Response

Debates around translation and migration are continually beset by a preoccupation with difference. The notion of difference is stock-in-trade of any treatment of intercultural communication and is a powerful vector for one of the world's major economic activities, tourism. However, a difficulty arises when the so-called typical differences (Japanese “formality”, American “informality”, Caribbean “joie de vivre”) become a barrier rather than an aid to understanding as they harden into the exportable cliché of mass tourism or the semiotic shorthand of commercial soap operas. The culturalization of difference becomes even more problematic when it informs the differentialist racism that is an integral part of the seemingly inexorable rise of European populism with its concomitant hostility to migration. This differentialist racism – we respect your difference so that is why you should be sent back to where you come from, where your culture is appreciated – receives a powerful boost from the panoptic gaze of the anti-migratory blogosphere. More particularly focused on the Muslim population, these “anti-jihadi” websites concoct a totalizing theory of domination from an instrumentalized bricolage of hyperlinked texts. As Gavan Titley has noted, “Understood not only as a religion but as a totalitarian political and cultural system, any net-located evidence of Islamic backwardness – across space and anywhere in time – is accreted as further evidence of the global progress of this totalizing drive” (Titley 2013). If the use of difference makes a difference, and often a tragic one, what other operational concepts do we have to think about what happens when people, languages and cultures move from one point to another?

The sinologist and philosopher François Jullien has argued more recently that the notion of écart or “gap” is more productive and less toxic in accounting for cultural diversity and more especially in capturing the labile quality of self and intercommunal identity construction:

Between cultures, I would not trust these supposedly characteristic differences, labeled as such and presented as standard (the most obvious traits are often the least interesting): as they become ossified, they become an obstacle to thought. But, I said it before, I make the gaps work – the notion is exploratory not classificatory. Opening up a gap is to break with conformism, to bring tension back into thinking, in short, to set our reason back to work. (Jullien 2010, 15, translation mine)1

The notion of “gaps” here is as much within as between cultures. In other words, cultures are not uniform blocs reified under the sign of difference which are assimilated by translators and then bridged by their irreproachable sense of tact. They are dynamic entities, constantly in a state of flux. For this reason, the notion of “identity” becomes highly problematic as the question is: what kind of identity are we talking about, given that any given culture or language is a product of endless mixing and cross-fertilization and that new ways of working, generational change, new forms of technology, subject the language and culture to continuous transformation? In this context, Jullien argues not for the promotion of “identity” which, in many cases, is, to a greater or lesser extent, fictive but for the idea of “fecundity” (fécondité) (ibid., 12). Fecundity carries within it a dynamic sense of plurality that foregrounds the resources (ressources) of a culture. The notion of “resources” here is not to be confused with that of “values”: “values are the vectors of an affirmation of self. They are bound up, whatever one might claim to the contrary, in a relationship of power, whereas resources are indefinitely exportable (exploitable) and available to everyone” (ibid., 15).2 Confucianism, for example, offers the thinker the resources of subtlety of expression, sense of balance, the importance of a notion of “regulation”, the avoidance of overly dogmatic thinking; but as a value system, Jullien argues, it can be less attractive in promoting social conformism, a servile attitude towards those in power and so on (ibid., 16). In this context, it can be more useful to think of translation as it relates to migration not so much in terms of identity/difference debates and more as an activity that reveals “gaps”, distances that need to be crossed, and a provider of “resources” which are made available to world languages and cultures through the translational circuits of intelligibility. In other words, for translation scholars to challenge the reifying and exclusionary consequences of differentialist thinking in migration it is necessary to reflect hard on the very categories we use to describe what it is we do.

