On polyglossy

Observing society and in general nature is impossible to find too many similars even in the most homogeneous population. Despite all attempts of standardization --mostly on behalf of national enterprises, ranging from romantic to maniac, and even in times of globalization and massive media-- making of human communities a single one has proved to be impossible. Still I think these projects have had certain sucess in certain domains of human life, and some of them have underwent a horrible process of destruction: for example, the realm of language diversity. Such as nature itself, many languages have not only been marginalizated to tiny geographical regions, but also completeley --and forever-- extincted. Some of them are lucky enough to have survived in dusted grammars and dictionaries that only the very curious specialized scholars know. Whilst the Biblical myth of Babel implies a sacred condemation of polyglossy, being multilingual is closer to human nature and to the nature of human societies than monolingualism. Yet patriotism has lead us astray in making us believe that having one language is more normal.

In some parts of the world, for example in some European regions and in Latinamerica, this seems to have succeded to a certain extent (at this point I have to mention there are serious initiatives to reverse the situation, though). In France, Bretonese --a very old Celtic language-- has practically dissappeared, such as Provenzal. 60 of the 163 indigenous languages spoken in Mexico are in serious danger of extinction, such as Triqui, spoken only by 2,802 individuals --this is less than nothing in a country populated by ca. 120 Million people-- in the state of Baja California. Altough some efforts to resucitate these languages and promote their writing and learning have been made, they are still stigmatized by the Mexican middle and upper classses.

This matter has probably something to do with the idea of building nations and national identities on the basis of a single language, as Hobsbawn observes in Nations and nationalism (1992). With a few exceptions --such as the Austrian Hungarian Empire--, monolingualism (hidden in the idea of a "national language") was the obsession of patriots from the 19th to the 20th century who not only defended the idea of a common tongue, but also privileged a single version of the same language: this is how Spanish succeded to become the language of the majority in Mexico (even though in 1820 barely a third of the population spoke it), whilst standard German almost depleted old German dialects in a matter of only 150 years. I don't really think there are so many speakers left of, for example, the dialect of Cologne  and not so long ago I heard a linguist from the University of Cologne say that  actually no kölsch was spoken anymore, but only a verkölschstes Deutsch.

Before language became a matter of politics, it was common for people to be bilingual or even polyglot. There would be common languages - Latin, Arabic or Greek -- which would allow communication at certain levels, but if you think of the Roman German Empire, which comprised the current territories of Italy, Switzerland and Germany, people must have had a way to understand each other when they travelled and married among themselves. Yes, not everybody travelled in the Middle Ages but still --and facing the coming of Renaissance-- a certain degree of polyglossy was certainly required at least for merchants, militars, artists, clergymen and scholars. The same applies to Central Asia in the same period, where Slavic, Arabic, Turkish, Semitic and Chinese languages collide: I ask myself what language or languages spoke or could understand Genghis Khan and his men and women, who moved across Central Asia to Russia and then to Europe several times. When Atila met the Pope at the doors of Rome, what did they speak? Or when Viking merchants sailed along the river Dneper into the Black Sea and then to Byzance, what did they speak?

Another example is Medieval Spain: not only Castilian was spoken, but also many other languages that were gradually absorbed and dissappeared. Some of them survive, spoken by tiny minorities, such as aragonese. In a way or another, Arabs, Jews and Christians blossomed in the same society, and even though they cultivated different tongues, they lived in relative harmony together for some 700 years in the same peninsula. Back on the other side of the Atlantic, the encounter of Europeans and Native Americans allowed multilingual communication. In the Mesoamerican world, the command of several languages was common -- Malintzin, the young Mayan girl who spoke fluent Náhuatl and then learned Spanish served as a translatior between Cortés and the Aztecs. Many Spaniards learned indigenous languages as well. At the same time the first offsprings of Europeans and Indians were growing up -- speaking in some cases even 4 languages (like the Aztec young scholars educated in the convent of San Juan de Tlatelolco, fluent in Latin, Greek, Spanish and Náhuatl).

