Translation and Reception: 21st-Century French Fiction in the UK

Translation and Reception: 21st-Century French Fiction in the UK

Friday April 12th 2013

at the French Institute, South Kensington.

Organised by the Society for French Studies and the French Studies Library Group,

with the collaboration of the Institut français.

This event will bring together some of the most important agents in the production and reception of contemporary French fiction, in France and (primarily) in the UK:  reviewers and critics, literary agents, editors, translators, academics and librarians, to promote a better understanding of the processes of selection, translation and mediation, and of why this matters.

Speakers include writer, critic and ex-Le Monde journalist Patrick Kéchichian; the publisher Claire Paulhan; Hélène Fiamma of the Bureau du Livre; Kerry Glencorse of Susanna Lea Associates; translators Peter Bush, Ros Schwartz and Siân Reynolds; Stéphanie Lenne and  Melissa-Laure Mayer of the Institut’s library and Culturethèque; Geoffrey Mulligan (editor with Harvill); David Platten (researcher and writer on French crime fiction); Marcella Frisani of the CESSP-EHESS in Paris. The ‘case-study’ session will focus on the work of crime novelist Fred Vargas.

Advance booking is essential.

See here for the full programme and booking details.

 

Translating legal cultures

News last week of the Justice Select Committee’s report, ‘Interpreting and translation services and the Applied Language Solutions contract’, underlined the importance of high standards of translating and interpreting to the maintenance of any equitable judicial system. An article in last week’s Guardian reported that the outsourcing a year ago has been ‘nothing short of shambolic’, with the result that trials have been caused to collapse and suspects have been unnecessarily remanded in custody; at the same time, evidence of regular mistranslation by unqualified interpreters clearly compromises the credibility of the legal process. According to the report, central to the reported chaos has been the failure of the Ministry of Justice to understand the complex nature of court interpreting work. Outsourcing also led to a reduction in remuneration, meaning that many qualified professional interpreters with experience of legal translation have boycotted the new arrangements, with the result that an inadequate volume and quality of interpreting services have been available to courts and tribunals. The report is a substantial one, and the evidence included provides a fascinating insight into the intricacies of court interpreting work as well as into the practicalities of being a professional translator. I was particularly struck by the evidence of one professional translator, who underlined the extent to which court and legal interpreters require specific skills that are not required in interpreting in other fields: ‘We need to understand how long it takes to learn a foreign language to a certain standard, in order to be able to interpret from and into it within a specific sector. First of all it takes decades to learn the language itself and later you need to obtain a specific set of skills that are required in order to interpret. You need to be able to translate legal terminology within seconds during a court session and sometimes it is very difficult even for the best interpreters out there. You need to take into account that it is a job that requires due diligence, great listening and verbal skills, ability to transfer a vast amount of information that is encrypted in a different language within a short time frame.’

The ‘Translating Cultures’ theme is of direct relevance to explorations of the importance of language and interpreting in the legal sphere. Of particular interest is the project in this area at the University of Glasgow on ‘Translation and Asylum Claims: Matters of law, language and silence’, full details of which are available here.

