed potentially negative consequences of translation technology use. These include ways in which technologies can have a negative impact on the translation process as well as ways in which it can exacerbate broader phenomena linked to how translation work is structured in business supply chains. The chapter has also shown that, despite its potentially negative consequences, technology can also have a positive impact on translation as a practice and profession. Adaptive and interactive MT can provide translators with more intelligent ways of leveraging automatic suggestions and of avoiding or speeding up repetitive work. While MT can be perceived to threaten translators’ standing and professional status, it is in a relationship of complementarity with translators and not in one of exclusion. As shown by some of the studies reviewed earlier, more serious issues can arise, however, in situations where the power of MT is misinterpreted, oversold or misused. We therefore highlight two key issues that merit increased attention in the debate on the future of translation and translation technology. First, human- computer interaction in translation is likely to continue to evolve. Speech and the written text may interact in new multimodal ways of producing translations, a process which, in turn, is likely to involve more interactive technologies that blur the lines between tasks and practices. Second, issues of ethics and economic fairness are increasingly important aspects of ensuring that translation technology’s benefits are reaped in a positive and sustainable manner. Interest in these issues will hopefully continue to grow as it becomes clearer that technological progress is not detached from the social and economic context in which it comes about. A continued focus on these areas, we believe, will help to ensure that MT and other translation technologies offer new opportunities.

Further reading Christensen, T. P., Flanagan, M. and Schjoldager, A. (2017) ‘Mapping Translation Technology Research in Translation Studies’ [special issue], HERMES – Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 56. This special issue is a comprehensive review of state- of-the-art research in translation studies with a ­three-fold ​­ focus: ­technology-oriented ​­ (tools ­ and resources), ­workflow-oriented ​­ and industrial research, ​­ and ­translation-theoretical approaches. Lumeras, M. A. and Way, A. (2017) ‘On the Complementary between Human Translators and Machine Translation’, HERMES – Journal of Languages and Communication Business, 56, pp. 21–42. ­ ­ ​­ In this paper, the authors clarify what MT can do well and what human translators find challenging (terminology management, translation speed, translation scoring). Similarly, they also discuss areas

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where human translators excel, as well as others where MT struggles ( language pragmatics, rephrasing, domain expertise). They argue that human and machine translation are – and will continue to ­be – ​­mutually complementary. Vieira, L. N., Alonso, E. and Bywood, L. (2019) ‘Post-Editing in Practice: Process, Product and Networks’ [Special Issue], Journal of Specialised Translation, 31. This special issue offers an updated panorama of post- editing practices in training and production settings, as well as information on translators’ perceptions of post- editing and MT.

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28 Volunteerism in translation Translators Without Borders and the platform economy Attila Piróth and Mona Baker

Introduction Translators, whether professionally trained or otherwise, volunteer their time and skills in many contexts, including humanitarian assistance and political activism. Volunteering for humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross ( ICRC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ( UNHCR) has received very little attention from scholars of translation but is partly addressed in a small number of recent studies. Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche (2018: 418) confirm that ‘the overwhelming majority’ of interpreters working ‘ in refugee camps or UNHCR offices’ are incentive workers, that is refugees who provide interpreting for very low payment, which may take the form of cash vouchers or in-k ind goods.1 Moreno-R ivero (2018) features an interview with a former Senior Project Officer with Translators without Borders ( TWB), the subject of the current study. No critical questions are posed and the focus is on research the Officer undertook for TWB and Save the Children during the Greek migration crisis, stressing, in the Officer’s words, that ‘[t]hrough research TWB recognizes the gaps in the field, measures the effectiveness of certain tools and formats, and acquires evidence, data and statistics to strengthen its advocacy’ (ibid.: 154). Federici et al. (2019: 6) briefly refer to volunteering for humanitarian organizations in order to stress the importance of investing in technological resources, arguing that the expansive demands of language access are likely to outstrip the internal resources of most organizations in the humanitarian sector, and only those with the greatest budgetary resources will be able to contract translation services, or materially support key volunteers in the translation domain. Volunteering in the context of political activism has attracted more interest and has generally been approached more critically. Among others, Boéri (2008, 2009) offers a detailed, critical analysis of the work of Babels, the international network of volunteer translators and interpreters who cover the linguistic needs of the Social Forums, Baker (2013) examines the political positioning of volunteer translators involved in collectives such as Tlaxcala and 406

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Translators Brigade and Baker (2016) provides a critical account of the ethos and output of volunteer subtitlers who supported the work of two collectives of film makers involved in reporting events during the Egyptian Revolution. Selim (2016) is a first-hand account of the author’s personal experience as a volunteer subtitler for Mosireen, a collective of film makers active during the Egyptian Revolution. These studies challenge the prevalent model of treating volunteer translators as service providers by developing alternative discourses and practices that empower translators and recognize their labour – paid or otherwise – a s a valuable contribution to society rather than a cheap source of additional profit for the corporate world. The term volunteer translation overlaps with but is broader than terms such as crowdsourcing, which assumes that the unpaid translation work is undertaken in digital space and is solicited by content owners such as Twitter and Facebook (McDonough Dolmaya 2020), and user-generated translation, which suggests that those producing the translations are also its ultimate users. We opt for the broader term because despite the increased reliance on digital platforms in soliciting and undertaking unpaid translation work in recent years, most of the ethical issues we discuss are not limited to crowdsourcing in the strict sense. The term ‘volunteer translation’ also allows us to engage specifically with the ethical and social implications of unpaid translation work, whether offered as an act of charity or solidarity with disadvantaged or threatened communities. At the same time, we will be highlighting certain aspects of the widespread practice of crowdsourcing where relevant in order to situate the examples of volunteer translation we discuss within the wider context of the platform economy and the widespread exploitation of digital labour (Morozov 2013; Scholz 2014a).

Volunteer/crowdsourced translation and the platform economy Lanier (2013: 53) warns that ‘digitizing economy and cultural activity will ultimately shrink the economy while concentrating wealth and power in new ways that are not sustainable’, citing translation as an example. ‘The act of cloud-based translation’, he explains, ‘shrinks the economy by pretending the translators who provided the examples do not exist. With each so-called automatic translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away from the world of compensation and employment’ (ibid.: 20). Given the centrality of translation in the information society and the growing interest in its social and political impact, it is important to explore how these general industrial economy trends apply more broadly to the field of translation – once considered as artisanal economy – and how alternatives to a platformbased approach might help counter some of these trends and restore an element of parity to the system. The relevance of this discussion thus extends beyond our immediate target audience of translation scholars, raising issues that are pertinent to social theorists, scholars of political economy and digital culture, as well as non-specialist audiences interested in the ethical questions it raises and the power relations underpinning the political economy of volunteer work. The new platform economy that has replaced artisanal economies such as those of traditional translation is specifically directed at reducing the value of human labour ( Rushkoff 2016: 19), with technology playing a major role in the process. The impetus to devalue human labour underpins the extension of ‘the extreme efficiencies of digital networks’ to new areas ‘ in such a way that the sources of value, whatever they may be, are left more off-thebooks than they used to be’ ( Lanier 2013: 66). Rushkoff (2016: 7) adds that corporations introducing new technologies ‘are free to disrupt almost any industry they choose – journalism, television, music, manufacturing – as long as they don’t disrupt the financial operating system churning beneath it all’. 407

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­Figure 28.1 Screenshot from TM town page ‘10 reasons to upload your prior work to TM town’.

Crowdsourcing, a practice that is widespread in the field of translation and whose ethics have been rarely questioned,2 and then only from the perspective of its impact on the profession ( Baer 2010; McDonough Dolmaya 2011), is a major feature of the platform economy and a prime example of the devaluation of human labour that it enables. As Rushkoff points out, drawing on Scholz (2014b), ‘ in crowdsourcing there’s no minimum wage, no labor regulation, no governmental jurisdiction’ (2016: 50). With a high and increasing proportion of translators working as freelancers, translation lends itself readily to crowdsourcing projects initiated by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. The integration of linguistic assets such as translation memories and the widespread use of word-based rather than hourly or projectbased pricing schemes have accelerated the commoditization of the sector to the point where ​­ network the platform TM Town, owned and operated by Proz.com 3 (a­ ­membership-based website targeting freelance translators), invites freelancers to upload their own resources, including translation memories, in order to improve their ranking in the bidding process on new translation projects, thus shifting the focus from skills to assets, and from value creation to value extraction (Figure 28.1). Scholars and practitioners of translation have rarely shown awareness of the cynical aspects of such crowdsourcing practices, and so far have never examined the motives behind soliciting volunteer translation for humanitarian organizations. This is not surprising, given that the humanitarian rhetoric is rarely questioned outside those areas of scholarship that are directly concerned with the study of humanitarian and non-governmental organizations. The humanitarian rhetoric has been widely instrumentalized by the United States and United Kingdom during their various invasions of the Middle East, with implications for NGOs, described by Colin Powell in 2001 as ‘such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team’ ( Krausse 2014: 18). The perception of NGOs as implicated in military operations may be one of the reasons why ‘ humanitarian relief is a very reflexive and very self-critical field’ (ibid.: 126). The same cannot be said of the field of translation, where this rhetoric continues to be accepted at face value, and where volunteering for humanitarian causes is typically couched in the language of charity rather than solidarity, as evident in some of the quotes from volunteers cited on the TWB website, Volunteer section: ‘I’m welloff in my world. Many others need help in theirs. That’s why I volunteer’; ‘This work is immensely satisfying – particularly when I can see how I am helping to make a difference’; ‘The sense that people are genuinely helped by my translation makes me happy’ ( Figure  28.2). Construing volunteer translation as an act of charity rather than solidarity has consequences for the level of critical awareness with which we are likely to approach it. Unlike charity, solidarity is reflexive and is able to critique itself ( Rai 2018: 14). Khasnabish (2021: 386) highlights two further characteristics whose relevance to the current discussion will become clear. Solidarity, he explains, is ‘a transformative relationship for those involved in forging it, not a thing to be achieved; second, it is grassroots in nature and often constructed 408

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IN THE WORDS OF OUR VOLUNTEERS “Language can open doors to exhausted and hopeless people.” Roya Khoshnevis, volunteer on the TWB English to Farsi Rapid Response Translation Team “I’m well-off in my world. Many other need help in theirs. That’s why l volunteer.” Markus Meisl, sponsorship volunteer “The last thing refugees should be facing is more distress because of a lack of corret information” Hanan Ben Nafa, member of the TWB Arabic Rapid Response Translation Team “As long as every one of us does something no matter how small - we can hope for a better future.” Narges rasouli, TWB English to Farsi Volunteer Translator “This work is immensely satisfying particularly when I can see how I and helping to make a difference.” Farideh Colthart, TWB Farsi Interpreter “The sense that people are genuinely helped by my translation makes me happy.” Bashir Baqi, TWB English to Farsi volunteer translator

­Figure 28.2 TWB – In the words of our volunteers (accessed 25 October 2019).

from the margins, not something imposed from above’. As such, many acts of solidarity are not sanctioned by mainstream institutions and may attract critical attention. Charity, on the other hand, is rarely treated as a potentially controversial act, and hence is more likely to escape scrutiny. So far, for instance, the limited literature on crowdsourced translation has focused on topics such as motivation (McDonough Dolmaya 2012; Olohan 2012, 2014) but has rarely engaged with its ethics or situated it within wider critiques of the platform economy and digital labour. Charity is also not a transformative relationship for those who offer it, as it is typically restricted to helping those in need without expectation of material return. Nevertheless, registered charities are obliged to operate under formal and transparent guidelines to ensure that all donations are properly allocated to the recipient community and stringently managed. This requirement, as we will demonstrate, is absent in the case of some organizations that solicit unpaid translation work as a form of charitable contribution. Formal non-profit charities have long operated by appealing to governments, corporate donors and the public for donations, which are used to cover expenses and pay suppliers and skilled professionals adequately for their aid services. In some cases, the donation being sought is not financial but actual k now-how, often embodied by reusable or codifiable solutions. Seeking such donations by harnessing what Shirky (2010) refers to as the ‘cognitive surplus’ through crowdsourcing has been facilitated by technological developments. With 409

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the accelerated consolidation of human knowledge into databases, this leads to a disruption of professional practices ( Piróth 2016) and requires engagement with the ethical and social implications of free labour. In addition to its local and discrete charitable effect in the form of delivering translated material, for example, crowdsourcing may also create long-term intangible assets: digital bilingual databases such as translation memories, glossaries and corpora that are of intrinsic value to the translation market. These assets are not localized to the charity recipients: they can be stored, managed, replicated and transferred by their curators. The use of such assets is not regulated by any special regime, and there is no standard for tracking their deployment in other contexts. In short, saleable intellectual property can be generated, posing valid socio-economic questions in our increasingly d ata-based economy. We demonstrate this issue in Section ‘Machine translation and the money trail: who benefits from volunteer work?’ by exploring the close collaboration between the charity TWB – the subject of the current research – and the for-profit tech giant Microsoft. We describe how, in a Microsoft-funded project, TWB used the unpaid labour of its volunteer translators to produce Swahili language assets that were subsequently integrated into Microsoft’s various commercial tools in 2015. In what follows, we contrast the practices of two organizations that aim to address humanitarian needs and that have a history of making extensive use of volunteer translators in order to highlight the ethical issues involved in offering free labour to different parties, whether in digital or physical space, and to situate discussions of unpaid translation work within the wider context of the platform economy.

Solidarités International and Translators without Borders The two organizations we focus on offer two markedly different models of collaborating with volunteer translators. Solidarités International (SI) runs a paid internship programme that adopts a peer-based, horizontal model with a strong focus on early career translators. TWB, on the other hand, adopts an a sset-centred, platform-based, top- down model that offers massive scaling possibilities and reflects a corporate vision of the translation community. SI’s internship model operates on a small scale and aims to integrate translators with the rest of the organization’s staff. Linguistic assets created by translators within the internship framework are managed in close collaboration with SI. On the other hand, TWB aims to centralize outsourced translation tasks from many non-profits and to complete them using a free crowdsourcing model through a scalable platform suitable for hundreds of potential NGO clients and thousands of volunteer translators. Linguistic assets created through the platform are managed by TWB’s leadership. An emerging strand of social movement studies has begun to engage specifically with the effectiveness and positioning of volunteer translators in these two markedly different contexts – g rassroots vs top- down models of organization ( Doerr 2018) – but much more still needs to be done. Our account of SI’s internship programme is informed by first-hand involvement of the first author ( Piróth) with the organization as a volunteer, initially in relation to terminology coordination and project management, and later in training and tutoring, though we also draw on publicly available information relating to the organization. Our account of TWB practices, on the other hand, is undertaken from an external point of view, building on earlier critique discussed in Baker (2006, 2010). Our critical analysis of TWB practices and ethos also draws on publicly available data such as TWB’s own website, discussions on platforms such as Proz.com in which TWB representatives and volunteer translators have been involved, TWB declarations to the Internal Revenue Service as a tax exempt organization 410

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and published records of talks by TWB executives. We consider this t wo-pronged approach fit for purpose in this case, since our primary aim is not to perform a point-by-point comparison but to explore whether probity, transparency and conflicts of interest meet the usual requirements imposed by established charities, and to identify key issues that impact the professionalization and stature of translators in various collaborative setups. Founded in 1980 and based in Clichy, near Paris, SI currently operates aid programmes in 18 countries devastated by political conflicts, epidemics and natural disasters. With almost 2,000 national and international staff, it helps around four million people worldwide. In recent years, its annual budget has been around 70– 80 million euros, with over 90% consistently allocated to its humanitarian programmes to assist populations in need. Its publicly available annual reports quote the following figures:4 2013: 70.33 million €, 93.6%, over 5.8 million people helped; 2014: 72.5 million €, 93%, more than 5 million people helped; 2015: 69 million €, 91.3%, 3.8 million people helped; 2016: 71 million €, 91.5%, almost 4 million people helped; 2017: 79 million €, 92.1%, nearly 4 million people helped; 2018: 86 million €, 91.4%, nearly 4 million people helped. The organization publishes its accounts transparently and undergoes external audits regularly to ensure and demonstrate the proper use of resources. It is among the 91 French organizations that hold the Don en confiance ( Donate in Confidence) accreditation ( Don en confiance 2018), which requires NGOs to adopt stringent measures regarding transparency, efficiency and potential conflicts of interest. The approval of a dedicated independent organization that lists a French ministry among its partners, and another among its supporters, helps reinforce donors’ confidence that SI’s aid programmes and avowed vision are supported by a robust internal structure. SI has over 50,000 active donors, including major international financial backers, and its key communication materials have to be available in French and English. It does not employ full-t ime in-house translators, since the demand for translation is insufficient and variable. There is therefore a recurrent need for external French-to-English translation. Other translation needs, to and from the languages used in the countries where the NGO operates, are usually handled locally by SI’s national staff. In terms of organizational structure and governance, full membership of SI can be obtained solely by first doing fieldwork or by spending years in a logistics or administrative role. Only full members are eligible to join the board and must first disclose any potential conflicts of interest. These requirements are standard practice ­ for humanitarian NGOs. For example, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans ­Frontières –​ ­MSF) applies the same approach, as a colleague was informed during a telephone call to MSF’s office in Sydney ( Vivian Stevenson, personal communication, November 2014). In response to a specific question about possible exceptions for high-profile individuals, he was told by an assistant to MSF Australia’s Board that even Bill Gates would not get an ordinary – let alone a board – membership through monetary donations: he would have to toil at the coalface first. Or as the MSF representative put it, ‘you earn your stripes’. The non-profit TWB is often mentioned whenever translation for humanitarian causes is discussed, and its agenda tends to be embraced uncritically by scholars of translation. The Dublin City University led INTERACT project (INTERnAtional network on Crisis Translation), for instance, lists TWB as a partner organization. Although its name may suggest otherwise, TWB is not a front-line humanitarian NGO but an independent non-profit 411

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providing linguistic support to humanitarian and other organizations. Launched as Traducteurs sans Frontières in Paris as an offshoot of the for-profit translation company Eurotexte, the organization started to provide free translation to select NGOs in the mid-1990s, by donating the work of Eurotexte’s paid, in-house translators. The conflict between humanitarian and commercial agendas and the resulting narrative incoherence were discussed over a decade ago by Baker (2006: 157–162). TWB later adopted a large- scale crowdsourcing approach that extended its pool of translators well beyond its in-house team, imposed professional credentials as entry criteria and offered zero payment to volunteers. It has attracted thousands of freelance contributors over the years through extensive marketing and PR, and has become a household name. As of this writing, TWB has donated over 82 million words (Figure 28.3) across all languages (over 190 language pairs) and projects; its website states that it ‘translates more than ten million words per year for non-profit organizations’. Unlike MSF or SI, TWB has a strong top- down corporate structure, as discussed in more detail below. According to TWB’s own IRS 990 declarations ( TWB 990, 2015, 2016), the organization has no written conflict-of-interest policy to date. TWB thus cannot meet the requirements of Don en Confiance and similar independent bodies. Nonetheless, TWB has received h igh-level recognition: for instance, in October 2017, in her contribution to the House of Lords debate on Sierra Leone, Baroness Coussins ( Vice President of the Chartered Institute of Linguists in the United Kingdom) drew attention to the important role played by TWB volunteer translators in assisting recovery from Ebola in the region (Coussins 2017). Just a year before, in October 2016, TWB’s chair Andrew Bredenkamp was the invited keynote speaker at the European Commission’s Translating Europe Forum in Brussels. He was warmly welcomed by Kristalina Georgieva, who had just resigned from her position as the Commission’s Vice President to become the CEO of the World Bank. Mr. Bredenkamp shared information on TWB’s involvement in the Ebola crisis and TWB’s work in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew in 2015. We take a closer look at these flagship projects later in the chapter, as we examine a range of issues that may serve as yardsticks by which to critique the ethical practices of TWB, using SI as a potential alternative model for organizing volunteer translation work for humanitarian purposes. These issues include the translators’ status and

­Figure 28.3 Words translated counter on TWB’s homepage (accessed 25 October 2019). 412

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ethos, the limits of unpaid work, the need to trace the money trail to establish who ultimately benefits from volunteer work and the path of evolution followed by putative non-profits such as TWB as opposed to that pursued by bona fide humanitarian organizations.

Translators’ status and ethos As the high-level appreciation received in the House of Lords and in the European Commission indicates, TWB successfully raised awareness of the importance of language and translation; Federici et al. (2019: 5) make this point explicitly. But what of translators themselves? To answer this question, it is worth looking more closely at how TWB addresses different audiences. When targeting humanitarian organizations and the general public, the organization emphasizes the vital importance of translation; however, when targeting volunteer translators, TWB depicts translation in the FAQ section of its Workspace ( TWB FAQ 2016) as an unbudgeted afterthought. 4. Are translators paid? No. Although there have been rare exceptions, most of the projects are done strictly on a volunteer basis. 5. Does Translators without Borders charge its partners? Yes, there is an annual subscription fee of $500. This is an initial fee introduced in January 2017 for the first 20,000 words, and it will cover their use of the Workspace, general management of the Workspace and Translation Server, as well as the future development of our community. The additional payments will be based on the partner’s annual expenditure and the volume of translation/other work with TWB. We do ensure that very small partners doing great strategic work are still supported. 6. If you get payments, why don’t you pay translators? The management fee we are requesting from our partners only covers oversight of the Workspace and Translation Server, allowing us to professionalize the Workspace for our volunteers and our partners. With our current growth, we need a dedicated team to properly oversee and support the Workspace going forward. (https://twb.translationcenter.org/workspace/manuals/page/frequently_asked_questions) ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Translation is thus presented as vital or incidental, depending on the audience. The dissonance between the two stances is worrisome in light of the emerging employment precariat in society at large. Indeed, as one scholar of translation notes, ‘The low status that translators are associated with stands in contrast to the volume of translation work that is carried out worldwide, which has increased under the influence of globalization’ ( Tesseur 2014: 31). Hence, while translation may be doing fine, translators apparently are not. This inversion of benefit is a familiar historical theme and an inherent feature of the platform economy, but there is no compelling reason why it should be accepted at face value. Demonetization, commoditization and deprofessionalization are unlikely to boost the net worth of society’s cognitive capital, whether in the field of translation or in other areas of the economy. SI adopts a different approach to volunteer translation that contrasts markedly with TWB’s practices. It set up an external pro bono network of freelance translators in 2007,5 with a dual aim: to provide free linguistic aid to the organization and to create a workspace where qualified translators (including career starters) could collaborate, network and develop their skills. Since previous experience was not a prerequisite, the team was, from the outset, a mix of qualified professionals at the beginning of their career and experienced colleagues. 413

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The possibility of working with senior colleagues and receiving detailed feedback turned out to be particularly attractive to young colleagues, who felt that it accelerated their transition from qualified but inexperienced newcomers to established professionals. Typically, participants took on 1,500 to 3,000 words of translation per project – roughly a day’s work, often with long gaps between projects. All translations were revised by a second professional. Unlike the typical setting of a translation agency, the translator and the reviser were not anonymous to each other, and communication between them and with other team members was strongly encouraged. To ensure consistency of key terms, a glossary was developed right from the first project. It was first published in 2009, then updated in 2017 ( Fowler et al. 2017), with all contributors credited by name. Some organizations emphasize the volume translated by their volunteers. For example, volunteers for TWB have the number of translated words displayed on their ProZ.com profile page ( ProZ 2011), and TWB itself welcomes website visitors with a counter that shows in real time the ‘number of words donated’ (see Figure 28.3). This is very much in line with the ‘alternative value systems’ created by social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook – consisting of likes, views – which have become ‘a kind of new currency’ ( Rushkoff 2016: 31). By contrast, translators in the SI network spend a considerable amount of time communicating with others, whereas in a more ‘streamlined’ setting they could presumably translate a greater volume. High productivity has never been a priority for them; in fact, productivitymaximizing strategies may easily reduce volunteers’ interest. The SI team, moreover, chose not to prioritize productivity because emphasizing the sheer number of words contributes to the commoditization of translation. Instead, translators’ names feature in printed brochures, including the credits section in SI’s annual reports. This gives translators recognition, emphasizes the importance of translation to readers and gives SI the assurance that participants will do their best, since their own reputation is at stake. While many translators find that helping a humanitarian organization is rewarding in itself, the benefits of collaboration should not be underestimated. Shared projects can be the basis of future partnerships among translators. Experienced freelance professionals frequently emphasize the importance of having a trusted business partner, as it alleviates isolation, makes regular work less stressful, helps ensure a reliable backup for holidays and may open new revenue streams by allowing modest scaling, i.e. handling projects that are too large for one person. The SI network thus serves to create relational capital for freelance translators. Shared pro bono projects for humanitarian NGOs may facilitate finding good network partners, especially because the environment is less competitive than typical t ranslator-revisertranslation agency settings, where financial interest may turn collaborators into competitors.

The limits of unpaid work It is often considered bad taste to raise critical questions about charity and volunteering, as we have already noted, but the potential contribution of pro bono work to precariousness in the labour market is a pressing issue. NGOs in the international development field carefully consider external factors so that their actions do not harm the physical or economic environment in which they operate. This should include the community of translators who support their services. Indeed, the International Federation of Translators’ position paper on internships (FIT 2016) stresses that If all other members of the staff of the non-profit organisation do their work on an unpaid basis, then it is fair enough that the translator/interpreter intern is not paid either. 414

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But if other staff members are paid for their work, then there is no reason not to remunerate the translator/interpreter intern. Naturally, this argument does not apply to interns alone. During the Ebola crisis, TWB volunteers translated 81,000 words across all languages ( Words of Relief 2015). This is valuated at roughly $16,000 using TWB’s usual conversion factor ( USD 0.20/word), bearing in mind that the detailed program report ( HIF-TWB 2015) reveals high organizational and Machine Translation/MT-training costs, whereas costs related to translation itself are well under the USD 0.20 reference value. It is worth noting that the hypothetical per-word rate of USD 0.20/word, usually cited to tax authorities ( TWB 990, 2015, 2016), the general public ( Kelly 2011) and potential sponsors, is in fact several times higher than what bulk-market translation companies – which have long been represented on TWB’s board of directors and advisory board – actually pay their freelance translators, raising questions about TWB’s motives for inflating the hypothetical value. Nonetheless, a $16,000 budget would have comfortably allowed TWB to pay its translators handsomely during the Ebola crisis. An even smaller amount would have sufficed to pay those whom TWB engaged in 2015 to ‘minimize the devastating effects of the Nepal earthquake’ by translating, among others, ‘over 500 terms into Nepali, Newari and Hindi for search and rescue people and for people monitoring messages coming from the affected populations’ on a volunteer basis ( TWB 2015). Importantly, TWB’s approach here is clearly at odds with the practices of humanitarian NGOs, which typically collect funds in Western countries and employ paid national staff for their aid programmes, thus contributing to the revitalization of the local economy. This is what donors expect after an earthquake that destroyed about half the country’s annual GDP. SI attempts to avoid this ethical black hole by pursuing a different model. In 2009, it set aside a sum of €2,000 to pay its translators, consulting with them about how this amount might be shared among them. The idea of rewarding past projects was quickly discarded, as payment would have been far below professional levels and would have established an inappropriate baseline. After much discussion, a seemingly inequitable solution was agreed: to pay some participants but not others. Looking at the question from the angle of peer-to-peer solidarity led to a joint decision to reserve the limited funds available to pay colleagues without a stable income: qualified early career translators for whom this could be the first career step. They would probably have more time to devote to SI, so they could be expected to contribute much more than those participating pro bono. The idea of a paid remote internship was thus born. Over a period of three months, ‘ interns’ – who could be located anywhere, and work from their home office – would devote 10–15 hours per week to SI and build their freelance career in parallel. They would be paid €1,000 each in total – a modest sum on a professional level but a decent one for the equivalent of a one-month full-time internship at an NGO in France. The rest of the team would continue to help pro bono occasionally, as their schedule would allow. Over the years, previous interns would take on more and more of the pro bono revision and mentoring work; their commitment would thus extend beyond the three-month internship period to ensure a self-perpetuating setup. These ideas were put forward in a group discussion, since a decision that would affect the overall collaboration so profoundly had to be decided collectively. The team’s unanimous approval opened the way to the annual SI internship programme. To make the internship even more useful, a series of ten two-hour webinars was created for the interns and the rest of the team on various aspects of the profession such as translation tools, business issues and revision and quality assessment protocols. 415

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Universities often require graduating students to complete internships. Unpaid internships have become standard across the board, facilitating the recruitment process at marginal costs for companies and public institutions. Even UNICEF runs unpaid translation internship programmes – although, given the size and status of the organization, one would expect them to offer paid traineeships, as does, for example, the European Parliament’s Terminology Coordination Unit. Although SI’s paid internship programme is not a sustainable long-term career option, it is a step in that direction. If other organizations followed suit and NGOs working in the humanitarian and international development fields set similar internship conditions, for-profits would be under more pressure to improve their offers. With these considerations in mind, SI’s internship programme has been advertised at universities in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada since 2016. In addition to their suitability for the task, SI’s guiding principle of solidarity rather than charity meant that candidates were also assessed in terms of how they would benefit from the internship programme.

Machine translation and the money trail: who benefits from volunteer work? As O’Donnell (2016) puts it, ‘[m]ake no mistake, there is big money in the international volunteering industry’, and hence ‘[i]t is the volunteer’s responsibility to learn about the ethical quandaries, issues, and attitudes within this industry’ ( bold in original). Volunteering Grassroots, the site founded by O’Donnell in 2011 ‘as a way to decommodify the volunteerism industry’, proposes a number of criteria for ‘assessing an organisation one is considering volunteering with ethically’. Prominent among these criteria is ‘money trail’ – that is, establishing who ultimately benefits from the volunteering work. TWB’s use of machine translation dates back to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, when Carnegie Mellon University researchers released their data on Haitian Creole (CMU 2010). It was around this time that TWB relocated from France to the United States and corporate heavyweights joined its boards en masse, expanding its management structure. President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation 2009 had included ‘automatic, highly accurate and real-t ime translation between the major languages of the world – g reatly lowering the barriers to international commerce and communication’ just a couple of months earlier (Obama 2011). In addition to international commerce and communication, intelligence (military, police and business) also remains a high priority field of application for this technology. In 2014, TWB received a $250,000 ‘Technology for Good’ research grant from Microsoft ( TWB 2014) to fund a crowdsourcing application to help communicate with aid workers in Swahili and Somali when disasters strike, and to build a corps of vetted translators and interpreters, plus machine translation capacity, in under-resourced world languages. In The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein (2007) investigates how crisis situations are exploited to push through controversial policies while citizens are too distracted by disasters or upheavals to mount effective resistance. Organizations like Movement Generation thus emphasize the importance of setting up a critical framework for ‘Just Recovery’ (Movement Generation 2017), to amplify collective efforts in the face of disaster situations and make sure that they are not hijacked. Such a framework does not seem to have been considered by TWB, which used the Microsoft grant funds to verify the efficiency of the technology supplied by Microsoft itself – a company that was also represented on TWB’s advisory board. Further, the entire initiative was undertaken in response to a recommendation by the market-research firm Common Sense Advisory in its report on The Need for Translation in Africa ( Kelly et al. 2012). Common Sense Advisory co-founder, Renato Beninatto, was also 416

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curiously on TWB’s advisory board at the time. In addition to the crowdsourcing application it produced, the grant also helped to set up f ree-of- charge ‘ linguistic assets’ ( human and machine), but did not, however, pay those who provided linguistic services. Acknowledging TWB’s help, Microsoft launched its Swahili translation tool, integrated into Microsoft’s various commercial products, in 2015 (Microsoft 2015). Similarly, speaking about the work of TWB in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew in 2015, TWB’s chair highlighted the organization’s issuing of cholera prevention messages and posthurricane warnings in Haitian Creole with the help of 40 volunteer t ranslators – in close collaboration with Microsoft, with a view to improving Microsoft’s machine translation engine for Haitian Creole. The participation of TWB volunteers in building machine translation capacity for Microsoft is thus a specific example of the changing landscape of ‘charity’: here, a linguistic asset created collectively by volunteers in a humanitarian context was transferred to a for-profit project partner and turned into saleable intellectual property. This is in stark contrast with the practices of MSF, which ‘distances itself from the pollution of political capital and economic capital … [and] refuses to be driven by donors’ agendas in its choice of projects’ ( Krausse 2014: 122). Close examination of TWB’s structure confirms that the example of machine translation capacity-building for Microsoft by volunteers is not a one- off slip or oversight but an intrinsic feature of the way the organization operates. TWB relies on thousands of freelance translators who enthusiastically contribute on an unpaid basis, whereas TWB’s leadership has long been composed primarily of major industry players, many of whom own or operate commercial concerns that have a strong and undisguised interest in exploiting machine translation and unpaid crowdsourcing. Over the years, major users of machine translation and crowdsourcing ( Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, Oracle, MacroMedia, dotSub, Paypal), some of the largest translation companies (such as Lionbridge, Moravia, Textminded and Elanex), as well as agenda- setters of the bulk translation market (such as ProZ.com, TAUS, Common Sense Advisory, Localization World and Multilingual Magazine) have all been represented on TWB’s board of directors or advisory board, making TWB look like the philanthropic arm of a massive business consortium. The invocation of charity and humanitarianism makes objective commentary and critique a minefield, as already noted. If Reporters without Borders had Arianna Huffington, Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch as board members, questioning their representation would only be natural. But when perceptions of conflicts of interest within TWB were raised on Kevin Lossner’s Translation Tribulations blog in October 2014, various people expressed their ‘[sadness and shock] by the unjustified, small-m inded and (what appears to be appallingly poorly informed) attack on an organization that has a decades-long history of providing urgently needed charity for people in dire health crises’ (comment on Lossner 2014) – ignoring the actual issue of conflict of interest. No further comments were added by the same critics of Lossner’s blog when specific details of the ACCEPT project were published ( Piróth 2014). The avowed aim of ACCEPT (Automated Community Content Editing PorTal) was to enable ‘machine translation for the emerging community content paradigm, allowing citizens across the EU better access to communities in both commercial and non-profit environments’ (ACCEPT 2012). The project received an EU grant of 1.8 million euros, allowing the participating for-profits – including the IT giant Symantec as well as two for-profit companies, Acrolinx and Lexcelera/Eurotexte, run by board members of TWB6 – ​­to lower their R&D costs for a disruptive technology that yields them high profit margins. In the ‘Exploitation Plan’ (no irony intended) of the ACCEPT project, Lexcelera committed itself to ‘scaling up the operations of Translation [sic] Without Borders from millions of words per 417

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year to tens or even hundreds of millions of words’ (ACCEPT 2013). Piróth (2014) concludes the following: Using [TWB’s] unpaid participants in a project with an admitted commercial motive, funded by and for the EU, appears – at very least – curious. From a distance, one might ask whether TWB’s name and fame (derived from the idealistic and unremunerated contributions of donor translators focused on developing nations) has helped profit-m aking concerns – Acrolinx, Lexcelera, Symantec – obtain public monies for developing valuable digital media translation solutions. The ACCEPT project may yield results that justify its public funding, but they will be specifically for EU ( First World) nations. TWB and other non-profits would doubtless receive some benefits, but the outcomes and assets would be ripe for use in prime commercial settings far removed from developing nations and the motivations of most volunteers. A couple of days after the questions on conflicts of interests were raised, Lori Thicke (who founded TWB as part of her Eurotexte translation company) stepped down, leaving TWB’s chair, curiously, to Andrew Bredenkamp, the CEO of Acrolinx. The ACCEPT project, with massively funded digital media companies using volunteer contributors, reflects the general trend noted by Lanier (2013: 257), where ‘network- oriented companies routinely raise huge amounts of money based precisely on placing a value on what ordinary people do online’ while repositioning the same people ‘out of the loop of their own commercial value’. The massive scaling promised in the exploitation plan was probably a key to success; as Rushkoff (2016: 5) notes, ‘[g]rowth is the single, uncontested, core command of the digital economy’ and ‘the logic driving the low-wage gig economy’ (ibid.: 4). Consequently, he argues, platforms are optimized ‘not for people or even value but for growth’ (ibid.: 6). ­

TWB vs humanitarian organizations: different paths of evolution In her presentation at the 2012 TAUS European Summit, Lori Thicke emphasized the importance of ‘disintermediation’, of ‘putting the crowd in direct touch with the NGO and then getting out of the process’. Just as in the ACCEPT project, she recommended the same approach in non-profit and for-profit settings: ‘This is the same kind of infrastructure that I believe could be used to support other translations where there is no traditional budget, like customer support’ ( Thicke 2012). But it is disingenuous to describe the aim of replacing human intermediaries by an all-logging communication platform as disintermediation, given that the idea here is to consolidate the intermediary’s role and to enable scaling and lock-in, as the example of Uber clearly shows. This slippage of terminology is not new or accidental. Morozov (2013) shows how digital media companies, under the banner of ‘disintermediation’, have introduced a growing number of mostly invisible intermediaries, a situation that might more aptly be described as ‘ hypermediation’. The emerging platform economy ( Lanier 2013) and ‘disruptive technology- d riven productivity gains’ ( Kapur et al. 2005) are widely identified as key drivers of increasing inequality but are central to the operation of corporate bodies. The translation industry, represented by TWB, now offers potential investors free crowdsourcing combined with machine translation technology – on a platform that is a potential treasure trove for HR managers. In his Brussels talk, Mr. Bredenkamp mentioned that TWB would soon start collecting contributions from

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‘partner NGOs’ to sustain this platform. Today, subscription fees for NGOs start at USD 500 ( TWB Kató 2017), while translators continue to contribute pro bono. TWB is not the only large- scale collaborative volunteer translation platform adopting a technology- d riven approach and a top- down management structure: The Rosetta Foundation ( Translation Commons/Trommons) (The Rosetta Foundation 2017) is another well-known example. For years, there has been a significant overlap between the major stakeholders of TWB and The Rosetta Foundation, including members who served on the advisory boards of both organizations simultaneously. It thus came as no surprise when the two organizations merged in June 2017 ( TWB-TRF 2017). Mergers and acquisitions are standard practice in the for-profit sector but are rare among humanitarian and international development NGOs. This stage in TWB’s evolution can thus be more readily understood in terms of the corporate vision of the translation industry reflected by TWB’s management and practices than by TWB’s non-profit status or chosen position as an actor in the humanitarian field, providing support for its partner (client) NGOs. Human resource management, technology and access to future EU funding are admitted key motivations: ‘the merger gives Translators without Borders ( TWB) access to The Rosetta Foundation’s community model and technology. It also gives TWB access to EU funding through the Irish registration’ ( TWB Merger FAQ 2017). Until the beginning of this century, humanitarian and international development organizations often relied heavily on volunteers. In the past two decades, they have overwhelmingly chosen the path of professionalization, employing qualified professionals. TWB’s evolution has been quite different. As mentioned earlier, Traducteurs sans Frontières initially worked with the paid in-house translators of Eurotexte. Through a system of skills sponsorship, French companies can obtain a tax break for providing professional services to approved cultural and humanitarian organizations. This way, the French state financially supports the professionalization of these organizations.7 Traducteurs sans Frontières did not make use of this benefit, and its later transformation as the current TWB adopted a large- scale crowdsourcing approach. It now imposed professional credentials as entry criteria, but dropped payment to zero  – outdoing even Amazon’s notoriously poor-paying Mechanical Turk. Demonetization usually goes hand in hand with deprofessionalization, making it particularly noteworthy that TWB managed to set up a large- scale demonetized service using professionals. This development is not in the interest of the thousands of translators who constitute the large base of the TWB pyramid, especially when professional practices are quickly being eroded by TWB’s policy of ignoring the ‘ four- eyes principle’ recommendation of industry standards and skipping revision on grounds of urgency: ‘Since there is no time for reviewing and no room for errors in the handling of emergencies, Translators Without Borders recruits only experienced and solid professionals able to do a good job each time’ ( ProZ Blog 2011). TWB’s activity in Kenya merits a separate detailed account. Shortly after setting up a Healthcare Translation Centre in Nairobi, where hundreds of translators have been trained to date, TWB launched a ‘Fund a translator’ program on ProZ.com, targeting professional translators as potential donors. Upon inquiry ( ProZ 2012), it was clarified that the program was not meant to fund translators but their training. Program director Rebecca Petras admitted that the name of the program ‘could be deceiving’. As TWB’s form 990 declaration ( TWB 990, 2015, 2016) states, moreover, TWB provides financial support to TWB Kenya as ‘an independently registered non-profit’. Thus US-registered TWB could conveniently claim that it ‘did not invest in, contribute assets to or participate in a joint venture or similar arrangement with a taxable entity’ – which means it is none of IRS’s business whether Microsoft

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obtained any Swahili language assets in a joint venture (or similar agreement) with TWB Kenya. TWB actively participated in monitoring elections in Kenya in 2013 and 2017, through translating communication on social media. A rapid response team of TWB provided translations into English ‘as quickly and accurately as possible’. A paid consultant was hired to monitor the translation process ( NGOjobs 2017), ‘to help determine the effectiveness of [the] approach’. This case is not unique: TWB has created some paid positions – including a paid three-month ‘crisis response intern’ position with a monthly stipend of USD 400 ( TWB 2018), in which the intern’s role is to support ‘the team on a daily basis, with a focus on managing TWB’s engagement with our community of volunteer translators during emergency responses’. While this position is certainly an interesting opportunity for someone starting out in community management, the ‘volunteer translator – paid manager’ model is highly problematic. In its FAQ section, TWB argues that NGOs often do not have a budget for translation because their core activities need to be prioritized. But how does the same argument apply to TWB itself? TWB found the necessary budget to cover substantial organizational, technical and other costs in the Word of Relief project ( HIF-TWB 2015), to monitor and assess the translators in the Kenya elections, to manage the community of translators during emergency responses and to ensure that the participating for-profits in the ACCEPT project were handsomely paid – while those who undertook the core task, translation, were systematically asked to work on a volunteer basis. This is not an unfortunate lack of budget for translation: it is a policy decision from the top of TWB’s pyramid, which should not come as a surprise given the undisguised interest some companies represented on TWB’s board have in exploiting machine translation and unpaid crowdsourcing. It is hard to imagine that TWB would adopt the same policy if its board were composed of translators who used to ‘work at the coalface’, as is the case in Doctors Without Borders or in SI. TWB’s translators, through their laudable volunteer work, currently continue to serve TWB’s ‘partner’ NGOs (now more accurately called ‘clients’), which are now required to financially participate in the maintenance of TWB’s platform. In this setup, the top of TWB’s pyramid continues to benefit from excellent exposure opportunities and exceptional disruptive technology- driven productivity gains, furnished by the wide base of translators working free of charge, making it a textbook example of socialized work for privatized profit. Such a policy does not reflect the priorities of TWB’s partner NGOs (as their own policies are diametrically opposite) or TWB’s in-kind donors: the thousands of volunteer translators who continue to support the organization.

Concluding remarks The fundamental guiding idea at SI has been that those who perform skilled work for humanitarian organizations must not risk demonetization and deprofessionalization by doing so. Rather, they should be able to make a living and grow professionally – a nd ultimately proceed to organizational or governance roles, if they so wish. This is not the pathway currently in evidence with the mass crowdsourcing of translation services for humanitarian ends. Translators who consider participating in such projects, achievements notwithstanding, should be aware of how the growing focus on socialized work for privatized profit can impact them and their profession. They will be right to demand the same practices that are standard for any respected humanitarian NGO: increased accountability towards in-k ind donors, with exact accounts of where volunteer translations go, and rigorous assurances that the donated or generated assets are allocated as the collaborators and 420

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public would rightfully expect. There should be conflict- of-interest policies  – as again is standard for humanitarian NGOs – which should be rigorously applied to the composition of the board. After all, board members of Doctors Without Borders do not come from big pharmaceutical companies but are former fieldworkers, for very good reasons. Meanwhile, the SI experience shows that it is possible to build collaborative communities of translators capable of working directly with NGOs, bypassing the mass platforms altogether in order not just to do good for the intended recipients, but also to enhance the training, professionalization and stature of translators themselves within an overall framework of solidarity. Ultimately, as McDonough Dolmaya argues, given the ethical questions posed by crowdsourcing and volunteerism, ‘ including corporate reliance on free labour and the potential devaluation of translation work by the general public’, we must now address the question of how ‘the strengths of crowdsourcing could be leveraged to make information more widely accessible while also ensuring that users who participate are doing so as part of a communityd riven initiative rather than a corporate-run activity’ (2018: 354). What is needed, in other words, is a model that combines the benevolence of charitable work with the reflexivity and transformative potential of solidary action, for the benefit of both givers and recipients.

Further reading Baker, Mona (2010) ‘Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community’, in Maria Tymoczko (ed.) Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 23–41. ­ ­ ​­ This is a revised version of a 2006 article that appeared in the Massachusetts Review and reiterated much of the argument outlined in Chapter 7 of Baker’s Translation and Conflict, published in the same year. It offers the first critique of Translators without Borders, drawing on Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm. Rushkoff, Douglas (2016) Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. Portfolio: Penguine. Rushkoff argues that following the i ndustrial-age mandate for growth above all, the digital economy has gone wrong: workers lose to automation, drivers lose to Uber, even tech developers lose their visions to the demands of the startup economy. This obsolete economic operating system needs to be rebooted, he argues, by using the unique distributive power of the internet to break free of the w innertake-all game that defines business today. Lanier, Jaron (2013) Who Owns the Future. New York: Simon & Schuster. An award winning examination of the exploitative powers of big business in the age of the internet, focusing on the ways in which different types of information provided online are used by various corporations to generate capital without remunerating the sources of information. Piróth, Attila (2016) Comments about FIT’s Position Statement on Crowdsourcing. Available online: http:// www.translationtribulations.com/2016/05/comments-about-fits-position-statement.html. ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ This blog post on Kevin Lossner’s Translation Tribulations site makes reference to Translators without Borders’ ACCEPT project to argue that crowdsourcing – combined with machine translation in the case of ACCEPT – ‘does not enable a sustainable professional career for those who perform it’ and ‘ is fundamentally a winner-takes-all scheme, in which the only real winner possible is the entity that owns or controls the platform’.

Notes 1 On a related topic, Crack (2018) and Crack et al. (2018) point out that NGO workers on the ground rarely speak the local language and hence tend to rely on multilingual local staff, often resulting in low quality translation. 2 With the exception of one critique by a professional translator who is also one of the authors of this chapter ( Piróth 2016). 3 See https://www.proz.com/about/tm_town_acquisition/. ­ ­ ­ 421

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4 Available at https://www.solidarites.org/en/publications/categories/annual-reports/. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ​­ 5 Piróth (the first author of this chapter) was involved in this initiative. 6 Acrolinx, represented by TWB board member Andrew Bredenkamp, received €312,399, while Eurotexte/Lexcelera, represented by TWB’s founder and long-t ime chair Lori Thicke, received €261,288 (ACCEPT 2012). 7 The same tax benefits are not available to those working as freelancers (‘profession liberale’) or solo entrepreneurs (‘autoentrepreneur’). In 2016, Piróth drew the attention of his MP, Noël Mamère, to this difference, who then raised the issue in the National Assembly (Mamère 2017). However, no progress has been achieved to date.

