A former UN and WHO translator, who is also a psychologist — Claude Piron taught for 20 years at the Psychology Department of the University of Geneva – shares his experience of international communication and discusses the international language Esperanto.
Subtitled in others languages:
http://dotsub.com/films/thelanguage/
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Posted by fajro
As a former translator and reviser of translations, I find it very difficult to believe that a data processing system is really able to do the same job as a human translator. This is probably due to my lack of knowledge and understanding of how computers work. But whatever my incompetence in that field, I hope the examples I will draw from my experience in translation units will give you an interesting insight into some of the most frustrating problems encountered when transferring ideas from one language to another. Taking part in the selection of candidates for translator jobs, I have often been amazed by the fact that a number of candidates with a perfect knowledge of both the source and the target languages and an impressive mastery of the relevant field could be very poor translators indeed. Why is that? One of the human factors is the lack of modesty. The translator’s personality and intelligence interfere with the very humble task he has to perform. Instead of putting aside his own ideas, fantasies and style to follow blindly the author’s, he embellishes, adds or transforms. This kind of problem, I suppose, cannot arise with a machine translator, although, being something of an Asimov fan, I may have my doubts: if machine translation is actually working, it must come close to the capabilities of Asimov’s robots.
Anyway, besides humility, candidates must possess two other qualities that may be difficult to develop in machines, however sophisticated: judgment and flexibility.
Judgment
By judgment I mean the ability to solve a problem through wide knowledge of the field, through awareness that a problem exists and through taking into account the various levels of context.
Wide knowledge of the field. Let’s take the phrase to table a bill. The translator must know that if the original is in British English, it means “to submit a bill – i.e. a text proposed to become law — to the country’s legislative body”, in French déposer un projet de loi (in Esperanto, submeti leĝprojekton), but that if the author followed American usage, he meant “to shelve”, i.e. “to adjourn indefinitely the discussion of the text”, in French ajourner sine die l’examen du projet de loi (in Esperanto arkivigi la leĝprojekton).
Here is another example. The word heure in French can mean “hour” as well as “o’clock”. To be able to translate correctly the French phrase une messe de neuf heures, you have to know that a Catholic mass lasting nine hours is extremely improbable, so that the translation is “a nine o’clock mass”, and not “a nine hour mass”. Since the linguistic structure is exactly the same in un voyage de neuf heures, which means “a nine hour journey”, only knowledge of the average duration of a mass can help the translator decide.
Awareness that a problem exists. When you become a professional translator, the chief development that occurs in you during your first three or four years consists in becoming aware of problems that you had no idea could exist. If you are transferred to another organization, the whole process will start anew for a few years because the new field implies new problems that are just as hidden as in your former job. Some of the public in this room may know that in the history of international communication there was an organization called International Auxiliary Language Association. Well, if you ask people how they understand that title, you will realize that, for a number of them, it means “international association dealing with an auxiliary language”, whereas for others it means “an association studying the question of an international auxiliary language”. The interesting point lies not so much in the ambiguity as in the fact that most people are not aware of it. When exposed to the phrase, they immediately understand it in a certain way and they are not at all conscious that the very same words are susceptible to another interpretation and that their immediate comprehension does not necessarily reflect what the author had in mind.
Similarly, most junior translators simply do not imagine that the words English teacher usually designate, not a teacher who happens to be a British citizen, but somebody who teaches English and can be Japanese or Brazilian as well from any English speaking country…
Taking into account the various levels of context. The English word repression has two conventional translations in French. In politics, the French equivalent is répression (in Esperanto subpremo), whereas in psychology, it is refoulement (repuŝo). You might believe at first glance that translating it correctly is simply a matter of knowing to what field your text belongs. If it deals with politics, you use one translation, if with psychology another. Reality is not that simple. Your author may use the psychological sense within a broad political context. For instance, in an article dealing with the Stalin era, you may have a sentence beginning with Repression by the population of its spontaneous critical reactions led to… In this case, although the text deals with politics, the sentence deals with psychology. The narrow context is at variance with the broad context.
I recently revised a text which had me wondering how a computer would deal with the various meanings of the word case. It was about packaging. In a section on wooden cases, it said: Other reasons for water removal important in specific cases are: (1) to avoid gaps between boards in sheathed cases; (2) to (…). A human translator’s judgment leads him to a correct understanding of the first case as a synonym of “occurrence” and of the second as “a kind of big box”, but how will a computer know? Suppose the text includes such phrases as A case can be made for plastic boxes or the importer complained about the poor quality of the cases. When the case was settled in court (…). Knowing the broad context does not help to choose the right translation if there is no mechanical means to determine that the author switched, in a narrow context, to a different meaning of the word.
Flexibility
Besides judgment, the other quality I mentioned as indispensable to make an acceptable translator is flexibility. This refers to the gymnastics aspect of translation work. Mastering the specialized field and the two relevant languages is not enough, you have to master the art of constantly jumping from one into the other and back. Languages are more than intellectual structures. They are universes. Each language has a certain atmosphere, a style of its own, that differentiates it from all others. If you compare such English expressions as software and, on a road sign, soft shoulder with their French equivalents, you realize that there is a very definite switch in the approach to communication. The French translations are respectively logiciel and accotements non stabilisés. The English phrases are concrete, metaphorical, made up, with a zest of humor, from words used in everyday speech, although this does not contribute to better comprehension: knowing the meaning of soft and of shoulder does not help you to understand what a soft shoulder is. In French, the same meanings are conveyed by abstract and descriptive terms, which do not belong to everyday usage. You don’t understand them either, but for a different reason: because they are based on too intellectual, too sophisticated, too unusual morphemes, so that most foreigners have to look up the words in dictionaries.
The difficulty lies in the fact that this difference in approach has to be taken into account at the level, not only of words (a good dictionary may often solve that problem), but of sentences. Consider the sentence Private education is in no way under the jurisdiction of the government. It includes mostly English words of French origin, but common etymology does not imply a common way of expressing one’s thoughts. In this case, a good French rendering would be L’enseignement libre ne relève en rien de l’Etat. You will realize the importance of those differences in the approach to communication if you take the French sentence as the original and translate it literally into English. The result would be Free teaching does not depend in any way from the State, which means something quite different, especially to an American.
In order to translate properly, you have to feel when and how to switch from one atmosphere to another. No human beginner, in translation work, knows how to do that, and I wonder how a machine will detect the need to do it, unless its memory is so huge that it includes all the practical problems that translators have had to solve for decades, with an appropriate solution. For instance, when new translators arrive in the World Health Organization and have to translate the phrase blood sugar concentration, practically all of them use an expression like concentration de sucre dans le sang. This is what it means, but this is not how the concept is expressed in French, in which you have to replace those three English words with a single one: glycémie.
Similarly, knowing that the French equivalent of software is logiciel does not help you to translate it by didacticiel when it refers to a teaching aid, which is the word you should normally use in that particular case. French uses narrower semantic fields, and this is something you have to bear in mind constantly.
The problem is that with languages, you never know how you know what you know. (Sorry, I am being self-centered. I never know, but perhaps, with your experience in the computerized analysis of languages, you know.) If, in a text dealing with economic matters, I meet the phrase the life expectancy of those capital goods, I know — because I feel — that I have to translate it by la longévité des équipements. I also know that when that same text mentions the consumers’ life expectancy, I’ll have to say, in French, espérance de vie, because the author for a while deals with a demographic concept which is included in his economic reasoning. But how do I know I know? I don’t know. This ability to adjust to the various approaches to reality or fantasy embodied in the different languages, linked to an ability to pass constantly back and forth, is what I call flexibility. This is the quality which is the most difficult to find when you recruit translators.
We can now approach the same field from a different angle, asking ourselves the question: what are the problems built-in in languages that make judgment and flexibility so important in translation work? They relate to the grammar and the semantics of both the source and the target languages.
Grammar
The more a language uses precise and clear-cut grammatical devices to express the relationships among words and, within a given word, its constitutive concepts, the easier the task for the translator. The worst source languages for translators are thus English and Chinese. A Chinese sentence like ta shi qunian shengde xiaohair can mean both “he (or she) is a child who was born last year” and “it was last year that she gave birth to a child”.
In English similar ambiguities are constant. In International Labor Organization, the word international refers to organization, as shown in the official French wording: Organisation internationale du Travail. But in another UN specialized agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the word international is to be related with aviation, not with organization, as shown, again, by the French version: Organisation de l’aviation civile internationale (and not Organisation internationale de l’aviation civile). This is legally and politically important, because it means that the organization is competent only for flights that cross national boundaries. It is not an international organization that deals with all problems of non-military flying. However, since the linguistic structure is similar in both cases, no text analysis can help the translator; he has no linguistic means to decide which is which. He has to refer to the constitution of the relevant organization.
The problem is complicated by the fact that most English texts on which a translator works were not written by native English speakers, who might be more able to express themselves without ambiguity. Let us consider the following sentence: He could not agree with the amendments to the draft resolution proposed by the delegation of India. The draft translation read: Il ne pouvait accepter les amendements au projet de résolution proposé par la délégation indienne. I am not able to judge if the English is correct or not, but, as a reviser, I had to check the facts, so that I know that the translator, who had understood that the text submitted by India was the draft resolution, was mistaken. Actually, it was the amendments. In French, you would have proposé if it referred to the draft resolution and proposés if to the amendments. Similarly, in Esperanto you would have proponita or proponitaj according to what refers to what.
I wonder how a computer solves similar problems. I have been told that it detects the possible ambiguities and asks the author what he or she means. I wish it good luck. All translators know that authors are usually unavailable. Much translation work is done at night, because a report or a project produced during the afternoon session has to be on the desks of the participants to the conference in the various working languages on the following morning. They are not allowed to wake up authors to ask them what they meant.
Or the author is far away and difficult to get in touch with. When I was a reviser in WHO, I had to deal with a scientific report produced by an Australian physician. He mentioned a disease outbreak which had appeared in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. This was before e-mail time, so that we had to write to Australia to know if the disease affected American soldiers who were prisoners of the Japanese or Japanese caught by the Americans. When the reply arrived, it stated that the author had been dead for a few years.
Many mistakes made by professional translators result from this impossibility, in English, to assign an adjective to its noun through grammatical means. When a translator rendered Basic oral health survey methods by Méthodologie des enquêtes fondamentales sur l’état de santé bucco-dentaire, he was mistaken in relating the word basic to survey, whereas it actually relates to methods, but he should be forgiven, because only familiarity with the subject enables the reader to understand what refers to what. The correct translation was Méthodologie fondamentale applicable aux enquêtes sur l’état de santé bucco-dentaire.
My wife teaches translation to American students who come to Geneva for one year. A standard translation task she gives them includes the subtitle Short breathing exercises. Every year, half her class understands “exercises in short breathing”, whereas the real meaning is “short exercises in deep breathing”. The fact that native speakers of English so consistently make the same mistake, although the context provides all the necessary clues, keeps me wondering. Does a computer have a better judgment than humans? Can a machine discern, compare and evaluate clues?
