During a long period after the second world war, the political as well as the socio
cultural world have been heavily influenced by a dominantly dualistic organization.
It is not only since 1989 that this “world order” has been shaken. Anyway there seem not be many chances that it will be re-established in one way or another. For many years already the internationalisation process has crossed most borderlines and influenced the daily life of most citizens. Whatever it may offer to populations,
it has enormous consequences for their self-definition in the world frame. The fact that so many new nations try to conquer a seat at the United Nations indicates clearly that our world is much less static than ever. New borderlines are being es
tablished in many parts of the world, and internal as well as external struggles (or wars) are the most substantial part of the media news. When political order is not at stake, economic and/or cultural autonomy may be questioned or redefined. After all, this is just a matter of values, value hierarchies and power. The problem is which groups/institutions are accepted by given populations as their authority.
On the occasion of a congress organized in the heart of the new European world (Lambert 1993), I have demonstrated how translation may offer a privileged ap
proach to the analysis of the new socio-cultural organization. In case the basic rules of socio-cultural life have indeed been revised, this is supposed to influence very basic activities such as verbal communication, discourse, language and languages.
It is on the basis of such a general hypothesis that I have suggested to study to what extent the basic rules of verbal communication have changed in diplomatic discourse, in the discourse of the media and in business communication. There are strong indications that heavy shifts have taken place long before the Berlin wall has collapsed, which implies that more has changed than just political order.
From the perspective of the West-European countries, where traditions used to be well-established and stable, it seems that autonomy is not much less at stake than in other parts of the world. The EU tends to envisage the power of the Ameri
can media industry as a threat for its own economy, or rather for its own culture.
Heavy discussions have taken place around treatment of economic activities with cultural consequences, at least in the case of the audio-visual media. Where exactly are the borderlines between economics and culture? This is one of the key issue in the relationships between the EU and the USA. It is not sure at all that our politi
cal leaders need any help from scholarship in their definition of concepts, since they may be more interested in (economic) power than in the discussion itself. But the fact that culture is so central in political and economic decision-making is an interesting point for historians and for scholarship. In fact this is not new at all in history. Martiné Danan has shown how French film industry since the twenties has systematically used the same kind of arguments in order to protect itself against the American invasion (Danan, forthcoming). In this case language has always been treated as a key aspect of culture, sometimes as a cultural value, at other moments as an economic weapon.
The question of language has been a crucial issue since the very beginning within the European Union. It has been linked with a very new language policy which has been defined as “ethnolinguistic democracy” (Fishman 1993), since it aims at pro
tecting the rights of minorities with the aid of language. The boom of translational activities on behalf of Europe is a direct consequence of this peculiar language pol
icy. Whatever such a democracy may imply (Lambert 1994b), it is a rather surpris
ing phenomenon in a group of nations with - in certain cases - a strong tradition of centralization and monolingual language policy. According to some hesitations and discussions it is not sure at all that it will survive in an enlarged European Union.
On the other hand it is not sure at all that the European Union would have good chances for revival from the moment it would drop its ethnolinguistic democracy
Jósé Lambert
principles (Coulmass 1991). And such observations stress the relevance of language and translation as part of political strategies.
Some member states of the EU have also been submitted to a reshuffling, with
out any apparent change of borderlines. This has been obviously the case in Bel
gium, where different communities have conquered autonomy within the Belgian constitution. Such a reshuffling of a nation born in several steps during the 19th century has not really been perceived in the international world since in this case no weapons nor wars have attracted the international media. However it has changed everyday life in Belgium rather profoundly. For our topic, the use of the language principle as a distinctive borderline for political, economic and cultural options is an interesting matter. It confirms that language is more than a simple technical tool in our contemporary world.