References ACCEPT (2012) ­ Automated Community Content Editing PorTal. Available online: https://cordis.europa. eu/project/rcn/101285_en.html. ­ ­ ­ ACCEPT (2013) ­ ­ACCEPT  – ​­Exploitation Plan Update. Available online: http://www.accept.unige. ch/Products/D_10_7_Exploitation_Plan_Update.pdf. ­ ­ Baer, N. (2010) ‘Crowdsourcing: Outrage or opportunity?’ Translorial: Journal of the Northern California Translators Association. Available online: http://translorial.com/2010/02/01/crowdsourcing-outrage­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­or-opportunity/. ​­ Baker, M. (2006) Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London and New York: Routledge. Baker, M. (2010) ‘Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community’, in Tymoczko M. (ed.), ­ Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 23– 41. Baker, M. (2013) ‘Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action’, Social Movement Studies, 21(1), ­ pp. 23–47. ­ ­ ​­ Baker, M. (2016) ‘The Prefigurative Politics of Translation in Place-Based Movements of Protest: Subtitling in the Egyptian Revolution’, The Translator, 22(1), ­ pp. 1–21. ­ ­ ​­ Boéri, J. (2008) ‘A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy: Competing Perspectives on Activism in Conference Interpreting’, The Translator, 14(1), ­ pp. 21–50. ­ ­ ​­ Boéri, J. (2009) Babels, the Social Forum and the Conference Interpreting Community: Overlapping and Competing Narratives on Activism and Interpreting in the Era of Globalisation, PhD Thesis (Manchester: CTIS, University of Manchester). CMU. (2010) ­ Carnegie Mellon Releases Data on Haitian Creole to Hasten Development of Translation Tools, ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ https://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2010/January/jan27_haitiancreoletranslation.shtml. Coussins (Baroness). ­ (2017) ­ Sierra Leone: Ebola; House of Lords Debate. Available online: http://hansard. ­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­ parliament.uk/Lords/2017-10-30/debates/C4811542-5F9C-4EF6-905E-4DCC458C6B44/Sierra LeoneEbola#contribution-74E5555C-59DD-458E-A9F5-02893D510AEB ­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Crack, A. M. (2018) ‘Language, NGOs and Inclusion: The Donor Perspective’, Development in Practice 29(2), ­ pp. 159–169. ­ ­ ​­ Crack, A., Footitt H. and Tesseur W. (2018) ‘M any NGO Workers on the Ground Don’t Speak the Local ­Language – ​­New Research’, The Conversation, 8 August. Available online: https://theconversation. com/many-ngo-workers-on-the-ground-dont-speak-the-local-language-new-research-100845. ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Delgado Luchner, C. and Kherbiche L. (2018) ‘Without Fear or Favour? The positionality of ICRC and UNHCR interpreters in the humanitarian field’, Target, 30(3), ­ pp. 408–429. ­ ­ ​­ Doerr, N. (2018) Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Don en confiance (2018) ­ Available online: http://www.donenconfiance.org/759_p_43852/les­ ­ ­­ ­​ ­­organisations-labellisees.html. ​­ Federici, F.M., Gerber, B.J. O’Brien, S. and Cadwell P. (2019) The International Humanitarian Sector and Language Translation in Crisis Situations. Assessment of Current Practices and Future Needs. London, Dublin and Phoenix, AZ: INTERACT The International Network on Crisis Translation. FIT (2016) FIT Position Paper on Internships. Available online: http://www.fit-ift.org/fit-position-paper­ ­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­ ­​­­on-internships/. ​­ Fowler, J., Gilchrist, S. Gutman, C. Piróth, A. et al. (2017) ­French-English ​­ Humanitarian Aid Glossary for Solidarités International. 2nd edition. Available online: http://www.pirothattila.com/Sol_2017_ book.pdf. Grassroots Volunteering. Available online: http:// blog.grassrootsvolunteering.org. 422

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­HIF-TWB ​­ (2015) ­ Humanitarian Innovation Fund, Large Grant Final Report. Available online: https:// www.elrha.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/HIF-TWB-FINAL-REPORT.pdf. ­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Kapur, A., Macleod N. and Singh N. (2005) Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances. Citigroup, Equity Strategy, Industry Note: 16 October. Kelly, N. (2011) Translators Without Borders Prepares to Bridge the Last Language Mile. Available online: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/nataly-kelly/translators-without-borde_b_1122452.html. ­ ­­ ​­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ Kelly, N., Depalma, D. A. and Hedge, V. (2012) The Need for Translation in Africa. Common Sense Advisory Report. Available online: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/portals/0/downloads/ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ africa.pdf. Khasnabish, A. (2021) ‘Solidarity’, in Baker, M. Blaagaard, B. Jones, H. and Pérez- González, L. (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 385-389. Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. Krausse, M. (2014) The Good Project – Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lanier, J. (2013) Who Owns the Future. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lossner, K. (2014) Translators Without Borders: cui bono? Available online: http://www.translationtrib­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ulations.com/2014/10/translators-without-borders-cui-bono.html and Translators without Borders: Some Projects. Available online: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2014/10/translators­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​ ­­without-borders-some.html. ­​­­ ​­ Mamère, M. Noël (2017) Question N° 94281 de M. Noël Mamère. Available online: http://questions. ​­ ­ ­­ ​­ assemblee-nationale.fr/q14/14-94281QE.htm. McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2011) ‘The Ethics of Crowdsourcing’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, 10, pp. 97–111. ­ ­ ​­ McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2012) ‘Analyzing the Crowdsourcing Model and Its Impact on Public Perceptions of Translation’, The Translator, 18(2), ­ pp. 167–91. ­ ­ ​­ McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2018) ‘The Politics of Localization’, in Fernández, F. and Evans, J. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 343–357. McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2020) ‘Crowdsourced Translation’, in Baker, M. and Saldanha, G.(eds) The Routledge in Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 124–129. Microsoft. (2015) ­ Introducing Kiswahili for Microsoft Translator. Available online: https:// blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/translation/2015/10/21/introducing-kiswahili-for-microsoft-translator/. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Moreno-R ivero, J. (2018) ‘Interdisciplinary multilingual practices in NGOs: Addressing Translation and Interpreting at the “Human Rights Investigations Lab” and “Translators without Borders”’, Translation Spaces, 7(1), ­ pp. 143–161. ­ ­ ​­ Morozov, E. (2013) To Save Everything, Click Here. London: Penguin. Movement Generation (2017) ‘Transition is Inevitable, Justice Is Not: A Critical Framework for Just Recovery’. Available online: http://movementgeneration.org/transition-is-inevitable-justice-is­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­not-a-critical-framework-for-just-recovery/. ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ NGOjobs (2017) ­ Consultant – Real Time Monitoring Kenya Elections at Translators without Borders. Available online: https://ngojobsinafrica.com/job/consultant-real-time-monitoring-kenya-elections­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ ­­translators-without-borders/. ­​­­ ​­ Obama, B. (2011) Executive Office of the President: A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs, September 2009, DIANE Publishing. O’Donnell, S. (2016) ‘The Psychology and Ethics of International Volunteering’, Grassroots Volunteering. Available online: http://blog.grassrootsvolunteering.org/ethics-of-international-volunteering/. ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Olohan, M. (2012) ‘Altruism and Voluntarism in the Context of a Nineteenth- century Scientific Periodical’, The Translator, 18(2), ­ pp. 193–215. ­ ­ ​­ Olohan, M. (2014) ‘Why Do You Translate? Motivation to Volunteer and TED Translation’, Translation Studies, 7(1), ­ pp. 17–33. ­ ­ ​­ Piróth, A. (2014) Translators without Borders: The ACCEPT Project. Available online: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2014/11/translators-without-borders-accept.html. ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Piróth, A. (2016) Comments about FIT’s Position Statement on Crowdsourcing. Available online: http:// www.translationtribulations.com/2016/05/comments-about-fits-position-statement.html. ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ProZ (2011) ProZ.com, A New Badge for Translators without Borders. Available online: https://www.proz. ­ com/topic/204463. ­ ­ ProZ Blog (2011) Translators without Borders and the ProZian Community Work Together in Large Humanitarian Localization Project. Available online: https://prozcomblog.com/2011/03/28/translators-without­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​ ­­borders-and-the-prozian-community-work-together-in-large-humanitarian-localization-project/. ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­​­­ 423

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ProZ (2012) ­ Thank you to the Translation Professionals Who Have Donated to Worthy Causes this Year. Available online: https://www.proz.com/topic/239618. ­ ­ ­ Rai, S. M. (2018) ‘The Good Life and the Bad: Dialectics of Solidarity’, Social Politics, 25(1), ­ pp. 1–19. ­ ­ ​­ Rushkoff, D. (2016) Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. Portfolio: Penguine. Scholz, T. (2014a) ‘Platform Cooperatism vs. The Sharing Economy’. Available online: https:// ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ medium.com/@trebors/platform-cooperativism-vs-the-sharing-economy-2ea737f1b5ad. Scholz, T. (2014b) ‘Crowdmilking’, Collectivate. Available at http://cast.b-ap.net/wp-content/ ­ ­ ​­ ­­ ​­ ­ uploads/sites/40/2018/03/Trebor_Scholz_Crowdmilking.pdf. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Selim, S. (2016) ‘Text and Context: Translating in a State of Emergency’, in Baker M. (ed.), Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 77– 87. Shirky, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators. London: Penguin Press. Tesseur, W. (2014) Transformation through Translation: Translation Policies at Amnesty International, unpublished PhD Thesis, Birmingham: Aston University. Available online: http://publications.aston. ac.uk/26207/1/Tesseur_Wine_2015.pdf. ­ ­ ­ The Rosetta Foundation (2017) Available online: https://www.therosettafoundation.org/. Thicke, L. (2012) Technologies and Processes for Empowering Communities to Communicate Across the Web and Across the World, talk at the TAUS European Summit 2012. Available online: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=osy58OV_tZE ­ TWB (2014) ­ Translators without Borders Receives Grant from Microsoft. Available online: https:// translatorswithoutborders.org/translators-without-borders-receives-grant-from-microsoft-2/. ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ TWB (2015) ­ Translators without Borders Response to the Nepal Earthquake. Available online: https:// translatorswithoutborders.org/translators-without-borders-response-to-the-nepal-earthquake/. ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ TWB (2018) ­ Translators without Borders Job Description: Crisis Response Intern – Words of Relief Program. Available online: https://translatorswithoutborders.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Crisis­ ­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​ ­­Response-Intern.pdf. ​­ TWB 990 (2015) Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax, Translators without Borders. Available ­ ­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ online: https://translatorswithoutborders.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Form-990-for-2015.pdf. TWB 990 (2016) Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax, Translators without Borders. Available ­ ­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ​­ online: https://translatorswithoutborders.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FY16-TWB-990.pdf. TWB FAQ (2016) Frequently Asked Questions. Available online: https://twb.translationcenter. ­ ­ ­ ­ org/workspace/manuals/page/frequently_asked_questions TWB Kató (2017) TWB Kató Upgrade and Management Fee FAQ. Available online: https:// ­­ ​­ ­­ ​­ services/TWB-workspace-upgrade­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ translatorswithoutborders.org/non-prof its/translation­­management-fee-faq/. ­​­­ ​­ TWB Merger FAQ (2017) The Merger between Translators without Borders and The Rosetta Foundation. Available online: https://translatorswithoutborders.org/Merger_FAQ. ­ ­ ­TWB-TRF ​­ (2017) ­ Translators without Borders and the Rosetta Foundation are Merging. Available online: https://translatorswithoutborders.org/translators-without-borders-and-the-rosetta-foundation­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ ­​­­ ­­are-merging/ ​­ Words of Relief (2015) Words of Relief  – Ebola Crisis Learning Review. Available online: https:// translatorswithoutborders.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/20150529-Ebola-Learning-Review_ ­­ ​­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ FINAL.pdf.

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Part V

Politics

29 Translating democracy Esperança Bielsa

Introduction1 Contemporary approaches to cosmopolitanism have brought attention to the significance of multilingualism and translation in a global context, emphasizing a multiplicity of perspectives and the interaction between different traditions rather than the world’s unicity or homogenizing trends towards the constitution of a global culture. Cosmopolitan competence has been defined as the art of translation and bridge-building ( Beck 2006: 89), while cosmopolitan processes are seen as taking the form of translations between things that are different, where one culture interprets itself in light of the encounter with the other and constantly undergoes change as a result ( Delanty 2006: 23, 2009: 193–198). On the other hand, there is a renewed urgency to specify the conditions and principles of a cosmopolitan order that recognizes the increasing interconnectedness of political communities and provides a democratic space at local, national, regional and global levels in the face on new global threats (Held 2010). This chapter examines how debates on language and democracy have been differently framed within a multiculturalist and a cosmopolitan framework, questioning some of their underlying assumptions and demonstrating a basic continuity with what is approached as the monolingual vision. It then goes on to propose an alternative conception of the language of democracy based on plurilingualism, linguistic hospitality and translation. Such a conception is not ignorant of the social role of language in the constitution of individual selves and of collective identities, nor does it avoid confronting the politics of language in a highly unequal global space. It recognizes that the grounds of a cosmopolitan democracy can only be built through generalized plurilingual exchanges and sees in the difficulties of understanding and the productive confrontation with the opacity of others and of ourselves the very substance of democracy among diversity. This approach also identifies different processes of political translation as a key area of interdisciplinary interest for the humanities and social sciences.

The language of democracy In view of the growing relevance of new forms of democratic politics beyond the state, as well as challenges to still prevalent, t aken-for-g ranted notions of cultural homogeneity at 427

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the national level, the question of linguistic diversity is increasingly becoming unavoidable. Thus, in reflecting on the possibility of a multilingual democracy, Daniele Archibugi (2008: 256, 259) refers to Will Kymlicka’s renowned statement that a democratic politics is politics in the vernacular ( Kymlicka 2001) as dangerous and even reactionary. With reference to new demands for democratization not just on a national level but increasingly beyond, Archibugi proposes instead a cosmopolitan approach that, from a normative standpoint, maintains that ‘democratic politics must be in Esperanto’ (2008: 260). ­ For Kymlicka, a common language is not just a basic element of nation-building, through which states have achieved institutional integration within a given territory, but also essential to democracy. A common language and social institutions provide cohesion to what is otherwise characterized by diversity and plurality within modern liberal democracies (with reference to religious and political beliefs, family customs or personal lifestyles) ( Kymlicka 2001: 25). Language is thus considered a basic and necessary constitutive element of national identity; indeed, the only remaining principle that is left when older, more problematic notions such as soil, faith or blood have been rejected. For Kymlicka, a common language defines the very practices that are at the basis of democratic politics: ‘ how can “the people” govern together if they cannot understand one another?’ (2001: 26). This is the reason why he is fundamentally sceptic about the possibilities for a transnational democratic politics and defends the nation- state as the basic unit through which politics at the supranational level can take place. For instance, in the context of the EU, Kymlicka considers demands for democratization through strengthening of the European parliament as inherently flawed, and remarks that democracy can only be maintained through accountability to national governments and the preservation of national veto powers, thus effectively taking his model of multinational states as federations of peoples beyond the state level. Interestingly, linguistic diversity is presented as the central reason for defending such a model: For Danish citizens to engage in a debate with other Danes, in Danish, about the Danish position ­vis-à-vis ­​­­ ​­ the EU is a familiar and manageable task. But for Danish citizens to engage in a debate with Italians to try to develop a common European position is a daunting prospect. In what language would such a debate occur, and in what forums? (2001: ­ 326) By contrast, Archibugi defends a passage from a language of identity to a language of communication as a basic prerequisite for promoting democracy among diversity. However, whereas Kymlicka falls prey to an essentialist view of language as the defining property of a community or a nation, Archibugi instrumentalizes language as a vehicle of communication, ignoring the powerful connections between language and subjectivity and blinding himself to the politics of language in the context of globalization. A more sociological approach is needed that retains a perspective on language as the basic means of socialization, and not just as an instrument of communication, and that considers the implications of going beyond one’s language in order to be able to communicate with others, both at the individual and collective levels. Esperanto in Europe (Archibugi 2008: 265–266), English in India (Sommer 2004: 96; Archibugi 2008: 267–268) or Spanish in the Philippines ( Rafael 2005) has helped to bring people together because it did not belong to any single group. But the use of a lingua franca as a democratic means has many important implications that relate to existing power asymmetries between languages and to the specific consequences derived from adopting and promoting one particular language, which inevitably benefit some and are detrimental to others. 428

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Archibugi’s unwillingness to consider the politics of language is reflected in the choice of the Esperanto metaphor as a normative principle, which in reality hides the promotion of English as the de facto common democratic language, as his discussion of paradigmatic cases at different local, national and supranational levels reveals. As Peter Ives has argued, Archibugi’s position can be none other than an advocacy of global English for cosmopolitan democracy. The reasons for obscuring this advocacy – or presenting it in very abstract and metaphorical terms – a re telling of the political issues that Archibugi hopes not to have to deal with. (Ives 2009: 520) Despite their apparent differences, Archibugi and Kymlicka share some fundamental ideas about the language of democracy. On the one hand, both authors highlight that states cannot be neutral towards language, unlike in matters concerning religion or race. This idea is at the basis of Kymlicka’s emphasis on nation-building through the promotion of a common language, which makes national democracies possible in the first place and provides, at the same time, a rationale for the defence of minority rights ( Kymlicka 2001: 26–27; Archibugi 2008: 254, 257). On the other hand, like Kymlicka, Archibugi unquestioningly believes that democracy is monolingual, in spite of the fact that he acknowledges that monolingual communities are becoming increasingly rare (2008: 257). By adopting the prevailing linguistic model for democracy at the national level to tackle the conditions for a democratic politics outside the state, Archibugi is bound to amplify its paradoxes and unresolved contradictions, falling into idealist notions of a universal language of communication that is detached both from the social contexts from which it emanates and from the materiality of language itself. It would seem that cosmopolitan designs are inextricably bound to fall upon an abstract vindication of a universal language, implicitly conceiving language mainly as a vehicle for conveying ideas (Ives 2009: 521; May 2014) and diluting the significance of a politics of language to which multiculturalists have called attention. From this perspective, Archibugi’s case for a democratic politics that, wherever possible, can and must be in Esperanto appears as a contemporary exponent of a long standing tradition of cosmopolitan designs that goes back to the Enlightenment. Thus, Kymlicka refers to Condorcet’s belief in the emergence of a universal language as the culmination of a process of emancipation of individuals from the ethnic, religious or linguistic communities in which they are born, as cultural membership is replaced by a cosmopolitan identity (2001: 203). According to Kymlicka, this ideal of a universal language was endorsed by cosmopolitans from Descartes and Liebniz to Franklin, Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Turgot ( Kymlicka 2001: 205). In addition to Archibugi’s proposals, it also finds expression in contemporary notions about the creation of a universal digital language of communication in the network society (Castells 2000: 2, 212). However, the dichotomy between the essentialism of multiculturalist language politics and the idealism of cosmopolitan designs that reduce language to an instrument of communication is questioned when one turns to the perspective of a critical cosmopolitanism that reveals some of their key underlying assumptions about nation, culture and language. On the one hand, nationalism and cosmopolitanism can be seen as mutually interrelated, rather than opposites, and different particularistic and universalistic moments identified in both nationalist and cosmopolitan positions ( Rao 2010, 2012; Chernilo 2015). On the other hand, Eurocentric cosmopolitan designs can be subjected to critical scrutiny from the perspective of border thinking, pointing to a notion of critical cosmopolitanism that reconceptualizes cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality (Mignolo 2000a, 2000b), or from a dialogical 429

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cosmopolitanism that contextualizes universalism and finds in the processes through which others reappropriate and reinterpret institutions and cultural traditions that initially excluded them the source of cosmopolitan reflexivity and change ( Benhabib 2004; Mendieta 2009). Or, closer to the approach that will be pursued in this chapter, a productive confrontation with Eurocentrism can also be sought through radical engagement with different traditions in the key but often neglected practices of interpreting otherness (Godrej 2009, 2011) or of cultural translation ( Delanty 2014) as social processes that leave neither the interpreter/translator nor their object unchanged. Rather than overcoming or dissolving Eurocentrism, this approach points towards a post-Eurocentric space as a fertile ground for learning and transformation in light of the difference of the other. Framing its contribution within this tradition of critical cosmopolitanism, this chapter seeks to articulate an alternative view of the language of democracy that does not renounce the cosmopolitan ideal of a language beyond identity without reducing it to a language of communication in a social void. In opposition to both multiculturalist views and the cosmopolitan approach defended by Archibugi, my argument will be that cosmopolitan democracy is necessarily plurilingual and takes place through the practice of translation. Although explicitly conceived for a democratic politics outside the state, such a view on the language of democracy is also relevant at the local and national levels because it breaks with multiculturalist’s essentialism in promoting a democratic politics in increasingly heterogeneous communities, where assumptions of linguistic and cultural homogeneity can no longer be sustained. This democratic politics is not based on the construction of a common culture through the privileging of one language over others, but emerges from the negotiation of diversity and from the continued exposure of different languages to each other, opening them up to the presence of others. Contrary to Kymlicka’s belief, this view can in fact be traced back to Enlightenment cosmopolitan designs that are not formulated through the notion of a universal language, most notably to Goethe. Moreover, such a conception of a plurilingual democratic politics through the practice of translation recuperates an artistic cosmopolitanism that has been systematically ignored in the cosmopolitanism literature, thus overcoming the division between political and aesthetic cosmopolitanism ( Papastergiadis 2012; Bielsa 2014). But before such articulation is offered, it is necessary to critically examine the view that profoundly permeates both Kymlicka’s and Archibugi’s approaches to the language of democracy: the monolingual vision. This undertaking is offered in the next section.

The monolingual vision: a critique Like nationalism, with which it is inextricably related, the monolingual vision that underlines the discussion about the language of democracy presented above has its origins in late eighteenth- century Europe. It has constructed monolingualism as second nature and the mother tongue as both the private property of individuals and collectivities and a key marker of identity. The monolingual vision has entailed the promotion of one language over others for the creation of monolingual populations, effectively marginalizing alternative languages and dialects and already existing widespread plurilingual practices, both within and outside Europe.2 Unquestioned assumptions regarding the necessary diffusion of a single language as a basic element of nation-building and the impossibility of state neutrality towards language, highlighted above, attest to its continued presence and pervasiveness. Herder, who approached the distinctiveness of each language as emanating from the character of a people or nation (Volk), ­ is typically highlighted as initiator of a conception that became highly influential in the nineteenth century (Anderson 1983: 66; Yildiz 2012: 430

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Like mother’s milk, the mother tongue seems so natural that it has taken an Algerian Jew who was never able to call French ‘my mother tongue’ to remind us of the impossibility of owning a language: ‘I only have one language; it is not mine’ ( Derrida 1998: 1, 34). It is only from this questioning of language as a possession and a belonging, from the recognition of every language as the language of the other, that a cosmopolitan politics of language can emerge. In other words, just as a necessary, although not in itself sufficient, precondition of cosmopolitan citizenship is the disaggregation of citizenship, through which the privileges of political membership are no longer tied to national and cultural origins ( Benhabib 2004), so too a cosmopolitan vision can only emerge from a conceptualization that disaggregates linguistic origins, communal belongings and affective investments, from a critical multilingualism where linguistic practices are not tied to ethnic identity ( Yildiz 2012: 29). In addition to deconstructing the mirage of language as a possession through a vision of the monolingualism of the other, it is necessary to destabilize the notion of a single mother tongue, which is presupposed in common conceptions that have taken monolingual individuals and communities as the norm. Part and parcel of the promotion of a shared language in processes of nation-building (a process of enforced monolingualization) was the suppression of widely extended plurilingual practices. Yet, in the context of increased connectivity and mobility, and of the questioning of clearly defined borders and identities, the persistence and changing forms of plurilingualism are becoming the object of considerable multidisciplinary interest. In the field of sociolinguistics, notions of double talk, heteroglossia, language crossing and codemeshing have been used to approach plurilingualism and in-betweenness and to challenge prevailing ideas of the distinctiveness of languages as bounded wholes ( Woolard 1989; Rampton 2005; Canagarajah 2013). A critical sociolinguistics of globalization that can account for new linguistic patterns of mobility and diverse scales of plurilingual use has been proposed to analyse emerging landscapes of superdiversity ( Blommaert 2010), while literary studies have opened their conceptual apparatuses to literatures outside the nation (Seyhan 2001; Sommer 2004; Yildiz 2012; Walkowitz 2015). Translanguaging and flexible bilingual education are at the centre of pedagogical approaches that break with monolingual instructional practices in order to mobilize the overlapping of languages for learning and teaching (Creese and Blackledge 2010; García and Wei 2014). Attention is also turned to communication strategies that do not necessarily involve shifting to a shared language, for instance, among diaspora Tamil families and communities (Canagarajah 2013), or to how Kurds in Europe translate their political movements and struggles for European audiences ( Demir 2017), or to widespread multilingual workspaces and classrooms as sites of ordinary language crossing. In a variety of fields in the social sciences and humanities the significance of multilingualism is being rediscovered, while prevailing assumptions that reduce it to the simple aggregation of different languages with reference to individuals or communities are increasingly challenged. Thus, notions of translingualism or plurilingualisn seek to emphasize the intermeshing of languages and identities from a more dynamic perspective (Canagarajah 2013: 8), whereas the term postmonolingual is proposed to designate the persistence of a monolingual paradigm even when the presence of widely relevant forms of multilingualism is acknowledged ( Yildiz 2012).3 From these critical perspectives, Kymlicka’s recurring assumptions about language can readily be revealed as the expression of the monolingual vision. For instance, he refers to Condorcet’s proposition that everyone should learn a second universal language regardless of social class as fundamentally unrealistic, arguing that Various efforts have been made to encourage personal bilingualism, particularly in multination states, but they have failed. The goal was that Belgian citizens, for example, 432

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would read a Flemish newspaper in the morning, and watch the French news on television at night, and be equally conversant with, and feel comfortable contributing to, the political debates in both languages. However, these efforts have been uniformly unsuccessful. This sort of easy personal bilingualism is more or less restricted to intellectuals, while the vast majority of the population clings stubbornly to their own tongue. (Kymlicka 2001: 217) Kymlicka’s assumptions about the impossibility of bilingualism for the majority of the population would arguably not apply in non-Western contexts, where the monolingual practices introduced by European colonization have not penetrated as deeply. But even within Europe his vision can be refuted with reference to effective and widespread bilingualism in Catalonia, for instance, which has been extended in the last decades to individuals of varying social, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, in addition to Catalan native speakers ( Woolard and Frekko 2012; Woolard 2016).4 Further, and contrary to what Kymlicka suggests, linguistic policies in Belgium have not been designed to promote personal bilingualism, but rather led to divide the country into separate linguistic groups, effectively disavowing plurilingualism and reaffirming distinct populations conceived in monolingual terms.5 It is also worth noticing how, in Kymlicka’s view, only intellectuals are seemingly liberated from the identitytrap of monolingualism, paradoxically becoming both heralds of the monolingual vision and free-floating entities at the same time. A different but equally puzzling disavowal of plurilingualism can be found in Benedict Anderson’s approach to language use before the generalization of monolingualism in Europe: The pre-bourgeois ruling classes generated their cohesions in some sense outside language, or at least outside print-language. If the ruler of Siam took a Malay noblewoman as a concubine, or if the King of England married a Spanish princess – did they ever talk seriously together? Solidarities were the products of kinship, clientship, and personal loyalties. ‘French’ nobles could assist ‘English’ kings against ‘French’ monarchs, not on the basis of shared language or culture, but, Machiavellian calculations aside, of shared kinsmen and friendships. (Anderson 1983: 74) Needless to say, the assumption that a shared language is needed for successful communication is itself the product of the monolingual vision through which the nation has been imagined. This vision affirms, as we have seen, that most individuals cannot feel comfortable using more than one language for ordinary exchange and that plurilingualism inevitably leads to a deficiency in democratic terms because it disrupts the shared meanings that are considered to make possible and facilitate collective decision-making. Here, an alternative view is proposed that does not see linguistic diversity as an unnecessary hurdle for the conduct of a democratic politics. Contrary to old assumptions that relegate the competence of polyglots to the rare attribute of a privileged few in blind ignorance of the widespread plurilingual practices in which the majority of the world’s population are ordinarily involved 6, this view breaks with dominant conceptions of the monolanguage of democracy in order to recuperate an already existing reality of cultural mixing for cosmopolitics. In this approach, which rejects both the essentialism of identity politics and the instrumentalism that conceives language merely as a medium of communication, the incongruities and discrepancies that appear at the interstices between languages are not erased but turned into the substance of cosmopolitan reflexivity. Indeed, there is 433

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scarcely a better source of cosmopolitan learning than confronting ourselves through the language of the other, questioning our innermost beliefs and interrupting the fluidity that gives our reality its rock-firm naturalness. Strangeness can be enrolled at the service of a democratic politics through which the legitimacy of procedure is renewed and the scope of democracy enlarged ( Honig 2001; Sommer 2004; Rumford 2008: Chapter 5). It is precisely the difficulties of understanding that in Kymlicka’s view limit the scope of democracy beyond the nation that can generate new forms of cosmopolitan democracy, both at the local and at the global level.

Cosmopolitanism, linguistic hospitality and translation Unlike reified notions of culture as bounded and cohesive wholes, which have been the object of considerable critical attention ( Waldron 2000; Benhabib 2002; Scholte 2014), the monolingual assumptions of multiculturalists have not been significantly challenged within mainstream cosmopolitan theorizing and, as we have seen, have even been unwittingly reproduced in cosmopolitan designs. Nevertheless, cosmopolitanism’s emphasis on cultural interaction and the negotiation of difference calls for an explicit approach to linguistic diversity and translation as key aspects of the cultural contact zone. Just as attention to the changing meaning of borders offers a new perspective on social phenomena that were previously confined to the margins and a reconceptualization of global connectivity itself ( Balibar 2002, 2004; Rumford 2008; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Agier 2016), so too consideration of linguistic exchange and translation reveals the central significance of what, according to the monolingual vision, can only be considered as an anomaly. Indeed, as the pioneering work of Étienne Balibar has consistently revealed, borders and translation are significantly related ( Balibar 2006, 2010). Balibar has described the border as the ambivalent site of two opposite paradigms, the paradigm of war and the paradigm of translation, through which relations with others are constructed and peoples, languages or races produced. What characterizes the current epoch is precisely ‘a new intensity of this overlapping or indecision of the relationship between war and translation, more generally power and discourse’ ( Balibar 2010: 317). In fact, as Vincente Rafael has shown, translation is used as an instrument or, indeed, a weapon by imperial and national powers, while wars of translation often become wars on translation ( Rafael 2016). Linguistic differences and hierarchies are always heavily politicized, and this is why rather than avoiding these issues a cosmopolitan politics of language and of translation becomes indispensable ( Bielsa and Aguilera 2017). Like the border, translation offers a privileged vantage point for a discussion of cosmopolitics, but this requires us to challenge common definitions of translation as the transfer of meaning from one language into another. Against this narrow definition that reduces and depoliticizes translation, I have elsewhere called attention to a definition of translation as the experience of the foreign ( Bielsa 2010, 2016), a social relation that mobilizes our relationship to others as well as our conception of ourselves. Like the border that is itself the origin of the territories it partitions, translation is what allows us to conceive the separateness of languages that is posited as a natural fact by representing linguistic difference as a difference between language unities (Sakai 1997: 14). Like the border, translation represents both closeness and openness, or their permanent dialectical interplay ( Balibar 2010: 394). Balibar shows how this essential ambiguity is resolved in current constructions of strangers as enemies, which are aimed at their permanent exclusion (2006). Similarly, it is necessary

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to examine different ways of translating the foreign in dealing with the strangeness of others, the essential ambiguity of translation that has given origin to widespread views of its inevitable treason. The transparency and ease of communication that are presumed and celebrated by the monolingual vision as basic characteristics of community and of democracy must be questioned in order to make space for heterogeneity. In this approach, difficulty of understanding is not an obstacle for democratic debate but precisely the substance of the democratic process itself, through which difference can be productively confronted, our horizons widened and our convictions re-examined. As Balibar has already clearly perceived, translation is precisely the basic medium for the creation of a transnational public space in a democratic sense, the real ‘common’ idiom of its citizens ( Balibar 2006: 5 – 6). When we consider translation as the non-transparent medium of democracy, a noninstrumental means, the key is no longer communication but rather confronting the opacity of meaning that results when diverse people attempt to communicate with each other. This is why linguistic hospitality becomes in this context more important than the practical possibilities offered by the use of a common language of communication, for instance, international English, which in reality erases substantive issues of cultural difference and power inequalities that bear on the democratic process. Linguistic hospitality has been called upon to defend an ethical approach to translation in terms of the fundamental ambiguity between openness and closeness highlighted above. The ambiguity of translation, which is said to serve two masters at the same time  – the strangeness of a foreign author and the reader’s demand for intelligibility – is expressed in the paradox of either bringing the author to the reader or the reader to the author (Schleiermacher 1992; Ricoeur 2006: 23). Bringing the author to the reader, in Schleiermacher’s terms, has the advantage of producing a transparent, fluid translation that puts in the mouth of a foreign author the words that readers would use themselves, thus minimizing the very foreignness that makes translation necessary in the first place. Bringing the reader to the author preserves a notion of the author’s strangeness, of the fact that she writes in a different language, but places unusual demands on readers and shakes their unquestioned expectations. Linguistic hospitality – the ethical objective of translation – clashes with the ethnocentrism that is present in any culture, and that is why there is a permanent pressure to resist translation and to produce bad, ethnocentric translations that deny translation’s very aim – ‘to open up in writing a certain relation with the Other, to fertilize what is one’s Own through the mediation of what is Foreign’ ( Berman 1992: 4). The social and political significance of linguistic hospitality emerges only when we recognize translation as approximation without identity, as correspondence without adequacy, as continuity in discontinuity (Sakai 1997: 13; Ricoeur 2006: 10, 22). This is precisely what is denied by those that insist in the importance of communication, both in translation and in democracy. At this point, one more voice needs to be called upon to complicate the false dichotomy presented above between a democracy in the vernacular and a democracy in a language of international currency. It is the voice of Goethe, a remarkable cosmopolitan polyglot who reflects on the practical advantages of learning international languages without reducing them to mere instruments of communication: … young men do well to come to us and learn our language; for … no one can deny that he who knows German well can dispense with many other languages. Of the French I do not speak; it is the language of conversation, and is indispensable in travelling,

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because everybody understands it, and in all countries we can get on with it instead of a good interpreter. But as for Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, we can read the best works of those nations in such excellent German translations, that … we need not spend much time upon the toilsome study of those languages. It is in the German nature duly to honour after its kind, everything produced by other nations, and to accommodate itself to foreign peculiarities. This, with the great flexibility of our language, makes German translations thoroughly faithful and complete. ­ ​­ (Eckermann 1850: ­190–191) One could easily be led to doubt Goethe’s cosmopolitan intent in recommending what is, after all, his mother tongue as a universal medium for a cosmopolitan culture. However, Goethe’s argument is not principally related to German as such, but to what was then, and still is, a relatively marginal type of translation that can serve as a vehicle for an experience of the foreign potentially to all contemporaries, as opposed to a narcissistic experience of recognition of dominant cultural values of one linguistic group. German thus becomes, through a self- conscious form of translation that renounces full fluency and transparency, demanding from readers some accommodation to the author’s strangeness, a privileged language for the acquisition of a cosmopolitan culture, whereas French ( English today), as the dominant language of transnational linguistic exchanges, merely represents a more pragmatic choice for ordinary travel and interchange.7 This perspective is not just relevant to literary translation, but also to a form of cosmopolitics that sees in deliberation between diverse people the very substance of democracy, approaching democratic politics not as the space for expedient, mostly unproblematic communication within homogeneous groups but primarily as an arena where heterogeneous voices can be productively confronted. Goethe’s approach also reminds us that, even if we resort to the use of a lingua franca, translation is unavoidable, and it always implies taking a position with respect to the strangeness of others and of ourselves. A perspective on translation as the medium of democracy breaks with a view of language as a vehicle of identity without resorting to an instrumental view of the lingua franca of democracy as a language of communication. Translation is not about identity, but about how we deal with the strangeness of others. In preserving a degree of linguistic hospitality, a type of non-transparent translation that does not succumb to demands for instantaneous communication can make space for the strangeness of others, obliging us to step outside ourselves and look at ourselves as another. The stranger’s language, a language that does not belong to us as a property, is key to cosmopolitan reflexivity and self-transformation in light of the difference of the other. Just as democracy is a politics among strangers ( Honig 2001: 39– 40, 72), the stranger’s language is the language of democracy.

Conclusion Generalizing a critique of the monolingual vision and replacing it with a plurilingual vision is one of the major challenges that awaits the cosmopolitan imagination. The plurilingual vision makes us perceptive of the cultural mixing and absence of borders that Beck discerned in a reality that has already been cosmopolitanized, of the cosmopolitanism of ordinary migrants and world families who confront in their everyday and intimate lives the contradictions of living in between, of lives lived in translation ( Beck 2006; Beck and Beck- Gernsheim 2014). The plurilingual vision challenges the simplistic assumption that one culture corresponds to one nation and to one identity, that we own a language that belongs 436

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to us as a property and are its authentic bearers. It replaces a politics of belonging for a politics of translation in the cultural contact zone in a context of growing interconnectedness, increasingly blurred borders and hybrid identities. Plurilingualism and translation are today essential skills for individuals and communities, enabling us to confront and productively address the tensions and conflicts that inevitably emerge when heterogeneous people need to find ways of living together and of collectively addressing common problems. However, the monolingual vision is still pervasive and monolingualizing projects continue to shape democratic politics within the state and beyond, even though the prevalence of monolingualism can no longer be taken for granted. Contrary to what Kymlicka believes, plurilingualism and translation are not detrimental to democracy, neither are they the reserve of a privileged intellectual elite, but rather the source of a much needed reflexivity that allows us to distance ourselves from our unexamined beliefs in light of the difference of others and to participate in democratic decision-m aking among strangers. Cosmopolitan designs based on the use of a lingua franca among diverse people decouple language from identity in order to find in language a vehicle for new democratic possibilities. But, as Mignolo’s decolonial perspective has already made clear, an approach to languaging rather than language is required in order to destabilize t aken-for-granted assumptions that link language, culture, identity and territory to the nation (2000b). Furthermore, as Godrej has suggested, we need to break with the tendency to relegate this undertaking to the margins in order to permeate our disciplines at large with a more genuine understanding of a cosmopolitanism that is explicitly linked to dislocation, to an existential immersion in the unfamiliar and to the theoretical illumination that this experience brings forth (2009: 138). Only from a plurilingual vision that articulates forms of hospitable translation without reducing language to an instrument of communication, from a plurilingual vision that is not ignorant of the politics of language and translation in a highly unequal world, can we defend the use of a lingua franca of democracy. As essentially an experience of the foreign, translation can serve as a cosmopolitan democratic means not because it provides a common idiom that we share with others or because it allows to communicate ideas from one language into another, but because it can make us step outside ourselves and meet others in their strangeness, creating new ways of existing and inhabiting a world that we share with strangers whom we do not understand.

Further reading Balibar, É. (2004) We, The People of Europe. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. An exploration of the possibilities of and obstacles to transnational citizenship from an European point of view, where translation is approached as a laboratory or ‘worksite’ for democracy. Bielsa, E. and Aguilera, A. (2017) ‘Politics of Translation: A Cosmopolitan Approach’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 4(1), ­ pp. 7–24. ­ ­ ​­ A theorization of the role of translation in a cosmopolitan context that presents translation as a social relation with foreignness and argues for a politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality. Doerr, N. (2018) Political Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A social movement approach to democracy that highlights the role of political translation as a disruptive and communicative practice developed by activists to address the inequities that hinder democratic deliberation. Honig, B. (2001) Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. An investigation of how nations and democracies rely on foreignness through readings of popular and high cultural texts about strangers, examining the lessons they might have for democratic theory. Rafael, V. (2016) Motherless Tongues. Durham and London: Duke University Press. A lucid exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial and imperial contexts, and of the ambiguous relationship between linguistic pluralism and translation. 437

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Notes 1 This chapter is based on the article ‘Cosmopolitanism Beyond the Monolingual Vision’, published in International Political Sociology, 2018, doi: 10.1093/ips/oly014. 2 For classical accounts of nationalism that trace its connection to processes of linguistic and cultural homogenization see Anderson (1983) and Gellner (1983). Renaissance literature offers not only a glimpse of a material bodily principle that was a strong component of medieval folk culture, but also of an existing plurilingualism that crystallized in the new novelistic genre as a literary contact zone ( Bakhtin 1981, 1984). For reflections of the role of translation in colonial relations with plurilingual Others, see Cheyfitz (1997), Niranjana (1992) and Rafael (1993). 3 The preferred conceptual choice of plurilingualism in this chapter is to question views of multilingualism as the coexistence of neatly defined distinct linguistic minorities within federal political structures, identifying instead the simultaneous presence and use of different languages at both the individual and group levels as an open challenge to enforced monolingualization that has been part and parcel of the process of state formation. 4 This is not to suggest that a plurilingual vision has been promoted by the policies aimed at the ‘normalization’ of Catalan after Franco’s dictatorship. Rather, it can be seen as an unintended effect of policies that could also threaten existing plurilingual practices, particularly among native Catalan speakers. 5 This is reflected in the constitution of three separate cultural communities, Dutch speaking, French speaking and German speaking, which only partially overlap with the three autonomous regions of its federal system. The division of some of its main universities along linguistic lines ( Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Université libre de Bruxelles and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/ Université catholique de Louvain) is a clear example of these monolingualizing policies. 6 A recent Eurobarometer survey shows that over half of Europeans (54%) are able to hold a conversation in at least one additional language to their mother tongue, while regular foreign language use is widespread, particularly with reference to watching films/television or listening to the radio, using the internet and communicating with friends. The proportion of Europeans who do not use a foreign language regularly in any situation was only 9% in 2012 ( European Commission 2012). David Crystal estimates that approximately one in four of the world’s population are now capable of communication to a useful level in English (Crystal 2003: 69). 7 For a discussion of Goethe’s views on world literature and translation, see Bielsa (2014).

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Bielsa, E. (2014) ‘Cosmopolitanism as Translation’, Cultural Sociology, 8(4), ­ pp. 392–406. ­ ­ ​­ Bielsa, E. (2016) Cosmopolitanism and Translation. Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign. London and New York: Routledge. Bielsa, E. and Aguilera, A. (2017) ‘Politics of Translation: A Cosmopolitan Approach’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 4(1), ­ pp. 7–24. ­ ­ ​­ Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2013) Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. and Verschueren, J. (1992) ‘The Role of Language in European Nationalist Ideologies’, Pragmatics 2(3), ­ pp. 355–375. ­ ­ ​­ Canagarajah, S. (2013) Translingual Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Chernilo, D. (2015) ‘Las relaciones entre nacionalismo y cosmopolitismo’, Papers. Revista de Sociologia, ­ pp. 303–324. ­ ­ ​­ 100(3), Cheyfitz, E. (1997) The Poetics of Imperialism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2010) ‘Translanguaging in a Bilingual Classroom: A Pedagogy for Learning and Teaching?’ Modern Language Journal, 94(1), ­ pp. 103–115. ­ ­ ​­ Crystal, D. (2003) English as a Global Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2006) ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, ­ pp. 25–47. ­ ­ ​­ The British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), Delanty, G. (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2014) ‘Not All Is Lost in Translation: World Varieties of Cosmopolitanism’, Cultural Sociology, 8(4), ­ pp. 374–391. ­ ­ ​­ Demir, I. (2017) ‘Rethinking Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism and Diaspora via the Diasporic Cosmopolitanism of Europe’s Kurds’, in Bhambra, G. and Narayan, J. (eds), European Cosmopolitanism. London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1998) Monolingualism of the Other. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eckermann, J. P. (1850) Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret. London: Smith, Elder & Co. European Commission (2012) ‘Europeans and their Languages’, Special Eurobarometer 386. Available ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ online: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf. García, O. and Wei, L. (2014) Translanguaging. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Godrej, F. (2009) ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Political Thought: The Hermeneutics of Interpreting the ­ pp. 135–165. ­ ­ ​­ Other’, Polity, 41(2), Godrej, F. (2011) Cosmopolitan Political Thought. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Held, D. (2010) Cosmopolitanism. Ideals and Realities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Honig, B. (2001) Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Ives, P. (2009) ‘Cosmopolitanism and Global English: Language Politics in Globalisation Debates’, Political Studies, 58(3), ­ pp. 516–535. ­ ­ ​­ Kristeva, J. (1991) Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press. Kymlicka, W. (2001) Politics in the Vernacular. Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. May, S. (2014) ‘Contesting Public Monolingualism and Diglossia: Rethinking Political Theory and Language Policy for a Multilingual World’, Language Policy, 13(4), ­ pp. 371–393. ­ ­ ​­ Mendieta, E. (2009) ‘From Imperial to Dialogical Cosmopolitanism’, Ethics  & Global Politics, 2(3), ­ ­ ­ ​­ pp. 241–258. Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. (2000a) ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, 12(3), ­ pp. 721–748. ­ ­ ​­ Mignolo, W. (2000b) Local Histories/ Global Designs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Niranjana, T. (1992) Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Papastergiadis, N. (2012) Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rafael, V. L. (1993) Contracting Colonialism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Rafael, V. L. (2005) The Promise of the Foreign. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Rafael, V. L. (2016) Motherless Tongues. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Rampton, B. (2005) Crossing, 2nd ed. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. 439

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30 The travel, translation and transformation of human rights norms Tine Destrooper

Introduction Human rights have become a dominant paradigm for framing issues of social justice. The language of human rights is one adopted by a multitude of actors across the globe in their struggle for more equality, justice and accountability. This, as the late Sally Merry (2018) argued recently, is because framing social struggles in human rights terms offers several important benefits to social justice activists engaged in ‘ local’ struggles. For one, it can add legitimacy to a moral claim made by local actors: using the human rights language suggests that these claims are not just the demands of a local community or even country, but that they refer to norms that have been created and agreed upon by virtually all the countries of the world. In addition, describing a particular issue as a human rights one renders this issue understandable to a wider audience. Using the shared language of human rights allows activists to frame issues in ways that other justice activists can understand even if they might not have encountered this particular problem themselves (also see White 2015). Furthermore, and related to this, calling a social justice claim a human rights claim produces allies: it allows activists from across the globe to engage in a shared struggle using the common language of human rights. Because of these advantages of using human rights language as a mobilizing discourse, the group of actors invoking human rights language has been steadily growing and diversifying (Moyn 2014; Vandenhole and Van Genugten 2015). Governments in the South, grassroots activists in remote communities, members of transnational networks and country officers of international organizations all refer to human rights in their attempts to create a sense of legitimacy and recognition, remedy structural inequalities or seek redress for rights violations. However, human rights norms are – necessarily  – interpreted in different ways in different localities and by different kinds of actors. Indeed, norms emerging in New York or Geneva need to be translated to specific contexts in order to make sense there. However, like all forms of translation, also the translation of human rights involves complex and normative decisions about what to include and what to exclude, and in which ways (Choudhury 2018). It is therefore crucial to pay specific attention to the dynamics through which this process of translation takes place, since often this process of translation also entails some kind 441

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New York and Geneva, and ( b) in crafting new norms and sharing these at a translocal level, away from the alleged ‘centres’ of cultural production ( Desai 2015). Both types of agency regarding human rights travel, translation and transformation are crucial if we want to understand how human rights norms affect the realities of rights users on the ground – which is where these norms can act as a line of defence against injustice ( De Feyter 2007). As several authors have previously demonstrated, rights users’ dynamic and decentralized engagement with various aspects of human rights quickly proved that the assumption of a more or less monolithic human rights understanding was, in practice, an illusion, and the adoption of human rights discourses by a growing range of actors resulted in various partial, innovative or biased articulations and translations of this discourse (see, e.g. Goodale and Merry 2007; De Feyter et al. 2011). As Halliday and Carruthers (2007) posit, in a globalized landscape it is not the authoritative transnational and global bodies that create norms that they can then impose more or less subtly upon a hapless world. The processes of norm setting, as well as that of norm implementation, always and everywhere involves negotiation between various actors with different interests and differential access to power, and therefore cannot be conceptualized as top- down universalizing undertakings. Also, the groundbreaking work of Simmons (2009) and Goodman and Jinks (2013) is crucial in this regard to understand the agency, both on the side of individual and collective rights users as well as on the side of states, in the process of disseminating human rights norms. Notions like contextualization (Zeleza 2004), indigenization (Merry 2006a), plurality (Falk 2000), vernacularization (Merry 2006b), inclusive universality ( Brems 2001) and alternative manifestations of rights (Gready and Ensor 2005) all point out the importance of considering the realities of local rights users and how they interact with global, regional and national norms. Merry (2006b), for example, uses the notion of vernacularization to refer to the adaptation of existing international human rights norms to local contexts by norm entrepreneurs.2 She examines how and when a human rights idea or norm is redefined and represented in a way that is more or less compatible with the existing social world. She argues that when specific struggles in non-Western societies utilize a Western liberal-legalist discourse, local understandings, practices and symbolisms are applied to these global discourses and lead to a reinterpretation of its core concepts and ideas. Scholars in this tradition (e.g. Zeleza 2004; Nyamu-Musembi 2005) analyse how rights users (and in particular norm entrepreneurs) transform the meaning of rights when they translate the – otherwise often legalistic – human rights discourse into action, thereby shifting the parameters and symbolic forms of the discourse. New ideas of gender equality coming from other parts of the world might, for example, be presented through the conventional figures in a familiar genre of a street play (Merry 2018). Merry posits that in such a case, the new idea is dressed in the clothes of the old to render it more understandable, acceptable and relevant. What several of these explorations of the interaction of human rights users with human rights norms have in common is that they tend to take the pre-existing human rights system as a starting point, from where local variations, iterations and translations become possible. Even so- called ‘upstream approaches’ (e.g. Gledhill 2009; de Gaay Fortman 2011) that examine how spontaneous bottom-up action by marginalized rights users might bring about changes at the international level, tend to still be deferential to formal human rights bodies – with their capacity for drafting new declarations and treaties – as the primary norm setters. Instead of these downstream or upstream conceptualizations, I am most interested in understanding how rights holders navigate and interact with – translocal and multi- directional – processes of travel, translation and transformation to make claims and organize in ways that 443

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allow them to take greater direct control over the production of their own identities and self-representation. Looking at this translocal level allows for a focus on the social practices of translation and the involved networks of translation that compete for interpretive authority. This translocal translation can be distinguished from hegemonic practices of transnational translation (Canfield 2019). Also the abovementioned threefold understanding that distin­ guishes between the parallel processes of movement of human rights norms (travel) and the ­ ensuing changes in substance (translation and transformation) allows for such a genuinely interactional and multi- directional understanding, which does not require giving a privileged status to international norm- setting bodies and which instead proposes a more explicit focus on practices of everyday rights users.

Travel, translation and transformation Human rights travel refers to the proliferation of existing human rights norms within and between groups of rights holders (who can invoke them as remedies in their specific situation), transnational and translocal human rights communities (who can invoke the norms as indirect users of human rights) and formal human rights norm setters (who often provide various kinds of mechanisms to ensure that ‘voices from below’ can reach them). I use the notion of human rights travel because it is a term more accurate than, for example, the notion of human rights circulation, which connotes a level playing field and equality of the actors involved, which renders it difficult to account for power differences. At the same time, the notion of travel does not have the inherently hierarchical and verticalized connotation of notions like upstreaming or downstreaming. Moreover, this notion foregrounds the potential for agency more explicitly than notions like dispersal. This is important, because, beyond this neutral process of movement, the notion of travel of human rights norms inevitably also entails a risk of norms becoming alienated from their original context and their originators. This is because when human rights norms travel, they need to be translated, not just in a linguistic sense but also in a substantive or cultural sense. This translation process is by no means a neutral or merely technical matter. While travelling through the dense human rights architecture of courts, councils, counsellors, and communities of – international or professionalized – activists, there is a constant competition over interpretive authority, and specific and context-bound human rights claims are likely to become translated as more or less unidimensional or technical debates that fit the existing narrative of powerful institutions and groups ( Baxi 2007, 69; Canfield 2019). Therefore, when international human rights practitioners adopt a certain strategy and language to defend rights holders’ interests, their choice to use the frame of human rights entails the constant – and almost inevitable – danger of narrowing social movement agendas in ways that fit the existing legalist imaginary of human rights, sometimes at the cost of becoming incomprehensible or irrelevant to the rights holders who were originally at the heart of the struggle.3 This brings us to the third dimension of this process, namely, transformation. I see translations and transformations as two sides of the same coin, in the sense that both relate to the changes in substance, strategy and language that occur when human rights norms move between – communities of – r ights users at various scales and localities. However, whereas I use the notion of translation to refer to the act of rendering intelligible and acceptable for other constituencies and audiences a discourse and practice that has its roots in one site ( be it local, global or any of the intermediary or overlapping scales), I use the notion of transformation to refer to conscious or unconscious foregrounding of certain elements of the human 444

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rights discourse and the omission or adaptation of others, which leads to changes in the substance, strategy or language of certain components of the human rights system. These transformations brought about through this process of translation and transformation have the potential to enrich our human rights understandings on the basis of rights holders’ daily realities. For example, when rights users turn to human rights language and methodologies to frame their struggles for social justice, thereby appropriating the human rights discourse in a specific way that is relevant for their struggle, they may open up this discourse and propose new concepts and readings. However, when intermediaries in various localities advance human rights claims or norms and translate them in ways that are comprehensible – and acceptable – for other constituencies in the human rights edifice, this does not necessarily adequately reflect these claims’ history and context of origin, and always carries the potential for transformations or distortions of various kinds. As Waldmüller (2018) argues, apparent translational paradoxes are often enrobed in hidden or open struggles for power, with more powerful actors being more likely to be able to capitalize on these translation paradoxes by promoting – or obscuring – certain agendas in the name of intelligibility and legibility (also see Vázquez 2011). Hence, while processes of translation inevitably involve reductions, erasures, or reinterpretations, it is crucial to acknowledge that the selective treatment of certain dimensions of a concept may be an intentional strategy by more powerful actors seeking to shape the eventual understanding that is likely to result from this translation. In this sense, transformations may be either intended or unintended effects of translations and may either be beneficial or disadvantageous to certain rights holders. Thus, while none of these processes is inherently problematic, it is crucial for scholars, activists and practitioners to improve their understanding of how the processes of travel, translation and transformation relate to, and shape, one another. By unpacking the question of precisely which elements are erased and which are added and by whom, we can start to understand the dynamic and interactive dimensions of these processes of travel, translation, and transformation. This undertaking is pertinent both from an empirical and from a normative point of view in that it helps us to better understand the power dynamics, imprecision, uncertainty, and instability that characterize the international legal realm and the translations of norms happening there. Rendering these more visible can, according to critical legal scholars, be a means to return agency to various groups of rights holders ( Delmas-Marty 2006; Baumgaertel et al. 2014).