The fact that, in English, the endings -s, -ed and -ing have several grammatical functions often complicates matters. In the sentence He was sorting out food rations and chewing gum, it is impossible to know if the concerned individual was chewing gum while sorting out food rations, or if he was sorting out two kinds of supplies: food, and chewing gum.
Semantics
Problems caused by semantics are particularly difficult for human translators. They are of two kinds: (1) the problem is not apparent; (2) the problem is readily seen, but the solution either requires good judgment or does not exist.
An example of the first category is provided by the phrase malaria therapy. Since malaria is a well known disease, and therapy means “treatment”, a translator not trained in medical matters will think that it means “treatment of malaria”. But the semantic field of therapy is not identical with that of treatment, although this is not apparent if you simply consult a dictionary (Webster’s defines therapy as “treatment of a disease”). It would be too long to explain here the differences, but the fact is that malaria therapy should be rendered, not by traitement du paludisme (kuracado de malario) , but by impaludation thérapeutique or paludothérapie (permalaria kuracado) , because it means that the malaria parasite is injected into the blood to elicit a febrile reaction designed to cure the attacked disease, which is not malaria. In other words, it means “treatment by malaria” and not “treatment of malaria”.
In the French version, published by Albin Michel, of Hammond Innes’ novel Levkas Man, one of the characters complains about les jungles concrètes in which an enormous population has to live. This does not make sense for the French reader. Since some of you understand Esperanto, I can explain the misunderstanding better using that language. Jungles concrètes means “konkretaj ĝangaloj”. What the author meant by concrete jungles was “jungles de béton”, “betonaj ĝangaloj”, i.e. high-rise housing developments made of concrete. This is a case in which the translator was not aware of the existence of a semantic problem, namely that concrete has two completely unrelated meanings: a building material, and the opposite of “abstract”.
An example of a semantic problem requiring good judgment — and, with all my prejudices, I fail to imagine how a computer can exercise that kind of judgment — is the word develop. It has such a wide semantic field that it is often a real nightmare for translators. It can mean “setting up”, “creating”, “designing”, “establishing” and thus refer to something that did not exist before. It can mean “intensifying”, “accelerating”, “extending”, “amplifying”, and thus express the concept “making larger”, which implies that the thing being developed has been concretely in existence for some time. But it can also mean “tapping the resources”, “exploiting”, in other words “making use of something that has been having a latent or potential existence”. In all other languages, the translation will vary according to the meaning, i.e. to that particular segment the author had in view within the very wide semantic field covered by the word. To know how to translate to develop such or such an industry, you have to know if the said industry already exists or not in the area your text is covering. In most cases, the text itself gives no clue on that matter. Only the translator’s general culture or his ability to do appropriate research can lead him to the right translation.
Such a simple word as more can pose problems, because its semantic area covers both the concepts of quantity and of qualitative degree. What does more accurate information mean? Does it mean “a larger amount of accurate information” or “information that has greater accuracy”?
A word like tape is just as tricky. If it refers to sound recording, you translate it into French as bande or cassette (provided you know which kind of recorder was used). But if it refers to the gluing material, as in Scotch tape, you have to render it by ruban adhésif, since in that particular case, the French word bande evokes the bandaging of a wound.
Often, a problem arises — without being always apparent — because a word has a special semantic value in the particular milieu in which the author works; in that case, an underlying concept is frequently unexpressed, since the author addresses persons working in the same field and used to the same kind of compact expressions. In the sentence WHO helped control programs in 20 countries, only knowing that in WHO parlance control program means “a program to fight a disease and put it under control” may make the translator suspect that the author meant “WHO granted its assistance to help fight the relevant disease in 20 countries”. The junior translator who understood it as meaning “it helped to control the programs” was grammatically justified, since in English the verb to help can be construed without the particle to in the following verb and, in such a sentence, nothing enables you to know if control is used as a noun or as a verb.
However, most of the difficulties that human translators meet relate to the different ways in which various languages cut up reality into differentiated semantic blocks. I use the word block on purpose, because very often reality is continuous, as well as concepts, whereas language is discontinuous. Blue and green are what I call “semantic blocks”, whereas in the spectrum there is perfect continuity. Very often, a concept that exists in a language has no translation in another, because peoples cut up the continuum in different sizes and from different angles.
In a number of cases, it does not matter. The fact that for the only French word crier English has to choose among shout, scream, screech, squall, shriek, squeal, yell, bawl, roar, call out, etc., does not pose serious problems in practice.
But how can you translate cute into another language? The concept simply does not exist in most. Conversely, the French word frileux has no equivalent in English, so that a simple French sentence like il est frileux cannot be properly translated. Still, you can say he feels the cold terribly or he is very sensitive to cold. Although those are poor renderings, they are acceptable. What most resists translation is the adverbial form: frileusement. How can you translate il ramena frileusement la couverture sur ses genoux? You have to say something like He put the blanket back onto his knees with the kind of shivering movement typical of people particularly sensitive to cold. To those of you who might think that this is literary translation, something outside your field of research, I have to emphasize that descriptions of attitudes and behavior are an integral part of medical and psychological case presentations, so that the above sentence should not be considered unusual in a translator’s practice.
An enormous amount of words, many of them appearing constantly in ordinary texts, present us with similar difficulties. Such words as commodity, consolidation, core, crop, disposal, to duck, emphasis, estate, evidence, feature, flow, forward, format, insight, issue, joint, junior, kit, maintain, matching, predicament, procurement and hundreds of others are quite easy to understand, but no French word has the same semantic field, so that their translation is always a headache. Dictionaries don’t help, because they give you a few translations that never coincide with the concept as actually used in a text; in most cases the translations they suggest do not fit with the given context.
Another case in point is provided by the many words that refer to the organization of life. You cannot translate Swiss Government by Gouvernement suisse, because the French word gouvernement has a much narrower meaning than the English one. (Interestingly, although the semantic extension of both words does not coincide exactly, you can translate it into Esperanto by svisa registaro, because the Esperanto concept is wide enough). In French, you have to say le Conseil fédéral or la Confédération suisse according to the precise meaning. The French word gouvernement designates what in English is often named cabinet. The English word government is one of the frustrating ones. You may render it by l’Etat, les pouvoirs publics, les autorités, le régime or similar words, evaluating in each case what is closest to the English meaning, and you have to bear in mind that at times it should be sciences politiques (for instance in the sentence she majored in government, in which the verb major is another headache, because American studies are organized in quite a different way from studies in French speaking countries).
The Russian word dispanserizacija illustrates a similar problem. It designates a whole conception of public health services that has no equivalent in Western countries. If you want your reader to understand your translation, you should, rather than translate it (it would be easy enough to say dispensarisation), explain what it means.
Conclusion
As you see, each one of the problems I mentioned makes the translators’ task very arduous indeed. Problems caused by ambiguities, unexpressed but implied meanings, and semantic values without equivalent in the target language require a lot of thinking, a special knowledge of the field and a certain amount of research — as for instance when you have to find out if an industry being developed already exists or not, or if secretary Tan Buting is a male or a female, which, in many languages, will govern the correct form of the adjectives and even the translation of secretary (Sekretär? Sekretärin?) . Such problems take up 80 to 90% of a professional translator’s time. “A translator is essentially a detective,” one of my Spanish colleagues in WHO used to say, and it is true. He has to make a lot of phone calls, to go from one library to another (not so much to find a technical term as to understand how a process unfolds or to find basic data that are understood, and thus unexpressed, among specialists) and to tap all his resources in deduction. I do hope that computers will free the poor slaves from those unrewarding tasks, but I confess that, with my incompetence in data processing, I am at a loss to imagine how they will proceed.
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Posted by fajro
Translation in international organizations
by Claude Piron and Humphrey Tonkin
INTRODUCTION
In July 1977, the Joint Inspection Unit of the United Nations published a document entitled The Implications of Additional Languages in the United Nations System. This document assembled in one place a great deal of data on the language services in the UN system – more than had ever been brought together before. The document offered detailed information on the language policies of the United Nations and specialized agencies, gave comparative data on costs and staffing, described the limitations of present language services, and provided projections on the costs of new services.
But there was much that the Joint Inspection Unit report could not cover, either because specific information was not available or because of its primary focus on the costs of additional services. The authors of the present study — one of them a professional translator and the other a student of language problems — offer a closer look at the present organization of translation services in international bodies. They enter a number of caveats on the difficulties both of collecting and of interpreting data in this area, and they propose some radical solutions which go far beyond the recommendation of the Joint Inspection Unit that language services be kept to the minimum level compatible with the operations of the organization in question.
The authors offer their study as a contribution to an ongoing debate, not as the final word on the matter. They have drawn extensively on their own knowledge of UN practices and on many of the available documents, though they cannot lay claim to a comprehensive knowledge of translation practices in all international organizations, nor indeed of all documentation on the subject.
They would, in fact, welcome additional comments from readers and users of this study, particularly concerning the feasibility of the solutions they propose.
C.P., H.T.
1. TRANSLATION AS A JOB
”Don’t try to understand, just translate.” Such advice is often heard by translators in international organizations. Its frequency shows that whatever their academic achievements, many people with positions of responsibility in such institutions have not understood what language is and still harbour the childish impression that translating is largely a matter of replacing each word by its equivalent in the other language.
In fact, it is impossible to translate without understanding, which implies that it is impossible to translate without being conversant with the relevant field. The word pattern in International Labour Organization and in International Civil Aviation Organization is exactly the same: international/something/organization, but the word international refers to organization in the first instance, to aviation in the second, which explains that in French ILO is called Organisation Internationale du Travail, whereas ICAO has to be rendered as Organisation de l’Aviation civile Internationale (and not Organisation Internationale de I’Aviation civile). This is not an insignificant detail: it has legal and political implications, since understanding the terms of reference of ICAO depends on relating appropriately adjective and noun in its title.
Here is another example. Malaria treatment and malaria therapy are so similarly constructed that most translators without inside knowledge translate the second phrase as if it were synonymous with the first. In fact, malaria therapy means “treatment (of another disease, e.g. of general palsy) by inoculating the patient with the malaria parasite”, in French impaludation thérapeutique or paludothérapie. If the context is sufficient and the translator good, he (or she) may realize that it means something else than “therapy of malaria” — and will have to spend some time in finding how that form of treatment is referred to in his language — but such expressions may appear without any context clue, for instance if they are part of an enumeration, given as an example, or found in such a sentence as “(…) a reaction he discovered when studying malaria therapy many years ago”.
Such problems are part of a translator’s everyday work. Does more accurate information mean “a larger quantity of accurate data” or “information with a higher degree of accuracy”? Does WHO helped control programmes in 12 countries mean that it assisted in controlling the programmes or that it gave assistance in carrying out (trachoma) control programmes?
The fact that an original text may have been written by a Japanese, a Greek, an Iranian or a citizen of some other country does not help the translator, who never knows if a departure from good usage is due to a wish to introduce a nuance or ignorance of a fine point of grammar.
