Geopolitics, Geolinguistics,
and Translatability
Robert de Beaugrande
A. ‘Geopolitics’ and
‘geolinguistics’
1. I was surprised to notice that the only definitions
listed for ‘geopolitics’ in the two
recent dictionaries I most depend upon (the Collins
COBUILD and the Random House Webster’s) concern the relation between geography and politics. One older
dictionary (Webster’s Seventh Collegiate from 1963) also listed the ominous definition of ‘a Nazi expansionist
doctrine emphasising strategic frontiers, lebensraum, and racial, economic, and
social pressures, and demanding reallocation of the earth’s surface’; one entry
in the Oxford English Dictionary
(whose first attestation of the term is from the year 1905) carried a similar
import.
2. I myself have been spontaneously using the term for
some years on the assumption that the ‘geo-’ prefix broadly means ‘having
reference to the earth’, which is clearly its meaning in compounds like
‘geophysics’ and ‘geochemistry’, and thus not restricted to ‘geography’ proper.
Instead, ‘geopolitics’ would be
defined as ‘a view or a mode of politics with an active concern for the overall
planetary scheme of life’ (e.g. Beaugrande 1994, 1998a). I have only recently
thought of proposing the term ‘geolinguistics’,
which I have not encountered in reference works (not even in the latest OED),
and which we could define as ‘a view or study of language in relation to the
overall planetary scheme of life’.
3. If ‘geopolitics’ and ‘geolinguistics’ did address
the topic of geography, one key issue would surely be the role of ‘translation’ among the languages
currently suspended in a problematic symbiosis between ‘identity‘ and ‘modernity’.
Specifically, ‘modernity’ has come to resemble a commodity to be exported and
imported, sometimes at ruinous prices, from the so-called the First World’ to the ‘Third World’. My own preferred, and more
forthright, terms for this agonising division would be ‘Robber Nations’ and
‘Robbed Nations’, but I don’t expect them to be adopted. So I shall use the
terms — coined, I believe, by the eminent peace researcher Jon Galtung — of ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’. These terms aptly signal the direction of the flow of
wealth by means of undervalued currencies, underpriced labour and raw
materials, and the servicing of horrendous foreign debts, measured against
which ‘aid’ from the Centre, such as ‘loans’ and ‘credit’
from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, resembles the alms you
graciously hand out to people after you yourself have reduced them to beggars
(cf. Frank 1979; Hayter
1981; Manley 1991) (§ 23).
4. Insofar as ‘modernity’ is a ‘foreign import’ from
the Centre, it can pose a serious threat to cultural and linguistic identity at
the Periphery. To become ‘modern’, you cast aside your traditional identity and
emulate the peoples at the Centre, who are themselves being propelled with
accelerating frenzy into fresh stages of ‘modernity’ by ‘high technology’. My
students who came to Yarmouk University from small villages in northern Jordan told
me how the communal life in the evenings has virtually died out as families sit
immobilised in their homes consuming television shows either produced at the
Centre or produced as imitations of shows from the Centre.
5. Viewed from a long-range historical standpoint, the
onrush of ‘modernity’ from Centre to Periphery can echo the pat rhetoric of
colonialism and imperialism about bringing ‘modern civilisation’ to ‘backward
and primitive’ peoples’. Geography itself was redrawn at the Centre for the
Periphery to undermine linguistic and cultural identity by creating artificial
countries with borders fixed in arrant disregard of the resident communities of
languages and cultures (Bamgbose 1991; Phillipson 1992; Ngugi 1993). Moreover, horrendous atrocities like those in Biafra have displayed
the fate of a linguistic group that tries to break away from such a country in
search of its own geographical and political self-determination and. The same
European news media that voiced deep outrage over the tragedies of family
separation, forced relocation, economic devastation, and so on through the
division of Europe by the ‘Iron Curtain’, regard the African situation as the
normal and permanent state of affairs — deplorable no doubt, but a fact of
life. Yet it is a fact imported to
Africa along with the ‘modernisation’ first needed to subjugate or exterminate
the local inhabitants with ‘modern’ weaponry, and later needed to extract the
wealth of Africa more swiftly and efficiently with railroads, mining machinery,
hydroelectric plants and so on (cf. Mandela, 1986; Manley 1991). This ‘modern’
equipment was left behind after ‘Independence’ for the para-military African
‘governments’ and elites who had learned the ‘modern European ways’ of
controlling the populace, extracting the wealth, and ‘dealing severely’ with
dissident cultural and linguistic groups (Brunold 1997).
6. The most popular (and disingenuous) designation for
imported modernity is ‘development’, which, in the words of the Nigerian writer
Oyekan Owomoyela (1996: 208), ‘has in our time come to mean the abandonment of
all habits and institutions that vary from the Western paradigm, and the
radical assumption of Westernisms’; thus, ‘development’ is ‘measured’ by ‘the
degree of a society’s dependence on mechanical gadgets and the degree of the
automatism of its relational practices’, whilst ‘the degree to which it relies
on primary human skills and valorises the human dimension in its transactions’
are understood to be ‘measures of its underdevelopment’.
7. The processes of ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’
are prone to influence the evolution of the languages of the population,
especially when Centre languages are also major imports. Yet whether and how
far the imported language does influence local cultures is an open question.
Consider this trial testimony given by Steve Biko (1978 [1976]: 115ff), the
leader of Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, on the legal question
of whether the term ‘racially inflammable’ applied to a document circulated at
the funeral of Nthuli Shezi, a black organiser of community projects killed by
a train after being pushed onto the rails by a white railway worker:
Biko:
If you put this into Zulu, you would find that is what any old man from the
village would say about Nthuli […]
Attwell
[prosecuting attorney]: The point is these are not in Zulu, they are in
English.
