Locating power in intercultural relationships or why may translators have a hard time
in multilingual societies?
Reine Meylaerts
KULeuven
Belgium
‘Tell me what language(s) you (are allowed to) speak and translate and I tell you who you are’
The present paper will be devoted to issues of language and translation rights in multilingual
societies and to the contested role of translators in these power struggles. Translation is indeed
inherently part of language ideological battles in multilingual societies, and the historiography
of translation policies and strategies, both at the macro- and micro-level, forms an essential
contribution to the understanding of language policies, of language ideologies and their link
with ‘nations’, minorities, migration, globalisation etc. Not only which language(s)
can/cannot/must be used but also, and necessarily, what can/cannot/must be translated by
whom and how in a certain geo-temporal, institutional framework: these matters are never left
to chance, but form part of multilingual societies’ fundamental (legal and other) options and
regulations.
Locating power in multilingual contexts from a functional dynamic, translational viewpoint
requires a combination of text-, discourse-, institution- and actor-oriented levels of analysis
(separated here mainly for the sake of the analysis). At the textual level, the quantitative and
qualitative aspects of translation flows give insight in the frequency and modalities of contacts
between the various language groups. Power relations are further constructed and contested in
social discourse, constituting the reservoir of implicit and explicit assumptions on language
values, users, contacts and translation. These discursive practices take sense within an
institutional framework, promoting or censoring them through language and translation
regulation and policies. Discursive and institutional practices try to define and control linguistic,
national, social, … identities by determining ‘who is in’ and ‘who is out’ (Blackledge et al
(2002. Thus, in order to avoid a simple reproduction of the dominant ideologies, any analysis of
power mechanisms has to be an analysis of the legitimising discourses and of corresponding
institutional mechanisms (Bourdieu 1990:133). Finally, in order to grasp the various and
variable roles of the actors involved, it is necessary to incorporate the micro-sociological level
into this macro-sociological textual, discursive and institutional framework. Through their
habitus1, cultural actors internalize - but also act upon - institutional and discursive structures
in various and variable ways. The more pervasive the institutional hierarchy between
‘majority’ and ‘minority’ cultures in multilingual contexts, the more the actors (e.g.
translators, but also critics, politicians) will have to hover between competing perceptions,
attitudes and discursive practices on language and translation by both ‘majority’ and
‘minority’ sides. This is one of the reasons why translators may have a hard time and
sometimes very little latitude to act in oppositional multilingual contexts (see also below).
The actors’ plural and dynamic (inter)cultural habitus (Lahire 2004) therefore forms a key
concept for understanding the modalities of intercultural relationships in multilingual
1
See Bourdieu 1991. The habitus concept refers to the internalized system of social structures in the form of
durable dispositions. Under the influence of its social position and its individual and collective past, every
cultural agent develops (and continues to develop) a social identity: a certain representation of the world and of
its position in the world. See also Simeoni 1998, Lahire 2004, Inghilleri 2003&2005.
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contexts. It can reveal how cultural actors interiorize dynamically and variably oppositional
linguistic and translational values and models.
In the following and as an illustration of these general methodological and other principles, I
will zoom in on such a multilingual context where the institutional hierarchy between
‘majority’ and ‘minority’ cultures is very pervasive. I’ll focus on the role of translation in the
organisation of society, in the evolution of institutional hierarchies and on the way in which
translators position themselves in an oppositional multilingual context. Examples will be
taken from the history of language and translation struggles in Belgium. General principles
hopefully also apply to other situations.
When Belgium was created in 1830, the choice for French as the unique language of
administration, justice, education, army of the young nation was beyond discussion. However,
institutional monolingualism contrasted with the actual multilingualism on the field.
Especially in the North, the coexistence of French and Flemish (and various Flemish dialects)
implied a hierarchical, oppositional relationship between them. Language practices were
indeed indexed: Flemish, the minority language, was excluded from the powerful political,
administrative, educational sphere. As so often is the case, languages were linked to social,
cultural and political power and prestige and institutional mechanisms contributed to control
‘who was in’ and ‘who was out’. This, of course, has fundamental implications for the
linguistic habitus of all people in the field. Through the prevailing monolingual institutional
structures (French only) and via discursive practices that implicitly or explicitly confirm the
prevailing hierarchies (superiority of French and the inferiority of Flemish), people interiorise,
yet in various and variable ways (from total submission to strong resistance), the sociolinguistic and socio-political hierarchies. In Belgium for more or less one century, French was
perceived as the language of socio-cultural distinction and social mobility; knowledge of
French conditioned access to university and to higher-level prestigious jobs.
