A Cultural View of the Discipline of Modern Languages

Abstract

Shadow me today: anthropologists, ethnographers, explorers of disciplinary cultures, academic tourists follow me as flies on the wall around the School of European Studies and Japanese, here in Cardiff. The School occupies the entire top floor of the building, with views of the sea, of the mountains, of the city: to the west a l9th-century mediaeval castle; to the north a railway siding. German and Italian are down one corridor, Spanish and French along another, Politics in a corridor behind a corridor and around the corner. Japanese is in another building altogether. The School was formed two years ago by the merging of four separate autonomous language departments and one Politics department. Japanese was a later addition, funded directly by the University Grants Committee (now the University Funding Council (UFC)) and located in the School of European Studies because that seemed the obvious place. The first thing any ethnographer worth his or her salt notices is that this system mirrors Europe and the world. The School is a Federation; heads of the sections are more foreign secretaries than prime ministers and the head of the School is (in a variety of ways) more like Jacques Delors than Margaret Thatcher. My section is French. Let us go through the mail: A man from the Building Section writes enclosing a copy of a letter he has sent in English to a French manufacturer of car-park barriers. He has had no reply. Will I please translate the letter into French and see if that works? A long letter from some students who are spending their compulsory year abroad. There was riotous behaviour in a hall of residence after an international rugby match. They feel they were treated unfairly the French were at least as much to blame. We need to avoid an International Incident. A memo from the colleague in CLAWS (the Cardiff Law School) with whom I administer the Law/French integrated degree. He has had a letter from the '1992 partner' of a commercial law firm in Cardiff: they want their staff to be able to talk Law in French with the French. Can we put on a course? I add it to the file: the Engineering Department would like its Engineers to be able to talk Engineering in French, the Business School business and so on. -Minutes of a meeting about ERASMUS. The university assumes we are the ERASMUS experts, whereas we are probably the people who need ERASMUS least, since we have been organising exchanges almost since the time of the great man himself. -Next: a request from the firm of accountants for a reference for a B.A. student