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0:00
I'm talking today not so much about the technicalities of translation. I'm interested in language policy and in the fact that you're interested in language policy. At Stellenbosch we are in the midst of a conversation, dialogue, debate, review of the university's language policy. I'm following that as an outsider. I understand that the question at the center of the review is whether or not Afrikaans is to be used as a vehicular language in lectures such as this one.
0:43
I'm not going to talk about that. I'm interested in it but I think as an outsider I should do other things and talk about other situations. You can translate for yourselves what I'm talking about. I cannot pretend to be neutral because I'm associated with an Afrikaans department and I am also associated with a particular kind of language solution known as translation. So beware: I'm not neutral. But the more important things that would locate what I want to say
1:26
has to do with personal experience. Years ago in 1979-80, I taught in the Basque Country in Spain, which is that bit at the left at the top. They used to have terrorist movements in favor of their independence. When I was there, nobody spoke Basque (Euskera). A few people did in the countryside; there was a symbolic column in the newspaper; but it was nowhere near a standardized language and nothing like an academic language. Now everybody speaks it: the kids in the street speak it.
2:10
There are Basque television channels with lots of children's television. In that period they have created a viable, vibrant, academic and social language. It can be done Similarly, in Catalonia where I now work, we speak Catalan. Spain has one official language over the entire territory, which is Spanish and in particular regions the co-official languages are Catalan, Basque and Galician. I work in a Catalan-speaking university where the policy is to privilege Catalan.
2:48
All official communication is in Catalan. People have the right to use Spanish and everybody understands Spanish. We're being encouraged to use more English. International students, Erasmus students come in and they're looking for more English classes and we try to provide them. Basque and Catalan have fewer than 10 million speakers. They are not disappearing; they are much stronger these days and they were 20 years ago. We could say the same of Irish and Welsh
3:24
and other languages where there is a social will for the languages do manifest themselves and develop, using the institutions and technologies of our globalized Europe. There is no fatality in the global movement towards English. Because I have lived these realities. My right to speak here though isn't so much personal experience as my involvement in the European research project call MIME: Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe, which is looking at this general
4:02
problem in the European context. I am in charge of the subgroup working on mediation as a set of solutions to multilingual problems.
4:21
Where multilingual communication needs some help, these are things you can do and the solutions we're looking at are: Public Service Interpreting and Translation (PSIT) we're looking at the moment very much at the asylum seekers moving into Europe and how we handle that linguistically. Lingua francas are another kind of solution: English obviously but also Esperanto. Intercomprehension... is when for example I speak German and you speak Afrikaans and
4:57
we can understand each other more or less, with a bit of passive competence in the other language, within the same language family, people can continue to speak their language and have a bilingual composition. That is what I'm calling it to comprehension - that's what it is called in this project. I use comprehension if I go to Portugal or Italy: I speak Spanish; they answer in Portuguese or Italian. We also look at translation technologies: what's the impact of the new technologies we
5:39
have for translation? We're comparing those with language learning, which is the big heavy-gun solution to problems. We're interested in not just translation as you can see, not just language learning, but all the things that can be done to bridge across languages when some help is needed. This project has a model and I think this is the thing I really want to bring to you. When you get involved in these debates things become complex, categorical and acrimonious,
6:24
and you don't know where you are Here's a proposal to simplify things. It's from François Grin who is a professor of economics at the University of Geneva and head of this European project which involves I don't know some 21 universities. It's it's a big project, extremely interdisciplinary, but this is what economics brings to our problems. The supposition is this it is desirable for our societies, here as in Europe, to have as much inclusion as possible
7:02
that is, we don't want people to be excluded from our societies and it's desirable to have as much mobility as possible. Mobility here means more geographical mobility than social mobility. We want people to be able to move around Europe because of the principle of free movement of labour. Here you might want your students to have a career in other parts of your country and in other parts of the world, and to be trained for that mobility. So we have two conflicting or potentially
7:42
conflicting ideals. Inclusion is one thing and mobility is another, and we need solutions that allow both at the same time. So a solution that only gives us inclusion with no mobility, and the solution out here that only gives mobility and no conclusion is also a poor solution. Are we looking at a perpetual contradiction, paradox, conflict of interests? No, because there is a range of solutions along these moving lines that allow a bit of both
8:27
They allow a trade-off where you can have a solution high on the left that allows a lot of inclusion and a little mobility. here that Or a solution at bottom right that allows a lot of mobility and a bit of inclusion. And you can have solutions that move between the two according to the circumstances.
