Translating in Town

Local Translation Policies During the European 19th Century

Lieven D'hulst, Kaisa Koskinen, Lieven D'hulst, Kaisa Koskinen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350091023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translating in Town uncovers administrative and cultural multilingualism and translation practices in multilingual European communities during the long 19th century. Challenging the traditional narrative of nationalist, monolingual language ideologies, this book focuses instead upon translation policies which aimed to accommodate complex language situations with new democratic principles at local levels. Covering a time-frame from 1785 to 1914, chapters investigate towns and cities in the heartland of Europe, such as Barcelona, Milan and Vienna, as well as those on its outer rim, including Nicosia, Cork and Tampere. Highlighting the conflicts and negotiations that took place between official language(s), local language(s) and translation, the book explores the impact on both represented and non-represented monolingual and multilingual citizens. In so doing, Translating in Town highlights the subtle compromises obtained between official monolingualism, multilingualism and translation, and between competing views on official and private translation and transfer techniques, during this fascinating era of European history.

1

Translating in towns: An introduction

Lieven D’hulst and Kaisa Koskinen

1 Translation as a local practice

Language, Alistair Pennycook has argued, is a local practice. That is, languages emerge from and are grounded in particular ‘deeply social and cultural activities in which people engage’ (Pennycook 2010: 1). Similarly, we argue, translation is a local practice, and translatorial practices, too, emerge through particular social and cultural activities in which people engage. It is a truism in translation studies to focus on the social and the cultural, but the discipline is yet to fully comprehend the relevance of the local. In this book we provide our answer to Michael Cronin’s (2006: 14) call for micro-cosmopolitan thinking from below. Taking the issue of the locality of translation seriously, we ground written and oral translation to particular time and space, charting the history of local translation practices in a number of places across Europe. Our aim is to further and model the historical understanding of intermingled language and translation policies and to reconstruct patterns of negotiation between long-standing everyday practices and policies and emergent new ideologies during the European nineteenth century.

The decision to approach this broad task not from a national perspective but by focusing on local municipalities is a very conscious methodological choice. The city has long been understood as a place of language contact, attracting people from different backgrounds and with varied linguistic repertoires, and the spatial coexistence of different languages within the confined and shared urban space has made cities a popular environment for studies on linguistic variation and multilingualism. Recent research has also put forward the logical corollary idea that the city is a space of cultural exchange in which translation operates as an ‘active, directional and interactional model of language relations’ (Cronin and Simon 2014: 119; see also Cronin 2006 and Simon 2012). We continue this emerging spatially determined research tradition in translation studies, agreeing that one of the best possible loci to find evidence of such an interaction is the city.

As an entity below – and to an extent under the radar of – the level of the emerging nation state, the nineteenth-century city bears traces of deeply engrained habits while it is also constrained to apply or adapt, at its own level, the decisions made by the political centre. The title ‘Translating in Town’ rather than the more commonly used city was chosen to underline that the contributions to this volume contain evidence not only from well-known cosmopolitan cultural capitals but also from a variety of smaller towns and villages across the borderlands and heartlands of Europe. We acknowledge the varying usage and definitions of cities and towns, and the difficulty of applying them across historical periods in non-anglophone territories. What we wish to underline is the relevance of looking into language and translation policies and practices in municipalities of different size and status, applying the interactional model of everyday practices and language ideologies to entities that vary in scope, demography, location and more elements. In this way we can begin to account for both the specifics of the various locations and their similarities and common features.

Another significant contribution to the emerging ‘translation and the city’ research tradition comes from the decisively historical perspective employed by all our contributors, and from the unified research aim to advance our understanding of a particular period within a particular geographical area. The chosen time span, the long nineteenth century, was decisive in the building of a new social order in Europe, and language and translation issues were deeply intertwined with processes of modernization, industrialization and democratization. In looking at nineteenth-century translation policies we are therefore looking at a moving target. The European nation states were emerging, societies and municipalities were in flux, and so were also local language hierarchies, language practices and translation policies.

