MarySnell-Hornby,Vienna,
Austria
I wish to speak to you today about the tragedy of Europe. This noble conti
nent, comprising on the whole the fairest and the most cultivated regions of the earth, enjoying a temperate and equable climate, is the home of all the great parent races of the western world. It is the fountain of Christian faith and Christian ethics. It is the origin of most of the culture, arts, philosophy and science both of ancient and of modern times. If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the hap
piness, prosperity and glory which its three or four hundred million people would enjoy. Yet it is from Europe that have sprung that series of frightful nationalistic quarrels, originated by the teutonic nations which we have seen even in this twentieth century and in our own lifetime wreck the peace and mar the prospects of mankind.
Those words were spoken by Winston Churchill at the beginning of his memo
rable address to the ‘academic youth of the world’ held in the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946, almost exactly fifty years ago.1 Europe was then in ruins, and the speech is in essence a visionary description of Churchill’s dream of a ‘United States of Europe’, which he then saw as the remedy of the ills of the time. From the viewpoint of today - 1996 - there are several aspects of the speech that are remark
able, above all the fact that basically history did indeed take the turn that Churchill had hoped for, beginning with the reconciliation and renewed friendship between France and Germany and leading up to that community of nations now called the European Union. Remarkable too is the unmistakable Churchillian rhetoric, couched in a kind of prose which today strikes us as being powerful but singularly old-fash
ioned. And indeed, despite the immediacy of some aspects of Churchill’s message, the lines I have just read to you contain elements that may be disconcerting to the citizen of the outgoing twentieth century. One is its unashamed and even self-evident Eurocentricity. Europe is extolled, not only as the fountain of Christian ethics and the origin of culture and arts (ignoring other world religions and cultures of which we Europeans are so aware today), but even as ‘the home of all the great parent races of the western world’. In 1946 the British Empire - along with other forms of Euro
pean colonial rule - was not only still formally intact, but for a man like Churchill,
1 I am indebted to the University of Zürich for placing the unpublished manuscript at my dis
posal.
Plenary Lectures
one of the last great representatives of the old world order, it was even a source of pride and veneration.
Fifty years later we see things quite differently. After European powers had for centuries dominated most of the earth’s surface, nearly all colonies have now gained independence - which usually meant the transfer of power from the colonial over- lords to an indigenous elite - and new nations have emerged with an identity of their own, though the links to the past cannot be severed completely and the way to democ
racy has often been accompanied by traumatic social and political upheavals. Parallel to this, the political scene was rearranged in the post-war years with the division of Europe and the Cold War, leading to new alliances and new confrontations - and yet again to new hopes and new crises when these crumbled in 1989. Economically, the last fifty years have seen unparalleled growth, prosperity and technological progress - including the field of communication technologies - followed by crises, recessions, uncertain bouts of recovery, phases of disorientation, and the polarization of rich and poor nations. This is the global village in which we live today - it is a ‘post’-world:
post-war, post-colonial, post-communist, post-apartheid, post-industrial, post-mod
ern, post-structuralist and post-totalitarian. The world of today is essentially a hybrid world, where the former clear-cut and conflicting power structures and systems have given way to interacting, heterogeneous groups and often unpredictable forces in a constant state of flux.
Against this background of disorientation and insecurity, language remains a rel
atively stable factor. Indeed, the legacy of language is one of the most deep-seated elements of colonial rule left behind by what Churchill referred to as the European parent races. And this is the reason why European languages - French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch, but especially English - are spoken nearly all over the world.
Within this context I should like to differentiate between what I call a dominant lan
guage and a linguafranca. A dominant language is one forced on the subjugated peo
ple along with the foreign world-view and culture; a lingua franca is one more or less freely accepted or chosen as a system of communication for mutual understanding.
In the case of newly formed nations after independence from colonial rule, the for
mer dominant language is usually established either as a lingua franca or even as the official language. At the same time however the new communities see their indige
nous language as a means of expressing their individual cultural identity, an essential factor one cannot overlook as a natural reaction to any form of foreign domination.
The developments in Central and Eastern Europe during and after communist rule form an interesting parallel - but with a vital difference. In the countries of the for
mer Eastern bloc Russian was the prescribed dominant language; the violent reac
tion is now the rejection of Russian in general in most of the new democracies that emerged after 1989, and an insistence on developing the local language as an expres
sion of national identity, even to the extent of separating language varieties where only limited formal differences exist and where there is complete mutual understand
ing. (A sad example is the development of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian from Serbo-Croatian as a result, not of organic development, but of ethnic animosities).
The vital difference in this Eastern European scenario - as this conference confirms - is that the freely accepted lingua franca is not the former dominant language, but English.
