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Burning the House Down: Translation in a

Global Setting
a
Michael Cronin
a
Centre for Translation and Textual Studies , School of Applied Language
and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University , Ireland
Published online: 05 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Michael Cronin (2005) Burning the House Down: Translation in a Global Setting,
Language and Intercultural Communication, 5:2, 108-119, DOI: 10.1080/14708470508668887

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 Burning the House Down: Translation in a
Global Setting
Michael Cronin
Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, School of Applied Language
and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland
The paper examines the situation of translation in the contemporary world,
particularly with respect to the changes in the political economy of developed and
developing societies. It is argued that the nature of the changes impinge directly on
translation and translation finds itself at the heart of the new informational
economy, which in turn has implications for the relationship between translation
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and the global media. The paper looks specifically at the position of interpreters who
frequently find themselves in news-gathering activities and whose specificity as
embodied agents needs to be acknowledged in intercultural research.

Cet article traite de la situation de la traduction dans le monde actuel, surtout en ce

qui concerne l’évolution de l’économie politique des sociétés développées et de
celles en voie de développement. Cette évolution touche directement à la traduction
qui se trouve de ce fait au coeur de l’économie informationnelle et impliquée dans le
développement des médias de masse à l’échelle mondiale. L’article se penche tout
particulièrement sur le rôle des interprètes qui travaillent souvent de près avec les
journalistes et sur leur statut en tant qu’agents incarnés.

Keywords: economy, globalisation, interpreting, media, translation

The protagonist of The Book of Illusions has no illusions about books, or rather
about certain kinds of books. David Zimmer, the central character in Paul
Auster’s novel, decides that translation is the next best thing to bereavement
counselling after he loses his wife and two sons in a plane crash. He takes
up the translation of the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe by Chateaubriand and his
view of the practice is characterised by bleak pragmatism and dangerous
melodrama:
Translation is a bit like shovelling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into
the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another
sentence, and if your back is strong enough and you have the stamina
to keep at it for eight or ten hours at a stretch, you can keep the fire hot.
With close to a million words in front of me, I was prepared to work as
long and as hard as necessary, even if it meant burning down the house.
(Auster, 2002: 70)
Auster’s image is of an activity that is both tedious and eventful, part
hackwork and part Armageddon. This duality of approach and interpretation
is intimately bound up with perceptions of what it is that translators do. On
the one hand, there is the view that translation is a dull, spiritless form of
verbal drudgery, particularly in the area of pragmatic translation, the

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Language and Intercultural Communication Vol. 5, No. 2, 2005

108
 Translation in a Global Setting 109

translation of non-literary texts. In 1943 E.S. Bates, for example, defended his
decision to confine his comments on translation to the translation of poetry
claiming that in his work:
It is the spiritual aspect of translation which will get exclusive attention,
to the abandonment of that function of translation which consists in the
transmission of technical improvements from worker to worker and
from industry to industry; not because such transmissions do not make
as much difference to civilisation as any other function, but because this
is a simpler form, a function which can, in part, be carried out by
demonstration instead of by speech or in writing. (Bates, 1943: 8)
Bates concedes that other forms of translation may be important but their
inherent simple-mindedness banishes them from the scholar’s study as
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unworthy subjects.
There is another view of translation, however, that sees translation not as an
innocuous if necessary pastime for the mindless but as an activity which fuels
the fires of religious or cultural controversy. The history of bible translation has
its martyrs like William Tyndale who will literally burn for their commitment
to making the Word of God available in the vernacular (Daniell, 1994). Less
dramatically, there is a litany of truisms on translation as an essentially
destructive activity where translators when they are not being traitors are busy
ensuring that poetry is what gets lost in translation. Another variation on this
binary reading of the act of translation is the pedagogic versus the aesthetic.
The association of translation for centuries with the translation of texts in the
classical classroom meant that the largely literalist renditions of Latin and
Greek texts were the desired outcome of translation as an integral part of the
language-learning process. As Susan Bassnett has noted:
Translation in the classroom had to be assessed, and hence the notion of
faithfulness to the source text was a crucial one. In the age of
dictionaries, the bilingual dictionary as a tool for translators posited
the idea of equivalence as sameness across linguistic frontiers. Difference
was elided in this view of translation; whatever was said in one
language could and should be rendered into another, and the success
of that rendering was gauged in terms of the faithfulness of the copy to
the original. (Bassnett, 1996: 19)
It is in part a reaction against the tradition of philological dutifulness
which draws the leading practitioners of early and late modernism such as
Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell to the subversive energies of translation and
to a freer, more experimental approach to the translator’s task (Gentzler,
2001: 5
43).
What the differing perspectives on translation alluded to here did have in
common was a primary concern with texts rather than contexts. For centuries
reflection on translation had largely been a consideration of texts themselves
and the particular problems involved in their movement from one language to
another. This however will change in the late 20th century with the emergence
of the cultural turn in translation studies and the advent of post-structuralism
where much greater attention is paid to the how, where, when, why and who
 110 Language and Intercultural Communication