What must/can not be translated: the struggle for ‘who is in’ and ‘who is out’
What does this imply for translation? In a situation of institutional monopoly of one language,
legal, administrative and judicial translation is virtually inexistent (during the first five
decades after independence). Translation is not an issue, is not a right, in a multilingual
society that deliberately gives the right to communicate with the authorities only to those
citizens who are able to understand the majority language, the language of institutions. As
institutional monolingualism tends to do, it reinforces social structures of inequality in a
multilingual society. And this of course is exactly the reason why opposition is likely to
develop. Since actors interiorise dynamically and variably (linguistic and other) hierarchies,
discordant voices and practices progressively develop.
From an institutional viewpoint, this means that minority language users claim for the minority
language the attributes and domains of power from which it is so far excluded: from 1850 on,
some Flemish struggle to make Flemish the official ‘national’ language for administration,
justice and education in the North. Of course, since issues of language policy in national
institutions are readily interpreted as a potential threat to the coherence and even survival of the
nation, this is bound to be a long and difficult process. The most important linguistic laws for
monolingual Flemish institutions were only voted in the 1930’s, one century after Independence.
In the decades preceding these laws, discursive practices were particularly revealing of the
heightened socio-linguistic oppositions and power struggles. The overall defensive, sometimes
even aggressive tone that characterized e.g. the majority position, illustrates to what extent
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dominant groups feel threatened by the minority linguistic claims and how strongly they oppose
to it.
The struggle of the minority groups for linguistic emancipation does have implications for the
status of translation in a multilingual society. From absence of translation one moves to
obligatory translation (translation becomes a right) but in strict obedience to legal regulations
on what has to be translated from what moment on. Regulations first seem to condition the
presence of the minority language in the public sphere (public inscriptions, coins, bank notes,
stamps, laws, constitution). Without being immediately admitted in the functioning of the
country’s institutions (administration, justice), translation thus gains in quantitative and
strategic importance. At this stage, translation directions are necessarily asymmetrical
(unidirectional), from the majority language into the minority language (French into Flemish):
the minority language making up its arrears in specific domains. From the moment on that
non translation is no longer an option, majority groups first limit translation to a kind of
cosmetic intervention, a superficial bilingualization of public life, whereas important
institutions and corresponding linguistic habituses remain unchanged.
As a next step then, translation is institutionalised in other, more fundamental societal
domains, like justice or politics (summaries of Parliamentary debates, government policy
statement). Finally, linguistic laws are giving to the minority language the attributes and
domains of power from which it had more or less been excluded until then: Flemish only in the
North for administration, education, university, justice, army... In this long lasting process, the
position of translation moves from one extreme to the other, from a massive movement of
obligatory translation from the majority language into the minority language to a
straightforward prohibition to translate from the minority language into the majority language.
Once the minority language has made up its arrears and has obtained a monopoly situation in a
specific part of the territory, it starts to behave like a majority language.
In between these two points, during the often long period of evolution, translation, and radical
opposite views on the obligation, the permission or the interdiction to translate, are used as
strategic weapons in the language struggles between minority and majority groups. Let me just
give one example. The possibility of an occasional translation (instead of obligation to translate)
is more than once advanced by majority groups as a means to secure institutional
monolingualism in the majority language, to deny the rights of the minority language and to
perpetuate social structures of inequality in a multilingual society. Whenever a Flemishspeaking person would be incapable of understanding a French document, official translation
services would deliver a free Flemish translation of the official French text3. Obviously, minority
groups fighting for the institutional recognition of the minority language radically reject
occasional institutional translation.
In multilingual societies, translation and its institutional modalities, ‘the right/interdiction to
translate’ is thus the continuous locus of ideological struggles between majority language
groups trying to preserve their power position and minority language groups struggling for
socio-linguistic emancipation.
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It is interesting to see how today exactly the same argument is used in opposite direction. In 1997 a circular
(the so-called circular Peeters) concerning language use in Flemish communities with facilities for Francophones
around Brussels, stated that Francophones who wanted to obtain a French translation of a Flemish document
were obliged to ask for it explicitly over and again.
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This explains why translators often have a hard time in multilingual societies. Who has the
right to be a translator? Why does someone refuse to translate? Answering these and other
questions requires an analysis of the divergent and dynamic internalisation of institutional and
discursive structures by members of the ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ groups and of their mutual
contacts and intersections. Translatorship amounts to an individuation of collective schemes
related to: his/her ‘personal’ history, the collective history of the majority culture, the
collective history of the minority culture, their multiple and variable intersections. As a
hypothesis: the more institutional and discursive hierarchies within a multilingual context are
pervasive, the more translators have to hover between competing perceptions, attitudes and
practices on cultures and translation by both ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ sides, because indeed,
in a multilingual space, these perceptions and practices share the same space.