2. TRANSLATORS’ QUALIFICATIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
The fact that translating requires understanding has many implications. One of these is that having good translators on an organization’s staff is both difficult and costly. A translator cannot be content with a more or less general understanding of the text: a translator’s comprehension must be precise and detailed. On the other hand, one cannot understand a technical text thoroughly without being a specialist. But since texts are extremely varied and it would be uneconomic to have a translator for each speciality, the translator must be a specialist of many fields, which is an inherent contradiction: depth and breadth are mutually exclusive in any kind of training.
Such being the case, an optimum must be reached: to find somebody who has a specialized training in a given field, has a deep knowledge of at least two foreign languages used by the organization, is able to express himself clearly and is willing both to develop his understanding of neighbouring or different fields and to devote his energy to a clerical, tedious, intellectually unrewarding job.
We arrive here at another contradiction, between the high qualifications required and the subordinate, uninteresting nature of the work. In the machinery of an international organization, the translation unit is something like a typing pool: its status does not run high, and nobody is really aware that it is made up of people with high academic degrees in law. physics, medicine, engineering, economics or other fields.
One frequent result of this situation is a feeling on the part of the administration that translation costs much too much compared with its usefulness, and an awareness on the part of the translators that their plight will never be fully understood.
Translation involves a pervasive feeling of frustration, on many accounts. It is frustrating to read a sentence that you understand perfectly, but to realize that you just cannot find a way of expressing it in your own language, either because the latter lacks the necessary linguistic means, or because the right phrasing eludes all your efforts.
It is frustrating to have no say in editing a document when, because you see it in closer detail than any of its authors, you are conscious of obvious ways of improving the draft. It is frustrating to be barred from expressing your thoughts on the subject of the text you translate, even if it deals with your own speciality, because you are, in a way, a non-person, whose job is to express other people’s ideas, even when they appear to you more confused or less pertinent than your own.
It is frustrating to strain your mind to solve translation problems while knowing that your text will, at most, be given a superficial reading by one or two experts, if it is ever read at all. It is frustrating to know that much of your wording will be changed more or less arbitrarily by a reviser.
It is frustrating to stumble again and again, even after ten or twenty years of translation work, upon passages that you do not understand, without finding the person or the book that will give you clues to the meaning that eludes you. It is frustrating, after years of university study, to do a tedious, monotonous job in which you are alone with your text and your reference books, without any exterior stimulus to respond to, facing documents that seldom have any relationship to your interests.
Having a thorough knowledge of the relevant fields and of a few languages is only a prerequisite for translation work. The process of translation itself is a kind of acrobatics which consists in constantly switching from one set of reflexes to another, from one cultural universe to another. It requires both strength (solid bases in the treated fields and in languages — superficial knowledge is of no avail) and flexibility (you have to reframe your thoughts according to a new series of constraints quite different from those which governed the expression of the original idea). Anybody taking part in the screening of candidates for a translation post realizes that many people with high technical or scientific qualifications and a very thorough mastery of several languages can be very poor translators. They have the strength, but not the flexibility. They lack the acrobatic skill which is a must for doing translation work day after day.
3. PRODUCTION
Acrobatics is exhausting. That, plus the frustrations mentioned above, explains why no translator can work eight hours a day, except during very short periods. You can strain your mind just so much, no more.
Since administrations do not realize this, they apply to translators rules that are valid for other kinds of staff members. Consequently, translators are forced to pretend to be full-time employees when most work only half-time, the other half being spent in reading, writing, relaxing or talking with colleagues.
The result of this comedy is that the production of a translation unit, in terms of pages, is quite low in comparison with the cost involved in the employment of such highly qualified staff. (1)
The production of translation units in international organizations is one of the best kept secrets in the world. It is a subject on which each unit head would like to know the figures of his counterparts’ services in other organizations, but on which he is aware that the real truth will never be forthcoming.
In UN document A/7606 (p. 255 of the French edition), it is stated that the average estimated production of a translator is five pages a day. This may be confirmed by the following data.
The usual practice of translation units is to have a slip for each translator on which every job he does is entered, with the number of pages converted into “standard pages”. This allows the secretariat to follow the production of individual translators. The figures are confidential, and we would not mention them here if we had not come across a draft report prepared by a member of a translation unit in one of the organizations of the UN system in response to a circular from the head of the unit demanding an increase in output. The report was never transmitted because the personnel conflict in the unit was somehow defused, but at the time the translators had agreed to ask the secretariat for their daily production figures in the two relevant years and to communicate them to one another so as to have a factual basis on which their reply could rest. Those figures were as follows (standard pages/day):
|
Translator |
Year 1 |
Year 2 |
| A | 4.4 | __ |
| B | 7.4 | 5.2 |
| C | 3.9 | 4.2 |
| D | 4.8 | 4.2 |
| E | 4.4 | 4.4 |
| F | 5.0 | 5.6 |
| G | 5.4 | 4.0 |
| H | 4.7 | 4.8 |
| I | 7.0 | __ |
| J | 4.2 | 7.0 |
| K | 5.8 | __ |
| L | __ | 4.4 |
| M | __ | 5.3 |
| mean | 5.18 | 4.91(2) |
The means for both years are quite close to the figure given in the UN document. But these figures are misleading because they do not take revision into account. It will be recalled that in most organizations translation is done in two stages: the translator’s paper goes to a reviser who checks the meaning, removes the mistakes and endeavours to improve the style.
In the translation unit considered here, there were at the time seven revisers. If they were included, the average output per person of the whole unit would fall to 3.17 pages per day for year 1 and 2.89 for year 2. Those figures are not quite exact because revisers may occasionally have done some translating, which could not be considered here for lack of the relevant figures, but since in the organization concerned revisers did very little translation at the time, the difference is negligible for all practical purposes.
Such a low output is arresting if one considers the costs. Staff members of a translation unit are ranked as P-3, P-4 (most revisers, a few senior translators) and P-5 (a few senior revisers), but the cost must also include the head of the unit and its secretaries, plus, in a few organizations — the UN for instance — reference staff. Moreover, most of the time of the typing pools is devoted to the translation unit. Equipment and material costs (dictating machines, tapes, typewriters, paper, electricity, maintenance) should also be added (see the report of the Joint Inspection Unit on the implications of additional languages in the UN system, document A/32/237, par.24).
The reader should bear in mind that the costs are multiplied by the number of languages. Let us see for instance how many people are paid to convey the information contained in a document of 40 pages. Whereas production figures differ for some languages, we will assume an equal output for the sake of simplicity. This is justified by the fact that the apparently higher production of Russian translators is offset by the lower output of the Chinese.
| French translator | 40 : 5 = 8 person/days |
| Spanish translator | 40 : 5 = 8 person/days |
| Arabic translator | 40 : 5 = 8 person/days |
| Russian translator | 40 : 5 = 8 person/days |
| Chinese translator | 40 : 5 = 8 person/days |
| subtotal translators (P-3): | 40 person/days |
| French reviser | 40 : 15 = 2.7 person/days (3) |
| Spanish reviser | 40 : 15 = 2.7 person/days |
| Arabic reviser | 40 : 15 = 2.7 person/days |
| Russian reviser | 40 : 15 = 2.7 person/days |
| Chinese reviser | 40 : 15 = 2.7 person/days |
| subtotal revisers (P-4): | 13.5 person/days |
| French typist | 80 : 40 = 2 person/days (4) |
| Spanish typist | 80 : 40 = 2 person/days |
| Arabic typist | 80 : 40 = 2 person/days |
| Russian typist | 80 : 40 = 2 person/days |
| Chinese calligrapher and typist | 80 : 40 = 2 person/days |
| subtotal typists (G3-4-5): | 10 person/days |
| TOTAL | 63.5 person/days |
4. A CONTROL SITUATION THAT REVEALS BOTH WASTE AND DISCRIMINATION
It is a principle of scientific studies that a valid assessment of a situation can be made only by comparing it with a control situation in which another hypothesis is tested. To assess the value of the plurilingualism used in the UN system, it may be useful to consider it against the background of an organization using only one language. The Universal Esperanto Association (UEA), which is as worldwide, for all practical purposes, as the UN family, is a nongovernmental organization whose only working language is the International Language Esperanto. The information contained in a forty-page document prepared by the UEA is immediately available to its members in all countries, so that there is no need whatsoever to invest 63 person/days in a single document just to overcome the language barrier. The total investment in time and energy does not exceed that expended in the production of the original English text considered here.
Of course it will be objected that the members of the Universal Esperanto Association must first learn their language in order to use it. But even here the UEA scores over the method currently in use in the UN system, both in terms of initial investment and in terms of linguistic equality.
The system used by the United Nations involves vast preliminary investment in time, money and intellectual energy, the individual language learner and by that person’s country. Delegates or users of documents who were not educated in one of the working languages have to spend many hours for many years (at least six, and for some speakers of non-cognate languages, e.g. the Japanese, as much as ten) to become adequately familiar with the languages in which the documents are available. The investment in the case of Esperanto is far lower, varying anywhere from a few months to a maximum of two years. The method of overcoming the language barrier in an organization like the UEA is all the more rational since perfect mutual understanding is obtained with a minimal or non-existent investment by the various national educational systems.
If the investment of time and energy is enormous, the United Nations method also involves more discrimination. And — ironically — this discrimination is largely financed by its victims. With the addition of new languages, overall costs have to be increased. Since the language situation is not taken into account when computing contributions, those Member States whose own languages are not used by the UN have to pay their share of these added costs as if they benefited from them, though in reality their situation has deteriorated. Korean, Indonesian, Finnish and many other delegates gained nothing when Chinese, Arabic, Spanish and Russian — languages without communication value for them — were added to the translation burden. On the contrary: there are now more potentially rival Member States in a better position to frame their ideas and defend their theses.
There is thus discrimination, as far as ease in communication is concerned, in favour of a Yemeni as against an Iranian, of a Chinese as against a Japanese. An expert who is a native speaker of Arabic or Russian may be invited to a Committee or Board even if he is poor at languages. A Greek or Ethiopian cannot be. In fact such a person cannot enter international life at all. Such discrimination is obviously contrary to the spirit of the Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the case of Esperanto, nobody is excused from the necessity of investing some time and energy in the acquisition of the means of communication, which puts everybody on an equal footing, but that investment is relatively small, which means that it is within everyone’s reach. In the UN system, the whole burden of language learning falls on those whose language has no official status, the other ones being free from the painstaking obligation of assimilating another tongue, which gives them more time to acquire expertise in their field.
We are of course well aware that the present linguistic situation in the United Nations is as much a result of political forces as it is a consequence of the desire for equality of communication. But we are equally certain that there is no way of breaking the political stalemate through any revision of the use of national languages. The United Nations began with two working languages, and there are many who wish that situation could be brought back. But there is no way of turning the clock back. Linguistic power, like political power, is too diffuse and general to allow the disfranchisement of languages now enjoying the status of working languages. The only way out of this impasse (and even that is a politically difficult course) is through the use of a neutral language — a language which is no one’s property — as a replacement for national languages under certain circumstances.
People familiar with the work both of the UEA and of international governmental organizations assert that Esperanto is capable of all the administrative and organizational functions for which national languages are used. Hence its use in governmental organizations is largely a political and organizational matter, not a linguistic one. We shall return to this question later in this document.
