Babels and the Politics of
Language at the Heart of the
Social Forum
Babels and the Politics of Language at the Heart of the Social Forum
February 12, 2005
By Julie Boéri
Language is at the heart of the Social Forums. Or at least it should be. The
Porto Alegre Charter that continues to shape and guide the ESF process makes
clear our collective commitment to "reflective thinking, democratic debate of
ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking
for effective action". It reminds us that the Forum must always be open to
pluralism and "the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and
physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter of Principles." Breathing
life into these worthy principles requires that people have the means to
communicate with and understand each other in ways that are egalitarian and
democratic. As Susan George writes in her new book 'Another World is Possible
If…', political activists are as guilty as the ruling classes in using language for
purposes of power, control and domination:
Some people use specialised language in order to communicate faster with
each other…but others may consciously or unconsciously use jargon to
impress or to exclude. Some may simply be unable to imagine that others do
not share their vocabulary, concepts and intellectual framework.
Language in the ESF is foremost experienced through interpretation. For the
last three years, participants in the ESF's 'official' plenary and seminar spaces
will have all at some point traded in a piece of identity for a flashy black headset
providing live, simultaneous interpretation of speakers into French, English,
Spanish, German and Italian, and increasingly other languages like Arabic,
Russian, Greek, Turkish, and even Galician. Those new to the ESF experience
are often impressed by this aspect of internationalism; others, however, can be
are often impressed by this aspect of internationalism; others, however, can be
left frustrated by the long pauses, broken sentences and occasional loss of
sound, and have been known to complain about the 'quality' of interpretation
being provided.
Yet how much do ESF organisers and participants reflect on the people, skills,
technology, and resources - and above all the politics - involved in enabling
participants to understand and speak in the myriad different languages that
define and bring the Forum to life? For example, a common misunderstanding
among Forum goers is the assumption that interpreters are hired in by the
Forum to cater for 'international speakers'. Yet since the first ESF in Florence
2002, almost all simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, as well as
document translation, has been provided in political solidarity by Babels, the
growing international network of volunteer interpreters and translators that was
born out of the Social Forum process. The development of Babels and the
commitment of its protagonists to 'learn from practice' pro vides one of the
best examples of how alternatives to market capitalism can and are being
actively produced through the Social Forum process. At the same time, the
problematic way in which the ESF (organisers) and Babels relate both to each
other and language issues is evidence of the contradictory political ethics and
practices within the ESF that must be addressed during the process towards
Athens 2006.
The aim of this article is to critically examine these issues as a contribution to
the debate on the future direction of the ESF process. We begin with a brief
overview of the Babels story so far before turning to how its identity, principles
and activities are being developed by learning from practice. Then we reflect on
the serious dilemmas and contradictions relating to language within the ESF
through examples from the London ESF.
Babels: a Brief History
Babels was born in the run-up to the Florence ESF in 2002 when the dubious
politics and huge expense of hiring professional interpreters for the WSF in 2001
and 2002 led a small network of communication activists linked to ATTAC France
to propose that only volunteers be used to interpret. Initial scepticism about
volunteer 'quality' gave way to pragmatism at the 11th hour when the high cost
of the traditional market route began to bite the Italian organisers, unsurprising
when one considers that professional interpreters normally command between
300 and 400 euros per day. An emergency call for volunteers was made to
which some 600 people responded, eventually yielding around 350 volunteer
interpreters and translators for the Forum.
Although rightly hailed as a great success, the Babels experiment in Florence
was in reality a miracle born out of improvisation, some good fortune, sheer
hard work…and a bit of old-fashioned direct action to boot. Cathy Arnaud, an
interpreter at Florence and now a coordinator with Babels Spain, paints a frantic
scene:
It was complete chaos, but miraculously it worked. We had to fight the
organisers just for a space to work in; eventually we took our own initiative and
squatted a medieval tower. It was beautiful but freezing and we had no money,
computers, phones, nothing. Coordinators hung booth planning sheets on
washing lines; some people stayed up all night to finalise everything. As for the
quality of the interpretation, well, that was definitely a mixed bag.
The success of Florence led to the emergence of new Babels coordinations in
Germany, UK, and Spain alongside the original French and Italian pioneers. It
also prompted more consideration of language issues by the Paris ESF 2003
organisers with Babels given decent office facilities, computers, a longer
preparatory process and a relatively large pot of money (£200,000) to
coordinate and innovate with. Boosted by Babels' participation in the counter-G8 conferences in Evian and Annemasse, the Paris ESF was able to draw on over
1000 Babelitos from a volunteer pool four times that number.
With the Mumbai World Social Forum (WSF) and the first Social Forum of the
Americas in Ecuador under its belt during 2004, by the time of the third London
ESF in October this year, the Babels database had almost doubled to over 7000
people representing 63 languages. From this network, the London ESF
welcomed 500 volunteers from 22 countries who in turn enabled some 20,000
participants from more than 60 countries to express themselves in 25 different
languages over 3 days. However, despite undoubted progress on many levels,
it was widely felt within the Babels network that London had been the most
politically difficult ESF it had participated in, especially in terms of its
relationship to the host country's main organisers. We return to this issue later
on.
