In defence of Modern Languages

Languages

Our purpose is to trace and explain theoretical and practical developments in foreign/world language teaching over the last decade or more. Language teaching in its modern form, from the Reform Movement of the late 19th century, has focused upon the need for learners to learn or acquire a foreign language in order to use it for communication. Other purposes involve language learning as an intellectual exercise, the development of a language faculty, and opening (young) people’s eyes to new worlds by introducing them to other countries. Here, we argue that these purposes are reasonable and enriching, but only if they are combined. We suggest that, by taking a humanistic perspective, language teaching can go beyond communication as a dominant purpose. This humanistic perspective is realised through two complementary developments. One is to emphasise that learners are members of various communities, including their local community, their national community, and a world community. The s...

The Handbook of Language Contact, 2010

Language & Communication, 2009

The producers of global news-wire agencies such as Reuters and Agence France-Press (AFP) and television services of the same kind (CNN, Al Jazeera, etc.)-send out a continuous stream of information all day long, creating in all of us the unthinking impression that whatever happens in the world, wherever it happens, will be available as information everywhere else within a short space of time. But as we all know, news events happen in hundreds of different languages, and news of them is distributed to end users by way of newspapers, television, radio and the web in almost as many different tongues. How does the process of language transfer really happen? I cannot be the only person to have imagined that a huge army of translators is at work behind the scenes to ensure that the news is brought galloping in comprehensible form through the global ether from Ghent to Aix. What I learned from the recent book by Bielsa and Bassnett is that things are not so simple, and that the problems of language transfer in the vast news industry of the modern world are resolved in what seem to be counter-intuitive ways. How is a bellicose speech uttered in Farsi made available in Spanish, French, English, Arabic, Dutch, Hindi or Russian less than an hour later, and printed in the morning papers in a great number of other languages by the next dawn? Most of us assume that it is the same speech, and that foreigners reacting to it are reacting to the same thing we have read. Who translates what from what, under what constraints, in what kind of circumstance? The answer is that nobody does. Global news agencies do not employ translators, except in very specific circumstances, such as the visit of a star international reporter. AFP, AP and Reuters have no people working in or around their bureaux and desks who are called, or who would call themselves, translators. The great virtue of the study of Translation in Global News is to lay bare this extraordinary situation, and to explain how the language system of the global news economy works in practice. Much of the book is taken up with an account of the origins and institutional development of journalism and of the agencies that provide newspapers with their raw material. The authors' original purpose was to analyse the process of translation in this multilingual industry, but what they show is something else. Nothing as simple as a ''translation process" can be pinned down, let alone analysed, in the global flow of information. Translating is just one of the many things that an agency journalist does, and that he or she does not and cannot formally distinguish from his or her other language-related tasks, such as summarizing, rewriting, recontextualizing, adapting and so forth. From the point of view of the desk editor, the indistinctness of translation from the rest of the job is perfectly rational and practically comprehensible. The main contribution to the study of language and communication made by this largely descriptive book is the material evidence it provides for the indistinctness of translation from all other kinds of language use. News agency practice as described in Bielsa and Bassnett provides a real-world instantiation of what Jef Verschueren seeks to show more generally in his contribution to the collection edited by Jeremy Munday. ''The Interventionist Role of (Re)contextualization in Translation" is the rather weighty title of a piece that argues from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics that translation is not in principle any different from other operations involved in everyday communication. ''Everyone is somehow involved in translation when using

Language in Society, 1988

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines contemporary interactional studies of the cultural specifity of human language, conducted mostly in modern, multiethnic, industrialized societies (e.g., Clyne 1979; Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Valdés & Pino 1981). What is often presented as the “linguistic evidence” for miscommunication in such contexts is in fact, we argue, the locus of the violations of the cooperative principles of discourse and human interaction, such as the Principle of Charity (Davidson 1974) and the Principle of Humanity (Grandy 1973). The conclusions these studies arrive at are vitiated by the fact, for which considerable empirical evidence exists, that the native speaker's repairability threshold depends crucially on nonlinguistic variables (Hackman 1977). Only a cross-cultural analysis of how or whether these misconstruals entail analogous consequences, regardless of who is being misunderstood by whom, can, we argue, produce the sort of evidence these studies claim to...

