Response

Loredana Polezzi's position paper on “Translation and Migration” comes at an exciting time for translation studies, as it expands internationally, looking at more languages and cultural traditions for translation, including those of many immigrants’ home cultures, and as it turns inward intra-nationally, looking more at minority languages and immigrant groups within any given culture. Not only does Polezzi give a thorough overview of the problems created by increased movement and migration in this global world, but also the fears, anxieties and prejudices that arise in such situations. Translation has become an international civil rights issue, one of the leading issues of the times. She also introduces a theoretical framework with which to address the problems, locating her work within a paradigm of Bakhtinian scholars working on heteroglossia, but also connecting with ongoing work by Michael Cronin on translation, immigration and travel; Zygmunt Bauman on the figure of the interpreter as mediator and cross-cultural communicator; and Michel Foucault on alternative political positions with regard to the way translation functions at the institutional level. Given the limited space she has to work with in such a short article, the paper is remarkably insightful and far-reaching.

Beginning with Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) is particularly well suited for such a presentation. His argument that “one's own language is never a single language: in it there are always survivals of the past and a potential for other-languagedness” (66) disturbs the notion that translation always involves a carrying across some division between one culture and another and shifts the focus to translation occurring within any given culture. Indeed, as cultural studies scholars are showing, cultures overlap and intersect in a myriad of linguistic and semiotic ways. Languages are always growing and moving, and the impetus of much language change and innovation derives both from migrants and travelers crossing borders and importing new ideas and means of expression, but also from minority language groups living within cultures, often products of centuries-old migrations. The idea Bakhtin is raising is that monolingualism is a myth, and that multilingual and translational elements are always embedded within any single national language. English, to take just one example, contains an overwhelming presence of German and Latin in its roots and derivations, a strong presence of Celtic words and traditions, and lesser presences of Romance and Scandinavian languages. Further, bits and pieces of languages from nearly all the countries from the Commonwealth have arrived, greatly expanding the language. In this new global village, new terms arrive on a daily basis, from people traveling, Internet resources, scholars digging in archives, and, especially, immigrants. Add to English the immigrant languages spoken in the United States, Canada and Australia, as well as English enclaves within India and South Africa, and notions of monolingualism become increasingly diffuse. Indeed, if the Man Booker prize-winners are any indication, Commonwealth English, with writers from Nigeria, Canada, India, South Africa, Australia and Ireland winning in the past decade as often as UK writers, is becoming the new standard.

Polezzi's point, based on Bakhtin, is that other-languagedness inheres in every language, and she finds its roots in immigration and translation. By looking at those performing translations – the translators, the interpreters and immigrants themselves – Polezzi shifts the focus of the field from the abstract to the concrete. Cronin's work does much the same; those people in such multilingual landscapes need to know translation, or make use of translators, to successfully navigate the terrain. What makes Polezzi's paper so innovative is also a difficult idea to wrap one's head around. The translations she calls for enquiry into – the translations and self-translations – are not carried out center stage: the “texts” are not speeches made at the UN, official translations carried out in the EU's government circles, international business reports, texts taught in universities, published books, articles in journals – all those texts that comprise the corpora of traditional translation studies. Rather, Polezzi's “texts” are carried out out-of-sight, hidden from mainstream view, more often than not found on the streets, in social service agencies, in private homes, in factories and in refugee camps, and at times, in the detention centers of any given culture. Her texts are primarily oral, not written, broken not standard, whispered not declaimed, and, on many occasions, erased from public records. Many are internal, so no source text or utterance even exists. Others are embedded in otherwise “normal” national languages, accidentally interspersed, or, by a handful of artists, deliberately interjected for their very disruptive effect. Polezzi productively cites a group of scholars – Samia Mehrez, Paul Bandia and Maria Tymoczko – connecting postcolonial writing to translation for this very reason. She could also have mentioned creative writers such as Ludmila Ulitskaya, Daoud Hari or Leila Aboulela, who highlight translators and interpreters as characters in their fiction. Polezzi also looks at writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Abdelkebir Khatibi who have written about self-translation and techniques for resisting mental colonization. Indeed, in most countries in the West, such texts are not even called translations, and data are few because of their very hidden nature, either oral and ephemeral, or embedded within another genre. Polezzi's position paper calls for a radical redefinition of what is called a translation, what kinds of “texts” translation studies should study. In Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida (1998, 10) too argues that multilingualism inheres in all “monolingual” cultures, resulting in an ongoing process of translation; he refers to this kind of translation as a bit “mad”, and I do think there is a bit of schizophrenia underlying such utterances. Including such psychosocial forms of translation certainly is destabilizing for the field, and those hoping to restrict the field to translation “proper” will no doubt feel threatened.