5. BUDGET DATA
Budgets and financial reports do not give an accurate picture of the real situation concerning translation. Translation services involve an increase in overall costs – personnel, insurance, finance, office space, etc. Obviously, this increase does not figure in budgets under “Translation”. But this is not the point we want to make here. We wish rather to emphasize that organizations are ashamed of their poor performance in overcoming the language barrier and endeavour to blur the picture as much as possible.
One of the means sometimes used to that effect consists in separating conference translation from other translation, so that the latter heading covers only routine work not relating to meetings. If a budget line is devoted to Publications, this may also hide a part of translation costs.
Similarly, a certain amount of translation is done in Public Information Offices, which does not show up in budgets and financial documents. We might also add that translation in regional offices is usually shown separately, which gives the superficial reader of a budget the impression that the organization employs less translators than in fact it does.
Much depends also on how the amount of work is figured up. If the basis is the individual slips made by the secretariats of the translation units, there may be some (hardly conscious) cheating, which is almost unavoidable since it is in the interest of all concerned. Frequently the secretary is very generous in counting pages: a new version, with a few changes, of an already translated text will be entered in full, as if it were a new document, so that a 50-page paper will have been “translated” within half an hour: pages with only figures or diagrams, or with just a few lines, will be counted as full pages, etc. This mode of calculation works in the interest of the individual translators, of the revisers, and of the unit as a whole — and puts its leaders, and indeed the whole organization, in a favourable light.
Moreover, statistics made up on the basis of individual slips may neglect to distinguish between translation and revision figures. If there is one reviser for three translators, with a respective individual output of 300 and 100 pages in a given month, the translation unit will have produced 300 pages at the end of the month. But the secretary drawing up the statistics may write:
| Mr A | 100 pages |
| Ms B | 100 pages |
| Mr C | 100 pages |
| Ms D | 300 pages |
| 600 pages |
Another element that distorts the picture of translation in financial documents is the practice of financing translation through funds appropriated for a project, a programme or a given section. This happens, for instance, when some office wants a text translated at a time when the translation unit is too busy to accept an extra workload. If the translation unit suggests that the office turn to outside help (i.e. a free-lance translator working at home), but itself has no funds available for this, the office concerned often replies that it can draw on its own appropriations to finance the translation.
Other sums directly linked to translation but not appearing as such in budgets or financial reports are – besides all the supporting services, equipment and supplies – the amounts spent on travel, accommodation, visas, etc., for translators sent to conferences away from headquarters. Let us illustrate this point with a recent example.
The Alma Ata Conference on Primary Health Care (6-12 September 1978) jointly sponsored by WHO and UNICEF employed some thirty translators. They worked little. The French unit, for instance, included two shifts — a ‘day’ one, which worked from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. and a ‘night’ one which was supposed to work from 4 p.m. to midnight, but which always left at 10, except for the last night, when the translation of the conference report required the staff to remain till 2 a.m. The chief of the day shift had some (little) work to do which he had to take on himself because it happened that the texts to be translated were in Spanish and in Russian and he alone had the necessary combination of languages. But everyone else, on both teams, was for all practical purposes idle for the first five days of the seven-day Conference.
This should not be construed as criticism of the person who organized the translation activities for the meeting. As for every outside conference, he had no means of guessing the amount of translation that would be required. Had the Conference decided on the establishment of summary records in all languages for all Committee meetings, the translation staff would have been working full time. We just want to point out that the plurilingual system used in the UN family implies such economically absurd situations as having thirty persons doing little or no work in a faraway place while their routine work at Headquarters is done by costly temporary staff.
But the amount lost in such a way is greater than appears at first glance. How many hours did the Travel, Conference, Transportation and Visa Offices devote to that staff? How much did it cost to dispatch typewriters with Arabic,. Spanish, French and English keyboards, dictating machines, reference works, etc., considering both the transportation cost itself and the time devoted to arranging the transportation?
To add to the absurdity, a number of documents for the same conference had been translated into Chinese, because it was not known until very late whether the Chinese would attend. Chinese being a working language, a “yes” would have considerably increased the costs alluded to here. If we relate all this to our control situation—similar conferences organized by the Universal Esperanto Association—we will realize that none of these many extra costs is absolutely necessary for smooth intercultural communication under such circumstances.
6. REAL EFFECTIVENESS OF THE TRANSLATION EFFORT
Even if the papers produced in several languages were of the utmost importance, it could still be asked whether such translation is worth the expense involved. But this is far from being the case. A major part of the time and intellectual energy invested in translation relates to texts which will have one or two readers at most, and in many cases none.
This may seem incredible to somebody without inside knowledge. But let us look again at the concrete example of the Alma Ata Conference.
The speeches delivered in languages other than French at the plenary meetings of that Conference represented in round figures 35,000 words, i.e. some 102 standard pages to be translated into French, or 31 man/days (not including typing), according to the average quoted above. The whole set of speeches had to appear in the five languages used at the Conference, and the amount of pages to be translated into the other languages was probably approximately the following: English — 66; Spanish — 110; Russian — 125; Arabic — 118. (5)
It is difficult to convert this number into man/days for lack of data on the average output according to languages. Usually English translation units have a much higher output than the others, for three main reasons: (a) it is much easier to translate into English than from English, since most languages – apart from Chinese – are much more precise; (b) English translation units are most tolerant of mistakes and less demanding as far as style and clarity are concerned; (c) several English units do not use revisers.
A sensible estimate might be to assume that the average daily production per person of the English unit is 10 pages and that of the Russian one 5 pages, while Arabic and Spanish translators/revisers have an output similar to that of their French colleagues. In that case, the number of man/days required to produce the Alma Ata speeches in all languages would amount to 134 (without including typists, editors, printers, proof-readers and administrative staff).
Now we can revert to our original question: who will read those translated texts? The speeches — if honesty may excuse bluntness – are for a very large majority of potential readers devoid of interest. There are two main reasons for this.
First, a part of most speeches consists of greetings, congratulations to WHO and UNICEF for organizing the Conference and to the Chairmen, Vice-Chairmen and Rapporteurs on their election, and thanks to the Soviet Government, the Government of the Kazakh SSR and the authorities and people of Alma Ata for their warm hospitality.
Second, while the considerations on Primary Health Care may be deemed interesting in a few cases, most speeches simply repeat ideas formulated and published since that concept has appeared in the field of public health. A public health administrator will consider reading them a loss of valuable time; if interested, he or she will prefer to turn to the background document and to the report of the Conference. A few speeches contain some interesting information on the situation or experience of the speaker’s country, but most data given by most speakers are to be found in a WHO reference book, the Report on the World Health Situation, where they are easier to find. Besides, such oral statements are in many instances valueless because it is impossible for the reader to distinguish between boasting propaganda assertions and honest accounts on the situation in the speaker’s country.
Such being the case, who will read the documents? Nobody but the proof-readers will read them in full. Most probably, each participant will get a copy and look at his own speech in his own language: it is always a pleasure to see one’s prose printed. A few may check the translation in one of the other languages. Perhaps ten or twelve will have a look at a speech of a colleague. And that will be all.
In other words, it is more than probable that 134 man/days (60% of a staff member’s working year) devoted to the production of those speeches in five languages will have been for all practical purposes close to useless. In six months’ time, it would make no difference whatsoever if those translators had stayed at home or gone skiing instead of getting their work done.
Now, is this example an exception? Not at all, alas. How many readers are there for the speeches of all assemblies of all organizations in all languages? Or, to take at random a single example, how many people have read and will ever read — or, let us say, consult — even a few of the 400 printed pages (470,000 words, 1382 standard pages) of the summary records of the Third Committee of the Ninth Session of the UN General Assembly in Russian or in Chinese? And of most of the other General Assembly Committees or of such organs as the Trusteeship Council?
What actually happens with such records is that the people who took part in the meeting read the provisional text once — usually partly; the speaker refers to his interventions only, possibly to the replies to it or to the statement which prompted him to ask for the floor — as soon as it is available. In an immense majority of cases, those records are never read afterwards. Most of the interventions in most languages in the official version are never read at all.
Does that mean that those records are useless and should not exist? Not at all. It is impossible to know today if a given record may not become extremely important ten or twenty years from now. Our question is rather: what is the point of producing those records in so many languages? Or, to put it in another way, does the number of readers justify the cost of translation?
The same reasoning applies to reference books such as the already mentioned Report on the World Health Situation (approximately 400 printed pages). Is there a balance between the amount of translation work involved and the number of readers in the different languages?
That is not all. As a matter of fact, whole series of documents are never read in a number of languages because of the inadequate level of translation (often combined with the poor quality of the original text). We recently asked a number of delegates to a technical meeting, all of them from a given language area, whether they read the technical documents published by the Specialized Agency concerned in their own language. Most replied negatively. Typical answers were: “I read them in English in order to understand them” and “In my mother tongue the texts are kind of hazy, so that I find them difficult to understand, but since my English is not good enough, I just read papers directly produced on the subject in my country.”
Why are those documents “kind of hazy”? Because no translation staff sufficiently conversant with the field is available to produce the necessary versions in the various languages. When a French reader comes across the phrase un écart-type de deux in a technical report of a certain Organization, he simply cannot understand it, because it means nothing. The translator and the reviser had insufficient knowledge of statistics to understand that the text referred to a distance, from the mean, of two standard deviations, i.e. of twice the value of the standard deviation. They chose a phrase which “sounded scientific”, but unfortunately it is an enigma to the specialist.
It may also happen that a translation unit coins a new word because the concept cannot be expressed by a single word in its language, but that specialists have not really assimilated the meaning of the new form. We do not have the means to carry out a proper survey of this problem, but we wonder how many people in health administrations in French-speaking countries realize what is meant by système d’orientation/recours, a term found in recent WHO documents. It is a phrase coined by the WHO translation unit to render the English referral system, but since it is not used outside WHO, it is doubtful if many French-speaking Africans, for instance, would be able to define what it covers. The combination of jargon and translation mistakes produces the “kind of hazy” style which deters potential readers in a given language.
The reader of this document may wonder that such mistakes happen considering what we said earlier about the high technical qualifications required for employment in a translation section. But these high qualifications raise a recruitment problem. Specialists usually do not have the necessary high level of language competence, or have other more interesting job opportunities. The result is that, in practice, a translator with a degree in law may have to do his best with a page of statistics or an economist with a report on agriculture — or, to quote an actual instance (it happened in WHO in 1964), a text on mosquito ovaries for the Malaria Division may be translated… by a gynecologist, because there is no biologist or entomologist on the staff. And annual or sick leave may deprive the translation unit of its only specialist in a given field just when that specialist is needed.
The dearth of specialists/translators is one of the reasons for the employment of revisers, the rationale being that two cultured persons are more likely than one to understand or express correctly ideas from outside their particular field.
Now, using very emphatic turns of phrase is taking a risk if one does not feel at home in a subject. Consequently, to avoid being blamed for misunderstanding the text, translators and revisers tend to be as technically vague as possible, while subtly exploiting all linguistic possibilities in order to conceal that lack of precision beneath effects of style.
