Hybrid Englishes and the Challenges of and for Translation

Identity, Mobility and Language Change

Karen Bennett, Rita Queiroz de Barros, Karen Bennett, Rita Queiroz de Barros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367731441
• eBook ISBN: 9781351391986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume problematizes the concept and practice of translation in an interconnected world in which English, despite its hegemonic status, can no longer be considered a coherent unified entity but rather a mobile resource subject to various kinds of hybridization. Drawing upon recent work in the domains of translation studies, literary studies and (socio-)linguistics, it explores the centrality of translation as both a trope for the analysis of contemporary transcultural dynamics and as a concrete communication practice in the globalized world.

The chapters range across many geographic realities and genres (including fiction, memoir, animated film and hip-hop), and deal with subjects as varied as self-translation, translational ethics and language change. As a whole, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how meanings are generated and relayed in a context of super-diversity, in which traditional understandings of language and translation can no longer be sustained.

1
Introduction

Translation in a Multilingual World: Reflecting Hybridity

Karen Bennett

Linguistic hybridity, understood broadly as the mixing of two or more languages in the same communicative event or artefact, whether through code-switching or the creation of new syncretic structures, is of course nothing new. Hybrids, in the form of pidgins and creoles, have developed at the margins of cultures—around settlements and missions, along trading routes and in metropoles and other cosmopolitan cities as the result of migrations and diasporas—for as long as mankind has been tempted to extend the borders of his world and venture out into the unknown. With the phenomenon of ‘mother-tongue interference’, hybridity can also be found in language classrooms and lingua franca situations, wherever people struggle to communicate in a language that is not their own. And for some scholars (e.g. Schäffner and Adab, 1997, 2001; Adab, 2005; Simon, 2011), it is a characteristic of translated texts too, particularly when decisions taken during the translational process result in features deemed strange or odd by the receiving culture.

What is new, however, is our attitude towards the phenomenon. Until quite recently, hybridity was viewed as defective, impure; a sign of inadequate mastery of a (usually high-status) language or contamination of it by some other (usually inferior) tongue. Efforts were expended to eliminate it through policy and education, while in literature the pressure to keep languages apart was such that bilingual authors sometimes developed strikingly different identities in their two tongues.¹ Now, however, hybridity is in vogue. The bestseller shelves are crammed with works that positively revel in it, innovatively exploiting resources from different language systems to create aesthetic effects or define ideological positions. In the public domain, debates are ongoing about the use of dialects and creoles in schools and public places (e.g. Reaser et al., 2017), with vernaculars once considered to be subnational varieties now recategorised as languages in their own right. What is more, this is not just happening in English. Similar changes in attitude are evident with respect to French (Grutman, 2006), Italian (Polezzi, 2012) and Spanish (Tajes et al., 2011), to name but a few.

When did the attitude begin to change? In the case of English, it could perhaps be traced back to the moment the British norm was challenged and varieties laden with traces of other cultural and linguistic realities began to clamour for recognition as standards in their own right. Though this could be said to have begun with Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, it was really with the appearance of the World Englishes model in the 1970s and 1980s (Kachru, 1976, 1985; McArthur, 2002) that hybridity first began to gain respectability, permitting upper mesolectal varieties such as Indian English and Nigerian English to acquire the status of regional standards. Then, with the arrival of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in the first decade of the 21st century (Jenkins, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011), a flexible new variety was announced that was no longer confined by native-speaker norms but instead could absorb all manner of first-language interference in the pragmatic interests of global communication. Now, ELF too seems to have dissolved into the so-called multi- or translingual paradigm in recognition of the profound shift in communication patterns that has occurred as a result of economic globalisation, modern technology and mass migration (Jenkins, 2015). Proponents of the new paradigm (e.g. Pennycook, 2007; Blommaert, 2010; Canagarajah, 2013) have charted how people on the move, in cosmopolitan cities or across cyberspace, bring different languages into contact on a daily basis, communicating in an ad hoc manner using the various repertoires at their disposal. And the evidence from popular culture—particularly music videos and cinema²—suggests that audiences across the world are embracing multilingualism like never before. Hybridity, it seems, is becoming the new normal.