Biko: But they are understood by people who are rooted
in Zulu culture. […] They don’t sit down to look at one word as such and say
what it does it mean, no, they listen to the whole paragraph and understand the
combined meaning. […] Zulu attaches not an analytical but emotional meaning to
situations whereas English tends to be analytical
Biko implied that a local home culture can readily project its own
meanings onto English discourse. If so, the importation of English need not by
itself dislodge local cultures, though it can undeniably facilitate the
processes which do (Beaugrande 1999a).
B. Translation as geopolitics
and geolinguistics: theory versus practice
8. If we now agreed to define ‘geopolitics’ ‘a view or
a mode of politics with an active concern for the overall planetary scheme of
life’ (§ 2), we would have a key concept for the ideology of ecologism, defined
in its turn as a concerted dialectic
between theory and practice to expressly sustain a human life-style in harmony
with our social and ecological environment (Beaugrande 1997a). This
definition goes beyond and away from ‘modernism’ by consciously rejecting the
popular notion that modernity is both highly desirable and ultimately
inevitable. And ‘post-modernism’ is
arguably the most significant intellectual and ‘geopolitical’ counter-current
today which insists upon respecting and valorising the cultural and linguistic
identities and traditions of diverse groups (e.g. Giroux 1992).
9. If we extend these lines of reasoning, ecologism
would also welcome the concept of ‘geolinguistics’ as ‘a view or study of
language with an active concern for the overall planetary scheme of life’ (§
2). For those linguists whose work has been closely attuned to cultural
anthropology, such K.L. Pike and M.A.K. Halliday, such a definition might seem
quite plausible. Yet it has had little impact on the ‘theoretical problems of
translation’ as seen from the ‘linguistic’ standpoints discussed by Georges
Mounin (1963). Still, many of my colleagues specialising in translation between
English and Arabic would
probably grant straightaway that translation
is a geopolitical and geolinguistic issue par excellence (cf. Menoufy 1982;
Farghal 1994; Jalabneh 1994; Sallo 1994; Shunnaq 1994; Hatim 1997). Its being just such
an issue has probably been one powerful reason why translation until recently
not received the serious and sustained attention it merits from the science of
linguistics insofar as the latter has been dominated by the idealisation of
‘language’ (Beaugrande 1997a, 1997b, 1998b, 1999a).
10. Geolinguistics might provide a fresh basis for
tackling the many conundrums when translation
tries to balance ‘theory and practice’
— a pair of terms in numerous titles of collections of papers (e.g. Grähs, Korlen, & Malmberg (eds.) 1978; Holmes (ed.) 1970; Rose (ed.)
1981) as well as of monographs (e.g. Postgate 1922; Kelly 1979), my personal
favourite being that of Nida and Taber (1982). In past work on translation, I
have diagnosed a symptomatic split whereby ‘theoretical’ work has been of
limited use for practice, whereas ‘practical’ work has been rather shy about
theory.
11. In my own PhD thesis (Beaugrande 1978), I
undertook to actually produce the theory out of the practice and vice versa,
whilst translating an entire text. In retrospect, I can feel no surprise at how
hard the job turned out to be. I repeatedly had to change the theory because it
didn’t fit my own practices; or else change the practice because it didn’t live
up to my own theorising. If everyone who expostulates on ‘translation theory’
were obliged to perform similar labours, the questions of theory and practice
in translation would be under far better control today — not all answered, to
be sure, but stated in more precise terms. Providing a theory that you can
actually observe getting put into practice upon a whole authentic text enforces
a far more ‘geolinguistic’ standpoint than devising a top-down ‘theory’ like
Catford’s (1965) illustrated with handfuls of artificial samples, rarely more
than isolated phrases or sentences and sometimes even less.
12. Perhaps we shouldn’t blame ‘mainstream linguists’
like Catford for trying to stay inside the narrow limits of their staid
discipline. But today, our major question for linguistics deserves to be turned
around. We no longer ask: how would the established ‘modern science of
linguistics’ describe or explain the theory and practice or translation?
Instead, we ask: how should a new ‘modern science of geolinguistics’ be
established and expressly designed to contribute to the theory and practice of
translation as its central and paradigm case?
13. Which among the available ‘linguistic’ approaches
might offer guidance to this enterprise of ‘geolinguistics’? Two sources I have
touched upon already (§ 9) are (1) functional
linguistics, such as the ‘systemic
linguistics’ developed mainly by Michael Halliday and his associates; and
(2) fieldwork linguistics, such as
the ‘tagmemics’ developed by Ken and
Evelyn Pike, Bob Longacre, and their associates. Both of these
approaches have long maintained a cordial relationship to cultural anthropology
for the compelling reason that they were primarily designed for the description
of non-European languages, a task where ‘geopolitical’ and ‘geolinguistic’
issues must be closely examined if you want to make sense of your linguistic data.
14. The early work of the systemic functional
linguists was materially influenced by the concentration of British ‘general
linguistics’ at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Their
specialisations in Oriental and African languages — J.R. Firth and M.A.K
Halliday for Chinese and Japanese, Braj Kachru for Hindi, T.J. Mitchell for
Arabic, Ayo Bamgboe for Yoruba, and so on — compelled them to seek out the order of
language in authentic discourse, since the much-studied European languages of
the Centre afforded few clues of where to look or what to look for.
