Europe, lost in translation? Villa Finaly, Florence – 18-­‐20 novembre 2011 IT’S NOT ABOUT LANGUAGES, REALLY Ubaldo Stecconi, European Commission ABSTRACT The language issue is generally overrated, and more so in let's-­‐build-­‐Europe debates. In interpersonal communication, language is rarely a problem when people want to understand and go along with each other. This applies in interactions that take place both within and across language boundaries. Correspondingly, people often raise a language point to signal a desire to start a conflict ("What do you mean?" she shouted). Using the language issue to tip the scales of power or pick a fight is fairly common at institutional level too; examples abound. So, if it's not about language, what is it about, really? I will argue that our debates can benefit from a broader scope which would embrace other semiotic systems and from a serious reflection on our attitudes towards people who move, dress, eat, think and – yes – speak in unfamiliar ways. SPEAKING NOTES Broadening the scope I will start by asking how we regard language when we reflect on how we make sense of ourselves, of the world, and of what we say to each other. It seems to me that the role of language is often overstated and that we often use an abstract and reified representations of language. If this is the case, how can we account for these facts? Among the probably many reasons, I would like to point towards our biological and cultural evolution and towards an enduring paradigm in the scientific investigation of language. 
Biological evolution: language is the most developed semiotic system in the animal world – it is not unique, but it does give our species an edge. Among other things, we can ask what-­‐if questions; which is not as easy using our other semiotic systems. 
Cultural evolution: language more than other factors allows us to feel that we belong to a community and are recognised by it; hence it also allows us to identify a group of people as a community. Example: barbaros as babbler and inferior (see Padgen in Appendix). 
Modern academic paradigm: Saussure’s structural linguistics and Chomsky’s generativism focussed on language as their sole or preferred object of study. For Saussure, understanding means decoding language signs – for instance, words – which correspond to ideas. Therefore, the two-­‐way signifiant-­‐signifié relation is paramount. And this is where the problems start. This representation suggests a process for human communication similar to putting a parcel in the mail; the speaker places her idea in a verbal sign; sends it orally or in writing to her audience; and all the audience has to do is picking up the idea from inside the sign. Within this code-­‐based – as opposed to inference-­‐based – model of communication, a focus on verbal language and its formal structures is totally justified. However, the model fails to account for commonly observable facts such as ambiguity, the influence of the context, and the perplexing inability of computers to pass a simple Turing test in spite of their seemingly limitless powers. In scholarship just as in other fields, we should break free from tradition when it fails to account for observable facts and becomes a constraint to thought and action. I will recall three attempts to do just that; interpretive semiotics, pragmatics and a line of research in Translation Studies. Semiotics Charles Sanders Peirce (1857–1913), an American polymath contemporary of Saussure, gave birth to an alternative, inference-­‐based theory of thinking and communication sometimes labelled ‘interpretive semiotics’. For Peirce, understanding involves a three-­‐way relation in which the audience interprets something which stands for something else. Therefore, the interpreting act is paramount. Peirce’s model of communication has little interest or room for the abstract properties and relations of language. Because anything at all can kick start the three-­‐stroke semiotic engine, Peirce’s semiotics does not give verbal language pride of place. Pragmatics The second alternative to code-­‐based models of communication I will present is Pragmatics. Ever since Grice’s 1957 seminal paper1, philosphers of language and other scholars have addressed some of the problems left open by structural views of communication. Pragmatics deals with utterances, by which we will mean specific events, the intentional acts of 2
speakers at times and places, typically involving language . 1
Grice, H. Paul, 1957, “Meaning,” Philosophical Review 66: 377–88. 2
Korta, Kepa and John Perry. Summer 2011 Edition. "Pragmatics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta (ed.), n.p. URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/pragmatics/. 2 This short quotation points at crucial aspects of Pragmatics’ research agenda: actual utterances as opposed to possible sentences, speakers’ real-­‐life intentions as opposed to abstract semantic content, and the demotion of language as the sole object of investigation. Relevance theory Grice’s work has given rise to Relevance theory, an inference-­‐based account of communication that is gaining ground in academic circles. In relevance-­‐theoretical terms, when a speaker intends to convey information to an audience, she produces a stimulus designed to modify the cognitive environment of the audience in certain ways. The difference with the code-­‐based model I described earlier is stark; in particular, inference-­‐based models reserve a larger and more active role to the audience. In addition, verbal and nonverbal means alike can be used to ‘modify the cognitive environment of the audience’. Relevance-­‐
theoretical literature often refers to nonverbal communication, such as a Mary asking Peter to fix a broken blow–dryer by leaving it around the house3. Translation Studies In the wake of these and similar developments, Translation Studies has outgrown its traditional and obsessive interest in verbal language and several scholars have tried to re-­‐conceptualise translating as a process that involves language as well as other sign-­‐systems. Mary Snell-­‐Hornby listed Translation Studies’ main new interests as follows: 
The cultural turn of the 1980s 
The skopos theory and its functional approach 
The “interdiscipline” of the 1990s: Beyond language 
Of norms, memes and ethics 
Translation and nonverbal communication 
Translating multimodal texts4 She stated: Of course nobody pretends that translation can dispense with language (or with source and target texts) altogether, but it is now seen as a tool or instrument for translatorial action rather than as the central object of study in itself. With this approach the definition of “text” is also widened 5
considerably: the “communicative occurrence” is by no means only verbal . 3
nd
This example from Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2 ed. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Original edition, Oxford: Blackwell. 1986. 4
This is part of the table of contents of Snell-­‐Hornby, Mary. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, p. vii. 5
Id., p. 79. 3 What can one mean by ‘translatorial action’ and ‘communicative occurrence’? The author gives two examples. In 1792, George III sent Lord Macartney to meet Emperor Qianlong and open the Chinese market to Britain. The envoy insisted to bow down on one knee instead of kowtowing. The negotiations failed. In 1992, Chris Patten’s brief included bringing democracy to China. Again, he refused to kowtow to the government, this time metaphorically. The last Governor could control every semiotic difference but negotiations failed again, except for the minimal goal of keeping the dialogue open6. Looking beyond languages I have tried to illustrate the merits of what I’ve called ‘the demotion’ of language and of a model of it that owes more to our cultural and intellectual tradition than to the way we actually use it to communicate, regulate our behaviour, and coordinate our actions. Besides, it is anachronistic to think of EU countries as language communities; 
A 2008 study counted about 300 community languages in England7. 
