I should like to begin by paying tribute to our Hungarian colleagues, who have indulged the rest of us by consenting to give up their own language during this con
ference, and making their own contributions - in their own country - in a foreign language.
It is sometimes particularly difficulty for those who speak English as a mother tongue to appreciate the sacrifices being continually made by our non-English-speak
ing colleagues. So I would like to begin by reading a passage from Shakespeare’s RichardII (I was able to borrow Professor Klaudy’s copy), where Mowbray has just been sentenced to exile by the king. The worst feature of the sentence, he recognises, is that he will be unable to speak his own language - in the 14th century English was not the ubiquitous lingua franca that it is today.
The language I have learnt these forty years My native English, now I must forgo, And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp, ... (Act 1 Scene 3)
So, before I try to summarise this wonderful conference, I would like, however inadequate my pronunciation may be, on behalf of all of us from outside the coun
try, to thank our Hungarian colleagues.
Mindnyájunk nevében akik nem vagyunk magyarok, szeretnék köszönetét mondani a jelenlevő magyaroknak. Saját országukban megengedték nekünk, hogy angolul (franciául, németül, oroszul) tartsunk elődást.
The assignment I have been given is to look back over the conference, and then - like the statue of some revolutionary hero to point the way forward to a glorious future.
I should like to go back to the origins of this Transferre necesse est series, referred to by Professor János Kohn during the opening ceremony. He recalled how a small group had met four years ago in the small Budapest fiat of György Radó, the grand old man of Hungarian letters and translation, to put together the plans for the first TNE conference in Szombately. As General Editor of LanguageMonthly (1983-89) and Language International (1990-1996) it has been my privilege to meet many of the leading personalities in the world of translation - indeed, many of them are
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sent at this conference. But I can say that of all the personalities I have met it was György Radó who made the strongest impression on me.
The last time we met was at the TNE conference in Szombately in 1990, two years before he died, when he was a frail old man. His mind, however, was still as lively as ever, and I remember him contesting a flippant remark I had made that Byron’s longer poems were unreadable. He had the better of the argument, for he had read them and I had not. He was truly knowledgeable about the literature of all the lead
ing countries of Europe, but he was also Hungary’s foremost expert on Hungarian literature in the original, on the translation of Hungarian literature into other lan
guages, and on translation from other literatures into Hungarian.
One of the many things I learnt from György Radó was the importance of the concept of Central Europe, or Mitteleuropa - he preferred to use the German term, because of the more precise connotations it conveyed. Some of his earliest writings, before second world war, were concerned with the political concept of Mitteleuropa.
We in this hall have all grown up with the separation of Europe into two blocks, East and West, and we have still not fully adjusted to the new situation. But the geo
political re-adjustment is already taking place before our eyes. Berlin has become one gigantic building site, and property on the Friedrichstrasse, so they tell me, is now more expensive than in downtown Tokyo. But Berlin is not strictly speaking Central Europe, which historically was in this area, Vienna, Prague, Budapest. Vienna, which was once a terminus, a dead end, when it was divided from the lands to the east and south, is now buzzing with a re-found cultural vigour. In our language world, it is no accident that the largest translation conference in Europe last year took place in Prague, just as the largest translation conference in Europe this year has taken place - over the last three days - here in Budapest. Already these three cities are playing a central role in our language world, and I forecast that they will increasingly play a central political role, too, in the new Europe.
This is why it was so appropriate to have the President of the Hungarian Republic here to open the conference.
It is an indication of the pull which Budapest now has that Professor Klaudy and her colleagues have been able to assemble for this second TNE conference what can only be called an all-star cast, not only for the plenaries but also for the working ses
sions. I did have a moment of doubt at the reception in the Academy of Sciences - one bomb on that room would have wiped out in one blow nearly all the leading fig
ures in translations studies in Europe!
In another sense this conference itself has been a bomb, which will change our sense of what translation is and where it is going. It has produced a veritable explo
sion of interests and sub-domains, which makes the problem of summarising the conference all that much harder.
In her keynote address, Professor Mary Snell-Hornby referred to the ‘complex job profile of the translator in the global village’. We have been reminded this week in the various working sessions of the many different kinds of translation there are - sometimes with different names: versioning, localisation, language mediation, multi
lingual text generation.
This is where we have to decide in which direction we should go, whether we should be purists or inclusivists. There is something to be said for the purist direction, because only if we have a clearly defined model of what translation is can we under
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stand the translation process and work to enhance the quality of translation. But with this approach there is a danger that we shall be forced to retreat to small islands of professional activity surrounded by a veritable ocean of amateur endeavour.
The other approach is to avoid the instinctive reaction “But that’s not transla
tion” whether it is working with machine translation, or sub-titling, or summaris
ing in a target language a long document in a source language. And translation, in Anthony Pym’s words, is a superordinate term which also covers interpreting - which has been an important subject of study at this conference - and to some extent ter
minology work. Perhaps a more accurate concept is that of language transfer, and it is interesting to note that ‘transfer’ occurs in the title of this conference, albeit in its original, Latin, form.