15. The early political roots of this school were
partially allied with British Imperialism, at we can deduced from the writings
of J.R. Firth, who had been associated with SOAS since 1931 and who assumed the
professorial chair in 1944. For Firth
(1964 [1930-37]: 209,136, 200), ‘the spread of European civilisation and the
culture of the white race has made English a world language’; in fact, ‘English
is the only practicable world language’ and can be ‘taught in a normalised form
the world over’ (see now Beaugrande 1999a for discussion). In contrast:
When
the number of speakers falls below 100,000, the social and cultural value of
the instrument from a world point of view is extremely doubtful; below 10,000
it almost ceases to be of any value outside the most primitive forms of group
action and social co-operation. (Firth 1964 [1930]: 208).
Obviously, such a colonialist ideology must be
repudiated in the strongest terms by an ecologically responsible ‘geopolitics’
and ‘geolinguistics’. Indeed, this repudiation was already achieved by the
ideology of those systemic functional linguists, who, like Halliday, took an
active ‘interest in national language policies in newly decolonising
societies’; they sought to elaborate a ‘socially accountable linguistics’ that
would ‘put language in its social
context’ and ‘put linguistics in its
social context as a mode of intervention in critical social practices’
(Halliday 1994a: 73, his emphasis). All along, ‘the main ideological input to
what evolved into systemic theory’ has been ‘to formulate a linguistics which
would give value to the language of the “other”: non-European languages,
unwritten vernaculars, non-native varieties of English, non-standard dialects,
restricted codes, and so on’ (1994a: 73).
16. Moreover, Halliday himself
anticipated my conceptions of ‘ecologism’ and ‘geolinguistics’ when he voiced
this ‘applied linguistic concern’:
to
learn to break the rhythm of endless growth, to identify ourselves with other
species as part of a living whole, and to recognise that our planet is not a
repository of infinite wealth and abundance. (1994a: 75)
17. Another closely related
geolinguistic application which Halliday anticipated — again in accentuated
opposition to Firth — and which is vital for the present conference, was a
‘strong commitment to working on the language of a small threatened community
as part of the effort to maintain their cultural identity’ (1994a: 7). Here, we
can look to the anthropologically oriented fieldwork linguistics, such as
tagmemics. The early geopolitical roots of much of this work were allied to
missionary Christianity,1 and they attracted our own attention in
translation studies by the fascinating problems they encountered for
‘translating the word of God’ (see already Nida 1947, and, more recently, de
Waard and Nida 1986). Curiously, Christianity has
in its Bible a dark explanation of
the multiplicity of human languages, namely to ‘confound the speech of the
whole earth’ (Genesis 11:9). My own
preference would be the Islamic vision in the thirtieth Sãra of the Holy Qur~n, revealed around the seventh year before the Hijra
(or 615 A.D. in Christian reckoning) just when Rome, another overweening
Empire, was rapidly crumbling. Among the enumerations of ‘the Signs of God’, we
read in Ayat 22 (in the translation of Abdullah Yusuf Ali):
And among His Signs
Is the creation of the heavens
And the earth, and the variations
In your languages
And your colours: verily
In that are Signs
for those who know.
18. The project of ‘giving value to
the language of the “other”’ (Halliday) has also been one concern in the
discipline of sociolinguistics,
notably in recognising the status of non-standard varieties as valid systems
with their own internal ‘logic’ (e.g. Labov 1970). But, as I have shown in a
discussion paper for recent issue of the Journal
of Sociolinguistics, that field has been hardly less divisive than
mainstream linguistics (Beaugrande 1999b). Moreover, much of this divisiveness
has been fomented precisely by attempts to place a ‘social’ framework upon a
‘linguistics’ whose ‘theories of language’ had usually minimised the role of
society.
19. Moreover, sociolinguistics has not achieved much
in laying to rest the colonialist and imperialist politics behind the ideology
of ‘world English’ we saw enunciated by Firth (§15). Joshua Fishman (1992
[1978]: 21-24) has in his turn enunciated a ‘no-nonsense view of English’
reflecting a ‘balance of power resting solidly’ on ‘realities’: English ‘reigns
supreme’ ‘in the cruel real world’, ‘where econo-technical superiority is what
really counts’; the lesson of History is quite clear’ — ‘the sun never sets on
the English language’. Fishman did not see a contradiction between his two
assertions that English is not ‘ideologically encumbered’ (1977) and yet that
English is ‘a major medium’ ‘of the metaphor of mastery’ and of ‘technological
modernity and power’ (1992: 19f). Let’s just inspect his curious roster of the
users of English world-wide: ‘the highest circles’, ‘indigenous elites (“native
foreigners”)’, tourists ‘(“foreign foreigners”)’, and ‘Third World recipients
of Western largesse’ (1992: 20).
20. I have already remarked that ‘Western largesse’ resembles
the alms you bestow on the very people you yourself have reduced to beggars (§
3). But my next point would be that some sociolinguists and language planners
appear to regard the bestowing of Centre languages, especially English, upon
the populations of the Periphery, as a highly desirable gesture of ‘Western
largesse’ in its own right (cf. Phillipson 1992; Pennycook 1994). The fact that
this ‘largesse’ benefits precisely those who require it the least — the
‘indigenous elites’ — would be accepted by these same sociolinguists as an
integral part of the ‘realities’ waiting to be ‘objectively observed’ by
scientists of language, and no doubt of translation as well.
21. The final and so far the least established source
I would invoke here for a ‘geolinguistics’ of a translation science would be large-corpus linguistics, which is
currently transforming our basic notions about language and discourse (cf.
Sinclair 1997, 1998; Beaugrande 1996, 1997c). We can expect similar revision
and renewal in translation science from research with multilingual corpora, such as the corpora of English, French, and
Spanish at the University of Lancaster. The first major focus will presumably
be allotted to issues of terminology (e.g. Pearson 1998), but wider
lexicogrammatical issues are coming under scrutiny. I shall suggest some of the
consequences later on in sections D and E.
