20101220.1046

I noted in my last post that I had received my copy of Profession 2010. Some days later, after a holiday party and several sets of exam-gradings, I have finally finished my first reading of it, and as with the previous issues, I find myself quite pleased with the text.

The 2010 issue is divided into some four sections. The first, centering around the Presidential Forum, discusses translation studies, which is a seemingly strongly emergent field of inquiry in the humanities and one which piques my interest both as one who does work as a medievalist (which almost always involves some translation) and as a teacher at a school largely populated by non-native speakers of English. The second discusses disability and language, a field with which I have had only limited contact. The third is a less-organized grouping of articles discussing a variety of subjects (including one relevant to this blog and all blogs, generally), while the fourth is the "Forum" in which Philip Goldstein and Gerald Graff argue about what the latter states in Profession 2009.

A concept that I had had earlier but that I find reinforced by the translation studies section of Profession 2010 is the notion that translation traditionally relies on the concept--not entirely accurate--that there is a single, stable version of a given language, which can be converted into a single, stable version of another language. For example, Naoki Sakai directly addresses the futility of the idea in "Translation and the Figure of Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action." Professor Sakai notes that "The unity of language cannot be given in experience because it is nothing but a regulative idea, enabling us to comprehend related data about languages" (27); Sakai cites Kant's definition of the regulative idea as one not actually in evidence but applied so as to make possible systematic interpretation of present evidence (I am, of course, paraphrasing). In Sakai's view, the concept of unified language accompanies unified nation-hood, and both are comparatively recent concepts that are artificially developed (30-31), and as such, both are contingent upon an Other (32). Sakai's viewpoint opens up any translated text to postcolonial analysis, really, and so the article serves to undergird more critical work.

More work on translation is, in fact, called for by the articles in the translation studies cluster in Profession 2010. As part of this, Catherine Porter notes that there is demand for qualified, productive translators (7), seemingly as an imminently understandable response to globalism and the breakdown of sociolinguistic hegemony. Verena Conley expands upon the notion, stating that "the global circulation of languages and cultures that, intersecting and interacting multifariously, are the foundation no longer for Towers of Babel but for myriad networks in and between which translations proliferate" (19). And it is in this multiplicity of sociolinguistic interaction that my teaching begins to be affected.

As I noted, many if not most of my students are not native speakers of English. By the time they reach my classes, though, they are expected to be able to function at the collegiate level (whatever that means) in English, largely as a result of having taken and passed a long sequence of ESL courses offered by my institution. In large part, they are; the tasks I set before them, they accomplish, perhaps not spectacularly well, but competently.

But there are always some who manage to slide through and should not have. I know I am not always as patient with them as I ought to be (though in one or two cases, I have been far more forgiving than is entirely appropriate). Still, at what point do I actually enter the sequence? I know that much of what I do is explicitly the development of vocabulary and specific modes of thought and inquiry which are derived at length from culturally-specific underlying concepts, and that the cultures spawning them are not the same which give rise to my students (including many of the native speakers, though I am not about to go into that particular discussion at the moment). Am I not then simply doing what we might call a more advanced level of ESL? Or is it something different altogether?

Ideas?

Works Cited
~Conley, Verena. "Living in Translation." Profession 2010 (2010): 18-24. Print.
~Porter, Catherine. Introduction. Profession 2010 (2010): 5-8. Print.
~Sakai, Naoki. "Translation and the Figure of Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action." Profession 2010 (2010): 25-34. Print.