Yet if I repeat it often enough, someone might eventually see what I have to say. We could picture this roughly as follows: They tend to be actively at least bilingual and passively polyglot. Indeed, translators and their academic representatives could be defined as the group of people requiring least recourse to translation. A conference on translation, precisely, should need minimal translating. Translation is expensive and often unnecessary nontranslation is cheap and can be effective. This was indeed a practical and effective regime, none the least because the added cost of interpreting services would have meant that I, along with any other unsubsidized soul, could not have afforded to attend. I spoke goddam awful French and trusted the French could follow me others spoke English and hoped for the same and communication proceeded, as much as it merited to do so, largely thanks to the preselection of participants willing and able to negotiate the vicissitudes of bilingual exchange. I simply wanted to point out that the practical alternative to translation was a local language policy, a restriction to two, and a supposition that the conference participants knew enough of two to make do. So much for respecting "l'usage de toutes les langues"! In practice, European multilingualism in a specific domain meant a restriction to two languages, and two is often pragmatically reduced to one.ĭon't get me wrong: I am not particularly upset that there were no interpreters feeding my words into a dozen or so languages at that conference. Speaking at the conference in question I had the bad taste and worse manners to point out that although the conference itself was certainly in Europe, and although it was ostensibly a space for a European debates, the languages accepted for use were restricted to two (French and English) and there were no interpreters in sight. Nothing new here: Europe means translation, and the more we have of both, the better. The main features of this text can be found in the speeches of virtually all well-interpreted members of the European Parliament, in the glossy brochures of virtually any translation school in Europe, in the introduction to several hundred well-meaning publications on European translation. This means that translation has pride of place."
"The European Union that is being constructed is unique in that it is not only multilingual but also seeks to respect its linguistic and cultural specificities through the use of all languages in its debates. If I may translate (and I don't intend to outlaw the practice):
"La communauté européenne qui est en train de se construire possède cette caractéristique unique d'être multilingue et de prétendre respecter les particularismes linguistiques et culturels par l'usage de toutes les langues lors de ses débats, c'est dire que la traduction y occupe une place de choix." (Colloque Europe et traduction, Artois, March 1996)
In which it is argued that there is too much translation in Europe, that effective integration depends on degrees of nontranslated communication, and that an exclusive focus on translation seriously obscures our vision of a unified future.Ī few months ago I attended a translation-studies conference where the official programmatic text began as follows:
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