When Polezzi makes her political turn toward the end of the essay, the ground is well set. I much like her turn to Foucault, and his focus shows how certain phenomena escape control. Despite the best attempts of entities such as the British Council, L'Académie française or the Real Academia Española, language has a nasty habit of slipping out of control. Writers invent, translators import, immigrants adjust and children come up with new expressions. Often those groups in border cultures and in marginal locations have cause to find the most creative ways to manipulate language, turning it to their own advantage. Indeed, their survival, and often the survival of their friends and family, depends upon it. Translation works in multiple directions. In the case of immigration, it is not always from the outside to the inside, of immigrants assimilating and conforming to the status quo. The immigrant's language changes the host country's language; and the host country's language changes the immigrant's language. This dialogue, Polezzi suggests, can be an enriching process, enhancing human understanding. The problem is that many groups, and here I think of the very strong English-only factions in the United States or of many German and Austrian anti-Muslim voices, resist new forms of communication and linguistic and cultural differences. This leads to national policies of non-translation, of sequestering immigrants, programs of deportation, and, for those who remain, discrimination and mistrust. Conservatives wish to preserve their language, their laws, policies, jobs and lifestyle, gating their communities. Polezzi suggests that translation calls witness to a whole range of practices that resist conservative thinking and challenge policy experts in a progressive way, as translators and interpreters are often the only people in the room who hear all sides. Translators and, I would argue, translation scholars possess a unique set of tools that also allows them to witness, record and analyze the large range of translation activity that is carried out behind the scenes – in smaller immigrant communities, blocks, cells, families, and even self-translations by isolated individuals – where likely 80–90% of all translational activity takes place.

If I have a criticism of Polezzi's essay, it might to question the pronouns she uses to discuss such relations. Readers cannot help but notice her use of “we” vs “they”; “we” often is an authorial “we”, but “they” is frequently used to refer to immigrants, as in “their voices” vs “our understanding”. When Bakhtin talks about one's own language never being a single language, he means all languages are polyvalent, multilingual and heteroglossic. In many ways “we” are all immigrants, which Polezzi, an Italian working in the United Kingdom, well knows. As Polezzi is reshaping translation studies, my guess is that her experiences both in terms of academia and with immigrants in Italy inform her research in England. This whole divide between host nations and stateless or paperless immigrants, on a certain human level, is a false dichotomy. At the end of his life, Derrida wrote frequently about immigration, focusing on the Latin term hostis, which can mean both “guest” and “enemy”, forming the root of both “host” and “hostile” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 157). He pointed out the impossibility of ever achieving pure hospitality: if one gives up one's place for the stranger, the other, the unknown, then the other takes over the host, reversing the poles; the host becoming the hostage, and vice versa. Thus all forms of hospitality are never absolute and need regulation by the tribe, community, state or church; thus laws of hospitality, justice and rights emerge. Hospitality may be granted, but it is always with restrictions, or the very law of hospitality is broken. Rules exist for maintaining the “house”, and those rules invariably, as Polezzi points out, involve language, i.e. speak the host's language before being welcomed, and translation, i.e. translate oneself into the home national language and culture and accept their rules. Thus “we” are all implicated.

Because of space limitations, Polezzi's position paper was unable to go into detail. Herein helps the response by Boris Buden, who offers Alexander Vaindorf's 2006 video installation “Detour: One Particular Sunday”, a film that depicts the lives of Russian and Ukrainian women who have migrated to Italy and end up working as domestic servants in Rome, as a corpus to accompany Polezzi's insights. The film is well chosen, for it shows the overlapping condition of migrants and hosts and hostilities which emerge. Migrants tend to arrive not as complete strangers, but together with other migrants who are moving as well, with whom they can join, many from the same language group. Thus there are multiple levels of translation and transformation, blurring boundaries of inside and outside, open and closed communities, past and present, and losses and gains. The film also illustrates a continuing journey, from outside to inside Italy, but also from south to north within Italy, with different dialects of Italian encountered, different economies and different labor relations, all demanding different levels of translation and cultural adaptation. The film underscores Polezzi's call for the field to move from traditional textual corpora to more concrete ones depicting the lives and struggles of real people, as they translate themselves into Italy, and translate Italy into themselves. The film also performs a form of witnessing, documenting the trials and prejudices experienced by the immigrant women and the forms of communication and consolation which evolve. It also shows why scholars studying translation and immigration often turn to autobiographies, memoirs and documentaries to access both the translations and depict the traumas experienced by immigrants.