National heritage: mobility and exchange

I spent a very enjoyable and informative day last Friday in Cambridge at the inaugural workshop, co-ordinated by Abigail Brundin, of the ‘Translating Cultures’ network on ‘National Trust libraries: an untapped resource. A pilot study of Italian holdings at Belton House, Lincolnshire’. Around 150 of the properties for which the National Trust has responsibility in the United Kingdom contain collections of books, a number of which have been in situ in the house libraries for several centuries or more. Some of these collections are of great national significance, and it is clear that their contents represent an invaluable resource for those interested in the history of private book collecting and ownership in the United Kingdom. Although little research has been conducted on the majority of these libraries, the project of cataloguing them, under the inspirational leadership of the Trust’s Libraries Curator Mark Purcell, is now underway, and the results are being made available to readers and researchers via Copac. The network project is centred around a pilot study, focusing on the collection at Belton House in Lincolnshire, where the Trust has its second largest library (with over 11,000 titles). This collection – the largest to be catalogued in its entirety by the Trust to date – is extremely varied, but contains significant numbers of early continental books acquired by members of the Brownlow family during the Grand Tour. It is this material that will form the basis of an exhibition, ‘The Brownlows: Books and Continental Travel’, running from March to November. The workshop was devoted to questions of mobility and exchange in Great House collections, and it opened with a fascinating session on the migration of books and ideas, including a paper by Guyda Armstrong on questions of translation revealed in the Chatsworth Boccaccio, and presentations by John Gallagher and Dunstan Roberts on the place of language learning, book buying and reading in the culture of the Grand Tour. What emerged was a complex picture of printed books as objects in motion that travel in their own right, physically in their owner’s baggage or through translation – and in the process permitting language learning, acting as mementos of the journey, representing the traveller’s acquired knowledge, and ultimately serving as a reminder that ‘national’ heritage is itself the product of processes of intercultural mobility and translingual exchange. A concluding panel on private libraries as cultural history provided an opportunity to address questions of collaboration between academics and those in other sectors. It highlighted the very real challenges of working together in this way, but also underlined the genuine benefits of seeking innovative ways to ‘translate’ the outcomes of research in non-academic venues and to non-specialist audiences. An excellent illustration of the potential of ‘translating cultures’ to allow us to think, research and communicate in new ways. The exhibition at Belton House opens on 2 March 2013.

Languages in the news: from multilingualism to monolingualism

Languages have been firmly in the news this week as analysis of the results of the 2012 census—the first to ask detailed questions about language use—have  revealed growing linguistic diversity in the UK, whilst UCAS figures for university applications have recorded yet another drop in the numbers of applicants to specialist language courses in universities.

Census data released by the Office of National Statistics shows that, after English and Welsh, Polish is now the main language spoken in England and Wales, with more than half a million speakers among the UK’s 56.1 million residents. The next main languages with large numbers of speakers reflect patterns of migration from south Asia, and include Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati. And Arabic, French, Chinese and Portuguese also continue to have important communities of speakers. The data suggests that over 100 different languages are spoken in the UK, with 49 of these having more than 15,000 users. What emerges from the figures is a sense of the UK as a linguistic patchwork, with—often for evident historical reasons—clear concentrations of speakers in certain locations: Ealing for Polish, Leicester for Gujarati, Kensington for French, and Manchester for both Cantonese and Mandarin. One million households have no members for whom English is a main language, although most of these remain to a greater or lesser degree bilingual since only 138,000 people were recorded as not being able to speak English at all.

The statistics reflect social and cultural transformations evident in much recent research, such as further diversification of the linguistic landscape of our towns and cities, the existence of a increasing number of young people in our schools who are bilingual, the need for multilingualism to be acknowledged in social policy and supported through innovation in translation practice. The fear that globalization and people’s ever-increasing mobility would lead to a monoculture characterized by growing levels of monolingualism appears to remain a distant one, although it is important to stress that the proportion of the population living ‘in translation’ remains a minority: English remains the main language for 92 per cent of the 50 million residents aged three or older, and the appetite amongst the wider population for acquiring higher level language skills appears to be decreasing. The UCAS figures reveal yet another in-year decline in applications for language degrees: -6.1% for European languages (compared to -11.2% in 2012); and -6.7% for Non-European Languages (compared to -21.5% in 2012). It will be argued that the statistics disguise an increase in the number of Higher Education students taking non-specialist language tuition, but there is a persistent need for us to acknowledge the risks inherent in a continued national decline in the number of specialists with high level language skills and the other attributes that accompany these – i.e., linguistic sensitivity complemented by the well developed intercultural competence  that comes from a formal period spent abroad. The role of higher tuition fees is evidently putting university applicants off four-year undergraduate language degree courses, although the actual cost of the third year abroad is greatly attenuated by a reduced fee, by the potential to earn an income as a language assistant or intern, and by the availability of Erasmus grants. Moreover, employers are emphasising more than ever the very clear advantages enjoyed by linguists in what is an increasingly competitive graduate job market. If we witness a further drop in applications in twelve months’ time, what is currently an already alarming situation will no doubt escalate into a crisis. It seems essential that those of us teaching modern languages in Higher Education must continue to work with our allies in other sectors—commercial, cultural, diplomatic…—to make the case for languages and to highlight the risks of widening monolingualism in what is a stubbornly and increasingly multilingual world.