So beside the psychological need for national or cultural identity as expressed
Mary Snell-Hornby
through language, there is also the pragmatic necessity for international and supra- cultural communication in a world which is growing ever smaller. And here, as has just been implied, English has assumed a hitherto unparalleled role as international lingua franca and world language. This is of course partly due to its former role as dominant language of the British Empire, whereby standard British English has diver
sified into numerous regional and local varieties or ‘new Englishes’. It is also due to the world-wide domination of American technology and culture, and the adoption of English as the lingua franca of science and commerce; and it is furthermore due to the fact that English - that is, its basic grammar and core vocabulary (cf. Strevens 1992:39) - can be relatively easily acquired for everyday conversation as needed for superficial communication by speakers of other languages all over the world, whereby the latter factor is coupled with a structural flexibility in the language itself and a general policy of openness among the English-speaking cultural institutions (as against the purist policy, for example, of the Academic Francaise). All in all, English has long since left the ownership of the native speakers in England and has become, as Henry Widdowson has put it, ‘world property’ (Widdowson 1993:5).
Taking this differentiation between the dominant language of colonialism or dic
tatorship and the postcolonial lingua franca, I would like to introduce two further concepts taken from, or at least inspired by, recent discussions on linguistic and cul
tural developments. In October 1993 an interdisciplinary conference was held in Vienna on the topic ‘Language of dictatorship’, with immediate reference to the lin
guistic conventions familiar in countries of the former Eastern bloc. The conference Proceedings were published last year with the title Totalitáre Sprache - Languede bois -Language of Dictatorship (Wodak & Kirsch 1995). Langue de bois - ‘wooden lan
guage’, or real-life Newspeak. In this case the topics ranged from the political slogans of Soviet Russia to official reports on citizens’ personal conduct from the German Democratic Republic and even to conventions of propaganda poetry in Ceausescu’s Romania. The language of dictatorship in itself is not the topic of my lecture, but I would like take the image of the ‘wooden language’, symbolizing the artificial and rigid clichee as the tool for power of a dominant regime, as a starting point for my deliberations on what can happen when a lingua franca is developed, as in the case of English, that gradually loses track of its cultural identity - its idioms, its hidden connotations, its grammatical subtleties - and turns into a kind of bland and flat
tened ‘plastic language’ or ‘langue de plastique’ available for the common denomina
tor of international communication.
For translation purposes we should, I think, view the phenomenon of the English language in the world today from three different perspectives: firstly, the lingua franca
‘langue de plastique’, a reduced, standardized form made to serve the specific pur
pose of supra-cultural communication; secondly, the individual variety of English as an expression of cultural identity with its idioms, metaphors and culture-specific allusions (e.g. British English, as shown in any feature article from the DailyMail), and thirdly, the hybrid forms as shown for example in the novels of Salman Rushdie.
This classification should be viewed as a prototypology of tendencies today, and it shows, on the one hand, the inextricable links between language and culture. On the negative side, it also reflects the conflict between globalism and tribalism, described in 1992 by Benjamin Barber as the ‘two axial principles of our age’ (1992: 53). To ver
balize the concept of that world-wide mass culture or ‘cultura franca’ that dominates
Plenary Lectures
our technological ‘post’-world of today, Barber coined the term ‘MeWorld’. In another interdisciplinary conference held in Austria in 1992 - this time in Graz - to com
memorate the so-called discovery of America, this notion was taken up again. In her essay in the Proceedings called ‘Amerika im Gedáchtnis’, the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli mourns the destruction of the ancient Indian cultures by the Euro
pean conquistadors, and she reviews critically the semi-feudal system that has mean
while divided Latin America into a privileged elite minority on the one hand and an impoverished majority on the other, now dominated, not by Spain but by North American values and norms - Benjamin Barber’s ‘McWorld’. Belli sees the essence of the cultural identity of Latin America in its resistance to this system (Belli 1994:16).
Cultural identity here emerges in a positive sense as against Barber’s notion of the essentially destructive force of tribalism.
I hardly need explain the implications behind his concept ‘McWorld’: that once so culturally specific ex-pat prefix ‘Me’ has long since emigrated from its ancestral home in the Scottish glens to connote the world of technology and of bland fast food as symbolic of our international consumer society of today. This supra-cultural, tech
nologically oriented society is a major element of our global village, and it forms the background of the professional translator, a figure rather drastically portrayed by Patricia Violante-Cassetta in an essay entitled Jack in theYear2000. Jack is identified as ‘a translator in the United States’, but:
I share many traits and characteristics with colleagues all over the world.
Jacks such as myself may be staffers at international organizations, multina
tional corporations, government agencies, private concerns, or we may be self-employed. We wade through documents that are often highly technical (sometimes barely legible2) and translate them into other languages. One day it might be environmental regulations and the next day the specifications for a desalinator. (1996: 199)
‘Jack’ has a variety of tasks and varied working conditions, but it is clear firstly that he/she will not survive without technology: computers for producing texts, on-line services providing continuously updated glossaries of terms, e-mail, internet, MT systems and so forth. A second ‘universal’ of the translator’s condition today is stress, whether caused by time-pressure, defective texts, lack of access to essential back
ground material, or whatever. The third important point, only implied in Violante- Cassetta’s article, is that the modern translator’s work, even within this cultura franca ‘McWorld’, is itself of a hybrid nature: it is not only a linguistic activity, but involves, besides the necessary cultural knowledge, specific subject-area expertise often in non-academic domains. For translation studies specialists this is a truism, but, as even recent studies show, it is still a cause of misunderstanding. I would like to illustrate this by three examples.