Translations and actors To understand the outcome of travel, translation and transformation processes from an interactional and actor- oriented perspective, it is crucial to highlight the role and agency of various types of human rights users – a s norm entrepreneurs and intermediaries. When are these actors most likely to play an active role in the processes of travel, translation and transformation, in which stages of the process and what determines whether and when grassroots actors are likely to play this role? What happens to a social movement’s formulations of injustice when these are reframed – sometimes by a small but influential section of that movement – a s rights claims? How do movement leaders and external allies collaborate in identifying what claims are to be given priority, and in deciding the mix of methods through which these are to be pursued? Is juridification an inevitable consequence of travel and translation, and does it inevitably entail a narrowing of social movement claims? And, if so, does such narrowing signal a shift in movement agendas from socially transformative to reformist aims? 445

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How may the very content of social justice struggles change when community membership organizations translate liberation agendas into legal terms with the aim of upstreaming them or making them intelligible to other audiences, and does it sometimes make more sense to pursue translations in more translocal ways? What is the role of grassroots work, and how can we understand why some grassroots groups deliberately decide not to engage with the human rights discourse? To start answering these questions, the complex role and position of norm entrepreneurs needs to be further unpacked. To understand who these norm entrepreneurs are, what their position in (civil) society is, and how they themselves often travel between various audiences and constituencies, we need to acknowledge that, because scientific, technical and organizational knowledge is often required for long-term human rights activism, many grassroots activists eventually become embedded to some extent in the systems of power they seek to influence. This means that shifts in subjectivity may occur, which place these norm entrepreneurs at a crossroads between various realms of which they are part and between various subjectivities they can adopt interchangeably or sequentially. At the same time, those norm entrepreneurs for whom this kind of insider positioning is not available (e.g. those working on controversial, under-explored or taboo-laden issues) may sometimes find it difficult to have their voices heard at all in certain forums. Equally, norm entrepreneurs who actually have insider positioning but wish to work on issues deemed less relevant there, might find that their struggles fall on deaf ears. Hence, there may be pressures for activists to focus on a limited range of issues, to advocate within the bounds of the permissible, and to focus on building networks with the international human rights community rather than with local partners. This is so because influence on processes of travel, translation and transformation depends, to no small extent, on the access – g rassroots – r ights users in one locality have to – grassroots – rights users in other localities and to the formal human rights architecture. As such, it is relevant to address the issue of norm entrepreneurs from two standpoints: a more institutional one which foregrounds the norm- setting power of formal human rights institutions, and a more interactional and multi- directional one foregrounding the agency of rights users. If the institutional perspective is the starting point, then seeking, demanding and granting access to that international system becomes primordial, and the institutionalization of mobilization and local ownership inevitable. It is important to acknowledge then that, first, this may create tensions between grassroots organizations and national or international NGOs, as well as among and within these grassroots organizations themselves. As Vandenbogaerde (2018) argued recently, the Human Rights Council, for example, has a strong bias towards Geneva-based professional NGOs, and despite its rhetoric about the participation of actors from the Global South, organizations working at the grassroots level outside of Europe or North America, especially, face multiple challenges in accessing the Human Rights Council. These challenges are exacerbated in the standard- setting phase (as compared to the agendasetting phase), when the debates get more technical, political and structured, making it easy to sideline actors that do not specialize in interest representation at the United Nations. This, in combination with several institutional obstacles to free and open participation, means that international NGOs can function as gatekeepers to the Human Rights Council, and the influence of small grassroots organizations over processes of norm setting, translation and transformation almost invariably becomes marginal. Second, when further staying within this institutional perspective on process of travel, translation and transformation, the prevailing focus on legal claim-m aking has led to what Martínez (2018) calls a process of juridification. This means that conflicts travel from a local 446

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context to – (inter)national – legal forums where they encounter a specific set of pressures and are moulded into a specific shape. This process tends to coincide with a process of professionalization (which can, in turn, lead to a tuning down of activism and a form of depoliticization) when rights are turned into a matter exclusively for legal experts and rights claimants become alienated from their own struggles (Madlingozi 2010). This juridification that occurs during travel can have positive outcomes, of course, in the sense that the travel, translation and transformation of social movement agendas into an internationally acknowledged legal language can open avenues for subalterns to have their grievances heard and it can transform international human rights professionals’ understandings of particular human rights crises. At the same time, ‘the pressure to conform to the needs of international NGOs can undermine the original goals of local movements… Unfashionable, complex, or intractable conflicts fester in isolation, while those that… match international issues of the moment attract disproportionate support’ ( Bob 2002: 44). This raises the question of whether grassroots actors’ attempts at legal reformism can ever take the form of an ‘alter-insurgency’ through which they can directly challenge power, or whether they are more likely to be co- opted by the powers they seek to challenge. Third, still staying within the institutionalized perspective on travel, translation and transformation requires us to ponder on the role formal human rights norm setters can play in facilitating the exchange of ideas and the extent to which subaltern voices have access to the institutionalized human rights architecture. Arguably, these human rights bodies themselves also benefit from the participation of civil society in the sense that this participation could facilitate a better understanding of local dynamics and that it enhances the democratic legitimacy of these bodies. The information and legitimacy arguments regarding civil society participation have led to an increased concern with participatory approaches, which can be observed, among other things, in the emergence of organizations and procedures aimed at facilitating the participation of civil society through written and oral statements at the sessions of the Human Rights Council special procedures. These participatory approaches can in principle be conducive to travel. Yet, across the board, human rights institutions have often been charged with being deaf to rights holders’ concerns and with advancing the interests of the state or the international community instead (e.g. Nesiah 2018). Moreover, authors like Nesiah ask how we should understand the role of formal human rights bodies in structuring processes of human rights travel, translation and transformation. For one, offering – g rassroots – civil society organizations a platform for having their voices heard may foreclose these actors’ willingness and ability to ‘engage in confrontational contestation’, and instead opt for negotiation – either with a human right-v iolating government or with international institutions that have different priorities. How, one can then ask, do the allegedly inclusive strategies of global actors affect rights users’ agency, their social structures, and their cost/ risk-benefit analysis? While institutional provisions can certainly facilitate some forms of travel, translation and transformation of human rights norms across localities, we have to examine what happens to the ‘ local’, when certain laws, policies or procedures to amplify local voices are adopted and institutionalized by international human rights bodies. More specifically, we need to examine how local concepts alter in response to this institutionalization. Can local struggles ever be accurately translated to be comprehensible in remote forums? As Nesiah (2018) warns the irony at the heart of this question is that, through these kinds of institutional provisions and the belief a technocratic and managerial approach towards the upstreaming of local concepts, human rights issues become politically intelligible and responses democratically legitimate precisely because they are recast as technocratic issues and thus stripped of politics and contestation. 447

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This brings us to the second relevant perspective on the role of norm entrepreneurs. Whereas the three arguments above zoom in on formal human rights institutions as norm entrepreneurs in the process of travel, translation and transformation, one of the main benefits of this threefold conceptualization is that it also allows for a translocal actor- centred analysis of these processes that goes beyond the formal international human rights architecture, i.e. one that allows for a focus on the practices of rights holders that does not consider New York or Geneva as a necessary stopover. This perspective sheds light on the agency of a broader range of norm entrepreneurs. When human rights norms and claims chart a complex landscape within the human rights field and travel in several directions simultaneously, more actors can be acknowledged to play a role in this. These actors occupy a variety of positions and roles in the complex, multilayered and juxtaposed networks of rights users at what could be called the translocal level, and beyond, in ways that defeat horizontal or vertical metaphors (e.g. Destrooper and Merry 2018). These are not characterized by the same vertical power relations that characterize the ­ ​­ ­local-global ​­ ­ ​­ ­ ​­ continuum. oft-invoked or top-down bottom-up If we refrain from adopting the kind of perspective that puts the formal human rights architecture on a pedestal, then both the ways in which power manifests itself across, between and within various localities, as well as the notion of ‘the local’ per se require further problematization (see, e.g. Hacking 1999). Various conceptions of ‘the local’ animate discussions of human rights transformations, and often what is at stake is a debate over what constitutes ‘the most relevant local’ for human rights decision-making and who has access to ‘the people’ to better represent their voices (e.g. Nesiah 2018). No definition of the local can ever be considered a silver bullet, and one has to always define and make explicit whether one uses the term to refer to grassroots place-based processes that stand in contrast to the national and the international realm to which local actors may have no easy access or of which they might have no direct experience; to national processes that stand in contrast to the international processes and institutions of global governance; or to yet other – potentially subaltern – dynamics and actors. While a sovereignty-based definition of local would be most closely in line with mainstream human rights language of states as duty bearers, and with the language of international law more generally, several authors have suggested that, in order to understand the multi-layered and multiple ways in which human rights norms travel, the local interests at stake should not merely be the nation-state register ­vis-à-vis ­​­­ ​­ the global, but should also include the grassroots community register ­vis-à-vis ­​­­ ​­ other grassroots, provincial, national, regional and international actors. Therefore, rather than taking as a point of reference the doctrinal recognition of the nation-state as the local level, elsewhere I have acknowledged that different notions of local circulate alongside different understandings of human rights norms and different norm setters (e.g. Destrooper 2018). Moreover, if it is true that ‘ human rights claims originate from a local site’ ( De Feyter et al. 2011: 14) and that the local is the primary site of struggle, more research is needed that sheds light on the multiple power dynamics at both the local level and between the local, global and any intermediate or translocal levels. Hence, if we acknowledge the complexity of human rights travel and the extent to which actors at various levels have agency (within and especially beyond the formal human rights system), it is crucial to account for the many ways in which actors at various places within the – formal and informal – human rights architecture do or do not have certain kinds of power at their disposition to steer this travel, translation and transformation in one way or another. Both perspectives on norm entrepreneurs are needed for a comprehensive analysis. As Martinez (2018) puts it, human rights may travel through networked relations, but historical, 448

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economic and ideological power relations structure these relations and determine rights users’ relative access and influence. For example, how does unequal access shape local understandings that can then feed back into the discourse existing at the international level? Is the travel of local understandings of human rights to formal human rights norm setters beneficial per se, or has the human rights field configured translations and transformations in such a way that the upstreaming of local concerns and the participation of local communities in the norm- setting process has become internal to global governance rather than a locus for challenging transnational processes or global institutions? The focus on power dynamics means that any analysis of the travel, translation and transformation of human rights norms necessarily contemplates local, international and intermediate politics of rights, which involve the establishment of hierarchies and the prioritization of values, actors, methods and claims. These processes cannot be understood without the broader contexts and constellations within which they take place (such as political interests and cycles, opportunity structures, strategic alliances, media attention or donor agendas). As such, the political context co- determines the outcomes of these processes in which a variety of norm entrepreneurs is involved.

Translations in practice Limited political space as well as the d ifferential – political and other kinds of – power of human rights users and norm entrepreneurs shape processes of travel, translation and transformation (e.g. see Rottenburg 2009). This is clearly illustrated in a recent study by Johannes Waldmüller (2018), which examines how the government of Ecuador invokes human rights (translated, selectively reinterpreted and thus transformed) to push internationally for the regulation of transnational corporations by invoking notions of ecosocial and collective rights as a matter of adapting the human rights language to the Ecuadorian context. Waldmüller critically analyses the ways in which the Ecuadorian government translates international human rights norms to the national context on the basis of local frames of reference, and then seeks to communicate these translations back to the international level, in order to promote a new international standard that serves the State’s interests. The study shows that upstreaming a socalled localized understanding of resistance-related human rights to the international level does not necessarily further the interests of those most in need of the protection that human rights can offer, and that, instead, it might actually have oft-overlooked potential disadvantages: some genuinely local understandings may become reinterpreted or even erased when powerful norm setters co-opt local understandings. The Ecuadorian case neatly illustrates Vazquez’ (2011) argument that these kinds of erasures are seldom accidental, and that they tend to play into existing balances of power. Indeed, as Randeria (2007) argues on a different case, erasures could be considered strategic choices of a ‘cunning state’. The Ecuadorian case raises the question whether it is ever possible to avoid these erasures completely? If not, we should ask why power-contesting actors in different localities continue to adopt human rights discourses despite the risk of ‘erasures’ that may fundamentally harm their cause? This question is partly answered in a recent study on anti-torture activism in Vietnam. In this study, Ken MacLean (2018) examines the pivotal moment in social movement activism when activists decide – consciously or more organically – whether or not to adopt a translated and transformed version of the human rights discourse. The study shows how activists weigh the impact of several contextual factors (such as fear of retaliation, lack of material resources, low level of human rights awareness, institutional obstacles and censorship) when shaping their strategies in this regard. The study shows that there is a growing number of references to the international human rights framework, as well as a growing number of campaigns that 449

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deliberately draw upon human rights treaties and mechanisms, such as the Universal Periodic Review, to challenge the structures that perpetuate impunity nationally and to urge policy reforms to increase police accountability. MacLean argues that this is indicative of activists’ growing awareness of these frameworks and of their relevance to human rights activism, and that the frameworks are considered as a protection against the rights-v iolating state. Other recent case studies, on the contrary, are indicative of rights holders’ and rights users’ reluctance to engage with the existing human rights framework, and of their choice for a strategy of nonengagement or of profound transformations of this framework. Activists working in the context of a sweeping crackdown on civil society in China, for example, must be skilled at managing political risks of many kinds. This can influence their strategic choices with regard to the translation of human rights. A recent case study on the right to education in China by Desmet (2018), for example, demonstrates that low perceptions of agency, risk aversion and group pressure played an important role in keeping rights holders from engaging in translations of the human rights discourse. Another case study on the right to health in China similarly demonstrates that Chinese activists working on the right to health, for example, showed pragmatism, sophistication and reasonable caution in the selection of their advocacy tactics and discourse, and prioritized the opportunity to deliver real and measurable gains for their communities. In concreto, this meant that many HIV/AIDS NGOs retreat to service delivery programmes, rather than engaging in critical human rights activism. Davis and Mohamed ponder the question of whether this type of engagement with service delivery and with rights holders’ immediate and practical needs – under the banner of human rights activism – a llows for a critical stance on government policy and, if not, what it means when these organizations coin their strategy as a human r ights-based approach, while condoning the actions of, and collaborating with, a human r ights-violating government ( Davis and Mohamed 2018).

Concluding remarks Human rights are often described as in crisis. But, as Merry (2018) asked, are human rights really on the verge of disappearing? She argued that it is certainly the case that many formal human rights institutions and organizations in many parts of the world are under threat, but that the heart of human rights does not necessarily lie in these institutions, but precisely in the ideal of justice, fairness, and equality that they represent. Recognizing this means that we can acknowledge different interpretations and translations of existing human rights norms, and that we can look for them in different places – not just the Human Rights Council or the regular committee meetings, but also the offices of small NGOs, social media accounts of activists, and the d ay-to- d ay conversations of people in the streets. Looking for human rights in these places requires attention to the multi- directional multi-actor processes of travel, translation and transformation. In this chapter I argue that consciously conceptualizing and analysing the threefold process of travel, translation and transformation can contribute to more progressive and locally relevant human rights norms and allows us to acknowledge the extent to which the ideals they promote have become part of everyday life for many people around the world. Thus, as Merry (2018) argues, the focus on how human rights travel and how they are translated and transformed offers an invaluable corrective to those perspectives locating human rights only in formal institutions and laws. It foregrounds the so- called peripheries, acknowledges these as dynamic spaces and sites of agency, sheds light on the constant competition over

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interpretive authority and shows how human rights are embedded in everyday social practice and activism. By studying the travel of human rights in this way, we can acknowledge it as a social justice ideology flexible enough to be translated to and transformed within a variety of contexts and for a broad range of problems. This makes it possible to develop a more comprehensive and useful understanding of the way in which human rights work in the world today. Yet, we should also acknowledge the challenges and complexities thereof. Some of the core challenges are how to define core concepts underlying and shaping our discussion, how to foreground the contested nature of current discourses, and how to bring power dynamics back into the analysis of how human rights norms travel, become translated and transform in practice. If human rights are to realize the socially transformative potential they are often claimed to have (Gready and Vandenhole 2014; Haglund and Stryker 2015), power dynamics and their impact need to be better understood ( Vázquez 2011). My aim in this chapter has precisely been to propose at a more textured and multidimensional understanding of how human rights norms travel and become translated and transformed and how power dynamics play a role in this. For this reason, this chapter has conceptualized translation as struggle, as a transformation at the borders of human rights discourse and practice. This allows for a focus on erasure (of issues that do not fit the ‘parameters of legibility’ and can therefore not be named or are actively omitted) as well as on processes of selection, classification and appropriation that are the outcomes of what is inherently a struggle in which relative access, influence and power play an important role ( Vázquez 2011). By conceptualizing translation this way, both institutional power and actors’ agency can be accounted for and a more contextualized and emancipatory analysis of these complex processes becomes possible.

Further reading Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.) (2018) Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. This volume is extensively cited in this chapter as it provides the empirical work on which this chapter is built. Case studies from various localities shed light on what dynamics of travel, translation and transformation look like in practice. Goodale, M. and Merry, S. E. (2007) The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drawing on anthropological studies of human rights work from around the world, this book examines human rights in practice. It shows how actors mobilize human rights language in a variety of local settings, often differently from those imagined by human rights law itself. Gready, P. and Ensor, J. (2005) Reinventing Development? Translating Rights-Based Approaches from Theory into Practice. London and New York: Zed Books. Well-researched volume that shows how the proliferation of human rights language has been translated in the context of development, and how it transformed this sector, as well as how it is being transformed by it. ­Meckled-García, ​­ S. and Ҫali, B. (2006) ‘Lost in Translation: The Human Rights Ideal and International Human Rights Law’, in Meckled- García, S. and Ҫali, B. (eds.), The Legalization of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Human Rights Law. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 11–31. ­ ­ ​­ Whereas the present chapter offers a view on how human rights principles travel and are translated and transformed in practice, Meckled- Garcia and Çali explore how the translation and transformations between theoretical normative rights models and international law happen. Vázquez, R. (2011) ‘Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 24(1), ­ pp. 27–44. ­ ­ ​­ This article maps how translation renders invisible everything that does not fit in the ‘parameters of legibility’ of modernity's epistemic territory and draws the attention to the politics of epistemic translation.

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Notes 1 One can be identified as a human rights user from the moment there is an explicit interaction with human rights – or as a potential user if one could legitimately and logically invoke human rights but chooses not to do this. This means that the term encompasses, for example, rights holders, human rights practitioners and activists and legal duty bearers ( Desmet 2014). 2 Sunstein (1996) uses the notion of norm entrepreneurs to refer to those societal actors interested in changing the substance of social norms. 3 Vázquez (2011) proposes the conceptualization of translation processes as processes of selection, classification and appropriation that erase all that does not fit into the proper place of the already established epistemic territory and its ‘parameters of legibility’.

References Baumgaertel, M., Staes, D. and Mena Parras, F. (2014) ‘Hierarchy, Coordination, or Conflict? Global Law Theories and the Question of Human Rights Integration’, European Journal of Human Rights, 3, pp. 326–53. ­ ­ ​­ Baxi, U. (2007) Human Rights in a Posthuman World: Critical Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bob, C. (2002) ‘Merchants of Morality’, Foreign Policy, 129, pp. 36–45. ­ ­ ​­ Brems, E. (2001) Human Rights: Universality and Diversity. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Canfield, M. (2019) ‘Banana Brokers. Communicative Labor, Translocal Translation, and Transnational Law’, Public Culture, 31, pp. 69–92. ­ ­ ​­ Casla, K. (2014) ‘Dear Fellow Jurists, Human Rights Are About Politics, and That’s Perfectly Fine’, in Lettinga, D. and van Troost, L. (eds.), Can Human Rights Bring Social Justice: Twelve Essays. Amsterdam: Amnesty International Netherlands, pp. 35–40. ­ ­ ​­ Choudhury, Z. A., Jensen, S. and Kelly, T. (2018) ‘Counting Torture: Towards the Translation of ­ Robust, Useful, and Inclusive Human Rights Indicators’, Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 36(2), ­ ­ ​­ pp. 132–150. Davis, S. L. M. and Charmain, M. (2018) ‘Global Rights, Local Risk: Community Advocacy on Right to Health in China’, in Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.), Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. 229–250. ­ ­ ​­ De Feyter, K. (2007) ‘Localizing Human Rights’, in Benedek, W., De Feyter, K. and Marrella, F. (eds.), Economic Globalization and Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 67–92. De Feyter, K., Parmentier, S., Timmerman, C. and Ulrich, G. (eds.) (2011) The Local Relevance of Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Gaay Fortman, B. (2011) Political Economy of Human Rights: The Quest for Relevance and Realization. New York: Routledge. ­Delmas-Marty, ​­ M. (2006) ­ Le Pluralisme Ordonné. Paris: Seuil. Desai, M. (2015) Subaltern Movements in India: Gendered Geographies of Struggle against Neoliberal Development. London and New York: Routledge. Desmet, E. (2014) ‘Analysing Users’ Trajectories in Human Rights ( Law): A Conceptual Exploration’, Human Rights and International Legal Discourse, 8(2), ­ pp. 121–41. ­ ­ ​­ Desmet, E. (2018) ‘Rural-Urban Migration and Education in China: Unraveling Responses to Injurious Experiences’, in Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.), Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. 183–207. ­ ­ ​­ Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.) (2018) Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Falk, R. (2000) Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World. London: Routledge. Gledhill, J. (2009) ‘The Rights of the Rich versus the Rights of the Poor’, in Hickey, S. and Mitlin, D. (eds.), ­ Rights-Based Approaches to Development. Exploring the Potential and Pitfalls. Sterling: Kumarian Press, pp. 31–46. ­ ­ ​­ Goodale, M. and Merry, S. E. (2007) The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, R. and Jinks, D. (2013) Socializing States: Promoting Human Rights through International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Gready, P. and Ensor, J. (2005) Reinventing Development? Translating Rights-Based Approaches from Theory Into Practice. London and New York: Zed Books. Gready, P. and Vandenhole, W. (2014) Human Rights and Development in the New Millennium: Towards a Theory of Change. London and New York: Routledge. Hacking, I. (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haglund, L. and Stryker, R. (eds.) (2015) Closing the Rights Gap. From Human Rights to Social Transformation. Oakland: University of California Press. Halliday, T. and Carruthers, B. (2007) ‘The Recursivity of Law: Global Norm Making and National Lawmaking in the Globalization of Corporate Insolvency Regimes’, American Journal of Sociology, 112(4), ­ pp.1135–202. ­ ​­ MacLean, K. (2018) ‘New Visibilities: Challenging Torture and Impunity in Vietnam’, in Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.), Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvanie University Press, pp. 157–179. ­ ­ ​­ Madlingozi, T. (2010) ‘On Transitional Justice Entrepreneurs and the Production of Victims’, Journal of ­ pp. 208–228. ­ ­ ​­ Human Rights Practice, 2(2), Martínez, S. (2018) ‘Upstreaming or Streamlining? Translating Social Movement Agendas into Legal Claims in Nepal and the Dominican Republic’, in Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.), Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. 128–56. Merry, S. E. (2006a) ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle’, American Anthropologist, 108(1), ­ pp. 38–51. ­ ­ ​­ Merry, S. E. (2006b) Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law Into Local Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merry, S. E. (2013) ‘Human Rights Monitoring and the Question of Indicators’, in Goodale, M. (ed.), Human Rights at the Crossroads. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 140–52. Merry, S. (2018) ‘Foreword’, in Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.), Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. vii–ix. Moyn, S. (2014) ‘Human Rights and the Age of Inequality’, in Lettinga, D. and van Troost, L. (eds.), Can Human Rights Bring Social Justice? Amsterdam: Amnesty International The Netherlands, pp. 13–18. ­ ­ ​­ Nesiah, V. (2018) ‘Local Ownership of Global Governance’, in Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. ­ (eds.), Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. 29–56. ­ ­ ​­ Nyamu-Musembi, C. (2005) ‘An Actor- Oriented Approach to Rights in Development’, IDS Bulletin, 36(1), ­ pp. 41–52. ­ ­ ​­ Patel, S. and Mitlin, D. (2009) ‘Reinterpreting the Rights-Based Approach: A Grassroots Perspective on Rights and Development’, in Hickey, S. and Mitlin, D. (eds.), Rights-Based ­ ​­ Approaches to Development. Exploring the Potential and Pitfalls. Sterling: Kumarian Press, pp. 107–124. ­ ­ ​­ Randeria, S. (2007) ‘Cunning States and Unaccountable International Institutions: Legal Plurality, Social Movements and Rights of Local Communities to Common Property Resources’, European Journal for Sociology, 44(1), ­ pp. 27–60. ­ ­ ​­ Rottenburg, R. (2009) Far-Fetched Facts. A Parable of Development Aid. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Simmons, B. (2009) Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sunstein, C. R. (1996) ‘Social Norms and Social Roles’, Columbia Law Review, 96(4), ­ pp. 903–968. ­ ­ ​­ Vandenbogaerde, A. (2018) ‘Accommodating Local Human Rights Practice at the Un Human Rights Council’, in Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.), Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. 57–76. ­ ­ ​­ Vandenhole, W. and Van Genugten, W. (2015) ‘Introduction: An Emerging Multi-Duty-Bearer Human Rights Regime’, in Vandenhole, W. (ed.), Challenging Territoriality in Human Rights Law. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Vázquez, R. (2011) ‘Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 24(1), ­ pp. 27–44. ­ ­ ​­ Waldmueller, J. (2018) ‘Lost through Translation: Political Dialectics of Eco- Social and Collective Rights in Ecuador’, in Destrooper, T. and Merry, S. (eds.), Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, pp. 101–127. ­ ­ ​­

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White, L. (2015) ‘Dialogue and Performance in Human Rights Practice’, Paper presented during The Localization of Human Rights, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, NYU School of Law, 6 November 2015. Zeleza, P. (2004) ‘The Struggle for Human Rights in Africa’, in Zeleza, P. and McConnaughay, P. (eds.), ­ Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–18. ­ ­ ​­

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31 Nations in translation Brian James Baer

Introduction The relationship between nations and translation is complex and fraught. The transnational nature of translated texts, which connect two different languages, cultures and often historical periods, challenges deeply held Western concepts of originality and authenticity that underpin the idea of autonomous sui generis national cultures. As Lawrence Venuti puts it, Translation can be described as an act of violence against a nation only because nationalist thinking tends to be premised on a metaphysical concept of identity as a homogenous essence, usually given a biological grounding in an ethnicity or race and seen as manifested in a particular language and culture. (2005: 177) ­ It is not surprising then that the rise of Romantic nationalism saw the systematic study of national languages and literatures, seen as privileged bearers of the national ‘genius’, accompanied by the marginalization of translated texts as unoriginal, mediated and inauthentic. Nevertheless, translation was central to the Romantic nationalist project, as will be discussed below. Before discussing the relationship between translations and nations and the concept of nations in translation, however, it might be helpful to review current conceptualizations of the nations, given both the ubiquity of the term and its conceptual plasticity.

What is a nation? There is a good deal of conceptual ambiguity in the popular use of the term nation. At times, it is used to refer to an ethnic people and other times to refer to a nation- state. There is also the distinction between an ethnic nation, founded on the basis of a particular ethnos, versus a civic nation, where, in principle, no ethnic group is privileged over another. These two models, however, often overlap. Many nations that were founded as ethnic nations today aspire to be civic nations, while civic nations, such as the US or the Soviet Union, may be

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haunted by the specter of ethnic nationalism, reflected in the privileging of ‘whiteness’ in the former and the cultivation of Russian chauvinism in the latter. Taking into account this conceptual slippage, scholars have articulated three conceptual models of the nation and nationhood: the primordialist, the perennialist, and the modernist ( Blackledge and Creese 2010: 182). Primordialists situate the origins of the nation in the distant past and posit an enduring essence for the nation over time, through periods of occupation and liberation, dormancy and revival, the latter often referred to as a rebirth or renaissance. As Homi Bhabha puts it, primordial nations are like narratives in that they ‘ lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind’s eye’ (1990: 1). Perennialists, on the other hand, believe that nations exist over time but that they undergo change, while the modernists hold that the nation is a relatively modern phenomenon, made possible by the emergence of modern technologies (e.g., a standardized ‘national’ language) and institutions (e.g., a national system of mandatory public education and ‘national’ newspapers and other publications meant to foster a national readership). One of the early texts of the modernist school is Ernest Renan’s essay ‘What Is a Nation?’ (1887), in which he argues that modern nations are built not only on shared memories but also on a shared forgetting of those aspects of their history that would undermine the national narrative, such as the fact that many modern nations began with invasion and conquest, that national boundaries shift over time, and that a single national language is a recent phenomenon, made possible by the suppression of competing idioms. Therefore, Renan concludes, nations are not the inevitable product of a language, territory and ethnos but rather require a ‘ daily plebiscite’ (1990: 19), that is, they must be constantly reaffirmed by the will of the people. More recently, Ernst Gellner declared that ‘[n]ationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’ (1983: 7). Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1992) studied manifestations of that invention in rituals, monuments and pageants, highlighting the specific role of ‘ invented traditions’ in obscuring the recent origins of modern nations, lending them a primordialist air. Benedict Anderson (1991) made a major contribution to modernist thinking with his description of the modern nation as an ‘ imagined community’, imagined in the sense that one can never know every other member of the nation although one senses a connection to them. Those perceived bonds of solidarity among the members of a nation are fostered through rituals, practices and institutions, made possible by the modern technologies and institutions mentioned above. Moreover, for modernists, national identity is shifting. As Blackledge and Creese argue, ‘ethnicity, and therefore national identity is socially-constructed and fluid rather than fixed, and is constantly re-negotiated in new settings’ ( Blackledge and Creese 2010: 182). While a modernist perspective informs most of the scholarly writings on nations and nationalism produced over the last 50 years, primordialist thinking remains firmly entrenched in the popular imagination, and its affective power is routinely exploited by politicians and pundits. Moreover, the recent rise of ethno-nationalist movements across the world challenges developmental narratives that see global institutions and systems as inevitably displacing the nation. This suggests the importance of understanding the national and the transnational or global not as mutually exclusive but as thoroughly entangled and mutually constitutive, or mutually enabling. In other words, the way we conceive of the nation implies a conception of the transnational or global, and vice versa. It is important, therefore, to recognize how the global is incorporated within nations (nations in translation) and how nations incorporate the global (translation in nations). The latter has been addressed philosophically by a number of scholars dealing with translation and hospitality (see Derrida 2000, Ricoeur 2006, and Inghilleri 2017, among others). I will concentrate instead on the former, demonstrating how 456

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‘critical and unrelenting attention to the very process of translation’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 17), to use Chakrabarty’s phrase, can challenge the basic tenets of primordialist thinking, exposing ‘the complex heteronomy that inheres in all of our constructed solidarities’ ( Bermann 2005: 3) while expanding modernist approaches to studying the national imaginary before offering a case study of the ‘ imperial nation’ of Russia.

The primordial nation and/in translation While it is a widely accepted truth that ‘the literature of most nations begins with translations’ ( Venclova 1979: 5), it is no less true that translation has been ignored or suppressed in the literary and cultural histories of modern nations. As Heilbron notes, ‘Literary history tends to ignore translation since it is commonly conceived as national history’ (2010: 316). The idea that university departments of language and literature were created in order to document and affirm the ‘national genius’ is supported by their traditional antipathy toward t ranslation—regardless of the cultural significance of those t ranslations—in favor of ‘original’ writing. Indeed, literary historians adopted the model of national historiography, with its preoccupation with origins. What is studied in such historiographies are works that were created in the period under investigation, typically ignoring the ‘continuous recycling of different texts from the past’ that occurs, often with the help of translation ( Lotman 2019: 141). The semiotician Juri Lotman rejects such national histories of literature and culture as marred by a superficial developmentalism that ignores the whole question of a work’s actual relevance. Lotman goes on to reference the nineteenth- century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol who, when asked to name the most important writers of his age, replied without hesitation: Walter Scott and Homer (qtd. in Lotman 2019: 141). Incidentally, Gogol would have read both of those authors in translation. In fact, the new relevance of Homer to Russian culture of Gogol’s time was reflected in the appearance of two much- d iscussed retranslations of the Iliad, by Nikolai Gnedich and Vasilii Zhukovskii (see Kalb 2017). Therefore, a focus on the relevance of literary works as opposed to their origin undermines nationalist historiography, making possible the full integration of translated texts. The Romantic obsession with origins and originality presents one of the central paradoxes or double binds of modern nationalism, namely, that nations are expected to assert their originality as the basis for their claims of autonomy but, at the same time, they are expected to follow general models for doing so. Hence, every nation must have its national poet, its national epic, and so on. Consider, for example, the paintings of Welsh ‘national’ painters of the Romantic Age. Many of them studied art in London and then used that imperial style to paint pictures of Welsh peasants in traditional folk costumes and scenes from Welsh history and legend. Such works of art could be described as imperial in form and national in content. Borrowing, however, also took place in the other direction. And so, while the persecution of the oral poet-storytellers known as bards was a classic theme in Welsh nationalist art of the nineteenth century— see John Martin’s 1827 ‘The Bard’, based on the Welsh tradition that Edward I of England, after conquering Wales, ordered all the bards be put to death—the importation of bardic forms of authorship from the peripheries was a defining moment in the creation of modern ‘English’ literature, underscoring the central role played by ‘the cultural nationalism of the peripheries’ in the construction of modern English literature ( Trumpener 1997: xii). As Katie Trumpener argues in Bardic Nationalism, ‘English ­ literature, ­so-called, ​­ constitutes itself in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the systematic imitation, appropriation, and political neutralization of antiquarian and nationalist literary developments in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales’ (1997: xi). 457

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The compulsion to meet established criteria for nationhood also produced some of the most high-profile scandals in literary history, involving the forging of ‘national’ epics, such as James MacPherson’s The Songs of Ossian in Britain, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, in Russia, and the Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts in Czech- speaking lands. ( The Russian manuscript is today largely considered to be authentic, although some doubt remains as the original manuscript was lost in the burning of Moscow that preceded Napoleon’s capture of the city.) The entangling of literary and political histories of nations is also highlighted by the fact that Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of an independent Czechoslovakia, often referred to as the President Liberator, was an accomplished philologist who played an instrumental role is exposing the Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts as frauds ( Dobiáš 2019). Such entanglements were inevitable given the fact that Romantic nationalism posited language as the privileged expression of the distinct genius of a nation, its Volkgeist, manifested in the literary works created in that language. Translation is directly implicated in Scottish poet James MacPherson’s Songs of Ossian (1760), which he claimed to be a translation, making one of the most popular— a nd most widely translated—works of the eighteenth century Anglophone literature not just a forgery but a pseudo-translation. Pseudo-translations, however, are the exceptions that prove the rule of authentic national cultures. Far more common is the phenomenon of ‘pseudo originals’, such as Irish poet Thomas Moore’s ‘Evening Bells’, which he describes as a ‘Russian Air’. The poem was translated into Russian by Ivan Kozlov and became extremely popular, so much so that Russian literary scholars began to conjecture that Moore’s original was in fact a translation of an ‘Eastern’ source text (see Baer 2017). At the same time, nationalist literary projects, whether located at the periphery or in the metropole, were typically led by educated elites and often involved the ‘translation’ of oral folk culture into written texts (e.g., Ossian, Afanasiev, the Brothers Grimm). Insofar as these written texts participated in the creation of a single national idiom, one could argue that they altered in fundamental ways the folk culture they were attempting to ‘record’, another of the paradoxes of the Romantic movement’s relationship to translation. To the extent that modern nation-building is tied to such standardization of language, or what Andre Lefevere refers to as the ‘monolingualization’ of cultures, it could be said to establish the conditions for translation in the modern world order, which Naoki Sakai argues, assumes a ‘monolingual address’ (1997). In this sense, translation between standardized (national) languages establishes the difference it purports to bridge. This is especially evident in the linguistic politics in the Balkan regions following the break-up of Yugoslavia, where translation is now required for closely related, mutually comprehensible languages, and deliberate efforts are being undertaken to further differentiate the languages from one another through the introduction of lexical items (see Kuhiwczak 1999; Jones 2010). Translation’s role in modern nation-building is associated in many nations of Europe with the transformation of the vernacular into a national language, often enacted and symbolized by the translation of the Bible. The cultural work achieved by the translation of the Bible into the vernacular cannot be underestimated. It not only helped to promote a version of the vernacular for an emerging national readership but also lent new dignity to the vernacular as a worthy bearer of divine truth, thereby lending new authority to authors writing in it. (As Thomas Greene [1982] argues, in pre-modern European cultures, only the ancients were considered authores, so the translation of the Bible into modern languages can be seen as part of a larger cultural project of ‘authorizing’ modern writers.) In Eastern Europe, the necessity for the missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius to provide translations of the Bible and other sacred texts for local populations led them to create the first alphabet in the region, which 458

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is why the alphabet used by many Slavic peoples today is referred to as Cyrillic. In many cultures outside the West, translation of the European novel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries performed similar cultural work, importing a language, a mindset and specific social (and gender) roles, as well as narratives of personal emancipation, associated with Western modernity (see Levy 2006; Cho 2016). The translation of the Bible, however, provided more than just a language for emerging or consolidating nations; it also provided a compelling narrative of the nation in the story of the Jewish people as recounted in the Old Testament. The idea of an ethnic people ordained by God, then defeated and sent into exile, only to be liberated and returned to their historic homeland has provided a template for many modern nations to follow, as evident in the nationalist ‘revivals’ that occurred across Europe in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. As David Aberbach notes, ‘In the two centuries after the invention of printing, the Hebrew Bible in vernacular translation had a decisive influence on the evolution of nationalism’ (2005: 223). Indeed, the Old Testament story of the Jewish people would also serve as the foundational narrative of the Black civil rights movement in the US of the twentieth century. So, this nationalist model, which was spread to many parts of the world via Western imperialism, then became the foundation of anti-imperialist liberation movements. As Aberbach notes, ‘The Bible was essential in the culture of empires but also, paradoxically, inspired defeated, suppressed and colonised people to seek freedom’ (2005: 223). At the same time, Western colonialism imposed national boundaries and institutions on territories characterized by radical multi-lingualism and ethnic and cultural diversity. In the nineteenth century, the story of the emancipation of nations was supported at a societal, historical and individual level by the powerful concept of Bildung, or progressive personality development The emancipation of nations and individuals were now informed by the same notion of developmentalism, which many scholars argue is central to the historical thinking of modern Western cultures. If, according to such thinking, the nation was akin to the individual in its quest for liberty and autonomy from oppressive supra-national or imperial configurations, then by the late twentieth century the treatment of subnational groups (such as the Kurds in Turkey, the Catalans in Spain, the Puerto Ricans in the US, the Palestinians in Israel, and the Bretons in France) have challenged that narrative, exposing ‘ imperial’ elements within the modern nation- state—David Lloyd notes the tendency of nations to ‘ape empires’ ( Lloyd 1993: 154)—t roubling any absolute separation of nation and empire, as reflected in such hybrid designations as ‘ imperial nation’ (Clowes 2011: 70) and ‘nation- centered imperialism’ ( Tageldin 2011: 199). A recent US documentary on the ­Spanish-American ​­ War titled Crucible of Empire makes this point: Victorious over Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States, a nation founded in opposition to imperialism, grappled with its new role as an imperial power. More recent events in Vietnam, Somalia, and Yugoslavia bear striking parallels to those of 1898. (Crucible 1999: online) The twentieth century also saw the emergence of what were believed to be post-national polities, such as the Soviet Union, in which the national designation Soviet was devoid of any association with ethnic nationalism. By the late Soviet period, however, the reality was quite different; the supra-national ideal of Soviet culture was marred by a distinct Russian chauvinism. The Bible’s role in supporting the autonomy of nations is, however, complicated by the fact that the Christian Bible contains the New Testament, as well as the Old, providing competing models of nations and of translation, as Naomi Seidman discusses in Faithful Renderings (2006). ­ Whereas the Old Testament offers a primordialist vision of the nation, which is reflected in a 459

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resistance to the translation of its sacred texts and to conversion, the New Testament puts forward an opposing model, one that supports if not compels translation when Christ says to his apostles: ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation’ (Mark 16:15); ‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew 28:19); and ‘You will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). Later, in Acts, the apostles hear a rushing wind after which tongues of fire appear above their heads and they begin speaking in tongues: ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them’ (Acts 2:4). These two contradictory models, one of nationalist consolidation and the other of imperialist expansion, together formed the basis of the modern European imperial nation. The consolidation of nations, which began in Renaissance Europe and produced many of the canonical works of ‘national’ vernacular literature, took place alongside imperialist exploration and conquest, or what Walter D. Mignolo refers to as ‘the darker side of western modernity’ (2011). This is another way in which modern nations are characterized by an ‘ impossible unity’ ( Bhabha 1990: 1). The accommodation of these two opposing models required a great many acts of forgetting, often involving the fact of translation. Ngugi wa Thiong’o points this out in his memoir In the House of the Interpreter (2012), when he recounts an incident that occurred in a class on English composition at his school in Kenya. The teacher encourages the students to learn composition ‘ from the Bible’. As his teacher explains, ‘It has the shortest sentence in English. Jesus wept. So follow the example of Jesus. He spoke very simple English’ (2012: 23). This leaves wa Thiong’o puzzled: ‘Not trying to be clever or correct him, I raised my hand and said that Jesus did not speak English: the Bible was a translation’ (ibid.: 23). While his classmates tittered, the teacher reacted with annoyance, saying, ‘Remember, you have come here to learn, not to teach. Or do you want to change places with me?’ (ibid.: 23). As wa Thiong’o recalls, ‘Smith’s testy response froze questions and differing perspectives’ (ibid.: 23). While translations of the Bible provided in many cases the foundations for a national language and a national narrative, the proliferation of Bible translations challenged the self-evident and transcendent nature of the national community and of religious truth. For this reason, the Russian Bible Society, which was undertaking the first translation of the Bible into modern Russian, was shut down by the government following the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825 (see Zacek 1966; Batalden 2013). In other parts of Europe, Catholics and Protestants produced competing translations to support their beliefs, and the proliferation of translations among Protestants reflected the splintering of Protestantism into a variety of sects, including fundamentalist ‘reactions to the modern world’ (Appiah 2018: 56). Hepzibah Israel goes further, describing how different translations of the Bible in Ceylon served to indicate membership not only in a certain faith community but also in a certain social group or class (Israel 2006). Translation’s capacity to trouble the Romantic notions of origins and originality that ground a primordial understanding of the nation is what allows translation to serve as a critical site from which to examine the modern national imaginary and specifically ‘the many things that must be forgotten’ ( Renan [1887]1990) in order to sustain it. This is a point made by an increasing number of scholars over the past 20 years. As Shaden Tageldin argues, translation can expose ‘the Eurocentrism that haunts current understandings of world literature and the origins of literary comparison’ (Tageldin 2011: 29), or, as Emily Apter puts it, ‘the politics of linguistic difference [can be] availed to unhorse language nationalisms’ (Apter 2013: 25). Only then, Michael Cronin argues, can we mov[e] away from the Romantic notion of an ‘original’, sui generis national genius which is transported unchanged through time (immutable mobile) to a notion of literature that 460

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is networked beyond national borders through the intrinsic duality and mutability of translation (mutable mobile). (Cronin 2006: 32) If the impetus for primordialists to forget translation is obvious, it is somewhat surprising then that very few modernists in the field of nationality studies have acknowledged translation as among the technologies supporting the modern national imaginary; in other words, translation functions not only as a techne of empire, as Vincent Rafael (1992) argues, but also as a techne of nations. It is also either ignored or elided in much of the literature on globalization and migration, treated largely as a metaphor, as Bhabha (‘cultural translation’), Hall (‘translation’) and Wallerstein (‘ interpreter’) do. Despite the emphasis among modernist scholars on the role of print capital in the rise of modern nations, translation has, at worst, been largely ignored, and, at best, acknowledged but not in a systematic or comprehensive way. So, while Anderson notes the importance of newspapers in creating the ‘ homogenous empty time’ of the modern nation, he fails to note that a good deal of the content of those early newspapers were translations (McLaughlin 2015). There are, however, some notable exceptions, a result perhaps of the increasing interest in a transnational perspective in fields across the Humanities and Social Sciences. For example, Susan ­Buck-Morss ​­ in Hegel, Haiti and Universal History has argued for a transnational perspective on modern Western philosophy, one that fully incorporates ‘ foreign’ texts that circulated both in their original languages and in translation, often in newspapers and journals. In her study of the influence of periodicals on Hegel’s philosophy and, in particular, on his conceptualization of the master and slave relationship, Buck-Morss pays special attention to the German journal Minerva, which ‘ borrowed freely from English and French sources’ ( Buck-Morss 2009: 42). When scholars ignore such ‘ephemeral’ sources, Buck-Morss argues, they participate in the ‘scholarly blindness that silences the past’ (ibid.: 37n). Heekyong Cho’s Translation’s Forgotten History provides another important model for understanding the role of translation in nation-building. Cho’s work highlights the role of Korean writers, translators and editors in circulating works of Western literature, especially Russian, which would become central to how Koreans imagined their nation. Paradoxically, the translations were made from the Japanese, the language of their colonial overlord at the time, which were themselves relay translations from the English or French. The fact that these works were doubly or triply mediated, however, did little to lessen their relevance to Korean society of the time. Moreover, the fact that the individuals who circulated these narratives were simultaneously translators, journalists, writers and often publishers facilitated the penetration of these texts deep into Korean culture.

An imperial nation in translation Modern Russia offers especially fertile ground for the study of nations in translation for a number of reasons. First, modern Russian culture was born in translation insofar as an alphabet was created for the Slavs for evangelization through the translation of sacred texts. In fact, sacred texts were the primary object of translation until the reign of Peter the Great. ( Before then, the Russian Orthodox Church owned the only publishing house in Russia.) Following Peter the Great’s policy of forced Westernization, translation of Western secular texts became a central concern of both civil society and the state. In fact, Peter I issued a decree in 1724 explaining that knowledge of a domain was as important as knowledge of the source language (2013: 3.) Catherine II, toward the end of the eighteenth century, took an active interest in 461

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translation, founding the Society for the Translation of Foreign Books, which operated from 1768 to 1783, providing material support for translators. The Society translated ancient and modern works, publishing an average of 11.5 volumes a year (Semennikov 1913: 10). At the same time, independent journals began to appear, featuring translations alongside original writing. Translation was also practiced within new transnational social movements, such as Freemasonry, which was introduced into Russia by members of the Russian foreign service in the early part of the eighteenth century. The spread of Pietism in late eighteenth- century Russia led to the creation of the Russian Bible Society in 1813, which sought to create a translation of the Bible into modern Russian. ( It was then available only in Old Church Slavonic.) This interest in translation was a reflection of a broader ‘religious experimentation and active striving for spiritual satisfaction’ among large segments of Russian educated society at the time (Zacek 1966: 411). The literary groups that arose in this period also undertook translations as a central part of their activity. Letters from Andrei Turgenev to his friend Vasilii Zhukovskii frequently recount the former’s progress on various translation projects (see Vatsuro and Virolainen 1987). It was at this time that some political (and cultural) conservatives, such as Admiral Shishkov (1811), warned that translations could serve as a vehicle for introducing undesirable foreign words and forms into the Russian language. He advised translators seeking new terms to refer to Slavic roots and word forms (2013: 8). (A similar campaign against “ foreignisms” would be launched a century later under Stalin.) The introduction of Romanticism into Russia in the early nineteenth century, with its cult or originality, problematized this translation activity. This problem was especially acute among those Russians who had adopted German Romantic notions of primordial nationhood to liberate themselves from the cultural imperialism of a cosmopolitan France. As the Romantic Vil’khel’m Kiukhelbeker lamented: ‘No one translates translators’ ([1824]2013: 21)—intimating that translation was a cultural dead- end that would prevent Russia from entering the international literary field. Others, like Kiukhelbeker’s contemporary, the poet Alexander Pushkin, expressed a more nuanced view toward translating, coining the somewhat oxymoronic phrase ‘a genius of translation’ in reference to the poet-t ranslator Zhukovskii, while elsewhere advising Zhukovskii to produce more ‘original’ writing. The problem of adopting a primordial model of nationalism by a cultural elite that was multi-lingual and multi- ethnic, for a ‘nation’ that had been since the fifteenth century a vast multi-l ingual, multi-ethnic empire is a central theme of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace, which opens with an entire paragraph in French, the prestige language of the time throughout Europe. Tolstoy ultimately resolves the issue of the Russianness of Russia’s elite in a scene where Natasha Rostova intuitively dances a Russian folk dance, mystifying the distance between the elite and the people. So central is this scene in resolving the many contradictions of the modern Russian nation that the historian Orlando Figes titles his monumental cultural history of Russia Natasha’s Dance (2002). The existence of a Russian essence is also confirmed when Natasha falls ill and the doctors attending her, who babble in a variety of foreign languages, are unable to diagnose her affliction (Sirotkina 2002: 82). While the nineteenth century saw the emergence of Russian writers who were themselves translated into other European languages, translation continued to be widely practiced in all spheres of Russian society and, in fact, became central in radical circles. Translations of American abolitionist poetry, for example, served as a vehicle for discussing serfdom, which would have been impossible in ‘original’ writing. The radicalization of the Russian left during the second half of the nineteenth century, a time of political conservatism in the government following the assassination of the l iberal-leaning tsar Alexander II in 1856, led to increasingly radical manipulation of texts in translation to serve political ends by translators 462

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such as V. Kurochkin, D. Minaev, and M. Mikhailov. In the early twentieth century, the conservative Count Kapnist would complain of Kurochkin’s translations of Pierre Béranger: While often preserving the spirit of the original, he is able, very cleverly, to apply various couplets of Béranger to our contemporary circumstances, so that Béranger is essentially nothing more than an unwitting weapon, and under the protection of his name, Mr. Kurochkin pursues his own purposes. (Kapnist 2013: 28) This period also saw the founding of the Woman’s Publishing Cooperative, which hired only women and published mostly translations ( Barendaum 1965). This left-leaning women’s collective produced the first Russian edition of the complete works of Hans Christian Anderson. Another sign of Russian interest in translation is the founding of the journal Vestnik inostrannoi literatury [Messenger of Foreign Literature], which ran from 1891 to 1916. It published translations from a wide range of languages, mostly European. So, the rhetorical and material support provided for translation by the Soviet regime was not entirely new, although it was unprecedented in terms of scale. Moreover, in the Soviet period, translation assumed a symbolic significance it did not have in the last decades of the empire, demonstrating the regime’s commitment to internationalism and establishing itself as a post-national, cosmopolitan state. In its effort to eliminate illiteracy, for example, new Russian readers would have access to all the great works of world literature produced by the publishing house Vsemirnaia Literatura [World Literature], established by Maxim Gorky in 1918. Moreover, because Lenin decided to allow ethno-nations to exist within the Soviet polity as republics, the cultural (and political or diplomatic) work of translation was directed both internationally and domestically, as evident in the creation of two journals dedicated to the publication of translated works: Vestnik Inostrannoi Literatury (messenger of ​­ ­ International Literature, ­1928–1930), which became Literatura Mirovoi Revoliutsii (Literature of World Revolution, 1930–1931) and then Internatsional’naia Literature (International Lit­ erature, 1933–1943), for translations of ‘ foreign’ works, and Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of Peoples, 1939), for translations of ‘domestic works,’ e.g., works produced by the various peoples of the Soviet Union. The decision to allow nations to remain was problematic insofar as the regime was antiimperialist—Lenin famously described the Russian empire as a ‘prison house of nations’— and considered nations to be a product of bourgeois capitalism designed to protect private property. So, this produced what Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin refer to as ‘a principal irony’ of Soviet history, ‘that a radical socialist elite that proclaimed an internationalist agenda that was to transcend the bourgeois nationalist stage of history in fact ended up by institutionalizing nations within its own political body’ (2001: 16). The regime negotiated that relationship with greater and lesser success across the entire course of Soviet history, and many scholars believe that its inability to juggle the two any longer was a major factor in the eventual fall of the Soviet Union. In any case, what is interesting for our purposes is how this problematic relationship between internationalism and nationalism, or empire and nation, played itself out in the Soviet Union, as reflected in its translation projects and policies. There were many ways the Soviet sought to accommodate nations with their post-national state. First, they argued that, under conditions of socialism, nations were no longer oppressive; so, Soviet nations were fundamentally different from capitalist or bourgeois nations. Second, when it became clear that a world-wide communist revolution was not imminent, it was argued that the Soviet Union could pursue ‘socialism in one country’ as this country 463

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was itself international. This idea of the Soviet Union as always already international appears in writings on translation of that time. As Andrei Fedorov writes: Translation in Soviet literature stands at an extraordinarily high level and fulfills tasks that are extraordinarily responsible. This is why analysis of examples from the work of Soviet translators and the exploration of the problems that lie before them in particular are of interest both for Soviet literature and for world literature. This is only natural as Soviet literature is international. (Fedorov 1941: 4, emphasis added) At the same time, the view persisted that nations would eventually disappear as the Soviet Union moved from socialism to communism: ‘The development of cultures national in form and socialist in content is necessary for the purpose of their ultimate fusion into one Common Culture, socialist as to form and content, and expressed in one common language’ (Stalin 1934: 195). Supported by the theories of Stalin’s favorite linguist, Nikolai Marr, it was believed that the soft borders between Soviet republics would facilitate a merging of the various languages spoken, which the government encouraged over the course of the 1930s by having republics switch from the Latin to the Cyrillic alphabet. Within such an ideological regime, translation was a temporary measure before the emergence of what Stalin referred to as a ‘Common Culture’. Moreover, Stalin’s formulation assumes the absolute primacy of content over form, which was central to the official Soviet aesthetic of Socialist Realism. The primacy of content was reflected in negative ways in the campaign against formalism that raged throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and in positive ways in Ivan Kashkin’s theory of ‘realist translation’, which asserted that the translator’s allegiance was to the reality portrayed not to the exact words of the author (see Witt 2016). The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1942 represented a break in these policies, with Stalin returning to traditional primordialist rhetoric to inspire Soviet citizens to defend their motherland. Churches were opened and Communist Internationale was replaced as the anthem of the Soviet Union by the jingoist anthem written by Sergei Mikhalkov invoking ‘Velikaia Rus’, or Great Rus, with Rus being a mytho-poetic designation for all the Russias ( Belorus, Russia and Ukraine, once known as Little Russia) as well as a reference to the Kievan state that adopted Christianity for the Eastern Slavs in 988. In 1943, the same year that the Communist Internationale was replaced, the translation journal International Literature was closed. Following the war, a new translation journal was founded with the title Foreign Literature. This shift in the journal’s conceptual framing from international to foreign was reflected in greater tolerance for cultural differences, without essentializing them, as explained by the editors in the introduction to the inaugural issue of Inostrannaia Literatura [Foreign Literature]: Every people values the particular, unrepeatable features of its national culture. A love for the particularities of a national culture, however, does not imply a cult of isolation: all peoples have common aspirations, a common truth. Committed to the lofty principles of internationalism, the Soviet people respect the cultures of all peoples—big and small. They know that all peoples make their contribution to the culture of humankind. ( Editorial Board 1955, I:3) That increased tolerance for cultural particularity was even reflected in the visuals that appeared in the journal, many of them featuring individuals in folk costume or peasant dress. 464

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The preference for peasants as subjects had its formal equivalent in the journal’s preference for woodcuts. (International Literature, on the other hand, featured relatively few visuals; mostly ­ photographs of authors or literary groups.) There was also some distancing in those post-war years from the idea that Soviet nations would fade away. Nations— and their languages—Fedorov would make clear in his 1953 Introduction to Translation Theory, were here to stay: The Soviet Union is a ­multi-national ​­ state, where people speak, write, and create in a multitude of languages, among which many acquired literacy only in the years of Soviet rule. Translation is the most direct path by which peoples of the USSR can become acquainted with the literary treasures of other peoples, and in this way serves as an effective means for the continued development of Soviet culture. The period through which we have l ived— a period marked by the victory of socialism in our country and by the shift from socialism to communism—is one of growth and development of national languages. (Fedorov 1953: 87; emphasis added) Note his use of ‘multi-national’ here instead of ‘ international.’ This greater tolerance for aesthetic particularity inaugurated the cultural flowering of the so- called Thaw era, which peaked in the early 1960s. It was reflected in translation theory in Kornei Chukovsky’s 1964 edition of A High Art, in which he abandoned the recommendation expressed in earlier editions that the translator ‘diminish his creative personality’ so as to subordinate his or her ‘style’ with that of the source text author lest the translator become the author’s ‘enemy’. Instead, he praises the stylistic particularities of Soviet translators: And now the very number of brilliant artists of the word who have dedicated themselves to this difficult work testifies to the fact that the unheard of has occurred. And it is a fact that it has never happened that such talents have worked together, shoulder to shoulder, within the span of a single century. Even the most original of our poets—those with a strongly expressed, distinct style, with pronounced features of creative individuality— are giving their energy to the art of translation. (Chukovskii 1964: 3) Here he is referring to those authors who were deemed antagonist toward the regime under Stalin and so forced to translate in lieu of publishing original writing. He also goes on to praise Tatyana Gnedich’s translation of Byron’s Don Juan, which she completed while serving a ten-year sentence in the Soviet Gulag. The relevance of translation in negotiating Russia’s complicated ‘national/imperial’ identity did not end with the Soviet Union, as evident in the number of autobiographies of translators and interpreters that appeared following with fall of the Soviet Union and the many literary and cinematic works featuring a translator or interpreter as the protagonist. Consider the documentary film about the translator of children’s literature, Lilianna Lungina, which became a surprise hit on Russian tv in 2015 ( Rogatchevski 2010). All this, however, is not to suggest that translation is uniquely relevant to Russia or to countries like it. When we recognize that nation and empire, or local and global, are not mutually defining opposites, but are thoroughly entangled and mutually constitutive, and that ‘national’ identities are being constantly re-negotiated, then translation’s capacity to capture the particular nature of that negotiation is useful in studying every culture. 465

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Conclusion Writing from the vantage point of the early twenty-fi rst century, millennial predictions of the death of the nation- state appear to have been premature. In fact, the incoherence of the modern nation, characterized by an ‘ impossible unity’ Bhabha (1990: 1), may represent not an inherent weakness in the nation as concept but rather the very thing that has allowed it to morph and adapt to overcome threats and challenges by turning ‘ loss into metaphor’ ( Bhabha 1994: 139). At the same time, it is important to recognize the ways in which nationalist thinking informs our models of translation—for example, the notion that the proper object of Translation Studies are translations that takes place between discreet national languages— so as better to understand the limits of those models. Tarek Shamma (2009: 65), for example, argues that ‘attendant notions of “equivalence” and “ faithfulness” are conditioned by modern constructs of authorship and of the nation- state that do not hold for Arabic translation during [the early Abassid period], nor, probably, for premodern translation in general’. Only with such self-reflection can translation serve as a site from which to interrogate the modern nation rather than reflecting and reinforcing the exclusions that structure it and dehistoricizing the distinct modernity that informs it.