8:48
All the things I just mentioned: public service interpreting, lingua franca, intercomprehension and translation technologies can be placed along that kind of line to allow trade-offs, to allow both things at the same time. Hence their interest. Hence my interest in getting out of the categorical debate that says if we don't have inclusion then we have all of mobility, and vice versa. This problem is being faced
9:24
by all our societies. What we have to do is to look for the trade-offs, the midway solutions. Now, any solution that enables a trade-off is good: that one is good, but this one towards top right is better because it enables more of both. So the challenge for our project is to find solutions that increase the availability of both goods. A solution is okay in the middle, but it's better out to the top right because you get more of both. So we know what a good solution is, or the economists do.
10:12
The model is interesting because it allows us to talk about degrees of inclusion instead of just saying you're in or out. What inclusion means, though, if you get together a whole lot of disciplines, is very vague thing. Everybody has their ideas about it. In my own work I choose to define it pragmatically, as whether or not the second person is included in an utterance: if the receiver can occupy the position of the second person. I'll come back to this later.
10:52
We can give a linguistic definition of inclusion and I think it's very interesting to do so if we're talking about actual linguistic communication. And we can talk about degrees of mobility, which means I can talk about our Erasmus or international students as well as the waves of asylum-seekers coming into Europe. Most importantly the solutions that are most available, that allow most of both, tend to be the cheapest.
11:26
It is legitimate in this model - which is by economists - to talk about the costs, not just the financial costs, but how much individual effort has to go into preparing for the communication and carry it out. So you can start to work out abstract formulas with respect to costs. Don't worry I'm not going to give you any abstract formulas but you can see where the economists take the model. I'm interested now in what that abstract model omits: various things that we tend not to discuss enough
12:03
when we talk about language policy, certainly when the economist come on but the people in in policy studies also tend to forget about things like this.
12:16
Within the research group we have fundamental disagreements. We have people who believe that there are language rights and people who believe that there are no rights if the remote economic means to provide the good in question. There is the realist position versus the idealist position. I'm in the realist position. I don't believe there are language rights if there are not the economic means to provide the good in question. Time is missing.
12:49
How long is this communication going to last? How long is the institution going to last? How long do we need a solution to the problem? The values of language that whole question of what values people attach to different languages is omitted in the model. The sustainability of the solution is limited and the very possibility of not having policy is omitted. I want to very briefly look at all those points to tell you why they should be considered. I'm going to go very quickly
13:33
with respect to language rights, the respect to the possibility that they are equal languages I will point out merely that when I study medieval translation theory the assumption of a hierarchy languages is normal and that translation works to develop the languages that are furthest from God. The Renaissance invented the idea or the ideal of equal languages notably the national vernaculars but it's not a stable idea and it's not an idea well
14:11
suited to our age of globalization. Similarly for the same reasons all languages have borrowed from other languages; many of these borrowings come in through translation; there are no pure languages, so why pretend there are. The notion of what a language is is not in crisis because there are syntactic systems which are very strong, but the flow of lexical items and minor syntactic structures to and from languages, often through translation, is something we have to accept these days.
14:51
I tend to live in the kind of world that sees people working multilingually; most of the world's people are multilingual - "polyglots" is the better term. They're using some strong languages and then a multiplicity of semiotic resources from other languages. And I'm happier looking at that non-categorical view.
