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The translational city
Sherry Simon
What is a translational city?
There are no monolingual cities. The diversity of urban life always includes the encounter and exchange of languages. Conversations on sidewalks, buses and in corner stores, the display of scripts on storefronts and billboardsâthese are key to the sensory experience of every city. The accents and rhythms of speech, the landscape of signs, they shape the urban environment.
But urban languages do not simply coexist: they connect, they enter into networks. This means that cities are not only multilingualâthey are translational. Translation tells which languages count, how they occupy the territory and how they participate in the discussions of the public sphere.
Despite awareness of multilingualism, language interactions are often overlooked as crucial to meaningful spaces of contact and civic participation. Understanding urban space as a translation zone means taking into account the specific history and geography of the city, the circulation of language within urban space, zones of resistance and misconnection.
What might a map of the translational city look like? Think of a familiar type of language mapâthe kind that shows the multitude of languages one might find in a city like New York, for example, Jill Hubleyâs âThe Ultimate Map of New Yorkâs Non-English Languagesâ (www.citylab.com/design/2016/11/languages-spoken-in-new-york-city-map/506054/). It would display a mosaic of colours, indicating the homes or shops where a language is spoken. But what if the map focused instead on crossings and shifts, and on zones where languages meetâplaces that we could call sites of translation?
This map would have to indicate the direction of language transactionsâthe from and to of translation. Immigrant and minority languages will be largely translated into the dominant tonguesâthe stories and texts of migrants given legitimacy in the tongues of their new homesâwhile translation in the other direction will consist mainly of instructions and advice. The locations of cultural activities involving translation (theatres, publishing houses), scholarship (universities), tourism, journalism, health care and economic exchange would be indicated.
The map would also indicate sites of forgotten or suppressed languages, places whose memories are reactivated through translation. Translation is a pendulum. The back swing recalls the violence of voices suppressed. The forward swing embraces the struggle to reanimate and reinstate those languages and the worlds they contain. If languages can be eliminated through translation, then languages can be reanimated equally through counter-translation, brought back to the surface and into circulation. Disappeared languages are reinserted into public space through the collective activist work of memory. In the cities of North America, for instance, indigenous languages are reclaiming their presence in urban spaceâas place or street names, or in acts of cultural affirmation.
All cities, past and present, can be understood as fields of translational forces. Every city has its own map of zones and sites, resulting from the interactions among its home and migrant languages, its entitled and marginalized, precarious populations, and from the spatial organization of the cityâthe neighbourhoods, divisions and contact zones where languages come together. It is not the simple fact of translation that defines the history of these cities but the ways in which language interaction materializes social and cultural relations. Languages move across city space as a result of the forces that drive them. These forces define the direction and intensity of language traffic; they also determine the mood and affect of language exchangeâwhether translation is cool or warm, a transaction of pure protocol or an expression of urgency.
In translation studies, research on the city responds to two interlinked imperatives. First, it responds to the need to focus on local practices and specific spatial contexts, breaking with the default reliance on national languages as end terms. In the city, translation takes place across a wide variety of idioms, regional variants and languages which are not necessarily âforeignâ one to the other. They are physically proximate, share common references and in some cases share a common sense of entitlement to the city. Second, the city puts pressure on translation as a clearly bounded concept. Translation becomes a wide category of language exchange that includes translanguaging, multilingual artistic projects, political activism mediating across global movements, projects of renaming that symbolically territorialize public space, and the shifts in individual identity that are forms of self-translation. The cities open fresh perspectives on the ways languages intermingle and connect.
This article will examine recent research into the city by focusing on six critical concepts:
- 1Nationalist makeovers
- 2Dual cities
- 3Migration, presencing and translanguaging
- 4Mediation and mediators
- 5Modernist aesthetic practices
- 6Translation sites
Nationalist makeovers
Linguistic nationalism had an important impact on European cities during the 19th century, affecting translation practices and translation policies (Dâhulst and Koskinen 2020; cf. Dâhulst, this volume). During the crucial transitional period in European history when nationalism was an active force and yet continued to coexist with imperial and cosmopolitan practices, local responses were often improvisedâwhether in the streets, courtrooms and offices of cities, or as Michaela Wolf has shown, in the drawing rooms and kitchens of private houses. The legal egalitarianism of the Habsburg administration, for instance, which guaranteed rights of translation to national languages, competed with the rising power of local languages, while informal relations were guided by class hierarchies and cultural prestige (Wolf 2015).
The impact of nationalism was dramatic, however, when cities experienced language makeovers. The first decades of the 20th century saw many multilingual imperial cities reborn as national cities. This was the case across Europe and the Middle East, as the fall of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires resulted in the restructuring of states and the nationalist rebranding of cities. Such transformations also occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War, especially in Eastern Europe.
