If there’s anything at all that a modern curriculum should make clear to everyone, it’s that there’s no room for the monolingual any more. Because our modern world is so small today—and by small I mean globalized, rather than parochial, which is another kind of smallness; because in this world it is possible to know more about what’s happening in Gaza than what’s happening in our own neighborhoods. Perhaps in no other age has cultural and linguistic insularity been more perilous. We can’t afford not to speak to people whom we can’t speak to. We can’t afford not to read writings that we can’t read. We can’t, in other words, afford not to understand people whom we do not understand.
I therefore propose that translation should be one of the new liberal arts: translation in its literal sense of transmitting texts from one language to another, but also in the metaphorical sense of a sustained, collective effort towards genuine intercultural understanding. It couldn’t function as a stand-alone class in a single college: It must be plugged into a network of participating colleges from as many countries as possible, and it needs to be a genuinely global effort.
Every student would declare at least two languages: their native tongue and one or more languages of their choosing, however firm or tenuous their grasp of them. Seminar groups would consist of students who declared the same two languages, so that discussions could take place in two mutually intelligible languages, at varying levels of ability. These are the groups they’d work in, communicating in online forums and discussion groups, live chat, and video conferences.
How do you learn translation? Perhaps from the real world:
- Students could choose a suitably global event, collect media coverage of this event in different languages—in print, by broadcast, or online—and draw comparisons. How are the same events recast in different languages to different cultural audiences? What prejudices, slants and spins might be exposed by such an endeavour; or where might common ground arise where we least expect it?
- Students could investigate and report on literature outside their native language and together, as a group, come up with a more global literary canon.
- Students could work together to translate and exchange something they loved with someone else: a play or poem, the lyrics of a song, a funny TV ad, a speech by a personal hero.
- Students could take each other through tours of their internet, in their language. What blogs, news sites, and journals do they read? (For all its globalizing dimensions, whole swathes of the internet exist in languages we cannot read).
- Students could read to each other—poetry, short stories, anything—in their native languages. Even if you don’t understand it, hearing things in another language can be an enchanting, empathetic experience.
The point of a class like this wouldn’t be merely to develop competence in a language for its own sake, but to show us new worlds of literature, sounds, ideas and ways of being that exist outside what we know—to create opportunities for us to come to know them, and perhaps, to fall in love with them.
If done right, this class would even be a new kind of community service. Every translation generated in this class would go into a digital archive, for the benefit of future classes and a wider global public. Every graduating class of translators would add to a growing pool of bilingual world citizens: they might be anything from the greatest diplomats and the savviest journalists right down to the teenager who makes friends with the new foreign kid in school when no one else can, or will. And generation by generation, the world would fill with them: these deeply sympathetic people who would be nodes between cultures, slowly forging rapport and understanding from the friction and incomprehension that plague our small world today, with such vast, grievous consequences.
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