Translation and Globalization

Michael Cronin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135138295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation and Globalization is essential reading for anyone with an interest in translation, or a concern for the future of our world's languages and cultures. This is a critical exploration of the ways in which radical changes to the world economy have affected contemporary translation.
The Internet, new technology, machine translation and the emergence of a worldwide, multi-million dollar translation industry have dramatically altered the complex relationship between translators, language and power. In this book, Michael Cronin looks at the changing geography of translation practice and offers new ways of understanding the role of the translator in globalized societies and economies. Drawing on examples and case-studies from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the author argues that translation is central to debates about language and cultural identity, and shows why consideration of the role of translation and translators is a necessary part of safeguarding and promoting linguistic and cultural diversity.

1 Translation and the global economy

In AD 828, two merchants arrived in the city of Venice with a corpse. The body was not any old body, however, but that of St Mark, the Evangelist. They had stolen the mortal remains of the saint from the tomb where he lay in Alexandria with the help of the Christian guards who were fearful for the fate of Mark under Saracen rule. The shroud was slit up the back, the body removed and the remains of St Claudian put in its place. The mortal remains were taken to a waiting ship where they were covered in quantities of pork and the dead saint was spirited away to a city which would make the lion of the Evangelist a symbol of its greatness in the centuries to come (Norwich 1983: 28–9).

Translation

Saintly body-snatching was not an uncommon practice in the medieval period. In The Cult of the Saints:Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity Peter Brown notes,‘A hectic trade in, accompanied by frequent thefts of, relics, is among the most dramatic, not to say picturesque aspects of Western Christendom in the Middle Ages’ (Brown 1981: 88). It was, after all, preferable to bring the relics to believers than have large numbers of believers travelling long, uncertain distances to the relics, or as Brown puts it,‘Translations – the movements of relics to people – and not pilgrimages – the movement of people to relics – hold the centre of stage in late antique and early medieval piety’ (ibid.: 90).

The act of translation may have saved on time but it did not save on distance. In other words, although the time it took for a pious Venetian to get to the Basilica was much less than it would have taken him or her to get to the Evangelist's tomb in Alexandria, the distance between the believer and the relic when the believer was in the presence of the relic was just as great. The relic carried the miraculous aura of origin, confirmed by tales of divine intervention in allowing the translation to be effected, and nearness to its presence was a reminder of farness from its essence. The shrines containing relics were all closed surfaces, the faithful glimpsing fragments and shreds of the sacred through narrow openings. In Brown's words, the shrine housing the translated saint is replicating what he calls the ‘therapy of distance’ that is at the heart of pilgrimage (Brown 1981: 87).When pilgrims go on a journey, the principal discovery is not destination but distance. The spiritual value lies as much, if not more, in the wandering as in the arrival.The hermeticism of the reliquary makes the distance travelled palpable for those who have left and real for those who have stayed. In this chapter, we wish to explore the notion of a therapy of distance in the secular rather than the religious domain (see also Josipovici 1996: 65–78). In particular, we want to examine what this medieval practice of translatio might tell us about translation in the new global economy and about our roles as translators, teachers and theoreticians of translation in changing economic, political and cultural circumstances.

Venice was not unusual in being symbolically grateful to the dead. There are few cities which do not owe their prestige to mythical investiture by the presence of departed deities, emperors, saints or spirits. Régis Debray sees sepulchres as primordial mnemonics, an early stage in the elaboration of a symbolic dimension to human experience:

L'os, notre point fixe. Toute civilisation débute par des restes.‘Tu es Pierre et sur cette pierre …’ Martyr, tu seras réduit à l'os; cet os sera mis en châsse; ce réliquaire attirera les pèlerins, qui bâtiront une église par-dessus; et toute une ville va grandir alentour.¹

(Debray 2000: 25)

The standing stone links the past, present and future. It reminds those who are of those who were before and indicates a future time when they will no longer be, but others will be there in their place, contemplating the same stone. In linking a tangible presence to an intelligible absence, the stone or tomb or reliquary is performing a primary symbolic operation. The monument as physical trace also makes the existence of individual human beings transindividual through objectification. It is the materialization of the inscription as monument which allows the subject to emerge for other subjects. Humanity, in other words, is not constructed as an idealist antithesis between subjects and objects with freedom lying in the realm of the subjective mind and necessity resting in the realm of objects. It is the object which allows the subject to emerge and it is in and through objects that our subjectivity is constructed and endures.