Further reading Bermann, S. and Wood, M. (eds.) (2005) Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. This collected volume represents one of the first and most comprehensive interrogations of the relationship between nations and translation. While the contributors are for the most part from the field of Comparative Literature, the contributions are not restricted to analysis of translated literary texts, but also deal with the translation of cinema ( Wood), as well as philosophical ( Eaglestone), legal ( Legrande) and diplomatic ( Visson) texts. The overwhelming majority of the articles deal with Western European languages and contexts. Cho, H. (2016) Translation’s Forgotten History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. This monograph adds a sociological and postcolonial dimension to Even-Zohar’s polysytem’s theory by examining the role of translation in the emergence of modern Korean literature. Korea’s status as a colonial subject of Japan created a bilingual elite whose professional activity often involved translation, as well as fiction writing and journalism. Their multiple roles allowed for the deep penetration plots and themes from n ineteenth- century Russian literature to penetrate deep into Korean culture of the time. Kumar, R. (ed.) (2012) Role of Translation in Nation Building. New Delhi: Modlingua. This collected volume focuses on translation’s role in nation-building in the Global South, focusing on multi-lingual societies mostly in India and Africa. Starting from the premise that nationalism is a modern European phenomenon, the contributors examine how interlingual translation participated in various and at times contradictory ways in the importation of nationalism as a byproduct of imperialist domination. Rogers, G. (2016) Incomparable Empires. Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. This study of cultural exchanges between US and Spanish writers and literary scholars following the US victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 demonstrates the thorough entangling of the national and the transnational, while highlighting translation’s role as a ‘versatile apparatus that facilitated narratives and connections while covering over contradictions’ (2016: 7).

References Aberbach, E. (2005) ‘Nationalism and the Hebrew Bible’, Nations and Nationalism, 11(2), ­ pp. 223–242. ­ ­ ​­ Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London and New York: Verso. 466

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Appiah, Anthony. 2018. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. London: W.W. Norton. Apter, E. (2013) Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso. Baer, B. J. (2017) ‘De- sacralizing the Original, or the Translational Future of Translation Studies’, Perspectives, 25(2), ­ pp. 227–244. ­ ­ ​­ Barendaum, I. (1965) ‘Iz istorii russkikh progressivnykh izdatel’stv 60-ykh 70-ykh godov XIX veka’, ­ ­ ​­ in Sikorskii, N. M. (ed.), Kniga i nauka o knige. Moscow: Kniga, pp. 223–241. Batalden, S. (2013) Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bermann, S. (2005) ‘Introduction’, in Bermann, S. and Wood, S. (eds.), Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 1–10. Bhabha, H. (1990) ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Bhabha, H. K. (ed.), Nation and Narration. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 1–7. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2010) Multilingualism. A Critical Perspective. London and New York: Continuum. ­Buck-Morss, ​­ S. (2009) ­ Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Cho, H. (2016) Translation’s Forgotten History. Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chukovskii, K. (1964) Vysokoe Iskusstvo [A high art]. Moscow and Leningrad: Academia. Clowes, E. W. (2011) Russia on the Edge. Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Cronin, M. (2006) Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War. (1999) Official website of the film. New York: Great Projects Film. Available online: https://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_film.html. [Accessed 5 October 2019]. Derrida, J. (2000) Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmontelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. R. Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dobiáš, D. (2019) The Forged Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora Manuscripts. Prague: Czech Academy of Sciences. Editorial Board (1955) Introduction to inaugural issue. Inostrannaia Literature, 1, pp. 3–4. ­ ­ ​­ Fedorov, A. V. (1941) O khudozhestvennom perevode [On Literary Translation]. Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Fedorov, A. V. (1953) Vvedenie v teoriiu perevoda [Introduction to Translation Theory]. Moscow: Literatury na inostrannyikh iazykov. Figes, O. (2002) Natasha’s Dance. London: Allen Lane. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Heilbron, J. (2010) ‘Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translation as a Cultural World System’, in Baker, M. (ed.), Critical Readings in Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 304–316. ­ ­ ​­ Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. O. (eds.) (1992) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inghilleri, M. (2017) Translation and Migration. London and New York: Routledge. Israel, H. (2006) ‘Translating the Bible in Nineteenth- century India’, in Hermans, T. (ed.), Translating Others, vol. 2. Manchester: St. Jerome, pp. 441– 459. Jones, F. R. (2010) ‘Poetry Translation, Nationalism and the Wars of the Yugoslav Transition’, The Translator, 16(2), ­ pp. 223–253. ­ ­ ​­ Kalb, J. (2017) ‘Homer in Russia’, in Torlone, Z. M., LaCourse Munteanu, D. and Dutsch, D. (eds.), A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, ­ ​­ pp. 469–479. ­ ­ ​­ Kapnist, P. (2013) [1901] ‘On Nikitin’, in Baer, B. J. and Olshanskaya, N. (eds.), Russian Writers on Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome, pp. 27–28. ­ ­ ​­ Kiukhelbeker, W. (2013) [1824] ‘On the Direction of Our Poetry, Especially Lyrical Poetry, Over the Last Decade’, in Baer, B. J. and Olshanskaya, N. (eds.), Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology. Manchester: St. Jerome, pp. 21–23. ­ ­ ​­ 467

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Kuhiwczak, P. (1999) ‘Translation ­ and Language Games in the Balkans’, in Anderman, G. M. and Rogers, M. (eds.), Word, Text, Translation: Liber Amicorum for Peter Newmark. Clevedon: Multilingual ­ ­ ​­ Matters, pp. 217–224. Levy, I. (2006) Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Lotman, J. (2019) ‘Cultural Memory’, in Tamm, M. (ed.), Essays on Cultural Memory. London and New ­ ­ ​­ York: Palgrave, pp. 139–148. Lloyd, David. 1993. Anamolous States. Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McLaughlin, M. (2015) ‘Prolégomènes à l’étude des idéologies et attitudes linguistiques dans la presse ­ ­ ​­ périodique sous l’Ancien Régime’, Circula: Revue d’idéologies linguistiques, 1, pp. 4–25. Mignolo, W. D. (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Peter, I. (2013) ‘Edict 4438. On the Preparation of Translators of Books for Instruction in the Sciences (1724)’ in Baer, B. J. and Olshanskaya, N. (eds.), Russian Writers on Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Rafael, V. (1992) Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Renan, E. (1990) ‘What Is a Nation?’, in Bhabha, H. K. (ed.), Nation and Narration. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 8–22. ­ ­ ​­ Ricoeur, P. (2006) On Translation. Trans. E. Brennan. London and New York: Routledge. Rogatchevskii, A. (2010) ‘Review of Oleg Dorman: Word for Word Translation (Podstrochnik ­ 2009)’, Kinokultura 30: online. Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Seidman, N. (2006) Faithful Renderings. Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Semennikov, V. P. (1913) Sobranie staraiushcheesia o perevode inostrannykh knig. St. Petersburg: Sirius. Shamma, T. (2009) ‘Translating into the Empire. The Arabic Version of Kalila wa Dimna’, The Translator, 15(1), ­ pp. 65–86. ­ ​­ Shishkov, A. (2013) [1811] ‘A Conversation between Two Friends about Translating Words from One Language into Another’, in Baer, B. J. and Olshanskaya, N. (eds.), Russian Writers on Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Sirotkina, I. (2002) Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930. Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Stalin, I. V. (1934) Markizm i national’ no-kolonial’nyi vopros. Moscow: Partizdat. Suny, R. G. and Martin, T. (2001) ‘Introduction’, in Suny, R. G. and Martin, T. (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–20. ­ ­ ​­ Tageldin, S. (2011) Disarming Words: Empire and the Seduction of Translation in Egypt. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Thiong’o, N. wa. (2012) In the House of the Interpreter. A Memoir. New York: Anchor Books. Trumpener, K. (1997) Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vatsuro, V. E. and Virolainen, M. N. (1987) ‘Pis’ma Andreia Turgeneva k Zhukovskomu’, in Likhachev, D. S., Iezuitova, R. V. and Kanunova, F. Z. (eds.), Zhukovskii i russkaia kul’tura. Leningrad: Nauka, pp. 350–430. ­ ­ ​­ Venclova, T. (1979) ‘Translations of World Literature and Political Censorship in Contemporary Lithuania’, Lituanus, 25(2), ­ pp. 5–26. ­ ­ ​­ Venuti, L. (2005) ‘Local Contingencies: Translation and National Idenities’, in Bermann, S. and Wood, M. (eds.), ­ Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 177–202. ­ ­ ​­ Witt, S. (2016) ‘Socialist Realism in Translation: The Theory of a Practice.’ Baltic World 9(4), pp. 52–58. Zacek, J. C. (1966) ‘The Russian Bible Society and the Russian Orthodox Church’, Church History, 35(4), ­ pp. 411–437. ­ ­ ​­

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32 Translation and borders Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte

Introduction: what is a border?1 In a seminal essay entitled ‘What Is a Border?’ Étienne Balibar reflects on the ‘heterogeneity’ of borders, shifting zones which are ‘polysemic’ (1997/2011: 92) in the sense that they do not have exactly the same functions and meaning for everyone: they are experienced in different ways by individuals who come from different parts of the world, who do not have the same social status. So, a simple answer to that question is not possible, because the border cannot be attributed an essence that is valid in all places and at all times. In fact, trying to define borders is in some sense absurd, since ‘to mark out a border is, precisely, to define a territory, to delimit it, and so to register the identity of that territory’. Nevertheless, their ‘multiplicity, their hypothetical and fictive nature, do not make them any less real’ ( Balibar 2002: 76). Any attempt to define borders should take into account their ubiquity. Borders are no longer static. Nor are they lines or demarcations of sovereignty and nation- state power encompassing a national territory and marking a clear separation between political, social and economic spaces but something much more complex, since some borders are no longer situated at the borders, in the geographical, political and administrative sense. On the contrary, they are wherever controls are to be found, such as in health (in Foucault’s sense of biopower) or security checks. That is why Walters (2006a: 153) argues that borders are privileged sites that contribute to the production of population as a knowable, governable entity. Borders are places of separation, contact and/or confrontation, thresholds that exert a compelling hold on our lives (Mukherji 2011). They work as filters, as mechanisms to maintain official distinctions between people, allowing differential access to different individuals. This is the well-known filtering function of the border control ( Kearney 1991: 58), one that separates the unwanted from the wanted cross-border flows (Andreas 2000: 4). Borders are ‘asymmetric membranes’ ( Rumford 2008a: 3), a ‘firewall’ that hits and selects ( Walters 2006b: 197). The globalizing processes have not given way to a borderless world characterized by flows, hybridization, and smooth spaces where the global/ local nexus is possible (Appadurai 2006). Globalization has not led to a reduction of borders but rather to their proliferation ( Balibar 1997/2011: 92; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: 62). Far from disappearing thanks to a global, 469

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interconnected, universal world, borders are being reasserted, rebuilt and consolidated, from Trump’s idea of constructing a wall along the US-Mexican border (which led to the cruel physical separation of parents and their children, who were put into cages) to the political and social consequences in Europe in the wake of the ‘summer migration’ of 2015. Or, most recently, the huge migrant caravan of Hondurans making their way across Guatemala and Mexico to reach the United States. These and many other examples prove that there is a return to national borders and to ethnic separation, to the blocking of access on the principle of a perceived universal fear of the stranger. In fact, there are also invisible, inner borders, located everywhere and nowhere ( Balibar 1997/2011: 78– 84). Contemporary borders can take many forms. They continue to be physical spaces, which regulate movement from outside threats, but they are also radar- and computer- controlled, digital, intelligent border surveillance technologies that establish network-like security spaces (integrating satellites, drones, and radar systems with big data banks) such as Spain’s Integrated System for External Vigilance (SIVE), introduced in 2002 […], the Maritime Surveillance (MARSUR) system, introduced in 2005; and the European Border Surveillance ( EUROSUR) system, introduced by the EU in 2013 alongside databases like the fingerprint data bank Eurodac, the Schengen Information System (SIS), and the Visa Information System ( VIS). Traditional borders have given way to ‘smart’ borders, relying on high-tech biometric technology, ‘remote borders’ or those located at airports, in internet cafes or along the motorway (Amoore 2006: 337; Walters 2006a, b; Donnan and Wilson 2010; Dijstelbloem and Meijer 2011; Rumford 2014: 79). Borders are now contentious zones, ongoing, dialectical processes that generate multiple border zones, borderlands, borderscapes or networked borders ( Rumford 2006: 153), some of which are not located close to the official international boundary itself. Consequently, borders are not merely geographical edges, but also metaphorical walls, complex territories marked by tensions between practices of border reinforcement and border crossing. Borders are metaphors of a newly emerging culture- space where displacement is a daily reality for many people (Hicks 1991). They determine inclusion and exclusion. They are ‘equally devices of inclusion that select and filter people. These different forms of circulation are in ways no less violent than those deployed in exclusionary measures’. They have a ‘world- configuring function’ and the power to lead one to a ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: 3–7). Borders are zones that separate ‘us’ from ‘them’, ‘ here’ from ‘there’: bordering is thus closely linked to ordering and othering (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002) but also to questions of race and gender ( Vieten 2012). They have the power to remove the civic status of a person at the moment of crossing and turn her into an illegal, undocumented person without citizenship rights. Borders are both markers of belonging and places of becoming ( Brambilla 2015: 24). Geopolitical zones and social spaces of subaltern encounters, a Janus-faced territory, as Saldívar (1997: 13–14) calls it in his study of the US­Mexico border. The border is a ‘global frontier-land’ ( Bauman 2007: 37), a realm beyond the control of states where ‘global outcasts’ like refugees, migrants or asylum seekers reside in a state of ‘permanent transitoriness’ […] The global borderland can be appropriated by powerful nation- states […] to pursue forms of exclusion, create barriers to global mobility, and pursue a ‘politics 470

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of pre-emption’ which would be unthinkable and unacceptable in conventional domestic politics. Global borderlands are the ‘spaces of wonder’. (Rumford 2008b: 639) where ‘normal’ rules do not necessarily apply and, as a consequence, fear is institutionalized. Within these spaces of wonder, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib have become possible, and they also allow ‘thousands of “ illegal” immigrants to perish in the Mediterranean and Atlantic while undertaking journeys by sea or to be killed or injured attempting to cross into the EU at the barbed wire fences erected in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa’ ( Rumford 2014: 81). In this context, borders have an important role in the construction of strangeness. Strangers are at our door ( Bauman 2016) and hybridity can fuel reactionary politics and deep-seated xenophobia ( Beck 1997/2000; Held and McGrew 2000/ 2003: 4; Robertson and White 2007; Elliot and Lemert 2014). S/he who lives in the border is the contemporary homo sacer (Agamben 1995/1998). Borderlands are those topoi where asymmetry between cultures and a globalization of fear ( Bauman 2006) and violence ( Bielsa and Hughes 2009) is experienced. This has led to the rise of ‘the losers of globalization’ ( Beck 1997/2000) and of ‘wasted lives and outcasts’ ( Bauman 2004). Borders are continually made and remade, rebordered and debordered ( Brambilla et al. 2015: 3). That is why some scholars have reflected on their complex nature and argue for ‘cosmopolitan borders’, which have a changing nature, in terms of their function, their location and their ownership. Labelling some borders ‘cosmopolitan’ means that ‘they are no longer only a project of the nation- state […] borders are cosmopolitan because they are no longer only under the control of the state; other actors and agencies may also be involved’ ( Rumford 2014: 2). From this perspective, borders are a prime site for cosmopolitan encounters, and ‘ borderwork’ identifies new meanings of the border not tied to the state since it encompasses the role of ordinary people in making, shifting and removing borders, and in this sense they can be a political resource for citizens ( Rumford 2006, 2008a: 59– 65, 2009, 2014: 3). The centrality of borders to cosmopolitan thinking is fully understood when we see borders as zones of connectivity which not only divide but also connect individuals transnationally, both to the other side of the border but sometimes far beyond, by creating ‘cosmopolitan opportunities through the possibility of cultural encounters and negotiations of difference’ ( Rumford 2014: 3). It is true that the growing interconnectedness among cultures creates new animosities and conflicts, states of flux and turbulence ( Papastergiadis 2000/2007): the flows and mobilities of globalization constitute a threat to the integrity of our familiar communities ( Rumford 2013: xi). However, this connectivity also creates the potential for translation networking and it turns borders into ‘political resources, offering routes to empowerment of ordinary people’ ( Rumford 2014: 20). In fact, contradicting one of the basic tenets of border studies, multiperspectival studies of borders mean that some borders are not meant to be seen by everyone. This idea links borders to cosmopolitanism, since the ability ‘to see like a border’ is an essential component of meaningful cosmopolitanism because it is ​­ an alternative to ‘see[ing] like a state’ ( Rumford 2012: 8891; Rumford 2014: ­39–54). This new way to look at borders is linked to a more critical viewpoint according to which globalization has yielded to cosmopolitanism ( Rovisko and Nowicka 2011; Holton 2009; Kendall et al. 2009; Delanty 2012; Archibugi 2008). Cosmopolitanism offers ‘a critical approach to global issues and a way of looking at modernity beyond the limits of Eurocentrism’ ( Delanty 2009: ix). For a critique of Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, see Derrida 1997/2010). Cosmopolitanism concerns self-problematization. In effect, cosmopolitanism has managed to reveal the danger of globalizing Western views (a real danger if we consider the hundreds of 471

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thousands of people who have been seduced by a discourse as indescribable as that of Donald Trump), and the risk of imposing only a binary logic that creates physical and metaphorical borders. Instead, cosmopolitanism promotes a ‘plurality of worlds which are multiple, simultaneous, and perspectival’ ( Rumford 2014: 150), as well as a growing transnationalization, multiple identities, cultural mix and recognition of otherness. So, the new perspectives on borders underline the fact that a border is also a place, a situation or a moment that ritualizes the relationship to the other (Agier 2016: 7). And this shift from globalization to cosmopolitanism is very important in this chapter, because, as we shall see below, my proposal is one of cosmopolitan translation, a cultural translation understood as a third culture which incorporates the perspective of the Other, embraces diversity and tries to develop an ethicalpolitical relational model of planetary interaction that Rosi Braidotti dubs ‘ becoming world’ ( Braidotti et al. 2013: 8–27). Critical cosmopolitanism occurs whenever new relations between Self, Other and World develop in moments of openness […] Cosmopolitanism cannot be explained in terms of a single, Western notion of modernity or in terms of globalization. Cosmopolitanism refers to the multiplicity of ways in which the social world is constructed through the articulation of a third culture. ( Delanty 2009: 53) thus embodying, in its subversive potential, a transformative vision of an alternative reality ( Bielsa 2016) which will help us define our idea of a cosmopolitan translation.

Border languages From the middle of the nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth century, millions of people abandoned Europe for economic reasons and settled in Canada, the United States, Latin America and Australia. Another wave of emigration began towards the end of the twentieth century because of decolonization and recruitment on the part of the former colonies of workers to cover the needs of growing European economies. On the other hand, Western Europe was the destination chosen by those fleeing autocratic regimes in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Finally, in the t wenty-fi rst century, we find a new migratory wave in those trying to escape from Middle Eastern regimes long supported by the United States and Europe (Inghilleri 2017: 6–7). Calais, Lampedusa, Lesbos, Idomeni and Melilla, rush to strengthen their borders to stop the new pariahs from moving northwards. The exodus of refugees fleeing war in Syria or the caravan of Hondurans heading for the United States are perhaps the most recent ( but not the last) examples of a phenomenon which is forcing us to rethink the concept of border almost daily. In all these cases, borderlands are those places inhabited by nomads who have no rights to anything and not even the right to belong to a place. These world events point to a clash between cosmopolitan desires and counter-cosmopolitan forces (De ­ Medeiros 2019: 61–62). ­ ​­ In theory, the main aim of a border is to protect against mobility and disintegration. However, perhaps because the border is never only physical but also metaphorical, borders are linked to the ‘mobility turn’ ( Urry 2000; Inghilleri 2017). The narrator of ‘The Great Wall of China’ by Franz Kaf ka already discussed the idea that the wall designed to delimit and separate never becomes a complete and firmly closed structure, because conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in the points of contact and differentiation between two bodies ( De Certeau 1984/1988: 127). The human being always finds some crack in that separating space, and he does so through language, creativity, imagination or literature and the arts (Gómez-Peña 1996, 472

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2000; Welchman 1996; Muntadas in Davila and Roma 2002; Papastergiadis 2012; Soueif and Hamilton 2017), participating actively in that middle space characterized by ‘a logic of ambiguity’ ( De Certeau 1984/1988: 127). Thus, the border becomes a threshold of unpredictable dynamics, of variable spatial and temporal dimensions, a site characterized by asymmetry, instability and a potential for disorder ( Benito and Manzanas 2006: 2–3). Borders have transformed reality and identity. Migrants who inhabit borders are characters who ‘are always simultaneously influencing and being influenced by others, perceiving the world and evolving within it even when they appear to be standing still’, identities ‘ in movement, in constant transformation and continuous becoming’ ( Inghilleri 2017: 1). And since language is often a reflection of the social and political context where it is found, borders have also resulted in a language which reflects these identities marked by asymmetries, instability and hybridation. Border language is ‘an active site where the contours of inclusion and exclusion become most visible’ ( Inghilleri 2017: 3). The site where people are led to live in several places almost simultaneously, to live increasingly in mobility, in an in-between (Agier ­ 2017: ­viii–ix). ​­ It is precisely this in-between state that is the most important characteristic of border language. Those who live in a border live in a contact zone ( Pratt 1992), in the space in the middle (Godayol 2000, 2001), in Nepantla, the land in the middle (Mora 1993). But what is most important is that this in-between condition will never change, even if these people reach their destination, because they will always be identities between two cultures, atravesados, the squint- eye, the queer, the troublesome, the half-breed, the half- dead. In short, they are those who cross over the confines of the normal (Anzaldúa 1987: 3). They live at the juncture, where univocal identities are never possible and languages mix because borders are always present in their imaginary homelands ( Rushdie 1981/1991). The dominant discourses of modernity promoted paradigms that assumed territorialization, structure and stability. From this perspective, language became a static system. But as people move across borders, they are taking their languages with them and also appropriating new semiotic resources for their identities and communication. Transnational contact in diverse cultural and social domains has increased the interaction between languages and language groups and migration has involved people taking their heritage languages to new locales that were not traditionally part of their communities (Canagarajah 2013: 2). In these circumstances, language ‘ is never simply an instrument of self-expression or communication, but a collective force […] a site of cultural and political asymmetries’ ( Venuti 1998b: 136), a territory of endless negotiations between the familiar and the unfamiliar ( Bhabha 1994). Home-m aking and place-m aking are now ongoing activities in mobility mediated by language (Canagarajah 2017: 6–7), a language whose dismemberment makes us think of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1974/1986) ‘deterritorialization’. Border language rejects the colonizer’s language and transforms it into a different language, reflecting its own way of seeing the world and its experience of the world (Grutman 2006; Grutman 2009) in translation ( Bertacco 2014: 6). That is why border thinking demands a bilanguaging (Mignolo 2000: 251), which is a way of life ‘ between languages: a dialogical, ethic, aesthetic, and political process of social transformation’ (Mignolo 2000: 265). For example, the language originating on the border between Mexico and the United States reflects a way of living between two worlds, a way of life that refuses to accept being forced to speak ‘correctly’, something that Gloria Anzaldúa (1987: ix), one of the first authors to reflect on border and language, calls a bastard language which ‘ is not approved by any society’. And the reason this language is not accepted is that those who are in a permanent frontier state deconstruct language, twist it and say words like marqueta (a blend of market and mercado), 473

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watchear (a verb constructed using the Spanish system of the verb observar but based on the English verb to watch) or ‘ incorrect’ expressions like late or early, because they are again a mixture of peninsular Spanish grammar and English vocabulary. Thus, by replacing ‘English’ with their ‘English’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989) they show the asymmetries between languages, which reflect the asymmetries of power between cultures. This is something we find on all borders and is reflected in the literature of the so- called ‘ hyphenated writers’, who write ‘“diagraphic” works, written at least in the two languages of the writer’ (Casanova 1999/2001: 345). Examples of Latin writers who feel ‘out of place’ (Said 1999) include Susana Chávez- Silverman, Junot Díaz, José María Arguedas, Alejandro Morales, Julia Alvarez, Esmeralda Santiago, Ana Lydia Vega, Graciela Limón, Cristina García, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Óscar Hijuelos, Tino Villanueva, Abelardo Delgado, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat and many others. Writers from many other contact zones are Pakistanis (Moniza Alvi), Indians ( Vikram Chandra, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Jumpa Laghiri, Manju Kapur, Shobha Dé) or Chinese-Americans (Maxine Hong Kingston, David Wong Louie, Fae Myenne Ng) who write in English, Maghrebis who write in French ( Tahar Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar), Turks who write in German ( Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, Jakob Arjouni), Iranians who write in Dutch ( Kader Abdolah), Moroccans who write in Catalan ( Najat El Hachmi) or Africans who write in Spanish ( Donato Ndongo, Mohamed El Gheryb) or in English (Chinua Achebe, Nuruddin Farah). They are novelists who move across spaces. This is the case of the Chinese-American novels of Maxine Hong Kingston or the stories of David Wong Louie. They also cross other cultures, like Japanese and American culture in the novels of John Okada and Cynthia Kadohata. These writers reflect the constant, literal and metaphorical border situation many of their compatriots suffer. That is why they do not write in a ‘pure’ but rather in a hybrid English or ub French, German, Dutch, Japanese or Chinese. Like Linton Kewsi Johnson, Sam Selvon or Ken Saro-Wiwa they write in a ‘rotten English’, in altered forms of the colonizer’s language ( Hall 1990; Hall and Du Gay 1996/2005). Their use of language registers the arrogance of monolingualism ( Bennett and Queiroz de Barros, 2017) and invents ‘strategies for incorporating the various languages, geographies, and audiences in which they get their start’ ( Walkowitz 2015: 42). This language ‘exposes us to difference, awakening deep-seated fears echoed in words such as invasion and contagion’ ( Polezzi 2012: 346). It is a language that reflects critical and post-universalist cosmopolitanism ( Delanty 2009: 52), which is critical and dialogic. It fosters openness, and the encounter with the self, the other and the world, the encounter with the global and the local, in an attempt to reconcile universal solidarity with individual solidarities and to expose a plurality of cosmopolitan projects combining the global and the local. It is a political use of language which turns the border into a literal and metaphorical place of recognition: ‘We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages […] So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I a m my language’ (Anzaldúa 1987: 77, 81).

Translation and/in cosmopolitan borders Étienne Balibar was one of the first sociologists to see the connection between borders and translation. Following Walter Benjamin, he understood translation not as the transmission of contents but as the production of a transnational space of translation which establishes a relation with the foreign ( Bielsa and Aguilera 2017; Bielsa 2010, 2016). Border language is ‘a 474

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shifting boundary’ ( Bhabha 1994), but also what Balibar (1997/2011: 84) suggests is taking Bhabha’s argument a step further: a way for contemporary migrants not only to bear the mark of changing lines but also to transform themselves into borders, thus turning the border into a form of autotopography, an outer and inner landscape. As we have seen in the previous sections, borders and migrations are continually present in our contemporary world. That is why they are key concepts generating scholarly enquiry in many disciplines, but especially in Translation Studies, a field interested in questions arising on the move, at the borders, in the cosmopolitan encounter with the other (Minh-ha 2011: 110). The new venues in translation studies are far from traditionalist views of the task of the translator as impartial and invisible, and this has made possible a cosmopolitan approach to translating. After the ‘cultural turn’ ( Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), there was a shift from an emphasis on sameness and normativeness to an acceptance of difference in translation. Lefevere’s (1992) concept of rewriting took into account Foucault’s notion of power to show that language is never neutral but an unavoidably ideological medium for describing experience, and thus that translation is never a simple and innocent semantic substitution (Álvarez and Vidal 1996; Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002). All these changes in translation theory reflect a global and also asymmetrical world, where an ethical translation is understood as a political act, as an exploration of power relationships ( Vidal 2018). Translation is not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication  – and even, in some cases, of falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of secret codes. In these ways, translators, as much as creative writers and politicians, participate in the powerful acts that create knowledge and shape culture ( Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002: xxi) These powerful acts are what make translation a complex act because they have brought about epistemological shifts that have contributed to a rethinking of such concepts as identity, nation, the local and the global (Mudimbe-Boyi 2002) and because they put aside old unifying discourses about peoples and usher in the hybridity and wealth of difference: ‘The transnational dimension, of cultural t ransformation- m igration, diaspora, displacement, relocation- makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification’ ( Bhabha 1994: 172). In borderlands, translation needs to possess a sociological and empirical aspect ( Beck 2004/2006) in order to deal with a reality of multiple belonging or cultural hybridity, of translated lives and world families, a reality that escapes and can no longer be grasped by traditional conceptions of identity, which assume a natural correlation between the identity of individuals and the place they belong to. (Bielsa and Aguilera 2017: 17) That is why our proposal is that, bearing in mind the previous discussion regarding the progress made in sociology to make the move from globalization to cosmopolitanism, in borderlands an ethical translation is not a universalizing global translation but a cosmopolitan translation: a translation that highlights ‘the multiplicity of languages within any single language’. In doing so it ‘undermines the distinction between original and alien culture’ and gives the reader ‘the 475

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opportunity to practice multidimensional perception and nonsynchronous memory […] the ability to see not just from one side of a border, but from the other side as well’ (Hicks 1991: xxiii). A cosmopolitan translator wants the cultural other to be manifested, since translating should be here a form of resistance ( Venuti 1995; Venuti 1998b) against ethnocentrism, racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism. The greatest scandal of translation ( Venuti 1998a) is the fact that asymmetries, inequities, relations of domination and dependence exist in every act of translating. That is why translators should not be complicit in the institutional exploitation of foreign texts and cultures. Translation changes – should change – everything ( Venuti 2013). The cosmopolitan translator deals with people who are, like the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s Shame, translated beings who live in a liminal state between worlds, between realities, between systems of knowledge, between symbology systems ( León Portilla 1962; Pratt 1992; Mora 1993; Bhabha 1994; Anzaldúa and Keating 2002). S/he deals with border identities whose exile is ‘a discontinuous state of being’ (Said 1990: 357), who experience a continuous sense of placelessness and uprootedness, a state of perplexity and indefinition, of transition and concurrent positioning: ‘The exile therefore consists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with halfinvolvements and half- detachments’ (Said 1996: 49). This is what their language(s) reflect: their coming from elsewhere and hence their experiencing of ‘ both their preliminary dispersal and their subsequent translation into new, more extensive, arrangements along emerging routes’ (Chambers 1994: 6). If ‘the condition of the migrant is the condition of the translated being’ (Cronin 2006: 45), in order to translate ethically in borderlands the translator must bear in mind that the unity of language is fundamentally political ( Deleuze and Guattari 1975/1986, 1980/1987) and that, as previously argued, migrants do not want their language to be a mirror-image of the dominant language. A cosmopolitan translation is not translation as reflection but translation as reflexion: translation as diversification and not as assimilation (Cronin 1998: 148). Translation as representation ( Tymoczko 2007: 112–113). Translation as a way to reflect on the social conditions of the production of utterances: ‘what matters in talk, in discourse, is not power inherent in language itself, but the kind of authority or legitimacy in which it is backed’ ( Bourdieu 1991: 265). If the translations of these border writings are not made from a cosmopolitan viewpoint but from a globalizing one, then translating becomes a power exercise which brings with it ‘varying degrees of violence, especially when the culture being translated is constituted as that of the “other”’ ( Dingwaney 1995: 4). This is what has happened on occasion when these authors have been translated. For example, the first translation published in Spain of Sandra Cisneros’s short stories Women Hollering Creek (1991) was made from a universalizing perspective which did not take into account the hybrid nature of the text, the idea that to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture (Fanon 1967: 38). The result was a translation into peninsular Spanish which, logically, did not meet Cisneros’s expectations. She immediately demanded a second translation which was made by Liliana Valenzuela, herself a Chicana poet, and the result was completely different: Valenzuela’s starting point was that in this case her translation could not take place between monolingual cultures but rather between polyglot, asymmetrical and interconnected citizens and multilingual entities (Meylaerts 2013; Meylaerts and Serban 2014). It therefore had to open up to spaces of difference, spaces of the between in order to be in the world. Writing back from the inside of dislocations, from the inside of and between borderlands also derives from points at ‘centralities and monopolies of economic power, gender and ideology. The migratory text may well be unanchored but its talking-back voice, dissident, confused or 476

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suppressed is filtered through contesting layered hegemonies’ (Granqvist 2006: 8, 11). Valenzuela’s translation points rightly to ‘a radical and reciprocal exchange between different forms of being and existing, a questioning of self in light of the difference of the other, which is at the basis of a cosmopolitan notion of genuine openness to others’ ( Bielsa and Aguilera 2017: 17). We could mention many other examples of good and bad translations of border writings, but we would like to point out here some of the many excellent translations that have changed the state of things, such as Gayatri Spivak’s translations of Mahasweta Devi from Bengali to English, Dora Sales’s translations of Vikram Chandra and Manju Kapur from English into Spanish, Marta Sofía López Rodríguez’s of Chinua Achebe from English into Spanish, Elena Poniatowska’s of Sandra Cisneros from English into non-peninsular Spanish or Pilar Godayol’s of various Chicano authors (Cisneros, Viramontes, Mora, Castillo, Ponce) from Spanish into Catalan. Borders give way to a ‘rich cultural mix of languages and lifestyles that most . . . [cosmopolitans] celebrate and perpetuate in their vernacular existence’ ( Bhabha 2000: ix; see also Taraborrelli 2015: 93ff ). Contrary to the simplicity of globalization, cosmopolitan languages highlight the tensions and conflicts between the global and the local, between the universal and the individual, ‘moving in-between cultural traditions, and revealing hybrid forms of life and art that do not have a prior existence within the discrete world of any single culture or language’ ( Bhabha 2000: xii). The language used in borders mirrors cosmopolitan spaces. Every word in the borders is a paradigm of crossroads, cultural exchanges, a meeting of voices, a contact zone. The role of the translator in these situations is crucial: ‘Yes, because it is perhaps the first violence which the foreigner undergoes: to have to claim his rights in a language he does not speak’ ( Derrida 2005: 7). In these circumstances, translation no longer consists of transporting meaning from one language to another. It is an operation of thought through which we must translate ourselves into the thought of the other language, the forgotten thinking of the other language. We must translate ourselves into it and not make it come into our language. It is necessary to go toward the unthought thinking of the other language (Derrida 1982/1985: 115) ­ ­ Cosmopolitan translation as ‘relevant’ translation ( Derrida 2001), as a space for hospitality and not for ‘ hostipitality’ ( Derrida 2000: 8). Not as a mere intellectual exercise but as an ethical problem; a possibility for linguistic hospitality ( Ricoeur 2005). In fact, Delanty’s views on cultural translation are based on the idea of hospitality when he refers ‘to the need to translate between different world varieties of cosmopolitanism as a key aspect of the construction of a critical, non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism’ ( Bielsa and Aguilera 2017: 15). Because one of the most obvious conditions which shows how the stranger is invaded is the language s/he is obliged to use in physical and metaphorical borders. In this context, hospitality ‘ is a principle that captures the substantive core of cosmopolitanism’ (Inghilleri 2017: 30). That is how hospitality is related to translation and border ( Derrida 1997/2000, 2000, 1997/2010). Hospitality inhabits, or should inhabit the border, and in reality can only take place there ( Derrida 2000: 14). Within those borders, cosmopolitan translation turns out to be a means of relating to others and to ourselves ( Derrida 1997/2010: 16–17).

Conclusion Edward Said (1993: 407) concludes in his seminal Culture and Imperialism that ‘No one today is purely one thing’, and in a similar vein Appiah (2006: 113) argues that ‘cultural purity is 477

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an oxymoron’. Language reflects life, and consequently, multilingualism is an inherent part of our actual life experience. Cosmopolitan translation takes as its starting point that translation does not take place between monolingual cultures (Guido 2008) but rather within and between polyglot, asymmetrical and interconnected citizens and multilingual entities (Meylaerts 2013; Meylaerts and Serban 2014). Translation Studies is a privileged territory for exploring contemporary conditions of belonging, debates about identity and difference, citizenship, borders, and fear of the Other. It addresses questions of culture and power reflected in language, since linguistic differences are markers of cultural difference which are rarely if ever neutral and involve both ideological and practical relations of subordination and dominance (Meylaerts 2006: 3). Translation practices are today advocated in order to contribute to redressing geo-political and social injustices ( Baker 2016). As we have seen, many scholars insist ‘on the importance and even ethical imperative of researchers engaging with questions of power and injustice in regard to translation. It is argued that translation is never a “neutral” activity but is always embedded culturally and politically’ ( Brownlie 2010: 45). In this context, future directions call for ethical engagement in migrant, multi- and transcultural societies. Cosmopolitanism has encouraged activism in translation studies with the creation in the twenty-fi rst century of communities of volunteer translators and interpreters ( ECOS, Babels, Traduttori per la Pace, Traductores sen Fronteiras, among others). Scholars such as Mona Baker (2016, 2009), Moira Inghilleri (2017), Siobhan Brownlie (2010), Julie Boérie (2011), Martha Cheung (2010) and Maria Tymoczko (2010, 2000), to name but a few, advocate the work of activist interpreter and translator communities, since this is a phenomenon which directly challenges the notion of translators as passive and non-interventionist […] signalling the increasing importance of translation and translators in the world despite and because of globalization, promoting linguistic diversity, and pointing out injustices to which translators and interpreters are subjected. (Brownlie 2010: 46, 48) Borderlands imply permanent displacement, dialogue, not across difference, but dialogue about difference (Inghilleri 2007: 23).

Further reading Apter, E. (ed.) (2001) Translation in a Global Market. Special issue of Public Culture 13 (1). One of the most interesting features of this special issue is that the authors come from different academic disciplines (including visual artists) from where they question the impact of certain translations in non-Western languages and they claim to be in favour of shifting from global to transnational literacy. Bielsa, E. (2016) Cosmopolitanism and Translation. Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign. London and New York: Routledge. One of the few publications in existence on the subject of cosmopolitan translation. It is very clear and has a solid theoretical base with regard to both sociology and translation. Food for thought. Canagarajah, S. (ed.) (2017) Handbook of Migration and Language. London and New York: Routledge. A key reference to explore the consequences of human mobility in the languages of today’s globalized world, taking into account such concepts as identity, nation- state and social stratification. Inghilleri, M. (2017) Translation and Migration. London and New York: Routledge. A seminal book that studies the role of translation in situations of migratory movement through a rich variety of literary, ethnographic, visual and historical materials.

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Note 1 This paper is part of the research carried out within the project ‘Violencia simbólica y traducción: retos en la representación de identidades fragmentadas en la sociedad global’, financed by the Min­​­­ ​­ isterio de Economía y Competitividad ­FFI2015-66516-P.

References Agamben, G. (1995/1998) ­ ­ Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, D. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agier, M. (2016) Borderlands. Cambridge: Polity Press. Agier, M. (2017) Borderlands. Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition, trans. Fernbach, D. Cambridge: Polity Press. Álvarez Rodríguez, R. and Vidal Claramonte, M. C. A. (eds.) (1996) Translation, Power, Subversion. Cleveland: Multilingual Matters. Amoore, L. (2006) Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’ Political Geography, ­ pp. 336–351. ­ ­ ​­ 25(3), Andreas, P. (2000) ‘Introduction: The Wall after the Wall’, in Andreas, P. and Snyder, T. (eds.), The Wall around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North American and Europe. Lanham, MD, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 1–14. Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, G. and Keating, A. L. (eds.) (2002) This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. London and New York: Routledge. Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers. An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Appiah, K. A. (2006) Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin. Archibugi, D. (2008) The Global Commonwealth of Citizen: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (1989) The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post­Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. Baker, M. (2009) ‘Resisting State Terror: Theorizing Communities of Activist Translators and Interpreters’, in Bielsa, E. and Hughes, C. W. (eds.), Globalization, Political Violence and Translation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 222–242. ­ ­ ​­ Baker, M. (ed.) (2016) Translating Dissent. Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. New York and London: Routledge. Balibar, É. (1997/2011) ­ ­ Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Jones, C., Swenson, J. and Turner, C. London: Verso. Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (eds.) (1990) Translation, History and Culture. London: Pinter. Bauman, Z. (2004) Wasted Lives. Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2007) Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2016) Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (1997/2000) ­ ­ What Is Globalization?, trans. Camiller, P. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2004/2006) ­ ­ The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benito, J. and Manzanas, A. (eds.) (2006) The Dynamics of the Threshold. Essays on Liminal Negotiations. Madrid: The Gateway Press. Bennett, K. and Queiroz de Barros, R. (2017) ‘International English: Its Current Status and Implications for Translation’, The Translator, 23(4), ­ pp. 363–370. ­ ­ ​­ Bertacco, S. (ed.) (2014) Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures. Multilingual Contexts, Translational Texts. London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, H. K. (2000) Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition the Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge, pp. ­ix–xxvi. ​­ Bielsa, E. (2010) ‘Cosmopolitanism, Translation and the Experience of the Foreign’, Across Languages and Cultures, 11(2), ­ pp. 161–174. ­ ­ ​­ Bielsa, E. (2016) Cosmopolitanism and Translation. Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign. London and New York: Routledge.

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Bielsa, E. and Aguilera, A. (2017) ‘Politics of Translation: A Cosmopolitan Approach’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 4(1), ­ pp. 7–24. ­ ­ ​­ Bielsa, E. and Hughes, C. (2009) Globalization, Political Violence and Translation. New York: Palgrave. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Raymond, G. and Adamson, M. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Braidotti, R. et al. (eds.) (2013) After Cosmopolitanism. New York and London: Routledge. Brambilla, C. (2015) ‘Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept’, Geopolitics, 20(1), ­ pp. 14–34. ­ ­ ​­ Brambilla, C. et al. (eds.) (2015) Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making. London and New York: Routledge. Brownlie, S. (2010) ‘Committed Approaches and Activism’, in Gambier, Y. and Doorslaer, L. van (eds.), ­ Handbook of Translation Studies 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 45– 48. Canagarajah, A. S. (2013) Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London and New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S. (2017) ‘The Nexus of Migration and Language. The Emergence of a Disciplinary Space’, in Canagarajah, S. (ed.), Handbook of Migration and Language. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–28. ­ ­ ​­ Casanova, P. (1999/2001) ­ ­ La République mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Chambers, I. (1994) Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Cheung, M. (2010) ‘Rethinking Activism: The Power and Dynamics of Translation in China during the Late Qing Period (1840–1911)’, in Baker, M., Calzada Pérez, M. and Olohan, M. (eds.), Text and Context: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason. Manchester: St. Jerome ­ ­ ​­ Publishing, pp. 237–258. Cronin, M. (1998) ‘The Cracked Looking Glass of Servants: Translation and Minority in a Global ­ pp. 145–162. ­ ­ ​­ Age’, in Venuti, L. (ed.), ‘Translation and Minority’, The Translator, 4(2), Cronin, M. (2006) Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Davila, M. and Roma, V. (eds.) (2002) Muntadas. On Translation. Barcelona: ACTAR/MACBA. De Certeau, M. (1984/1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, S. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Medeiros, P. (2019) ‘Translation and Cosmopolitanism’, in Bassnett, S. (ed.), Translation and World Literature. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 60–74. Delanty, G. (2009) The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2012) Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies. New York and London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1975/1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Polan, D. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980/1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, B. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1982/1985) ­ ­ The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, J. (1997/2010) ­ ­ On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Dooley, M. and Hughes, M. London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1997/2000) ­ ­ Of Hospitality, trans. Bowlby, R. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. (2000) ‘Hostipitality’, trans. Stocker, B. and Morlock, F. Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical ­ pp. 3–18. ­ ­ ​­ Humanities, 5(3), Derrida, J. (2001) ‘What Is a “Relevant” Translation?’, trans. Venuti, L. Critical Inquiry, 27(2), ­ pp. 174–200. ­ ­ ​­ Derrida, J. (2005) ‘The Principle of Hospitality’, Parallax, 11(1), ­ pp. 6–9. ­ ­ ​­ Dingwaney, A. (1995) ‘Introduction: Translating “Third World” Cultures’, in Dingwaney, A. and Maier, C. (eds.), Between Languages and Cultures. Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 3–15. Dijstelbloem, H. and Meijer, A. (eds.) (2011) Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Donnan, H. and Wilson, T. M. (2010) Borderlands: Ethnographic Approaches to Security, Power, and Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Elliot, A. and Lemert, C. (2014) Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory. New York: Routledge. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin/White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Marmann. New York: Grove Press. 480

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Godayol, P. (2000) Espais de frontera. Gènere i traducció. Victoria: Eumo. Godayol, P. (2001) Veus Xicanes. Victoria: Eumo. ­Gómez-Peña, ​­ G. (1996) ­ The New World Border. San Francisco, CA: City Lights. ­Gómez-Peña, ​­ G. (2000) ­ Dangerous Border Crosser. London and New York: Routledge. Granqvist, R. J. (2006) ‘Introduction: Writing Back, False Obedience and Power’, in Granqvist, R. (ed.), ­ Writing Back in/and Translation. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 7–18. ­ ­ ​­ Grutman, R. (2006) ‘Refraction and Recognition. Literary Multilingualism in Translation’, Target, 18(1), ­ pp. 17–47. ­ ­ ​­ Grutman, R. (2009) ‘La autotraducción en la galaxia de las lenguas’, Quaderns, 16, pp. 123–134. ­ ­ ​­ Guido, M. G. (2008) English as a Lingua Franca in Cross- cultural Immigration Domains. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Hall, S. (1990) ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Rutherford, J. (ed.), Identity. London: Lawrence and ­ ­ ​­ Wishart, pp. 222–237. Hall, S. and Gay, P. du (eds.) (1996/2005) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage. Held, D. and McGrew, A. (2000/2003) ‘The Great Globalization Debate: An Introduction’, in Held, D. and McGrew, A. (eds.), The Global Transformations Reader. An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–50. ­ ­ ​­ Hicks, E. D. (1991) Border Writing. The Multidimensional Text. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press. Holton, R. J. (2009) Cosmopolitanisms. New Thinking and New Directions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Inghilleri, M. (2017) Translation and Migration. London and New York: Routledge. Kearney, M. (1991) ‘Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 4(1), ­ pp. 52–74. ­ ­ ​­ Kendall, G. et al. (2009) ­ The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism. Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lefevere, A. (1992) Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. New York and London: Routledge. León-Portilla, M. (1962) ‘Nepantla. La palabra clave de la tragedia de un pueblo’, México en la cultura, 672, 28, pp. 1–7. ­ ­ ​­ Meylaerts, R. (2006) ‘Heterolingualism in/and Translation’, Target, 18(1), ­ pp. 1–15. ­ ­ ​­ Meylaerts, R. (2013) ‘Multilingualism as a Challenge for Translation Studies’, in M illan-Varela, C. ­ ­ ​­ and Bartrina, F. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 519–533. Meylaerts, R. and Serban, A. (2014) ‘Introduction. Multilingualism at the Cinema and on Stage: A Translation Perspective’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series. Themes in Translation Studies, 13, pp. 1–13. ­ ­ ​­ Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ­Minh-ha, ​­ T. T. (2011) ­ Elsewhere, within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. New York and London: Routledge. Mora, P. (1993) Nepantla. Essays from the Land in the Middle. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ­Mudimbe-Boyi, ​­ E. (ed.) ­ (2002) ­ Beyond Dichotomies. Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Civilization, trans. Saussy, H. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 287–295. Mukherji, S. (ed.) (2011) Thinking on Thresholds. The Poetics of Transitive Spaces. London, New York and Delhi: Anthem Press. Papastergiadis, N. (2000/2007) ­ ­ The Turbulence of Migration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Papastergiadis, N. (2012) Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Polezzi, L. (2012) ‘Migration and Translation’ Translation Studies, 5(3), ­ pp. 345–356. ­ ­ ​­ Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (2005) Sobre la traducción, trans. Willson, P. Barcelona: Paidós. Robertson, R. and White, K. E. (2007) ‘What Is Globalization?’, in Ritzer, G. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 54–66. ­ ­ ​­ Rovisko, M. and Nowicka, M. (2011) Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. 481

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Rumford, C. (2006) ‘Theorizing Borders’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), ­ pp. 155–169. ­ ­ ​­ Rumford, C. (2008a) ‘Introduction: Citizens and Borderwork in Europe’, Space and Polity, 12(1), ­ ­ ­ ​­ pp. 1–12. Rumford, C. (2008b) ‘Social Policy Beyond Fear: The Globalization of Strangeness, the “War on Terror” and “Spaces of Wonder”’, Social Policy and Administration, 42(6), ­ pp. 630–44. ­ ­ ​­ Rumford, C. (2009) Cosmopolitan Spaces. Europe, Globalization, Theory. New York and London: Routledge. Rumford, C. (2012) ‘Toward a Multiperspectival Study of Borders’, Geopolitics, 17(4), ­ pp. 887–902. ­ ­ ​­ Rumford, C. (2013) The Globalization of Strangeness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rumford, C. (2014) Cosmopolitan Borders. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rushdie, S. (1981/1991) ­ ­ Imaginary Homelands New Delhi: Penguin and Granta. Said, E. (1996) Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Said, E. (1990) ‘Reflexions on Exile’, in Ferguson, R. et al. (eds.), Out There. Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 357–363. Said, E. (1999). Out of Place. New York: Vintage. Saldívar, J. D. (1997) Border Matters. Remapping American Cultural Studies ( Berkeley: University of California Press. Soueif, A. and Hamilton, O. R. (eds.) (2017) This Is Not a Border. London: Bloomsbury. Taraborrelli, A. (2015) Contemporary Cosmopolitanism. London: Bloomsbury. Tymoczko, M. (ed.) (2010) Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Tymoczko, M. (2007) Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome. Tymoczko, M. and Gentzler, E. (eds.) (2002) Translation and Power. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Tymoczko, M. (2000) ‘Translation and Political Engagement: Activism, Social Change and the Role ­ pp. 23–47. ­ ­ ​­ of Translation in Geopolitical Shifts’, The Translator, 6(1), Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge. Van Houtum, H. and van Naerssen, T. (2002) ‘Bordering, Ordering and Othering’, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 93(2), ­ pp. 125–136. ­ ­ ​­ Venuti, L. (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (1998a) The Scandals of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (1998b) ‘Introduction’, The Translator. Translation & Minority, 4(2), ­ pp. 135–144. ­ ­ ​­ Venuti, L. (2013) Translation Changes Everything. London and New York: Routledge. Vidal Claramonte, M. C. A. (2018) ‘Power’, in Harding, S. and Carbonell, O. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 79–96. Vieten, U. M. (2012) Gender and Cosmopolitanism in Europe. A Feminist Perspective. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Walkowitz, R. L. (2015) Born Translated. The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Walters, W. (2006a) ‘Rethinking Borders Beyond the State’, Comparative European Politics, 4(2/3), ­ ­ pp. 141–159. ­ ­ ​­ Walters, W. (2006b) ­ ‘Border/Control’, ­ ­ European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), ­ pp. 187–204. ­ ­ ​­ Welchman, J. (ed.) (1996) Rethinking Borders. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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33 Multilingualism and translation in the European Union Alice Leal

Introduction The European Union ( EU) is one of the most multilingual bodies of institutions in the world as the unparalleled economic and political union of 27 countries and their 24 respective languages ( Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish). Diversity constitutes one of the cornerstones of the EU, as enshrined in its legislation and conveyed in its motto, ‘united in diversity’. But how is linguistic diversity made viable in EU institutions? Mostly through mammoth translation and interpreting services coupled with the ad hoc, unofficial use of English as the EU’s lingua franca. Ironically, therefore, the EU's de jure multilingualism is enabled by its de facto monolingualism or use of English. Is this paradox an obstacle to the EU’s goal of equality among Member States and citizens? This is one of the main questions that permeate this entry. Another key issue in this chapter is the EU's translation culture. Although the majority of EU documents in languages other than English are most likely translations from English, these documents are not marked as ‘translations’ but as ‘originals’. This is known as ‘authentication’, a process stipulated in EU law through which the boundaries between originals and translations are effaced, thus granting translations original status. Is there a parallel between the EU’s translation culture and the contemporary debate on the status of translations versus originals? And to what extent does the EU’s translation culture reinforce linguistic hierarchy?