Ethnologue, using a much more conservative methodology, counts 62 living languages in France8. 
Also according to Ethnologue, Polish is spoken in 22 more countries beyond Poland, 10 of them in the EU9. My main point is that if we are serious about talking about Europe’s diversity and integration sub specie signorum, we should adopt the best and available science and we should not allow entrenched and outdated models cloud our vision. I will close my presentation with two examples among the many potential practical upshots of adopting a fresher and more realistic model of communication. Communicating the EU The EU institutions – especially the European Commission – are home to the largest language services in world history; only Canada’s federal Translation Bureau comes close. Yet, there is plenty 6
Snell-­‐Hornby reaches a different conclusion; you can read it in Appendix together with the full excerpts. 7
McPake, Joanna and Itesh Sachdev, with Tessa Carroll, Teresa Birks and Anjoom Mukadam. 2008. Community Languages in Higher Education: Towards realising the potential. Report available at http://www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk/downloads/community_languages.pdf 8
Lewis, M. Paul (ed.). 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. URL = http://www.ethnologue.com/ 9
Id. For the curious reader, the countries are Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russian Federation (Europe), Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and United States. 4 of room for improvement in communicating Europe; how is this possible? Here is a tentative explanation from Kaisa Koskinen: …the Commission, or the EU institutions in general, constitute a culture of their own, an institutional and supranational culture that has its own history, shared knowledge, norms and values – and its own idiom (in eleven [now 23] dialects). In EU translation there is sometimes a need to merely change the linguistic code without reaching outside this multilingual institutional culture (intracultural translation); other documents are addressed to readers outside this EU culture that is more or less 10
foreign to them (intercultural translation) If Ms Koskinen is correct, speechwriters work at the intercultural coalface. One example or two: 
Writing in English and in Spanish for Vice-­‐President Almunia; translating textual norms. It’s all about attitude Josè Lambert’s story on the French and Polish students. The Erasmus programme encourages young people to start cross-­‐border friendships and even families. The exchange programme has unwittingly become our most powerful language-­‐planning tool, precisely because it does not follow a plan and channels the semiotic correlative of huge market forces. We have come back to where we started: Erasmus shows that Europeans can be encouraged and educated to stop thinking that “those who are devoid of logos in one sense might be devoid of it in another”. As is common in these things, we can only wish that the future looks a bit like the distant past, when barbaroi was also used for the respected Egyptians. 10
Koskinen, Kaisa. 2004. “Shared culture? Reflections on recent trends in Translation Studies”. Target 16 (1): 143–156, p. 145. 5 Appendix Pagden Pagden, Anthony. 1986. The fall of natural man: The American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology. Cambridge University Press, pp. 15-­‐16. Snell-­Hornby Snell-­‐Hornby, Mary. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 168-­‐9. The richest example I know of failed intercultural communication is Lord Macartney’s ambitious expedition to China as envoy of George III in 1792 (described in detail in Snell-­‐Hornby 1996c). The aim was to negotiate outlets for British trade (a classic situation for Interpreting Studies), and as Britain then saw herself as the most powerful nation of the globe, Macartney was supremely confident of success (cf. 3.2.1). But the expedition was a complete failure. The Celestial Empire, with its population of 330 million, then one third of the human race, saw itself as the only civilization under heaven, the mission was viewed as yet another tribute offered from an inconsequential envoy, and Macartney’s every request was turned down flat. At the crux of the whole entanglement of diplomatic miscommunication was Macartney’s refusal to kowtow to the Chinese Emperor Qianlong, in the literal sense of course, which would have involved a ritual of prostrations where the 6 forehead meets the ground nine times; instead he was only willing to bow down on one knee, as he would before his own sovereign (cf. nonverbal communication in translation, 3.1.2). The British revealed themselves in Chinese eyes as a particularly uncouth and obstinate type of barbarian and were coldly shown out of the country. Fortunately, there is also a counter-­‐example to prove that the reverse can be true. Exactly 200 years after Macartney set sail for the Far East, Chris Patten, as the last Governor of Hong Kong, embarked on the ambitious task of trying to “sell” democracy to the Chinese. He was amply supported by political advisers, and had at his disposal a team of professionally trained interpreters, well-­‐paid government employees known as “Chinese Language Officers”, bilingual in English and Chinese. In this day and age, democracy, at least for any self-­‐respecting citizen of a Western nation, is such a self-­‐evident value in life that the Governor was confident his arguments would win. But these particular negotiations were fraught with difficulty. At the crux of a whole labyrinth of diplomatic wrangling was Patten’s refusal to kowtow to the Chinese government, in the metaphorical sense of course, which would have involved an abandonment of his basic principles. Clashing worlds once again? As experienced professionals the interpreters were quite aware both of the problems and the cultural differences involved, and despite some very harsh utterances their declared aim was to “keep up communication”. Those experts I later questioned agree that these negotiations achieved the maximum that could reasonably be expected: dialogue, not war, and a successful example of translation as intercultural communication. 7