Since the “clients” of translation units do not realize their plight, they often send their texts at the last minute, which prevents conscientious translators from doing all the research that should be done to produce an acceptable translation in a field outside their specialty.
If translated technical texts are full of mistakes or “kind of hazy”, the blame should not be put on translators, but on the whole conception of intercultural communication as applied in international organizations. The odds against good translation are very great.
7. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF LANGUAGE
It is the realization of the fact that many documents in translated form are not read and thus represent an economic absurdity that prompted Dr Mahler, the Director General of WHO, to make the suggestion, endorsed by the Executive Board, that WHO give up translating the records of its meetings into more than one language (resolution EB60.R7). If the significance of such texts lies only in their archive or research value, he reasoned, what is the point of publishing them at an enormous cost in five or six languages?
But Dr Mahler had not realized the psychological connotations attached to a language hierarchy and he made the mistake of suggesting English as the only language in which the records would be produced in full. Language is a symbol of identity. When you force somebody to use a foreign language, he feels it (perhaps only at an unconscious level) as giving up part of his power and his identity, and he resents it. Countries with relatively little power have long resigned themselves to this ignoring of their linguistic identity and surrendered to the pressure of larger linguistic powers. Their resentment has been repressed under the overwhelming feeling that they have to be realistic.
It is not a matter of chance that, apart from Spanish, the official languages of the UN have been from the beginning the languages of the Member States with a permanent seat on the Security Council. Nor is it a matter of chance that Chinese, which ceased to be heard all through the period when the seat of China was occupied by Taiwan, was suddenly-used again with the recognition of the People’s Republic as China’s lawful representative, or that Arabic was added to the working languages precisely at the time when the oil crisis revealed the strength of the countries using it. All these facts reflect the power situation.
Language use in international organizations has reached an impasse because the psychological/political forces push in a direction incompatible with sound economic management and with normal efficiency. It is obvious that if nothing is done to check the present trend, the number of languages will continue to increase. German is much used in practice as an international tongue among people of Central and Eastern Europe. It is partially used at the regional level by several organizations of the UN family. What will preclude giving it a working language status in a few years’ time?
Swahili will certainly be included one day among the official languages. During the discussion of a proposal to grant working language status to Spanish and Russian in one of the organizations, an African delegate was greeted with applause when he stated that he would vote in favour of the draft resolution on the understanding that the beneficiary countries would reciprocally vote in favour of Arabic, and. later on, Swahili, when these languages were proposed for similar status.
It is enough to read the records of the Committee discussions on the addition of working languages to realize that the psychological/political forces are much stronger than the economic/efficiency ones. Although in fact the addition of new languages has never improved the efficiency of secretariats, but imposed on them new burdens with tremendous increases in costs, this fact has never been expressed in so many words. Instead of telling the truth — “Secretariats worked better when only English and French were working languages” — all delegates congratulate the new languages, pretend to rejoice at what they call “increased effectiveness”, and manage to ignore the economic and organizational aspects of their decision.
When several delegations suggest that Swahili be added to the working languages, what country will dare to speak against it? Black Africa is the only continent which is not represented in the language spectrum of the UN system. A negative approach to such a proposal will be felt by Africans as a rejection of African culture, values and identity. No government can afford to assume that stance in today’s political constellation.
Such being the case, it is obvious that Dr Mahler’s idea of producing full records in English only, although quite sound in its principle, was erroneous in its proposed application. Considering the psychological connotations associated with the language situation as symbolizing the power pattern of the world, it could only be rejected by the World Health Assembly. That actually happened (resolution WHA 31.13).
8. INTEGRATING THE ECONOMIC AND THE POLITICAL/PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS
While Dr Mahler’s proposal overlooked an important factor and was thus unacceptable, this does not mean that the idea was fundamentally wrong. It would obviously make sense to give up the publication in many languages of texts that are never read in them by more than a few persons and to limit oneself to a single official edition in only one language. However, considering the psychological/political factors involved, that language should be devoid of any power connotation.
The only language meeting the necessary criteria of clarity, flexibility, long interethnic tradition, relative ease of learning, and neutrality in the power situation is Esperanto. Few people are aware of these properties of Esperanto. But the fact that these features are usually ignored should not prevent their serious consideration in this instance. The reality of Esperanto is very different from the many popular misconceptions about it. For both scientific and legal reasons it is important to emphasize fact over feeling, objective evaluation over subjective taboos.
If a document has only an archive or research value, it means that it will most probably never be read at all, although it has to be available should a given development suddenly increase its importance, or simply for the sake of research or history. Reference documents will be read only partially and by very few persons. Only a few health administrators or a handful of students doing research work — if any — will read the pages devoted to the Leeward Islands, Surinam, Brunei, Niger, Mauritania or similar countries in the Spanish edition of the Third Report on the World Health Situation.
Since all the people interested in such documents already have a reading knowledge of English, French or Spanish, and it is extremely easy (a matter of weeks) for somebody with that linguistic background to learn to read Esperanto, switching from several costly languages to one neutral one would be quite justifiable.
Actually, it might even be decided that the relevant documents would be produced only in Esperanto but that a given part — not exceeding a stated number of pages — might be translated into any one of the working or official languages at the request of Governments. Just as microfilms represent a tremendous economy of space in libraries, while the possibility of consulting any microfilmed document by requesting it makes them a very satisfactory system, similarly the storing of records in Esperanto only would not preclude the availability of the desired parts in Russian, Arabic or other languages if so required by an interested party.
The Universal Esperanto Association, which enjoys consultative status (B) with Unesco and is on the roster of the Economic and Social Council, is at the disposal of the organizations of the UN family to help with the recruitment or training of staff necessary to carry out the above proposal, which could of course be applied gradually.
In many economic, social and other fields, a pilot project is first undertaken and its application generalized if the results are found satisfactory. The experience acquired in the solving of linguistic problems in intercultural settings all over the world by the Universal Esperanto Association (as well as, for that matter, by many other Esperanto societies) might be regarded as such a pilot activity.
Hard facts are to be looked at, however unpleasant they may be. If the UN system wants to avoid the plight of the European Communities, where language work absorbs between one fourth and one third of the budgets, it has no choice: it must consider the adoption of a language which solves both the psychological/political and the economic/organizational problems, i.e. of an ethnically, economically and politically neutral language. The most sensible way to carry out this change — which, incidentally, would have tremendous positive psychological consequences for international activities — would be a double approach:
1. The UN would declare that within twenty years, the only working language would be a neutral international language. In that respect, a strong case can be made in favour of Esperanto. Because of its uncompromising conformity to psycholinguistic laws, it is the only international language in which fluency is readily acquired also by people outside the Indo-European language area. It is the only non-ethnic language which is used by a wide diaspora encompassing many non-European countries. It is also the only one with a tradition long enough to guarantee its effectiveness. Such an official declaration would stimulate the learning of Esperanto among the staff of all governments and the population of all countries. After twenty years, there would be no difficulty in including in delegations members with a real mastery of the language.
2. While governments and organizations prepare to meet that dead-line, Esperanto would gradually be introduced in documentation, starting with documents like those referred to above, which have, at least in a few languages, an extremely limited number of readers.
Alternatively, the United Nations might work towards a reduction of the use of vehicular languages, like French and English, and an expansion of the opportunities for delegates to use their own native languages in debate. Interpretation might be provided as a matter of course in Esperanto, perhaps at the expense of the Member States participating in debate at the time, perhaps at the cost of a much-diversified, though not necessarily enlarged, interpretation service. Hence there would be a double movement towards equality, involving a reduction of the number of languages used in translation and an increase in the number used in interpretation.
If such a policy were adopted, what would happen to the present staff in translation units?
First it is important to understand that there will always be a need for translators at the UN — not so much for routine work as for special assignments. While we have done no detailed study of the matter, we think it very likely that over the twenty-year period referred to above, attrition would be more than sufficient to bring the translation services down to the level called for in our proposal. Furthermore, at least in the early years, there would be a need for the translation and the stylistic revision of texts in Esperanto, as the producers of texts build up their expertise. Translation on demand would continue to require the services of qualified translators. There is also a good chance that, as the rules governing language became less politically charged, there would be scope for the publication of precis texts rather than word-by-word transcriptions of some speeches and ephemeral documents.
Translating is an impossible and frustrating job. There is no proportion between the input in money, time and intellectual energy and the output in the smoother working of an organization. Moreover, traduttore, traditore. If the official records and reference works of international organizations were produced in just one neutral language, the risk of misunderstandings and of distortions would sharply decline, as would the costs. And these are not idle claims. Esperanto is a living and functioning language, which can readily be studied and observed — not in abstract theory but in concrete reality. Such a study would not be difficult to carry out, and it should not be deterred by sceptics. If Esperanto does not work, what is the mysterious means whereby its speakers communicate?
It would be disingenuous to suppose that a systematic study of the potentiality of Esperanto would be without its detractors. Attitudes to Esperanto are strange. Perhaps because language is so much a part of personality, it is hard to believe that a language whose origin was the creative invention of a single man can really perform all the functions of a living ethnic language. And because speakers of Esperanto tend to use it and spend relatively little time telling the rest of the world about it (in ethnic languages…), it is all too easy to view Esperanto as a Utopian idea rather than a functioning speech community.
What these sceptics do not realize is that the greater part of the vocabulary of Esperanto, and much of its usage, sprang not from the head of Ludovic Zamenhof, its creator, but from the day-to-day use of Esperanto by thousands of speakers of the language all over the world. They also do not know that many international meetings are held every year in Esperanto, including large congresses which gather as many as four or five thousand speakers from all over the world, and where the exclusive use of Esperanto as the linguistic means of communication is entirely satisfactory to all participants. Finally, they do not know that a number of organizations, such as the Universal Esperanto Association, use it for the minutiae of office organization as well as for all kinds of cultural activities.
But it is precisely the sense of the sanctity of one’s native language — a factor that causes some to turn away from Esperanto — that is the strongest imperative for its use. Linguistic equality, like racial or sexual equality, is not utopianism but common sense and simple justice.
9. CONCLUSION
1. As far as working languages — and thus translation — are concerned, the history of language use in the UN system shows an evolution that has been hardly perceived by delegates, Member States and Secretariats. English and French used to be, and to a large extent still are, the lingue franche of people who do not share a common language: they may be used as the vehicle of communication between an Indonesian and a Norwegian, between a Turk and an Argentinian. Spanish, Arabic and Chinese are never used in that capacity: their utilization is confined to people whose mother tongue they are. Even Islamic people, when they do not belong to the Arabic speaking world, use another language (mostly English) in international spheres. One never hears Arabic used as the means of communication between, say, Moslems from Nigeria and Malaysia, nor does one see the delegations of such countries as Iran, Afghanistan and Indonesia read the documentation in Arabic. Similarly, Spanish and Chinese are practically never used by people who do not speak them at home. Russian occupies an intermediary position. It is an intercultural language in the USSR, but hardly so in international organizations, where its use is limited to the Soviet, Mongolian and Bulgarian representatives, with a sporadic, but very infrequent, appearance in some other delegations from Eastern Europe.