During the European nineteenth century, new ideas of political autonomy and cultural self-determination came to the fore, ushering in culturally oriented viewpoints that have inspired numerous historians of our time (see, for example, Hobsbawm 1992). Napoleon’s defeat and the ensuing peace Congress of Vienna (1814–15) are often taken as the starting points of a new era (Duchardt 2014). Major powers such as Austria, Britain, France, Russia and to some extent Prussia, reshuffled large parts of Europe into new or modified geopolitical constructs such as the German Confederation, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, the Grand-Duchy of Finland and even France or Austria. The new authorities of these emerging nation states facilitated and encouraged the overall spread of national feelings and ideologies via the media, public life and the many institutional and daily practices including school and education, church, administration, court, arts, monuments, theatre, historical narratives and literary genres (Anderson 1991; Leerssen 2011).

Languages became crucial vectors of national ideologies throughout Europe. Their use was partly reframed by new or rediscovered functions in addition to those of carrying information, imposing power or conveying prestige: languages received the task to bind members of national communities together and to enable them to voice this connectedness inside and outside the new nation states (Thiesse 1992). Languages originally rooted in regional and even local communities became ‘national’, as opposed to ‘foreign’ and hegemonic ones, in particular those prescribed by the Napoleonic and Habsburg regimes which they complemented, competed and eventually replaced (e.g. Weber 1976).

One nation, one language was the dominant ideology of the time, but in spite of their key premise of linguistic homogeneity, all nation states had to make complex decisions with regard to the status of the various languages used on their territory: Which one(s) would remain or become official, to be used for writing and publication of constitutions and codes, for the exchanges between the authorities and the citizens and for the representation of the state outwards? Which rights would be allotted to the speakers of the non-official languages? Fragile compromises had to be found between the major or exclusive status given to a specific language in legal and institutional domains such as law, politics, national ministries and local administration and the free or at least less constrained use of other languages in settings like religious practices, first-degree schooling, literary societies, publishing houses or written media. These compromises found many shapes: in France, for instance, regional languages were unequivocally minoritized and even banned in most domains of public life since the imposition of the français national (National French) by the French revolutionaries (Balibar 1985). By contrast, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire provided a Nationalitätengesetz (nationalities law) guaranteeing a certain degree of linguistic autonomy to an array of ethnic communities (Schjerve and Vetter 2007; Wolf 2015), while the Ottoman Empire actively sustained regional multilingualism till the twentieth century (Gawrych 1983). Of course, language practices also evolved in the course of the century, due to shifting nationalist and other policies in both the public and the private domains (see, for example, Rindler-Schjerve 2003).

Still, it would be fallacious to think that all language attitudes and language choices have undergone the same process of nationalization. On the contrary, some simply continued the usages established by former language regimes. For instance, although Finland was annexed to Russia in 1809, Swedish remained its only official language well beyond mid-nineteenth century. Similarly, the regulations of official language use by the young Belgian government largely retained the rulings imposed by the French revolutionaries, followed by Napoleon, on Belgium, the Netherlands, parts of Germany, Luxemburg and Italy. And even these hegemonic regimes had already built on earlier customized practices of language use in legislation and administration, some of which dated back to the Middle Ages. Such continued practices, one may argue, can be understood as examples of national ‘indifference’, by people who ‘are usually not actively or consciously engaged in concerted, organized nation-building strategies’ (Beyen and Van Ginderachter 2012: 10). Think of the many civil servants, clerks, secretaries and translators that survived the changes of political regimes.¹ They inherited, and transmitted in turn, language views, norms and practices over generations, as if they ‘seemed on the surface to resist the momentum of modern nation-building projects’ (Zahra 2010: 96). National indifference does not necessarily mean absence of national loyalty but rather loyalty to religious, social, professional and, in the case we are studying hereafter, regional and local entities, that is, a ‘banal city loyalty’ (Van Ginderachter 2018: 586).