And this will be the second theme of this chapter, the relationship between translation and things. In the history of translation studies, the tendency at one stage was to dwell on translation and texts. Translation studies compared source texts and target texts to see what happened and used the results of the analysis to form prescriptive or descriptive laws (depending on the School) of systemic change. In more recent times, there has been a greater focus on translation and translators. In part, this is due to the strong emergence of translation history as a sub-discipline in translation studies but there have also been the theoretical contributions of Douglas Robinson, Daniel Simeoni, Luise von Flotow and Edwin Gentzler (Robinson 1991; Simeoni 1995: 445–60; von Flotow 1997; Gentzler 2001). However, relatively little attention has been paid to translation and things. By things, we mean here all the tools or elements of the object world which translators use or have been affected by in their work down through the centuries. Though tools are routinely described in an instrumental fashion in the periodical literature of translation technology, thinking on the relationship between translation and the technosphere has been in the main underdeveloped.And yet like any other realm of human activity, it is impossible to conceive of translation outside the object-world it inhabits.

The standing stone is a reminder not only of time passing but of time past and how all that is human changes to dust. In the final section of this chapter, we want to explore what goes on in the afterlife of the soil and suggest that in translation terms our ends may very well be our beginnings.

The informational and global economy

So what kind of world is the contemporary context for our thinking about translation, distance and things? The dramatic slump in Western economies in the 1970s, with record unemployment and high inflation triggered by oil price increases in 1974 and 1979, led to a fundamental restructuring of economies in the developed world, with a strong emphasis on privatization and deregulation (see Castells 1980). The period also witnessed the advent of the information technology revolution that would dramatically transform work practices at local and international levels. The invention of the transistor (1947), the use of silicon for the production of semiconductors (1954), the invention of the integrated circuit (1957), and the creation of the computer on a chip, the microprocessor, by Ted Hoff of Intel (1971) laid the technological basis for the IT revolution (Castells 1996: 40–6). The emergence of PC software in the 1970s would allow the advances in microelectronics to bear fruit in the widespread dissemination of the personal computer (Rheingold 1991). In the agricultural mode of development, increasing surplus comes from increases in the amount of labour or natural resources (such as land) available for the production process. In the industrial mode of development, new energy sources (steam, electricity) are the principal source of productivity alongside the ability to distribute energy through appropriate circulation and production processes. As Christopher Freeman notes, ‘The contemporary change of paradigm may be seen as a shift from a technology based primarily on cheap inputs of energy to one predominantly based on cheap inputs of information derived from advances in microelectronic and telecommunications technology’ (Freeman 1988: 10). Manuel Castells, for his part, has described the economy that has emerged over the last two decades as informational and global. The economy is informational because the productivity and competitiveness of firms, regions and nations basically depend upon their ability to create, process and apply efficiently knowledge-based information.

Informationalism is directed towards technological development, in the form of the accumulation of knowledge and the move towards higher levels of complexity in information processing. The ‘informational society’ is to be distinguished from the information society in that all human societies rely for their cohesion and indeed survival on the communication of relevant information to their members but ‘informational’ refers to a particular way of organizing the economy and society. Castells makes comparisons with the use of the word ‘industrial’:

the term informational indicates the attribute of a specific form of social organisation in which information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power, because of new technological conditions emerging in this historical period. My terminology tries to establish a parallel with the distinction between industry and industrial. An industrial society … is not just a society where there is industry, but a society where the social and technological forms of industrial organization permeate all spheres of activity, starting with the dominant activities, located in the economic system and in military technology, and reaching the objects and habits of everyday life.

(Castells 1996: 21)

Information technologies range from microelectronics and computing to broadcasting, optoelectronics and genetic engineering. What is significant about the information technology revolution is the presence of a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation so that information and knowledge are applied to further information processing and knowledge generation in a virtuous circle that is also a non-negligible factor of acceleration. Furthermore, as we use information in all aspects of our lives, the effects of informationalism are all-pervasive.

This new economy is global because the central activities of production, consumption and circulation, as well as their components (capital, labour, raw materials, management, information, technology, markets), are organized on a global scale, either directly or through a network of connections between different economic agents.