C. The conception of
translatability
22. Instead of staying focused on translation and translating,
both theory and practice of translation might profit by centring upon the
conception of translatability,
defined as the dialectical interaction between what would be required of
translators and what actually gets achieved. Please note: this is not just one more division between
‘competence’ versus ‘performance’, but a bi-directional vision of translator ability: the ways in which
competent translators can perform and do perform, as well as how their
performances affect and develop their competencies.
23. The ideologies of colonialism, imperialism, and
‘world English’ depend materially upon the ideology
of limited translatability. I am not thinking here of the traditional
denials that poetry can be translated (e.g. Croce 1902), but of the diehard
notion that these supposed limitations impose an inevitable loss upon every
product of translating. This notion is most glibly applied to translating from
a Centre language into a Periphery language, during which we supposedly lose
such factors as ‘clarity, precision, certainty, rationality, technology,
modernity’, etc. etc. This ideology conveniently generates a ‘natural
hierarchy’ that matches the old racial and cultural hierarchies of colonialism
and imperialism. The speakers of the Centre languages are automatically on the
top, since they can understand the ‘originals’. The fluent non-native speakers
appear not too far but still definitely below them, e.g.. as Fishman’s
‘indigenous elites’ or ‘native foreigners’. Considerably below them are all
those whose command of Centre languages is not very fluent. And the immense
bottom level is occupied by those who speak only the languages of the
Periphery, and cannot access the ‘original’ texts at all.
24. Notice how insidiously this ideology dovetails
with the tiresome multilingual puns between ‘translator’ (‘traduttore’) and
‘traitor’ (‘traditore’); at least we would be unwitting and unwilling traitors
if we are compelled to give our target-language audience less than the audience
of the source-language text got. Even more insidiously, the same ideology can
use the supposed limits on translatability
to deduce inescapable limits on translator
ability in order to justify such timeworn abuses as inadequate translator
training programmes, publication of shoddy translations, plus poor pay and low
recognition for translators. If the limits of translatability can never be
overcome, who can complain about the limitations of one particular translation,
and why should translators be paid more just to struggle against unbeatable odds?
25. More quietly, the ideology of limited
translatability forwards the interests of colonialism and imperialism by
further eroding respect for the local home languages of the Periphery, even
among their own speakers. The limitations — so the ideology implies — are built
firmly into the organisation of these languages. So the language institutions
at the Periphery could not make much headway by seeking to enhance their
translatability. Far better leave these ‘little languages’ (Fishman again) to
their fate and scramble to join in what Fishman (1992: 20) envisions becoming a
‘veritable army of English-speaking econo-technical specialists, advisors, and
representatives’. Army indeed, for
the mother of battles over the assets of a globalised economy.
26. A more moderate version of this same ideology
stipulates that we can after all promote the translatability of the home
languages of the Periphery, provided we ‘reform’ or ‘intellectualise’ them to
resemble the Centre languages, especially English. Spontaneously at least, this
strategy is already well under way. Some of its impact upon Arabic has been
reported for Jordan by Yousef
Bader (1994) and for Egypt by Hosny A. Wahab
(1994). That impact is by no means limited to the episodic loan
translations, most which are innocuous though gauche like ‘kalaamun muzdawaj’
for ‘double talk’, or else patronising like ‘jumhuriyyaatu ʔal-mawz’ ‘ for ‘banana republics’ (Bader 1994: 96f).
Far more ominous were tendencies like these reported by Bader (1994: 95):
(a) use of
the sentence word-order Subject-Verb-Complement, instead of the usual Arabic
order Verb-Subject-Complement;
(b) use of
the present tense to refer to past or future events;
(c) use of
compound adjectives like ‘ʔafru-ʔasyawi’,
‘Afro-Asian’ by analogy to English;
(d) use of the English way of
expressing co-ordinated genitives, e.g., when ‘the dreams and aspirations of
peoples’, which is normally rendered in Arabic as ‘ʔaHlaamu ʔash-shuʕuubi wataTalluʕaatuha’, literally corresponding to ‘dreams of peoples
and their aspirations’, was found to be ‘ʔaHlaamu wataTalluʕaatu ʔashshuʕuub’,
corresponding word for word (except for the definite article, which is not
required in Arabic genitives) to the English structure.
Both Bader and Hosny underlined the role played by
journalism and mass media, where the influence of English may well reflect the
exceptional pressures exerted by rapid production time upon Arabic translators
using English news sources. But the cumulative impact upon the Arabic spoken
among broader society may still be hugely deleterious. The
Arabic language may be threatened by a translation-based trend toward an
enforced ‘modernity’ that could eventually compromise its ‘identity’.
27. The outcome of this supposed
‘enhancement of the translatability’ of Arabic as a target language for English
as a source language can only be a fresh demarcation of what Fishman called
‘indigenous elites’, and would give a new and vicious twist to his already
duplicitous term ‘native foreigners’ (§ 19). Now, the elites can
set themselves still further apart from the ordinary citizenry not just by
speaking English in addition to Arabic, but also by speaking an increasingly
Anglicised (or ‘Englishified’) variety of Arabic which would cause
supplementary communicative problems and humiliations for ordinary speakers of
Arabic, especially the elderly and the less educated.
28. The prospect we face is that either displacing
Arabic with English or making Arabic over to resemble English will impose limitations upon expressibility
rather than remove them. Though I
myself have no expertise on Arabic, some writers who do have made these
noteworthy points:
Much that in other
faiths is expressed through art and music is, in Islam, expressed through the
word, giving to verbal communication a unique importance. […] The earliest
Arabic classical writers speak of poetry and oratory as the two arts which the
Arabs most admired and in which they most excelled. Both of them are of course
arts of verbal persuasion; both were extensively used for political purposes.