15:21
This concerns
15:26
studies of diglossia, especially the general finding that in the world there are very few if any all-purpose languages. We tend to believe that a strong pure national language is one in which you can do everything you want to do in your life. The social reality is that we do some things in some languages and other things in others. I want to move on to the time element. I think it's key to consider carefully how long we want a solution to last. This is a model I drew after working as a
16:05
translator for the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992. The Olympiad is the four-year project leading to the Games. I started working actually as a language teacher. I was at the university and we had a contract. I was teaching the executives to improve their English. This was in Barcelona; they were going to
16:30
have to work in English, although French is strong in the Olympic Committee. So we were teaching languages and then we were translating at the same time.
16:41
Now, how would you know when to teach the language and went to translate? Well there's a difference. When you're learning languages the social effort and the individual cost decrease over time. It's tough at the beginning; it's hard work. But after a while... you never get to L1 or mother-tongue status but you get quite good, and it's easier.
17:14
Translation on the other hand - with a bundle of other solutions - but translation in particular gets a bit easier once you establish the glossaries and you know how to work with translators or how to work with interpreters - sorry I include interpreting within my general term "translation" - but after that you have to pay everybody by the hour or by the word. It doesn't get cheap. What's the message? Well, it seems to me that if you've got a project lasting less than T1, then you
17:50
translate more than you teach. If you've got a project lasting to T2, you combine language and translation, roughly in the proportion of the areas underneath these curves. And I think that the four-year project at the Olympic Games is about T2 but if you're going beyond that and you want to build up a country or build up multilingual Europe, which is a long-term undertaking we think, then language learning is far more important than translation.
18:34
Translation is useful for short-term solutions. Language learning is the big heavy solution for long-term problems. That's worrying to translators. Still, there it is. I think four years is a nice measure because most of the students come in for four years or five or six, and you can think about using two solutions at the same time in a certain proportion. When our internatpional students come to Catalonia lots of them have some Spanish and they improve their Spanish, but they're made to
19:16
confront the realities of Catalan, which they have all around them. Catalan classes are free and are made to be quite fun and cool. Do they all learn Catalan? No. Do they leave with an awareness of Catalan culture? Yes. Do they learn to respect the existence of that culture, I would hope so. I did, I have, but I've been there for a long time. That kind of analysis can be made more complex quite easily. Here's what we've done in our task in the research project. You'll see that here
20:02
I've lined up our four solutions with language learning. You've got the time frame, which is optimal and different for all: technologies, translation solutions are for short-term solutions, the others are for longer. We've been doing interviews with users of language services and with people coming into unfortunately called detention centers for asylum seekers and seeing what they prefer. What are their criteria? One of the interesting things have been that
20:45
user-independence is is a very important criterion for most of the people involved in negotiating these problems. They don't particularly like the use of interpreters because they feel they have been disempowered. They have to rely on somebody else and they don't entirely trust anybody because anybody could be a spy sent by the government to get some data on where they come from or why they are there. So things like that came out: user independence for the users is a
21:21
very important criterion and actually works against mediation by interpreters. And then there are some question marks: Can a lingua franca
21:33
allow inclusion in the host society? For our subproject, yes, because I define inclusion linguistically, so people come from Syria; they're speaking bad English but somebody in Germany also speaks English. They're communicating quite well in that lingua franca. Other people with social or idealistic notion of what inclusion means would say: no there cannot be inclusion if it's not in the national host language, in this case German.
22:12
So it's a matter of definition, but for us it can be inclusion. That's what we see happening around us in Europe. The rest of that - you can imagine how our discussions go. This is not definitive; this is an ongoing project. I can apply apply the same kind of analysis to some another solutions. For example, as I give the lecture here, you might notice I'm recording it. That will go on YouTube; it will go there with subtitles. It's quite easy to do
22:49
I do it myself; I also train people to do it. It's a very cheap solution for distributing knowledge - not that I really call my stuff knowledge. That can be compared, using the same criteria, with simultaneous interpreting which is far more expensive and far more limited to the time frame. As we were discussing with a doctoral student yesterday, that solution will give you the sense of an event, of us being here in this room together around a particular object.
23:28
It's an expensive thing to buy but it may have its values, whereas the subtitled
23:35
video means I could take this lecture, put it into two, three or eleven other languages, distribute it internationally for free and anybody anywhere can have access to it. Which allows the most inclusion? It depends what you mean by inclusion. We have to go back to that that particular value and discuss it some more. I think I'm being generous in saying "low inclusion" (for videos). I watch my son watching YouTube videos all the time.