The informational economy emerged at the end of the twentieth century because the information technology revolution provided the tools or the material basis for this new economy. A world economy is of course nothing new. The history of empires has shown us that capital accumulation proceeding throughout the world has been with us for a long time (see Braudel 1967;Wallerstein 1974). However, as Castells points out, ‘A global economy is something different: it is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale’ (Castells 1996: 92 [his emphasis]).Another way of analysing recent transformations is to see the economy as shifting from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production or from an industrial system dominated by mass production to one favouring flexible production. For much of the twentieth century, the mass-production model was paramount. It was based on the productivity gains from the economies of scale realized by the mechanized, assembly-line production of a standard product. The product in turn was sold into a market dominated by large corporations which were structured on the principles of vertical integration and institutionalized social and technical division of labour. With the economic slump of the 1970s, diversification of world markets and the emergence of IT rendering obsolete single-purpose production technology, Fordism was a paradigm which was generating diminishing returns. Hence, the advent of post-Fordism or high-volume flexible production which combined high-volume output with easy-to-programme computerized production units. These units could respond rapidly to changes in demand (product flexibility) or technology (process flexibility).

Post-Fordism is the era of lean production, time-to-market, flexitime, the horizontal corporation, the meteoric rise of sub-contracting and the exponential increase in advertising budgets (see Harvey 1990). The main resources driving the new economy are information and knowledge. Castells notes,‘Because informationalism is based on the technology of knowledge and information, there is a specially close linkage between culture and productive forces, between spirit and matter, in the informational mode of development’ (Castells 1996: 18). The relationship between spirit and matter in these new circumstances is not, however, always a harmonious one. In a world of ceaseless change and the unending global flows of wealth, power and images, the search for specific identity, whether religious or ethnic, as refuge and source of meaning becomes intense. There follows, in Castells’ words,‘a fundamental split between abstract, universal instrumentalism, and historically rooted, particularistic identities. Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self’ (ibid.: 3 [his emphasis]).

Self and the Net

Has translation been affected by the fundamental changes in the way in which the world does business? The answer of course is yes, but as always translation is a figure less of certainty than of recurrent ambiguity. In the bipolar opposition sketched by Castells translation occupies a typically both/and position. In other words, translation partakes both of the Self and of the Net. It is linked both to abstract, universal instrumentalism and to specific, rooted identities. This is cold comfort for those who prefer the digital certainties of on/off, for or against culture, for or against modernization, for or against diversity, for or against homogenization. However, it is precisely translation's analogue status which allows us to think out the world in its complexity rather than in the reductive simplicities of Manichaean polemic. Let us start with the Net, to be understood here in the broad sense of a worldwide, electronically mediated environment that underpins the operations of the new global economy. An area of substantial growth in the translation industry over the last two decades has been the activity of localization. So what is it? The Yearbook produced by the Localisation Resources Centre based in the University of Limerick gives a useful definition of software localization:

Software localisation covers many different aspects of industrial and academic activity, ranging from the manufacture of diskettes and CD-ROMs, through translation, engineering and testing software applications, to the complete management of complex projects taking place simultaneously, sometimes in a dozen different locations all over the world, involving people working in different languages and cultures.

(Localisation Resources Centre 1997: 7–8)

Localization clearly relates to the translation needs generated by the informational economy in an era of global markets. It is important at this point to make a distinction between internationalization, which is the design of a product so that it can easily be adapted to foreign markets, and localization, which is taking a product that has already been designed and tailoring it to meet the needs of a specific local market (Sprung 2000: xvi–xvii). The implications of the new economy in terms of volume growth in translation are striking. The world market for software and Web localization was estimated by Allied Business Research to be around US$11 billion for 1999 and expanding to US$20 billion by 2004. The number of full-time and part-time translators in the world was conservatively put at 317,000 in 1999 and continues to grow (Sprung 2000: ix). The scale of projects undertaken is commensurate with the rapid expansion in the size and global spread of business operations. One example was a project undertaken by Image Partnership, a multi-lingual project-management company based in London. They were responsible, along with the printer Ventura Litho, for producing 40 brochures, each of 56 to 88 pages, in 11 languages for 19 countries, with a print run of 800,000 copies. The whole project from initial design brief to delivery of the final printed copies had to be completed in 19 weeks (Hutchings 2001: 42). In the second version of the Microsoft Encarta translation, the project involved the localization of approximately 33,000 articles, 10 million words, 11,000 media elements, 7,600 photos and illustrations, 2,000 audio elements, 1,250 maps/charts, 110 videos and animations, 1,500 Web links, 3,500 bibliographical entries and 25 articles monthly for the Yearbook Builder (Kohlmeier 2000: 2).

