Globalization, Translation, and the University Tradition

I. The Priority of Economic Interests

Considerable effort in translation studies is devoted to understanding the role of globalization in the recuperation of postcolonial cultures.¹ Sandra Bermann writes in her introduction to a recent collection of essays on translation: “Waves of migrating people have made the contemporary nation-state, and especially its urban centers, into global sites with multiplicities of languages and cultures. At the same time, the international trade, finance, and information technology that support these sites both depend upon and often seek to bypass translation for economic growth with world and regional markets.”² How relevant are reconsiderations of translation strategies to the more immediate forces of economic globalization?

Unlike those involved in cultural and literary study, economic globalizers want to adopt “‘the invisible theory of translation,’ the assumption that languages are neutral media for separable ‘content.’”³ Because of the simultaneous necessity of translation and the desire to render it invisible, it has become common among literary translation critics to recognize how translation now performs what looks like two contradictory functions: it represents new readings (new interpretations), while, at the same time, it brings a known text (the “text itself”) to new language groups. It looks as if globalization renders the study of language and literature necessarily pluralistic and multiplies the dimensions that texts and genres can have at one moment.

Both globalization and translation have been key factors in the history of the Western university: scholars have always been involved in the mixing of societies, the sharing of languages and literatures, and the teaching of their findings and understandings. Those, such as Renaissance humanists, who were involved in these ecumenical efforts, have achieved a great deal that has enriched cultures for centuries. Yet these achievements have remained marginal relative to the roles of the university as a social institution. In spite of the historical awareness of both the processes of international cultural sharing, and the patient, and perhaps even heroic, efforts at translation when new texts have been discovered or have otherwise come into play, such scholarship has been reduced in its influence and significance by the supervening priorities of university sponsors. Church, state, and now corporations have shied away from, and in many cases actively suppressed, real interchange of language and culture; they have preferred the rule of single languages or, at best, a hierarchical arrangement of languages, in which there is one official or standard language, while other languages are tolerated to a limited extent. For the most part, this policy of the hierarchical arrangement and study of language and literature has been accepted by the majority of university faculty members throughout the history of the university. It is not clear that today’s academic initiatives will get a better response than the initiatives of such figures as John Wyclif in the fourteenth century, Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century, Sebastian Castellio in the sixteenth century, Christian Thomasius in the seventeenth,⁴ or many medieval “heretics” who advocated for vernacular translations of the sacred texts.⁵ If academics involved in literary globalization hold democratic and egalitarian ideals about the sharing of languages and literatures, the university as an institution has not recognized them in the past and does not seem to now. In general, intercultural mixing in university contexts, both socially and through language exchange, has not had the freedom to develop on its own. More often than not, academic pluralism has been constrained by their sources of support from the church, from monarchs, and now, from corporate interests. Under these circumstances, it would not be true to say that translation performs two different functions of equal consequence. Rather, the overwhelming economic identity of “globalization” values one of the translation functions over the other: the promotion of language transparency and/or the hegemony of a single language. This economic identity of globalization does not urge the formation of grounds for language interaction or exchange. English is promoted by social and economic elites as the standard, and other languages are to be translated toward English not the other way around. Anthropologist Jonathan Friedman, studying language change in Hawaii, observed that language minorities...