The ocean as ‘translation zone’…

At the end of last week, I co-organized with Bill Marshall, at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in the University of London, a conference on ‘Oceans: Concepts and Cultures’. Bill and I have both been struck by the ways in which, over the past two decades at least, spatial categories and insights from cartography and geography have contributed to transdisciplinary debates in the Humanities regarding oceanic spaces. Atlantic Studies have, most notably perhaps, flourished across many disciplines and language areas, radiating outwards from their origins in historical studies. Conceptualisations of the Indian Ocean are currently generating increasing scholarly attention also, while, to the European and North American academy at least, the particular challenges of the Pacific are increasingly recognized. Despite their strategic importance and increasing visibility in debates about environmental change, serious interest among Humanities scholars in the Arctic and Southern Oceans is only now beginning to emerge.

The aim of the event was to focus on the historical, conceptual, cultural and textual bases and ramifications of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as comparisons between them. Our aim was additionally to ensure engagement with the inherently multilingual dimensions of the oceanic. With keynote lectures by Felipe Fernández-Armesto on an oceanic history of the world and Nick Thomas on oceanic perspectives on Pacific cultures and histories, the conference provided a fascinating indication of the increasing interest of Humanities scholars in ocean spaces — and the enabling conversations that can emerge when we work cross-linguistically and transoceanically, moving beyond the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans in order to reflect on the possible comparisons and actual connections between these spaces. The emphasis was on the ocean as a site of mobility, contact and transformation, and as a location — detached from the logic of continental land masses — where alternative understandings of culture, history and sovereignty can be imagined and at times even realised. The ocean has often, in these terms, been understood as what Mary Louise Pratt dubbed a ‘contact zone’, that is, ‘an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’.[1] This interpretation is valid, and clearly captures some of the processes that occur in the fluidity of oceanic spaces. However, it is equally enabling to consider the ocean as what Emily Apter has called a ‘translation zone’, by which she means ‘sites that are “in-translation”, that is to say, belonging to no single, discrete language or single medium of communication’.[2] Such an approach engages with recent initiatives that have refreshingly (and, in some ways, counterintuitively, given the increasing association of translating with the virtual) explored the spatial dimensions of translation. It inevitably foregrounds the linguistic aspects of oceanic histories, underlining the extent to which languages as well as means of transport have served as key vehicles in processes of exchange. Creolisation is one particularly complex process on which this linguistic transformation depends, as Heloise Finch-Boyer exploredat the conference in a paper on the policing of creole identity in the Indian Ocean, examining how white military officers, police, plantation owners and priests categorized Malagasy speakers as ‘African’ or francisé (‘creolized’) in the Mascarene Islands and how enslaved and free Malagasy speakers negotiated these categories; but the ocean crossings of languages leads also to other effects, not least – in the case of French in the Atlantic spaces explored by Bill Marshall in his paper – to the reinvigoration, or ‘Montrealization’, of a language detached from the national space with which it is customarily associated. I came away from the conference with a renewed sense of the ocean as a ‘translation zone’, a location in which – to borrow from Michael Cronin’s recent (and excellent) Translation in the Digital Age – ‘translation is better understood not as suspended in the air, but as caught up in the living currents of language and cultures’.[3]



[1] Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p.7

[2] Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p.6.

[3] Michael Cronin, Translation in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2012), p.75.