of translation (Bassnett, 2002; Venuti, 1992). In this reflexive move in the

discipline, texts are not treated as free-floating objects of linguistic scrutiny
but are related to the dominant cultural practices and political ideologies of
target-language cultures. The marked interest in translation history in recent
decades is another sign of the desire to situate the work of translators in larger
contexts and to stress the positionality and agency of translators as historical
subjects (Delisle & Woodsworth, 1995). A dimension to translation activity
which has received somewhat less attention, and which is central to any
consideration of the media in a global context, is the political economy of
translation. The economic environment in which translation is currently
practised and in which global news circulates is very different from the one
which existed in the 1970s, for example, when polysystems theory began to
come to prominence in translation studies. So what are the chief characteristics
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of this changed environment and what are the implications for translation and
its relation to the media in the contemporary world?

Informationalism
In order to identify what is different about the present organisation of
economic activity in the developed world it is customary to contrast it with
earlier modes of economic growth and productivity. In the agricultural mode
of development, increasing surplus came from increases in the amount of
labour or natural resources (such as land) available for the production process.
Thus, an important impetus for imperial conquest and the development of
slavery was the desire to increase productivity through the acquisition of
labour and land. In the industrial mode of development, it was new energy
sources (steam, electricity) which became the principal source of productivity
alongside the ability to distribute energy through appropriate circulation and
production processes (Bayly, 2004: 49
85). As for the present age Christopher
Freeman has pointed out that, ‘The contemporary change of paradigm may be
seen as a shift from a technology based primarily on cheap inputs of energy to
one predominantly based on cheap inputs of information derived from
advances in microelectronic and telecommunications technology’ (Freeman,
1988: 10). Thus in the informational mode of development it is information
which becomes the primary source of enhanced productivity. As Manuel
Castells has remarked information has always been a part of humans’
engagement with the world but what is specific to late modernity is that it
is the processes of information generation, processing and transmission
themselves which are central to the operation of power and the generation
of wealth (Castells, 1996: 21). Purchasers of a musical CD or a new software
package are paying not for the costs of producing the physical support for the
CD or the software but for the digital ‘information’ it contains, whether that be
a chart hit or an accountancy program. The reflexive accumulation of
knowledge implies the move to higher levels of complexity in information
processing which both supports and drives the expansion of an informational
economy. Furthermore, the information technologies allow a global economy
to operate in real time. That is to say that translator managers working in
Dublin can manage a translation task which is being carried out in Brazil or
 Translation in a Global Setting 111

