Forced (Self)translation. The linguistic and translational work of exiled academics in the USA (1933-1945) and the development of English into an international research language.
Proceedings (Garda Elsherif)
During the twentieth century, numerous European academics were forced into exile as a result of persecution by fascist governments. The conditions of exile required them to continue their work in a new language. This was especially the case in the United States, where multilingualism had been treated with suspicion ever since the rise of anti-German sentiment during WWI.[1] The required shift amounts to far more than a mere change of working language. The English-language publications by authors, such as Hannah Arendt or Karl Popper, conceal a translation-historical problem, which is particularly visible in their correspondences and drafts. The continuation of their research in exile required a complex process of translation and self-translation, not only into a new academic language, but also into a new academic and intellectual culture. This “exiling of reason” (vertriebene Vernunft), as Friedrich Stadler[2] has described the exile of European intellectuals, and the translational challenges and strategies of making one’s work available in a new intellectual environment, has not received adequate attention from a translation-historical perspective.
The main explanation for this research gap is that the processes of translation and self-translation—essential as they were to these thinkers’ adaptation to new environments—were not immediately apparent, but rather needed to be reconstructed, especially in the cases of self-translation. For there was often no discrete source text to be translated. In such cases, the source text must first be constructed as a bricolage out of these academics’ oeuvres, including published and unpublished notes and correspondences, in which specific “objects of translation,” that is, terms, concepts, (implicit) theoretical views or convictions are problematized.
Over the last decade translation history has developed into a dynamic, discipline-crossing research area in the programmatic course of the “translational turn.” The translation-specific lens has proven productive for many historiographical fields, as a way of illuminating “hidden histories,”[3] which set the conditions on the linguistic and cultural levels for observable processes of transfer and transformation. A translation-oriented perspective on exiled academics’ work promises to reveal which elements of a text or an academic discourse (terms, concepts, theoretical assumptions, convictions, positions, perspectives, or criticisms) are considered translation-worthy or (un)translatable in these social agents’ (self)translation processes. Furthermore, such research would first expose which of the linguistic, cultural, and academic boundaries of the required (self)translations the translators themselves anticipated, and which translation-political strategies were developed as a way of bridging, deconstructing, or marking such boundaries. The time has come to work out the longer-term effects of this (self)translation within Anglo-American academic language and culture. Through this intercultural and translational lens, the English academic language appears in a new light. It is thus far been studied as a lingua franca whose spread tends to reduce the diversity of academic culture.[4] From a translation-historical perspective, academic English can be studied as an intercultural and transdisciplinary instrument of international research.
Central to the planned workshop will be texts authored in English by exiled academics (especially in the USA from 1933-1945), who have left recognizable translational “traces.” Such traces manifest in loan translations and teutonisms, or in the form of recognizably target-system-oriented adaptations, explications, and reformulations. Simultaneously, “translaborative” traces shall be sought out in texts by exiled authors, who testify to collaboration with English-language translators, editors, and colleagues.
[1] Gordin, Michael. Scientific Babel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 180–185.