The Emerging Praxis of Babels
The impressive and rapid expansion and development of Babels cannot be
adequately understood through statistics alone. The Babels network must also
be recognised as an emerging political actor in its own right with a growing
sense of identity and purpose. A commonly-held belief within the network is
that of 'horizontality' - Babelitos eschew leaders and hierarchies and instead
seek to work collectively as equals in a network organisation based upon
creative thinking and consensus. In reality, horizontality remains a difficult
principle to put into practice, not least because of the top-down and centralised
way in which the ESF itself is organised.
Underpinning the Babels philosophy is a determination to continually reflect
upon its role in each Forum and then learn and develop from practice. Out of
this process, three important political pre-conditions have emerged for Babels
involvement in Social Forums that are now guiding principles of the network.
The first is that all interpreters and translators for the ESF must be 100%
volunteers. This stems from the problematic experience of a two-tier workforce
volunteers. This stems from the problematic experience of a two-tier workforce
of voluntary and paid interpreters in Florence. Babels believes that hiring
professionals or companies to 'service' the Forum goes directly against the
principles of solidarity and developing communicational alternatives to the
market that are supposedly enshrined in the Social Forum's charter.
Secondly, Babels volunteers are not 'free' service providers and oppose any
attempts by social Forum organisers to treat them as such. Instead, they see
themselves as Social Forum organisers like any other and want to participate
fully in debates about the "part language plays in the mechanisms of cultural
domination and in the circulation of ideas between the various social and
citizens' movements" (Babels charter).
.
The third and perhaps most important principle of all is Babels commitment to
defend and promote "the right of everybody to express themselves in the
language of their choice" (Babels charter). For example, for the London ESF
Babels insisted that 'official' and 'unofficial' language distinctions be abolished
after the experiences of Florence and Paris, where the limited language pool of
interpreters combined with the inherent bias of the Forum's organisers to make
English, French, German, Italian and Spanish the official and thus
overwhelmingly dominant languages. As Emmanuelle Rivière a professional
interpreter and coordinator with Babels-UK explains, this outcome led to some
serious soul-searching within the Babels network as to its own role in the Social
Forum:
We did not like the idea of helping to reinforce and reproduce the existing
patterns of political, economic and cultural domination in the world through
some official 'language hierarchy'.
At a deeper level, in its efforts to bring to life these principles of 'learning from
practice', 'solidarity, 'horizontality' and 'equality', Babels embodies the two main
positive achievements of the Social Forum process. The first is its Gandhian
philosophy of 'being the change we want to see', also known as 'pre-figurative
politics'. In other words, Babels attempts to put into practice the very
egalitarian and internationalist principles of the 'good society' the alterglobalisation movement calls for in facilitating communication across linguistic
and cultural boundaries.
The second contribution of the Social Forums is that through organising as
much as possible 'outside' of the capitalist sphere of competitive market
relations, alternative systems of social and economic organisation based on
need and solidarity - and not profit and private ownership - are being developed
out of necessity. Annual Social Forums assembling tens of thousands of people
from across different continents simply cannot take place unless we develop
alternative means of internationalist communication to the high cost and
qualitative limitations of the market. At the same time, Babels must not be
seen as a 'low cost service provider' directly threatening the 'communicatariat'
of working interpreters and translators. Instead, it is an act of political solidarity
of working interpreters and translators. Instead, it is an act of political solidarity
indispensable to the Social Forums and the development of a global
transformative politics and movement.
Putting both these principles and the knowledge gained into practice is no easy
task for a volunteer network working mainly by Internet, but progress is being
made on a number of fronts. Partly through Babels pressure, the last WSF in
Mumbai 2004 saw the spectrum of 'official languages' publicly broadened to 13
languages to reflect the ethnic diversity of India and the Asian continent, a
development thought to have increased the number of participants from those
language groups. Respect for language diversity is also being addressed
through a commitment to improving the 'quality' of interpretation and
translation. Quality in the specific context and purpose of the Social Forums
does not mean a professional standard of 'technical proficiency' but the general
'quality of communication' experienced in the Social Forum as a whole. This not
only concerns how interpretation and translation are performed, but also how
'access to the message' is facilitated or obstructed by the organisational
structures and language discourses of the Forum, and its organisers, speakers
and participants.