India as efficiently as if the translators were located in another Irish city like
Galway or Belfast. So while it is important to remember that international
trade has existed on the planet for a very long time and that it is possible to
trace a history of ‘archaic globalisation’ as Christopher Alan Bayly has done
for the period 1780 to 1914 (Bayly, 2004), the contemporary period is unique in
the near-instantaneous information flows across the globe.
It is not only modes of production which have changed and the temporal
regime of economic activity but also, of course, the very nature of the economic
goods which are traded. Scott Lash and John Urry claim that in the post-
industrial world the objects created are gradually emptied of their material
content. The result is the proliferation of signs rather than material objects and
they regard these signs as being of two types:
Either they have a primarily cognitive content and are post-industrial or
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informational goods. Or they have primarily an aesthetic content and are

what can be termed postmodern goods. The development of the latter
can be seen not only in the proliferation of objects which possess a
substantial aesthetic component (such as pop music, cinema, leisure,
magazines, video and so on), but also in the increasing component of
sign-value or image embodied in material objects. This aestheticization
takes place in the production, the circulation or the consumption of such
goods. (Lash & Urry, 1994: 4)
What is implicit in the shift towards the production of informational and
aesthetic goods is a much closer relationship between spirit and matter or
between culture and the economy. If growth is dependent on the increased
production of these new type of goods, then there is increasingly a premium
placed on those sectors of society where the development of the cognitive and
the aesthetic are to the fore, whether that be the expansion of the media in its
various forms or a much greater emphasis on the R&D functions of
universities. So where do we situate translation in the context of the new
post-industrial or informational economy? One way of answering this
question is to ask another, namely, what is the specific relationship between
culture and the economy allowed by translation? The relationship is twofold.
On the one hand, through the development of localisation and internationa-
lization and more recently web or e-localisation, translation has a clear
universalising function in allowing for products and services to be dissemi-
nated as widely as possible throughout the globe. As the sales life of many
digital products, such as digital cameras, is relatively short, rapid and
extensive translation is crucial to the critical path of a product launch
(Sprung, 2000). Given time
space compression as a feature of the global age
and the importance of time-to-market as a guiding principle of economic
activity in the post-Fordist economy, the pressure is on translators to deliver
translations as quickly as possible, facilitating the global dissemination of
goods and services. On the other hand, the very act of translation itself
highlights the resistance of the specific to the universal. In other words, one of
the reasons that firms localise in the first place is that users have a distinct
preference for information and web sites produced in their own language
(Esselink, 1998, 2001). The product or service may be distributed globally
 112 Language and Intercultural Communication

but each language group demands to be able to access information in its

own language.
Talk about global flows does not, of course, solely relate to the physical
displacement of human beings but also to transfers of information in the
virtual world of cyberspace. The migration of information to other sites brings
with it the necessity for and the challenge of localisation. Localisation indeed is
frequently hailed as a means of protecting linguistic specificity and cultural
difference. As Detlev Hoppenrath, a German management consultant puts it,
Localisation is providing the vessel in which cultural content can be
transformed and carried into the world and to the people, allowing them
to participate and keep their own identities at the same time.
(Hoppenrath, 2002: 14)
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The difficulty is, of course as Richard Ishida has pointed out, that localisation
may involve painting the house a different colour but fundamentally the
house remains the same (Schäler, 2002a: 9). So cultural content may be carried
but it is a moot point to what extent it is transformed. Thus, while much is
made of the need to change data, time and number formats, colour schemes,
pictures and images, sounds, symbols, historical data, product names and
acronyms, the issue remains as to who are the real beneficiaries of the
localisation process apart from the shareholders of corporate giants. More
importantly, in the context of global media audiences and the significant
translation demands that result from acknowledging the legitimacy of
linguistic diversity, a commitment to translational resistance means a
reorientation of the localisation industry. Reinhard Schäler has argued that,
Around 90% of the overall globalisation effort is [. . .] invested in the
localisation of US-developed digital material. In other words, localisa-
tion is currently used almost exclusively by large US corporations as a
vehicle to increase their profits. (Schäler, 2002b: 22)
Localisation compounds rather than alleviates the problem of the digital
divide in that providing access to the internet and the web in the languages
of local elites further enhances the standing of the elites but does little to
advance the cause of the 97% of the world’s population that has never used a
personal computer. In addition, a common localisation mantra is the notion of
re-usability. The aim is to reduce wherever possible the amount of material
which needs to be translated, transformed or adapted. Hence, ‘Designers of
global products, of websites aimed at the global customer, use globally
acceptable standards, symbols, and conventions’ (p. 22). Schäler pleads for a
‘bottom-up localisation’ (p. 23) rather than the top-down localisation of
corporate capital, a form of localisation which would seek for example to
provide relevant, local digital content in as many languages as possible. As
migratory movements lead to the marked linguistic complexification of urban
centres and ensuing media needs the scale of the resulting translation task will
require the services of the localisation industry. It is imperative, however, that
bottom-up strategies are to the fore, otherwise the apparent resistance of
localisation will in reality be the endless recycling of culturally dominant
paradigms in the House That Bill Gates Built.
 Translation in a Global Setting 113

