Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens. Übersetzen und Dolmetschen in der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918 by Michaela Wolf (review)

Michaela Wolf is a professor at the Institut für Translationswissenschaft at the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz specializing in the history and sociology of translation; this fine book (available as an ebook sponsored by the Austrian FWF—Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung,: <https://fedora.e-book.fwf.ac.at/fedora/get/o:18/bdef:Content/get>) originated in her 2005 Habilitationsschrift. It is a comprehensive mapping of the social-political and cultural practice of translating and interpreting in the Habsburg monarchy and an introduction to the land’s ethnic politics.

This volume presents great challenges to both translation theory and scholars interested in the cultural history of the Habsburg monarchy, multiculturalism, and postcolonial theory. It combines the best in empirical research with a sophisticated approach to theory, for theorists of translation beyond (but still including) the literary. Wolf’s model for “cultural translation” diverges from much translation theory: it does not trace texts moving from source to target cultures, each a moment of cultural contact. Instead, Wolf follows Bourdieu’s definition of a field of pragmatic activity to redefine translation as a set of social functions enabled by both formal (institutional, governmental) activities and the habits of everyday life.

Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens thus documents the pragmatics of multiculturalism as a network of connections that help to establish cultural identities within a state that understands itself as more than an ethnic-national monoculture. Wolf adds an idea, drawn from Moritz Csáky, that there are endogenous and exogenous cultural networks, the former working within the region’s pluricultural reality (her main focus) and the latter transculturally.

The volume’s first five chapters frame the theoretical problems of the Habsburg regions’ networks of translation. The first introduces the basic configuration of today’s translation studies. The second chapter adds a theoretical layer, establishing a set of terms to understand the “cultural translation” functioning in various cultural domains (mostly beyond the literary): polyculture, polycultural communication and translation, and transcultural translation (moving beyond national borders).

The third chapter adds to this model the problem of multiculturalism, explicated here as participating in networks, such as the book trade and various official language laws and policies. Chapter Four amplifies these discussions by adding the social and governmental sites and entities that required translations, with a particular emphasis on the bureaucracy disseminating laws, law courts, and the military and institutions like the Ministries for Internal Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and War, and the Oriental Academy (dealing with the Ottoman Empire). Here, Wolf exemplifies how the government functioned with multiple languages, accommodating various publics.

The result is neither a bureaucratic utopia nor a stable pragmatic situation, given the Monarchy’s political flux. After the Compromise, for example, the importance of Hungarian grew in importance in Transleithania (once the population balance between Slavic and Magyar peoples was altered), as did the Slavic languages in Cisleithania (as nationalism grew), especially in law, juridical practice, and the publishing industry. As national tensions grew, translation became more critical, as ideological monolingualism began to exclude many forms of customary adaptation to plurilingualism (“habitual translation”), in what Wolf calls a “functional asymmetry” between German as the language of state and the less hegemonic languages (89). Here Wolf has painted a compelling picture about what happened in the back offices of the Habsburg bureaucracy.

Before the fifth chapter moves to a more theoretical restatement of the interactions of these official and informal sites of cultural interaction, Wolf offers a number of fascinating vignettes. For instance, in the realm of everyday accommodations to plurilingualism, she documents the case of so-called Tauschkinder, where families exchanged children for specific periods of time across language lines (sometimes within a village, others to a neighboring one) so that they could acquire a kind of multilingualism (and potentially a multicultural sensitivity, as well) that would benefit them in their futures (98ff.).

In the second part of Wolf’s book, Chapters...