For example, Babels is developing innovatory new language tools through
activities like the Lexicon Project. This is an on-going effort by volunteers from a
wide range of countries and backgrounds (teachers, students, professionals,
activists) to create a comprehensive glossary of words and phrases to help
interpreters and translators best reflect different meanings according to
different national, cultural and politico-historical contexts. It is consciously
creating a process of 'contamination' in which the excellent language skills of
the politically sympathetic trained interpreter/translator interact with the deeper
political knowledge of the language fluent activist to constantly improve the
communications medium within the Social Forums.
Lexicons are being formed in conjunction with the Situational Preparation
Project, more commonly known as 'Sitprep.', which records WSF and ESF
plenaries and seminars in a wide range of languages on to DVD to allow any
volunteer - experienced or inexperienced - to more realistically prepare for
simultaneous interpretation in the Social Forum. This issue links to the broader
'memory' implications of the NOMAD project to which Babels belongs. As
Sophie Gosselin argues elsewhere in this newsletter, one of NOMAD's main
achievements so far has been the creation of Targ, an open source software
system which can replace expensive propriety audio equipment used for live
simultaneous interpretation. In addition to the revolutionary cost implications,
using computers to relay the voices of speakers and interpreters the Targ
system enables all speeches and interpretations to be easily archived, creating
a direct and accurate 'memory' of all the debates, themes, and controversies
of each Forum. Taking it a step further, the audio could also be streamed live
over the Internet. These possibilities would allow millions of people currently
outside of the Forum to take part via the web.
Significantly for Babels, the creation of Memory will allow the quality of
interpretation to be assessed and new online 'distance practice' materials for
inexperienced volunteers to be created. Not everyone will welcome this latter
development within Babels. Many interpreters are already reluctant to have
their work scrutinised and not just because they are 'volunteers'. While
professionals are simply not used to such practices in their particular labour
market, non-professionals are often worried about being judged badly and
marginalised. But if Babels is genuine about its commitment to 'equality' and
'quality' of communication' within the Social Forums, then these worries will
hopefully disappear.
Babels, Language and the ESF: Dilemmas, Contradictions and Future Directions
Despite the central role of Babels in both meeting the language needs of the
ESF and developing alternative long-term communication infrastructures with
others, the network cannot and does not function in isolation from the rest of
the ESF process. Ultimately, Babels like everyone else involved in organising
and participating in the ESF, must reflect critically on the outcomes and
relationships being generated by our activities, and what this implies for future
directions.
To begin with, we must all accept and attempt to address the fact that the
ideals of diversity and inclusion within the Porto Alegre Charter still remain
largely unrealised in many Social Forums, especially the ESF. Like Florence and
Paris before it, the large majority of the 20,000 participants - and interpreters at this year's London ESF were again mainly white, able-bodied Western
Europeans. This failure over three years to significantly expand popular
participation of those either living in or originating from Central and Eastern
Europe and the global South, not to mention from the disabled and deaf
communities, cannot be simply explained away by the systematic refusal of
visas (the disgrace of London), problems of disability access or the gargantuan
cost of international travel from outside the EU - the 'politics of language' has
also played a central part.
Witness the London ESF. Although the official language hierarchy was dropped,
informally the same old colonial languages of English, French, Spanish, German
and Italian dominated the outreach materials, website, press releases,
platforms, and programmes. This means that since its inception in 2002, the
ESF has been almost exclusively communicated as a Western European event,
contributing hugely to the fact that it generally remains so. How do we explain
the continuation of this 'language elite' at the London ESF? In general, this
year's ESF organisers, steered by the controlling influence of the Greater
London Authority (GLA), saw language through the prism of market economics,
as a simple matter of 'supply and demand'. This is a familiar story. All too often,
language is treated as 'something that interpreters and translators provide' to
those who say they need it, and not as either a political right to self-expression
those who say they need it, and not as either a political right to self-expression
and democratic participation, or as a means of pro-actively including and
expanding out to people and movements traditionally marginalised.
While it is true that language hierarchisation is a reflection of the continued
dominance of West European political movements in the ESF process, the ESF
organisers also heavily influenced the 'demand' for languages through
restricting the supply. From an early stage, it was decided that the London ESF
would be a much smaller event than those witnessed in Florence and Paris. The
main organisers effectively made sure of this by setting very high entry fees
and only planning for around 20,000. They also believed that in such
circumstances, most of the participants would come from Western Europe and
thus began to communicate almost exclusively in English whilst asking Babels
to translate important documents for the website into the other main
languages. This inevitably acted as a major outreach barrier to the social
movements of 'majority Europe' and beyond because many people did not
believe that their languages would be spoken. This was reinforced by the huge
travel costs and the failure of the ESF organisers to put into place an adequate
system for helping participants - including interpreters - to receive Visas to
enter Britain.