As monolingualism is a fantasy, predicated upon multilingualism, so too is absolute hospitality a myth, always subject to perversion from within. In her response, Şebnem Bahadır productively suggests supplementing Polezzi's work with two additional concepts offered by Zygmunt Bauman: the “stranger” (the foreigner coming from abroad who transgresses boundaries) and the “pariah” (that migrant who is an impure hybrid, a linguistic and cultural misfit living within a culture). No matter how well the stranger or pariah adapts and assimilates, becoming a parvenu, traces of its “impure” nature always remain. And if, indeed, as I suggest, we are all immigrants, then traces of impurities, immigrant languages and cultures, always persevere. One cannot but help but think of Bakhtin's early work on Rabelais, where he talked about the carnival, the grotesque and, especially, the kind of language permitted in France at the time and deviant forms which were not. It also connects nicely to Polezzi's emerging concept of biopolitics of language, contact and contagion, and the policing of voices, often through translation policies (or lack thereof). Non-translation is a translation policy, one aimed at denying immigrants’ rights, especially in encounters with police and the justice system.

Leslie Adelson's response also calls for more research on the topic of translation and migration before larger humanist claims can be made, and the point is well taken. So far, few case studies exist, and she furthers the topic by offering the case of Turkish immigrants in Germany, and especially of adding additional factors such as gender and class to the analysis of the immigrant experience. Adelson cites her own study, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature, in which she looks at fiction writers such as Aras Ören, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Zafar Şenocak, focusing upon specific depictions of immigrant struggles, including complex structures that govern the immigrants’ imagination, discrimination and opportunity in the workplace, the role of memory and the past in multi-sided relationships of the present, and other forms of both representation and silencing. I agree whole-heartedly with Adelson's suggestion that Polezzi supplement her model with fictional texts and theater productions that depict concrete situations linking translation and migration. Immigration literature is also a form of witnessing and is often multi-generic, comprised of fiction and faction, memory and memoir, and biography and autobiography, all of which incestuously incorporate translations to different degrees. Often these “fictional” accounts reveal more about the inner workings of the mind during the process of a migrant's private self-translations than more factual accounts.

The further responses of Anette Svensson, Yasemin Yildiz, Tina Steiner and Rita Wilson support Polezzi's call to expand the boundaries of the field, drawing attention to examples of translation and migration in Australia, Germany, East Africa and Italy. Svensson's response broadens definitions of translation to include locational and temporal considerations, especially in that liminal space between departing and arriving, where translation is both necessary and impossible, an area much neglected by social and translation scholars. Yildiz sees translation and migration as illustrative of the “postmonolingual” condition and views the low status of immigration languages as a “pathological aberration”. Wilson introduces power, agency and creativity considerations, arguing that translation is a crucial component underlying many forms of creative writing, and, importantly, in the construction of fully formed autonomous individuals. Control of translation is seen as crucial to any form of emancipation, integration and success, particularly for women immigrant writers, by far the majority in Italy. Steiner also finds traditional definitions of translation too narrow to analyze the immigrants’ translational condition, in which the self is always defined in relation to others. Citing Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, she indirectly suggests a productive overlap between feminist theory and translation studies. Her example of the Asian-Muslim novelist and activist Sophia Mustafa in India/Tanzania illustrates multiple displacements in the migration process, thereby multiplying the translation/adaptation paths, and necessarily complicating any bilingual or bicultural comparative analysis. These complications, especially religious, class and gender considerations, all of which comprise part of the immigrant's translation process, break down false dichotomies and pair-bound descriptive methodologies long characteristic of the field.

In sum, Polezzi's position paper “Translation and Migration” informs many fields, including translation studies, cultural studies, social and political studies, transnational studies, gender studies and, as Adelson, Wilson and Steiner have shown, literary studies. It opens the field of translation studies to a set of new texts traditionally not included in the discipline to date, and suggests the field employ a new set of skills to analyze such texts, including multicultural awareness and social- and psychoanalytical insights. Translation is to be studied not just as a movement across borders, but also as a movement arising from within any given language or culture. In Polezzi's model, scholars are asked to look at both official and unofficial translations from and into official and unofficial languages. Boundaries between official and unofficial languages will necessarily be disturbed, as will distinctions between “original” writing and translations. With such expanded definitions of translation, my guess is that much “monolingual” original writing will be found to contain many translational elements, and translations will be found to contain much original writing. Translation, rather than a marginal discipline within social or literary studies, will be found to play an increasingly important role in helping to describe and inform future discussions around one of the most crippling problems in our time, that of immigration. According to the International Organization for Migration, over 200 million people, or 3.1% of the world's population, are migrants, and another 600 million are waiting, hoping soon to migrate to another country. Whatever solutions arise to deal with this phenomenon, with the continuing contributions of scholars such as Polezzi, Buden, Bahadır, Adelson, Svensson, Yildiz, Steiner and Wilson's continued contributions, translation promises to be at the table.

Note on contributor

Edwin Gentzler is a professor of comparative literature and director of the Translation Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory (2008) and Contemporary Translation Theories (1993), which has been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Arabic and Persian. He is the co-editor (with Maria Tymoczko) of Translation and Power (2002) and author of numerous articles in journals such as translation, TIS, Perspectives and Target. He serves on the executive committee of the Nida Institute and was co-editor (with Susan Bassnett) of the Topics in Translation Series for Multilingual Matters.