Even though in some parts of the world, like the European Union, there are serious efforts to promote the learning of a second, third or even fourth language (based upon the single fact that the EU is a plurinational, polyglot entity), there is still a lot of work to do. It is a shame that many young people in Germany aren't able to speak any dialect anymore or don't even understand them (or want to). The prestige of High German and the weird ideas some people associate to dialects, regarded by many as uncultivated or ugly, are responsible of this cultural massacre. It will be a huge cultural loss when dialects fully dissappear. There might be a few exceptions (it is said, for example, that  Bavarians cultivate and protect their bayrisch) but still dialects and regional accents are stigmatized. To think that we should speak with the same accent (melody, intonation, etc.) is a wrong pedagogical idea that goes against human-language nature itself. I know somebody from Southern Germany I hadn't seen in a long time -- when I told him that his German sounded very "southern" to me, he gazed me  in dissappointement and said: "but everybody says I speak German the way it is spoken in Hannover". If you are familiar with German, you certainly known that Hannover is reputated by its "pure" German language. Needless to say, but I had no intention to offend my friend or make him feel "provincial".

There shouldn't be a thing such as one language policy. I dare myself to state that the natural state of things should be that people could move along as many languages or dialects as they need or want, no matter what. Why don't Mexican children learn at school at least one of the indigenous tongues? They could start by learning the most relevant to their region -- in Monterrey, for example, the Zapoteco, Mixteco o Huasteco, the languages of the indigenous inner-migrants who come from their faraway communities seeking a job in the city.

But still in many other regions of the world polyglossy is a natural thing. Central and Southern Asia is a nice example. Last year I met a guy from Afghanistan. He lives as a refugee in England and, as far as I know, he never had an institutionalized education. Even though his English is not very good, he told me that he learned it just by hearing and speaking - his vocabulary lacked of any sofistication, but still he could communicate complex ideas and teach me some moral lessons about why I shouldn't laugh at friends (he couldn't understand Western humor). Even though he spoke English really bad (as far as I know, he never had formal education), I must tell that I admired his ability to move among languages: he spoke Farsi and Urdu at his cell phone, and sometimes Arabic. And he stated he could understand some other two Middle East languages I cant' remember now. After a couple of days that we spent together driving around The Cotswolds --between Gloucester and Birmingham-- he learned some Spanish phrases and words from my friend J. and me: his pronunciaton was close to perfect, and with almost no effort he could learn some structures and phrases. I will never forget him shouting out loud ¡Tengo mucha hueva!, imitiating us. I thought that if somebody had the patience and time to teach him --and if he had the motivation to learn it or lived in Spain--, he could learn Spanish in a matter of months with almost no effort, regarding his polyglossy.

 I had the experience to meet some Indian scholars in a conference a few weeks ago. They are all not only perfect in speaking English, but they also spoke one, two or even three other Hindostani languages. This was natural for them, and during this conference, Indian Professor Anil Bathi (by the way a very prestigious comparatist and germanist teaching in New Delhi) argued that the concept of a mother tongue should be deconstructed. I agree. And I add: a single person might have more than one mother language in the course of a life. Think of the many migrans living anywhere in the world. In an ideal context, probably a very utopian one, we should all speak at least two tongues (the one(s) spoken at home while growing up and another one). Last Christmas my young nine year old niece was showing me a new game she played on her tablet. It had a name in English I didn't understand, so I took the Oxford American Dictionary and searched its meaning: I read the definition out, which was composed by three long sentences of a certain degree of complication. The child understood them immediatly and found a Spanish translation in a matter of seconds. I was fascinated by her ability, and I praised it and congratulated her. I think that someold fashioned nationalist patriot would had thought that I was enforcing her to "betray" our culture and our "national language" (btw when my mom went to school, the Spanish class was called with the pompous name lengua nacional). But I think that at this point of human history -- and given the current conditions of the world -- the idea of national languages should be only reserved to a matter of bureaucracy and pragmatism, but left behind on behalf of a better understanding among cultures --and of the nature of language itself.

Finally I would like to remember another Biblical episode: Pentecostes, where the apostles received the flame of the holy spirit. And started speaking in tongues.