As Yasemin Yildiz correctly points out in her contribution to the Forum, conflating or, in certain instances, confusing translation and multilingualism is not particularly helpful. In invoking the trope of the translation there is not only the danger that you mislabel what it is that people are actually doing, but that you make them forever hostages to a point of origin, another variation on the differentialist thesis. The return to the multilingual is not, however, without its difficulties. Firstly, the multilingual can often be held up as a way of subverting or undermining nativist, monolingual readings of cultures and languages. It can equally, however, be subsumed into a “diversity” narrative where linguistic differences are diachronically or synchronically juxtaposed in the way of commodified smorgasboard multiculturalism (“the rich variety of ethnic eateries in our neighbourhood”). Translation as an activity that is transversal and processual disrupts this narrative of the exotic multiple and brings us back again and again to the detailed labour involved in the interstices between and within the units making up the multiple. Secondly, translation is inherently a transformative process or a prodigal act; it is as unsettling for points of arrival as points of departures. Individuals and communities, like texts and cultures, are strikingly affected by the translated movements of peoples as is amply demonstrated by the history of American popular cinema. So when translation is invoked to capture part of the dynamic of migration it is to problematize not reify difference, to challenge through the logic of oscillation any notion of stable departures and arrivals. Accents, for example, are as much about the mixity of the host population who are always already translated (no one is accentless) as they are about some putatively essentialist myth of origin. Thirdly, the interaction between translation and multilingualism can often lead to a fatal simplification of one of the terms of the debate. In the conventional modern languages paradigm translation was often presented as a kind of linguistic primitivism. The stumbling learners thrashed about in the lowlands of leaden equivalence before they left the barren fields of translation for the dizzying highlands of linguistic autonomy. Translation was an early staging post in ineptitude which explained, in part, the hostility or condescension practised by modern language departments towards translation as an activity. Understanding the importance of multilingualism, or more helpfully polylingualism, in debates around migration and translation requires a move away from reductive binaries to a more nuanced understanding of the contribution of translation to higher levels of language acquisition in migratory situations and also to a proper appreciation of the consequences of time-space convergence and cyber transnationalism for the experience of migratory subjects in translation.

The banner headline on the Daily Express on 31 January 2013 expressed the familiar fear that anything beyond the monolingual pale was tantamount to bad manners and worse: “MIGRANTS SHUN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE”. Commenting on a report published by the UK Office for National Statistics, the paper ran the cautionary subhead, “4 million people here hardly speak it”. The author of the article, Sarah O'Grady, quotes Robert Oxley of the TaxPayers Alliance who fulminates against the subversive Entryism of translation:

Those who want to live in Britain should make an effort to learn to speak English, otherwise taxpayers will end up picking up larger bills for things to be translated. Translation costs are already far too high. These should be there to help visitors and tourists who need one-off help, not for residents making use of public services.

Positing the notion of plurilingualism as an opportunity rather than further evidence of the putative failure of European multiculturalism is to argue for a different paradigmatic representation of translation and language. The fundamental move is to see translation as an analogue, both/and praxis which allows for both the instrumental utility of target language translation and the pragmatic and cultural necessity of mother-tongue maintenance. In other words, translation can obviously be used to allow for the circulation of meaning between a dominant host community and different minority language groups (translation into target language) but it can also be used as a means of legitimizing language alterity and social accommodation (provision of translating and interpreting services in minority or community languages). To take the example above, it is fallacious to contend that “integration” is all about either English or nothing else. As the evidence of countless countries throughout the world attests, it is perfectly possible for human beings to operate in more than one language at any number of different levels (Edwards 2012). In this respect, to pay due attention to the practice of translation and the encouragement of language diversity in societies is to do nothing that is particularly exceptional in global terms, but rather something that is deeply enriching in local contexts. What is more, extensive research has shown that the surest way to enhance second-language acquisition is to pay careful attention to mother-tongue maintenance (Baker 2000; Cummins 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000).

Reconfiguring the presence of plurilingualism in migrant societies means arriving at a different basic understanding of the relationship between language and society. Implicit in the analogue concept of translation is polyglossia rather than monoglossia. If multilingualism suggests a serial image of discrete units, polylingualism implies a more open, networked form of language relationships. Translators are, by definition, polylinguals, but in the repeated representations of cities as sites of serial monolingualism the role of polylinguals is minimized or forgotten. The reformulation of public space in urban centres as primarily a translation zone has the potential to promote a model of social cohesion which promotes the triadic creativity of gap, fecundity and resource as opposed to the zero-sum sterility of the World as a TaxPayers Alliance.

Note on contributor

Michael Cronin is professor of translation studies at Dublin City University. His most recent publications are The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of Microspection (2012) and Translation in the Digital Age (2013). He is editor of the New Perspectives in Translation Series for Routledge.

Notes

1. The original reads: “Entre cultures, je ne me fierai pas à ces différences prétendument caractéristiques, étiquetées comme telles et formant standard (les traits les plus voyants sont souvent les moins intéressants): en se figeant, elles font barrière à l'intelligence. Mais, je l'ai dit, je fais travailler des écarts – la notion n'est pas de rangement mais exploratoire: ouvrir un écart, c'est pratiquer une brèche dans le conformisme, réintroduire de la tension dans la pensée, bref, remettre notre raison en chantier.”

2. The original reads: “les valeurs sont les vecteurs d'une affirmation de soi, elles s'inscrivent, quoi qu'on prétende, dans un rapport de forces; tandis que les ressources sont indéfiniment exportables (exploitables) et sont disponibles à tous.”