Blind travellers and tactile geographies

As part of an ongoing project on travel writing and the senses, I spent some time last week at the Musée Valentin Haüy and the associated bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy in Paris. I am continuing my previous work on travel writing as a form of intercultural translation, but am particularly interested in this work in the ways in which the genre textualizes the role, in the experience of travel, of senses other than sight. One of my starting points is to consider journey narratives by blind and partially sighted travellers, and the museum and library proved themselves to be an essential resource for scholars interested in the history of blindness and in how the condition has been represented in France and beyond. The ways in which the blind were perceived, and their struggle for access to culture, education and full citizenship, are recounted through the objects and works in the museum and library. A series of nineteenth-century travelogues by authors such as Edgard Guilbeau (who created the Valentin Haüy Museum in 1886) and Maurice de La Sizeranne (who went on to set up the Valentin Haüy Association in 1889) will allow me to explore the socio-historical contexts of narratives produced by blind travellers, and will also provide core materials to test a thesis regarding the ocularcentrism inherent in the various forms of thematic and discursive normativity of the form. These narratives provide rich descriptions of soundscapes and smellscapes in urban and rural environments. Equally striking, however, were a number of tactile exhibits in the museum – especially relief maps and globes (such as the 1830s example produced by W.A. Hochstetter shown here) – which reveal the place of geography in the education of the blind in nineteenth-century France (and elsewhere). Such tactile geographies allow, through familiarity with distant places, a form of vicarious travel that would appear to reflect an active policing of the mobility of the blind. This confinement is to be associated in part with the intention to break perceived links between blindness and vagrancy; it also reveals a contemporary – and many would argue enduring – refusal to accept the restricted motility, the reduced right to mobility, of blind and partially sighted people. It is in the context of objects such as these that travelogues by authors such as Guilbeau suggest a surprisingly modern commitment, in the field of travel, to the equal rights of disabled people.

Languages of the future…

Central to the translating cultures theme is an awareness that processes of translation occur within cultures and nations as well as across and between them, i.e. intraculturally as well as interculturally. Observations about the global spread of English, often used as justification for the decline of Modern Languages in the Anglophone world, tend to ignore the fact that English-speaking countries are themselves increasingly multilingual, reflecting in their linguistic practices and landscapes the movement of peoples and cultures that characterize contemporary globalization. Yann Matras’s research has recently revealed, through the work of the Multilingual Manchester project, that the population of the city speaks 153 different languages, and possible more, making it one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the world. As a recent article in The Guardian has outlined, these include most major European languages as well as a number of rarer ones, including Chitrali from northern Pakistan, Konkani from western India, Dagaare from Ghana, and Uyghur from Xinjiang in north-western China. The recently published UK census data reveals that the population of England and Wales born outside the UK has grown from 4.6 million in 2001 to 7.5 million in 2011, meaning that the presence of ‘audible minorities’ is becoming increasingly apparent — and, with the proposed introduction of linguistic criteria for certain public sector jobs, increasingly politicized.

These shifts in language use and the debates they trigger are equally evident in the U.S.A., as changing voting patterns among the Hispanic population in the 2012 presidential elections made clear. The role of language in the re-election of Obama has recently been explored by Kathleen Parker in an article in The Washington Post. Reflecting on her father’s advice that she should learn Spanish, Parker notes: ‘What was clear to my father even then is that our hemisphere could not long be segregated by language. Nor, apparently, can we be kept apart by borders, no matter how many fences we build or drones we deploy. […] Metaphorically, learning Spanish means learning people. Knowing them as human beings, not as statistics on a game board. Recognizing their humanity and finding new ways to talk about immigration that don’t alienate entire swaths of the population.’ Bringing language and translation to the centre of political debate and developing what Mary Louise Pratt once called a more sophisticated ‘public idea about language’ allow us to analyse and understand contemporary society in ways that permit full engagement with the hypercomplexity of the modern world.

Translating Cultures

The blog focuses on the field of translation studies, understood in its broadest senses, and reflecting in particular the ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies and the ‘translation turn’ in cultural studies. Content will be cross-disciplinary, but given my own disciplinary location, is likely to privilege matters relating to Modern Languages

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