[…] In the days before the advent of the media, the poet had an important role
in the field of propaganda and of what we nowadays call public relations (Lewis
1988: 10)
Unlike a number of other
world languages, […] the Arabic language often explicitly marks the finest
fluctuations in context, be they related to socio-cultural factors, to
intentions, or to general communicative matters such as the formality of a
given text, [by means of] rich, flowery lexis to cater for every minute nuance
[and by means of] word-order manipulation […] to communicate a wide range of
added rhetorical effects. (Hatim 1997: xivf)
As these views indicate, Arabic could well surpass present-day English
in its vast richness of resources for public discourse — and, yes, in the
public ‘media’ and ‘public relations’, the very domains which are now taking
the lead in engineering the Anglicising of Arabic. And this richness is a vital
part of the Arabic identity now menaced by imported ‘modernity’: ‘in Arabic’,
‘regrettably, a yawning gap exists between the rich rhetorical tradition of the
Arabs and the way the language is currently being used’ (Hatim 1997: 47).
29. The time seems urgent when the experts on Arabic
language, terminology, and translation join in an open resolution: those whose translate into and out of Arabic
should seek modes for exploiting its rhetorical richness and delivering some of
that richness over to languages like English. I was highly pleased when an
Arabic version of one of my own books laudably succeeded in integrating text
linguistics with the Arabic rhetorical tradition (Beaugrande, Abu Ghazaleh, and Dressler 1993). It is now in use as a textbook at Birzeit University in Palestine, in the
same department once headed by Hanan Ashrawi, whose luminous book This Side of Peace (1995) should be
required reading in language programmes all over the Arabic-speaking world.
D. Expressibility
in language and discourse
30. Leading the agenda of the ‘geolinguistics’
propounded here would to promote an ecologist
ideology of unlimited translatability
and translator ability in both theory and practice. We would mount
international programmes to develop and enrich each participating language in
ways that reduce or transcend the limits upon the translatability of the
knowledge and information needed by its speakers. If you tell me that the goal
is utopian, I would remind you that translation itself is fundamentally
utopian, as Ortega y Gasset (1937) has taught us so eloquently.
31. On the side
of theory, we could invoke a principle which many linguists already accept
at least implicitly, and which we might call unlimited expressibility, or, in everyday language: any meaning or
content can in principle be expressed by any language. As every skilled
translator knows, more often than not the meaning will not be expressible in
different languages by the identical
linguistic means; what was ‘grammaticalised’ may need to be ‘lexicalised’,
and vice versa; expansions, explanations, and expositions may be required;
several alternatives may need to be proffered; and so forth. Yet all this does
not limit translatability in principle.
32. So far, we still confront a serious deficit on the
side of theories that could explain the
conception of expressibility in linguistic, cognitive, and social terms
suitable for translatability. Most previous work, whether speculative,
anecdotal, empirical, or experimental, has focused upon the expressions themselves, assuming that
these have ‘meanings’, ‘content’, ‘concepts’, ‘signifieds’, ‘referents’, and so
forth, all of which come ready-packaged by the language system, e.g., as
bundles of ‘differential semantic features’. Apparently, ‘expressing’ is deemed
an activity that words, phrases or sentences perform by themselves under the
firm control of the ‘lexicon’ and the ‘grammar’, a bit like fitting together
the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to make just so many different pictures.
33. Theoretical research has seemed reluctant to go
beyond the expressions to attain a focused vision of expressibility itself, even though this might be considered the
first principle of translation theory. In consequence, we are unduly prone to
imagine that these pre-packaged ‘meanings’ determine what can be expressed; we
overlook the importance of theoretical research upon the activities of rendering expressible what is not usually
expressed, or has not yet been
expressed at all.
34. The main reason and the real extent for this
oversight have only become plain now that we have access to large corpus data:
the order of language and the order of
discourse are dialectically generated on-line. Until you look at large
samplings, you will always miss some portion of that order, even if you happen
to a highly fluent native speaker, simply because anyone’s experience with text
and discourse is limited. For the same reason, we can all gain from
opportunities to stretch our ‘competence’ into new areas a ‘performance’, and
translation offers many of these.
35. Now, if the order of language and discourse
are dialectically generated on-line, we might pose the unusual question: what holds a language together? In real
language, the ‘grammar’ is held together by colligability,
the tendency of some grammatical elements or patterns to ‘attract’ each other,
whilst the ‘lexicon’ is held together by collocability,
the tendency of some lexical elements or patterns to ‘attract’ each other.
Discourse in turn produces the grammatical colligations
and the lexical collocations which
partially realise these two sets of
resources, and partly vary or innovate upon them. Thus, many of the unpredictable, novel, or even
unprecedented configurations in discourse are easily produced and understood in
terms of their relevant colligability and collocability.
E.