Normally, in an oppositional multilingual context, and especially as long as the majority
language has the quasi monopoly of education, translators have their origin in the minority
language groups. Having interiorised the hierarchical institutional and discursive structures,
majority language users indeed deem not worthy to know the minority language. Their ideal is
non translation or, at a later stage, limitation of translation. Translators, seen as promoters of
the emancipation of the minority group, are therefore somehow suspicious in the eyes of the
majority language users. However, relations with the minority language groups are not
univocal either because translators also symbolize the domination of the majority language.
Once the minority language has gained institutional status, and has taken the place of the
majority language, translation will become superfluous or even prohibited.
Individual translators therefore are generally torn between minority and majority interests. Let
me end by an illustration of what this intricate web of oppositions can mean for the position
and positioning of a translator in Belgium in the first half to the 20th century. Ernest Claes
(1885-1968), a Flemish bestseller author of the interwar still famous today, was also a
professional legal translator in Parliament. Moreover, he was the first director of the Flemish
Summary Report of the Parliamentary Debates (see above). Child from penniless Flemish
peasants, Claes was raised in Flemish. An intelligent boy and promising pupil, he received the
bishop’s financial support to follow secondary school at a prestigious francophone Collège in
Flanders4. As a youngster of humble Flemish origin, Claes felt bad ad ease among fellow
pupils who mostly belonged to the francophone or bilingual upper and middle classes.
Moreover, the Flemish children’s inferiority position was accentuated by the interdiction to
speak Flemish at school. Whoever broke this rule was punished. After secondary school,
Claes studied Germanic philology at the then francophone University of Leuven (in the
North). Through his French education, young Ernest was bound to interiorize the superiority
of the French language and culture, but not without developing resistance to it, both in his
professional and literary career. As a university student e.g., he was an active member of
several organisations devoted to the Flemish emancipation struggle and to Flemish university
education in particular. Nonetheless, as a bilingual, he had the ideal profile to become a
professional translator. However, he was aware of the ambiguous role of translation in the
continuation of the domination of the majority language. So, e.g. when he applied in 1913 for
a job as a legal translator, he addressed his letter of application to the President of the
Chamber in Flemish, not in French. This was perceived as a provocative choice because it put
into question the prevailing socio-linguistic and institutional hierarchies. Claes’ resistance
4
The Church has always played an important role in education in Belgium, and especially in catholic Flanders.
Catholic schools had to form a barrier against the godless public schools. Since most prestigious (secondary)
catholic schools were francophone in Flanders up until the linguistic laws in 1932, they were also an important
factor in the continuation of the existing language hierarchies.
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against his linguistic habitus was even more evident in his literary career. In theory he could
have chosen to write his novels either in Flemish or in French. Arguably, his exclusive choice
for Flemish was a way to resist his interiorized inferiority. It was generally seen at the time as
a means to promote Flemish as a literary language and to participate in the emancipation of
the Flemish people. Due to these pronounced hierarchies, the choice for the minority language
was so exclusive that Claes, although he was a legal translator during his entire life, never
translated his own novels into French, preferring to ‘follow’ his French translators and control
their work as an invisible hand. Called traitors by combative minority language groups,
literary translators were considered as one of the cornerstones for the continuation of
prevailing language hierarchies by the dominant groups.
Conclusion
‘Tell me what language you speak and I tell you who you are’. ‘Tell me what can (not) be
translated and I tell you in what kind of society you live’. Whoever wants to understand
multilingual societies (and are there any others?) has to have insight in the history and dynamics
of their language and translation struggles, as Siamese twins allied with each other. Language
and translation struggles are settled in an intricate web of institutional settings and legal
dispositions, of competing discursive practices, of various and variable interiorizations of and
resistances to these institutional and discursive structures by the actors involved. All these
parameters evolve by their own rhythm, within dynamic and complex power relations. However,
within this intriguing network of parameters, one thing seems undeniable. If, as often is the case
in multilingual societies, socio-political power is linked to language domination of one group
over the other(s), among other things by institutional monolingualism, then translation forms an
integral part of multilingual societies’ ideological debates. This is no innocent conclusion: it
means that an essential part of our societies’ history – at least Belgian history – remains to be
discovered and rewritten. Let’s face it, let’s start working.
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