Postcolonial and diaspora literatures offer an interesting barometer of this process. In the colonial period and its immediate aftermath, the imperial standard (whether English, French or any other) was relentlessly imposed, permitting the intrusion of ‘native’ elements only in dialogue, to represent the speech patterns of a character marked out as uneducated or unsophisticated, or, occasionally, in descriptive passages to add a touch of exoticism. But then, little by little, those native features started to overspill the inverted commas and italics designed to contain them and crept into the main narrative voice, unsettling not only the language hierarchy but also (through their portrayal of de-centred and hybrid subjectivities) the political status quo. Buzelin (2006 : 96–97) describes the shock caused in Britain by the publication in 1956 of Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, a stream-of-consciousness novel written entirely in West Indian Creole mixed with traces of Cockney; while Grutman (2006 : 29–31) recounts a similar reaction amongst French readers in the 1960s and ’70s as Quebecois authors, such as Claude Jasmin, André Major, Jacques Renaud and, particularly, Marie-Claire Blais, began to incorporate the hybrid dialect of joual into their literary writing, firstly by means of free indirect speech, which blurred the boundaries between the characters’ and narrator’s voices, and then as fully fledged stream-of-consciousness narrative. Today, postcolonial and diaspora writing is awash with hybridity, created by

inserting unglossed words, phrases, or passages from a first language; by using concepts, allusions, or references that may be unknown to the reader; by syntactic fusion; by code-switching; by transforming literary language with vernacular syntax or rhythms, or even by generating a particular cultural music in their prosody.

(Ashcroft, 2014 : 56)³

The ‘cultural-linguistic layering’ (Mehrez, 1992 : 121) resulting from such experiments has enriched Anglophone writing immeasurably, but it has also been profoundly disruptive on a number of different levels.

One of the casualties of this process is, inevitably, our notion of what a language actually is. Logically we cannot really speak of linguistic hybridity unless we assume that languages are self-contained and separate to begin with, and this is one of the assumptions that has gone by the wayside in the new paradigm. Many scholars (e.g. Edwards, 2004; Meylaerts, 2006a, 2006b; Makoni and Pennycook, 2007; Hokenson and Munson, 2007; Stratford, 2008; Yildiz, 2012; Mignolo, 2012; Canagarajah, 2013; Schneider, 2016) trace the monolingual mindset back to 19th-century Europe and the rise of the nation state, when political and economic control became concentrated in the hands of a dominant group, and policies were put in place to ensure that a single language variety would become the locus of patriotic sentiment and collective identity.⁴ This national tongue was then artificially demarcated from its neighbours and sustained by a range of social and semiotic processes, such as the development of national literatures and literacy programmes, the marginalisation of inconvenient language practices, and, particularly, the invention of a ‘metadiscursive regime’ to justify and perpetuate the new ideology (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007 : 1–4). It was not until the final decades of the 20th century that the most significant product of this mindset, the Saussurian idealisation of langue as a bounded artefact, began to be seriously challenged, not only by philosophers like Bakhtin (1981 : 262–263) and Derrida (1985 : 100), who pointed out the ‘internal stratification’ and ‘impurity’ that exists within every language but also by linguists working with dialects and creoles. For dialectologists, a language is defined primarily by mutual intelligibility (Chambers and Trud-gill, 1980), with dialect continua, such as those that run between Low to High German or across the Iberian Peninsula, throwing up countless in-between forms that stubbornly disrespect national boundaries, despite pressures from the political centre. As for the creole continuum (a ‘post-colonial linguistic theory’, according to Ashcroft et al., 1989 : 44), this is even more complex, with many speakers able to codeswitch at will between acrolectal, mesolectal and basilectal varieties (Bickerton, 1975). Hence, for these scientists, ‘hybrids’ are empirical realities, despite the efforts to oust them. One of the effects of the new multi- or translingual paradigm has been to enhance the visibility and status of these occluded forms; and although the traditional concept of the bounded language has not yet been abandoned, efforts are being made to replace it with more open-ended notions, such as ‘semiotic resources’ or ‘repertoire’, better equipped for a ‘sociolinguistics of mobility’ (Blommaert, 2010 : 4–6, 2006 : 167–170).

If the new paradigm is challenging our notion of what a language is, what, we might ask, will be the implications for translation? Translation theory has traditionally depended upon a binary model that clearly distinguishes the source and target languages, as indeed a number of theorists (e.g. Derrida, 1985 : 100; Mehrez, 1992; Meylaerts, 2006a, 2006b; Grutman, 2006; Bandia, 2012, 2008 : 5–6) have pointed out. How might the process be conceptualised if we admit that these languages are not self-contained and internally coherent entities, or that they may not be truly separate in the first place? And more pragmatically, how should a translator proceed when the source text itself is an exercise in heterolingualism?