Intralingual translations

One can translate from one language into another language, but also from one language variety into another variety of the same language. An example of the latter would be a translation from British English into American English. Many Harry Potter readers know that the American editions of the series were different from the British originals. While this is a very famous example, originally British books are often modified for American readers, in terms of spelling, vocabulary and cultural concepts. Despite common belief, such an intralingual translation of British books into American English is common practice and does not only happen in the realm of children’s literature (Mühleisen 2009: 377 and 388). American readers buying an originally British book are often unaware of the fact that it has been modified for them (Pillière 2010: 2). This is where traditional interlingual translations and intralingual translations differ from each other. The readers of books that have been translated from one language into another know that a translation has taken place. In an intralingual translation, the fact that editing has taken place is not as obvious to the reader (Pillière 2010: 6f.).

The American editors’ need to adapt British fiction for their readers is the outcome of the linguistic differences between the two varieties, which result from the history of the English language. Contemporary American English, as well as British English, derives from an earlier variety of English spoken on the British Isles (Algeo 2006: 1). As a matter of fact, American adaptations of British fiction offer good sources for insights into differences between British and American English (Algeo 2006: 5) and are therefore linguistically interesting.

One of the examples of an intralingual translation is the American edition of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding 1998), which, apart from orthographic modifications, has also undergone changes in grammar, vocabulary and cultural references, as can be seen when comparing it to the original British edition (Fielding [1996] 2001). In the realm of grammar, for example, the editions differ in terms of prepositional usage and the forms of irregular verbs. Since Bridget Jones’s Diary is a quintessentially British book, a few cultural references had to be changed to make their meanings understandable to American readers. This practice is meant to ‘move the text toward the cultural background of the reader’ (Mühleisen 2009: 382). For example, some names of personalities from British popular culture were replaced with American or more internationally known stars. With cultural references, the reading experience is probably more vivid when one understands what exactly is meant. Nevertheless, the reader may still be able to guess what is meant even when the specifics of a reference are unknown. The majority of alterations in the American edition, however, were concerned with vocabulary items. Many of the words that were changed in the American edition were everyday words concerned with food, clothing and household items. Despite a large number of changes, many Britishisms remained unchanged in the American edition and the text still sounds distinctly British.
 
The changes undertaken in intralingual translations influence the voices of the characters and the narrator of a text (Pillière 2010). Such an alteration of literature, of a piece of art, can indeed be questionable. Mühleisen (2009) argues that American adaptations are made for ideological reasons, i.e. the need to establish and maintain a separate linguistic identity. As American literature is published in the UK without major changes (Pillière 2010: 7), one might wonder whether an intralingual translation is really necessary. As Mühleisen (2009: 391) points out, American adaptations of British novels could be carried out ad absurdum. Where does one stop? Generally speaking, an adaptation of the orthography may be reasonable, as it is indeed confusing to encounter two orthographic systems for the same language. When it comes to lexical or cultural changes, it is harder to say whether those are really necessary. In a book, words do not occur in isolation and the context often provides help for the reader. It is also not necessary to understand every single word or concept in order to enjoy a book. It is of course also debatable as to whether American readers actually want such translations (cf. Mühleisen 2009: 391f.). Changing a book to a large extent might diminish the charm that it had in its original form. Furthermore, literature can provide a door to a different, foreign world, thus broadening the reader’s horizons. The opportunities for this would be limited when a text is changed to be more similar to the reader’s own world. I can only concur with Mühleisen’s (2009: 387) view that ‘it is one of the excitements of the act of reading that you can enter a new world and discover things with which you are not familiar – and gradually find out more about them.’

Bibliography

Algeo, John. 2006. British or American English: A Handbook of Word and Grammar Patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fielding, Helen. [1996] 2001. Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Picador.

—, 1998. Bridget Jones’s Diary. New York: Viking Penguin.

Mühleisen, Susanne. 2009. Language Ideology and the Language Divide in Cross-Atlantic Translations. In Americanisms: Discourses of Exception, Exclusion, Exchange, ed. Michael Steppat, 377-393. Heidelberg: Winter.

Pillière, Linda. 2010. Conflicting Voices: An analysis of Intralingual translation from British English to American English. E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 8 (1): 2-10.