Nine years ago I interviewed the then president of the Federation Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT), Jean-Fran^ois Joly, and asked about the then comparatively new discipline of public service interpreting, sometimes known as community interpret
ing. He was dubious about this, because standards at that time in that domain were generally very low, and he thought it would weaken the image and effectiveness of FIT. At this year’s FIT congress in Melbourne public service interpreting was one of the most prominent subjects for discussion. The same thing is now happening in translation for the media - mainly sub-titling and dubbing. One of my sentences in Language International: “The reason this rapid growth is often overlooked by the pro
fession is that the practitioners are usually not part of the translation mainstream”
has been quoted at this conference. I think we are going to find that languages in the media is going to be the subject of a lot of discussion at all general translation con
ferences in the future; one reason for this is that the media themselves are crying out for a training infrastructure.
I think this TNE conference has shown the way translation conferences are going to go. When a general conference such as this is held, there is going to be an explo
sion of different interests and sub-domains. Such conferences are necessary in order to explore the common ground which still unites us. But there will also be more and more translation conferences which explore specific areas of activity.
What does unite us is a concern for the efficiency and quality of language trans
fer, and for maintaining the rich diversity of languages with which the world, and particularly Europe, is blessed. If we relax our efforts, we could be letting in all the dangers of a shallow world monoculture, the Jack MacWorld to use Mary Snell- Hornby’s telling image.
Linguists, whether they are literary translators, technical translators, court inter
preters or whatever, must have a sensitive feeling for languages and cultures. Our task is to communicate from one culture to another, thereby enriching both cultures.
Our responsibility is to maintain and enhance that richness in diversity which is such a characteristic of Europe.
Professor Snell-Hornby talked about the problems of language and European integration, and this was reflected in several papers, though no-one tackled the prob
lem in such a direct and head-on manner as she did. She called for a workable - not a Utopian - language policy for Europe. In my humble opinion, language is too important a matter to be left to the politicians, and I think this is yet another respon
sibility we should shoulder. What I would like to see are the professional linguists of Europe coming together, perhaps in some Etats-Généraux des Langues, to discuss
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workable language policies which could be adopted in Europe. Perhaps the best body to launch such an initiative could be the European Society for Translation Studies, perhaps in collaboration with the recently-established umbrella organisation, the European Translation Platform.
I keep quoting from Mary Snell-Hornby’s keynote address, because it did what a keynote address ought to do, address the concerns which the conference should tackle. And in fact her concerns were reflected in the papers in the working sessions.
She had remarked that “instant and easy communication is no longer a clear-cut journey from one shore to another". In one of the working sessions we heard about the distorting prism which the media hold up to the world, mainly because of their linguistic ignorance. Professor Newmark has just been dealing with the same area, and the problems of manipulation. “The more inaccurate the translation, the more extensive the manipulation", he tells us.
In a world where the media of communication are falling into fewer and fewer hands, and where those same media will soon be beamed into almost every home on the planet, this is a matter of the most serious concern. We need to draw the world’s attention to inaccuracy in use of language, to insensitivity in cross-cultural commu
nication. This is yet another of our responsibilities. But we can co-operate with bod
ies such as the European Institute for the Media in Düsseldorf, which shares the same concerns.
Such errors and misunderstandings often occur because the commentators have not, in Professor Eugene Nida’s words, “understood the discourse". Professor Nida drew on his wide knowledge of languages to show the value of appreciating, and being sensitive to, different thought patterns embodied in different languages. Yet another reason for upholding linguistic diversity, and combating the trend towards Jack MacWorld’s debased world monoculture.
Professor Nida also told us that the translators’ association of the People’s Repub
lic of China had 500,000 members, a reflection of the fact that China was deter
mined to catch up with the west. It was Napoleon who said that China was a “sleep
ing giant". Perhaps the sleeping giant is about to start waking up. Jack MacWorld and his cronies, those complacent English-speakers may be less enthusiastic about promoting a world monoculture if it meant that their grandchildren would have to learn Chinese. Because world language patterns can easily change. For a long time Gibbon hesitated about writing his epic masterpiece, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in English; he thought that if he wrote it in French it would have a better chance of acceptance in the world of historians.
Professor Nida also emphasised the importance of clarity in texts meant to inform, and we have heard several examples of this in this conference, ranging from Brussels directives to petro-chemical plant documentation. Andrew Chesterman devoted much of his working session to cultural differences in the translation of how to use tea-bags, reminding us that people do need the simplest matters explained clearly, with a sense of cultural appropriateness.
I have long been an advocate of translation reaching out to the allied profession of technical writing, where much interesting work has been done in recent years on reader-oriented communication. I often wish that those writing on the theory of translation would sometimes quote from experts in technical communication, Flesch or Gunning, Richaudeau or Timbal.
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In November 1994 the American magazine Newsweek ran a feature article on
“Why Europe is losing the technology race". One of the principal reasons it gave was the vertical compartmentalisation of much of our university education. In his bleak but realistic paper on interpreting research Daniel Gile called for more interdiscipli
narity as well as for more empirical data.
Daniel Gile showed just how much we have to do, and I have also been mention
ing burdens we ought to shoulder and responsibilities we ought to undertake. The task is immense, but the importance of that task - of securing true intercultural communication and understanding - cannot be overestimated. We need to be more assertive about our role, as Cay Dollerup has suggested. Because we have to realise, in the words of the president of the Hungarian Republic opening our conference: “In this complex global society, we” (and we all appreciated that inclusive “we” in which he identified himself as one of us) “we are the most important people in this modern world” - as this wonderful conference has shown.