But if Babels is a political actor like all others in organising the ESF, committed
to language diversity and undermining power relations within the movement,
how did it allow such a situation to develop in the first place? More to the point,
why did it not withdraw its participation from a Forum that did not respect
Babels pre-conditions for participation? The answers to these questions are
very complex and still somewhat unknown, so here we simply flag up some of
the dilemmas and constraints Babels faced.
In general, Babels could not prevent the de facto officialisation of languages
because coordinators were only provided with information about the language
profiles of registered speakers and participants two weeks before the ESF took
place. Prior to this, it was only able to build up a vague idea of the nationalities
of people and sizes of delegations that would be attending from second-hand
scraps of information. This is because from the very beginning of the ESF
process, Babels coordinators were excluded from the information flows coming
in and out of the ESF office, and their recommendations for how to integrate
language needs into the heart of the organising process were generally
ignored. Babels was also not allowed to have any autonomy over its own
coordination budget. In other words, just like languages issues themselves,
Babels was marginalised from the decision-making centre consisting of the
Mayor of London's political office that runs the GLA, a handful of trade unions,
and political sects like the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Action and the
Communist Party of Britain. These forces ultimately controlled the ESF and put
up political walls and barricades around a supposedly open space.
Because of this, and a number of serious problems over accommodation and
reimbursement for volunteers, Babels issued a number of critical public
reimbursement for volunteers, Babels issued a number of critical public
statements and nearly pulled out of the London ESF on several occasions. That
fact that Babels stepped back from the brink each time was partly due to the
fact that reaching a consensus to walk away is far harder than agreeing to get
involved, especially in a a network bringing together people from different
backgrounds and perspectives. Moreover, the UK coordinators of Babels who
agreed to participate in this year's ESF did so with their political eyes wide open.
The reality is that the Social Forums - and especially the ESF - are not politically
'pure' spaces where everyone works together in mutual respect and harmony.
They are instead political battlegrounds where self-interested factions fight for
leadership and control and are met with resistance from those opposed to
vanguardism. Babels thus currently accepts that the innovations and
alternatives being generated by projects like itself and and Nomad come not
only through the annual process of organising the ESF and WSF, but also in
struggle against those within them. And whatever the shortcomings of the
organisation of this year's ESF, we still managed to gain an enormous amount
of knowledge and experience that we will now share with future processes,
particularly through adding value to the Lexicon and Sitprep projects. Most
importantly, pulling out would have stopped the ESF from taking place - this
was not a decision that Babels alone should have the power or right to make.
At the same time, in an organising process lasting just under 12 months,
problems develop cumulatively and become institutionalised before anyone has
noticed or developed the means to challenge them. Babels cannot shy away
from its own responsibility in this regard. Through its inseparable development
alongside the ESF, the majority of nationalities and languages of Babels
interpreters, translators and coordinators also belong to the same Western
Europe elite. This means that however much we criticise the ESF organisers'
insular outlook, the way Babels has evolved inevitably acts to some extent as a
reinforcing mechanism of bias. More seriously, while Babels may dislike being
treated as a service provider, it has so far done little other than follow the
market model imposed on it by the ESF organisers. This implies the urgent
need for all of Babels volunteers, be they interpreters, translators or
coordinators, to stand back from the ESF process and once again engage in a
deep process of collective self-reflection and self-criticism in order to learn the
lessons of London.
If we are serious about creating spaces for exchange between people from a
diversity of social, ethnic, cultural and political backgrounds and contexts, with a
multiplicity of needs, then all of us in the ESF process must collectively address
head on the issues and politics of language and communication within our
movement. Babels cannot obviously do this alone. Trade unions, NGO, social
movements, networks and individuals must from now on work hand-in-hand
with Babels to make connections with social movements and actors in
marginalised countries and communities in the process help pass on
knowledge to create new Babels coordinations. This is especially urgent for the
next ESF scheduled for Athens in Spring 2006 due to the severe shortage of
Greek interpreters within Babels. Without a genuine commitment by everyone
Greek interpreters within Babels. Without a genuine commitment by everyone
to an unprecedented process of linguistic and popular outreach - and to the
necessary resources this implies - the ESF is destined to remain centred
around the Western European left and risks having the microphones turned off
altogether.
Stuart Hodkinson is Associate Editor of British green-left magazine Red Pepper;
Julie Boéri is a professional interpreter and researcher. Both are coordinators
with Babels-UK; www.babels.org
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
http://www.zcommunications.org/babels-and-the-politics-of-languageURL:
at-the-heart-of-the-social-forum-by-julie-bo-ri