Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

5. Related-Language Translation: Naskapi and East Cree

Related-Language Translation Naskapi and East Cree Bill Jancewicz Introduction Translation for Minority Languages While some theorists have suggested that translation is impossible (Payne 1971), to a large degree Western civilization and culture has depended upon translated documents originally written in one language into some other, usually more common, language. A large portion of our current understanding of philosophy, history, mythology, and religion comes to us through translated documents. What could we know of Aristotle, Plato, Moses, or Muhammad without contemporary translations of their writings into our mother tongue? From the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to the literature of Victor Hugo, the breadth of human knowledge is inextricably linked to the translation of documents from one language to another. Despite the claim that the deeper one analyses the linguistic science of translation on a theoretical level, the more impossible translation appears, translation remains a fundamental component of our understanding of the world. It follows then that translation must indeed be possible. It has been suggested that one reason for this is that translation is neither simply a science nor even an art but rather a craft; that is, it is a skill or a technique (Azizinezhad 2006) that can be developed, practiced, and taught. There are two different translation issues actually at stake here. One is the translation of Native-language documents into majority languages, providing wider access to the knowledge, culture, and traditions of indigenous groups. The other is the translation of documents from outside the 109 110 Jancewicz indigenous culture into the Native language. During the research for this chapter and over the course of the Naskapi language project, this writer has had opportunity to elicit responses from native Naskapi speakers on both issues. With regard to the translation of traditional Naskapi material such as legends or oral histories into the majority languages, one Naskapi speaker responded this way: “I never thought about it before. But for me I think it’s good that we translate of [sic] our language and it’s not stealing . Ex; some of our great-grand-children in the future may not speak the Naskapi language and might want to know the stories their grandfathers and grandmothers told. They will have it in their hands in English.” And regarding those who would assert that translation of material from outside his own culture and traditions into the Naskapi language might be unethical, he writes: “I would say they are wrong, I’ll take the Bible for example, it is ok that we translated it into our language so that our people (especially those who don’t speak English) will learn more and more and read about God and Jesus. We learn from it and it teaches us how we should live our lives, the way God wants us to, etc. . . . The Bible makes us strong. That’s one example.”1 This writer acknowledges that for some in the academic community, the idea of translating religious materials into First Nations languages is problematic, questioning whether it is ethical for any translation take place for these languages at all. Over the years sil International has come under criticism at least in part because of the religious motivation of its members.2 Some of these criticisms surfaced in 2006 and 2007 regarding the sil management of the iso 639-3 standard, in connection with the language codes used in the Ethnologue, an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s known living languages. Although the International Organization for Standardization (iso) invited sil International to participate in the development of these standards and has authorized sil International to be the registration authority for the administration of the standard,3 in 2007 the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (ssila) proposed a resolution advocating the creation of an alternative to sil management of the iso 639-3 standard because of some “colleagues who are reluctant to be associated with sil for religious, social or political reasons” (Golla 2006). While the Linguistic Society of America (lsa) devoted a portion of its January 2007 meetings to the question of missions and linguistics (symposium “Missionaries and Scholars: The Overlapping Agendas of Linguists Related-Language Translation 111 in the Field”),4 this merely underlines the fact that such controversies exist , and that some steps are being taken to clarify the various positions of each side in dialogue, which is commendable. Fostering a spirit of understanding...