1 Inspiration
Whenever I get a chance, in class, to refer to Edward Sapir’s famous claim that “[t]he worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached” (Sapir 1961 [1929], p. 69), I usually notice three kinds of reactions from my students. One is a puzzled look of disbelief and incomprehension, something like “what on earth is he [Sapir? me?] talking about?”; another is an outright rejection (“that’s a silly thing to say, everybody can see that!”); the third one is this elusive spark in their eyes, a “eureka” kind of look to the effect: “yes, that’s what I’ve always felt but couldn’t find the words to express it!” It obviously takes us a little while, anything between one session to half a semester, to make out what Sapir might have had in mind, and no, certainly not get to the bottom of it, but perhaps scratch the surface of that mystery a little. Usually what happens is that the sceptics come out a little less sceptical, those who intuitively side with Sapir become better equipped with arguments, and the puzzled ones begin to see some light. But before anything else, we can all be a little more precise about why and in what sense Sapir might or might not have had a point.
With some liberty, one can say that this book is about just that: it explores the worlds that languages construct, interpret, express, and make available to their speakers. Or better: the worlds that speakers construct with the help of their languages. Or better still: the worldviews that emerge, interact, and clash when speakers operate within the realms of the languages they speak—which is basically at all times during their waking hours. We are thus moving within the perimeter of the linguistic worldview conception1 but approached from the perspective of translation as a process and translations as texts, and the contribution of the two to the worldview inherent in the receiving linguaculture. This is a relatively new perspective but certainly not totally original: there have been studies on worldviews inherent in the writings of specific authors and in translations of those (cf. e.g. Gicala 2013 and forthcoming on Wisława Szymborska in Polish and English; or Danaher 2013 and 2015 on Václav Havel in Czech and English). So, the path has already been taken, some ground has been covered—but there’s never enough.
Although the book attempts to cast its net wide, in terms of the problems being identified, the methodologies applied, the contexts and linguacultures discussed, it certainly shows a recognisable influence of my own linguacultural background, which is Polish. It arose from the conference we held at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) at Lublin, Poland, in November 2017, where thirteen of the sixteen chapter authors were present.
2 The Rationale
In fact, the idea for the 2017 conference I’ve mentioned, and so for this volume, emerged from James Underhill’s (2013) inspiring list of strong and weak points of research on linguistic worldview , as it is pursued in some linguistic circles at UMCS (cf. Bartmiński 2009). Says Underhill:
The place of translation within this approach needs to be established, consolidated, and defended. What are the essential foreign texts that have helped cultivate Polish literature? The Bible? Shakespeare? What others? How did the daily translation of Russian into Polish affect the Polish worldview? And how is that worldview holding up to the daily influence of English journalism and its translation into Polish? (Underhill 2013, p. 344)
Obviously, parallel questions concern all languages and cultures, the Polish context is just a pretext—nevertheless, it does bear a distinctive mark on the content of this volume. On that more general plane, however, Piotr Blumczynski and John Gillespie evoke Hans-Georg Gadamer’s rather idyllic picture of intercultural encounter:
If, by entering foreign language-worlds, we overcome the prejudices and limitations of our previous experience of the world, this does not mean that we leave and negate our own world. Like travellers we return home with new experiences. (Gadamer 2004, p. 445; in Blumczynski and Gillespie 2016, p. 9)
This almost sounds too beautiful to be true. Although language-to-language and culture-to-culture contact may involve give-and-take, mutual enrichment, and broadening of horizons, it comes at a cost. Do we really overcome our prejudices and limitations? Do we unconditionally cherish the new experiences? Does either of the parties involved, the giving and the receiving, cry out in exultation when confronted with the “otherness” of the other side? Or rather, isn’t the contact actually painful, full of apprehension, and characterised by the desire to have the upper hand? In our attempts to advance our experiences to Others, and/or to accommodate the foreign viewpoints into the fabric of our own linguaculture, don’t we engage in struggle and strife rather than in an exchange of gifts?
Indeed, Vladimir Macura’s (1990) discussion of the nineteenth-century Czech context resonates well with those intuitions:
[T]ranslation now acquired the character of a complex semiotic operation, a refined manipulation of foreign texts. Translation was not seen as passive submission to cultural impulses from abroad; on the contrary, it was viewed as an active, even aggressive act, an appropriation of foreign cultural values . To put it in more figurative language, translation was seen as an invasion of rival territory, an invasion undertaken with the intent of capturing rich spoils of war. (Macura 1990, p. 68)
Can Macura’s images of aggression, invasion, and war be taken as at least a partial answer to Underhill’s concerns? Quite possibly, for he’s invoking them with reference to the receiving culture, in this case Czech, as it comes into possession of a bounty by “appropriating” the cultural values and concepts from foreign territories.
It is these kinds of concerns, among others, that this volume has the ambition to address. They can be captured in the form of questions:
- 1.Isn’t there a need to re-define translation when it faces the “(linguistic) worldview ” issue or are we splitting hairs?
- 2.How do translated works contribute to the shaping of the linguistic (or linguacultural ) worldview entrenched in the target language? What’s the import of the notions of inter-pretation “placing between” and trans-lation “carrying across” (see Forster 1998, p. 171, in Leavitt this volume) for the sense we make of the world in and through linguacultural contact?
- 3.Are there translation strategies that favour the preservation vs. modification of that worldview ?
- 4.What aspects of culture get (or don’t get) translated in the process? Cultural val...