2017

corner, this could just be the time, Leech suggests, to reopen the debate on the relations between language and political institutions. Michael Tieber opens the section on interpreting with a report on a survey of attitudes regarding language preference amongst conference speakers at the European Union. He begins looking at lingua francas and then at the rise of English as the lingua franca. The elephant in the room is again scrutinized, but this time from the point of view of the conference interpreter. It seems clear from the literature that increased use of ELF is already leading to a reduced need for interpreters. A second problem is that for the interpreter (and for any listener), English as a lingua franca (ELF) is usually more difficult to decipher than the use of a speaker's first language. What Tieber focusses on next is attitudes. He investigates, using a corpus of young conference speakers at the EU, why non-English speakers might prefer to use ELF rather than taking advantage of trained interpreters. Reasons given ranged from 'taking control', 'impressing others', 'saving time', and also familiarity of the subject in English. Interestingly, however, they did mention that having interpreters benefitted the community by levelling the language playing field rather than boosting individual egos. Paola Gentile and Michaela Albl-Mikasa follow on, analysing the conference interpreter's perception and reaction to the feeling that 'Everybody Speaks English Nowadays'. Respondents noted that this trend, along with machine translation and perceived increase in multilingualism, was damaging the interpreters' profession in terms of remuneration, work and status. At the same time, they noted that the increased use of low level ELF was significantly reducing effective communication. This is compounded by the fast past technological improvement and increased use of the machine whether it be for translation or for distance interpreting. The result is an increasing commodification of the profession. So, for reasons of economy, English is becoming the language hub around which other languages are routed. Respondents also noticed increased ignorant or non-appreciative client attitudes, an issue touched on also by Liu in the conversation. Another aspect (also mentioned by Liu) is that the profession itself is expanding, though as Gentile and Albl-Mikasa point out, it is away from the traditional conference mode, to that of community interpreting-and is itself heavily reliant on ELF. The next paper, by Lorena Carbonara and Annarita Taronna, takes us to ELF itself. The authors report on a survey of teaching practice (of Italian) in a refugee camp. They begin with a discussion of how 'superdiversity' well defines the multi-dimensional fluidity of the migrant experience. Here, numerous linguistic and cultural communities use ELF as a bridge between student and teacher to learn Italian as a Foreign Language. The discussion continues with an explanation of how ELF differs from EFL (English as a Foreign Language). Their survey of teachers of Italian and of refugee students investigated the 'translingual practices' that took place in the classroom within the larger Henry: Despite increasing intervention through visibility, collaboration and dialogue, the working conditions and remuneration of professional translators, interpreters and terminologists has not reached the level which reflects the important role we play. Translation and interpreting schools remain underfunded, and language departments continue to be closed or downsized. And importantly and most regrettably, the language and communications need of the wider society and international community, especially that of refugees, migrants and smaller NGOs and SMEs remain unmet. In fact, at the FIT Congress in 2014, we resolved to call upon national governments and the international community to protect local translators and interpreters in conflict zones, ensure a life in safety and security during and after their work in conflict zones, respect the impartiality of their work and work for a UN Convention for the protection of translators, interpreters in conflict zones during and after their service. We have had very limited success. My country, New Zealand and Norway remain the only two who have provided refuge to conflict-zone interpreters engaged in Afghanistan and their family. In January, the coalition led by Red T (a US non-profit organisation), AIIC and FIT since 2010 and now joined by a number of other organisations including WASLI had a rare and qualified victory which reversed the visa ban on former conflict zone interpreters imposed by US President Donald Trump. On May 25, 2017, during the UN Security Council debate on protecting civilians in conflict zones, Permanent Representative of Belarus to the United Nations, Ambassador H.E. Alexei Dapkiunas made the historical appeal on our behalf to the international community to protect translators, interpreters and linguists working in high risk settings working for military forces and peacekeeping missions. In doing so, they place their lives at risk and many of them are threatened, persecuted, prosecuted, incarcerated, kidnapped, and killed. However, an International Convention to protect conflict zone translators and interpreters remain elusive today. David: Clearly translators and interpreters working in these areas are under intense pressures. But perhaps there is a note of optimism, in that academics, CULTUS __________________________________________________ 14 Mona Baker being a notable actor here (e.g. 2006), have expanded their horizons and are now concerning themselves with, literally Translation and Conflict (the title of her 2006 book). But this is not the only challenges that face FIT is it? Henry: FIT has been operating thanks to the good will of leading practitioners and academics from around the world. Monetary resources are limited. The funding model is predominantly based on subscriptions. There is always a tension between the contributions and concrete benefits one expects to receive. I often draw the parallel between that of EU and FIT, in that the distance between individual translators and that of FIT is similar to that of an individual European citizen and the EU. A lot of the important and resource intensive work are too distant from the daily grind of individual translators, interpreters and terminologists. Even though most of the aforementioned failures and successes are beyond the reach and capacity of national and even regional professional associations of translators, interpreters and terminologists, our profession is not immune from self-interest, nationalism, fear of globalisation and xenophobia. The tension between belonging to a bigger organization-with increased credibility, security, impact, influence and strength that comes with numbersversus the financial contributions, the loss of autonomy and self-determination are much more palpable in the last few years. Perhaps, translation and interpreting not only encompass all aspects of human endeavours and are intrinsic to human conditions in this globalised world, but our profession or at the wider Federation level is also a microcosm of our times. David: You mention our profession, and some of the problems. But there is an elephant in the room which we need to talk about. The future. So, let me paint a scenario, which I dearly hope you can get me out of. It begins like this: the translation profession is very much bound by conduit or instrumental understandings of communication. FIT, for this year's Translation Day does say that translators are involved in "challenging intellectual tasks that involve much more than mechanically matching up the words and phrases of two languages", and that "Only skilled human translators are able to perform these creative types of translation". That said, there still a huge constraint on being creative or interpretative; and making explicit what is tacit in the context is still a "no no" according to the FIT charter (the AUSIT charter is even more rigid on intervention). And many, such as the linguist David Crystal (Crystal and Jiang 2013) agree. Indeed, he says: "I don't expect my translator to be a mind-reader" (41). At the same time, research (and practice) is constantly underlining the 'zone of uncertainty', where the translator (though more often the interpreter) knows that communication could be improved through intervening on the text (adding, altering …). But professional guidelines-and the market itself sees this as unethical or simply not their job. If we combine this text-centred limitation on the translating professions along References Albl-Mikasa, M. 2015. "ELF restricted power or expression". In Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Séverine Hubscher-Davidson and Ulf Norberg (eds) Describing Cognitive Processes in Translation: Acts and events. Benjamins: Amsterdam, pp. 43-62.