The city of Salonica/Thessaloniki is an example of such a makeover. Between the years 1912 and 1928, the city was transformed from a cosmopolitan, largely Turkish- and Ladino-speaking place, into a Greek city. An Ottoman city from 1430 to 1912, Salonica became Thessaloniki as a result of Greek victories during the first Balkan war. The population exchanges between Greece and Turkey that began as early as 1913 and attained massive proportions in 1923 further transformed the city. Thessalonikiâs Christian identity was enhanced by the arrival of some 100,000 Christians from Asia Minor who filled the city as Muslims were forced to cross the Aegean into Turkey. What had once been a cosmopolitan, mixed city, where Turkish, Ladino, Armenian and many other languages were heard, gradually became a Greek-speaking place. While barely one third of the population spoke Greek in 1912, Thessaloniki was by 1928 almost entirely Greek-speaking.
The remaking of Salonica was especially remarkable because the spatial configuration of the city was also transformed to align with its new linguistic identity. A great fire destroyed the city centre in 1917, and in its aftermath a modern and rational city plan was devised to reflect its new political identity. In one of the first great works of European urban planning in the 20th century, the French urban planner Ernest HĂ©brard created a grand new design in the neo-Byzantine style, solidifying the imprint of the new Greek state. Traces of the Ottoman past and even the street layout of the densely packed Jewish quarters were wiped out. In few cities can one see such a radical transformation of the cityâs identity and the realignment in parallel of both linguistic and built heritage.
Thessaloniki was among a legion of cities that experienced language flips in the wake of imperial collapse. These were traumatic transformations, where one identity was obliterated in favour of a more modern affiliation, destined to make the city more truly itself. In Central Europe, successive border shifts in the wake of war and occupation had immense repercussions on the language lives of cities. Lemberg-LwĂłw-Lviv, Pressburg-Pozsony-Presporak-Bratislava, Danzig-Gdansk, Wilno-Vilna-Vilnius, Czernowitz-Cernauti-Chernivtsi: variants of the city name stand for a new regime of political and linguistic power. Entangled in the transformations brought about by the fall of the Habsburg Empire, two World Wars, and the end of Communism, the cosmopolitan cities of Central Europe fell prey to many forms of forced translation.
Lviv is a compelling example. Variously called Leopolis (Italian), Lemberg (German and Yiddish), LwĂłw (Polish), Lvov (Russian) and today Lviv (Ukrainian), it is a city of stratified histories. The name of the street that the grand Opera sits on, according to the interactive map on the website of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe (https://lia.lvivcenter.org/#!/map/), changed ten times between 1940 and the presentâfrom Untere Karl Ludwig Strasse in Habsburg times to Opernstrasse, Adolf-Hitler-Ring, and Prospekt Lenina, to todayâs Prospeckt Svobody. Each easy click on the map calls up a chapter in a turbulent history of murderous conflicts.
Because of the successive layers that make up the history of Lviv, language is a powerful vehicle of memory. The very instability of meaning and topography in the city, where names and memories mutated with the changing configurations of power, points to translation as an overburdened metaphor. Different versions of a guidebook to the city in Ukrainian, English and Polish offer subtle changes in emphasis and impose different forms of exclusion (Sywenky 2014; cf. Sywenky, this volume). Translation is a form of commodification when it packages the essence of the city for select audiencesâthrough tourist guides (see Yun 2018 for a study on the commodification of the district of Itaewon, in Seoul, South Korea, as reduced to capsule âtranslationsâ found in tourist guides; cf. Yun, this volume).
Tourists and visitors have become the bearers of linguistic memory. Large groups of noisy Polish tourists visit the iconic restaurants, palaces and museums that celebrate the pre-war version of the city. Somewhat less prominent groups of German-language tourists visit Habsburg sites. And Jewish tourists have begun to return to the city in search of a tragic past. Yesterdayâs language mixings have turned into a trade in cultural meanings and in competing claims to the city (Lyubas 2018). There is a renewed mixing of languages, then, but some count as insider tongues, while others are confined to the role of observers.
Who is the guardian of a cityâs memory? To read the story of a city like Lviv, historians must be able to combine the narratives written in its many languages. Its identity would have to be a composite, combining the angles of vision from its multiple pasts. Similarly, the languages and memories of the past must be reintegrated into the materiality of the city, as scripts, as monuments, as marks on the legible surfaces of its streets and buildings.
Dual cities
There is a special character to cities where more than one language group feels entitled to the same territory. Each community considers itself to be an âinsiderââan original or historically legitimate presence. This situation results from forms of colonialism and imperialism, where the imposition of one language on another has resulted in a situation of rivalry. In contrast to the previous situation of the âmakeoverâ, where one language effectively eliminates its rivals (at least officially), the dual city witnesses ongoing forms of competition.
In such cases two principal languages play out their disputes in public view. An essential aspect of duality is that each language is supported by institutions of similar authorityâuniversities, writersâ associations, publishing houses, legal rights, eligibility for government subsidies, etc. One might want to call such cities bilingual, but the term is misleading because by...