2. The trend to add new languages is linked to such psychological factors as the search for prestige and a recognizable identity as well as to such political issues as the symbolization of power — cultural and economic, as well as purely political, power. Such being the case, nothing can alter this trend unless there emerges a will to face the language realities and to undertake a serious study of alternative solutions.
3. The evolution alluded to above has resulted in an enormous increase of man/days devoted to translation.
4. The constraints inherent in the task of translating impose a combination of high personnel costs (because of needed qualifications) and low production (because the human mind is limited, as is nervous energy, because many texts demand some kind of research, and because the kind of mental gymnastics required by the translation process is exhausting; the need for understanding precludes the extensive use of computers).
5. The high cost of every translated page is not perceived by secretariats, delegations and Member States because the issue is blurred by a number of factors. In particular, budgets and financial reports do not reflect the real influence of translation on overall costs.
6. Contrary to what is usually said by delegates when a new language is added, switching from “intercultural communication” (English and French only as working languages) to “facilitation of privileged groups of nations” (Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic) has nowhere contributed to a smoother functioning of secretariats. It has only imposed on them a costly burden. Secretariat representatives at discussions on languages do not present such additions as facilitating the task of their organizations. The only advantage is to a number of Member States, which amounts to discrimination against the others.
7. A very considerable proportion of translated pages produced by the UN system has no or very few readers.
8. An alternative solution is used in a number of non-governmental organizations in what might be described as pilot project conditions, although this phrase is perhaps too restrictive if one considers that this experience covers four generations and all parts of the world. It has always been found extremely satisfactory by its users. This alternative solution consists in the use of the International Language Esperanto.
Attending a World Esperanto Congress in 1977, the Director-General of Unesco said that this was the first time he saw an international meeting in which language was an aid and not a barrier to understanding.
9. Responding to a market situation and to specific requests from Esperanto-speaking people all over the world, the UN Public Information Office and parallel offices in Unesco have produced a few documents in Esperanto, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. The Esperanto version of the UN Charter — published, of course, by the UN — is forthcoming. At its General Conference in Montevideo, in 1954, Unesco adopted a resolution (resolution I V.I.4.422) in which it took note of “the results attained by Esperanto in the field of international intellectual relations” and instructed its Director-General “to cooperate with the Universal Esperanto Association in matters concerning both organizations”. The Universal Esperanto Association has been granted consultative status (category B) by Unesco and is on the roster of the Economic and Social Council. It also enjoys general cooperative relations (established in January 1979) with the Organization of American States.
10. Whereas the mastery of Esperanto requires only an eighth to a tenth of the time necessary to acquire a reasonably good knowledge of an ethnic language, a reading knowledge can be attained in a few weeks by any person capable of understanding English, French or Spanish UN documents.
11. The decision to translate little-read documents having only a research or achieve value into Esperanto only would represent a more rational use of Government contributions than the present system.
12. This would not solve the long-term problem, nor check the trend to new language additions. To achieve this, a proposal to adopt a declaration of principle in favour of Esperanto, on the understanding that it would be the only language used after a transition period — for instance twenty years — might be the sole effective way of forcing Member States and Secretariats to face up to the long-term problem and assume their responsibilities.
13. There is, however, widespread psychological resistance to considering seriously the adoption of such a language as Esperanto, even in a long-term perspective. The roots of this resistance lie both in sociopolitical factors and in the psychology of many individuals. People tend to dismiss the international language problem without devoting time to reflecting on it, as if everybody could in a few minutes give an opinion on a complex matter without considering its various aspects. In fact, the problem of language use in international relations, either at the public, or at the private, person-to-person level, is much more complex than is generally perceived at first glance. A very wide spectrum of political, social, cultural, economic, psychological, linguistic, phonetic and pedagogical realities have to be taken into account.
14. However understandable the resistance may be, indulging in it would be contrary to all principles generally accepted both in law and in science. It is universally recognized that, as a basis for assessing alternative solutions to a problem, evidence is more important than subjective impressions and logical thinking more appropriate than a reluctance to study the available data. Everybody would consider it absurd to discuss interurban communication without taking into account the existence of the telephone, or to ignore the availability of a vaccine when discussing how to handle a smallpox outbreak. Similarly, it is absurd to study intercultural communication as though nobody had ever used a neutral non-ethnic language, when it has been for almost a century a daily experience of hundreds of thousands of people scattered all over the world, and of a number of international associations with a sophisticated and complex level of organization.
15. Perhaps the saddest part of the Joint Inspection Unit’s nonetheless impressive report is its rather poignant admission that it sees no practical way of breaking out of the present pattern of language services, or of changing present language policies in the United Nations to any very significant extent. For this reason, if for no other, we should give very serious consideration to alternatives and the claims made about them, particularly when these claims are easily tested and documented.
NOTES
1. A simple way to increase the productivity of translation units would be to recruit translators as half-time employees, but administrations do not seem to favour such a system, and it would raise various problems that we cannot consider here.
2. Without translators B and 1 in year 1, and J in year 2, the means would be 4.73 and 4.68 respectively. It is impossible to assess the stability of the performance of translator I, who was away in year 2, but as far as B and J are concerned, their figures for the other year show that their performance was exceptional when it reached the 7-page level. It seems incredible that a person who produced an average of 4.2 pages a day for a whole year (average quite close to that of his colleagues and thus probably “normal”) could suddenly increase his output by some 3 pages a day simply by his own effort. No worker increases his own daily output by 67% without an outside factor intervening. The explanation may lie in one of the “cheating techniques” mentioned on page 11.
3. On the basis of one reviser for three translators.
4. On the assumption of an average typing output of 40 pages a day. The text is typed twice — once before, once after revision. The real figure might be lower because of the high standard of quality required for the final text; it is certainly lower for Chinese calligraphers and typists.
5. These figures are estimated on the basis of the number of speakers of each language. We could not obtain the actual statistics, but the Joint Inspection Unit will certainly have no trouble in getting them.
Esperanto Documents, new series, number 20 A (1979)
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Posted by fajro
When you travel all over the world, you soon realize that English is the language of power. Outside of English speaking countries, the victims of the system do not speak English, or at least they do not master it at a level which would put them on an equal footing with native speakers. Those who have a real mastery of English belong to the ruling classes, to business, to academe, to the comprador class and, in a number of countries, to the media. A typical example is India, where English is officially the inter-ethnic language, but where it is spoken only by 3% of the population (some sources say 1%). As in many other fields, the powerful have succeeded in conditioning people into believing that this is normal, that it is fair and that there is no alternative. English as a global language is taken for granted by practically everybody, including the victims. A very strange blindness occults its disadvantages, as compared with other solutions. Its main drawback is that it is so difficult for most inhabitants of our planet – but with various degrees of difficulty – that it creates a hierarchy. Among the peoples: English speaking nations, then people with a Germanic language, then people with a Romance language, followed successively by people with a Slavic language, and people with non-Indo-European languages. Within a given people: practically only persons wealthy enough to be able to afford several years of study in an English speaking country can be articulate in it. It may be that even in an English speaking country like the US, African-Americans and Spanish speaking people (as well as people of Korean, Ethiopian and other non European heritages) are also victims of this discriminatory hierarchy. In no sport would it be accepted that the competing teams might be submitted to unequal conditions, but nobody seems to realize that a negotiation in which one of the partners is obliged to use a foreign language is like a ping-pong match in which one of the players, although right handed, is forced to use his left hand.
All through the world, 95% of young people lucky enough to frequent a secondary school learn English. Apart from countries with a Germanic language, the result of this teaching, which represents a tremendous investment by governments and by a large number of private institutions, just as it requires a considerable investment in time and effort from the relevant individuals, is practically nil: in non-Germanic Europe, only 1% of the young are able to communicate more or less correctly in English at the end of their secondary studies; in Asia the percentage is 0,1%. When this poor result is called to the attention of government representatives, they incriminate the teachers or the pedagogy, or the students, never the language itself. Nobody in the whole world is willing to acknowledge as a fact that English is much too difficult to be acquired with only four or five hours a week for only six or seven years. According to my research (see my book Le défi des langues, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2nd ed. 1998, pp. 73-78), a minimum of 10’000 hours of study and practice are required to be able to master the language. The man in the street does not have 10’000 hours to devote to the study of the language. He is thus cut off from international life. Although his welfare depends on it.
Another perverse effect of English as a global language is that practically all through the world the information is biased according to the viewpoints of English speaking societies, since most of it comes through United Press International, Associated Press and Reuters, not to mention the impact in the world of magazines like Newsweek and Time (which did not devote a single line, at least in its European edition, to the Porto Alegre Forum or to the troubles in Quebec triggered off by the meeting of government representatives from the Americas on the large free market zone in that part of the world). The fact that in most countries 80% of movies shown on television are Hollywood productions is seldom related to language, although since English is the only foreign language understood in many countries, translations can be arranged for such films whereas they are not if the movie comes from another culture.
The subtle message that English is all right and that, anyway, there is no alternative to it is so prevalent that I would not have been aware of its significance if it were not for three circumstances:
(1) I have had the opportunity of travelling all over the world (especially for the World Health Organization),
(2) I have lived at the same time in various international milieus, which use different systems of linguistic communication,
(3) I happen to speak Esperanto since childhood.
The fact that Esperanto is so little known (especially in the US) and that, where the name is known, the real nature of the language is not, is part of the prevalent message. Ignoring a reality which is potentially disruptive for an established order is quite an effective way of preventing the replacement of this order by something more democratic and fair. In the case of Esperanto, it is taken for granted by most people who know about it that it is dead-born or that it is a failure, some kind of utopia which was doomed from the first because it is contrary to human nature. It is also wrongly imagined that its purpose is to solve the language problem by replacing all other languages, which is a sure means of eliciting a strong negative reaction against it, since language is part of our identity and nobody (apart form immigrants who want to assimilate completely) likes to give up such an important factor in his or her sense of being. As somebody who has spoken Esperanto with ordinary people in countries as different as Uzbekistan and New Zealand, Brazil and Hungary, Japan and the Congo, and many, many others, and who is exchanging e-mail messages in Esperanto with people in many countries I have not visited, like Togo, Ukraine and Mongolia, I can testify that Esperanto is extremely alive, practical, culturally inoffensive (as contrasted with English) and has never be meant to replace the other languages. Just consult http://www.esperanto.net.
As can be seen in my paper “Linguistic Communication: A Comparative Field Study” (http://claudepiron.free.fr), Esperanto can be acquired in between 180 and 220 hours, according to the native language, or in 0,02% of the time required to acquire English. Other studies conclude that at a same level of intensity (same number of hours per week), after six months of Esperanto the student has a communication capability which requires six years in the case of English.
This is the reason why Esperanto has been selected by the project Indigenaj Dialogoj, which helps people from discriminated ethnies to communicate and coordinate their actions by teaching them both the use of computers and of an international language much more cost effective than English and free from any power or economic connotation.
Language has in society the same function as nervous influx in an organism. The kind of monopoly on international communication that English has acquired creates a gap between those who master it and the bulk of the population in non-English-speaking countries. It is a very good application of the divide ut imperes principle. Unity of action and accurate mutual information are necessities if we want to orientate the world towards a fairer society, both within and among countries. Without an easy and rich language, accessible to all, as Esperanto happens to be, this goal cannot be attained.