The order of large corpus data
36. I can only briefly illustrate these conceptions
with some data I drew from the Bank of English at Birmingham University in July
of 1994, when the corpus contained approximately 200 million words of authentic
text and discourse. Most
people, including translators into or out of English, would probably say that the
common English verb ‘see’ means ‘to perceive with the eye; to view’ (Random
House Webster’s, p. 1213). Upon further reflection, we would arrive at some
of the less obvious dictionary meanings, such as: ‘to perceive mentally;
understand; to construct a mental image; visualise; recognise: accept or
imagine as acceptable; to foresee’ (from the same source)
37. What easily gets overlooked when giving such
meanings are the wider constraints upon authentic usage, such as what people
really and commonly say they ‘see’ or ‘don’t see’. To show some of these
constraints, I shall summarise what I found for the 365 data lines returned by
the Bank of English for the key-word combination ‘don’t see’, i.e., for the
Negative Simple Present Tense, excluding Third Person Singular Present Tense
along with Past or Future Tense, plus Modal Auxiliaries.2
38. For grammatical colligability, one striking
discovery was the proportions among the Pronouns as Subjects, which together
accounted for 335 lines (about 92%) in contrast to only 16 Noun Subjects.3
Among those, the Subject ‘I’ was attested in no fewer than 223 lines (about 61%
of the total), ‘you’ in 64, ‘they’ in 38, and ‘we’ in only 10. Among the few
Nouns, ‘people’ was most frequent at 4, ‘analysts’ followed at 2, whilst all
the others appeared just once, some with vague similarities in meaning:
‘experts, academics, doctors, shrinks, countries, Americans, Christians, kids,
children’. Now, frequencies in large corpus data may not be easy to interpret,
but do prompt us to pose question like: why should ‘don’t see’ take ‘I’ as a
Subject six times more often than ‘they’ and twenty times more often than
‘you’?
39. To probe such questions, let’s shift our attention
from the left-hand Subjects of ‘don’t see’ over to the right-hand Objects. By
far the most common colligation, occurring in 80 lines, was a ‘that’-Proposition
Clause, like those shown in
(1-5).
(1) taken over power, but I don’t see that anything
has changed.
(2) particularly pleased, but I don’t see that it
matters to anyone else
(3) he said finally, ‘I don’t see that you’ve got an
option, son’.
(4) let’s say you’ve guessed correctly. I don’t see
that you’ve incriminated Deidre.
(5) we still don’t see that the teachers are
well-trained
The social function here seems to be to adopt an intermediary stance
between a stronger denial (e.g. ‘the teachers are still not well-trained’), and
a weaker denial (e.g. ‘I don’t think/believe that the teachers are
well-trained’). ‘I don’t see that …’ can imply having looked for evidence and
not found any. Notice here the things which could hardly be ‘seen’ in any
concrete sense, such as ‘it mattering to anyone’ (2). Indeed, visibility was
often not a decisive factor in the choices of Objects (§ 43-46; 51f ).
40. The stance of the speaker (or writer)4 regarding
the evidence also strongly influenced the preferences for Subjects being First
Person Singular versus Third Person Plural. If ‘I don’t see’ it, then it usually because it just isn’t the case, as
in (1-4). If ‘they don’t see’ it,
then usually because they are not being attentive, open-minded, thoughtful, and
so on, as in (6-7). The choice of ‘you’ Subjects could have same social
function as ‘I’, e.g. (8), but most of them were more like ‘they’ — ‘you don’t
see’ what’s really there, as in (9-10).
(6) bureaucrats. They don’t see the difference. They
simply
(7) conditions getting worse. They don’t see the
economic reforms
(8) stopping in black towns, you don’t see them
kissing black babies
(9) You don’t see the beauty of the bay
(10) so few casualties. If you don’t see the hand of
God in something like this
However, the implications shifted dramatically when the Enumerator
‘many’ appeared just to the right of ‘don’t see’, which I found in 30 lines.
Here, the preferred Subject was not ‘I’ in just 8 lines like (11), but ‘you’ in
20 lines like (12-13); now the denial means ‘you don’t see many’ because there
aren’t many.
(11) I hope this one does, but I don’t see many signs,
frankly, of doing it.
(12) you don’t see many boarded-up storefronts
(13) because boys programme them. You don’t see many
women practising their golf
(13a) I don’t see any women practising their golf
(13b) women don’t practise golf, it’s a man’s sport
and — [speaker gets thrown out]
By using ‘you’ and ‘many’, the speaker can doubly weaken responsibility
for the denial. Such is quite useful if your denial might be controversial, as
you can see by comparing (13) with the more dogmatic (13a) and (13b).
41. I also
noted 6 lines with ‘really’ being used in two differing social functions.
Placing the item to left of ‘don’t see’ implied not seeing something because
its not real (14); placing it to the right could have either that same
implication, as in (15), or the implication of not seeing something even though
it is real, as in (16).
(14) I really don’t see the government doing that
(15) I don’t see that there’s anything really wrong
(16) Alvarez says the Americans don’t see the Japanese
as they really are
As we can see by contrasting (15) against (16), the choice of Subject
follows suit: First Person for what’s not real, and Third Person for what is
real but is not ‘seen’.
42. The collocation ‘don’t see that’ was followed by
the Existential ‘there’s’ or ‘there is’ in 17 lines, such as (17-18). How might
this collocation differ from a version with just a Direct Object, as in
(17a-18a)?
(17) I don’t see that there’s anything funny about it
(17a) I don’t see anything funny about it
(18) I don’t see that there’s any natural conflict
(18a) I don’t see any natural conflict
Perhaps a strengthening effect can be achieved by having the key item
that is ‘not seen’ placed as the Subject of its own Existential Clause —
‘not only don’t I see it, there’s no
such thing’.