EU languages and language policy When the European Economic Community ( EEC), the forerunner of the EU, was founded in 1957, Article 217 of the Treaty of Rome (today Article 342 of the Treaty on the functioning of the European Union [TFEU]) stated that the ‘rules governing the languages of the institutions of the Union shall (…) be determined by the Council [where all Members States are represented], acting unanimously by means of regulations’.1 The very first EEC regulation 483

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(15 April 1958) ruled that ‘each of the four languages in which the Treaty is drafted is recognized as an official language in one or more of the Member States of the Community’, and went on to establish, in Article 1, that ‘[t]he official languages and the working languages of the institutions of the Community shall be Dutch, French, German and Italian’ – a n article which has been repeatedly updated after each accession. It is therefore up to the Member States to appoint one official language which, upon admission to the Union, automatically becomes an official and working language in all EU institutions. The status ‘official language’ is crucial because, as stipulated in Article 24 of the TFEU, ‘[e]very citizen of the Union may write to any of the institutions or bodies (…) in one of the languages mentioned in Article 55(1) of the Treaty on European Union [TEU] and have an answer in the same language’. Article 55(1) lists the 24 official languages of the EU, whereas Article 165(2) highlights the importance of ‘developing the European dimension in education, particularly through the teaching and dissemination of the languages of the Member States’. Further, Articles 2 and 3 emphasize the need to respect both human rights (and nondiscrimination) and the ‘rich cultural and linguistic diversity’ of its members. Article 21 of The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU ( legally binding since the Treaty of Lisbon) prohibits discrimination on grounds of language, and Article 22 obliges the Union to respect linguistic diversity (see Arzoz 2008). How do these EU articles translate into action? All EU treaties (which are known as ‘primary law’) are legally binding and set out the objectives and ground rules for the functioning of the Union. Their formulation is often vague, as we have seen in the previous paragraph. The articles in these treaties then give rise to the body of legislation known as ‘secondary law’, which lays specific actions for the goals of the treaties to be achieved. Secondary law comprises regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations and opinions. Only ‘regulations’ are legally binding and mandatory to all Member States, resulting in supranational actions – and hence the most relevant in relation to language policy. They must be translated into national law within a given deadline. Take, for instance, Regulation 2015/478 of 11 March 2015: it comprises 27 articles which painstakingly lay out common safeguards regarding goods imported into the EU. As far as language policy is concerned, we have several articles in EU primary law that emphasize the importance of multilingualism without, however, leading to specific language policies in secondary law. The only supranational, legally binding pieces of secondary law currently in force listed in the EUR-Lex platform on language and culture are Regulations 1295/2013 and 1288/2013, which established the Creative Europe Programme and the Erasmus+ programme, respectively (more on these below).2 Yet statements univocally celebrating diversity abound in non-legally binding documents, such as the following, taken from the language policy section of the European Parliament (2019) website: ‘Languages are an integral part of European identity and the most direct expression of culture’, ‘In an EU founded on the motto “United in diversity”, the ability to communicate in several languages is an important asset…’, ‘Languages not only play a key role in the everyday life of the European Union, but are also fundamental for respecting cultural and linguistic diversity in the EU’. The right to use one’s own language is thus seen as a basic right in the EU, one that dovetails with the notions of identity and democracy. This point raises the following questions: (1) Are all EU official languages equal in terms of status? (2) What about languages that are not official (such as Catalan or Turkish)? (3) And what does the EU do to foster and protect multilingualism not only in its Member States but also within its institutions? The answer to (1) is a straight ‘no’. Although officially all 24 languages enjoy the same status, informally (and in clear breech of its own legislation) the EU makes a distinction between official and 484

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procedural languages, the latter being English, German and French, with English being by far the most frequently used language across EU institutions (statistics in the section on EU translation). This distinction, along with the special status of the English language, has not been implemented by treaties or regulations and is often only mentioned in passing in different EU sources, such as in the booklet ‘Translating for a multilingual community’ ( European Commission 2009: 3), in which ‘procedural languages’ are defined as ‘English, French and German – i.e. (…) those [languages] in which the Commission conducts its internal business’. In the wake of Brexit, English is now spoken as a first language by less than 1% of the EU population (Ginsburgh et al. 2018). As a second language, English is spoken by a mere 38% of EU citizens, though ‘spoken’ does not mean spoken well, as only 21% of these EU speakers of English as a second language rate their English proficiency as ‘very good’ ( European Commission 2012: 6). Combining these two percentages, the number of competent non-native speakers of English amounts to 8% of the EU’s population – roughly 9% if we include all Irish and Maltese citizens (see also Barbier 2018: 339–340). The predominance of English in EU institutions is hence controversial in terms of democratic representation as it is neither a widely spoken language nor a neutral language that ‘ belongs’ to no one. I will come back to the de facto monolingualism of the EU in the following section. Even if we ignored the pecking order of the EU languages and concentrated on the legally binding documents mentioned in the previous paragraphs, in which all 24 official languages enjoy the same status, what about (2) all the other languages at use in the EU? It is estimated that there are ‘more than 60 indigenous regional and minority languages, and many nonindigenous languages spoken by migrant communities’ ( European Commission 2012, 2). And although the EU may allow for translation and interpreting services to be allocated to some of these languages (namely Galician, Catalan and Basque) sporadically, this is the exception and costs have to be covered by the respective Member State, as these languages do not enjoy the same status that working languages do. Due to space constraints, the issue of minority, migrant and non-territorial languages (such as the Sámi and Romani languages) cannot be addressed here. Suffice to say that, at first glance, what might look like an inclusive community in which the boundaries are blurred and the notion of national, state-bound citizenship is taken to the supranational level, can also be seen as a mechanism of internal exclusion on historical and ethnic grounds ( Balibar 2004; Craith 2006; Shuibhne 2008). Let us now turn to the last question asked above regarding (3) the EU’s concrete actions to foster and protect multilingualism in its Member States and within its institutions. Can it realistically achieve that and if so, how? Here the answer is not as clear- cut. The EU does promote numerous programmes to encourage multilingualism and language learning, such as the two mentioned above – the Creative Europe Programme and Erasmus+. These initiatives, coupled with the EU’s gargantuan translation and interpreting services, do contribute to multilingualism. However, both the level on which they operate and their scope are modest, chiefly for reasons of budget and jurisdiction. Let us take the 2018 budget as an example: out of €157.9 billion, just under €400 million (0.25%) was allocated to the Commission’s language services (Official Journal of the European Union 2018). Different estimates set the total amount invested in language services across all EU institutions below 1% of the budget ( Phillipson 2003: 114; Kraus 2011: 123; European Commission 2013). Also, all programmes under the umbrella ‘education and culture’ (such as Erasmus+ and Creative Europe) take up just over 2% of the 2018 budget. As for jurisdiction, ‘the EU (…) has limited influence because educational and language policies are the responsibility of individual Member States’ ( European Commission 2012, 2). In short, as stipulated in Article 5(2) of the TEU common provisions, ‘the Union shall act 485

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only within the limits of the competences conferred upon it by the Member States (…). Competences not conferred upon the Union in the Treaties remain with the Member States’. This is known as the ‘principle of conferral’, which hampers any supranational initiatives on the part of the EU regarding language policy. However, this principle is complemented by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, also laid out in Article 5 of the TEU. ‘Subsidiarity’ means that the EU is only allowed to act in those areas that fall outside its exclusive competence (such as language policy) when its action shall be more effective than action taken locally. ‘Proportionality’ means that any such actions taken by the EU on grounds of subsidiarity may not go beyond what is strictly necessary to achieve the objectives of the treaties. This means that, by default, EU language policy is largely limited to the symbolic level. Nevertheless, legally speaking, if it resorted to the principle of subsidiarity and conformed to the principle of proportionality, the EU could take ( legally binding) steps to engender a more robust language policy.3 But should the EU do that? Let us investigate these questions in the next section.

The EU’s paradox of language for communication and language for identification The EU’s de jure multilingualism and de facto monolingualism or use of English has become the elephant in the room, so to speak: whereas most EU researchers mention it as a hard fact (to be celebrated, accepted or regretted), the EU sweeps it under the rug ( Phillipson 2003, 2017, 2018; Frost 2004; Ives 2004; Craith 2006; Arzoz 2008 [entire volume]; Modiano 2009, 2017; Kraus 2011; Seidlhofer 2011; Leal 2012b, 2013, 2014, 2016; Gazzola and Grin 2013; Gazzola 2014; among many others). As we have seen in the previous section, the EU sees language as a crucial element of one’s identity, culture and Weltanschauung, while at the same time using language (mostly English) as a mere vehicle for communication. This is not the place to explore the philosophical underpinnings of this paradox (see Ives 2004: 28–29; Leal 2016: 5– 6, 2018; Leal forthcoming). In a nutshell, the view that language, culture and identity are interconnected, as opposed to the notion of language as a neutral instrument for communication, has come to form our contemporary concept of language (Macnamara 1991; Schlesinger 1991; Steiner 1998: 97–114; Wierzbicka 2013: 1–51; Leal 2018). Here the following questions arise: What English has become the EU’s unofficial lingua franca? Is there a paradox between the EU’s de jure multilingualism and de facto monolingualism? And does this paradox need to be resolved? The first question – what English? – would require an entire volume to be answered thoroughly, so I shall paint with a broad brush here. There are various models that portray the spread of different Englishes across the globe. Braj Kachru’s (1985) is one of the most widely used, despite its shortcomings (Seidlhofer 2011: 81). It consists of three concentric circles in a fluid, dynamic framework: the ‘ inner circle’, i.e. ‘norm-providing’ nations (Great Britain and Ireland, North America, Australasia), the ‘outer circle’, i.e. ‘norm- developing’ countries (most former British colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia) and the ‘expanding circle’, i.e. those nations where English is a foreign language and hence ‘norm- dependent’ ( Kachru et al. 2006: 1–270). The EU is situated mostly in the expanding circle, and a case is being made for it to be moved inwards to the outer circle as the use of English becomes more widespread and institutionalized – a nd hence ‘norm- developing’ (Seidlhofer 2011: 60; Modiano 2017: 314). Unlike in the countries traditionally placed in the outer circle, in the EU English did not spread as a result of colonialism (except for Ireland and Malta) but rather of globalization, and English is not an official language in most EU Member States. 486

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So in the context of the EU, is English a ‘ foreign’ or a ‘second’ language? Shall we call it ‘ international English’, ‘English as an international language’, ‘global English’, ‘world English’, ‘Euro-English’ or ‘European English as a lingua franca?’ (see McArthur 2001; Rajagopalan 2012). Regardless of what we choose to call it, there has been a clear shift in applied and sociolinguistics, since the latter half of the twentieth century, from a monocentric to a pluricentric approach – i.e. English is no longer seen as belonging to and measured against inner- circle speakers and norms ( Kachru et al. 2006; Modiano 2017).4 This shift led to what is often referred to – positively and negatively – a s ‘ liberation linguistics’, which, in turn, has resulted in the establishment of new paradigms in the study and teaching of English(es) across the globe. Within the world Englishes paradigm, inaugurated by Kachru, the English language used in EU institutions constitutes a variety in its own right, with its own norms. Marko Modiano calls it ‘Euro-English’, and some of its features, which are now in the process of being codified, include a preference for the present progressive instead of the simple present (Modiano 2006, 2009, 2017). On Modiano’s account, Euro-English spans Kachru’s three circles and facilitates communication among them. A competing paradigm, which shares the core values of liberation linguistics, is that of English as a Lingua Franca ( ELF). ELF, like Euro-English, is based on language use rather than on inner- circle norms. Juliane House (2013: 287) also calls it ‘English as a vehicular language’, a ‘mere tool bereft of collective cultural capital’ (House 2003: 560), as it is largely restricted to non-native uses of English.5 ELF, a hybrid contact language not associated with any national tongue, emerges wherever and whenever non-native speakers of English across the globe need to communicate and their only shared language is English. Jennifer Jenkins and Alessia Cogo (2010), for instance, call the ELF spoken in the EU ‘European ELF’. In the context of the EU, the idea of a ‘ lingua franca’ seems pertinent – a shared language among speakers of multiple tongues. It is indeed in this sense that I have used ‘ lingua franca’ in this paper – not in the sense proposed within the ELF paradigm in linguistics, in which English is often taken quite apart from inner-circle contexts and celebrated for being both ideologically neutral and a natural choice in multilingual settings ( Breiteneder 2009; House 6 In this sense, Modiano’s notion of ‘Euro-English’ is more pro​­ 2010: 364. 2013: ­282–283). ductive for my purposes here, since it takes the hegemony of English more critically (Modiano 2009: 220). To come back to the question of ‘what English’, therefore, I propose we use ‘ lingua franca’ in its more mainstream sense, as ‘any language that is widely used as a means of communication among speakers of other languages’ (Random House Webster’s electronic dictionary), while at the same time understanding it as a continuum within the world Englishes paradigm. Both ‘ELF’ and ‘Euro-English’ have become infused with connotations specific to applied and sociolinguistics, particularly in the context of English language teaching – a context distant from ours here. Also, research in both fields has focussed on spoken rather than written English, more reasons why I would rather not adopt one or the other term (see Leal forthcoming). The second question proposed earlier about a possible paradox in the EU’s discourse on versus its use of language can be linked with the terminological issue of ‘Euro-English’ and ‘ELF’ in linguistics. Both epithets tend to presuppose that the English spoken in international settings is a vessel for communication. House, for example, distinguishes between ‘ languages for communication’ and ‘ languages for identification’, with ELF firmly in the former field (2003: 559–562). In a similar vein, though from a different discipline, Catherine Frost (2004: 52) proposes a distinction between ‘ language attachment’ and ‘ language use’, quoting Irish as an example of high ‘ language attachment’ but low ‘ language use’. The EU seems to subscribe to this dual view of language as well, as it celebrates linguistic diversity for 487

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its identity- shaping role on the one hand, while turning a blind eye to language use within its institutions on the other, allowing it to unofficially default to English. Is there a paradox between these v iews  – a n instrumental versus an identity- shaping notion of language? Not at a practical level. Like the Irish example mentioned by Frost, whereby English is the preferred language of the majority while Irish still retains high levels of attachment, English fulfils a need for communication in the EU, at first sight quite apart from cultural identification  – a role reserved to one’s mother tongue. A special Eurobarometer report confirms this trend: while 81% of respondents agree that all EU languages ‘should be treated equally’, 69% believe that Europeans should ‘ be able to speak a common language’, with 53% suggesting that ‘a single language’ should be adopted by EU institutions to facilitate communication. And although the question ‘what single language’ was not part of the survey, 67% of respondents consider English ‘one of the two most useful languages for themselves’, while 79% see English as ‘the most useful [language] for the future of their children’ ( European Commission 2012, 141). These results unveil the duality encompassed in the EU’s own paradoxical notion of language. Like the EU as a body of institutions, EU citizens perceive language both as a vehicle for communication and as an important element in one’s culture and identity. At an epistemological level, however, this is a pernicious paradox which needs to be addressed by the EU  – to move on to the last question suggested above, on whether this paradox needs a resolution. If multilingualism is one of the pillars of the European project, and if language equality is enshrined in EU law, the EU cannot allow it to be undermined in its institutions by the ad hoc, seemingly unescapable and especially unofficial use of English. And the strategies to tackle the paradox must be twofold, following the lines of its premises. At a practical level, the EU must invest a more significant portion of its budget in languagerelated services and programmes. Also, it must enact more legislation to ensure language equality and language awareness within its Member States. We need a linguistic turn in the EU: language services are not a vanity project, for every document drafting, every meeting, every transaction takes place in and through language. At an epistemological level, the EU needs to openly acknowledge both the special role that English plays in its institutions and the implications of this superior status. English has not become the world’s lingua franca by accident, nor is it simply a natural result of economic prowess. The role played in the spread of English by Britain’s and America’s colonial past can never be overstated ( Phillipson 2003, 2017). Moreover, the idea that one can use a language purely for communication purposes is an illusion. The fact that English is the global language in science, research, diplomacy, entertainment, and so many other areas entails, at least to a certain extent, the imposition of world views and thought modes ( Phillipson 2003; Wierzbicka 2013). And this imposition happens to the detriment of other languages and cultures (more in Leal forthcoming).7 The last question on whether there is a need to resolve this epistemological paradox can thus be answered with a ‘yes and no’ – the paradox needs to be addressed by the EU, even though it cannot be resolved (more below). Let us now turn to translation in EU institutions and investigate how it fits into the EU’s paradoxical approach to language.

EU translation: the tension between multiplicity and unity As of 2018, the EU’s Directorate-General for Translation ( DG Translation) employs 1,600 translators and 700 support staff, producing an output of over 2 million translated pages every year – a quarter of which are translated by external translators. The Directorate-General for Interpretation ( DG Interpretation) relies on 530 staff interpreters along with freelance 488

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interpreters, who account for half of the interpreted output. Both the DG Translation and Interpretation are part of the European Commission. In addition to these, there are numerous other translation, interpretation and language service departments and directorates in other EU institutions, agencies and bodies, which together count on just under 3,500 staff interpreters, translators, terminologists and language assistants (Tcaciuc 2013: 95–99; European Commission 2018). A rough estimate of the total number of EU translators and interpreters thus surpasses 5,500, and the number of freelancers is probably just as high. Excluding external staff, nevertheless, 5,500 is still about 10% of the EU’s total staff. Therefore, the EU does strive to maintain multilingualism in its institutions, and its language services play a pivotal role in this task. Just how dominant is English in the context of the EU’s translation services? The use of English as a source language rose from 45.4% in 1997 to 62% in 2007, 72.5% in 2008 and then 85.5% in 2020 (European Commission 2009, 2020 - see also Sandrelli 2018, 64; Cliffe 2019), whereas the percentage of EU law originally drafted in English reaches 95% (Barbier 2018, 337). Regarding target languages, the output is more even, but English still has the upper hand with over 185,000 pages in 2020, compared with average of 81,000 into each of the non-procedural languages (European Commission 2020). Turning specifically to translation at the DG Translation now (which is emblematic of the EU’s general stance on translation), two issues are of particular interest to us here. First, as EU translators Emma Wagner et al. (2014: 47) explain, any document translated by the EU is ‘not (…) presented as a translation, but as an original, an authentic piece of Community legislation, with a legal force identical to that of all the other language versions’. The authentication of translations is stipulated in EU legislation, as already mentioned: Article 248 of the final provisions of the Treaty establishing the European Community (today Article 55 of the final provisions of the TEU) states that the Treaty was ‘ drawn up in a single original in the Dutch, French, German, and Italian languages, all four texts being equally authentic’. This article has been updated with each accession, so that subsequent versions of the Treaty produced in other languages are also ‘authentic’. As a result, if a text has been translated into ten languages, one does not speak of ‘one original text and ten translations’ but rather of ‘11 language versions’ or ‘11 originals’, for the ten translations have been authenticated and are now on a par with their source-text and with each other ( Wagner et al. 2014: 8; Leal 2016: 7). Except for the odd booklet in which broad EU translation statistics are disclosed, there is no information on which texts are originals or translations, nor on source and target languages. Hence, not presenting certain (mostly English) texts as originals and others as translations serves both to circumvent legal questions arising from different interpretations of the ‘same’ document (in different languages), and to erase linguistic hierarchy among official languages. But is the EU instead not quietly maintaining linguistic hierarchy by sweeping it under the rug? And why is the word ‘translation’ promptly associated with lack of authenticity? What does this say of the EU’s underlying notion of translation? What does it say of the hierarchy between ‘originals’ and ‘translations’ and the role of translators in society? (Leal 2016: 8–9) We will come back to the questions regarding translation in the next section. As for the pecking order of the EU’s languages, it seems clear that its current translation culture, coupled with its questionable stance on multilingualism, strengthens rather than erases linguistic hierarchy in the EU. The EU bearing its head in the sand does not make the problem disappear; on the contrary: it allows the problem to grow surreptitiously. The second issue that interests us here in relation to the EU’s translation culture concerns the level of multilingualism achieved by translation. Wagner et  al. emphasize that not all texts are translated into all official languages, and that it ‘may be sufficient to translate [them] 489

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into one language for information (usually English or French)’ (2014: 9). This volume was first published in 2002 – French is still listed alongside English. Today we can find various EU online sources that mention English only ( European Union 2019): ‘Legislation & key political documents’ and ‘[g]eneral information’ are ‘[p]ublished in all EU official languages’, whereas ‘[o]fficial documents’, ‘[u]rgent or short-l ived information’ and ‘[s]pecialised information (technical info, campaigns, calls for tender) & news / events’, along with websites are sometimes ‘only available in 2 or 3 languages – or even just one (usually English)’.8 The current call for tenders, for instance, has been available solely in English at least since I started monitoring in early 2018 ( European Commission n.d.). Is this not a violation of Articles 21 and 22 of The Charter of Fundamental Rights, which prohibit discrimination on grounds of language and oblige the Union to respect linguistic diversity? Not to mention Regulation 1, whereby all 24 languages enjoy the status of official and working languages? ( Phillipson 2003: 120) When information such as calls for tenders is only available in English, English speakers have an unfair advantage and other applicants are discriminated on grounds of language (see Leal forthcoming for examples of law cases brought to the Court of Justice of the EU). These two issues – namely, the effacement of the boundaries between originals and translations together with a low level of multilingualism enabled by the unofficial use of English – are in no way exclusive to the EU. A similar policy is in place in the United Nations, for example. Unlike the EU, however, the UN only has six official languages, which are all working languages as well – a s Rule 51 of the General Assembly Rules of Procedure states. This means that not only do they enjoy the same status, but that all speeches must be interpreted into all working languages – a s stipulated in Rule 52 of the General Assembly Rules of Procedure. But like the EU, the UN ‘ has always shown a tendency towards a clear predominance of English, the true working language of the Secretariat and the real official language used in most negotiations’ (Baigorri-Jalón 2004: 30–31). Jesús Baigorri-Jalón (2004: 34) fur­­ ​­ ­ ​­ ­ ​­ ­ ther asserts that for more than 50 years ‘(…) the UN has demonstrated the progressive ascent of English to the rank of universal language of communication within the organisation’, and contends that ‘[n]o country interested in taking part in any real negotiation would send to Headquarters a representative who does not speak English’ (see also Leal 2016: 8–9). The EU’s paradoxical stance on multilingualism, discussed above, manifests itself in its translation culture, too. The tension between unity (monolingualism enabled by English) and multiplicity (multilingualism) is relevant in relation to translation as well. The EU effaces the boundaries between translations and originals to create both the (necessary, for obvious legal reasons) illusion of equality of meaning among translations of the same document, and the illusion of status equality among its official languages. These illusions of meaning and status equality, along with the ad hoc use of English, ensure unity in an otherwise diverse environment. Notwithstanding this push for unity, the EU’s mammoth translation service represents and strengthens multiplicity. Does this tension between unity and multiplicity require a resolution? Must the EU opt for pure unity or pure multiplicity? This and the other questions asked above will be addressed below.

The EU’s double responsibility: a necessary aporia The tension between unity and multiplicity has been at the heart of the EU from the outset. This tension manifests itself at every level – particularly clearly when it comes to languages and cultures. It is this tension that underpins the paradoxes mentioned in this chapter: a single language and translations that are originals foster a sense of unity, ‘consensus’ and ‘transparency’, whereas multilingualism and translation remind us of the ineluctable 490

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multiplicity and ‘dispersion’ inherent in the EU ( Derrida 1992: 41, 54). Let us analyse two reflections in contemporary thought here, one about unity versus multiplicity and one about translations versus originals, to draw conclusions as to how the EU can tackle this tension. Jacques Derrida’s recommendations for ‘today’s Europe’, made in 1991, sound surprisingly contemporary. He calls for an ‘aporia’, ‘a double duty’ or a ‘double injunction’ to take Europe beyond the paradox of unity versus multiplicity – a paradox which ‘[is taking] unprecedented forms… today in Europe’ ( Derrida 1992: 80) and thus requires an unprecedented type of responsibility: Responsibility seems to consist today in renouncing neither of these contradictory imperatives [to maintain unity and multiplicity]. One must therefore try and invent gestures, discourses, politico-institutional practices that inscribe the alliance of these two imperatives (…). That is not easy. It is even impossible to conceive of a responsibility that consists in being responsible for two laws, or that consists in responding to two contradictory injunctions (…). But there is no responsibility that is not the experience and experiment of the impossible (1992: 44– 45). He goes on to defend that ‘ethics, politics, and responsibility (…) will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of the aporia’. In other words, ‘[w]hen the path is clear and given, when a certain knowledge opens up the way in advance [and] the decision is already made, it might as well be said that there is none to make’ (1992: 41). This aporia or double responsibility can take numerous forms. In one of his last texts, for instance, Derrida describes his ‘dream’ for Europe through several of these double injunctions: ‘A Europe where we could criticize Israeli policy (…) without being accused of anti- Semitism or Judeophobia’, or ‘[a] Europe where we could simultaneously be concerned about the rise of antiSemitism and Islamophobia’, among others (2006: 410– 411). Regarding language and translation, we can understand this double responsibility as follows: ‘[f ]irst tension, first contradiction, double injunction: on the one hand European cultural identity cannot be dispersed (…) into a myriad of provinces, into a multiplicity of self-enclosed idioms or petty little nationalisms, each one jealous and untranslatable’ ( Derrida 1992: 38–39). However, to complete the double injunction, ‘[Europe] cannot and must not accept the capital of a centralized authority that, by means of t rans-European cultural mechanisms (…) would control and standardize, subjecting (…) discourses and practices to (…) channels of immediate and efficient communication…’ ( Derrida 1992: 39; Leal 2016: 16–17). Further, he exhorts Europe to ‘avoid both the nationalistic tensions of linguistic difference and the violent homogenization of languages through the neutrality of a translating medium that would claim to be transparent, metalinguistic and universal…’ (1992: 58; Leal 2016: 11). To come back to the questions asked above as to whether the tension between unity and multiplicity requires a resolution and whether the EU must opt for pure unity or pure multiplicity, in a later work Derrida asserts that ‘pure unity or pure multiplicity (…) is a synonym of death’ (Caputo and Derrida 2004: 106). In other words, we have to be capable of ‘non-binary judgements’, as Derrida (2006: 410) cautions, and go beyond the principle of reversibility associated with binary oppositions – in the Latin sense of revertere, to turn or move in the opposite direction. Gasché explains why Europe is ‘another term for – another figure of – deconstruction’ as follows: in reversibility, the sphere (…) of the same remains fully intact, no opening to otherness in all its unpredictability occurs there. (…) Reversibility is a function of, and a way of 491

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securing, sameness: a celebration of sameness (…) Reversibility is without risk, since the other, or the foreign to and into which the self reverts, is only the opposite of oneself (thus the self can always reassert itself in the other, or reappropriate it). (…) By contrast, that which makes the new figure of Europe the figure of a passage or conversion into the other (…) is precisely the fact that such transition and transformation is also charged with danger. ­ ­ ​­ (Gasché 2007: 16–17) What does this mean for our unity-multiplicity paradox discussed here? Let us look at yet another dichotomy, ‘originals versus translations’, before moving on to the conclusion. In the previous section, we wondered why the word ‘translation’ is associated with lack of authenticity in the EU and what this says of the EU’s underlying notion of translation, as well as of the hierarchy between ‘originals’ and ‘translations’. The idea that original texts are complete and perfect whereas translations are incomplete and imperfect has dominated both the discourse on translation and the mainstream notion of translation and translators for over two millennia (e.g. Steiner 1998: 251). This cliché has been questioned many times in these 2,000 years as well, of course; more systematically so since the latter half of the twentieth century and within different traditions, from descriptive translation studies to the German functional approach and, in a more systematic and incisive fashion, within poststructuralist thought ( Leal 2012a, 2018)­9. Today, even the more conservative translation thinker is unlikely to claim that translations are illegitimate or falsifications of a perfect original. Equally unlikely is the claim that translations are equivocal, whereas originals are always univocal. Despite that, two areas remain taboo, namely, religious and legal translation (for religious translation, see Long 2005). Regarding the latter, the process of authentication of translations is key. As Theo Hermans explains, ‘authentication has a double effect. It makes two or more parallel texts equally authentic; and in so doing it creates the presumption of sameness of meaning between these texts’. In other words, it creates the presumption of equivalence, which in this context ‘ is not a feature that can be extrapolated on the basis of textual comparison’; instead, equivalence ‘ is imposed on [texts] through an external intervention’ (2014: 9, 12). Furthermore, as Hermans posits, if one or more versions of a treaty have come into being as a result of a process of translation from one initial version, authentication erases the memory of this process. Upon authentication, translated texts become authentic texts and must forget that they used to exist as translations. (…) If versions that were once translations are now parallel authentic texts on a par with all other versions, then the version that once served as the original is now also one authentic version among the other authentic versions that are its equals. Where there are no translations there are no originals – unless all are agreed to be originals. Nor (…) are there translators. (2014: 9) ­ The EU’s translation culture thus reinforces the mainstream, logocentric notion of translations as inferior to their originals. ‘A translation’, Hermans asserts sarcastically, ‘simply cannot have the same force of law as an authentic version’; after all, ‘any reminder that the text in question is in fact a translation threatens the assumption of equivalence and tells the reader: oh yes, this is only a translation, not quite the same thing as the original…’ (2014: 11, 24). It follows that translators are not to be taken seriously either. In the context of international law 492

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discussed by Hermans, officially there are indeed no translators. Yet this stance on translation is in no way exclusive to the EU, as noted above; in fact, it has a long history in various multilingual settings in the West ( Hermans 2014: 7–17). Is there an alternative? Can the EU adapt its translation culture, or its ‘philosophy of translation’, in Derrida’s words (1992: 58), to fit more contemporary views while at the same time complying with the ‘double responsibility’ mentioned earlier? I will take up these questions in the conclusion.

Conclusion The EU is torn between unity and multiplicity  – in terms of languages and cultures, its discourse favours multiplicity, whereas its practices enforce unity. Pure unity or pure multiplicity would be unfeasible and undesirable. Derrida’s double responsibility hence entails a double duty: ‘[this] duty dictates respecting differences, idioms, minorities, singularities, but also the universality of formal law, the desire for translation, agreement and univocity…’ (1992: 78). The EU’s current language and translation regimes clearly strengthen unity at the expense of multiplicity. To turn this around, in addition to a linguistic turn, i.e. an active stance on multilingualism, more transparency regarding its internal language use and incremented language services, what can the EU do regarding its translation culture? The model of authentication of translations, albeit widespread, is not the only model of translation of international law. The 1971 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the 1955 Protocol Amending the Warsaw Convention of 1929, for example, both available in several languages, state that the French version shall prevail in the case of differences of opinion regarding the other versions (Hermans 2014: 14). As Hermans puts it, ‘[a]uthenticating only one among several language versions privileges that version and the speakers of its language’ (2014: 11). In these two examples, the French document is clearly the original – hence it (along with its speakers) is privileged. At first glance, this model might seem even more unjust because it lays bare the status chasm between originals and translations – and their respective languages. However, at least in this model language hierarchy is made transparent – more thorough translation statistics could be kept, for example. Moreover, if the EU adopted this model and were to truly abide by its own treaties, it would have to ensure that all official languages are equally represented as authentication languages, i.e. that the proportion of original and translated documents (ideally) remains the same for all languages. This would force the EU to keep its policy and lawmakers truly multilingual (and not multilingual in English only); it would prevent the EU from privileging English speakers when choosing staff or making information available.10 This, coupled with an increase in the budget allocated to language services, proposed earlier, would bring about a translation turn in the EU. Of course it is unrealistic to expect, say, a new EU regulation concerning the use of pesticides to be originally drafted in Bulgarian, because although there may be Bulgarian speakers among the authors of the regulation, Bulgarian is unlikely to function as the link language among all authors – but let us remember Derrida’s warning that ‘there is no responsibility that is not the experience and experiment of the impossible’ (1992: 44– 45). Therein lies the advantage of this model: the EU would be forced to seek alternatives if all or nearly all their original texts were persistently in English after some time. This is already the case now, but because of the effacement of translations, this fact goes unnoticed and the fiction of equality among languages remains. However, by forcing itself to address its own language hierarchy, the EU might find ways to mitigate this hierarchy – or in the very least it would be forced to transparently report on their language bias. The linguistic and translation turns proposed 493

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here could be an interesting way both to enact Derrida’s double responsibility and to answer his call to ‘invent gestures, discourses, politico-institutional practices that inscribe the alli­ ance of these two imperatives’ (1992: 44), without simply falling back on Gasché’s notion of reversibility outlined in the previous section. Within this new translation culture, ‘ difficulty of understanding [would] not [be] an obstacle for democratic debate but precisely the substance of the democratic process itself, through which difference [could] be productively confronted, our horizons widened and our convictions re- examined’, as Esperança Bielsa argues in this volume regarding what she calls ‘the plurilingual vision’. This translation model might even lead to a new dynamic between translations and originals, potentially affecting the EU’s and the mainstream ( logocentric) notion of translation. Imagine what it would be like if the original version of an important piece of EU legislation were, say, in Portuguese, and the corresponding English version were a translation?

Further reading Derrida, J. (1992) [1991] The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Brault, P. A. and Naas, M. B. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Arguably one of Jacques Derrida’s most political works, this volume includes an assessment of the main challenges faced by Europe, along with possible solutions rooted in deconstruction. Grin, F. and Kraus, P. (ed.) (2018) The Politics of Multilingualism: Linguistic Governance, Globalisation and Europeanisation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. A multidisciplinary analysis of language policy and politics in multilingual settings with emphasis on globalization and Europeanization. Kachru, B. B., Kachru, Y. and Nelson, C. L. (eds.) (2006) The Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Blackwell. A comprehensive overview of the different Englishes spoken in the world today, their status and impact on other languages. Leal, A. (forthcoming) English and Translation in the EU after Brexit. London and New York: Routledge. A transdisciplinary analysis of the status of the English language and the role of language services in the EU in the wake of Brexit.

Notes 1 All EU legislation mentioned throughout this chapter was taken from the EUR-Lex portal: https:// ­­eur-lex.europa.eu/. ​­ 2 This is not to discredit the (modest) impact of the EU’s symbolic actions in this field (Schjerve 2003: 58; Craith 2006: 57– 80; Schjerve and Vetter 2010). 3 The legal mechanisms to introduce supranational language policy are thus in place, but as they currently stand, they by no means facilitate any initiatives in this direction as they are extremely cumbersome (see Leal forthcoming). The adoption of concrete EU-w ide language policies would require not only a bold step on the part of the EU, potentially infringing upon one of the Member States’ areas of competence, but also an almost utopian willingness to comply on the part of the Member States. 4 This applies to other languages as well, of course. In Brazilian Portuguese, for instance, there has been a growing movement since the 1980s to combat linguistic prejudice and celebrate the different varieties of Portuguese ( Bagno 2002). 5 ‘Largely’ because English native- speakers may take part in ELF interactions but, according to ELF proponents, these speakers cannot simply use English as they usually would, having instead to acquire ELF as a new language system (see Jenkins and Cogo 2010, 275, 289–290; Leal forthcoming). 6 Barbara Seidlhofer (e.g. 2011), another proponent of ELF, is against the exclusion of inner- circle speakers, the use of the word ‘variety’ in relation to ELF and the insistence on codifying the features of ELF (more in Leal forthcoming). 7 Due to space constraints, I cannot go into the debate on the status of English in outer circle nations as an identity- shaping, decolonized language that can very well be used to fight linguistic 494

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imperialism (e.g. Dissanayake 2006). Of course English can be used to destabilize, for example, the very hegemony of English, as I hope this chapter shows. My point here is that English – or any natural language – is not a mere tool for communication without f ar-reaching implications on the speakers’ identity and ideology. 8 Interestingly, this information was adapted on 06 May 2019 and now, instead of ‘or even just one (usually English)’, it says ‘or even just one – the choice depends on the target audience’. 9 See also Leal (forthcoming), Venuti (2016), Cassin (2004) for a recent debate on (un)translatability that has taken translation studies by storm.

References Arzoz, X. (2008) ‘The Protection of Linguistic Diversity through Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights’, in Arzoz, X. (ed.), Respecting Linguistic Diversity in the European Union. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, pp. 145–173. ­ ­ ​­ Bagno, M. (2002) Preconceito Linguístico: O que é, Como se Faz. São Paulo: Loyola. ­Baigorri-Jalón, ​­ J. (2004) ­ Interpreters at the United Nations: A History, trans. Barr, A. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Balibar, É. (2004) We, the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Barbier, J. C. (2018) ‘European Integration and the Variety of Languages: An Awkward Co-Existence’, in Kraus, P. A. and Grin, F. (eds.), The Politic of Multilingualism: Europeanisation, Globalisation and Linguistic Governance. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 333–357. Breiteneder, A. (2009) English as a Lingua Franca in Europe: A Natural Development. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. Caputo, J. and Derrida, D. (2004) [1997] Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press. Cassin, B. (ed.) (2004) Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies: Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles. Paris: Seuil. Cliffe, J. (2019) ‘Brexit Is the Ideal Moment to Make English the EU’s Common Language’, The Economist, 15 June. Craith, M. N. (2006) Europe and the Politics of Language: Citizens, Migrants and Outsiders. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Derrida, J. (1992) [1991] The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Brault, P. A. and Naas, M. B. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. (2006) [2004] ‘A Europe of Hope’, trans. DeArmitt, P., Malle, J. and Saghafi, K. Epoché, 10(2), ­ pp. 407–412. ­ ­ ​­ Dissanayake, W. (2006) ‘Cultural Studies and Discursive Constructions of World Englishes’, in Kachru, B. B., Kachru, Y. and Nelson, C. L. (eds.), The Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 545–566. ­ ­ ​­ European Commission (2009) ‘Translating for a Multilingual Community’. Available online: https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/4dd2388f-db28-4629-abe4­ ­ ­­ ​­ ​­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​ 26f2d4376cd9 [Accessed 31 July 2019]. European Commission (2012) ‘Special Eurobarometer 386: Europeans and Their Languages’. Available online: https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/dataset/S1049_77_1_EBS386 ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ [Accessed 31 July 2019]. European Commission (2013) ‘Frequently Asked Questions on Languages in Europe’. Available online: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-825_en.htm ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed 31 July 2019]. European Commission (2018) ‘Interpreting and translating for Europe’. Available online: https:// publications.europa.eu/en/publication­ ­­ ​­ detail/-/publication/1c437dc0 ​­ ­ ­­ - ­​­­ 49c5-11e8­​­­ ­​­­ be1d-​ 01aa75ed71a1 [Accessed 31 July 2019]. European Commission (2020) ‘Translation in figures 2020’. Available online: https://op.europa.eu/en/ publication-detail/-/publication/c29be934-9588-11ea-aac4-01aa75ed71a1 [Accessed 21 September 2020]. European Commission (n.d.) ‘Calls for Tenders, Grants and Calls for Expression of Interest’. Available online: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/calls-tenders-grants-calls-expression-interest_de ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed 31 July 2019]. 495

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European Parliament (2019) ‘Language Policy’. Available online: http://www.europarl.europa.eu /fac tsheets/en/sheet/142/language-policy ­ ­ ­ ­­ ​­ [Accessed 31 July 2019]. European Union (2019) ‘Language Policy’. Available online: https://europa.eu/europeanunion/abouteuropa/language-policy_en ­ ­ ­­ ​­ [Accessed 31 July 2019]. Frost, C. (2004) ‘Getting to Yes: People, Practices and the Paradox of Multicultural Democracy’, in Laycock, D. (ed.), Representation and Democratic Theory. Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 48–64. ­ ­ ​­ Gasché, R. (2007) ‘“This Little Thing That Is Europe”’, The New Centennial Review, 7(2), ­ pp. 1–19. ­ ­ ​­ Gazzola, M. and Grin, F. (2013) ‘Is ELF More Effective and Fair Than Translation? An Evaluation of the EU’s Multilingual Regime’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23, pp. 93–107. ­ ­ ​­ Gazzola, M. (2014) ‘Partecipazione, Esclusione Linguistica e Traduzione: Una Valutazione del ­ Regime Linguistico dell’Unione Europea’, Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata, XLIII(2), ­ ­ ​­ pp. 227–264. Ginsburgh, V., Moreno-Ternero, J. and Weber, S. (2018) ‘The fate of English in the EU after Brexit: Expected and Unexpected Twists’. VOX CEPR Policy Portal. Available online: https://voxeu.org/ article/english-language-eu-after-brexit ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed 31 July 2019]. Hermans, T. (2014) [2007] The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St. Jerome. House, J. (2003) ‘English as a Lingua Franca: A Threat to Multilingualism?’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), ­ pp. 556–578. ­ ­ ​­ House, J. (2010) ‘The Pragmatics of English as a Lingua Franca’, in Trosborg, A. (ed.), Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures: Handbook of Pragmatics vol. 7. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, pp. 363–390. House, J. (2013) ‘English as a Lingua Franca and Translation’, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 7(2), ­ pp. 279–298. ­ ­ ​­ Ives, P. (2004) ‘Language, Representation and Suprastate Democracy: Questions Facing the EU’, in Laycock, D. (ed.), Representation and Democratic Theory. Vancouver: UBC Press, pp. 23–47. ­ ­ ​­ Jenkins, J. and Cogo, A. (2010) ‘English as a Lingua Franca in Europe: A Mismatch between Policy and Practice’, European Journal of Language Policy, 2(2), ­ pp. 271–294. ­ ­ ​­ Kachru, B. B. (1985) ‘Standards, Codification and Sociolinguistic Realism: The English Language in the Outer Circle’, in Quirk, R. and Widdowson, H. G. (eds.), English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–30. Kachru, B. B., Kachru, Y. and Nelson, C. L. (eds.) (2006) The Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Blackwell. Kraus, P. A. (2011) ‘Neither United Nor Diverse? The Language Issue and Political Legitimation in the European Union’, in Kjær, A. L. and Adamo, S. (eds.), Linguistic Diversity and European Democracy. England and USA: Ashgate, pp. 17–34. ­ ­ ​­ Leal, A. (2012a) ‘Equivalence’, in Gambier, Y. and van Doorslaer, L. (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 3. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 39– 46. Leal, A. (2012b) ‘Mehrsprachigkeit: Brasilien, Österreich und die Europäische Union’, in SnellHornby, M. and Kadrić, M. (eds.), Die Multiminoritätengesellschaft. Berlin: SAXA, pp. 45–54. ­ ­ ​­ Leal, A. (2013) ‘The European Union and Translation Studies: Unity, Multiplicity and English as a Lingua Franca ( ELF)’, Translation Spaces, 2, pp. 63–80. ­ ­ ​­ Leal, A. (2014) Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full: Reflections on Translation Theory and Practice in Brazil. Berlin: Frank and Timme. Leal, A. (2016) ‘Translation at the European Union and English as a Lingua Franca: Can Erasing Language Hierarchy Foster Multilingualism?’, New Voices in Translation Studies, 14, pp. 1–22. ­ ­ ​­ Leal, A. (2018) ‘Equivalence’, in Wilson, P. and Rawling, P. (eds.), The Handbook of Translation and Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 224–242. Leal, A. (forthcoming) English and Translation in the EU after Brexit. London and New York: Routledge. Long, L. (ed.) (2005) Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable? Clevedon, Buffalo and Toronto, ON: Multilingual Matters. Macnamara, J. (1991) ‘Linguistic Relativity Revisited’, in Cooper, R. L. and Spolsky, B. (eds.), The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in Honor of Fishman’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 45– 60. McArthur, T. (2001) ‘World or International or Global English – and What Is It Anyway?’, in Alatis, J. E. and Tan, A. (eds.), Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics 1999. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 396–403. ­ ­ ​­ Modiano, M. (2006) ‘Euro-Englishes’, in Kachru, B. B., Kachru, Y. and Nelson, C. L. (eds.), The Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 223–238. ­ ­ ​­ 496

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Modiano, M. (2009) ‘Inclusive/exclusive? English as a Lingua Franca in the European Union’, World Englishes, 28(2), ­ pp. 208–223. ­ ­ ​­ Modiano, M. (2017) ‘English in a Post-Brexit European Union’, World Englishes, 36(3), ­ pp. 313–327. ­ ­ ​­ Official Journal of the European Union (2018) ‘DEFINITIVE ADOPTION 2018/251 of the European Union’s General Budget for the Financial Year 2018’, Available online: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/3a0cb847-1c55-11e8-ac73-01aa75ed71a1/language-en ​­ ​­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ ­­ ​­ [Accessed 31 July 2019]. Phillipson, R. (2003) ­English-only ​­ Europe? London and New York: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (2017) ‘Myths and Realities of “Global” English’, Language Policy, 16(3), ­ pp. 313–331. ­ ­ ​­ Phillipson, R. (2018) ‘English, the Lingua Nullius of Global Hegemony’, in Grin, F. and Kraus, P. ­ (eds.), The Politics of Multilingualism: Linguistic Governance, Globalisation and Europeanisation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 275–303. Rajagopalan, K. (2012) ‘“World English” or “World Englishes”? Does It Make Any Difference?’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 22(3), ­ pp. 374–391. ­ ­ ​­ Sandrelli, A. (2018) ‘Observing Eurolects: The Case of English’, in Mori, L. (ed.), Observing Eurolects: Corpus Analysis of Linguistic Variation in EU law. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 63–92. ­ ­ ​­ Schjerve, R. R. (2003) ‘Europäische Sprachenpolitik und Minderheiten’, in Krumm, H-J. (ed.), Sprachenvielfalt: Babylonische Sprachverwirrung oder Mehrsprachigkeit als Chance? Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, pp. 49–60. ­ ­ ​­ Schjerve, R. R. and Vetter, E. (2010) ‘Europäische Mehrsprachigkeit zwischen politischer Gestaltung und wissenschaftlicher Erforschung’, in Hinrichs, U. (ed.), Handbuch der Eurolinguistik. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp. 805–819. ­ ­ ​­ Schlesinger, I. M. (1991) ‘The Wax and Wane of Whorfian Views’, in Cooper, R. L. and Spolsky, B. ­ (ed.), The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in Honor of Fishman’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 7– 44. Seidlhofer, B. (2011) Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shuibhne, N. N. (2008) ‘EC Law and Minority Language Policy: Some Recent Developments’, in Arzoz, Xabier (ed.), Respecting Linguistic Diversity in the European Union. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, pp. 123–143. ­ ­ ​­ Steiner, G. (1998) [1975] After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tcaciuc, L. (2013) Translation Practices at the European Central Bank with Reference to Metaphors (doctoral ­ dissertation). Aston University, 288 p. Venuti, L. (2016) ‘Hijacking Translation: How Comp Lit Continues to Suppress Translated Texts’. ­ pp. 179–204. ­ ­ ​­ boundary 2, 43(2), Wagner, E., Bech, S. and Martínez, J. M. (2014) [2002] Translating for the European Union Institutions. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Wierzbicka, A. (2013) Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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34 The activist role of translators and interpreters under globalization Fruela Fernández

Introduction The study of translation and interpreting has shown a keen awareness of the promotion of dissent and the relevance of power inequalities upon linguistic practices for many decades. Indeed, these issues were at work in several books that are now considered pivotal to the evolution of discipline— such as Cheyfitz 1991, Lefevere 1992, Niranjana 1992, Rafael 1993, Venuti 1995, to name just a few. However, interest in translation and interpreting as forms of activism— a particular type of civic engagement against established powers—is relatively recent and the available bibliography is modest, in comparison with other strands of research. In this chapter, I will first outline the key characteristics of activism and how this form of political intervention has evolved in the historical period known as ‘globalization’. Second, I will present different approaches to activist translation and interpreting, before moving into a survey of existing research that connects translation and interpreting with activism against the negative effects of globalization.