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Posted by fajro
If you examine Esperanto from the outside, you’ll be tempted to consider it a Western language. Its pronunciation will remind you of the sounds of Italian and its vocabulary has, to a large extent, a definite Romance flavor. If you have the opportunity to hear a conversation in that language, you will soon notice that “yes” is used just as in English and is pronounced in the same way (but it is written jes). This will seem to confirm the Western nature of the language. If, being more conversant with linguistics and listening more carefully, you perceive a relatively high proportion of Germanic roots, you will conclude that it is indeed a Western language, and that, just as in English, its words are of both Latin and Germanic stock. If you have studied Greek, you will find it a bit more Eastern than you thought at first. “And” translates as kaj (rhyming with I), which is the exact equivalent of the ancient Greek kai, and plurals are apparently inspired by Homer’s language. In ancient Greek, parallelos ‘a parallel line’ becomes in the plural paralleloi ‘parallel lines’; in Esperanto, the plural of paralelo is paraleloj (rhyming with boy), a very close approximation to the classical Greek pronunciation.
Seeing an Esperanto text may somewhat alter your first impressions. The presence of some consonants with little hooks, the recurrence of the letter j after a vowel at the end of words, groups of letters like kv give it an aspect reminiscent of Slovene or Croatian. If this suggests to you a Slavic influence, you’ll be on the right track. Esperanto was born in Eastern Europe. Its syntax, many grammatical features, a number of phrases and the style of a typical sentence do betray an important Slavic substratum. The same may be said of semantics. While the word plena ‘full’ is taken from Romance languages, its usage is not restricted to the meaning of the French plein or the Portuguese pleno, it covers the same semantic field as the Russian polnyj, which derives from the same old Indo-European root pln. In no Romance language could you speak of a plein dictionnaire, pleno dicionario (literally, ‘full dictionary’), you’ll use a word like complet, completo and put it after the noun. Plena vortaro, in Esperanto, is a literal rendering of the Russian ‘polnyj slovar’ even in the way ‘dictionary’ is derived from ‘word’ (Russian slovo ‘word’, slovar ‘dictionary’; Esperanto vorto ‘word’, vortaro ‘dictionary’).
Has Esperanto anything in common with Semitic languages? In form, no, in spirit, yes. As in Arabic and Hebrew, Esperanto makes up most of its vocabulary through derivation from invariable roots. True, in Semitic languages, roots are almost always made up of three consonants and derivation is often effected by inserting vowels in between, whereas in Esperanto roots have no predetermined pattern and the only way of deriving a word from a root is to add something either at the beginning or at the end. All the same, the Esperanto version of the Hebrew Bible contains approximately the same number of roots as the original. In this it is much closer to the latter than translations in Western languages, forced to use numerous words which, unlike their equivalents in Hebrew and Esperanto, have no transparent derivation.
If, proceeding further towards the Orient, we go over from Arabic to Persian, we leave a language with a complicated grammar and a lot of exceptions to come upon a rather remarkably consistent language. In Arabic, in order to form the plural, you often have to transform the whole interior of the word: kitab ‘book’ becomes kutub ‘books’. Persian, which has borrowed many words from Arabic, has not kept the latter’s irregular plurals. To form the plural, you add the ending –ha, so that the plural of kitab has not to be memorized separately, it is simply kitabha, ‘books’. Esperanto is characterized by a similar simplicity. You need just a split second to learn how to form the plural of any noun, since you only have to remember that it is done by adding a j, which is always pronounced as the y in boy. What a difference with languages like German, Hausa, Arabic, in which you are practically obliged to learn the plural with every new noun! And even with English, more consistent, but still presenting a number of exceptions: woman, child, foot, mouse, sheep and many other words do not follow the general rule which states that you form the plural by adding an –s.
Most Westerners do not imagine that some languages are so consistent that irregular verbs, exceptions in plural formation or unclear derivation are, for their speakers, unthinkable, something like the aberrant product of a neurotic mind. It is so much more pleasant to do without those inconsistencies and yet to understand one another perfectly! Among such languages are Chinese, Vietnamese and… Esperanto. These three have in common a feature that sets them apart from most languages, especially the Indo-European ones: they are composed of strictly invariable elements which can combine without restriction. For people who speak such a language, the idea that ‘first’ cannot be derived from ‘one’ as tenth is from ten, seems quite bizarre, as it seems incomprehensible that there is no pattern in the modulations of pronouns, so that you have to learn, besides I, a whole series of words like me, my and mine. In Chinese, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ are, so to say, the adjective form of ‘I’: wo, ‘I’, wode ‘my’, ‘mine’ (compare women ‘we’, womende ‘our’, ‘ours’).
Esperanto derives the corresponding words in the same way. As a result, parallel realities are expressed in both languages by parallel forms, which cannot be said of any Western language. In ‘He takes yours, you take his’, the reciprocity of the gestures appears in the language as well in Chinese (ta na nide, ni na tade) as in Esperanto (li prenas vian, vi prenas lian). In English, while the symmetry is visible, it is not as perfect as in both Chinese and Esperanto: you cannot form yours from you or his from he, you have to learn those words as separate entities, and what is take in one part of the sentence becomes takes in the other. Units or details to be memorized in order to express oneself correctly are considerably more numerous in Western languages than in Chinese or Esperanto.
In word formation as well Chinese and Esperanto share a similarity of patterns. In English, as in French, you have to learn separately such words as fellow-citizen and coreligionist and you cannot express in one word the concept ‘a person of the same race’ or ‘somebody who speaks the same language’. In Chinese, you have only to know the structure and the basic word. Just as in Esperanto: to form samlandano ‘fellow-citizen’, ‘compatriot’, samreligiano ‘coreligionist’, samklasano ‘school fellow’, ‘kid who is in the same class’, samrasano ‘person of the same race’, samlingvano ‘person with the same mother tongue’, you just have to know the pattern sam—ano and to insert the corresponding root. Similarly, a Chinese who studies English, French or Italian has to memorize as a completely different unit the word foreigner (étranger, straniero). If he learns Esperanto, he has only to translate syllable after syllable (morpheme after morpheme, a linguist would say) the three elements of the word in his mother tongue: waiguoren ‘foreigner’ is made up of wai ‘outside’ (Esperanto: ekster), guo ‘country’ (Esperanto: land) and ren ‘human being’ (corresponding here to the Esperanto ano, a human being who belongs to, who is a member of, who resides in…). ‘Foreigner’ is eksterlandano in Esperanto.
Here is another example. The Chinese who tries to acquire a Western language and wishes to be able to speak accurately of animals has to memorize a whole series of nouns which, in his own language, follow regular patterns. To have learned horse is of no avail if he has to express (or to understand) mare, colt and stallion; similarly, knowing how to say ox does not help him to say cow, calf and bull (to say nothing of beef, veal and similar words). In Chinese, such words are part of a consistent table. They are respectively ma, muma, xiaoma and gongma (for the horse family), niu, muniu, xiaoniu and gongniu (for the ox family). The system is just as consistent in Esperanto. The relationship is the same between, on the one hand, ĉevalo (ĉ is pronounced as ch) and ĉevalino, ĉevalido, virĉevalo, and, on the other hand, between bovo and bovino, bovido and virbovo.
Those who criticize Esperanto for being too Western overlook two important aspects of the question. First, they neglect to proceed to a linguistic analysis of the language, which is the only way to discover how different it is, in depth, from what it seems to be at first sight: their judgment is purely superficial. Second, they ignore the fact that some language is necessary if people with different mother tongues have to communicate. In practice, on what language does one fall back when mutual comprehension is needed and Esperanto is not used? On English! Isn’t this one a Western language? As a matter of fact, it has many more Western features than Esperanto, and is much more difficult to learn and use for the large majority of the inhabitants of our planet. No language could put all peoples on an equal footing. But among all those that exist and are being used, Esperanto comes closest to that ideal. After 2000 hours of English (five hours a week for ten school years), the average Japanese and Chinese are incapable of using it in a really operational way. Their clumsiness, as well as their difficulty in producing the relevant sounds, tend to complicate communication or to make them ridiculous, a risk which is, unfairly, spared the native speaker of English, although he is the one who has made no effort towards mutual understanding. After 220 hours of Esperanto, as an average, Eastern Asians can really communicate in that language, a language which is a foreign language for everybody and in which the risk of sounding strange is thus equally distributed.
Whoever wants to play fair and to be objective has to refrain from criticizing Esperanto as long as he has not proceeded to a deep enough analysis of the language and to comparisons with English and the mother tongues of the peoples whose interests he pretends to defend. In a democracy, you are presumed innocent as long as your guilt has not been proven. It would be in accordance with the best Western traditions to apply that principle to Esperanto and to reserve one’s judgment until the evidence has been examined. No serious linguist, journalist or politician would dare pass judgment on Tagalog or Malayalam without having gathered facts on those languages. There is no reason to adopt a different attitude about Esperanto.
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Posted by fajro
There is so much interdependence in today’s world that we can regard mankind, or even the Earth with all the living beings it nurtures, as one huge living organism. Once this working hypothesis, or this metaphor, is adopted, it becomes obvious that this living organism is sick: some parts are destroying the environment of which the organism has a vital need, others are acting like a cancer: overfeeding, they drain the resources of the whole for their own sake, while starving out the rest.
If we analyze the situation with a view to achieving a cure, we cannot fail to realize that the organism’s nervous system has a crucial role to play in solving the problems. To respond immediately to a crisis, nerve impulses acting at light speed are indispensable. The necessary information has to reach the brain at once, and a decision taken at the brain level must trigger off without any delay the appropriate gestures or movements. This is just as true in a wide society as in any individual. If the information received by your eyes can reach your brain only through some prosthesis, and the orders given by your brain move your members only after a complicated, delaying process, how could you drive a car, play a musical instrument or save somebody from a fire or a drowning? Instant communication is the key to the good functioning of any organism and of any society. Mankind, as a whole, is not different. Hence the importance of language, the means it uses to communicate.
It is strange that this basic need for effective linguistic communication is so seldom taken into account in today’s international life. Indeed, it is all the more curious since language is what makes us human: it is the basic feature that distinguishes us from animals. However, there is a tremendous resistance throughout society to face up to reality in the field of language. As a result, people do not realize the perverse effects of the communication system currently in use at the world level.
A few examples of perverse effects
Selection
Language choice selects the people who will take part in international activities. Our seminar is a good example. Since we use only two languages, Russian and English, we have closed our door to many young people who had the required competence and interest to share our discussions and bring their specific contributions. It is obvious that, apart from Russians and participants from the former Soviet Union, the only countries really represented here are the countries where a Germanic language is spoken: Great Britain, USA, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. Where are, for instance, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, the Greeks? Where are the Japanese, the Koreans, the Africans, the Latin Americans? It is not only a matter of financial means, as shown by a comparison with similar meetings held by the world youth organization TEJO, to which I will refer in my final remarks. Because TEJO uses another system of linguistic communication, it does not select its participants according to language. There, a forum like this one benefits from the participation of people from Asia, Africa, Latin America and all countries of Europe. The selection of English as the language of many international gatherings is based on a misapprehension: the idea that English is understood all through the world. This is a gross mistake. The only peoples with a fair knowledge of English in the average population are the peoples I listed, who reach rather easily a good level in that language simply because their mother tongues belong to the same family.