43. Attempting to sort out the other right-hand data,
I tabulated all the choices of Direct Object Nouns which might conform to the
presumably basic meaning of ‘see’ noted in § 36 and listed in first place in a dictionary, namely ‘to perceive with the eye’. My findings confirmed what John Sinclair (1998)
has repeatedly pointed out: the presumably basic meaning in dictionaries or
textbooks may not be the meaning in most common usage. My tabulation found only
18 fully plausible attestations (about 5%), as in (19-23):
(19) You don’t see the blood until you take off a
glove
(20) you just don’t see the flag much in Japan
(21) with radio you don’t see the candidate’s face
(22) we don’t see the moon very much here
(23) it’s nice to be where I don’t see the
anti-Semitic graffiti
A small portion of these data involved Objects that would be visible but
in unspecified ways:
(24) they don’t see the reality of war
(25) you don’t see the horrors of the bombing
(26) Hurricane Hugo. You don’t see the suffering that
people are going through
In these data sets, especially the second type (24-26), the dominant
implication is not seeing something that is actually there — and so the Subject
is rarely ‘I’ (compare § 38ff).
44. Two colligations with Noun Object each preferred
just one Noun for a non-visible thing so frequently that they indisputably
count as solid collocations. The more frequent, appearing in 38 lines, was ‘any
reason’ which nearly always had one of three colligations further to the right:
‘why’ (19 uses), ‘to’ (10 uses), and ‘for’ (7 uses). After ‘why’
came a Clause consisting of Subject + a Modal Verb ‘should/shouldn’t’ or
‘can’t’ + Process Verb, as in (27-28); after ‘to’ came a Verb in the
Infinitive, as in (29); and after ‘for’ came either Noun as Actor + ‘to’ + Verb
in the Infinitive, as in (30); or else Verb as Present Participle, as in (31).
These three colligations could presumably be interchanged, e.g. in (27a, 29a,
30a). But each may be felt to place its own focus by moving the respective
items close to the ‘reason’: ‘why’ focuses on motivation, ‘to’ focuses on the
Action, and ‘for’ focuses on the Actor.
(27) If that’s your true pattern, I don’t see any
reason why you should change it
(27a) If that’s your true pattern, I don’t see any
reason for you to change it
(28) I don’t see any reason why Canada can’t compete
(29) top managers don’t see any reason to retreat from
stocks
(29a) top managers don’t see any reason for retreating
from stocks
(30) we don’t see any reason for the U.N. to
investigate
(30a) we don’t see any reason why the U.N. should
investigate
(31) when I find a colour I like, I don’t see any
reason for changing it
Curiously, the data did not attest the combination ‘I don’t see why’
(without the ‘any reason’), which I had intuitively expected; perhaps speakers
prefer to suggest that they would need ‘reasons’ before they would accept a
scenario. Nor did I find ‘I don’t see the reason’ with Definite Article;
perhaps Negation + ‘any’ is thought to make a stronger denial.
45. The second most frequent Noun Object, appearing in
28 lines, was ‘the point’, which, like ‘reason’, is not a visible thing. The
social function would be subtly different. If you say you ‘don’t see any
reason’ for doing something, you imply that doing it anyway would be
‘unreasonable’, unmotivated, unjustified, and so on; so it probably won’t be
done. But if you say ‘don’t see the point’, you imply that doing it anyway
would be ‘pointless’, idle, unproductive and so on; yet it may be done, or is
being done anyway, as in these data (32-35). ‘Worrying’ is no less common for
being ‘point’-less (32). Somebody apparently is just ‘passing the time’ (33).
And many people certainly ‘have dual nationality’ (34), and ‘ski downhill’ (35)
as contrasted, I suppose, to ‘skiing cross-country’ rather than ‘skiing uphill’
(which would be really ‘pointless’!).
(32) and panic. I don’t see the point of worrying
until I have
(33) not particularly demanding but I don’t see the
point in him ‘passing the time’
(34) I don’t see the point in having dual nationality
(35) And what’s more, secretly, I don’t see the point of
downhill skiing
To the right of ‘point’ I found ‘of’ in 10 lines, and ‘in’ in 8 lines.
Either Preposition could be followed by Verb as Present Participle, as we see
here in (32-35).
46. Eight attestations were simply about ‘not seeing
the point’ of what somebody is doing or saying. Using ‘see’ for an audible
modality like talk underscores the extent to which meaning of ‘understand’ or
‘grasp’ can displace the meaning ‘perceive by the eye’.
(36) I really don’t see the point of this, Chief
Inspector.
(37) about this story. I really don’t see the point
you’re making, Colin
A similar displacement could be inferred for some other Noun-Object
collocates, such as ‘relevance’ (38), ‘logic’ (39), ‘need’ (40), ‘advantages’
(41), or ‘threat’ (42).
(38) has a multicultural policy, I don’t see the
relevance of this question
(39) it’s stupid, I just don’t see the logic in it
(40) have been returned unopposed. I don’t see the
need for an election
(41) not ready for Europe, they don’t see the
advantages it offers
(42) But other analysts don’t see the threat that Dr
Kramer sees
All these are not visual, or only vaguely so.
47. In most of the corpus data, the right-hand
colligations were more complicated than just ‘don’t see’ + Noun as Direct
Object. Some illustrations we have seen already, such as ‘that’-Proposition
Clause (§ 39) and ‘reason why’ + Clause (§ 44). These preferred colligations
were Clause-like without actually having the Subject + Agreeing Verb that a
genuine Clause requires. One collocation, attested in 28 lines, was
constructed with ‘don’t see’ + Object as Actor + Participial Verb as Action,
where the social function was to express an unforeseen scenario, as in (43-44).
Even an Object or Actor that was not human or animate was expressed as if it
could act under its own power, as we see in (44-45). Alternative Clause
versions are not hard to imagine, as in (44a-45a), but the originals seem to
have a smoother prosody.