Understanding activism in a globalized context ‘Activism’ is a concept that has gained traction in social parlance over recent decades. Its meaning, however, is frequently ‘emotional and i ll- defined’ ( Baker 2018: 453), characterized by ‘ its inherent slipperiness’. In the context of this chapter, it will be understood as a broad set of activities undertaken by members of civil society— generally, although not exclusively organized as a group or community—who aim to change the current state of affairs in the name of a given cause. A key characteristic of activism is the fact that it ‘goes beyond conventional politics’ (Martin 2003: 20), that is, it does not follow the standard channels for political action, which in the case of democratic systems are generally assumed to be parties, elections, unions, and similar procedures. As such, activist groups tend to be ‘set up outside the mainstream institutions of society’, since their agendas ‘explicitly challenge the dominant narratives of the time’ ( Baker 2006a: 462). Activist goals can range from merely influencing public opinion by rising awareness on a topic to more vocal actions, such as exposing an injustice, denouncing individuals or 498

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collectives, and even providing help and support to certain social groups. In this sense, therefore, activism is not a recent development, but it has rather ‘ been present throughout history, in every sort of political system’ (Martin 2003: 19). As will be discussed in this chapter, the study of translation has occasionally attempted to read back ‘activist’ endeavours in past periods on the basis of this commonality. Since this chapter explicitly addresses activism under globalization, it is essential to define the latter—which is, in fact, ‘a contested concept’ (Steger 2013: 1) for which multiple definitions coexist— a nd outline the ways in which it influences activism. Globalization will be understood here as an advanced stage in the evolution of capitalism that began in the 1970s, enabled by the evolution of technology, a transformation of regulatory practices, and the ascent of a series of political leaders—most notably Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1979–1990) and Ronald Reagan in the US (1981–1989)—w ith strong pro-m arket ideologies. In this historical period, exchanges and flows of capital, goods, and information have become the cornerstone of the social and economic system. Key characteristics of globalization ( Went 2000: 8–10) are the increase in integrated global markets, the decisive growth of multinational companies, a loss of sovereignty on behalf of nation- states due to the expansion of transnational governance, and the dissemination of macroeconomic policies, commonly bundled together under the name of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005). Although some of these changes might not be ‘ historically unprecedented’ ( Went 2000: 8), as global exchanges have been common for several centuries, their ‘combination and scope’ is indeed new. The ‘ boom in information and communications technologies’ ( Pieterse 2009: 9) and the facilitation of commercial exchanges that has accompanied the implementation of several common regulatory frameworks— such as the establishment of the European Common Market (created in 1993), the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA (1994), and the World Trade Organization (1995)—have provided a completely new infrastructure for ‘finance, capital mobility and export-oriented business activity, transnational communication, migration, travel, and civil society interactions’. With its emphasis on exchanges, globalization has also paved the way for what has been called the ‘network society’ (Castells 2000). Here, information technology is altering most aspects of human life, from the dissemination of knowledge to the organization of society. A major criticism of globalization revolves around the way in which it has resulted in greater inequality; as the authors of the World Inequality Report 2018 have emphasized, ‘ income inequality has increased rapidly in North America, China, India, and Russia’ since 1980, while growing ‘moderately in Europe’ (Alvaredo et al. 2018: 5). In their view, ‘this increase in inequality marks the end of a post-war egalitarian regime which took different forms in these regions’. Second, globalization is also blamed for worsening the impact of climate change on the planet ( Wenz and Levermann 2016), as ‘the pervasive and increasingly systemic environmental impact of many economic activities’ (McMichael 2013)— such as extractive industries, urbanization, consumerism, globalized supply chains, and the increasing need for travelling and transportation— a re leading to unforeseeable consequences at a planetary scale. Finally, globalization also has ambiguous cultural effects, as the erosion of cultural difference ‘coincides with a growing sensitivity’ towards it ( Pieterse 2009: 43); in other words, while the diversity of local cultures seems to be threatened by global homogenization, both individuals and societies show greater awareness and respect towards this difference. On the basis of this brief outline, it is possible to highlight certain specificities of activism under globalization that will form the backbone of this chapter. In my understanding, ‘globalized’ activism is characterized, on the one hand, by opposition to the consequences of globalization and, on the other, by greater interaction between activism and technology, fostered by 499

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the rapid evolution of the latter under globalization. First, one of the most defining activist movements under globalization is the so-called ‘alter-globalization’, ‘global justice’, or ‘anti-g lobalization’ movement (Hands 2010: 142), which developed at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s ( Della Porta 2007; Reitan 2007). The activist platforms grouped under this rubric found their origins in the denunciation of various aspects of globalization— such as the signature of NAFTA, the activities of the International Monetary Fund, the piling up of poor countries’ foreign debt, or rising inequality— emphasizing ‘a critique of the democratic deficit of the supranational bodies and global institutions’ that have fostered globalization, as well as a rejection ‘of the market- oriented policies of these institutions’ ( Wennerhag 2010: 28). To a great extent, the so- called ‘movement of the squares’ (Gerbaudo 2017) or ‘antiausterity and pro- democracy protests’ ( Flesher Fominaya 2017: 2– 4) that took to the streets of many global cities in the years following the 2008 economic crisis can be understood as being related to the global justice movement, despite their differences in terms of discourse and conceptualization (Gerbaudo 2017: 19–25). In this sense, we may view the global justice movement and the movement of the squares as two ‘waves’ of the same ‘epoch of contention’ ( Wolfson and Funke 2016: 62). A second salient aspect of activism under globalization is the defence of cultural, sexual, racial, environmental, and linguistic diversity, which ties in with both the birth of alter-g lobalization and the ascent of identity politics. Although the claims of oppressed and minority groups had played an important role in traditional protests, they have acquired a central role under globalization. This is due to the ongoing decline of the labour movement— mostly centred upon the working class, from a generally ‘male’ and ‘white’ perspective— as well as the increasing expansion of capitalism across the globe, with its associated threats to traditional environments and ways of life. The concept of ‘ identity politics’ refers to ‘a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded upon the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups’ (Heyes 2018). This came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s with ‘the emergence of large- scale political movements’ such as ‘second wave feminism, Black Civil Rights in the US, gay and lesbian liberation, and the American Indian movements’. The appearance of these groups demanding recognition of their difference would later feed into anti-globalization concerns for the fate of indigenous and traditional peoples across the world, who see their ways of life threatened in the name of capitalist expansion. In fact, indigenous peoples have always been strongly represented in the World Social Forum, an annual meeting of activists and civic organizations that started in 2001, which is strongly linked to the global justice movement (Santos 2006). Based upon this double strand of dissent, many among the most relevant activist movements that have taken place in recent decades have espoused the claims of collectives that are oppressed, threatened, or discriminated against. This is the case with numerous indigenous initiatives that are active across Latin America ( Warren and Jackson 2003), demanding cultural and political autonomy; the global feminist movement Ni Una Menos (‘Not even one [woman] less’), which started in Argentina in 2015 (Gago and Cavallero 2017) to protest against violence and discrimination against women and has later expanded to numerous Spanish- speaking countries; and Black Lives Matter ( Lebron 2017), which campaigns against systemic racism and violence towards black people in the US. Finally, a third defining characteristic of activism under globalization is its relationship with technology, a factor that cuts across a variety of campaigns and causes. Like any other human endeavour, activism is conditioned to great certain extent by technology ( Hands 2010: 23), and technological change is a key determining factor for globalization. While previous generations of activists relied on means of communication that were strongly time and 500

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location dependent (e.g. letters, pamphlets, books, or newspapers), the advent of new media, such as the internet, mobile phones, and social networking, has made communication quicker and easier, enabling activists to coordinate with others in unprecedented ways. For instance, a variety of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, were paramount in the organization and coordination of protests during the so- called ‘movement of the squares’ (Gerbaudo 2012), as well as for the international dissemination of these events ( Romanos 2016). However, the centrality of technological means for new protests has also been criticized for its ‘cyberfetishism’, which equates media and network presence with tangible results in everyday life ( Rendueles 2013). In this sense, the proven ability of governments to ban access to certain sites ( Xiao 2011) and even to shut down the internet ( Ritzen 2018) as a means of stifling dissent should serve as a cautionary tale against an excessive dependence on technology. In fact, growing awareness of its potential abuses and misuses has generated an important strand of activism that focusses specifically on technology. This includes data activism (Gutiérrez 2018), which utilizes data infrastructure as a way of denouncing an injustice or raising awareness to a risk, and hacktivism ( Karagiannopoulos 2018), a rather loose set of practices that puts traditional hacking (i.e. illicitly taking control of a computer, website, or computing system) at the service of a given activist cause. The group Anonymous, which has launched cyberattacks against a variety of corporations and governments, and the project Wikileaks, which has leaked secret information on sensitive matters (such as the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), can be seen as notable examples of this type of activism.

Translation, interpreting, and activism: approaches and main areas of research The conceptualization of translation and interpreting as forms of activism is relatively recent, first taking place at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century. Despite the relative paucity of research on the topic, interest is clearly growing, as shown by an increasing number of pieces ( Brownlie 2010; Baker 2018; Carcelén-Estrada 2018) aimed at charting the field, and even a proposal to see an ‘activist turn’ ( Wolf 2012), in line with previous ‘turns’ in the history of the discipline. In this section, I will sketch two main approaches to activism within the field, according to their focus on the individual or the collective, before reviewing the existing bibliography on the contribution that translation and interpreting have made to activist movements that oppose the consequences of globalization. These take the form of ‘two waves’ of anti-globalization (the 1990s global justice movements and the 2010s movement of the squares) and the promotion of linguistic diversity. Both areas are also frequently underpinned by technological change, one of the aforementioned characteristics of globalization.

Approaches to ‘activism’ in translation studies As Brownlie (2010: 46) has argued, research on activism in translation studies can be divided into two main groups: on the one hand, the study and reappraisal of ‘activist’ translators and interpreters; on the other, the role of translation and interpreting in the advocacy of certain political causes. This division involves, in turn, two further oppositions: the past vs the contemporary and the individual vs the collective. A notable example of the first trend of study is a much- cited piece by Maria Tymoczko (2000), which also constitutes the first explicit attempt—though at times a rather unclear one—to discuss translation as a form of activism. By looking at how numerous Irish translators reworked the myth of the hero Cú Chulainn across several decades and put it at the 501

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service of various ideological projects, Tymoczko argues that activist and engaged translation should be understood ‘as a sort of speech act’ (2000: 26), that is, a textual construction that has effects upon external reality through its ‘ involvement in conflict or battle’ (2000: 31). Other scholars (Milton 2006; Guo 2008; Cheung 2010) have shared her textual approach, and have studied the ways in which past translators can be understood as activists through the production of translations that are aimed at eliciting social change. Tymoczko would later pursue her interest in activist translation by editing a special issue on ‘Translation and Resistance’ ( Tymozcko 2006), which would also form the backbone to one of the first edited volumes on the topic ( Tymoczko 2010). The second strand of research on the topic has focussed strictly on contemporary activism, placing greater significance on communities. A major reference in this area is Mona Baker’s work and her ‘narrative’ approach. In her seminal book Translation and conflict (2006b), Baker argues that narratives—’everyday stories we live by’ ( Baker 2006b: 3)— are paramount to the functioning of societies, as they form the basis of exchange, mediation, and transmission of knowledge, ideologies, and attitudes. At the same time, narratives are also ‘dynamic’, which implies that at any given time it is possible to find ‘a variety of divergent, criss-crossing, often vacillating narratives’ (3) that coexist. Since narratives are fundamental to the legitimacy of the status quo, a central method in undermining a regime is to challenge ‘the stories that sustain [it]’ through the articulation of ‘alternative stories’ (3)— a point at which, as Baker shows, translation and interpreting can play a central role. In an article published in the same year (2006a), Baker linked the notion of narrative with activism by looking at ‘narrative communities’: communities of translators and interpreters who have been brought together by a shared narrative that aims to transform social reality (2006a: 471– 472). In Baker’s view, this ‘emerging pattern of communities’ is characterized by both a political commitment and an awareness of the transnationality of struggles, since they understand that contemporary conflicts ‘reverberate across the planet and, almost without exception, are played out in the international arena’ (2006a: 472). The existing bibliography on activist communities constitutes a major point of reference in the field. Given its clear link to the problematic of globalization, it is used at various points in the following sections. For the time being, it is important to highlight a main divide between, on the one hand, those communities whose members identify themselves professionally as translators and interpreters, and who put their skills at the service of a given cause ( De Manuel Jerez et al. 2004; Baker 2006a, 2013; Boéri 2008, 2012) and, on the other, communities formed by non-professional translators and interpreters, who nevertheless use their linguistic abilities and their shared knowledge for political purposes ( Pérez- González 2010, 2016; Baker 2016b).

Translation, interpreting, and the alter-globalization movement As discussed, the ‘a lter-g lobalization’ or ‘global justice movement’ was born in the 1990s in opposition to the consequences of neoliberal globalization. Its truly transnational constitution and the variety of movements that came together implied, in turn, a great diversity of languages and a need for mediation services. In fact, it could be argued that translation and interpreting were essential for these movements, enabling communication between different collectives and raising global awareness of local struggles. A major strand of research on this aspect of the alter-globalization movement has focussed on the work of an organization of voluntary interpreters, Babels, which was ‘set up in September 2002 by a group of activists linked to the French branch of the alternative globalization 502

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network, ATTAC’ ( Baker 2006a: 474). Babels constituted itself as ‘an international network of volunteer interpreters and translators’ who had the goal of using ‘their skills and expertise for the benefit of those social and citizens’ movements that adhere to the charter of principles of the Social Forums’ ( Babels n.d.). As such, Babels coordinated interpreting services at various Social Forums—the main meeting of the global justice movement—between 2002 and 2014. Since 2014, however, Babels has ended this cooperation: in 2015 they refused to offer their volunteer services at the World Social Forum ( WSF) due to the lack of consultation and dialogue on behalf of the organization ( Babels 2015), while in 2016 they declined to participate due to a controversial decision by the WSF organizing committee to offer interpretation only into French, English, and Spanish—what Babels considered ‘three colonial languages’— and to the lack of both sufficient equipment and funding ( Babels 2016). In fact, Babels has been characterized by frequent conflict, both internal and external, throughout their existence. In 2005, Peter Naumann, a German professional interpreter who had worked at a number of WSFs before the arrival of Babels, heavily criticized the collective for their interpretation services at the WSF 2005, which he characterized as lacking professionalism and showing poor quality. From a narrative perspective, Boéri (2008) analysed this controversy and argued that each position was shaped by different understandings of commitment, which, in turn, led to different conceptions of conference interpreting. While Babels showed strong ‘[c]ommitment to participation and horizontality’, Naumann manifested ‘commitment to expertise and rationality’ (2008: 43). The former leads to a vision of ‘a horizontal world’ where interpreting is ‘the product of the collective participation of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds’, while the latter espouses ‘an expertise-based hierarchical world’ in which ‘conference interpreters are portrayed as an elite of gifted individuals’ (2008: 44). In fact, these tensions between ‘ horizontality’ and ‘verticality’ —understood in this context as non-h ierarchical vs hierarchical social structures—have plagued Babels on more than one occasion ( Boéri 2012). At the London Social Forum in 2004, Babels released a statement criticizing the organization of the Forum; yet this communiqué had only been written and approved by certain members, which led to ‘dissatisfaction among volunteers’, as some of them ‘ felt they had not been informed of the organizational process nor consulted with respect to Babels’ statement’ (2012: 276), effectively contradicting the network’s commitment to horizontality and member participation. From a different perspective, Babels and, by extension, translation and interpreting have been studied as a central factor for enhancing inclusion and fostering more democratic practices in political deliberation. Through the comparison of monolingual national activist meetings with multilingual meetings at the European Social Forum ( ESF), Doerr (2012) has argued that the presence of interpreters at the ESF created a more welcoming space for newcomers and minorities. In this case, the need for a slower pace of deliberation caused by linguistic and cultural differences fostered a more attentive and inclusive attitude among participants (2012: 13–16); at the same time, monolingual deliberations were more strongly characterized by ‘ hierarchical settings that reproduced inequalities of class, gender, and ethnicity’ (2012: 18). Moving beyond Babels, Doerr would later develop and expand this argument in her book Political Translation (2018), in which she analyses the work of a variety of grassroots translators and interpreters at several Social Forums across numerous countries to reaffirm her conclusion that ‘multilingual and culturally diverse situations’ involving translator activists ‘were more inclusive, democratic, and effective’ than monolingual and homogenous meetings ( Doerr 2018: 120). Finally, the World Social Forum itself has been studied as a translational space. Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos has argued that t ranslation—understood here 503

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in a wider, conceptual sense, not in a strict interlingual one— can be ‘the procedure that allows for mutual intelligibility’ among multiple experiences of the world, as the ones that came together at the WSF, ‘without jeopardizing their identity and autonomy’ or ‘reducing them to homogeneous entities’ (2006: 131–132). In this sense, Santos sees translation as the element that can bring together a wide diversity of movements that would otherwise run the risk of falling into atomization (2006: 132), ‘reinforcing what is common in the diversity of drive’ (133). ­counter-hegemonic ​­ ­ Along with the WSF, another central collective that can aid us in understanding the alterg lobalization movement was undoubtedly the Mexican Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional ( EZLN, ‘Zapatista Army of National Liberation’), commonly known as the ‘Zapatistas’ or EZLN. Borne out of decades of collaboration between a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla and various indigenous movements ( Romero 2014), the EZLN came to the fore on 1 January 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect, issuing a declaration against NAFTA and the Mexican government. The EZLN opposed NAFTA on the basis of the threat it presented to the survival of traditional indigenous agriculture, as the agreement would ease ‘the influx of cheap goods, particularly corn, from US-based agrobusiness’ ( Wolfson and Funke 2016: 68). After a few days of armed- skirmishes against the Mexican army, the Zapatistas retreated to the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas, from where they have continued to develop their struggle. Along with its emphasis on direct democracy ( Wolfson and Funke 2016: 69), the EZLN has played a central role in the alter-g lobalization movement through their involvement in media and cyberspace activism. From an early stage, various networks of activists across the world helped disseminating the message of the EZLN by uploading and translating their comunicados (‘communiqués’) and related news. Even in 1994, an electronic book on the Zapatistas (Autonomedia 1994) was put together by ‘an e-mail coordinated team translating material largely gathered from The Net’ (Cleaver 1998), in what might have constituted one of the very first examples of translation cyberactivism. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, there is very little research available on the different networks that developed this collective work of translation. Moreover, the evolution of the internet over the last 20 years—w ith the arrival of new communication systems and the erasure of numerous mailing lists and websites that are no longer in use—implies that much of this information is probably irretrievable. In an early piece, Shirley (2001: 8, 22) briefly touches upon the role of The Groundwork Collective, a student organization at the University of California at San Diego, and the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico—US in the maintenance and translation of the first Zapatista website; neither of these groups appear to be active at the moment. However, translation activism in support of the EZLN is still vigorous: the website Enlace Zapatista (‘Zapatist Link’, http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/) regularly uploads Zapatista communiqués and related documents, which are translated into a variety of languages ( English, Italian, German, French and, to a lesser extent, Greek and Arabic).

The movement of the squares and the second wave of activist translation The global economic and social crisis of 2008 led to a period of turmoil that, rather than being over, seems to have since evolved into two distinct phases. The first of these has been characterized by an ‘array of popular and anti- establishment protest movements’ between 2011 and 2016 (Gerbaudo 2017: 32), which involved the occupation of public spaces across a great variety of countries ( Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Greece, Spain, the US, Turkey and France, to name just a few) to protest against the social consequences of the crisis. The second 504

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involves a series of reactions that partially overlap in time with the former and share some of its anti- establishment concerns (criticisms of corruption and the economic inequalities of globalization, political disaffection, uncertainty over the future) while reformulating them in a nationalist and conservative framework (e.g. the xenophobic strand within the Brexit campaign in the UK, the elections of Donald Trump in the US, and the increasing presence of the far-right in European parliaments). In this section, I will focus on the role of translation and interpreting within the first of these phases, commonly known as the ‘movement of the squares’ (Gerbaudo 2017). A salient characteristic of translation activism in this second wave of alter-globalization protests is the enhanced role of cyberactivism. The expansion and growth of technology over the last decade, particularly with the popularization of social media ( Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), user-generated content sites (such as blogs), and instant messaging services ( WhatsApp, Instagram), has taken the possibilities of online activism over recent years to new heights. In particular, the potential of activist networks to become fluid and no longer bound to a shared place has increased exponentially. Pérez- González (2010), for instance, has shown the emergence of what he calls ‘ad-hocracies of activist translators’, that is, groups of individual users who start cooperating online through translation without any previous knowledge of each other. Nevertheless, as will be discussed below, this trend has not meant the end of activist communities in a more traditional sense, including those that are location-based. The Egyptian uprisings of 2011 and their aftermath, which played a key role in the birth and evolution of the movement of the squares, is the only movement that has generated a remarkable body of research on translation activism so far. In 2012, an edited collection (Mehrez 2012) was published following a collective project at the American University of Cairo, compiling translations made by university students of chants, slogans, poems, interviews, and communiqués, as well as reflections on the difficulties and nuances of the translational process. In 2016, another edited collection ( Baker 2016a) took a more complex angle, bringing together a series of reflections on the translation of the Egyptian revolution across multiple media, including poetry, documentary film, street art, and comics. Within this strand, the activist video collective Mosireen, which has incorporated the work of activist subtitlers, has attracted significant attention. One of those volunteer subtitlers (Selim 2016) has reflected on the influence of political commitment upon the task of the translator, emphasizing how activists at Mosireen worked ‘with the intention of building international solidarity networks’ and ‘always with one eye to other uprisings’ (2016: 84– 85). Meanwhile, Baker (2016b) has studied the work of Mosireen and Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution to analyse to what extent subtitling enhances or, on the contrary, undermines these projects’ political commitment. Through sustained fieldwork and textual analysis, Baker analyses the secondary and passive role played by volunteer translators, and how their translations frequently fail to adhere to the principles of solidarity and diversity that underpin the movements. For instance, Baker shows how the choice of languages for the subtitles, with a strong prevalence of English, has limited the expressions of solidarity that the collectives received (2016b: 9–10). However, collectives are not systematic in their use of translation practices in a way that can reflect the diversity of the speakers interviewed, and subtitlers show a tendency to erase linguistic diversity in favour of coherence and semantic meaning. For the time being, the remaining protest movements in this wave remain largely unstudied from the perspective of translation. In an early piece, Mowbray (2010) analysed the importance of blogs in the international dissemination of information on the Greek riots of 2008, and briefly noted the presence of translation as part of their activity, although there is no reflection on their production and reception. From a different angle, activist Mark 505

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Bray (2013) has proposed an understanding of Occupy Wall Street in terms of intralingual translation, arguing that the movement aimed at translating anarchist ideas into a language that could overcome the ideological prejudices that American audiences might have towards anarchism. Finally, my own work (Fernández 2018, 2021) constitutes the only attempt so far to highlight the strong translational components of the political cycle that opened in Spain with the popular protests of 2011, popularly known as the ‘ indignados’ or ‘15M’. First, I address how the conceptual framework and language that underpins Spanish political activism across a wide variety of fields (e.g. feminism, environmentalism, new leftist movements) is strongly indebted to an important work of translation, undertaken by a wide variety of politically committed publishers, but also by non-professionals who use blogging and social media to share translated materials with an activist component. Second, ‘translation’ has a strong presence as a political concept, used by various thinkers and activist-politicians to reflect on the processes of communication between the different constituencies of society.

Translation, interpreting, and the promotion of diversity As discussed at different points in this chapter, globalization is characterized by tensions between unity and diversity; these can arise, for instance, out of the need to provide a unitary front of action for multiple groups espousing a diversity of causes. Nevertheless, this tension can also emerge out of a contrary move, when this unity becomes so imposing and overwhelming that it threatens to erase diversity. This is certainly the case of linguistic diversity and translation. As various studies have shown (Heilbron 1999; Sapiro 2009), the world system of translation in which linguistic exchanges take place is strongly hierarchical, which means that a very reduced number of languages provide the source texts of the majority of the books translated globally. In this system, English enjoys a highly dominant position, which has been reinforced by globalization (Sapiro 2010: 423– 425) as more than 50% of the translations published around the world come from this language. The strong correlation between globalization and the increasing dominance of English certainly poses a threat to the various languages spoken across the world— and not only to the so- called minority languages. In a perceptive piece, Cronin (1998) argued that the condition of a ‘minority’ language is not static or fixed, but rather dynamic; in other words, any language can potentially become a ‘minority’ language under certain conditions. Therefore, the hyperdominant role of global English has consequences for virtually any language across the world ( Bennett and Queiroz de Barros 2017), such as the increase in linguistic interferences or the blurring of boundaries between translator and user. As a reaction against this pre-eminence of English, certain collectives of activist translators and interpreters have made a commitment to defend linguistic diversity as part of their political engagement. As noted above, Babels would be one such example, through their pledge ‘[t]o affirm the right of everybody to express themselves in the language of their choice’ ( Babels n.d.), and their refusal to volunteer at the 2016 World Social Forum, as interpreting services were only offered in the ‘three colonial languages’. A similar endeavour led to the foundation in 2005 of Tlaxcala (www.tlaxcala-int.org/), an international network of translators for linguistic diversity. Its manifesto, which is available in 14 languages, states that Tlaxcala’s founders shared the aim of de-i mperializing the English language by publishing in all possible languages (including English) the voices of writers, thinkers, cartoonists and activists who nowadays write 506

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­ their original texts in languages that the domineering empire’s influence do (sic) not allow to be heard. ­ (Tlaxcala 2005) In this sense, Tlaxcala’s website functions as a publishing site for both authors and translators, as both can submit proposals for publication and requests to become members of the translation community. Across the website, menus offer users the possibility of searching for materials following thematic, geographic, or linguistic criteria, as well as browsing the library of authors, translators, and editors. Finally, the promotion and recognition of indigenous, lesser- spoken, and endangered languages across the world also connects with civic engagement. Generally, this issue tends to fall within the realm of institutional policy (in the case of the protection of a language within a multilingual state) or cultural diplomacy (for programmes promoting the translation of works written in these languages through economic subsidies), which places it within the traditional channels of governance that activism seeks to avoid. However, in certain cases there is an interesting overlap between both. For instance, indigenous activism in the Andean region of Latin America has been paramount in the protection of their languages—which have historically been threatened by the dominance of Spanish— and their enshrinement in governmental policy ( De Pedro et al. 2018a). In the specific case of Peru ( De Pedro et al. 2018b), this linguistic activism has led to the passing of the Prior Consultation Act in 2011, which gives indigenous peoples the right to be consulted in their own languages before the State can adopt an administrative or legislative measure that affects their collective rights. In turn, this has led to the creation of interpreter training programmes by the Peruvian State in order to ensure adequate communication during these consultations. In this way, activism has influenced the provision of translation and interpreting services, even if these are not necessarily activist in nature. At the same time, the expansion of technology has opened new paths for the promotion of endangered languages, as grassroots communities of speakers have resorted to new media as a way of increasing the presence and visibility of their language in the digital world. For instance, Scanell (2012) has shown how users on the social media network Facebook have been able to request and generate volunteer-translated versions of the network in languages such as Basque, Welsh, Cherokee, Northern Sámi, or Rumantsch. An example of such a community is the Bolivian Jaqi Aru (2018), which is promoting online use of the Aymara with a variety of projects, including a translation of Facebook into their indigenous language. However, the fact that Facebook is a for-profit corporation raises a number of doubts, especially regarding how this volunteer work by activists contributes to increasing Facebook’s online presence and its economic profits. In fact, Scanell (2012) also highlights how translations can only take place if Facebook previously agrees to add a new language to its interface, which has led language activists— such as Scanell himself, or the late Neskie Manuel (2010)—to explore shortcuts in order to generate partial, ‘unofficial’ translations of the site. It is evident, therefore, that future forms of community activism will need to go hand in hand with developments in community- centred and - owned technology in order to fully empower users.

Conclusion Despite its recent emergence as a field of research, the study of translation and interpreting as forms of activism seems to be gaining momentum, due to growing interest in the political aspects of the discipline and the increase in activist engagement across the world. Nevertheless, 507

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certain problematic issues arise and many areas are still under-researched, as will be argued in this conclusion. A first key issue is the volatility and instability of digital archives. As mentioned briefly in the case of Zapatista online activism, the rapid evolution of technology implies that certain data can become obsolete (i.e. generated by or stored in a system or media that is no longer in use) or even disappear altogether, as is the case with tweets, sites, comments, or recordings that have been deleted. Therefore, any scholar wishing to embark in a study of activism that involves an online media component should be careful enough to start building their own archive from the very beginning, storing and categorizing any relevant materials for future uses. In relation to this, a second key issue is building trust between researcher and activists. Although this is certainly a characteristic of any kind of research involving social groups, especially when these are undertaking activities that can potentially threaten established powers, the fluid and shapeless character of many activist communities implies that the researcher might find difficulty in accessing them and, in the case of being granted access, might only be able to establish contact with a limited number of activists. In terms of the potential areas for future research, it is evident that the field is immense and constantly expanding, as activism has acquired a truly global character, due to both an interest in reaching wider audiences and the formation of alliances between activist groups across countries. However, it is worth noting a few relevant absences. First, as already highlighted, there is little ‘ historical’ perspective on the long wave of alter-globalization movements: little is known, for instance, about the translational processes, practices, and groups that enabled the birth of the global justice movement in the 1990s. Second, although there is abundant research on individual translators that have shown a commitment to a given cause or identity through their translation practices—notably in the fields of gender and sexuality ( Baer and Kaindl 2017; Castro and Ergün 2017)—there is still ample room to explore how onsite and online communities of activist translators (such as the one studied in Baldo 2018) are contributing to the dissemination of identity politics and the visibility, defence, and recognition of stigmatized and oppressed groups. At the time of writing, a special issue on ‘Translation and LGBT+/Queer activism’ had recently launched its call for papers, which might provide a first point of interest on the topic ( Baldo et al. 2018). Finally, our generalized understanding of activism from a progressive perspective seems to be obscuring the possibility of analysing and understanding r ight-wing activism. This absence is even more controversial in the light of ongoing transnational exchanges between far-right movements and increasing evidence of their use of the internet and related media ( Daniels 2018). Therefore, it would certainly be relevant to know whether translational practices are at work in the evolution and expansion of these movements that, in many cases, also oppose the consequences of globalization. This knowledge would not only enable us to refine our knowledge of translational activism, but also to denounce and counteract groups within these movements that contribute to the dissemination of xenophobic, homophobic, and supremacist contents that violate human dignity.

Further reading Baker, M. (2016b) ‘The Prefigurative Politics of Translation in Place-based Movements of Protest: Subtitling in the Egyptian Revolution’, The Translator, 22(1), ­ pp. 1–21. ­ ­ ​­ An in- depth study of subtitling practices within two activist collectives, Mosireen and Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution, and the ways in which subtitling enhances or undermines their political principles.

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Boéri, J. (2012) ‘Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis. The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice’, The Translator, 18(2), ­ pp. 269–290. ­ ­ ​­ An analysis of the activist interpreting network Babels, which was strongly connected with the birth and evolution of the global justice movement. It pays special attention to the frequently conflictive relationship between their political principles and interpreting practice. Doerr, N. (2018) Political Translation. How Social Movement Democracies Survive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Based on substantial fieldwork across a variety of countries, this text studies the importance of translation and interpreting as a way to ensure diversity, fight inequality, and increase democracy within activist groups. Fernández, F. (2021) Translating the Crisis. Politics and Culture in Spain after the 15M. Abingdon: Routledge. Analyses the importance of translation in Spanish left-w ing politics after the emergence of the 15M or ‘ indignados’ movement in 2011, showing how translation has contributed to the dissemination of ideas and concepts, produced new intellectual and political figures, and provided support to emerging political projects.

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Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Castro, O. and Ergün, E. (eds.) (2017). Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Cheung, M. (2010) ‘Rethinking Activism: The Power and Dynamics of Translation in China during the Late Qing Period (1840–1911)’, in Baker, M., Olohan, M. and Calzada Pérez, M. (eds.), Text and Context: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason. Manchester: St. Jerome, pp. 237–258. ­ ­ ​­ Cheyfitz, E. (1991) The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cleaver, H. (1998) ‘The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle’, Texas Liberal Arts. Available online: https:// la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/zaps.html#29 [Accessed 4 December 2018]. Cronin, M. (1998) ‘The Cracked Looking Glass of Servants’, The Translator, 4(2), ­ pp. 145–162. ­ ­ ​­ Daniels, J. (2018) ‘The Algorithmic Rise of the “Alt-Right”‘, Contexts, 17(1), ­ pp. 60–65. ­ ­ ​­ De Manuel Jerez, J., Cortés, J. L. and Brander de la Iglesia, M. (2004) ‘Traducción e interpretación, ­ ­ ​­ voluntariado y compromiso social’, Puentes, 4, pp. 65–72. De Pedro, R. Howard, R., and Andrade, L. (2018a) ‘Translation Policy and Minority Languages in ­ ­ ​­ Hispanic Latin America’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 251, pp. 19–36. De Pedro, R., Howard, R. and Andrade, L. (2018b) ‘Walking the Tightrope: The Role of Peruvian ­ pp. 187–211. ­ ­ ​­ Indigenous Interpreters in Prior Consultation Processes’, Target, 30(2), Della Porta, D. (ed.) (2007) The Global Justice Movement: Cross-national and Transnational Perspectives. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Doerr, N. (2012) ‘Translating Democracy: How Activists in the European Social Forum Practice Mul­ pp. 361–384. ­ ­ ​­ tilingual Deliberation’, European Political Science Review, 4(3), Doerr, N. (2018) Political Translation. How Social Movement Democracies Survive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fernández, F. (2018) ‘Podemos: Politics as a “Task of Translation”‘, Translation Studies, 11(1), ­ pp. 1–16. ­ ­ ​­ Fernández, F. (forthcoming) Translating the Crisis. Politics and Culture in Spain after the 15M. London: Routledge. Flesher Fominaya, C. (2017) ‘European Anti-austerity and Pro- democracy Protests in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis’, Social Movement Studies, 16(1), ­ pp. 1–20. ­ ­ ​­ Gago, V. and Cavallero, L. (2017) ­ ‘Argentina’s ­ ­Life-or-Death ­​­­ ​­ Women’’s Movement’, Jacobin, 7 March 2017. Available online: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/argentina-ni-una-menos­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ ­­femicides-women-strike/ ­​­­ ​­ [Accessed on 28 November 2018]. Gerbaudo, P. (2012) Tweets and The Streets. Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto Press. Gerbaudo, P. (2017) The Mask and the Flag. Populism, Citizenism, and Global Protest. London: Hurst & Co. Guo, T. (2008) ‘Translation and Activism: Translators in the Chinese Communist Movement in the ­1920s–30s’, ​­ ­ in Boulogne, P. (ed.), Translation and Its Others. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research ­ ­ ­ ­ Seminar in Translation Studies 2007. Available online: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/ files/guo.pdf [Accessed 30 November 2018]. Gutiérrez, M. (2018) Data Activism and Social Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hands, J. (2010) @ is for Activism. London: Pluto Press. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heilbron, J. (1999) ‘Toward a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World–System’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2(4), ­ pp. 429–444. ­ ­ ​­ Heyes, C. (2018) ‘Identity Politics’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/identity-politics/ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ​­ [Accessed 10 December 2018]. Jaqi Aru (2018) ‘Jaqi Arxata/Acerca de’. Jaqi Aru. Available online: http://en.jaqi-a ru.org/ [Accessed 7 December 2018]. Karagiannopoulos, V. (2018) Living with Hacktivism: From Conflict to Symbiosis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lebron, C. (2017) The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefevere, A. (1992) Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge. Manuel, N. (2010) ‘Secwepemc Facebook: A Greasemonkey Userscript to Alter Facebook to Display Words in Secwepemctsin’. GitHub, October 28. https://github.com/neskie/secwepemc-facebook/blob/ ­ ­ ­­ ​­ ­ master/README.textile [Accessed 7 December 2018]. 510

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Martin, B. (2003) ‘Activism, Social and Political’, in Anderson, G. L. and Herr, K. G. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice, vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage, pp. 19–27. McMichael, A. (2013) ‘Globalization, Climate Change, and Human Health’, The New England Journal ­ ­ ​­ of Medicine, 368, pp. 1335–1343. Mehrez, S. (ed.) (2012) Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir. Cairo: American University Press. Milton, J. (2006) ‘The Resistant Political Translations of Monteiro Lobato’, The Massachusetts Review, ­ pp. 486–509. ­ ­ ​­ 47(3), Mowbray, M. (2010) ‘Blogging the Greek Riots: Between Aftermath and Ongoing Engagement’, The ­ ­ ​­ Resistance Studies Magazine, 1, pp. 4–15. Niranajana, T. (1992) Siting Translation. History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pérez-González, L. (2010) ‘Ad-hocracies’ of Translation Activism in the Blogosphere a Genealogical Case Study’, in Baker, M., Olohan, M. and Calzada Pérez, M. (eds.), Text and Context: Essays on ­ ­ ​­ Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason. Manchester: St. Jerome, pp. 259–287. Pérez- González, L. (2016) ‘The Politics of Affect in Activist Amateur Subtitling: A Biopolitical Perspective’, in Baker, M. and Blaagaard, B. (eds.), Citizen Media and Public Spaces: Diverse Expressions of ­ ­ ​­ Citizenship and Dissent. London: Routledge, pp. 118–135. Pieterse, J. (2009) Globalization and Culture: Global Melange. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Rafael, V. L. (1993) Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reitan, R. (2007) Global Activism. Abingdon: Routledge. Rendueles, C. (2013) Sociofobia. El cambio político en la era de la utopía digital. Barcelona: Capitán Swing. Ritzen, Y. (2018) ‘Rising Internet Shutdowns aimed at silencing dissent’, Al Jazeera, 29 January 2018. Available online: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/01/rising-internet-shutdowns-aimed­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ [Accessed 10 December 2018]. ­­silencing-dissent-180128202743672.html ­​­­ ​­ Romanos, E. (2016) ‘De Tahrir a Wall Street por la Puerta del Sol: la difusión transnacional de los movimientos sociales en perspectiva comparada’, Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 154, ­ ­ ​­ pp. 103–118. Romero, R. (2014) ‘A Brief History of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation’, ROAR Mag­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ azine, January 1, 2014. Available online: https://roarmag.org/essays/brief-history-ezln-uprising/ [Accessed 4 December 2018]. Santos, B. de S. (2006) The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond. London: Zed Books. Sapiro, G. (2009) ‘Mondialisation et diversité culturelle : les enjeux de la circulation transnationale des livres’, in Sapiro, G. (ed.), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale. Paris: Nouveau Monde, ­ ­ ​­ pp. 275–301. Sapiro, G. (2010) ‘Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary ­ ­ ​­ Translations in the US and in France’, Poetics, 38, pp. 419–439. Scanell, K. (2012) ‘Translating Facebook into Endangered Languages.’ Paper Given at the 16th Foundation for Endangered Languages Conference, Auckland. Available online: http://cs.slu. edu/~scanell/pub/fel12.pdf [Accessed 10 December 2018]. Selim, S. (2016) ‘Text and Context: Translating in a State of Emergency’, in Baker, M. (ed.), Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 77– 87. Shirley, S. (2001) ‘Zapatista Organizing In Cyberspace: Winning Hearts and Minds?’, Latin American Studies Association. Available online: http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/Lasa2001/ShirleySheryl.pdf ­ ­ ­ [Accessed 3 December 2018]. Steger, M. (2013) Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tlaxcala (20 05) ‘Tlaxcala’s Manifesto’, Tlaxcala. Available online: http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/ ­ ­ ​­ ­ manifeste.asp?lg_aff=en [Accessed 6 December 2018]. Tymoczko, M. (2000) ‘Translation and Political Engagement: Activism, Social Change and the Role ­ pp. 23–47. ­ ­ ​­ of Translation in Geopolitical Shifts’, The Translator, 6(1), Tymozcko, M. (2006) ‘Translation: Ethics, Ideology, Action’, The Massachusetts Review, 47(3), ­ pp. 442–461. ­ ­ ​­ Tymoczko, M. (ed.) (2010) Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Venuti, L. (1995) The Translator’’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge. 511

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Introduction One of the patterns of the splitting/sharing of reason, traversing all fields, is the sex divide, where translation either stops at a bifurcation, or proceeds. Gender is a fundamental figure 2003c: ­259–278, 2007: ­45–55, 2017: ­259–​ of the mechanism of partage de la raison1 (Iveković ­ ​­ ​­ 278), functioning by analogy in all other binaries. Gender inequality, hammered as ‘natural’, ‘ justifies’ other hierarchies whether racial, class or other, which are gendered through such approximations. Today this also targets migrants. Globalization makes cultural/ethnic fragmentation the flipside of uniformity. Essentialized culture is now perceived as nature. We therefore need to be wary of the dichotomic dynamics of reason. In her critique of Kalidas Bhattacharyya’s philosophy, Shefali Moitra writes, ending with a quotation: His later philosophy does not ignore but rejects the logic of alternatives (...). In his Alternative Standpoints in Philosophy [Bhattacharyya] (...) comes to the conclusion that, ‘ in Philosophy (…) one has to identify himself with one or the other of the different alternative ideologies – for all of them cannot be accepted’. (Moitra 1988: ­1–14) ­ ​­ But thoughts often come to us in binaries (gender, ‘we’ vs. ‘others’, ‘nationals’ vs. ‘ foreigners’, ‘citizens’ vs. ‘migrants’...). Françoise Héritier (Héritier 1996) thinks this is because our species is sexed. The concern should be to take reasoning/thinking beyond the dichotomies in a permanent translation process, a double-bind activity. The translator is ‘translated’ in the process. Naoki Sakai’s work (Sakai 2010: 441– 464, 2011, 2013), linking (colonial) history, linguistics, humanities, is most instructive here in that he manages to overcome mere oppositions and reductive positionalities. ‘Cultural differences’ between citizens and migrants (the decisive dichotomy today), genders, inequalities, conflict, violence, ‘ identities’ all happen in community and in language, well within ‘culture’ which in itself is no guarantee against violence. In a crisis, society is depoliticized as shown in Konstantinović’s concept palanka 2

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­ (Konstantinović 1981), whereby brutality and indifference reveal an incapacity for desire. The failed, divided ‘subject’ can’t negotiate subject-positions. In this we must reconsider the concept of universal and its relationship to the particular. Eleni Varikas writes: (...) state universalism acts as if all were indeed free and equal. When seen from the state’s point of view, ‘differences’ produced by social antagonisms, impeding the effective exercise of the universality of rights, are bereft of political content. (...) This dissociation ­ politique) to mere politics (la ­ politique), to the science of government, reduces the political (le to the functioning of the state and of its institutions. (Varikas 2006: 85, emphasis in original) If the universal is seen as a plural rapport rather than as the supreme office, the subject’s autonomy appears as complex, contextual, relational and relative. The dominant subject has to give up some of its authority and normativity in order to share the universal, for the move to be effective. This involves de-identification as an alternative option, a neglected complement to any identification. In this sense, translating between the particular and the universal levels, which can take various directions especially considering the character of the universal (whether inclusive or exclusive, the latter being the usual, though not obligatory, form), is a highly political act. Renewed forms of partition, of political, emotional disbandment and of division are projected on, identified with, and made to be supported by the founding rift of reason (which they reinforce). From separating reasons (reason against madness; ‘my’ reason against ‘yours’; also, ‘theory’ against ‘practice’), different forms of partition gather their divisive, normative and exclusive efficiency. It is therefore crucial to imagine political subjects that outgrow both the reductive language of citizenship, and the depoliticized concept of governmentality. We need to rethink popular movements that are not recognized as political, such as migrations, women’s life stories ( Lalita et  al. 1990; Meer 2001), suburbia riots, the ‘Yellow vests’ in France in 2018–19, and others ( Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018).

Feminist ethics and translation The work of translation helps switching between political, economic, cultural, social, psychological discourses, reducing their ethnicization (fragmentation, balkanization through disciplines), and moving between different epistemes. This epistemological and theoretical challenge is also a practical-political problem. In such dovetailing of two senses, the split (of ) reason should be overcome. This often means dealing with personal as well as historical, political defeat, with loss, disgrace (Coetzee 1998, 2000, 2003) and divided reason, and reconsidering the way in which loss is constitutive (Spivak 2004; Iveković 2010: ­43–50). ​­ Reason is divided into dominant reason and that of the subservient in each hierarchy, injustice, inequality or domination; each time someone is found subordinated, and may negotiate hegemony. Prevailing reason knows nothing of the reasons of the defeated, of alternative histories, as patriarchal reason ignores that of women, of the young, of the enslaved. The reason of citizenship ignores that of non-citizens, of mere ‘migrants’, whose reasons appear as incongruities, madness, non-language, as inarticulate and wild. It is thus that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and others ( Kofman 1982, 2000; Schott 2004) build an efficient critique of Kant’s divided reason. Spivak shows the local, European, German origin of posing reason’s universality, its geographical roots, its ignorance of colonization and of the conquests accompanying and extending it. The modern subject and the citizen are born split, Spivak shows (Spivak 1999). 514

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They are differentiated in terms of property, gender and ‘civilization’ (Said 1979, Said 1994), the latter being a euphemism for ‘race’. History and society have introduced, and political configurations, patriarchal and race regimes, class divides, have maintained inequalities, presenting them as natural. ‘Respect’ was due to women ( Kofman 1982), or to ‘others’, as a mark of civilization, implying ethnicization. Therefore respect is now theorized and claimed for mending the injustice in cases of racialized minorities ( Balibar 2018). As Kofman underscored remarkably, respect to females actually meant distancing oneself from them for one’s own benefit and for separating ‘women’ (on pedestal) from ‘whores’. Respect was due to the first (the mother figure) and not to the ‘whore’. Kofman shows how respect for women is, in Kant, a law before other laws. It thus remains with women in the realm of the ‘natural’. ‘The education of man to reason and to morality ends therefore up’, Kofman writes, ‘ in liberation from mother nature, from women and from inclinations, yet all education passes through them’ ( Kofman 1982: 38).3 This is Kant’s basic paradox of practical reason. ‘From a subjective viewpoint, the [(virile) power of impulsive force] is called respect. Respect is what eschews reason’s emasculation in setting into motion transcendental imagination’ ( Kofman 1982: 48). Keeping women, sublime or fallen beings, at a distance (‘respect’), clearly from a male position, is the price of reason. Its price is self- d isciplining, producing a raft in reason and in its objects. The ‘respect ­ ​­ for women’ as morality’s precondition confirms that the wrongs they suffer are also pre-given as a ­pre-condition. ​­ They are ‘natural’, and women are naturalized. Gender, naturalization and ‘ethnic’ determination fare together in the construction of inequalities. Spivak introduces however an important difference between women and native informants of their mother-tongue in colonies. If the latter remain invisible, if the ‘subaltern cannot speak’ (Spivak 1999), women are not always muted. There may be a difference of degree in how women and migrants are subalternized. But we may doubt the utility of separating and positioning women outside the imprecise category designated as ‘subaltern’. Divisions are the dynamics of reasoning (Nāgārjuna). Fluid bifurcations of reason imply transitory ( Vega 2003: 49– 60), uncertain and ‘soft’ identities. ‘Heteronormativity’ ( Nivedita Menon 2004) as developed in Queer theory is here most interesting because it shifts from identification to utter de-identification. Judith Butler gradually moved from gendered categories towards overcoming divisions, while nevertheless recognizing an ethical horizon in conceptualizing. Such non-normative ethics is distinguished by a margin of freedom in any relation (within a framework). Those are instances of sharing: here, Butler distinguishes self­ ​ ­control from sovereignty ( Butler 2004: 193–214). But the relational, though not necessarily normative, does not exclude the hegemonic aspect of power! ( Laclau 1999/2000: 82ff; Sangari 2001). In our terms, Butler refuses compartmentalized reasons but accepts the process of reason’s divisions, its becoming (devenir), ­ as its constant displacement through splitting up. This corresponds to partage de la raison (sharing/splitting of reason, as a process) as opposed to raison partagée (separated reason(s), as definitive). She sees in it an open ethics inducing responsibility at every step, but exposing to risks, of which there is no zero degree. We face then constitutive exclusion, or exception, as a question of (un)divided rationality. A ‘weak’, non-normative ethics of decentring the subject, de-identifying, and of partage in the best sense. Something ­ like Simone Weil’s ‘de-creation’ or ‘inachèvement’ (state of incompleteness), a negative or ‘decreasing’ spiritual progress towards grace? Like Buddhist ‘ethics’ both ontological and epistemological ( Weil 1947)? In several schools of Buddhism indeed the subject is decentred or willingly decreasing in an ontological process accompanied by an epistemological one ­ (Iveković 2014). No equitable reciprocity seems to be readily available, and Spivak warns that an attempt to tame the receiving end may not be innocent (Spivak 1999: 130). Can we reverse 515

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the action by becoming (an)other? This seems to be the only viable way left, as some kind of self­translation (Milčinski ­ ​­ 2017: ­583–595). ­ Is Ewa Płonowska Ziarek’s project of An Ethics of Dissensus (Płonowska Ziarek 2001) distant from Butler’s? She deals with dialogues between discourses ranging from feminism, to ‘postmodernity’, theories of emancipation of the Blacks,4 postcolonial theories or radical democracy. Recognizing all instable alterities is here required. The exercise displays and critiques a wide range of theoretical approaches and distils the latter down to an anticipated project of postmodern plural harmony. The core remains the paradox of hegemony, of dissensus, of différend. Feminist scholars have tried to find a ‘ feminist logic’ in ethics, or a feminist ethics as a distinct engagement (Schott 2003; Schott and Klercke 2007). The unconventional philosopher Chantal Maillard attracts our attention by her ease in moving between western and Indian philosophies, remarkable in her personal rigorous intel​­ lectual ethics that transforms her own engaged ­self-decentring into a discreet project. She poses a ‘rationality whose first instance would be a receptive openness and the second a communicative construction. Turning reason into an art and the world into a piece of art (…)’ where the ethical and the aesthetic meet. She writes to this author in a 2007 mail: ‘I cannot write an affirmative sentence without thinking that the opposite could also be defended’. She practises sharp, inventive translating between the inner and the outer dimensions, oneself and the reader, ‘India’ and the ‘west’, between ‘cultures’, between different epistemes, codes or dispositions. She shows the vital risk of thinking, and takes it (‘to value the possible rather than the certain’) while demonstrating the advantage of putting oneself into question (Maillard 1993, 1998, 2001). Particularly impressive is her mediation between the political and the aesthetic. Freedom requires aesthetics too. According to her, separated reasons (one could say: balkanized reason, Iveković 1995) have been our ruin, where ‘to think’ and ‘to love’ have become different things. A line of contemplative, therapeutical, incisive philosophy can be detected in the unusual work of Maillard, philosophe sans frontières. The historic gap Maillard senses between loving and thinking is a politically and socially foundational one in hierarchical societies. The division travels from the imagined origin to the core of the political body and of social institutions, established upon a constitutive subordination or exclusion, a subaltern inclusion, an inclusive outside: that of women and others, as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin or Urvashi Butalia show in the case of independent India and Pakistan ( Butalia 1998; Menon and Bhasin 1998; Moitra 2002; Bagchi and Dasgupta 2003). The foundational moment of partition and of nation-building demanded retrieving universality and citizenship from women and thus building into the heart of the political institution as such – its paradoxical but basic incompleteness. The latter is symbolically ‘ deduced’ from women, as shown by Nicole Loraux (1990, 1997), and also by Butalia (1998) or by Menon and Bhasin (1998). The ‘universal’ rule, by which ‘all’ could choose the country they would live in at partition ( Pakistan or India), didn’t apply to women. Loraux explains how, according to the Athenian foundation myth, only men have already been there ‘at the beginning’. Women, an element difficult to fit,5 a necessary evil, had been introduced later. They are not ‘autochthonous’, and are unfit for citizenship ( Loraux 1990, 6 ​­ Masculine self-generation and autochthony are evidenced as 1997; Andreani 2005: ­85–94). a foundational dream right in the first written accounts. Female non-authenticity, the idea that women are an incongruous artefact and an addition to male universal normality rather than present from the origin or, worse, that their inauthenticity is original, will be used in order to despoil women of parental rights, of adult status and of citizenship. Evidence of women as non-citizens and as originally displaced shows their kinship and shared interests ­ ­ with migrants/refugees (Iveković 2015). Autochthony, according to Loraux, means that men 516

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were all born from a common mother, Athens’ soil, but have patrilineage through different fathers. Women don’t enjoy it themselves, but partly transmit autochthony (to full-fledged citizen sons) on condition that their own fathers be of a ‘high’ lineage. There is no denying – and this is a digression from Loraux  – that for such an amount of androcentrism, you need some anthropocentrism in the first place. It is women that disrupt the old law and order so as to maintain a community of sharing. The fantasy of masculine self-generation has been generalized in the construction of the nation. Self-generation and self-foundation, as an impossible dream of self-sufficiency and absolute autonomy, is not only murderous, it is also suicidal, as i have shown in my work (Iveković 2003a, 2003b). Men will be self-born. ­ ​­

The constitutive and foundational condition The aim of the self-born(e) and autochthonous is to bridge sexual duality: a dream of selfgeneration. The mythical preference evidenced by Loraux shows that, a unique autochthonous only-male lineage would be far preferred. This dream reorganizes the origin in order to eliminate the others or any due to others in maintaining privileges and dominance. Myths immobilize time, no historicity is accorded to the other: women are all ‘the same’, descending from a ready-made woman ( but neither Athenian, nor citizen). Girls resemble their mothers ( boys are after their fathers) and belong to the female species. Loraux shows not only the political role of partitioned reason, but also how one binary can be translated into another through a ‘chain of equivalence’. The original couple ‘mother and father’ is replaced by ‘ father and fatherland’ in a territorial imaginary anticipating the ‘national’. The imaginary of a masculine origin and essential male symbolic connection and claim to the land is a ­self-referential, ​­ self-founding and self-establishing universalization of the wild dream of self-origination: the dominant can only descend of the same ( here, masculine). When it is revealed that the same (the masculine) is born from the different (the feminine), this scandalous paradox is covered by a different regime of discourse, a command. There are two divisive mythical events in Greek self-representation according to Loraux: first, the separation of man( kind) and gods; second, that of men and women – their becoming different species. In a digression from Loraux, may i add that it also entails the separation between theory and practice? It is probable that the latter separation starts from the Ancient Greeks, but my concern is that generally the separation between theory and practice, pertaining to the ‘western’ knowledge paradigm, is a mechanism of policing and constraint exercised by epistemological elites more often than not at the service of political elites too. There is a permanent process of differentiation and of inferiorization of women and other subordinates. This requires a heavy politics of translation ­ (Iveković 2019). The second step is on-going and complex. It reconstructs a universe free of women, linking up autochthony to procreative sexuality in a gender regime. Whoever comes ‘after the beginning’ is included as subordinate. The creation of women is part of the process of taking distance from the origin, of separation, differentiation and evolution. For their sociability, in patriarchal societies (in the case of India, this is all the more true of brahmanical society), men have to separate from the other and join the same; while women are expected to separate from the same (the mother and female company) – and join the other as subservient, if at all they are to exist (Iveković 1993: 113–126). It can be concluded from Loraux but also from other authors that it is women who finally separate men and gods. ‘Separating men from gods’ is a patriarchal synonym for decadence and disaster, no conclusion of ours. It denotes the end of unity of men and gods or, in monotheisms, the end of Paradise. According to Loraux, Athens reconstructs in retrospect an a priori unquestionable prohibition of women’s citizenship. 517

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Is this different from women’s condition in politics in general and in partition as brought to light by Indian feminist scholars? Here too, the foundation of institutions inhabits the move that excludes/subordinates women. In her book, Butalia shows the complex intersections of conditioning, re-foundational exclusions in the partition of ( British) India ( Butalia 1998): partition itself was foundational of the new nation(s). The price for a ll- encompassing nationhood in the case of India was its double amputation of the feminine: the ejection of territories and of parts of the population seen as feminine; as well as the deletion of womenfolk. The hunt on women in partition is well documented in Butalia’s as well as in Menon’sBhasin’s (1998) books. The aim of the nation ‘ justifies’ massacres of women, retaliating for ‘ lost’ territories seen as feminine, as motherland. The ‘masculinization’ of the world has gone a step further since the contemporary turn of globalization: the ‘ feminine’ is now perceived as a concentration of poverty, insufficiency, insecurity, destabilization, as a threat to defuse or eliminate in advance. Brutal, militarized and masculinized ‘civilizations’ in warfare, have now cut themselves from any ‘ feminine’ element involving asylum or alternative (Zajović et al. 2015), and have condemned themselves to suicide through the elimination of others (women, immigrants), in some cases elimination even from sight (women under burqa; remote shantytowns). Eliminating others nowadays targets migrants too. According to Esther Cohen (Cohen 2004), women’s ancient healing and caring expertise – in Europe principally at Renaissance – was seen as dangerous power and as a lower kind of knowledge ( Ehrenreich and English 1985). This is a division of reason, whereby the (male) philosopher’s reason is associated with power. Witches were persecuted in Europe and in the colonies (notwithstanding Enlightenment and Rationalism). With other debased groups, they were seen as irrational, domesticated at best.

