Lost in translation

Michael Cronin's insights about the crucial role translation has played in shaping debates about identity, language and cultural survival provide an impressive statement of intent, says Eamon Maher

translation and identity

By Michael Cronin

Published by Routledge

€60

Michael Cronin is a renowned expert in the area of translation studies and has published widely on the subject. With Translation and Identity he provides an invaluable assessment of the crucial role played by translation in developing an understanding of cultural differences and specificities.

At times, the ideas are intellectually challenging, the language dense, but the reward for perseverance is a marvellous insight into the many ways in which the translation process moulds, in a sometimes oblique way, the elusive concept we refer to as 'identity'.

In Cronin's view, identity has replaced ideology as the main structure underpinning political communication.

However, as developments in business, the economy and society make the working out of any form of identity problematic, the temptation is "to reach for a notion of identity which is wholly concerned with economic entitlement and detaches identity from any idea of collective, social transformation which goes beyond the need of the market". Such a move in many cases, according to Cronin, nations go to war because they "misinterpret" each other, fail to "translate" adequately what the other is saying. tends to see individuals as mere consumers and this in turn can lead to "the paradoxical risk of increasingly virulent forms of nationalism in a globalized world with the much-vaunted decline of the nation-state".

Cronin provides concrete examples to underpin his thesis. His discussion on cosmopolitanism shows how the city of Dublin was marginalized for many years in Irish writing after independence "because in the nationalist imaginary the city was a foreign presence, an alien substance in the Irish body politic". As the country began to find its feet, economically and culturally, it suddenly dawned on people that the simple binary of rural versus urban, tradition versus modernity, did not bring us to a better understanding of what constitutes 'Irishness'. Our national identity is not the sole preserve of the country or the city: rather, it is a meshing of the two. Which leads on nicely to the impact of migration on Irish culture.

Translation is a vital tool in aiding assimilation and/or encouraging multiculturalism. Immigrants with a good grasp of English tend to be recruited for higher paid jobs, a fact that hasn't gone unnoticed by the Bank of Ireland whose retail strategy and marketing director, Brendan Nevin says: "We find that migrant workers have an above-average distribution of third-level qualifications and in many cases are working below their qualification level. But over time, this will change as more people open up businesses of their own. They will be the business people of tomorrow, so potentially it is a very lucrative market for us."

Borrowing on literature, cinema and cultural studies, Cronin provides many compelling insights. He argues, for example, that Brian Friel's play, Translations, is not really about translation at all, but about interpreting. Owen, the Irish man who is assigned to assist the English Ordnance Survey, describes his role thus: "I'm employed as a part-time, underpaid, civilian interpreter. My job is to translate the quaint archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King's good English."

Owen is well-placed "to understand the new linguistic dispensation that he is partly responsible for bringing into being. He is an amphibian figure, straddling two cultures and two languages, adulated on his return to his home village of Ballybeg by his father and yet actively distrusted by his brother." His dilemma mirrors that of translators everywhere.

In 16th- and 17th-century Ireland, interpreters were vital in the colonisation process. As the legal system became the preserve of the English language, and as only a fraction of the population had any knowledge of it, interpreters assumed an essential role. However, the "fidelity" of their translations was sometimes open to doubt: "The court interpreter was, in a sense, an uneasy reminder that areas of Irish life and experience were still outside the Anglophone purview."

At present in Iraq, interpreting is a dangerous and underpaid civilian job. Cronin quotes Ellen Ruth Moerman on how there is little or no consideration given to the risks to which interpreters expose themselves: "And yet, we know that interpreters who work with the 'occupiers' of a country are often seen as 'sleeping with the enemy'. We know of the dozens that were murdered in ex-Yugoslavia, dozens are now being murdered in Iraq, even publicly executed on television, and are now having to live with the enemy permanently instead of going home."

In many cases, according to Cronin, nations go to war because they "misinterpret" each other, fail to "translate" adequately what the other is saying.

He uses the film The Interpreter to great effect to illustrate this point: "The promotional material for the film claims that 'the truth... needs no translation' but what exercises the minds of many of the characters... is whether there can be any truth without translation."

Declining interest in modern languages in the Anglophone world is one of the greatest threats to the linguistic diversity of the planet. This is clearly an issue of "pressing political and educational concern to translators and translation scholars as love without knowledge is truly blind and a world-view without close readings is the ultimate form of provincialism, a global projection of myopia".

Translation supplies the necessary tools for combating misconceptions about "the other". Cronin argues that translators cannot afford to ignore the obligation to involve ourselves in debates revolving around how we are to find ways to live together in the global world of the third millennium, and warns: "If we fail to engage, then there will be no end to the grievous evils that lie ahead."

This book is an excellent statement of intent in relation to such an "engagement" and its author is a central figure in highlighting the dangers that lie in wait for us if we fail to "sign up" also.

Eamon Maher is a director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies at Tallaght Institute of Technology. He has written several books including John McGahern and Irish and Catholic and Towards An Understanding of Identity