(43) to prove we are the best. You don’t see many
people smiling at a John Major speech
(44) Mr Scalfaro and others don’t see the currency
decisively sliding
(44a) Mr Scalfaro and others don’t see that the
currency will decisively slide
(45) if we make any speed at all, I don’t see the watertight
bulkheads standing up
(45a) I don’t see that the watertight bulkheads are
going to stand up
Notice again the preferred implication, reinforced by signals like
‘many’ (43) and ‘I’-Subject (45), that what you ‘don’t see’ just isn’t there
(or won’t be).
48. An alternative Clause-like colligation, found in
23 lines, was constructed with ‘don’t see’ + Object + ‘as’ + Object Complement
as Modifier (46) or as Noun (47), where the social function was apparently to
repudiate an assessment.
(46) I don’t see the deficit as insurmountable
(47) because they’re only pictured, I don’t see women
as any sort of threat
As before, what isn’t ‘seen’ just isn’t there when ‘I’ was the Subject.
49. Interestingly, both of these colligations clearly
preferred Personal Pronouns for Objects. The most common was ‘myself’ in no
fewer than 27 lines, e.g. (48-52). The most numerous were repudiated
assessments with ‘as’ (in 16 lines), e.g. (48), then unforeseen scenarios with
Present Participles (in 5 lines), e.g. (49). The 4 attestations with both ‘as’
and Present Participle in the same data line, e.g. (50), might indicate that
the two colligations are fairly close in their social functions. A few with
Prepositional Phrases (in 4 lines), e.g. (51-52), might be either assessments
or scenarios.
(48) Banton says ‘I don’t see myself as a homophobic
artist’
(49) I'm over 70 now, and I don’t see myself starting
again.
(50) when I walk down the street, I don’t see myself
as attracting attention.
(51) I don’t see myself on a Versace runway.
(52) I don’t see myself in the role of a teacher,
The high frequency of ‘myself’-Objects might be due to widespread
concern for self-images among the participants in media discourse. Notice how a
speaker can invoke the possibility of a flattering image — e.g., qualifying to
be a fashion model for ‘Versace’ (50) — in the same speech act as repudiating
it.
50. The Pronoun Object ‘you’ attested in 15 lines gave
a different profile. Eight data lines were utterly prosaic: what would ensue
‘if I don’t see you’, e.g.: I’ll see you on Sunday’; or ‘you know I’ve not made
it’; or ‘I’m going to die’. Only a few involved scenarios or assessments, e.g.:
(53) I don’t see you as a murderess
(54) try using any other method, if you don’t see
yourself fitting into any of these
(155) if you can’t handle your own mother, I don’t see
you handling yourself
Evidently, saying what ‘I don’t see myself’ being or doing is definitely
preferred in respect to one’s self-presentation over saying what other people
‘don’t see you’ being or doing.
51. I have now surveyed some major colligational and
collocational preferences of ‘don’t see’ in English usage, and suggested that
they serve useful social functions. Especially when used with the Subject ‘I’,
or with the Subject ‘you’ + the Enumerator ‘many’, the most important function
is for speakers to deny, with a fairly mild force, that something is true,
likely, plausible, reasonable, and so on, even though some people may believe
otherwise. Considerably less often, the speaker asserts that some people ‘don’t
see’ what the speaker does. These functions would be unduly restricted if
usages depended in a direct way upon the scenario, assessment, image, and so
on, being construed in visible or visual terms. Yet the visual associations may
be helpful for implying that the denial is a reasonable one in terms of
perceptible evidence.
E. Theory and practice of
translation revisited
52. I shall new suggest some tentative conclusions from
these data. On the theoretical side, once we have granted that
expressibility is indeed unlimited in linguistic
aspects, translation theory can use large real-life data-sets to determine how
richly expressibility is limited in social
and cultural aspects. On the side of practice, the training of
translators could improve enormously by focused browsing though selective
bilingual large-corpus data. We could refer our own description and awareness
of data to the larger community of real speakers in order to refine our intercultural sensitivities.
53. Moreover, a strong component of large-corpus
linguistics could bring a refreshing burst of ‘geolinguistics’ into university
departments or language centres that offer degrees or at least courses in
‘translation’. By browsing multilingual corpus data, future translators can and
observe for themselves how the comparative order of English discourse and of
Arabic discourse are actively constructed on line. Nowadays, the hardware and
software are no longer rare and expensive. Also, I can testify from pilot work
that students find corpus-browsing far more interesting and memorable than
working through the artificial samples of conventional textbooks and training
materials.
54. These, then, are some prospects for ‘geopolitics’
and ‘geolinguistics’ to resituate translation between ‘modernity’ and
‘identity’ as the 20th century times out. I ‘don’t see’ anything
particularly radical or even revolutionary about them. We must squarely face
the responsibilities of the swift rise in international and multicultural
communication, and we are fortunate that new technologies can help now us to do
so.
Notes
1. James Dickins, a Lecturer in Arabic in the UK, has
pointed out that tagmemics has been linked to the Summer Institute of Linguistics
and Wycliffe Bible Translators, whose impact upon some indigenous peoples in
South has been found in recent research to have been utterly incompatible with
the geopolitics advocated here. Still, the sincerity and good intentions of
Pikes and Longacre are, in my view, beyond all question.
2. I shall identify the grammatical terms here by
Capitalising them. The full grammar is presented in Beaugrande (1997a) as
derived and modified from Halliday (1994b).
3. These proportions would have been different if I
had included the Third Person Singular (‘doesn’t see’), but the predominance of
Pronouns would still be striking. Minor discrepancies in total numbers, here
and further on, arose from not counting cases where data were missing, unclear,
or duplicated.
4. I shall use the term ‘speaker’ in this section on
the understanding that a writer is often implied, though the differences in
usages between speaking versus writing certainly deserve to be explored by
contrasting spoken corpora with written corpora.
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