Firstly let me read you a comment made during an interview in May 1996 by the marketing manager of an international electronics firm which employs translators3:
2 Violante-Cassetta may perhaps mean ‘barely readable’.
3 The interview, conducted by Eveline Sobotka for a research project, was in German. This is my English translation.
Mary Snell-Hornby
Basically the translations I receive are quite acceptable on the semantic and syntactic level - but I wonder whether there’s any point in producing text conversions of this kind, because they only serve as material for further pro
cessing by specialists in my company. Modern MT systems only require a single investment and produce the same result as human translators: in both cases post-editing is necessary to produce user-friendly instruction manuals.
Translators only bother about translating - they can’t be expected to familiar
ize themselves with everything else that goes on in my firm, they haven’t the time, there isn’t the money, and they are not trained for it. The other day I advised a translator to replace some rather complicated instructions by a drawing, because it’s easier to show how a machine works than to put it into words. He answered that he was a translator and not an engineering draughtsman.
The solution is that text-production of this kind requires both skills - graphic and linguistic - a fact pointed out back in 1984 by Justa Holz-Mánttári in discussing translation as an expert activity (‘translatorisches Handeln’), but unfortunately her book was firstly written, not in the world lingua franca English but in German, and secondly it was only available in academic circles, where it was treated as theoretical heresy.
My second example is taken from a recent issue of Language International (3196), where it is correctly pointed out that currently the fastest growing area for transla
tion services is not, as is often assumed, technical documentation, but media transla
tion (television, film, video). What interested me particularly was this comment:
The reason this rapid growth is often overlooked by the profession is that the practitioners are often not part of the translation mainstream. Indeed the word
‘translation’ is often d iscarded in favour of terms such as ‘language transfer’
or ‘versioning’. (1996:16)
The third example is taken from a recent issue of CurrentIssues in Language and Society, where in a lecture entitled ‘Translation and Advertising: Going Global’, the Canadian translation scholar Candace Séguinot again correctly points out that:
... the globalisation of the translation business sometimes means providing full marketing services in addition to translation and interpreting. (...) Transla
tors need to understand the basics of marketing; they need to know the legal jurisdictions of their market; they must know how cultural differences affect marketing; they must be aware of constraints placed by the form and func
tions of the source text, and they must be able to interpret the visual elements which are of key importance in advertising. (Séguinot 1994: 249)
During the ensuing debate Kirsten Malmkjaer - a linguist - questioned whether this was really ‘translation’ or ‘... deconstructing the message and then recreating it as something very different for a different culture’ (1994: 269).
What all three examples illustrate is firstly the increasingly complex job profile of the translator in the global village of the outgoing 20th century: language proficiency
Plenary Lectures
is of course a necessary prerequisite, but it must be coupled with other skills. Thus the technical translator may well require the skills of a draughtsman. In media trans
lation, technical knowhow (and cultural knowledge) will be essential both for subti
tling and dubbing, especially if the translator is to join the production team and do more than merely provide a rough version for subsequent processing. And in adver
tising work knowledge of both marketing and the legal systems involved should be taken for granted if the translator is to accept the responsibility for the text he/she produces. Secondly, all three examples illustrate yet again the need for reconsidering the meaning of the term ‘translation’, whether as ‘language transfer’ or ‘deconstruct
ing the message and recreating it’. Here too translation scholars have long since used such definitions: since the early 1980s the skopos theorists have even viewed trans
lation as a ‘cultural transfer’ (see Vermeer 1986), but yet again their work was writ
ten, not in the world lingua franca English but in German and again it was mainly debated within academe - practitioners usually dismissed it as being ‘too theoretical’
to bother about. Certainly academics need to consider the nitty-gritty and the needs of the practitioners in their deliberations, but conversely the work of the translator Jack McWorld might profit if he sometimes read some standard literature on transla
tion studies.
Like Basic English of the war years, International English as a purely instrumen
tal lingua franca is a reduced language which has lost its cultural roots and is not identical with a dominant language used as a tool for power, as was definitely the case both under dictatorial regimes and in the early colonial years. In her enlighten
ing study on language in the colonial context of India, Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) has shown how both language and translation were deliberately used to enforce and perpetuate unequal relations of power, prejudice and domination, particularly where Indian texts were translated into English. Her outstanding example is the work of Sir William Jones, who arrived in India in 1783 and sought to use translation, as Edward Said described it ‘to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning’ (Niranjana 1992:12). Niranjana maintains that Jones’s work, which has had a lasting impact on generations of scholars up to the present day, has helped construct a powerful but falsified image of a submissive and indolent nation of
‘Hindus’ taken over wholesale by later writers. She diagnoses the basic factors under
lying Jones’s approach as follows (1992:13): firstly, the professed need for translation by a European and not an Indian translator, because the natives were considered unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture; secondly, the desire as colonial
lying Jones’s approach as follows (1992:13): firstly, the professed need for translation by a European and not an Indian translator, because the natives were considered unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture; secondly, the desire as colonial