As a newly established society, the Flemish Community and its government even work out strategic models for the integration of language and culture into its gen
eral long term plans. In a way similar to the GATT policy of the EU, it tries to pro
tect the Flemish economic and financial backgrounds of its enterprises against the foreign (French) impact (Brockmans 1993).Within the Language Union (“Taalunie”) that links the young Flemish society with the well-established Dutch nation (16th century), it is often the Flemish partner that is the most dynamic one. After all, the Netherlands have never really cared nor had to care about their language: their international business companies tend to use English as the official language and even their universities, sometimes supported by their minister of education, feel attracted by the idea to offer their programs in English rather than in Dutch. How
ever, the Language Union is used by both the Dutch and the Flemish government as a support for their international activities, not at the least in the European Union.
But the Flemish government is obviously more eager than its partner to promote an international media policy on the basis of cultural and linguistic guide-lines. It has supported and organized recently several symposia on the interaction between culture and economics. During an important symposium organized in Brussels (van Zutphen & Nootens 1994), it was the Flemish Community that took the initiative to gather countries like Aruba, Indonesia, Surinam and, of course, the Netherlands on the basis of their Dutch speaking backgrounds in order to work out a (more) common media policy, including the book market. The participation of the new post-apartheid South Africa to such a symposium was an interesting event in itself since this nation tends to question more and more its own Dutch (speaking) backgrounds, and many among the other participants, including the Netherlands, indeed rejected the idea of a language union for their media. During the discussions, it appeared time and again that other cultural components than language have a strongly differentiating impact on the various traditions. But the most fascinating observation was and remains that the various cultural groups who were invited to report on their media landscape did not know too well how exactly to catch the language component, in particular in the case of translations.
In a situation where the basic task of the partners was to describe the local me
dia production in relation with imported media production, it became obvious that governments are badly informed on import from the moment the language of the local population is used: the experts stress that the language matter is everywhere conditioned by economic circumstances, but they recognize that they cannot
analyse them at this stage. The techniques and the figures used in order to distin
guish between “original production” in Dutch and the productions translated into Dutch were not only declared primitive and unclear by the experts themselves, they were not even considered to be important: from the perspective of the media experts involved, foreign programs translated into Dutch tend to be perceived as Dutch, and it is only due to certain obviously imported and exotic looking best
sellers that the question of translation finally pops up, not as a threat for the Dutch language, but as an economic problem. The fact that enormous areas of the (liter
ary) book production is invaded by foreign writers and genres in Dutch translation is not interpreted as a problem for the autonomous production, nor even for the dynamics of the Dutch (standard) language. Even the Language Union hardly cares about the translator’s strategies, it rather attempts to systematically promote the translation of Dutch (literary) works into foreign languages.
This is why governments who take their cultural and linguistic policy seriously have strong reasons for not ignoring any more the translation phenomenon. That’s what some scholars in social studies happen to discover exactly at this moment, and the strange thing is that it occurs in the Netherlands. A few months only after the Universiteit van Amsterdam has decided to dismantle the institute where James S Holmes has been teaching for many years, in a country where institutes for trans
lation training are not only very small in number, the Amsterdam School for Social Research has decided to focus on translation as an important aspect of social be
haviour. In a programmatic article (Heilborn 1995) published in a book devoted to the international position of the Netherlands, it is even recommended to orga
nize research on translation as an aspect of language competition and as an aspect of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems (Wallerstein 1991), although Wallerstein himself rather excludes the language problem from his world systems. The argu
ment is well taken, but the information on translation studies as a discipline is very incomplete and somewhat unsystematic (historical-descriptive research would be rather limited to translated literature). An interesting idea is anyway that the statis
tical analysis of translations in terms of export and import provides useful data about the dynamics of a given nation (see also Milo 1984).