A recurrent difficulty then in localisation is the prevalence of ‘checklist

interculturalism’ where date/time conventions, measurements, colours, ab-
breviations and so on are changed but the content otherwise can remain
strongly marked by the cultural assumptions of the culture of origin
(Preston & Kerr, 2001: 109
131). The extent of cultural reworking in translation
it turns out is much greater than the naı̈ve substitutionalism which underlies
much corporate thinking about localisation To some extent, the universalist
credo of localisation is underwritten by a tension between the conflicting
logics of technology and culture. There are approximately 6000 languages on
the planet but only two systems of voltage, three railway gauges and one
language for air traffic control. We might say that technology brings together
what culture sets apart. However tempting it may be to have translation and
language mimic the universalist transferability of the tool (once it is plugged
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in, a food mixer operates the same way wherever it is), people and languages
are very much of a time and place and thus frustrate the attempt to have the
logic of the content follow the logic of the tool.
Translation, in a sense, does not fit easily into a binary reading of our
current circumstances. It both facilitates the global spread of the informational
economy and signals the resistance of languages and cultures to the
homogenising outreach of technocratic instrumentalism. One could say that
the evolutionary logic of the tool is a continuous movement towards the
standardised, the normative, the homogenised and the universal whereas the
claims of the cultural are rooted in the specific, the anomalous, the exceptional
and the local. Translation again occupies an analog or a both/and position in
the context of this duality. Translation resembles the tool in that its very raison
d’être is its ability to move in the direction of the universal, its capacity,
however contested, to take a text from one spatially and historically bound
language and culture and bring it into another. It is also translation however
that highlights the extent to which languages and cultures are specific and
local by highlighting hitherto unknown textual riches of the culture (outward
translation) or revealing hidden linguistic strengths of a language (inward
translation). Thus, translation partakes of both the particularising drive of the
cultural and the universalising drive of techne so any attempt to understand
translation in the context of the media in a global age must acknowledge this
dual nature.
The danger is that with the time pressures of informationalism a view of
translation will prevail which will stress its generalising, universalising thrust
as part of a technocratic view of economic efficiency and ignore translation’s
equally important commitment to particularity and differentiation. The use
of translation memories and machine translation (MT) or the availability of
web-based MT services can lead to a further conflation of translation with
translation tools where an instantaneous, borderless use of translation is seen
as concomitant with the universal application of tools. It is of course one of the
firmly held beliefs of commentators on literary translation that the complexity
of the practice lies in its engagement with specificity (Tomlinson, 2003). The
difficulty is that to see cultural distinctness as primarily the province of the
literary and to present commercial and technical translation as the domain of a
hapless technophile universalism is to seriously undermine the ability of
 114 Language and Intercultural Communication