The rise of the World Wide Web means, of course, that localization is moving into different areas such as Web and e-commerce localization. Indeed, given that 91 per cent of the world's secure sites are in English, translation for e-commerce is likely to continue to expand. The International Data Corporation reported that in 2001 over half of the world's 147 million Internet users were non-English speakers and they estimated that by 2005 this figure would have risen to two-thirds. In 2003, the non-US portion of the e-commerce market would account for 46 per cent of a US$1.3 trillion market. The Atlas II project of the IDC predicted that, by 2003, 50 per cent of Web users in Europe, 75 per cent in Latin America and 80 per cent in Japan would show a distinct preference for native language sites (Myerson 2001: 14). The advent of digital industries centred around e-learning and other forms of content delivery across the Web has led some commentators to use the term ‘e localization’ (Schäler 2001: 22–6). A crucial difference between traditional localization and Web site localization is that the former is project-based whereas the latter is programme-based.Web sites by their nature are never one-off projects.As Bert Esselink notes:

Most professional Web sites contain continuously updated and revised content, sometimes referred to as streaming content. Most of today's professional Web sites are updated frequently, are provided in multiple languages, and offer a high degree of personalization. The main challenges in maintaining multilingual (or global) Web sites is [sic] internationalizing the site architecture, balancing global/translated versus local content, automating translation workflows, and keeping multilingual content in sync with the source language.

(Esselink 2001a: 16)

The motivations for software and e localization are expressive of the specific connections between translation and the economy in the global age. Producing a localized version of a product means that new markets are opened up for an existing or potential product.While a domestic market may be stagnant or in decline, international markets may be buoyant and may also support a higher price level.A result is not only increased sales, but also as Ricky Thibodeau claims,‘[a] localized product will help spread R & D dollars over a wider base, as a localized version can extend a product's life cycle’ (Thibodeau 2000: 127). If translation is in what is often called ‘the critical path’ for the sales of particular products, it is because time-to-market is increasingly a global as opposed to a local phenomenon. The dissemination of information through globalized mass media or over the Web means that potential customers in different parts of the globe are aware of new models as soon as they come out, for example, in the United States.Thus, as Suzanne Topping points out, in the case of digital cameras the crucial sales period is the first few weeks following product introduction. In the case of foreign sales, the equation is simple: ‘no translation, no product’ (Topping 2000: 111). The objective then becomes the simultaneous availability of the product in all the languages of the product's target markets. In other words, it goes against the profit rationale of companies to have the localized versions appearing after the product launch in the original language. Instantaneous access to information in the original language generates demand for simultaneous access in the translated languages.

Informational and aesthetic goods

There is a further dimension to translation demand which not only relates to global information flows but is bound up with the changing nature of the objects produced in the new economy. Scott Lash and John Urry argue that the objects created in the post-industrial world are progressively emptied of their material content. The result is the proliferation of signs rather than material objects and these signs are of two types:

Either they have a primarily cognitive content and are post-industrial or informational goods. Or they have primarily an aesthetic content and are what can be termed postmodern goods. The development of the latter can be seen not only in the proliferation of objects which possess a substantial aesthetic component (such as pop music, cinema, leisure, magazines, video and so on), but also in the increasing component of sign-value or image embodied in material objects. This aestheticization takes place in the production, the circulation or the consumption of such goods.

(Lash and Urry 1994: 4)

The aestheticization referred to explains the prodigious rise in advertising budgets in the last three decades of the twentieth century and the strong emphasis on value-added design intensity in the production of clothes, shoes, cars, electronic goods, software and so on in late modernity. The increasing importance of the sign and the appearance of ‘informational’ and ‘postmodern g...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Translation and the global economy
• 2 Globalization and new translation paradigms
• 3 Globalization and the new geography of translation
• 4 Globalization and the new politics of translation
• 5 Translation and minority languages in a global setting
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index