24:13
He's definitely included in some kind of virtual community that I don't know anything about.
24:22
The other points that are forgotten about too often: We seem to talk about languages as if they were tools and nothing but tools, to pick this up and use it obtain this effect. Research done by Birgitta Busch at the University of the Western Cape working with the much-regretted Neville Alexander on linguistic biographies - getting people especially students to write up what they remember about their language(s), what values are associated with it.
25:04
When you engage in this kind of activity it comes very clear that languages are not equal. I could say this thing in three different ways and they will be technically equivalent for a translation theorist for example but they are not equivalent according to how I feel those languages because of where they come from the baggage they carry. For example, for many years I didn't like speaking English
25:35
I would give lectures in (bad) French out of preference - crazy, but I've now come home.
25:43
I still feel uneasy speaking Spanish in public and far better speaking Catalan, for reasons that have to do with recent history in Spain, over the last forty years or so. Those things are motivating a lot of what goes into the debates on policy, and if you don't talk about them, they don't reach any solution - people argue at cross-purposes because of the values attached to the languages and where these people are coming from. I see this very much
26:20
in Catalonia with our discussions about language. I think it's important to realize that, rather than say all languages are automatically equal before the law, the value of a language is ultimately performed by people every time they speak and use it. This is frustrating for the people who want to have policy as as a rule that can be applied and regulate social action. Social action doesn't work that way. The values
27:00
are instilled by the people who use the language in each particular situation. This goes into a lot of performativity studies, gender studies especially: the idea that gender is not what we're born with, it's something we create as we act in each moment of our lives. The valorization languages is the same. How do you get positive affective values into a language? This is where the two success stories that I started with have played it very well. This is a Catalan class in Melbourne Australia
27:44
Catalan-speaking families who want to maintain the language go along there. They're practicing an open vowel there, I suspect. No, they're having fun.
27:58
The trick of getting Basque and Catalan into positions where they are now established powerful languages is they started with children's television - getting the best television, getting the best fun and games, making that language associated with future events, with a certain degree of social mobility as well, but more importantly the children want to speak that language because it's cool. And then you want to analyze what that word "cool" means. But there it is: they're having fun.
28:37
I like Catalan because you have fun with it, and from there you can associate it with where I can go with it, how I can be with certain people with it. If you're not doing that, if you come in and have your language policy regulating what happens at university level, I'm sorry but you are closing the gate after the horse has bolted. The values are in place and you're trying to regulate them as if languages were equal. They're not.
29:12
because those kinds of values have been instilled into some languages more than into others. So abstract rules and regulations fall sadly amiss if we're not doing that kind of long-term work on the values associated with the language, giving us motivation to use and enjoy our languages rather than a regulation that penalizes the use of one or the other.
29:45
One of the other things that's missing from the model is what is these days call sustainability, a very loose term. I'm reading here from a recent book by Pascal Chabot, L'Âge des transitions Chabot picks up the point that we no longer talk about revolution. We were all radical leftists or marxists not long ago and we all sought the ideal revolution and it was going to happen and it hasn't happened. And then our terminology changed. If you look around us
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so much talked about in terms of transition, and the important thing is the movement towards. In Catalonia we have a radical independence movement which is not seeking revolution, we're not going to kill anybody or have an army - although some people would like to - and the term they use for that is "el procés", the process: we are going towards something and the going towards it is more important or as important as the goal.
31:06
We want to be independent but in the meantime we can gain some respect and understanding and open a new dialogue with people in our part of the world. That sense of importance being attached to the means rather than the end, says Chabot, is something new. The great disasters of the twentieth century came from revolutionaries who said the end justifies the means. Young people today texting, googling, can get information about what they doing in the world and who they're voting for and where
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products are made, and they can be very aware of the different processes that are going on, and suspicious of anyone who comes up with a new immediate revolutionary goal, such as imposing one language on everybody. Sustainability means paying attention to the means and not destroying things as you go along. I'm just taking one point from this book and I'm actually stealing it from Michael Cronin, who has also stolen from this book:
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mobility is a value; it's good for people to get to where they want to go. So our cities build motorways, highways, freeways - like that one in Cape Town that still doesn't go anywhere - and that's a good thing. All our cities do that. But if you want a sustainable city you also think about having public bicycles, you know where you the municipality provides free bikes or very low-cost bikes and you ride somewhere and somebody else comes back.