At any rate, national indifference and ‘hot’ nationalism (Billig, 1995: 43 ff.) coexisted side by side in many of the new nation states in Europe, turning this coexistence into a truly European trend. This trend could very well be the outcome of spillover effects between more influential and less influential states. Indeed, in spite of the political independence that had been conquered by the new states, the social and cultural prestige of the hegemonic languages such as French, German or even Latin still pervaded large territories and many practices well into the nineteenth century. For example, French remained the most prominent carrier of legal thinking and writing in Europe, even in those regimes that designed their own national systems (Soleil 2017). The lingering old language regimes were also a necessity, as vernacular regional languages were only gradually developed into the kinds of usage new public domains required.

The historical study of these interconnected nationalisms with regard to language issues is still in the making, offering a striking contrast with the wealth of contributions on separate language areas and particular national language regimes (see, for example, Osterhammel and Conrad 2004). Yet many of these contributions, since they manifest a great diversity of viewpoints and methods towards nationalist language policies, lack enough shared ground to invite large-scale comparisons of the solutions offered by European governments to handle the issues of multilingualism.

The focal nineteenth-century phenomenon of the emerging nation states across Europe, with their pressing language ideological and practical needs for solving issues of multilingualism, has also foregrounded research that is based on methodological nationalism. That is, the national level has offered itself as the self-evident primary level of analysis. This has also made sense, as language regimes and practices were – and still are – often regulated at the national level. But methodological nationalism obscures lower level phenomena such as resistant local practices, unique regional realities or the fuzziness of border areas. By zooming into the level of the municipal local realities, we aim to offer a novel contribution to the study of language and translation practices during an era when Europe was radically reshaped.

2 Mapping translation policies in the making

This book investigates the intersection between nationalisms and multilingualism in Europe. The contributions take the reader through the streets, court rooms and offices in European cities big and small, central and peripheral, tracking the remaining traces of nineteenth-century written and oral translation practices. The chapters are grounded on methodological translation history work, and they offer a wealth of examples on how archival sources, in particular, can be explored to advance our knowledge on translatorial practices across time. Significantly, we also aim to show how looking into translation allows us to contribute to study beyond disciplinary borders and to bring to light new aspects of more general questions – in this case the role of multilingualism and language conflicts in the emergence of European nationalisms.

All chapters focus on (written or oral) translation practices and translation policies within a particular locale. Recent research on language policy, although in itself a domain with competing views, has considerably enhanced the potential to achieve clear and workable frameworks to deepen historical insights in this area. One well-known theoretical model to study language policies (Spolsky 2012: 5) distinguishes between three layers: language practices (‘the actual language practices of the members of a speech community’), language beliefs or ideology (‘the values assigned by members of a speech community to each variety and variant and their beliefs about the importance of these values’) and language management (‘the efforts by some members of a speech community who have or believe they have authority over other members to modify their language practice’). The three layers are closely tied up, since language management must be consistent with language practice and beliefs in order to provide r eal effects (Spolsky 2012: 222).

Languages have always partaken in international exchanges, which expanded considerably after the Napoleonic Wars. Any history of language policies during the nineteenth century obviously faces the necessity to observe these exchanges, as they operate at the three levels: language beliefs and regulatory practices migrate between nation states, as do language products themselves. The techniques by which these exchanges are carried out are diverse: borrowing, plagiary, multilingual writing, code-mixing and translation. In particular the last modality developed considerably during the nineteenth century, introducing policies of a new kind: while the previous hegemonic regimes mainly sustained monolingual and unidirectional translations (e.g. from French into the vernaculars of the annexed territories, cf. Schreiber 2015), a larger range of directions developed, both between the languages of a single nation state and between the latter and those shared with or pertaining to other nation states (cf. D’hulst and Van Gerwen 2018).

Clearly, the diversification of language regimes and the multiplication of translation directions a...