Multilingualism as a challenge for translation studies

Abstract

Traditional definitions considered translation, implicitly or explicitly, as the full transposition of one source language message by one target language message for the benefit of a monolingual target public. Accordingly, the translation process would transfer the source language message from the source culture into the target culture, translations thus taking place between linguistically and geographically separated cultures.1 Obviously this has been unmasked as an idealized construction and as too simple a conceptualization. Messages, people and societies are more often than not multilingual in themselves. Consequently, multilingualism, commonly defined as ‘the co-presence of two or more languages (in a society, text2 or individual)’ (Grutman 2009a: 182) is inextricably linked with translation. At the heart of multilingualism, we find translation. Translation is not taking place in between monolingual realities but rather within multilingual realities. In multilingual cultures (assuming there are such things as monolingual cultures), translation contributes to creating culture, in mutual exchange, resistance, interpenetration. The translational phenomena are likely to transcend the traditional notions of foreignness based on the postulate of a monolingual culture; they are the prolongation of the source messages, adding in turn to their significance (Simon 2006). Since the idea of a geographical transfer of the translated message becomes rather virtual, the distinction between ‘source’ and ‘target’ may lose part of its conceptual pertinence. Due to the relativity of geography as a distinctive cultural feature, translations, both as a process and as a product may also belong to the source culture. The latter may co-determine the translation initiative, the selection of material to translate, the translation strategies, the reception of the translations and the interruption of translation contacts (Meylaerts 2004). In short, questioning the binary opposition between a so-called source and target, translation in multilingual cultures discusses one of the key postulates of descriptive translation studies (see Ben-Ari, this volume): ‘translations are facts of the target culture’ (Toury 1995: 29). It is only recently that the complex connections between multilingualism and transla-tion have gained attention from translation studies. A simple search based on the keyword ‘multilingualism’ in Benjamin’s Translation Studies Bibliography shows how half of the publications related to translation and multilingualism between 1972 and 2010 have appeared during the last decade. They cover a vast array of methodologies, of fields andtopics – literary translation, audiovisual translation, localization, machine translation, language management, community interpreting, teletranslation and teleinterpretation, language policy, etc. (see e.g. Hernandez 2008; Kruger et al. 2007; Valero-Garces 2007) – and a wide range of geographical and institutional settings – Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Israel, the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) (see e.g. Kofoworola and Okoh 2006; Weissbrod 2008), etc. The following paragraphs will reflect upon the complex but fundamental relations between translation and multilingualism at the level of texts, people, institutions and societies. Of course, these levels are fundamentally intertwined and are only separated for the sake of the argument.