There have already been attempts to grapple with these questions from a variety of different angles. The practical problem was addressed early on by Sternberg (1981),⁵ whose taxonomy of possible translational strategies served as a starting point for some of the descriptive, theoretical and applied studies that came later (e.g. Chan, 2002; Stratford, 2008; Klinger, 2015; Oliveira Martins et al., this volume). As for the ideological ramifications, these have been explored particularly thoroughly through the prism of postcolonial translation studies (e.g. Mehrez, 1992; Niranjana, 1992; Rafael, 1993; Cheyfitz, 1997; Tymoczko, 1999; Bandia, 2008; Batchelor, 2009),⁶ though there have also been significant contributions from bilingual states like Belgium (Meylaerts, 2006a) and Canada (Grutman, 2006; Ladouceur, 2006; Gagnon, 2006; Simon, 2007), as well as others focusing on multilingual communities in ostensibly monolingual countries (Bandia, 2014; Buzelin, 2006; Ryan, 2013). One common thread running through many of these chapters is the ethical matter of how to reproduce the source text’s heterolingualism in another language, given the widely documented tendency towards increased monologism in translation (cf. St. André, 2006 : 143; Meylaerts, 2006a : 90–95; Batch-elor, 2009 : 206; Suchet, 2009; Rizzardi, 2018; Klinger, 2015 : 2). Another concern is the construction of the translation’s target reader: for while early debates assumed a monolingual reader for whom everything had to be made transparent through the provision of prefaces, notes and glosses (e.g. Appiah’s notion of ‘thick translation’, 1993/2000), this ‘anthropological’ approach has now fallen out of favour on the grounds that it “turns so-called primitive cultures into artefacts for Western consumption” and “undermines the artistry and aesthetics of the creative work” (Bandia, 2008 : 165; also Ashcroft, 2014 : 56). Today, fewer concessions are made to the reader, either on the assumption that s/he too is multi-lingual (Chan, 2002 : 50; Ray, this volume) or to give expression to the untranslatability that lies at the heart of cultures (Bertacco, 2014a : 24–27; Apter, 2008). That is to say, the ‘hide-and-seek games’, which Sommer (2003 : 2) identifies as a characteristic of bilingual texts, are fast becoming a feature of translated texts too, producing something of a revolution in the reading experience.

Related to this is the rather more philosophical question of how meaning is actually generated in the hybrid text. With swathes of it potentially opaque to a reader that has no knowledge of the embedded tongues, this is no longer the kind of representational meaning posited by modernist semiotics, with its emphasis on the arbitrariness of the sign (Saussure, 1959 : 67–70) and separation of sign and referent (Frege, 2011: 103–140). Instead, the recipient of the hybrid work will be struck by the text’s material presence, experienced visually as a strange graphic sequences on a page, or aurally (in the case of dramatic productions) as musical cadences and rhythms—and by its capacity to conjure up worlds in the here-and-now.⁷ Through “orders of indexicality” that “define the dominant lines for senses of belonging (…) in society” (Blommaert, 2010 : 6, 2007), hybrid texts are also performative of cultural realities and political identities (Bhabha, 2004 : 325–326; Ashcroft et al., 1989 : 41–44; Ashcroft, 2014), which makes them resistant to conventional translation techniques. Hence, there has been a certain urgency amongst translation scholars to explore the implications of hybridity for translation theory, description and practice.

Given the wealth of debate that already exists about hybridity in different domains of knowledge, it is perhaps inevitable that there should now be a bewildering array of terms with which to conduct such exchanges. In the literature reviewed here, the phenomenon is explored under the rubric of heterolingualism (Meylaerts, 2006a, 2006b; Grutman, 1997), multilingualism (Grutman, 2009; Meylaerts, 2010, 2013), translingualism (Canagarajah, 2013), polylingualism (Sternberg, 1981; Polezzi, 2012), metrolingualism (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015), bilanguaging (Mignolo, 2012), translanguaging (García and Li, 2014) and métissage (Nouss, 2007; Laplantine and Nouss, 2008), amongst others. To some extent, the preference is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Translation in a Multilingual World: Reflecting Hybridity
• PART I Translation and the Construction of Identity
• PART II Translating Hybridity
• PART III Translation and Language Change
• Contributors
• Index