Translating gender, ethnic or national violence Making patriarchy foundational is not an affair of the past ‘once for all’, or one that concerns women only. It is a (re-)foundational ­­ ​­ ­ process persisting in time, adaptable to changing conditions. ‘Migrants’ ­ (Iveković ­ 2016), ‘ foreigners’, ‘Muslims’, etc., will follow suit and track exclusion pattern or the subordinate inclusion of women. This process involves a ‘ justifying’ translation of the constructed hierarchies, addressed to different publics but also of different political narratives. The debate about the ‘Moslem Scarf ’ worn by some girls in French schools produced much confusion around the French concept of secularism, which is historically at the core of the construction of the nation and of the state. It concerns gender, ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, class. In patriarchy, secularism has a hidden agenda on sexuality because the inequality of women is constitutive (women, children, the dependent and groups considered as inassimilable or not corresponding to the universal pattern). In order to avoid a split of reason ( partage de la raison) it is useful seeing the link between religion and politics, and the theological origin of state ​­ secularism (and of laïcité)7 inasmuch they are the secularization of a divine concept – sovereignty itself ( Bhargava 1998; Esposito 1998; Agamben 2002; Schmitt 2002). The sphere of this is law itself. Through it the state and its elites self-establish themselves as sovereign exceptions to the very law they proclaim. It is also they who provide the prevailing translation protocol, namely, ‘Sovereignty as the creation of law, i.e. its non-legal origin, and the law as a legitimating a posteriori of the illegality that constituted it: the law of exception’ ( Esposito 2002: 86). There is indeed no law without exceptions. This is why ‘ laïcization’ fails: whereas universal projects such as the ‘republic’, ‘democracy’ have been de-legitimized together with 518

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utopias, insistent particularistic/identitarian/communitarian claims are supported by a general condescendence to cultural or religious essentialisms (Menon 2004). Here comes the confusion about the ‘Islamic veil’: the veil is a universal sign of the subordination of women ( Nasrin 2007: 62– 63), but it may also claim ‘recognition’ and agency, personal or collective. It is used for opposite arguments, as has been the case in Turkey, Iran or France. The misunderstanding lies in bad translation and bad negotiation of the relationship between the universal and the particular, and not in the particular (‘culture’, ‘religion’, ‘race’) itself, or even in the universal(s) ( Balibar 1997: 419– 454, 2016). Religion may attempt to animate all those excluded from political agency and from effective citizenship. This prevails where active citizenship is fading away (through a general depoliticization) and where an important part of the economically active population is without political rights because foreign: it is now citizens (nationals) vs. foreigners (non-nationals). ­­ ​­ ­ As in the Yugoslav conflict over the 1990s, gender issues in France are now often instrumentalized in public discourse for other political purposes, but are otherwise neglected. The scarf issue, regarding democracy and equality, concerns the immigrants or their descendants. Secularism and sexuality are difficult to link, although their connection defines the nation. For Balibar, gender is the missing link in the relationship between cosmopolitanism and secularism in view of democracy ( Balibar 2011: 6–25, 2012). I call that missing link a political operator. As from a 2004 law, no one under 18 was to be admitted to a public school wearing an ‘ostentatious religious sign’: practically, it concerned mainly Muslim girls. Many were withdrawn from public schools.8 Everyone is right here, with opposite arguments.9 The matter concerns ‘migrants’ and populations of foreign origin too. The scarf is worn for diverse reasons. Reshuffling a ‘new tradition’ doesn’t represent a breach with modernity ( Urvoy 2006). Some of those girls who often face everyday racism would be looking for their cultural ‘roots’ (often, daughters, not the mothers, wear scarves). French universalism makes it difficult to identify explicit discrimination. It also makes impossible the disentanglement of conflicting patriarchies that cooperate in infantilizing girls and women and subordinate them to the family, the community, the religion and the state. The 1905 ‘Law of separation between the State and the Churches’, known in France as ‘the law on laïcité’, was the end of a long struggle between the state and the Church over land property and political power. Education had been the first to be secularized in ending the ancien régime. Religion was relegated to the private sphere for everyone because of the presence of Protestants and Jews among Catholics, ending a long series of religious wars. Secularization followed different courses elsewhere. The national state, secular within Europe, is colonial elsewhere ( Kristeva 1991; Bessis 2002). Laïcité, which is not atheism, allows for the nation’s unification regardless of religious, class or other differences because it keeps religious or ethnic manifestations private and separate from the state and the nation, and invisible in the sphere of the latter in the case of France. It is therefore thanks to laïcité and in its name that geographical conquests were possible, as a promise of equality to all regardless of their faith or gender. Needless to say that it never kept its promise. Laïcité was meant as the equal right to religious cult and its protection by the state when practised in private. Catholicism gave much of its colouring to such secularism: state celebrations are mainly Christian holidays. Laïcité is only possible as the flipside of monotheism, as shown by Jean-Luc Nancy ( Nancy 2004, 2005). ­​­­ ​­ The opposition ­citizens-non-citizens is established. The inscription into the system requires the previous ethnicization and atomization of particular interests, claimed by the nation. It necessitates a good amount of recasting women according to community, state and other political interest (Sangari 2001; Sangari and Vaid 1990). How to inscribe into the nation a population whose 519

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exclusion from it was the very condition of its integration? That was the case in the Americas. Settlers’ nations were paradoxically formed without the people as political agency (the local indigenous population), either exterminated or because they were surviving as subdued. The problem seems at first glance easier in the case of contemporary France – as the exclusion of the population to be now included in the nation was not the direct condition of the constitution of the nation at the French Revolution. There were no Maghrebian, colonial immigrants in mainland France then. But it is wealth from the colonies that fed European capitalism and prosperity, nurtured the Revolution and the nation state. There is no reversal of history: the only way to include this population, whose presence in Europe is a fait accompli, is to open borders and a public debate. This is starting very painfully. France has not benefited, like the UK, from a globalized language to export this debate while leaving it low-key within its own space.10 This debate has to relate not only to the definition of the French nation, but also to the integration of Europe, and the future of immigration. The pact of secularism needs to be reconsidered. The laïcité law prohibiting ‘ostentatious religious signs’ in order to forbid the veil worn by Muslim girls merely stops the debate and transforms a historic political problem into a false religious question. Gender is politically central here, though unrecognized. At a time (2018) when both France and Europe need to be redefined, gender and the relationship to ‘others’ will have to be reconsidered. This requires a definite politics of translation. ​­ ­11. In bad transIt is a possible new beginning for a new foundation (Iveković 2005a: ­81–95) lation, women are usually made instrumental to someone else’s stake in power politics. Due proportion being observed, the French condition of women is comparable to other examples that we randomly picture hereafter. Mukhtar Mai was gang raped in a Pakistani village allegedly upon the ruling of the local jirga in punishment… to her brother who had been seen in the company of a woman he ‘shouldn’t have been approaching’. His sister was the instrument of a verdict aiming him (Mai 2006; Sidwa 2006: 28). Public, state, national or regional politics, all have one basic common pattern ( however diversely declined ( Passerini 1999)). Families, communities and states overlook sexual and gendered violence, constitutive of their power, except when they can use it towards their aims. In that sense, Mai’s case is neither exceptional nor regional. Guriya’s is an Indian example: she found herself with two husbands, having been married to a relative of the first by her family, after the first spouse was thought to either have been killed in the Kargil War or to have deserted to Pakistan. Having been released, he returned in 2004 a local hero. The village panchayat facing TV cameras ordered her back to her first husband against her will, although already pregnant with the second. Private drama became public humiliation. She died of that trauma, probed for patriotic and communal feelings, symbolizing a larger social row.12 Another case: Imrana (India) was raped by her father-in-law in the absence of her husband. The panchayat invalidated her marriage, because the father’s reason must prevail over the son’s.13 Once again, the concerned person wasn’t consulted. Meanwhile, since the well-known case of the multiple rape with killing of a medical student in 2012 in Delhi, many more depressing narratives have come to be known about all pervasive depreciation of women and violence to them. Different patriarchies reach mutual understanding and translation. Still another case of extreme violence happened in France: actress and a public figure, Marie Trintignant was murdered in 2003 by her partner, singer Bertrand Cantat ( popular rock band ‘Noir Désir’), in a hotel room in Lithuania. He was convicted in Vilnius to eight years in prison, but was transferred to a French prison after one year. His penalty alleviated, he was released on parole in 2007. A sort of holy discretion developed around him. The 520

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murder is presented in public discourse as his tragedy. A journalist titles his editorial ‘Elegy’ (Sabatier 2005: 4). Some kind of public compassion for the assassin is maintained. Articles wrote about how much he must have loved her for hitting her so hard as to have killed her, or how she must have provoked him. He lost her, they said, in a tragic incident. One would have wished this outstanding case, which covers so much ignored domestic violence against women ( Jaspard & ENVEFF 2003) and children, to have resulted in a thorough debate and radical legal measures. In Spain, for example, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s government, on comparable matters, had made it into a nationwide issue and violence against women has since become publicly denounced. Under the ‘tragedy’ label sympathetic to the assassin minimizing general violence against women and against Trintignant in particular, the victim’s and the murderer’s families suddenly gained the same level of respectability. There are demands that Cantat should be left alone from the public gaze. The undeniable right to be left alone,14 however, was not an issue when, after the transfer to a French prison, the group Noir Désir got permission to work together again. The aim was now quick rehabilitation, burying and overlooking the facts. That the crime is symbolic of what happens to many women every day is no concern to the rehabilitation party. The band functions as a fraternity against all odds. His friends give an idealized picture of Cantat: We are not allowed to bring him anything. (…) His life is that of a normal detainee, not at all that of political crooks. Last time we saw him he said he could concentrate again on a book, on a bit of writing. (Sabatier 2005: 4) It is tragedy, not a crime, and the culprit is a victim! Then his wife (there is a wife), who supported him all along, commits suicide while he sleeps unaware. Even that is depicted as a blow to him in the media. About the ‘tragedy’, his companions declare: ‘All sorts of things have been said about how Bertrand never came out of his hotel room in Vilnius during the shooting of the TV movie in which Marie Trintignant played. In fact, he was working’ ( Barthe 2005: 27). Diluting proceeds: ‘Bertrand is like anyone else, capable of the best and of the ­ worst. That never put into question what we had achieved before’ (Ibid., emphasis added, Barthe 2005: 27). Are we all potential murderers, capable of beating up a woman to death? Any human is entitled to a chance. What seems revolting here is – how little is thought of violence against women, of murders on a daily basis of which Trintignant’s tragedy (not ­ Cantat’s) is an emblematic example. The case, though it became a popular feuilleton, never became symbolic, in France, of the plight of battered and assassinated women, of sexual or gendered violence. Indignation was not raised to the political level it deserves. Violence towards women needs translating into some meaningful language. Only the #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc movements are now bringing up that issue in public, with all the ambivalence they carry. All these cases became public feuilletons. Such examples draw on an ancient patriarchal culture’s sacrificial pattern, and specifically on the ‘western’ idea of a necessary aesthetic sacrifice. Aesthetics sublimates ethics. Artistic creation supposedly requires sacrificing the other or, more exactly, the third, i.e. the one who is not even a co- subject in interaction, as the art recipient would be. Property and propriety of a man is damaged when his woman is hurt. The paradigmatic western example is the Orpheus myth. In loosing Eurydice, Orpheus suffered a terrible tragedy that however allowed him to sing for posterity and to become famous. He honoured Eurydice, obviously best when dead, in singing. But there is no narration of her loss. A loss of life ( Theweleit 1977/78). The universal rewards through its confirmation of sameness, the hegemonic group. 521

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An example of twisted logic of this kind is that of male/community ‘ honour’ embodied in women, where the latter represent the negative and damaged bodily frontier between two opposed communities or ‘ identities’. It was seen in the partition of British India or of Yugoslavia, where the bodily integrity of ‘our’ women (Mostov 1995, 2000), independently of their will, is made to represent the integrity and the ‘ honour’ of the family, community, nation. Sometimes the injured portion of the group felt as ‘own’ by those who are subjects and agents in it (men) – has to be amputated. In renewal through self- sacrifice, the collectivity removes its spoilt part ( kills its women). Exit the women’s suffering. Men, directly identifiable with the community – by sacrificing their ‘own flesh and blood’ – invest into it at the highest (universal) level. That investment rewards them in return. The sacrificed (women), who aren’t subjects in this, will completely disappear absorbed by that ‘ higher’ office, transcendence. Meanwhile, men will suffer sacrifice symbolically in the name of the whole community that they alone represent. For the sacrifice to be rewarding, there must be a direct connection between the particular and the universal interest that, in the case of the dominant, are identical. There is no such thing for the subordinate (Iveković 2005b). That similar examples are not unbelievable and do happen in the West too, is obvious from the fact that the rejection of ‘others’ (refugees, immigrants, ( post)colonial populations, the poor, the other nation or ethnic groups, Muslims, other religions etc.) is operated according to the historically efficient mechanism of subordinating, disciplining or rejecting women in patriarchies. Subordinating women is part of the mechanisms subordinating other groups too.

Violence against women and the asymmetry of gender The above were individual cases. But cases of mass violence to women confirm this logic, and show the link between the violence of individuals and the systemic, foundational violence to women, that is constitutive of the body political; between ‘small’ and ‘ big scale’ violence. Violence is efficient through its symbolic power, directed to the enemy (to its meritorious, male, community), more than through its physical effects, considered collateral. The dilemma violence/non-violence remains foundational. This is why, as was visible in the case of Bosnia-and-Herzegovina during the 1990s’ war, the discourse on rape is as important a war weapon as rape itself. The conflict continues through rape narratives. Victims were not heard, in clear cases of différend ( Lyotard 1983), when the sense of the one has no wording in the language of the other who also pre-establishes the framework ( Nāgārjuna 2002). The same, identical to itself, will not yield and cannot loose. It will remove others from its own origin and recognize no debt. Absolute solitude is the cost of absolute sovereignty, which ultimately proves suicidal. Translated politically, as a minimum the citizenship of women is impeded in patriarchal societies regardless of universalistic views. It implies the complicity in violence against women at all levels. Between physical violence against women and not allowing them full citizenship in spite of declarations, there is a gradation. Democracy can be structured with that inequality, gender or caste, inherent and even conditional to it. The intrinsic connection between ‘small scale’ domestic violence and ‘ big scale’ war violence makes sense if gender is understood as foundational, and gender inequality as its variety adopted historically ( Falquet 1997: 129–160). Loraux described its formidable mechanism. The cases of working single women ostracized, abused, attacked or killed in Algeria, described by ​­ ­­ ​­ ​­ Dalila ­Iamarene-Djerbal in an Algerian journal (Iamerene-Djerbal 2006: ­11–40) are examples,15 but it happens in many places. The lurid case of professor Papiya Ghosh savagely murdered in Patna ( India) in December 2006 may well be illustrating this. According to Amrit Srinivasan: 522

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‘If, as he [Manu, the mythical lawmaker] argues, the burden of feminine transgression falls on the collective, then in Ambedkar’s India, the justice system must work hard to protect women as citizens, not just family members. (…) An authentic whistle-blower to tradition and its inherent anti-democratic intention, the single woman remains a soft target for enemies of the Constitution’. (Srinivasan 2006: 28; see Moitra 1996). Women are less protected by the state even as there are more protectionist laws concerning them. Other groups are similarly excluded from the practice of democracy and civility, beyond the universalistic mantra.16 There is a real and symbolic asymmetry of genders. Women’s weakness in law is constitutive of the legal system. The law bears the stamp of the dominant group (under the gender aspect, elite men), and women are exceptions within it. When some claim that women are always victims (which is often true, but logically fallacious), we claim the status of exception for them, thus maintaining the universal system subordinating them. That ‘women are “always”’ (or often) victims is inbuilt into the legal system and into the imaginary of which the subordinate inclusion (not the exclusion) is the condition, and the law can’t deal with that. The status and condition of women has improved by the twenty-first century in many ways. But being constitutive, the inequality of and violence to women encounters staunch support from masculinist mainstream establishments, and much of the progress is followed by backlashes and high prices paid by women around the world. A hunt on women has been unleashed, in concordant domestic and international impunity ­ (Kovačević et al. 2011: 10–182). The appropriation of women by men is not the ‘privilege’ of a country, it is part of patriarchal cultures to various degrees. In 2014, 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped in Nigeria. Weeks later, another 60 or so women and girls were abducted. The kidnapping of children and women has been a practice not only in war-ridden societies. Feminicide in Mexico is a murky chapter in women’s history ( Falquet 2014). Rape is a regular aspect of war (among other techniques), but rape is also tolerated in peacetime everywhere. In western/northern countries that see themselves as civilized, parallel to the improvement of women’s human rights, there is erosion of civic behaviour and of solidarity to women, but also to immigrants, to the poor, to ‘Moslems’, especially since the gradual dismantlement of the welfare state. The highest price for this undeniable global tendency is paid by women, migrant populations, the marginalized, subalternized, racialized and excluded groups (ethnic, religious, racial, or others). This is not a side- effect of social or political life, but its core.

Conclusion Every state privileges the system of rule and exception it is based on codifying its translation into public narratives. But translation can help deconstruct the exception- sovereignty paradigm. Women practise it daily through their mediation in welcoming associations. After the Yugoslav or Rwandan 1990s wars, women ( Kovačević et al. 2011) have translated the relationship between domestic, state violence and war (Stojanović et  al. 2013). But nationalisms resulting from such wars are now mushrooming everywhere. Against the fragmentation of globalization, universality is more easily associated with power, and women aren’t its co-carriers. Yet they are often the best negotiators/translators in view of peace (Women’s ­ Feminist ­Anti-militarist ​­ activity 1991). From ‘ inner displaced’, women became also outer displaced, refugees, participating in migrating labour, war and eco- system exiles. To understand the connection between women (who run the welcoming associations) and migrants – a relation needing further exploring that we recommend – one needs to see how violence is constitutive. Violence to migrants, asylum seekers and refugees is also derived 523

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from the gender pattern. Little translation is needed between women and migrants, but much more will be needed to include both within a construct that was established upon their omission. It will depend on the politics of translation involved.

Further reading Balibar, E. (2016) Des universels. Paris: Galilée. Balibar sees universalisms as multiple, competing and alternative to each other. Schott, R. M. and Klercke, K. (eds.) (2007) Philosophy on the Border. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. The border being a place of translation par excellence, this book deals with translation between philosophy and other disciplines, citizens and non- citizens, ethics and politics, responsibility and war within the global order. Kofman, S. (1982) Le respect des femmes (Kant et Rousseau). Paris: Galilée. Kofman disclosed and criticized the gender aspect, besides the ethnic one, of the subject in Kant. Konstantinović, R. (1981) Filosofija palanke. Belgrade: Nolit. ‘Philosophy of the Periphery’, important book theorizing the prematurely arrested and univocally translated narratives of (im)mature Modernity (national, etc.) producing violence. Sakai, N. and Solomon, J. (eds.) (2006) Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference ( Traces 4). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. The book addresses problems and dynamics of translation related to diverse political configurations within globalization.

Notes 1 The translation of the term partage de la raison, ‘the “partage” of reason’, is one of those ‘untranslatables’ in English, so i prefer to keep the French original. ‘Partage’ means two opposite things in French, both sharing ( putting in common) and separating. It is this simultaneous double edge in ­one-and-the­​­­ ­​­­ ​ same meaning that gives it its force. Reason is that which is largely shared by all (albeit unequally), but reasons are also plural and separate, for different purposes and held by distinct agencies. 2 Palanka denotes a spiritual and political condition of an interstice or undecided situation, in Konstantinović’s examples often somewhere between preindustrial rurality and urban modernity. Palanka being a point zero, it is potentiality itself. In a period of palanka, we can fear violence but we can also avoid it, since nothing is decided yet. Palanka is replete with possibilities. 3 My translation ( R.I.) in all citations. 4 ‘Black’: in the French language i have usually been writing in, ‘noir’ is ethically and politically correct, including to the concerned. I don’t have in mind the USA. 5 My comments on Loraux can also be found as ‘Gender as a Form of Divided Reason’ in Schott and Klercke (2007). ­ 6 In La cité divisée (1997) Loraux shows how the city, in its political dimension, is established upon – and on the condition of – the exclusion of women from the political sphere. 7 For the purpose of this paper we shall take laïcité and secularism as near- synonyms, which historically they are not. 8 Private and religious schools are exempt from this requirement. 9 In 2010 a law was passed prohibiting the veiling of one’s face. There have been hardly a few cases in France, but the debate became highly exasperated. Always showing openly one’s face in public had previously been merely self-u nderstood. Once spelled out, given the historic context, it now concerns mainly Muslim women and fuels the postcolonial social conflict. 11 The segment on the scarf episode in France is drawn on my paper ‘Nationhood and Women’ (Iveković ­ 2005a); a version was published as ‘The Veil in France: Secularism, Nation, Women’ (Iveković ­ 2004), here somewhat adapted. 12 ‘Gudiya’, ­ ‘Kargil ­ War victim’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudiya,_Kargil_war_victim ­ ­ ­ (Wikipedia) ­

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References Agamben, G. (2002) Homo sacer, trans. into French by Raiola, M. Paris: Seuil. Andreani, M. (2005) ‘The Body as a Borderline Phenomenon. A Re-reading of the Pandora Myth’, ​­ in ­Lorek-Jezińska E. and Więckowska, K. (eds.), Corporeal Inscriptions: Representations of the Body in Cultural and Literary Texts and Practices. Toruń: Uniwerzytet Mikołaja Kopernika, pp. 85–94. ­ ­ ​­ Bagchi, J. and Dasgupta, S. (eds.) (2003) The Trauma and the Triumph. Kolkata: Stree Publ. Balibar, E. (1997) ‘Les universels’, in Balibar, E. (ed.), La crainte des masses. Paris: Galilée, pp. 419–454. ­ ­ ​­ Balibar, E. (2011) ‘Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations’, Grey Room, 44, pp. 6–25. ­ ­ ​­ Balibar, E. (2012) Saeculum. Culture, religion, idéologie. Paris: Galilée. Balibar, E. (2016) Des universels. Paris: Galilée. Balibar, E. (2018) ‘Avec les “Rosa Parks”, contre le racisme d’Etat’. Available online: https://www.liberation. fr/debats/2018/11/25/avec-les-rosa-parks-contre-le-racisme-d-etat_1694192. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ Barthe, D. (2005) ‘L’éphémère résurrection de Noir Désir’, Le Monde, 16 September. Bessis, S. (2002) L’Occident et les autres. Paris: La Découverte. Bhargava, R. (ed.) (1998), Secularism and Its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Butalia, U. (1998) The Other Side of Silence. Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Viking. Butler, J. (2004) ‘Contre la violence éthique/Against Ethical Violence’, Rue Descartes, 2004(3–4), ­­ ​­ ­45–46. ​­ Coetzee, J. M. (1998) Boyhood: A Memoir. New York City: Vintage. Coetzee, J. M. (2000) Disgrace. New York City: Vintage. Coetzee, J. M. (2003) Youth. New York City: Vintage. Cohen, E. (2004) Le corps du diable: Philosophes et sorcières à la Renaissance, trans. Bradu, F., preface Traverso, E. Paris: Léo Scheer-Lignes. Ehrenrajch, B. and English, D. (1985) Witches, Midwives and Nurses: History of Women Healers. New York: The Feminist Press. Esposito, R. (1998) Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità. Torino: Einaudi. Esposito, R. (2002) Immunitas. Protezione e negazione della vita. Torino: Einaudi. Falquet, J. (1997) ‘Guerre de basse intensité contre les femmes? La violence domestique comme torture, réflexions sur la violence comme système à partir du cas salvadorien’, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, ­ ­ ​­ ­ 18. Available online : http://www.reseau-terra.eu/article541.html. Falquet, J. (2014), ‘Des assassinats de Ciudad Juárez au phénomène des féminicides: de nouvelles formes de violences contre les femmes?’ Contretemps, 7. Available online: http://www.contretemps. eu/interventions/assassinats-ciudad-juárez-phénomène-féminicides-nouvelles-formes-violences­ ­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​ ­­contre-femm. ​­ Héritier, F. (1996) Masculin, Féminin. La pensée de la différence. Paris: O. Jacob. Iamarene-Djerbal, D. (2006) ‘Affaire de Hassi Messaoud’. Naqd, 22/23, ­ pp. 11–40. ­ ­ ​­ Iveković, R. (1993) ‘Women, Nationalism and War: ‘“Make Love Not War”’, Hypatia, Special Cluster ­ pp. 113–126. ­ ­ ​­ on Eastern European Feminism, 8(4), Iveković, R. (1995), La Balcanizzazione della ragione. Rome: Manifestolibri. Iveković, R. (2003a) Le sexe de la nation. Paris: Léo Scheer. Iveković, R. (2003b) Dame-Nation. Nation et différence des sexes. Ravenna: Longo. Iveković, R. (2003c) ‘Reconnaître ou non le partage de la raison?’, Transeuropéennes, 23, pp. 259–278. ­ ­ ​­ Iveković, R. (2004), ‘The Veil in France: Secularism, Nation, Women’, Economic and Political Weekly, Bombay, 13 March. Iveković, R. (2005a) ‘Nationhood and Women’, in Sharma, M. and Das, S. (eds.), Defining Dignity. An Anthology of Dreams, Hopes and Struggles. New Delhi: World Dignity Forum-Heinrich Böll Foundation, pp. 81–95. ­ ­ ​­

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Iveković, R. (2005b) Captive Gender. Ethnic Stereotypes & Cultural Boundaries. Delhi: Women Unlimited. Iveković, R. (2007) ‘Du partage de la raison. De la différence des sexes dans la construction de la nation’, in Koudhai, B. (ed.), Kairouan: Le Gai savoir, Faculté des lettres et SH, pp. 45–55. Iveković, R. (2010) ‘Subjectivation, traduction, justice cognitive’, Rue Descartes, 67, pp. 43–50. ­ ­ ​­ Iveković, R. (2014) L'éloquence tempérée du Bouddha. Souverainetés et dépossession de soi. Paris: Klincksieck. Iveković, R. (2015) Les Citoyens manquants. Marseille: Al Dante. Iveković, R. (2016) ­Réfugié-e-s. ­​­­ ​­ Les jetables. Paris: Al Dante. Iveković, R. (2017) ‘Philosophie politique: Différence des sexes et partage de la raison’, Faces de Eva. ­ ­ ​­ Estudos sobre a mulher, 38, pp. 107–130. Iveković, R. (2019) Politiques de la traduction. Paris: T ERRA-HN. Available online: http://www.reseau-terra.eu/IMG/pdf/-5.pdf, series ‘Alterego’. Jaspard, M. and Enveff (2003) Les violences envers les femmes en France: une enquête nationale. Paris: La documentation française. Kofman, S. (1982) Le respect des femmes (Kant et Rousseau). Paris: Galilée. Kofman, S. (2000) Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher. London: Athlone Press. Konstantinović, R. (1981) Filosofija palanke. Belgrade: Nolit. Kovačević, L., Perković, M. and Zajović, S. (eds.) (2011) Ženski sud. Feministički pristup pravdi. Belgrade: ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Žene u crnom, Available at http://zenskisud.org/en/index.html; http://zenskisud.org/en/filmovi. html. Belgrade: Women in Black, http://zeneucrnom.org/index.php?lang=en. Kristeva, J. (1991) Etrangers à ­nous-mêmes. ​­ Paris. Flammarion. Laclau, E. (1999/2000) ‘La démocratie et la question du pouvoir’, Transeuropéennes, 17, paragraph 82ff. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Lalita, K., Kannabiran, V., Melkote, R. and others (1990) ‘We Were Making History…’: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle. London: Zed Books. Loraux, N. (1990) Les enfants d’Athéna. Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la division des sexes. Paris: La Découverte. Loraux, N. (1997) La cité divisée. L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes. Paris: ­Payot-Rivages. ​­ Lyotard, J. F. (1983) Le Différend. Paris: Minuit. Mai, M. (2006) In the Name of Honour. London: Virago Books. Maillard, C. (1993) El crimen perfecto. Aproximación a la estética india. Madrid: Tecnos. Maillard, C. (1998) La razón estética. Barcelona: Laertes. Maillard, C. (2001) Filosofía en los dias criticos. Diarios 1996–1998. Valencia: Pre-Textos. ­ ​­ Meer, F. (2001) Prison Diary. One hundred and thirteen days 1976. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Menon, R. and Bhasin, K. (1998) Borders & Boundaries. Women in India’s Partition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Menon, N. (2004) Recovering Subversion. Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. Chicago and Delhi: University of Illinois Press and Permanent Black. Milčinski, M. (2017) ‘The End of Violence: An Illusion or a Feasible Aim?’, in Cicovacki, P. and Hess, K. (eds.), ­ Nonviolence as a Way of Life: History, Theory, Practice. Delhi: M. Banarsidass, pp. 583–595. ­ ­ ​­ Moitra, S. (1988) ‘Alternative Standpoints. At the Foundation and Culmination of Kalidas Bhattacharyya’s Philosophy’, in Sengupta, P.K. (ed.) Freedom, Transcendence and Identity. Essays in the Memory of Professor Kalidas Bhattacharyya. New Delhi: ICPR-Motilal Banarsidass. Moitra, S. (ed.) (1996) Women Heritage and Violence. Calcutta: Papyrus. Moitra, S. (2002) Feminist Thought: Androcentrism, Communication and Objectivity. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Mostov, J. (1995) ‘“Our Women”/“Their Women”: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers and Violence in the Balkans’, Peace and Change, 20(4). ­ Mostov, J. (2000) ’Sexing the Nation/ Desexing the Body’, in Mayer, T. (ed.), Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation. New York: Routledge. Mouffe, C. (2018) Pour un populisme de gauche. Paris: Albin Michel. Nāgārjuna (2002) ­ Stances du milieu par excellence: (Madhyamaka-kārikās). French trans. and commentaries by Bugault, G. Paris: Gallimard. Nancy, ­J-L. ​­ (2004) ­ ‘Laïcité ­ monothéiste’, Le Monde, 01 January. Nancy, ­J-L. ​­ (2005) ­ Déconstruction du christianisme 1, La Déclosion. Paris: Galilée. Nasrin, Taslima (2007) ‘Let’s burn the burqa’, Outlook N˚22. No author, ‘Always a Victim’, Editorial (2006: 18), The Telegraph, XXIV(173), Kolkata, 28 December. Passerini, L. (1999) L’Europa e l’amore. Bologna: Il Saggiatore. 526

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Płonowska Ziarek, E. (2001) An Ethics of Dissensus. Postmodernity, Feminism and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sabatier, P. (2005) ‘Elégie’, Libération, 13 September. Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Said, E. (1994) Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Sakai, N. (2010) ‘Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos’, Post­ pp. 441–464. ­ ­ ​­ colonial Studies, 13(4), Sakai, N. (2011) ‘Theory and the West: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos’, Transeuropéennes. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Available online: http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/316/Theory_and_the_West/Sakai. Sakai, N. (2013) ‘The Microphysics of Comparison. Towards the Dislocation of the West’, Translate, ​­ 6, in ­eipcp-translate, eine kommunalität, die nicht sprechen kann: europa in übersetzung. Available online: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0613/sakai1/en/#_ednref1. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Sangari, K. (2001) Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English. Delhi: Manohar. Sangari, K. and Vaid, S. (eds.) (1990) Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Schmitt, C. (2002) Le Léviathan dans la doctrine de l’Etat de Thomas Hobbes. Sens et échec d’un symbole politique. French trans. Trierweiler, D., preface Balibar, E. Paris: Seuil. Schott, R. M. (2003) Discovering Feminist Philosophy: Knowledge Ethics Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Schott, R. M. (2004) Cognition and Eros. A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schott, R. M. and Klercke, K. (eds.) (2007), Philosophy on the Border. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. Sidwa, B. (2006) ‘Writing Her Wrong’, Tehelka, 30 December. Spivak, G. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Spivak, G. (2004) ‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching’, Diacritics, 32, pp. 3–4. ­ ­ ​­ Srinivasan, A. (2006) ‘Papiya’s Crime’, The Times of India ( Times International), 18 December. Theweleit, K. (1977/78) ­ ­ Männerphantasien 1–2. ­ ​­ Frankfurt a.M./Basel: ­ Verlag Roter-Stern. ­ ​­ Urvoy, D. (2006) Histoire de la pensée arabe et islamique. Paris: Seuil. Varikas, E. (2006) Penser le sexe et le genre. Paris: PUF. Vega, C. (2003) ‘Interroger le féminisme: action, violence, gouvernemantalité’, Multitudes, 12, ­ ­ ​­ pp. 49–60. Weil, S. (1947) La Pesanteur et la Grâce. Paris: Plon. Stojanović, S., Zajović, S. and Urošević, M. (eds.) (2013) Women’s Tribunal and a Feminist Approach to Justice: Women for Peace. Belgrade: Women in Black. Available online: http://zeneucrnom.org/ index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=19&Itemid=12 http://zenskisud.org/ ­ ­ 2013.html. Women’s Feminist ­Anti-militarist ​­ activity (1991), Belgrade: Women in Black. Available online: http:// zeneucrnom.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=3&Itemid=5; ­ Zajović, S., Duhaček, D. and Iveković, R. (2015) Ženski sud: o procesu organizovanja. Belgrade: Žene u crnom.

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Conclusion Paradoxes at the intersection of translation and globalization Dionysios Kapsaskis

In bringing together chapters written from various disciplinary perspectives, this handbook has sought to highlight the diversity of themes and concerns that emerge at the intersection of translation and globalization. This variety is not only conceptual; it is also discursive, and includes different accounts of how translation as process and practice, and globalization as an evolving historical condition, have shaped and continue to shape each other. While a critical and transnational understanding informs all the writing in the volume, individual chapters tell different stories about how translation has enabled globalization, and how globalization has affected translation, historically and in the current moment. The book’s organization in different parts  – concepts, people, culture, economics and politics – indicates the very broad range of empirical and theoretical fields that are concerned by the t ranslation – g lobalization interrelation. However, other cross- sections are possible. If we use translation as a lens through which to view social and cultural life, but also if we consider translation self-reflectively as interlingual/intercultural practice and as overarching metaphor, a series of paradoxes emerge.

Translation, a technology of globalization Translation is conterminous with technology both in the sense that it always implies ‘a technical infrastructure of production and transmission’ (Cronin 2003: 26), and in the sense that it is itself a tool for building specific types of relations between linguistically dissimilar groups. The enduring metaphor of translation as a bridge is telling of the social awareness of translation’s technological character. The artificiality of the bridge is of particular importance. The paradox of the bridge is not only that it connects at the same time as it separates the lands on each of its sides; it is also, and more importantly, that as soon as this construction is erected, the lands on either side are invested with new significations and textuality. Each side becomes distinct in relation to the other and makes a separate claim to its territorial selfidentity in a way that downplays the constitutive agency of the bridge. Naoki Sakai has thought of translation as a technology employed to manufacture what he calls regimes of monolingual address (Sakai 1997: 28; see also Sakai’s chapter in this volume).

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He highlights the paradox that, although translation is called upon to mediate a relationship of discontinuity between addresser and addressee, its effect is to transform that relationship retrospectively into one of continuity. The two parts concerned are not ‘translated’ in the sense of being repeated-in- d ifference; rather the difference between them is objectified and the two parts are instituted anew (Sakai 1997: 13–15). Like a mapping mechanism, translation makes possible to think of each language as being continuous with any other, but also external to it. Once configured as autonomous systematic wholes, languages can then be operationalized into parallel national regimes of monolingualism. But the argument can also be reversed: the artificiality of translation works as a visible reminder of the un-naturalness of monolingualism as political regime. For when the artifice of translation is visible, as in a translated text that refuses to be naturalized within a new linguistic ‘territory’, then both the source and the target languages are revealed to be partial and non- organic refractions of the world they are supposed to represent. Walter Benjamin’s utopian injunction was that translation should expose the fragmentary, artificial nature of ‘natural’ languages. In ‘The Task of the Translator’, he shows how translation belongs to techne rather than to physis, in that it is a second- degree representation that does not directly relate to nature but only to language. Equipped with a comparative gaze, the translator is best placed to witness first-hand the individual languages’ partial and unsystematic relation to reality, and to work this knowledge into the translation. From this point of view, the task of the translator begins by establishing that no monolingual regime can have any privileged access to any single ‘truth’. As many of the authors in the volume stress, contemporary globalization has multiplied the quantity and variety of translational exchanges and has intensified the technologization of translation on an unprecedented scale. One pressing question that the volume asks is the following: if translation is a technology of production of regimes of monolingualism and, by the same token, a technology that makes visible the faults of these regimes, what is the political meaning of its intense technologization in the era of globalization? As Alonso and Nunes Vieira explain in their chapter, in the past decades there has been a concerted engineering effort to develop tools that increase productivity while vastly reducing the time that translation takes to be carried out. The result as far as readerships are concerned is that the material labour of translation disappears from view and is replaced with the illusion of near-perfect translatability. If translation appears to happen almost magically, then a paradoxical new era of universal monolingualism dawns, where individual languages become interchangeable because completely translatable into each other, and primarily into international English as the dominant lingua franca. The illusion of an apparently seamless (though technologically mediated) continuum between languages risks to reintroduce linguistic essentialism through the back door, while governments and the media are busy legislating and celebrating linguistic polyphony. This point is hinted at in this volume by Leal, who discusses the paradox of de facto monolingualism within a multilingual entity such as the European Union, contrived by means of ‘elevating’ the status of translated texts to ‘originals’ by stipulated law. Computer-assisted translation blurs the visibility of translation, but it is only the most spectacular mechanism designed to do so. As Laurence Venuti has been tirelessly arguing, historically translation has been hostage to the Western cult of originality and has been pressurized to endorse the logic of self-effacement. Today, digital technology is enlisted to serve the same purpose and it does so with extraordinary efficiency. For example, capitalizing on the capabilities of resource sharing systems such as cloud-based platforms, the global

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translation industry delegates core translation roles to freelance translators who are physically kept away from the various centres of operation (see Moorkens in this volume). I will comment on the effect of this business logic further down, but it is important to remark that, in this way, the labour of translation becomes less visible even within its own operational field. Perhaps the most paradoxical example of invisibility as a result of technological manipulation is that of audiovisual translation ( Ďurovičová in this volume). In this entirely technologized context, sophisticated techniques have been devised so that viewers are hardly conscious of the genuinely translational environment in which they are immersed and through which they have to mediate the audiovisual text. For example, subtitles are a powerful aesthetic intervention on the body of the film; however, thanks to the strict regulation of their visual and linguistic features, and to refined techniques of adherence to film editing and continuity editing, subtitles become so naturalized that they are almost invisible. Similarly, synchronous dubbing, though flouting some basic principles of verisimilitude because of lack of coincidence between actors’ voice and lip movement, also becomes ‘ inaudible’ to those repeatedly exposed to it. Collective blindness and deafness to translation are tested and attested to in the cinema: for rarely do languages feel more fragmented and discontinuous and translation more unreliable and suspicious than during the viewing of a foreign language film. And yet, the inexorable conspicuousness of these methods does not prevent audiences from opting to suspend their disbelief and to focus on the unity of the message. Emily Apter has pointed out that something schizophrenic is revealed at the crossroads of global media, translation and technology. Noting that the lingua franca of our time is Netlish, the ‘mess[y]’ English that digital code ‘speaks’ (2006: 227, 230), Apter suggests that this is becoming the universal language of translatability, bearing the marks of both the disorder of multilingualism and the logical formalism of the code. As she puts it (2006: 239), ‘Netlish is an essentially schizophrenic phenomenon, pulled apart by the opposing forces of linguistic entropy and semantic condensation’. In Apter’s ascription, translation is a technology of globalization, in the service of a new universal monolingualism. Only, this monolingualism (and its attendant monoculture) is not part of a historically particular nationalism but a planetary reconfiguration of textuality based on a technological paradigm that has unapologetically shed any pretension to genealogical descendancy from ‘nature’. In fact, this new textuality rejects the idea of descendancy and origin tout court. Every language, medium and format is eminently translatable into every other following a logic of cross-textual transformation that is free from the pressure to remain faithful to any ‘source text’. Crucially, this new condition unlocks an enormous potential for critical insight and democratic practice ( Delanty, Bielsa, Vidal, this volume). But these still rely on the social visibility of translation, which our contemporary post-industrial order seems bent on minimizing.

Translation as industry and service Most of the authors in this volume who examine translation as professional career and social or commercial service point at various paradoxes in the way translation is understood in the contexts of policy, culture and the economy. These paradoxes invariably relate to the question of the visibility of translation as material mediation and labour, as discussed above. For example, in her chapter, Gentile registers the deprioritization of interpreting education in many countries at a time where increased migration flows make interpreting capability more important than ever. Federici stresses the paradox of the virtual absence of translation and interpreting in strategic planning for managing crisis situations, when it has been documented 530

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that this negligence has cascading effects on the affected populations. With regard to global tourism, Katan shows how translators’ intracultural expertise tends to be sidestepped, when in fact it is vital not just to the quality of visitors’ experience but also to the sustainability of the host communities. And DePalma, who sees the language industry as a positive force that enables communication and commerce, also notes that translation tends to be an afterthought which occurs to governments and businesses once they become aware that multilingual readerships need to be reached. A lot remains to be done in order for the contribution of translation to our multilingual economies and societies to be fully recognized. But the seeming lack of valorization of the labour of translation within the language service industry is more difficult to rationalize. The fact that competition and economies of scale are compressing rates and salaries cannot fully account for industry’s reliance on underpaid freelancers and even in some cases, crowdwork. Many cite translation technology and global English as factors affecting the low standing of translation work within professional translation contexts. Moorkens in this volume explains lucidly the role of automation in increasing expectations of productivity and decreasing translation rates. In their chapters, both Moorkens and Basalamah refer to the privileged status of originals (i.e. source texts) in relation to translations thus pointing at the global ideological and cultural condition into which the profession is embedded. This condition also maps onto the geopolitics of translation flows, i.e. from English- speaking centres of production of texts to linguistically diverse ‘peripheries of consumption’ of texts (see Brisset and Colón Rodríguez, and Tymoczko in this volume). Literally as well as metaphorically, the outsourcing model operates as a global mechanism for keeping translators at the margins of the translation industry and of text production more generally. Yet, as DePalma argues in his chapter, based on industry research conducted by the Common Sense Advisory (CSA), translation and localization remains a robust global business with enviable prospects in the current challenging economic climate. Translators at the higher end of the market, who are in a position to benefit from global interconnectedness and the rise in demand for language services, are thriving. Furthermore, despite justified concerns regarding the adverse effect of fragmented workflows (Alonso and Nunes Vieira) on translation quality, the latter actually may benefit in certain respects from changes in the business model, e.g. in terms of lexical consistency and the prevention of human errors. In fact, translation quality is currently being reconceptualized as a feature that pertains not just to the final product but also to the translation and localization process, including such aspects as editing, revision, interaction with technology, and the broader workplace dynamics (Abdallah 2010). This, in turn, should remind us that judgements on the status of professional translators and the state of global industry can only be meaningful if they take into account how the traditional role of the translator has widened to include new tasks and has been complemented by a number of other germane roles. More and more universityeducated translators build careers as translation ( project) managers, proof-readers, quality controllers, machine translation post- editors, intralingual subtitlers, audio- describers, website localizers, video-g ame testers, copywriters, transcreators and other relevant roles. Aware of the need to bring translator education in line with this complex new reality, the European Masters in Translation Competence Framework requires its member programmes to ensure that they provide not just lingua- cultural competences but also technological, personal and interpersonal, and service provision competences to trainee translators ( EMT Competence Framework 2017; see also Orlando and Gerber, this volume). These ‘other’ roles and competences are not incidental to being a professional translator; they are now part of the definition of what translation is. 531

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The purview of ‘translation’ The need to rethink what translation is and why it matters to contemporary societies is one of the key messages of this volume. This is not, at heart, a theoretical issue. Theoretical developments in translation studies have often been practice- and society- driven, and this is the case in the current juncture. This volume registers particularly well two types of challenges to conventional, text-based conceptualizations of translation. The first is related to translation practices that are either new or have gained currency in recent years resulting in terminological proliferation that cannot be conceptually contained within the standard paradigm of transmission from source to target. The second is metaphorical uses of translation, designating cultural transformations activated and undergone by societies as they participate in the contemporary move towards globalization. In the remainder of this Conclusion, I will briefly gloss over these two challenges. In addition to proliferation, there is a great deal of overlapping and inconsistency between many of the terms used to describe new or less conventional translation practices. Interestingly, several of them converge in questioning the foundational idea of translation as linguistic transfer. As Torresi suggests in her chapter, the terms ‘ localization’, ‘adaptation’, ‘transcreation’ and ‘rewriting’ are used almost interchangeably for the translation of advertisements, to signify interlingual practices in which the verbal mode is only one of the constituent elements, the broader semiotic encoding of the text is highly important, and the act of translation is firmly oriented towards the end user. Both the idea of the ‘original’ text whose ‘essence’ must be conveyed, and that of ‘fidelity’ as the methodological principle at work in this act are destabilized. From a different perspective, Jiménez- Crespo explains how, in commercial digital environments, translation is often embedded into the very conception of the ‘original’ text. As he explains, in the process of internationalization, digital texts (e.g. websites) are designed from the start so that they do not rely on specific linguistic and cultural features and can therefore be localized without important structural changes. The idea of texts being devoid of language and culture (compounded with the idea that language and culture can be ‘added’ to these texts at will) may not stand up to close theoretical scrutiny; yet the point remains that translation is conceived in these environments not as the act of carrying through a preexistent message but as a process that begins with the inception of the message and extends prosthetically following the message’s global dissemination. Worth noting is also Jiménez- Crespo’s reference to the use of ‘ internationalized version’ of texts, i.e. commercial texts edited so that they lose their l ingua- cultural specificities, again in order to enable easy localization. This practice is somewhat similar to that of proxy texts, mentioned by Tymoczko, i.e. texts which are translations of other texts but are used as source texts for further translation into other languages. In these cases, the purpose is to create a dominant-language version of an existing text (e.g. a novel) which was originally written in a lesser used language, and then utilize this version as proxy to produce other translations. Finally, there is also analogy with the example of template subtitling files, referred to by Ďurovičová in her chapter as ‘genesis/master files’: these are sets of subtitles usually in English to be used as relay texts for the subtitling of film dialogue into many other languages at once. In her chapter, Tymoczko interprets changes such as these as part of a drive to simplify and normalize t ranslation – a major paradox according to her in so far as more and more nations are now part of global cultural and commercial exchanges. It seems, however, that the paradox of translation’s normalization at a time of increasing complexity is itself further complicated. As translation is being normalized, the difference between ‘source’ and ‘target’ 532

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texts becomes less pronounced, the identities of the ‘original’ and the ‘translatum’ matter less, and no hierarchy between them can automatically be assumed. As suggested earlier, the demise of the canonical original- copy hierarchy should provide fertile ground for social practices based on textual plurality and capacity for transformation. Indeed, in their chapters, Fernández, Borodo, Basalamah, and Piróth and Baker offer important examples of errant, interventionist and politically proactive uses of translation and interpreting. But there is at least as much (and perhaps more generalizable) evidence, as per the examples mentioned earlier, which suggests that a new global hierarchy is currently replacing the familiar hierarchies of the past, with English (or Netlish) as a non-culture- specific language at the top. Translation seems to be called upon to play the same role as in other historical periods, namely, to help dissolve ancient orders and certainties and to replace them with new, firmer ones. The capacity of translation to signify general processes of transformation that extend beyond the purely textual element has made it an apt metaphor for cross-cultural interactions under globalization. Delanty, in this volume, makes a strong case for ‘cultural translation’ as the mechanism through which cultures interpret themselves as a result of encounters with other cultures, and thus progress to a higher degree of self-reflexivity. In his account, the ongoing intensification of these encounters (e.g. through trade, migration, technology or even war) triggers reciprocal changes to the cultures involved, but also opens them up to new possibilities of self-t ransformation. The historical projection that Delanty makes is that, in modernity, translation is the form that cross- cultural and universal interconnectedness takes. Every culture must reinterpret itself as it comes into contact with every other. Delanty’s memorable conclusion is that, in modernity, translation has become the dominant cultural form. This figurative sense of translation enlarges its purview to include cross- cultural interactions that are shaping contemporary social life. Importantly, the metaphor of translation as a tool for social change is not alien to the linguistic/textual model of translation. The case is rather that translation as a linguistic practice is an infinitely rich resource that generates possibilities of interpretation that extend beyond the text in the strict sense. Delanty’s use of cultural translation touches upon ideas that are also central to debates about translation in the linguistic sense of the word. These include the growing awareness that translation can no longer be understood as simple transmission of meaning, and that its effect is to generate newness. Cultural translation also exploits the paradoxical feature of textual translation to impact not just on the receiving culture but also on that of the original. Finally, a critical concern of cultural translation is the question of universal translatability, variously seen in utopian or dystopian terms, as seen above. These insights suggest that literal and figurative senses of translation feed into one and the same translational enquiry into language and society, against the backdrop of global interconnectedness. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization is published at a critical historical and ecological juncture. The hope is that translation emerges from this volume as a key infrastructure of social and geopolitical change. The change is happening at this very moment by means of interconnections that take the shape of negotiations, conflicts, displacements, adaptations and rewritings. As a form of techne, translation engineers these interconnections in ways that can variously lead to emancipation from essentialist theories of nation and language or, on the contrary, to new hierarchies that are consolidating hegemony at a global scale. The contributors to the volume have lent visibility and critical insight into the work of translation in various empirical and theoretical domains, without shying away from the paradoxes, inconsistencies and uncertainties to which this work gives rise.