translation studies to engage fruitfully with areas of research such as media

translation and the translation of the global news. It is precisely because news
is so time-sensitive, dependent on new information technologies, and the
product of a particular language and culture in a particular time and place,
that the insights from all the different branches of translation must be brought
to bear on the study of the phenomenon.
A function that translation and the media are said to have in common is that
of communication. For the originator of the term, the French translator, Nicolas
Oresme, communication was specifically to do with the emancipation of the
message from the medium in translation. Messages were no longer bound to
utterances of origin but could circulate freely, could be ‘communicated’ from
one language to the next (Bougnoux, 1991: 10). McLuhan, for his part,
famously proclaimed that communication was not so much about liberating
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the message from the medium as proclaiming that it was the medium itself
that was the message (McLuhan, 1964). McLuhan’s claims were largely
predicated on a certain historical experience of television. In the postwar era
of Fordist television, large audiences watched the same programmes on a
limited number of national channels. With the advent of privatisation and
deregulation, satellite and cable television, there was a significant increase in
the number of channels available to many viewers. What characterises the new
televisual environment is less the presence of a homogenous, national
audience than a segmented, differentiated audience which looks at one
channel for history, another for sport, another for music and so on (Allen &
Hill, 2004). In this context, the message dictates the medium as depending on
whether the content broadcast is historical documentaries or contemporary
popular music, the style of programming, the nature of the presentation, the
age of the presenters are going to be markedly different. If then the message is
increasingly going to become the medium, then the implication is that the
role of translation in this new media environment will be to follow the
differentiated specificity of the message rather than the globalising thrust of
McLuhan’s medium. Of course, the medium can also become a message in a
way not understood by the Anglocentric McLuhan, that is, the medium of
expression itself, the language, can become an important message for viewers.
A striking aspect of the lives of contemporary diasporic communities is the
importance of satellite television in maintaining a link with their country,
language and culture of origin (Chalaby, 2005). To the extent, then, that both
the medium (of expression) and the message (what is expressed) will become
more and more of an issue for the media in the 21st century, translation will
increase rather than recede in importance for media studies.

Embodied Agency
In any discussion of translation and global news reporting, the focus cannot
be confined to the practice of textual translation but must also take into
account the situation of interpreters who are involved on a day to day basis in
the collection of news. This is notably the case in situations of conflict and as
evidenced by the high number of interpreters either killed or seriously
wounded in the Iraqi conflict, the human cost of such involvement is often
 Translation in a Global Setting 115

high (Sinan, 2005). To put this into context, it is worth considering the
specificity of the interpreter’s position. A text that has come to haunt
translation scholars is Brian Friel’s play, Translations . However, there is a
sense in which, from a translation point of view, what is misleading about the
play is not the account of the motives of those working for the Ordnance
Survey but the title. Translations is arguably not about translation at all but
about interpreting. The tragedy in the play comes not from incorrect
orthography or the clumsy paraphrase of transliteration but from the physical
presence of the interpreter just as Yoland’s lexical duet with Maire Chatach is
not a failed attempt at translation but an impossible exercise in interpreting.
Owen’s status from the outset is uncertain. When he first arrives in
Ballybeg with the Ordnance Survey team, Manus asks him incredulously
whether he has enlisted as a British soldier. Owen’s answer is swift if not
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altogether convincing:
OWEN: Me a soldier? 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. (Friel,
1981: 29)
Already, the interpreter has begun to interpret the language context. The
asymmetrical situation of languages and their temporal positioning are made
clear. The ‘quaint, archaic tongue’ is opposed to, ‘good English’, one the
language of the past, the other the idiom of the present and the future, one
the expression of nostalgic resistance (‘persist’) and the other the instrument of
utilitarian rectitude. Owen as interpreter is better placed than most in the play
to understand the new linguistic dispensation that he is partly responsible for
bringing into being. He is the amphibian figure, straddling two cultures and
two languages, adulated on his return to Ballybeg by his father and yet
actively distrusted by his brother. Interpreters are frequently in cultures what
we might term prodigal figures. By this, we mean that they will often leave
(voluntarily or through force) their native place, learn the language of another,
return to their place of origin and in colonial history, frequently as the agent of
the other. The return of the native is of course unsettling and the situation in
Translations has distinct biblical echoes in presenting Owen as both the
Prodigal and the Prodigious Son (in his consummate mastery of both
languages). Feted by the father, resented by the brother, Owen’s linguistic
doubleness makes him a useful tool of the Empire but a dangerous insider for
the guardians of native language and culture. Owen’s dilemma and it is the
recurring dilemma of interpreters in history generally is that the consequences
of oral agency are often inescapable in a way that is not the case with the
textual agency. To illustrate this point, we want to look briefly at an interpreter
in another non-Irish context before returning to Friel.When Primo Levi arrives
in Auschwitz, the descent into hell is among other things a fall from familiar
language. In Se questo è un uomo he describes the arrival of the SS officer who
asks if anyone speaks German. A man named Flesch steps forward and he is
asked to interpret into Italian the rules of the camp. The officer takes particular
pleasure in humiliating the interpreter by asking him to interpret what she
 116 Language and Intercultural Communication