33:06
One of these solutions is focused on getting people to where they want to go as fast as possible because the end justifies the means. The other kind of solution says hey, enjoy the trip, take it slow, do some exercise, look around you, talk with people, enjoy the transition.
33:29
Apply that to your time at university, for example, or my students in my university. What do we want to give them? Straight access into a job or a process, a transition, classical humanistic education, which means you can look around and discover things along the way and one of the things that you can discover is the plurality of languages around you. How many languages around me? I started to learn about ten and I got to any kind of competence in perhaps five.
34:07
But there's no reason to think that the purpose of beginning to learn Arabic was to become a native speaker of Arabic. No, I enjoyed learning that. I enjoy using the bit that I know - why not?
34:28
This is part of my argument against categorical thought in language policy, especially in an educational institution. It shouldn't be one or the other, as if it were black and white. Itamar Even-Zohar makes a valuable point about Galician, the third co-official language in Spain which has been less successful in establishing itself. He says, well, it's true your language planning didn't work as well as the others; you didn't have the
35:02
children's television that's so great or you didn't do so many translations. But he says: even though you didn't get to that goal, you have put energy into the system - he is Mr polysystems theory he sees cultures as systems, and what a system needs in order to survive and sustain itself is intellectual energy. The very debate about language, the debate about policy generates that energy and helps form the community.
35:38
I have been discussing these things with Florian Coulmas, a Greek-born German sociolinguist who is very during critical. Her asked me over lunch, Why shouldn't we just let languages grow like grasses in the field? Why should we go and try to regulate them and say where one should be, and the other? Why do we need language policy? My answer, because I knew it was coming, was from Habermas: If we are living in a society that has true communication, we all feel we
36:24
are co-authors of our laws. We need discussion and debate to a level where the law is not somebody else addressing me but I am one of the co-authors of the laws and will therefore defend those laws. It is a very very high measure of inclusion, very interesting to analyze pragmatically. If you have that ideal that everybody should feel co-authors of laws then you need public education - the state has to be involved in public education. And since you have
37:04
public education you need language policy. That's the only reason. The rest sorts itself out very well. Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) these are the Scandinavian countries - they have no policy language policy. Or it says multilingual problems will be solved in a Scandinavian way.
37:35
So they use lots of intercomprehension, they switch to English when they have to, and they do some language learning in order to get the intercomprehension going, but there is no language policy because people solve these things very well by themselves. Public education, though, is more important.
37:58
That problem is not peculiar to this place, or Catalonia, or the Basque Country or multilingual Europe. That problem occurs in all our urban societies, because mobility is everywhere and globalization is a part of our urban environment. Working on it means solving the most profound or overcoming the most important impediment
38:29
to a viable community in a globalized electronic age. We're working on the building of paradises. That's how important the problem is; that's why it's important to look for creative, non-categorical, non-restrictive solutions. To summarize: With respect to translation which was my topic, it's good for short-term solutions. I suggest it should be used for high-risk high-value texts - the really important stuff, because it's
39:04
expensive and can only be justified then, and it should be used in combination with language learning, intercomprehension and a lingua franca, code-mixing, code-switching all these other things you can see and hear around you.
39:25
Language is not to be associated with [one] identity. I was in a train Melbourne overhearing students speaking, wondering what happened to my poor Australian accent and they said "Yeah it was like awesome." These guys have this broad Australian accent so they really identify with the place and they've adopted this American terminology of youth culture. Language is a wonderful thing. You can have two identities at the same time in language
39:59
doing different things on different levels. We have this wonderful tool at our disposal I suggest we use more of it. Thank you.
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