This has been the starting point, precisely, of various projects carried out at KU Leuven since 1980. Beside limited inquiries about “la traduction comme probléme beige” (Geysens 1986) and about recent trends in the interaction in Belgium be
tween different languages after the second world war (Capelle & Meylaerts 1995), it is mainly in the Reine Meylaert’s Ph D. research (Meylaerts, forthcoming) and in Katrin Van Bragt’s impressive bibliography (Van Bragt et al. 1995) that the fluc
tuations in translational exchange have been interpreted as a key to the dynamics of a given society. A decisive step into a systemic interpretation of bibliographical data on translation has been made in Van Bragt 1995 due to the development of interactive electronic programs: synchronic and diachronic correlations of all kinds can be examined by the reader of the bibliography, and the answers are formulated as graphics and statistics. Statistical data lead simply and directly towards the fluc
tuations and trends in the various subareas of French culture and towards a gener
al interpretation of the import trends during a period of thirty years. Bibliographi
cal statistics and their electronic analysis provide us with a barometer of translated importation into France.
Jósé Lambert
The resources of contemporary electronics indeed open the way into investiga
tions and towards tools that so far belonged to scholarly Utopias, i.e. the systemat
ic analysis of relationships between the various areas of (cultural) production. For decades already economists have analysed the export/import relationships in a giv
en society and on the world level. To the extent that translations can easily be con
sidered as (economic and cultural) import, they certainly deserve to be observed in relationship with export - as in Heilborn 1995 -, but more in particular with non-translated cultural import and, before all, with the local production and repro
duction of communications (of all kinds). This is exactly what Even-Zohar (Even- Zohar 1978) had in mind when dealing with the position of translations in a given culture. The innovation that becomes possible nowadays is 1° the statistical descrip
tion and analysis of such positions and relations, 2° not only in economic terms, but also in terms of cultural relations including the language component. Since computers are strong and sophisticated enough, societies who decide so are able to construct a cultural barometer which indicates the degree of both economic and cultural autonomy, both in particular subareas of society (such as children’s litera
ture or television programs) and more generally for the society in its overall behav
iour towards its neighbours. It is even possible to isolate the language component from the cultural and economic components, which finally allows us - translation scholars - to ask the question: “Is there really any evidence that language and trans
lation help in shaping societies and their values?” As in any kind of research, the results of such - now electronic - investigations do not offer any absolute certainty, they simply offer indications. But in this case, according to the kind of data one wants to collect and control, the possibility to test out data and to reach empirical evidence has become quite strong. And this might mean a historical moment for those who have always tried to establish historical-descriptive translation studies.
The use that could be made of such research may become a delicate matter: from the moment political leaders are offered instruments that allow for application, the independence of research is very much at stake, but this can never be a sufficient reason for keeping research far away from real life.
Notes
(1) Since the mid-seventies there has been a rather heavy discussion of the systems concept in Translation Studies (and in other disciplines). In 1989 the Gottingen Sonderforschungs- bereich devoted a Symposium to the topic. The bibliography on “translation” and “sys
tems” is enormous and the discussion is still very open. See Lambert 1995b.
(2) A few years ago several scholars have discovered the importance of the links between trans
lation and colonization (Susan Bassnett, Cheyfitz), but without linking it explicitly with the very nature of translation as an inevitable problem, in any society, which involves power mechanisms. This has become exactly the area of research where Clem Robyns (Robyns, forthcoming), but also Andreas Poltermann, Lawrence Venuti and Canadian scholars such as Annie Brisset, Sherry Simon and others are looking for discursive strategies and for pow
er relations in explicit and implicit discourse on translation. Since 1990 power in transla
tion has developed as one of the keys issues for research.
(3) It is since about 1980 that I deal myself with the very delicate matter of (economic?) im
portation/ exportation in literature and in translation. The key problem is in fact whether import, export and the like are indeed “just metaphors”, whether they have necessarily an economical and strictly economical “essence”. See the second part of this discussion.
(4) See my suggestions for a new “cartography” of linguistic, literary, translational and cultur
al phenomena which I have developed in several articles since Lambert 1989c. They argue against a static world view where scholars accept without any critical distance that tradi
tions would coincide only and necessarily with political (“national”) and/or linguistic bor
derlines. This implies that they support the normative organization of would-be totalitarian and coherent societies.
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