knows to be derogatory or offensive. When her superior enters, the attitude is

no different:
parla breve, l’interprete traduce. ‘‘Il maresciallo dice che dovete fare
silenzio, perché questa non è una scuola rabbinica.’’ Si vedono le parole
non sue, le parole cattive, torcergli la bocca uscendo, come se sputasse
un boccone disgustoso. Lo preghiamo di chiedergli che cosa aspettiamo,
quanto tempo ancora staremo qui, delle nostre donne, tutto: ma lui dice
che no, che non vuol chiedere. Questo Flesch, chi si adatta molto a
malincuore a tradurre in italiano frasi tedesche piene di gelo, e rifuta di
volgere in tedesco le nostre domande perché sa che è inutile, è un ebreo
tedesco sulla cinquintina. (Levi, 1958: 21)
[He speaks briefly, the interpreter translates, ‘The Officer says you
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should be quiet because this is not a rabbinical school.’ The words are
not his, bad words, making his mouth writhe in disgust as if he was
spitting out a horrible drink. We request him to ask what to expect, how
long we will be here, about our wives, everything; but he says no, he
does not want to ask. This Flesch, who very reluctantly translated into
Italian German sentences full of ice and refused to translate our
questions into German because he knows it is useless, is a German
Jew around fifty years old.]
The interpreter is German not Italian. He is interpreting into his foreign
language not his native language. When his fellow inmates ask him to
interpret into his mother tongue, he refuses. German, in this instance, is not a
language of requests but of orders. Flesch’s own language has disowned him
in a way that perhaps only Levi understands. The Italian writer is struck by the
physical toll of the translation task on the interpreter. Flesch is used as an
instrument, a mouthpiece but the mouth that utters the words also expresses
its revulsion, the expressive and alimentary functions of the same organ
combining to articulate the distress of the interpreter who becomes a hostage
to his own skills.
The philosopher Charles Taylor talks of the specific boundedness and
vulnerability of human enquiry in a way which is particularly relevant to
interpreting practice throughout history. He contrasts the picture of the human
thinking agent as disengaged, as a person who is disincarnate, who speaks
from nowhere in particular with 20th century attempts to rethink the nature of
the agent. Taylor sees both Heidegger and Wittgenstein in different ways as
struggling, ‘to recover an understanding of the agent as engaged, as
embedded in a culture, a form of life, a ‘‘world of involvements’’, ultimately
to understand the agent as embodied’ (Taylor, 1995: 61
62). When Taylor
speaks of ‘engaged agency’ he understands this to mean the way our thinking
about the world is shaped by our body, culture, form of life (p. 63). The fact of
Flesch having a body situated in place and time means that not only will his
body give expression, voluntarily or involuntarily to his world view, but the
fact of embodied agency means that he is immediately aware of the
consequences of his interpreting activity. Not only as a speaking body is he
affecting the bodies of the other deportees but as an embodied agent he is
 Translation in a Global Setting 117

uniquely vulnerable to torture and worse should he fail to discharge his duties
to the satisfaction of his superiors. Similarly, the tragic implications of what is
happening to Owen in Translations become apparent to him not when he
reflects on the approximations of translation in toponymy but when he is
brought face to face with his own irreducibly embodied state as interpreter.
When Yolland goes missing and Lancey announces a campaign of reprisals,
Owen is made starkly aware of both divided loyalties and his own
vulnerability:
LANCEY: Commencing twenty-four hours from now we will shoot all
livestock in Ballybeg.
(OWEN stares at LANCEY)
At once.
OWEN: Beginning this time tomorrow they’ll kill every animal in Baile
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Beag
unless they’re told where George is.