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References Abdallah, K. (2010) ‘Translator's Agency in Production Networks’, in Kinnunen, T. and Koskinen, K. (eds.), ­ Translators’ Agency. Tampere Studies in Language, Translation and Culture. Tampere: Tampere ­ 4), pp. 11–46. ­ ­ ​­ University Press (B Apter, E. (2006) The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, W. (1992) ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Zohn, H. (trans.), Illuminations. London: Fontana ­ ­ ​­ Press, pp. 70–82. Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge. EMT Competence Framework. (2017) European Master’s in Translation Competence Framework. European Commission. Available online: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/emt_compe­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ tence_fwk_2017_en_web.pdf [Accessed 15 June 2020]. Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aarne, Antte 229n12 Abdallah, K. 323, 329–331 Aberbach, E. 459 Abu-Lughod, J. 23 accessibility 179, 204, 311, 337, 341–345 accidental immigrant 149 Achebe, C. 61, 65, 477 activism 507, 508; alter-globalization 502–503; anti-torture 449; characteristics 498; cosmopolitanism 478; globalization 499, 500; human rights 446, 450; media and cyberspace 504; political 3–4, 198, 406, 506; translation studies 501–502, 504, 505 actor network theory 307, 396 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 65 advertising 4; colonialism(s) 355–356; commercial 351; cultural variation 352–355; global trade 352–353; interdisciplinary 356–358; language professionals 297; translation studies 351–356, 358 Aeneid 20 Africa 28, 60, 61, 204 Agamben, Giorgio 50, 154 The Age of Migration (Castles, Haas and Miller) 151 Agile development methodologies 366 Agnew, J. 74–75 Agorni, M. 86, 340, 345 Albl-Mikasa, M. 166, 167 Alonso, Dámaso 272 Alonso, E. 7, 395, 399, 529 alter-globalization movement 502–503, 505 Alvarez, Julia 474 America Is Not the Heart (Castillo) 157 Americanah 65 American democracy 137 American literature 265 American pragmatist tradition 133 American West 139; Irish and Chinese migrants in 134

Anastasiou, D. 378 Ancient Greek 233 Anderson, B. 99, 433, 456 Anders, William 78 Andrade, O. 67 Angelelli, C. V. 170 Anglo-American culture 166 Anglo-Celtic racial majority 136 Annual Review of the Translation, Localization, and Interpreting Services and Technology Industry 203 anthropocene 85, 87, 92 anthropomorphism 92–93 anti-Catholic Protestant majority 134 anti-Chinese sentiment 140 anti-globalization 59, 204, 500, 501 ‘anti-system’ approach 131–132 Antonini, R. 190, 192 Antwerp 77 Anzaldúa, G. 473, 474 aphorism 219 Appadurai, A. 62, 115, 153, 191 Appiah, A. 15 Apter, E. 56, 67, 71, 75–77, 266, 460, 530 Arabic 233, 238, 239 Arabic culture 238–239 Archibugi, D. 428, 429, 430 area studies 78, 115 Arguedas, José María 474 Aristotle 22, 23, 72 Arnason, J. 29, 30, 33 Arnason, P. 32 artificial intelligence (AI) 370 Asad, T. 66 Asia 28, 204 Asia Pacific region 205 Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies (APTIS) 100 asymmetry 5, 56, 57, 59–60, 267, 268, 472; authorship 258; cultural 221–222, 473; gender 522–523; globalization 379; 535

Index

languages 474; membranes 469; translation vs. power 428, 442 augmented translation 396 austerity 323–325 Australia 182, 207, 211, 313 Australian Qualifications Framework 202 authenticity 122, 251, 315, 489, 492; accessibility 341–344; cultural 7; originality and 431, 455; purity and 431; staged 338 authorship 3, 288, 457, 466; authenticity 251; authors’ rights and copyright 252; collective knowledge 261; derivative works 260; ethics issue 258–259; notions 252; originality 252–255; status issue 256–258; superauthors 261 authors’ rights 252, 254–255 Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) 325, 393 Babel 42, 44, 45, 198, 255, 406, 502–503, 506; Cinema Babel 279; West-centric concept 281 Babylon 225 Bachelard, Gaston 75 Backus, Megan 119 Baer, B. J. 120 Baghdad 22, 23 Bagley, P. 344 Baigorri-Jalon, J. 164, 166 Bain, David Haward 141 Baker, M. 6, 7, 198, 406, 407, 410, 412, 502, 505, 533 Balibar, E. 469, 474 Bancroft, M. 169 Bandia, P. F. 4, 5, 67, 122 Bar-Hillel, Y. 325 Barnstone, W. 20 Barthes, R. 253, 357 Bassnett, S. 67, 86, 100, 294, 296 “battle of the languages” 166 Baudelaire, C. 27, 253 Bauman, Z. 28–29, 150, 153, 161 Bayart, J.-F. 64 Beck, U. 1, 7, 9, 115, 116, 124, 153, 436 Behaim, M. 73 Belgium 236 Beliveau, R. 300 Beninatto, R. 416–417 Benjamin, W. 6–7, 27, 34, 44–45, 253, 474, 529 Bennett, J. 89 Bennett, T. 306, 308–310 Béranger, P. 463 Berman, A. 67, 86, 121 Berne Convention (BC) 251, 252, 254, 255, 326, 493 Bhabha, H. 34, 66, 71, 75–76, 456, 466 Bhasin, K. 516, 518 Bhattacharyya, Kalidas 513 Biau-Gil, J. R. 395 536

Bible translation 228n6 Bielsa, E. 86, 121, 294, 296, 300, 494 Big data 370 big money 416 Al-Biruni 23 Blackledge, A. 456 Blommaert, I. 355, 431 Blyth, M. 324 Boast, R. 315 Bodo, S. 309 Boéri, J. 406 Bogucki, Ł. 194 Bologna Convention 207 Bologna Process 202, 207 Bong Joon-Ho 278, 285 borders 8, 40, 41, 46–51, 147, 469, 470, 520; collies 90; conceptual 378; controls 76, 150; cosmopolitan 471, 474–477; cultural 300, 341; divisions and 153; French 269; friction-free communication 337; geocultural 253; global frontier-land 470; identities 432; heterogeneity 469; homo sacer 471; human rights discourse and practice 451; international 152, 170; Italian 314; languages 472–474; mobilizations 153; national 118, 119, 149, 152, 170, 293, 461, 470; physical and metaphorical 472; political 280; remote 470; smart 470; social phenomena 434; state 254; symbolic 260; Translators without Borders (TWB) 406–421; US-Mexican 470 Borges, J. L. 257–258 Borodo, M. 7, 533 Braidotti, R. 88, 89, 472 Braun, S. 165 Bray, M. 505–506 Brazil 227, 382 Brennan, T. 325 Brexit 170, 228n2 Britain 134 British economy 134, 138 British tourism 344 Brooks, D. 383 Broughton, A. 324 Brownlie, S. 478, 501 Buck-Morss, S. 461 bunker mentality 152 Burke, S. 253 business process outsourcing (BPO) 364 business-to-business (B2B) 363 business-to-consumer (B2C) 352, 363 Butalia, U. 516, 518 Butler, J. 515 Byron, Lord 465 Cabanellas, G. 331 Cairo 19, 23 Calvet, L.-J. 67 Calvo, E. 395, 399

Index

Cameroon 237 Canada 236 Canal construction 135 Canfora, C. 329 capitalism 63, 356, 499, 500; colonization 77; European 520; global 63, 343; informational 5, 6; modern 14, 15 Caribbean 60, 61 Caroll, Jane Suzanne 77 Caron, A. 90 Casanova, P. 57–58, 60, 61, 67, 68, 266–271 Cassin, B. 56 Castells, M. 5–6, 9 Castillo, Elaine 157 Castles, S. 151, 168 Castoriadis, C. 30 Catholic religion 136 Celestial Empire 138 Central Pacific Railroad 138, 139, 142 centre/periphery 57, 102–103, 147, 152, 164, 258, 267–271, 398 Chabot, P. 94 Chakrabarty, D. 71, 78, 457 Chang, C. 168 Chan, S. 395 Chávez-Silverman, Susana 474 Cheung, M. P. Y. 104–107, 478 Chiaro, D. 355–356 Chin, Frank 139, 140 China 15, 23, 61, 73, 86, 120, 220, 221, 342, 384, 450; internationalization 104–106; working-class communities 137 Chinaman, John 139–141 Chinese Americans 139–141 Chinese/English interpreters in Taiwan 168 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 137 Chinese food 142 Chinese immigrants 137 Chinese/Mandarin 233, 235, 238, 243 Chinese workers 141, 142; railroad workers 139 Chin, Frank 139 “Chin Sun” 137 Cho, H. 461 Choi, J. Y. 209 Chomskyan theory 90 Christensen, T. P. 395 Christianity 20–21 Chukovsky, Kornei 465 Cimoli, A. C. 309 Cinema Babel 279 Cisneros, Sandra 474 CIUTI (The Conference Internationale permanente d’Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interpretes) 205 Classics of Chinese literature 243 Clausen, L. 295 Clifford, J. 34, 123, 306, 309, 315

climate change 85, 95, 151, 176, 227, 449; animals 89–93; borders 8; demands 86; machines 93–96; management 204; political and cultural dimensions 2; terracentric translation studies 87–89 coercive isomorphism 316 Cogo, A. 487 Cohen, E. 337, 339, 341, 518 collective intelligence 252 colonization 57, 251; capitalism 77; cultural 355; European 433; globalization 58–60; language in equality 255; legacy 224; postcolonialism 102 Columbus 73, 74 commodity fetishism 6 Common Sense Advisory (CSA) 95, 203, 363, 368, 372, 416, 417, 531 communication 132, 150, 152, 162, 169, 222–223 community engagement 307 community, idea of 133 Complexity Theory 229m13, 246 Computer-Assisted (or aided) Translation (CAT) 6, 210, 287, 391–394, 396–399, 529 Conley, T. 81 Connolly, D. 315, 316 consumers/consumerism 64; cultural 353; end-users and retail 352; ethnocentrism 357; global 95, 352; identification 357; information 366–367; growth-fixated economy 375; postcolonial societies 60; suppliers 366; target group 352, 353 contact zone 76 Cooley, Earlier Charles Horton 131 Cooper, R. 337, 339, 341 copyright 251; Anglo-Saxon 254; authors’ rights 252; holders 193–195, 199, 252; law 253–255, 260; ownership of 326; translation 331 Corbett, J. 86 Cornu, J.-F. 279, 280, 284, 288 Cosgrove, D. 71, 72 cosmopolitanism 31, 86, 315, 317, 429–430; activism 478; borders 471; cultural translation 29, 32–36, 434; digital 93; globalization 300, 472, 475; modern urban life 27; multiple modernities 3; non-Eurocentric 477; secularism 519; sociological debates 302 country-of-origin (COO) effect 354 Coupland, N. 377 Cox, A. 169 Creese, A. 456 Criminal Justice Programme of the DirectorateGeneral Justice, Freedom, Security of the European Commission 170 crisis: accommodating language 177–178; Aristotelian model 72; cascading effects 181–182; conflict and 179; crisis 537

Index

communication 177; crisis management 177; crisis translation 178; Ebola 412, 415; ecological 89; economic 324, 500, 504; global scale 176; Greek migration 406; language 177–178; risk communication 8, 9, 181–182; response 183, 420; succinct literature review 178–181; transitional 260; translation 178 Critical Discourse Analysis 355, 356 Crocker, Charles 139 Cronin, M. 2, 9, 22, 67, 72, 73, 77, 80, 86, 124, 260, 314, 339, 460, 506 crowdsourcing 384, 412, 416–417, 419; freelancing 6; localization 385, 386; postediting 183; top-down 7, 191, 194–197; translation 183, 191, 194, 408, 420; volunteerism 421 cultural asymmetry 221–222 cultural imperialism 285 culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities 177, 179, 183, 184 cultural studies 56, 71, 75, 358, 378 cultural turn 2, 56, 58, 66, 67, 299, 475 cultures: conceptual frameworks of 132; incommensurability of 132–133; and languages 154; networks, nature of 219–220 Cussel, M. 3 cyberactivism 505 cyberfetishism 501 Dalché, P. G. 73 Damascus 23 Dam, H. V. 164, 166, 397, 398 Damrosch, D. 114, 266, 267, 281 Dante 56 Davidson, Donald 133 Davier, L. 294, 298 Debussche, J. G. 331 De Certeau, M. 75 decision-and policy-making center 164 Deganutti, M. 313, 314 deglobalization 2, 282 Delanty, G. 477 Deleuze, G. 66–67, 473 Delgado, Abelardo 474 Delisle, J. 86 demand and supply: B2B 363; B2C 363; CSA Research 363; data-based software 370; ecosystem (see ecosystem); language market 371–372, 372–373; language service outsourcers 364; MT 363; multilingual communications 364; qualitative and quantitative research 363; software supports service delivery 370–371 democracy 4–5, 516, 522; American 137; civility 523; cosmopolitanism 434–436; direct 504; equality 519language 427–430; identity 538

and 484; linguistic hospitality 434–436; monolingual vision 430–434 Democratic Party 136 De Mooij, M. 357 Deng Xiaoping 243 Denison, T. S. 137 Denton, K. 315–316 DePalma, D. A. 7, 531 Derrida, J. 46, 67, 141, 151, 153, 253, 491, 493, 494 Desmet, E. 450 Desnoes, Edmundo 272–273 De Stefano, V. 331 deterritorialization/reterritorialization 67, 154, 473 D’haen, T. 265 Díaz Cintas, J. 194 Díaz, Junot 120–121, 474 Di Biase, C. G. 80 Dibley, B. 315 Di Giovanni, E. 257 digital cartography 48, 50, 81 digital communication 222 Dijkstra, A. 342 Directorate-General for Translation (DG Translation) 488–489 Dirlik, A. 31 ‘disaster,’ definitions of 177 Disneyfication 315 Doerr, N. 503 Donald Duk (Chin) 139, 140 Drugan, J. 203, 204 dubbing 279, 283–288, 369, 530 DuBois, W. E. B. 62 Dubslaff, F. 170 Dünne, J. 81 Dunne, K. 329, 384 Dupré La Tour, C. 282 Dv ů r Králové 458 Dwyer, T. 280, 286–287 Dybiec, J. 342 Earth 88, 89; globe 71–72; geographies 73, 75; physical occupation 63; rising 78–80; translation 76 Eastern Europe 205 Echeverri, Á. 99 ecology 80, 89, 94, 96, 222, 227, 286 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx) 6 economic liberalism 324 ecosystem: demand for language 365–367, 367; freelancers 367–368; language service and technology 364, 365; language service industry 369–370; services span and spoken language 368–369, 369 education of translators and interpreters see translators and interpreters

Index

Egypt 225 Egyptian Revolution 407, 505 Eisenstadt, S.N. 29, 30, 33 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) 504 Elias, A. J. 71, 80 empire 16, 20, 257–258; Abbasid and Mughal 22; ape 459; Celestial 138; colonization 58, 59; culture 459; global systems 72; Mongol 23; postcolonialism 66; Roman 14; Russian 463 empowerment 191, 309–310, 342 EMT programmes 206 Engels, Friedrich 27 English 204, 235, 236–237, 245 English as a lingua franca (ELF) 162, 166–168, 209, 210, 487 English monolingual border patrol 170 English navvies 134 English to French, country and subject of books 236 entextualization 341 environment/environmentalism 87; anthropocentric treatment 65; bubble 337, 344; digital 260, 288, 532; economic activities 414, 499; educational 207; global 79, 208; human impacts 85; monolingual 286; museum 306, 308, 311; online MT services 193; register 311; regulation 95; social and physical 395; software tools 193; translation 330, 530; VLE 208; work 207, 330; ethnic community 43 ‘ethnic’ immigrant group 136 ethnicization 514 ethics 491; aesthetics 521; code of 195; economic fairness 400; feminist 5, 514–517; issue of 258–259; location 76; professional 211; translation technology 9, 95 Eurasia 13, 14, 19, 23 ethnocentrism 101, 105, 114, 271, 357, 435, 476 eurocentrism 101–102, 104, 105, 430, 460, 471 Europe 15, 23, 27, 56, 73, 107, 206, 207, 266, 282, 428, 433, 491, 520 European Directive 2010/64/EU 171 European Economic Community (EEC) 483–484 European languages 233 European Masters in Conference Interpreting (EMCI) 206 European Master’s in Translation (EMT) Network 206, 328, 399, 531 European Migrant Crisis 2014-2016 180 ‘European’ Renaissance 23, 24 European Social Forum (ESF) 262n2, 503 European Union (EU) 9, 205, 366, 529; directive 2011/ 24/ EU 182; employment 324; multilingualism 9

(see also multilingualism); policymaking 167; translation profession 205 extensively localized websites 383 Facebook 196–197, 408 face-to-face workshops 211 Famine 1846 and 1855 135 Fanon, Franz 157 fansubbing 191, 194, 197 Federici, F. M. 8, 177, 184, 406, 413, 530 Fedorov, A. V. 464 Fels, J. 80 Feminism 246; advertising translation 356; anti-humanism 88; ethics 5, 514–517; Ni Una Menos 500postcolonial studies 253, 354; transnational 120 Feyerabend, Paul 132 fidelity/faithfulness 20, 55, 66, 259, 284, 287, 466, 532 Flores, G. 169 Fogg, Phileas 77, 78 foreignization and domestication 67, 114, 116, 117–122, 295, 298, 301–302, 338, 379 foreign language versions (FLVs) 224, 285 foreign translation practices 226–227 Foucault, M. 66, 75, 475 France 59, 60, 520 freedom of mobility: and displacement 148–151; exponential growth of 147; primary role of 148 French 232, 236, 238 French literary system 269 French neoclassicism 117 French Theory 237 French to English translations 237 Freud, Sigmund 88, 243 Frey, C. B. 326 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 34, 133 Galician literary market 271 Galtung, Johan 102 Gambier, Y. 109 García, Cristina 474 García, O. 357 Gasché, R. 491, 494 Gaspari, F. 231 Gavioli, L. 340–341 Geertz, Clifford 143 gender studies 358 Gentile, P. 7–9, 165–167, 165–168, 530 Gentzler, E. 67, 68, 113, 118–119 geocentrism 80, 86–87 geography 87, 514; boundaries 212; colonial 68; cultural 133, 300; data sources 183; dispersion 6; distribution 236; earthrise 78–80; globe 71–73; human 134; imaginative 71, 73–75; interdisciplinary 3; language 122, 124, 368; 539

Index

limits 52; location 103; space 246; territorial 9; translation 75–78, 80–82, 314 geopolitics 271–274, 531 German 168, 232, 233, 236 Germany 167, 168, 195, 382 Giddens, A. 86, 163 Glick-Schiller, Nina 152 global: culture 36, 147, 150, 271, 315, 381, 427; economy 6, 79, 95, 231, 259, 268, 366, 395–397; flows 57, 86, 147, 149, 197; justice 79, 500–503, 508; media 123, 280, 296, 299, 300, 302, 530; networks 121, 190, 271, 275, 386; news 4, 293–299, 301–302; North and South 4, 58–64, 66; studies 1–5; village 375; warming 176 Global Humanitarian Summit of 2016 180 globalism 1, 80, 86 globalization 13, 16, 62, 147–150, 161; activism 498–501; advertising translation 353–355; anti-globalism 1–2; communication 222–223; complexity theory 225–226; cultural asymmetry 221–222; cultural networks, nature of 219–220; disembodied 2; diversity of translation practices 225; dynamism 1; economic 16, 65, 176, 183; foreign translation practices 226–227; on higher education 205–207; history 14–16; and indigenous languages 224–225; interdisciplinary 356–357; interpreting and challenges of 162–164; interpreting and translation studies 211–212; markets 351, 352; Monash MITS 209–211; museums 314–316; neoliberal era 325; network practices 220–221; politics of translation 513; subjective 7–8; technology 528–530; on T&I industry 202–205; within T&I programmes 208–209; translation networking 222–223; translation practices parameters 223–224; web of communication networks 222 Globalization 3.0 345 Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) 297 Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation (GILT) 376–378, 384 Global Language System Theory 239 global news organizations: doubly invisible 294; homogenization 295; linguistic borders 293–294; localization 296–299; multisource characteristics 301; national audiences 295–296; recontextualization 296; textual intervention 296; transediting 296; translated news 299–301; translation invisibility 302 Global Translation and Interpreting Professional Practices 210 globe 71–72 glocal/glocalization 61, 204–205, 353–354, 376, 378–379 540

Gnedich, Nikolai 457 Godard, Jean-Luc 287 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 117, 118, 266, 435, 436 Goffman, E. 131, 132, 142, 144 Gogol, Nikolai 457 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 474 Gongyan, Jia 105, 106 Gonzalez-Davies, M. 209 Goodman, R. 443 Gordon, Avery F. 141 Gouadec, D. 205 Gramsci, A. 66 Grand Bargain Commitment 180 grass-roots translation 194–198 Greece 15, 239, 436 Greek New Testament 228n6 Gregory, D. 75 Griffith, D. W. 281–282 Guangdong Province 138 Guattari, F. 66–67, 473 Guggenheim Museum 316 Guillot, M.-N. 317 Gurevitch, M. 295 Haas, H. 151 Halal tourism 344 Halliday, T. 443 Hall, M. 308 Han Chinese ethnic group 244 Hancock, M. 315 Hanson, T. A. 166 Hardt, M. 260 Harley, J. B. 80 Harry Potter series 194, 195, 199 Harvey, D. 75, 325 Al-Hasan ibn Suwâr al-Hammar 22 Hausa 241 Hayot, E. 266 Hebrew 233 Hebrew-Aramaic texts 21 hegemony 227, 258; see also globalization Heilbron, J. 245, 457 Heller, M. 338 Hendzel, K. 329 heritage translation practices 225 Héritier, F. 513 Hermans, T. 67, 492–493 hermeneutic tradition 133 heteronormativity 515 Higgins, M. D 273 higher education 205–207 Hijuelos, Óscar 474 Hillis Miller, J. 265 Hindi 239, 240 Hobsbawm, E. 456 Hodgson, M. 30

Index

Hofstede, G. 357, 381, 383 Ho, G. 356 Homer 20, 457 homogenization 1, 65, 207, 295, 491, 499 Hooper-Greenhill, E. 308 Hora, Zelená 458 hospitality 150, 151, 434–436, 456, 477 Huang, J. 354 hub translation 226–227 Hugo, Victor 254 Hui, H. 340 human-induced environmental change 85 Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response 180 human language 225–226 human rights: actors 445–449; advantages 441; anti-torture activism 449; centres 443; gender equality 443; peripheries 442, 450; political space 449; power dynamics 451; rights holders 450; social justice 441; transformation 442, 444–445; translation 442, 444–445; travel 444–445; vernacularization 442, 443; Western liberal-legalist discourse 443 human-rights-based paradigm 180 human translators: human-machine interface 392; MT and CAT development 393; MT/ enhancement of CAT systems 393–394; MT pioneers 392–393; NMT 394–395; techne 392 Hunayn ibn Ishaq 22 Hurricane Katrina 179 Hutchins, J. 231, 393 Iamarene-Djerbal, D. 522 imaginative geographies 73–75 imperialism 29, 56, 58, 63, 102, 245, 252, 285, 459, 462; see also empire In altre parole, In other Words (Lahiri) 154 independent software vendors (ISVs) 370 India 156, 239, 382, 520 indigenous languages 224–225 Industrial Revolutions 134 industrial society 5–6 inequality 499–500, 522; colonization and 58–60; cultural turn 56, 58; gender 513; interlingual communication 55; languages 55; metaphorical conceptualization 57; mission civilisatrice 57; neo-colonialism 62–66; postcolonialism 60–62; postcoloniality 56; power and 35; quality of life 176; translation studies 66–68 informational capitalism 5, 6 informational society 5 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 94, 95, 165, 166 information society 5 information technology 5, 209, 239, 260, 380, 499

infosphere 89 Inghilleri, M. 8, 478 Inglis, D. 4 intellectual property (IP) 252, 410, 417 intergeneric intertextuality 311 interlingual translation 40–42, 45, 294, 296, 306, 307, 316–317 International Business and Marketing 375, 381–382 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 183 internationalism/internationality 3, 41, 42, 45, 265, 377, 463, 464 internationalization 286, 532; APTIS 100; centre/periphery 102–104; China 104–106; de-localization 379; Eurocentrism 101–102, 108; European languages 106; globalization 100; postcolonialism 101–102; Western models 107 International Literary and Artistic Association (ALAI) 254 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 64, 324, 500 International Organization for Migration (IOM) 151 international pinnacle languages 224 interpreting, evolution of 180; analysis, model of 163; and challenges of globalization 162–164; English as lingua franca 166–168; global perspectives in 161–162; migration flows 168–171; profession 9, 163–167, 171; technological developments 164–166; and translation studies 211–212 interrogative museum 309 invisibility 294, 301–302 InZone Centre 178 Iran 31 Ireland: employment opportunities lack 134; poverty 134 Irish: Chinese superior workmanship 142; ‘ethnic’ immigrant group 136; working-class communities 137 Irish-American Catholics 136–137 Irish immigrants 133–136 Irish landowner 135 Irish Literary Revival 269 Irish navvies and Paddys 134–137 Istanbul 77 Italiano, F. 75 Italy 233, 382, 384, 436 Ives, P. 429 al-Jâhiz, Abû Utmân 22 Jakobson, R. 40–41, 45 James, P. 2, 3, 7 Japan 31, 73, 86, 258–259 Japanese 233 541

Index

Jimenez-Bellver, Jorge 5 Jimenez-Crespo, M. A. 7, 86, 383, 384, 532 Jinks, D. 443 John, J. D. 266 JoSTrans (“Professional Translation” 2016) 171 Joyce, J. 268–272, 274 Judea 15 Juris, J. 204 Kachru, B. B. 486 Kadohata, Cynthia 474 Kaf ka, Franz 472 Kant, I. 28, 42, 44, 514, 515 Károly, K. 298 Karp, I. 308, 309, 317 Karpinsky, E. C. 153, 154 Kay, M. 326 Kaza, Madhu H. 158 Kelly, D. 206, 340, 341 Kelly, N. 203 Kenny, Kevin 136 Kenya 419–420 Khasnabish, A. 408 Al-Khwarizmi 22 Kiraly, D. 209 Klein, N. 416 knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) 364 Kobarid Museum 313–314 Kofman, S. 515 Kolbert, E. 89 Konstantinović, R. 513–514 Konzelmann, S. 323–324 Koponen, M. 398 Koselleck, R. 28 Koskinen, K. 397, 398 Koyré, A. 72 Kratz, C. A. 308, 309, 317 Kronenberg, K. 325 Kuhn, Thomas 132 Kull, K. 89 Kurochkin, V. 463 Kymlicka, W. 428, 429, 433, 437 labour market structures 193 Lafargue, P. 326 Lahiri, Jhumpa 154, 155, 156 Lambert, J. 116 Lanchester, J. 96 landscapes 133–139, 141 language-culture-nation 148 language-independent determinate reality 133 language individuality: Babel interpretation 42, 44; co-figuration 45–48, 50; colonization 60; continuity in discontinuity 46–50; countability 39; dialects 41; English 43–44, 57–58; ethnic community 43; interlingual translation 41, 45; internationality 41, 42, 44; 542

Japanese 43, 44; modality 40; ‘nation’ 44; plurality 42; translation proper 40, 41, 45, 48, 51; translation types 40 language industry 203, 363–364, 367, 369, 380 language-related communication issue 177, 179 languages 88–89, 150, 156, 165; demand and supply (see demand and supply); democracy 427–430; dominant 68, 102–103, 224, 227, 236–237; indigenous 57, 59, 224–225, 343, 364, 507; market 371–372, 372–373; minority 61, 66–68, 224, 237, 270, 271, 506; world translation flows 231–235; see also specific entries language service 162, 179, 203, 297, 325, 364–373, 489, 531 language service providers (LSPs) 205, 287, 325, 331, 364–365, 367–372, 372, 394 languaging 343, 437 Lanier, J. 407 Larbaud, Valery 268–269 Latin 233, 436 Latin America 61, 204, 205, 282 Latour, B. 87 Lazaro Gutierrez, R. 169, 170 Lazier, B. 78–79 League of Nations in 1926 164 Lecercle, J. 66 Lee, J. J. 135 Lee, Robert G. 137 Lefebvre, Henri 75 Lefevere, A. 100 Leslie, D. 307 Levine, Suzanne Jill 118, 119 Liao, M.-H. 312–314 Lieberman, P. 90 Limón, Graciela 474 lingua franca 19, 338, 341, 378, 380, 428, 436, 437 literature: centre/periphery dichotomy 268–271; geopolitics 271–274; global informational flow 275; universal 269, 271, 272; world literature 265–268 localization: crowdsourcing 385, 386; culturally adapted websites 383; de-localization 379; economic constraints 382–384; foreignization 379; GILT process 376–378; globalization 384–385; glocalization 378–379; industrybased discourse 376; International Business and Marketing 375, 381–382; LISA 376; post-editing MT 376; quality 384; reverse localization 379; studies 380, 380–381; TIS 375, 385; websites 383 Ločmele, G. 354 London 15 looking glass self concept 131 Loraux, N. 516, 517, 522 Lossner, K. 417 Lotfollahi, B. 355 Lotman, J. 457

Index

Louie, David Wong 474 Lumeras, M.A. 395 Lviv 77 Lynch, B. 309–310 MacCannell, D. 338 McCarthy, C. 310 McClellan, Andrew 315 McDonough Dolmaya, J. 193, 197, 407, 421 Machine Translation (MT) 183, 370–373, 384–385, 415; CAT 393–394; data-driven 326; development 325, 326; digital cartography 81; goal 391; human translators 6; languages 224, 363; money trail 416–418; online services 193, 398; origins 396; pioneers 392–393; postediting 399; quality 327, 330; sociological approach 278–279; training 331; unpaid crowdsourcing 420 MacIntyre, A. 34 MacLean, K. 449–450 McNeil, W. 30 MacPherson, James 458 Magris, M. 340, 341 Maillard, C. 516 MA in Interpreting and Translation Studies (MITS) 208, 209 Malay 240, 240, 241 Malaysia 240, 241 Mallarmé, S. 254 Malmö Museums 310 Malouf, M. G. 271 Manca, E. 344 Mandarin to Uyghur 245 Mangiron, C. 86 Manuel, N. 507 Marais, K. 89, 229m13 Marinetti, C. 307 Martínez, S. 448–449 Martin, John 457 Martinsen, B. 170 Martin, T. 463 Marxism 241 Marx, K. 6, 27 Masaryk, Tomáš 458 masculinization 518 Mason, I. 340 Master of Interpreting and Translation Studies (MITS) programme 202 Mbembe, A. 64 Medina Reguera, A. 384 Mellinger, C. D. 166 Member States of the Arab League 238–239 Ménard, Pierre 257 Menchú, Rigoberta 267 Menon, R. 516, 518 Mensah, H. A. 357 Merry, S. 441, 443, 450

metacognition 209 metacognitive knowledge 209 metacognitive skills 209 methodological nationalism 1, 3, 8, 110, 115, 116, 124 Meylaerts, Reine 229m13 Mezzadra, S. 51 Middle East 204, 205 Mignolo, Walter D. 460 migrant labour force 134 migrant spectors and landscape 133–134; Chinese ‘Celestials’ 137–139; Irish ‘navvies’ and ‘Paddys’ 134–137 migration 154; flows 163, 168–171; human geography 134; illegal immigrants 158; immediate effects of 131; and transmigrancy 151–154; ‘universal experience’ of 151 Mikhailov, M. 463 Mikhalkov, Sergei 464 Miller, Kirby 135 Miller, M. J. 151 Minaev, D. 463 Model European Union 167 modernity/modernism 27–28; civilizational characteristics 29, 30; cosmopolitanism 32–36; cultural translation 32–36; entangled 29; global dimension 31; interaction modes 32; literary movement 27; micro-modernity 261; sociological theory 29; transformative process 30 Modiano, M. 487 Moll, Y. 119 Monash MITS 209–211 Monash University 208, 209 Mongolia 15 Mongolian 245 monolingualism 49, 437, 529; uniformity 62 Moorkens, J. 6, 7, 327, 329–331, 531 Moraga, Cherríe 474 Morales, Alejandro 474 Moraru, C. 71, 80 Moretti, F. 266, 268 M āori community 310 Morozov, E. 418 Morris, Philip 353 Moser-Mercer, B. 165 Mowbray, M. 505 multiculturalism 8, 133, 204, 309 multi-language vendors (MLVs) 368 multilingual communication 180, 181 multilingualism: communication 180, 181; languages and language policy 483–486; liberation linguistics 487; multiplicity vs. unity 488–490; translations 204 multilingual translations 204 multimodality 353 multimedia translation studies 278 543

Index

Muñoz Sánchez, P. 194 Musacchio, M. T. 378 museums 3; community engagement 307; cross-linguistic intercultural interaction 307; cultural translation 306; globalization 314–316; interlingual translation 306; Tlingit translators’ 307; translation off-stage 307–311, 316; translation on-stage 307, 311–314, 316 Muslim culture 157 Muzaini, H. 316 Nail, T. 151 Nam Fung, Chang 104 Nancy, J.-L. 519 Napu, N. 338 Naqvi, A. R. 157 National Register of Interpreters 171 nationalism: methodological 1, 3, 8, 113, 115, 116, 124; romantic 455, 458 nations: ethnic nation 455; imperial 461–465; models of 456; primordial 457–461; Romantic nationalism 455 nation-state 51, 60, 114–115, 148, 152, 153, 448 Native American children 229n10 Native American populations 225 navigators/navvies 134 Neather, R. 311–312, 316 Negri, A. 260 Neilson, B. 51, 116 Nelson, B. 30 neo-colonialism 102 neoliberalism 3, 4, 323, 324, 499 neoliberal era: 3D quality model 323; economic liberalism 324; globalization 325; language service industry 325; MT 323, 325, 326, 330, 331; NMT 327, 330; TM 326; translation industry 324; translation quality 329–330; translators’ profile 327–329; voluntary deflation 324 Nergaard, Siri 8 Nesiah, V. 447 Netherlands 382 Network Analysis 246 Neural machine translation (NMT) 327, 330, 392, 394–395 Neuzeit 28 Newman formulation 119, 122 New Orleans 77 news see global news organizations New Zealand 182 NGOs 421, 446, 447; demand 337; free translation 412; humanitarian 411, 412, 415, 420, 421; implications 408; labour market 414; partner 419, 420; TWB 420; HIV/AIDS 450; volunteer translators 410 Nida, E. 340 544

Nkrumah, Kwame 63 non-European languages 233, 239, 239 Non-Governmental Organizations 178 non-native original speech 168 non-professional translators 198–200; characteristics 191–194; grass-roots level, translation projects 194–196; grass-roots social activist translation initiatives 197–198; topdown crowdsourcing projects 196–197 non-profit organizations (NPOs) 366 Nornes, M. A. 279, 287 North America 205 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 499, 500 Norway 157 Nuremberg trials 162 Nussbaum, M. 87–89 Obejas, A. 120 O’Brien, S. 177, 211, 327, 330 O’Connor, J. 273–277 O’Hagan, M. 86, 190, 191, 196, 379 Okada, John 474 Olohan, M. 191, 192, 197, 397 Onciul, B. 307, 310, 316–317 ‘Opening’ policy 243 Opium War in 1842 137 Orengo, A. 296, 297 Organisation internationale de la francophonie (OIF) 236 Orientalism 355 originality 252–257, 431, 455, 457, 460, 462, 529 Oruka, O. 261 Osborne, M. A. 326 Ost, F. 260 O’Sullivan, C. 279, 280, 284, 288 Otero Pedrayo, R. 269 Ottmann, A. 329 Ó Tuathail, G. 74–75 outsourcing 205, 297, 324, 325, 364, 531 Ozolins, U. 170 Padrón, R. 81 Pakistan 239, 340 Palmer, P. 90 Panizzon, R. 378 Paris 19 Parish, N. 313, 314 ‘Patsy O’Wang: An Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-Up’ (Denison) 137 Paz, O. 256 Pearl River Delta 138 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 242, 243 Pereira, A. 381–383 Pérez-González, L. 190, 192–194 perlocutionary effect 48 Persian 239

Index

philosophical reflections translation studies 253 Pickering, A. 397 Pickles, J. 80–81 Piróth, A. 6, 7, 533 Plato 49, 72 plurilingualism 427, 433, 437 Polezzi, L. 80 police and healthcare interpreting 165 politics of language 198, 427–429, 431, 432, 434, 437 politics of translation 3, 255, 437, 513–525 Pollock, S. 31 Płonowska Ziarek, E. 516 populism 2 post-carbon society 87 postcolonialism 60–62, 67, 101–103 postcolonial studies 57, 253, 256, 355 postcolonial theory 29, 56, 61, 62, 66, 68, 102, 516 postcolony 64 post-editing; crowdsourcing 183; demand 394; MT 330, 331, 368, 376, 384, 392, 394, 396–400; writing 208 post-industrial societies 161 postmodernism 28, 56, 58, 66, 73, 119, 253, 343, 516 poverty 134 Powell, Colin 408 Pratt, M.L. 18, 76, 120, 306 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman) 131 promotional translation 351–358 property-rights 254 Ptolemaic planetary system 72 ‘The Public Realm’ 143 public service 162 public service interpreting 165–166, 169 Public Service Interpreting and Translation (PSIT) 342 Pushkin, Alexander 462 Pym, A. 107–109, 117, 191, 197, 199, 200, 204–206, 205, 206, 296–298, 327, 379 Qing dynasty 138 Quarantelli, E. L. 177 queer studies 57, 67 Rafael, V. L. 59, 67, 434, 461 Ramírez Delgado, C. 384 Randeria, S. 449 Ranger, T. O. 456 Rantisi, N. M. 307 Reagan, Ronald 324, 499 ‘reference’ language 245 refugees 151–152, 158, 472, 516–517, 523–524 regional-language vendors (RLVs) 368 re-globalized cinema 286–288

Reithofer, K. 168 Renan, Ernest 456 Renault, Louis 251 Return on Investment (ROI) 382–383 Rico, C. 400 Ricoeur, P. 33 risk communication 177, 181–182 Risku, H. 330 Ritzer, G. 337 Robertson, R. 7, 29, 300 Roediger, David 136 Rome 15, 225 Rorty, Richard 133 Rosenberger, B. 294 Rossato, L. 355–356 Ross, D. 340, 341 Rowley, R. 313, 314 Rubery, J. 324 Rumford, C. 1 Ruokonen, M. 397 Rushdie, S. 67, 152, 476 Rushkoff, D. 325, 407, 408, 418 Russell, Andrew J. 139, 140 Russia 220, 221 Russian 233, 238, 241–242 Russian Translations into Swahili 242 Sacramento Union 138 Said, E.W. 71, 74–76, 477 Sakai, N. 3, 116, 121, 123, 458, 513, 528 Saldanha, G. 211 Samuel-Azran, T. 298, 300 San Francisco 138, 139 Sanskrit 239 Santiago, Esmeralda 474 Santos, B. de S. 261, 503–504 Santoyo, J.-C. 23 Sapiro, G. 67 Sattelzeit 28 Scanell, K. 507 Schäler, S. 378 Schleiermacher, F. 114, 117, 118, 435 Schmitt, C. 50, 51 Scholte, J. A. 2 Schorch, P. 314 Schwarz, A. 177 screen errancy 286–287 Seeger, M. W. 177 Seidman, N. 459 self-knowledge 133 self-reflection 18 Selim, S. 407 Sellnow, T. L. 177 semilocalized websites 383 Sendai Framework 176 Sennett, Richard 143 Service Provision category 328 545

Index

Shakar, Zeshan 157 Shamma, T. 466 Sharma, S. 357 Shimp, T. A. 357 Shirky, C. 409 Shishkov, A. 462 Shryock, A. 307 ‘silent’ period 281–282 Silverman, R. A. 309 Silverstone, R. 121 Simmel, G. 27, 75, 131 Simmons, B. 443 Simon, S. 71, 75, 76, 77, 114, 121, 149, 307, 309, 314 Singapore 86, 240, 241 Singh, N. 381–383 single-language vendors (SLVs) 368 Six UN Languages (TL) 234, 235 Skains, R. L. 259 skopos 278, 340, 398 Slobodchikoff, C. 91, 92 Slocombe, K. E. 91 Sloterdijk, P. 71–73, 72 Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) 384 Smith, V. 81, 355 Snell-Hornby, M. 340 social networking 193 “social turn” 169 “society” concept 131 Soh, C. 315, 316 Soja, E. 75 Solidarités International (SI) 410–413, 412, 414–416, 420, 421 ‘Son of Heaven’ 139 SOS-VICS project data 170 source languages 231, 232, 234 South Asia 282 South East Asia 208 South Korea 86 Soviet regime 242–243 Spain 23, 74, 382, 384, 476 Spanish 235, 238, 436 Spanish Civil War 246 Special Interest Group of Translation and Interpreting for Public Services (SIGTIPS) 169 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 141 Spivak, G. C. 66, 71, 79, 80, 266, 477, 514, 515 Srinivasan, A. 522 standardized websites 383 Stecconi, U. 109 Steger, M. B. 2, 3, 7 Steiner, G. 256 stereoscopic vision 152 Stockhammer, R. 81 Strobridge, James 139 Strom, R. 325 student-learning outcomes 202 546

Sturge, S. 307 subjectivity 89, 92, 117, 253, 428 subtitling 532; abusive 287; countries 283; and dubbing 279, 286; English 119, 287; Japanese 118; non-professional 193 Sulaiman, Z. 337, 344 Suny, R. G. 463 Susam-Sarajeva, Ş. 102–109 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 183 17 Sustainable Development Goals 176 sustainability 87, 331, 337, 344–345, 531 de Swaan, Abram 230, 233, 236, 239 Swahili 239, 241, 241 Switzerland 236, 382 Taiping Rebellion 138 Taiwan 382; Chinese/English interpreters in 168 Tampere 77 Tan Zaixi 105 target languages 231–235, 234 Target Text systems 311 techne 392, 461, 529, 533 technological developments 162, 164–166 technological utopianism 288 technology impact: CAT tools 391; dehumanization 398; human activities and translation 391; human translators (see human translators); MT 391; post-editing 397; translation epistemology 395–396; translation profession 397–399; translator training 399–400 Tejaswini, N. 67 terracentric approach 9, 87–89, 96 terrestrial globalization 72 Thailand 31 Thatcher, Margaret 324, 499 Therborn, G. 31 Thiong’o, N. wa. 61, 460 Third Culture Kids (Naqvi) 156 Third UN World Conference in Sendai, Japan 176 Thompson, Stith 229n12 Thorpe, C. 4 Tieber, M. 167 T&I Graduate Employability Strategies 208 T&I industry 202–205 T&I programmes 208–209 T&I training courses 205 Tlaxcala 198, 406, 506–507 TM Town 408, 408 Tognini Bonelli, E. 344 top-down crowdsourcing translation enterprises 196–197 Torresi, I. 355, 532 Torres, Luis de 74 Torres-Simon, E. 206 Tourgeniev, Ivan 254

Index

tourism 3, 4, 204, 308; accessibility 337, 341–344; authenticity 341–344, 338; auxiliary language 338; cultural 316; English plus multilingual translations 338; foreignization 338; international 337; Islamic 344; interpreter/informant 339; lingua franca 338; staged authenticity 338; studies 339–341; travel writing 338 tourism studies 339–342, 345 Toury, Gideon 101 tradosphere 88, 89 training programmes 206 transatlantic solidarity 273 transcreation 118, 285, 353, 368, 532 transculturality 56–57, 67 transformation: cultural 475, 532; epistemological 395; global economy 6; human rights 442–451; knowledge 260; learning and 430; rationalization 27; rules 34, 144; social 50, 75, 473; vernacular 458; translanguaging 343, 355, 357–358, 432 translatability 132–133 translation: audiovisual 4, 9, 177, 194, 200, 279, 330, 530; community 191, 192, 410, 507; complexity of 226; complexity theory 225–226; cosmopolitan 472, 475–478; crosscultural interactions 533; flows 3, 57 (see also world translation flows); flows and societal changes 242–245; global economy 231; in globalizing context 223–224; industry and service 530–531; invisibility 134, 279, 294, 301–302; literary 257, 268, 271–274, 287, 299, 338, 391, 436; migration and transmigrancy 151–154; mobility and displacement 148–151; of news 4, 121, 293–294, 296–302; ‘normalization’ of 226; and places 18–19; political 427, 503; politics of 3, 255, 437, 513–524; profession 8, 17, 101, 190, 193, 205, 392, 397–399; promotional 4, 352, 354, 356–358; quality 312, 329–331, 357–358, 384, 397, 531; self-transformation 533; studies 99–110, 113–124, 211–212, 256–259, 339–341, 356–358, 501–502; technology 91, 223, 393–395, 399–400, 531; tourism 337–342, 344; transfer languages in 224; transmigrant subjectivities 154–158; volunteer 191, 192, 398, 407, 408, 412, 413, 419, 420 translational cyborg 193 ‘translational transnational zone’ 152 translational urban spaces 149 Translation and Globalization (Cronin) 2 Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) 161, 162, 375 translation memories (TMs) 326, 393 translation penalty 285 translation studies 99–110, 211–212, 256–259, 339–341, 356–358

translation theory 225 Translation Trends in the Digital Age 210 translation zone 75–77 translator status 205, 355, 398, 412–414 The Translator’s Invisibility (Venuti) 230 Translators without Borders (TWB) 366, 406, 419; vs. humanitarian organizations 418–420; Solidarités International (SI) 410–413, 412; machine translation 416–418; money trail 416–418; translators’ status and ethos 413–414; unpaid work 414–416; volunteer/ crowdsourced translation 407–410, 409 transmigrant/transmigrancy 149, 151–158 transmigrant subjectivities 154–158 transnation/transnational/transnationality 3, 7, 29, 71, 461; aesthetic production 57; border zones 149, 152; centrality of 274; citizenship 86; democratic politics 428; feminism 120; flows 86; globalized experiences 115, 116; governance 499; languages 66; literary texts 267, 269; plurilingualism 153; social movements 462; transculturality 57; translocal translation 444; transmigrancy 149 transnational feminism 120 transnationalism 152 transworld instantaneity 2 transworld simultaneity 2 travel 78, 225, 442, 516; authenticity and 337–338; guides 342, 343; translation 445–448; writing 80, 338 Triandis, H. 340 Trivedi, H. 67 Troussel, J.-C. 331 Trump, Donald 221 Trumpener, K. 457 Tsai, C. 294 Turkey 239 Turkish 239; Origin of Translations from 240 Twain, Mark 257–258 Tymoczko, M. 5, 67, 93, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106–110, 117, 301, 379, 478, 501–502, 532 The Types of the Folktale (Aarne) 229n12 Ukraine 228n1 Ulysses 268–270 UN Declaration of Human Rights 180 UNDP report 238 UNESCO 230, 238, 247n2, 316, UNESCO’s Index Translationum 230, 231 UNICEF 416 Union Pacific Railroad 138 United Kingdom 59, 182, 237, 242 United Nations (UN) 166, 176, 230, 233, 234, 235, 238, 341, 366, 406, 446, 490 United Nations General Assembly 176 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 406 547

Index

United States 43, 58, 134, 182, 220, 225, 227, 237, 242; Industrial Revolution in 134, 135; Irish immigrants in 133–136 unity and diversity 148 universal/universality/universalism 19, 514, 516–519, 523 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 150 UN Languages 238 untranslatability 56, 80, 149, 155, 158 Urdu 239, 240, 240 Valdeón, R. A. 90, 296 Valenzuela, Liliana 476 Valero Garces, C. 170 van de Kerchove, M. 260 Vandenbogaerde, A. 446 Van Doorslaer, L. 103–104 van Leeuwen, T. 298 Varikas, E. 514 Vazquez, R. 449 Vega, Ana Lydia 474 ventriloquism 279 Venuti, L. 57, 67, 76, 113, 114, 117–122, 230, 258, 259, 267, 268, 273, 275, 379, 455, 529 Venuti, Lawrence 230 vernacularization 443 Verne, J. 77, 78 Vertovec, Steven 115 Vieira, L. N. 7, 394, 395, 399, 529 Villanueva, Tino 474 Virgil 20 Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) 208 volunteerism: crowdsourced translation 407–410, 409; Egyptian Revolution 407; humanitarian organizations 406, 418–420; machine translation 416–418; money trail 416–418; political activism 406; translators’ status and ethos 413–414; TWB 410–413, 412, 418–420; unpaid work 414–416 Wagner, E. 489–490 Waisman, S. 258 Walcott, Derek 271 Waldmüller, Johannes 445, 449 Walkowitz, R. L. 121, 123 Way, A. 395 Weaver, W. 325 Web 2.0 192 Weber, Max 27, 30 Wei, L. 357 Weinbaum, A. E. 358 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak 180

548

Western globalization 74 westernization 58, 74, 101, 461 Western Renaissance 251 Wheeler, M. 342 Wheeler, T. 342 Whitehead, C. 311, 314 Whitman, Walt 254 Wikipedia 197 Wilke, J. 294 Williams, R. 88 Wilson, R. 337 Windhager, F. 330 Witcomb, A. 313 Wood, D. 80 Woodward, D. 80 Woodworth, J. 86 ‘Work Integrated Learning’ (WIL) 211 World Disasters Report 2018 180 World Health Organization 182 world cinema 278–281, 288; nationalization 282–286; ‘silent’ period 281–282; synchronized speech 282–286 world literature 275, 281; Anglo-American conceptualization 62; canonical 114; centre/ periphery dichotomy 268–271; eurocentrism 460; geopolitics 271–274; translation of 265–268 World Social Forum (WSF) 255, 261, 500, 503–504, 506 World Trade Organization (WTO) 254, 353, 499 world translation flows: flows and societal changes 242–245; global economy 231; machine translation 231; preferred subjects 236–242; source and target languages 231–235; speakers of 233 World War II 228n3, 241 Wuhan Municipal Museum 312 Wu, M. M. 168 Wyse, Francis 135 Yeoh, B. S. A. 316 Yildiz, Y. 431 Young, R. J. C. 63, 66 Yunker, J. 383 Zapatista online activism 508 ‘zero-degree’ cinema 280 Zethsen, K. K. 164, 166 Zhukovskii, Vasilii 457 Zoboff, S. 327 zombification 64 Zuberbühler, K. 91 Zuckerman, E. 93–94