LANCEY: If that doesn’t bear results, commencing forty-eight hours from
now we will embark on a series of evictions and levelling of abode
in the following selected areas. . .
OWEN: You’re not. . .!
LANCEY: Do your job. Translate. (Friel, 1981: 61)
In a sense, Owen’s job would be easier if he did follow Lancey’s instructions
and just ‘translated’ but he is not a translator, he is an interpreter. As such,
there is no appreciable time-lag between the act of translation and the moment
of reception. The message and messenger are co-terminous in time so that they
are easily conflated. Although translation has a long list of martyrs and victims
from Étienne Dolet to the Italian and Japanese translators of Salman Rushdie,
textual translation does always potentially provide the possibility of anonym-
ity and the point of textual production is almost invariably remote in time and
space from the point of textual reception. The applications of modern
technology in the form of videointerpreting and telephone interpreting have
freed interpreting from spatial constraints but for much of the history of
humanity and indeed throughout much of the world to this day, interpreting is
an exercise in bodily proximity. This is why the conditions and context of
utterance are always of a real and primordial concern to interpreters and are
inseparable from the contents of the utterance. Owen, as Lancey reminds him,
is not free to say what he likes.
In 1949 Warren Weaver drew up a memorandum presenting his vision of
speech-to-speech translation based on the use of machines. His mind is on
Babel but his images are those of the high-rise developments which would
come to house countless numbers of immigrants in post-war Europe:
Think, by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers,
all erected over a common foundation. When they try to communicate
with one another they shout back and forth, each from his own closed
tower [. . .]. But when an individual goes down his tower, he finds
himself in a great open basement, common to all the towers. Here he
establishes easy and useful communication with the persons who have
also descended from their towers. Thus it may be true that the way to
 118 Language and Intercultural Communication

translate from Chinese to Arabic, or from Russian to Portuguese, is not

to attempt the direct route, shouting from tower to tower. Perhaps the
way is to descend, from each language, down to the common base of
human communication
the real but as yet undiscovered universal
language
and then re-emerge by whatever particular route is
convenient. (Silberman, 2000: 226)
Down in the Adamic basement, communication is a fluent feast of talk, no one
excluded from the easy embrace of universal language. The speakers in
Weaver’s tall, closed towers have different language backgrounds (Chinese,
Arabic, Russian, Portuguese) but in the universal underground the shouting
dies down (foreigners everywhere being notoriously hard of hearing) and
‘useful’ exchanges are the norm.
What the pioneer of MT deftly echoes in his utopian memo is the biblical
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connection between translation and migration. The impulse to build the tower
and the city on the plain in the land of Shinar is after all the desire to resist the
endless onward march of migration, ‘let us make us a name, lest we be
scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’ (Genesis 11: 4). The moment
of linguistic confusion, when the city builders are forced up from the basement
level of ‘one language’ and ‘one speech’ to the new reality of translation, is
also the moment of forced departure, the journeying once again to the
uncertain and the unknown: ‘Therefore is the name of it [the city] called Babel;
because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from
thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth’
(Genesis 11: 9). Different migratory paths bring Weaver’s apartment dwellers
to their hermetically sealed towers and it is only by descending to the
underworld of the great open basement that they can undo the original
scattering. Any consideration of translation, the media and global news is an
attempt to explore the consequences of that scattering (linguistic and physical)
and ask what forms the relationship between translation and mobility take in a
contemporary setting. Now that we are scattered abroad upon the face of the
earth, the nostalgia for Weaver’s basement of the universal is understandable
but we may find that, however unglamorous, shovelling coal is a more
appropriate metaphor for what goes on there than any angelic communication
of technical instantaneity.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Professor Michael Cronin,
School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University,
Dublin 9, Ireland (michael.cronin@dcu.ie).

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