Now that, thanks to satellite dishes, a single television program can be watched all through Europe, a British advertising company planned to broadcast English language advertisements. But before carrying out this project it decided to check what proportion of the Western European population would understand them. An extensive survey was made to get an answer to that question. The company had to give up its project: it appeared that 94% of the surveyed population were unable to understand an average English text (1). An international event using only English thus excludes a large majority of the inhabitants of our planet.
A similar situation is found in the work of international organizations. An American or British expert recruited to do some specialized work will be the best in his field, period. If he is Czech, Finnish or Brazilian, he has to be both an expert in his specialty and a person with a great talent for languages, since being able to use a foreign language at a high technical level is not within everybody’s reach. A colleague who is much more competent, creative, with a higher potential for solving the kind of problems for which this expertise is needed will be excluded simply because he is poor at languages. This is both unfair and counterproductive. It is one of the perverse effects of the use of English as a world language.
Misinformation
Another perverse effect of the current system of language communication is the distortion of information it brings about. We had a very good example of that yesterday with the speech of Dr Augusto López-Claros, who represented the International Monetary Fund. The girl who did the interpretation transformed a whole part of his speech from mere statements of facts to advices and recommendations. Apparently she did not grasp in what spirit he was speaking. As those of you who understand both languages have noticed, there were so many distortions that the part of the audience which understands only Russian heard a different speech from the one which was being delivered. To quote just one example, there was a time when Dr López-Claros quoted infant mortality rates. It was translated as smertnost’, which simply means “mortality”. This is a gross mistake, since the infant mortality rate is an indicator of the economic and social development level of a given country, which general mortality is not. The whole point he made was lost for most of the Russians. Simultaneous interpretation is not a better solution to the problem. It saves time, but from the point of view of quality it is much worse than the cumbersome system we are using here,(2) as I have shown in a book I have recently published (3).
As to written translation, I have illustrated in the same book how far it is from being satisfactory in the majority of the cases (4). Most news reaches the various countries in English, since the main news agencies are Associated Press, United Press International and Reuter, and their news items are translated locally before being transmitted to the various papers and radio stations. The kind of distortion we just discussed is very frequent also in this case. For instance, all French language papers translate poverty threshold as seuil de pauvreté, whereas it should be seuil de misère. Poverty is a state which implies much more lack of essentials than the situation that the French word pauvreté evokes. Readers of French papers thus get a picture of the world which is considerably different from that conveyed in the original information.
Unethical use of financial resources
“An effective malaria control program would cost only $800,000 a year,” says a French doctor fighting disease in Laos, “but there is no money to finance the operations. Simply no money. No money to pay the staff, no money to purchase equipment, no money to buy gas. There is simply no money.” (5) But when the Twenty-Eighth World Health Assembly decided – against the recommendation of the WHO Secretariat – to add two languages to the four already in use, it accepted to earmark for its language services $5,000,000 a year, “to begin with” (6). It refrained from carrying out a cost/effectiveness analysis that might have determined if its decision would facilitate or complicate matters. As a matter of fact, observation of the functioning of international organizations shows that the addition of new languages entails for them only complications and added costs. True, a few States are put in a better position, since they can use their own language, but this involves no advantage for the organization as a whole, nor for most of the Member States. Yet, all international organizations have undergone the same evolution: they have kept increasing their language budget at the expense of the activities they were meant to perform. To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year. This is the cost of one 7 word sentence in a document translated at the UN, (7) which translates many millions of words a year. The European Union translates 3,150,000 words a day at a cost, avowedly, of $0.36 a word (8).
Translation and interpretation are unproductive operations. The UN worked better at far lesser cost when it used only English and French. Moreover, the addition of new languages has been useless to most governments: a Hungarian, a Japanese, an Ethiopian still have to use a foreign language to take part in discussions or negotiations, just as they did in the fifties. For the sake of slightly increasing the number of privileged countries – which is unfair to the majority, called upon to pay their share of this increase in expenditure without receiving any benefit – tremendous amounts of money are being diverted from substantive activities towards unproductive language work. The unavailability of financial resources for many social, educational, environmental and developmental purposes and their availability for language services point to an approach to world problems which is both irrational and unethical. Priorities should be revised.
Obstacles to development
In the field of development people think and act as though language played no part at all. The emphasis is on credits, technology, food, equipment. However, development implies training. Two facts are generally ignored in this respect: 1) that training implies the use of language, and 2) that acquiring one of the main languages of the developed world is impossible to most people in the developing countries. English has an official status in India, but only 3% of the population speaks it (9). The situation is worse elsewhere. To quote Jamaliah Mohamad Ali, head of the language training program at the University of Malaysia: “Even among English teachers the standard of English is low. Many cannot converse in English” (10). If teachers who have devoted so much time and effort to study the language cannot use it in practice, how can you expect to communicate in it with the average citizen? There is a tremendous resistance in the Western world to accept the fact that a language like English is far too difficult to ever be mastered, in most of the world, by the man in the street. Or the man in the bush.
A friend of mine was recruited by a non governmental organization to teach Afghans in the use and maintenance of the machinery which is his specialty. This French speaking Swiss had to deliver his teaching in English. Then a local interpreter translated his words into Farsi, the language used in that part of the country. You know how cumbersome this system is: you experience it at this very moment. It more than doubles the time required to communicate, since quite often, as you have noticed, the interpreter has to ask a question to ascertain if he has understood properly. In the instance I am referring to, there were many more problems because the interpreter did not understand in concrete details how the machines worked and was unable to use an appropriate technical terminology.
Here is another example. There is a need, today, for a good, up to date handbook on medical laboratory techniques to be used in the bush, i.e. in areas remote from so-called civilization. Development is impossible if people are not in good health, and maintaining a proper physical condition requires a number of diagnostic and other procedures that are to be performed in outposts lacking any sophisticated equipment. Such handbooks do exist. But only in English, French and Spanish. Which means that they are of no use whatsoever where they are most needed, because, for people whose mother tongues are quite different from any Western language, reaching a proper level in such languages requires too many hours of study to be feasible. Publishing such a handbook in the local languages would be too expensive, considering both the costs of the translation and the printing of a very limited number of copies bound to become obsolete after a decade or so. Why is it that the language factor in such situations is constantly overlooked?
Ecology
International life implies the working of many networks of world or regional organizations that do a lot of translation. Everywhere, translation is done in two stages: the translator prepares a first draft which goes to a reviser who corrects and improves the text and sends it over to a typing pool which produces either the final document or a typescript that will be printed. This procedure involves an extensive use of paper. An institution with eleven languages, such as the European Union, uses at least twenty-two times more paper than an organization with only one language, since each page has to be translated from the original into ten languages and typed at least twice. In the European Union, the staff employed because of the multilingual system numbers some 7,000 people (translators, interpreters, secretaries, typists, terminologists, librarians of language units, messengers, additional staff in administrative and social units to service all this personnel). This is a large community that requires a lot of supportive work: these people use elevators, telephones, offices that have to be heated and cleaned. In a small town of 7,000 inhabitants, people themselves are responsible for the maintenance of their houses, the cleanliness of their premises, heating or air conditioning, use of fax or telephone, consumption of electricity. Not so in the language community of the European bureaucracy: the corresponding expenses are paid by the taxpayers. How many forest acres does this unproductive consumption of paper represent? What is the cost of the energy used by this bureaucratic community? There are no answers to such questions. Official documents relating to language costs are always restricted to direct costs. Indirect costs are simply ignored.
Inferior position
All the languages in use in present day international life (with the exception which will be described in my concluding remarks) are very difficult for the average non-native speaker. A mastery of English, for a Frenchman for instance, requires some 10,000 hours of study or practice (this difficulty is the reason why 94% of the population of Western Europe, in spite of the many hours they have devoted to language courses in school, are unable to understand a simple text in English). The capability to use a foreign language at the level required for serious exchanges is thus limited to a very small élite.
As a result, there is an obvious lack of spontaneity when people with different language backgrounds have to exchange ideas, to say nothing of the misunderstandings and of the risk of being laughed at, a risk unfairly spared to people who can use their own language. The difference between what one means to say and what is actually said can be considerable. Mr. Cornelio Sammaruga, the Director General of the Red Cross International Committee, who comes from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, had all his audience laughing when he said – I heard it myself – “Nos délégués sont des zéros” (“Our delegates are nullities”). He meant Nos délégués sont des héros (“Our delegates are heroes”), but failed to apply the pronunciation rule which distinguishes hero from zero in French after a z sound. His French is excellent as a rule, but in this particular case, his flaw was particularly regrettable.
You never feel quite secure in a foreign language. I have more than 40,000 hours of study and practice of English, but when I improvised the inaugural speech last Friday, since, as you know, I had to replace the Secretary of the Club of Rome at the last minute, I mistakenly said costed instead of cost. I suddenly realized that I did not remember what the right form was. Irregularity of grammar always puts non-native speakers in an inferior position.
This inferiority has been well described by a Dutch mayor in a TV program: “Even if we have a good knowledge of English, as is often the case in this country, we hesitate to speak up in an international group which uses that language because we are afraid: afraid of not saying exactly what we mean, afraid of making mistakes, afraid of being deemed ridiculous because of our accent, afraid of not feeling at home enough in the foreign language to give tit for tat to an Anglo-Saxon with all the necessary strength…” (11). It is a fact: in a debate or a negotiation, language is a weapon, as every lawyer, every politician knows. The current system of language use in international contacts is extremely unfair to a large number of people. This is especially the case when a foreigner has to deal with a local authority. There are people who find themselves in jail because they could not explain themselves adequately to a policeman or a judge.
Distortion of relationships
The sane relationship between grown-ups is a relationship on an equal footing: it is an adult-adult relationship. If one of the participant in an exchange is forced to use his partner’s language, the relationship is automatically distorted. It becomes a parent-child relationship. He feels inferior, he is not sure of himself, he is in the position of a child. His partner, on the other hand, feels all the time that he could give lessons to the other, this one feels like a parent. Of course, most of the time these feelings are unconscious, people are not aware of the way the relationship is structured. Nevertheless, it is so structured, and it causes distortions that should be taken more seriously than they usually are.
Weakening of intercultural exchanges
Yesterday, somebody in our group suggested that we split according to languages. We decided not to do so. But other groups of our Forum have adopted this way of solving the language problem. While on my way here this morning I talked with a German participant who belongs to such a group. He was furious. He told me: “What’s the point of coming all the way to Siberia if I am to find myself discussing only with fellow Germans?” Such a situation is an extremely frequent feature of international congresses. It prevents the cross-fertilization of ideas. Intercultural exchanges are enriching precisely because people with different backgrounds have different approaches, different outlooks. This tendency to meet only people from your own culture even in international settings is not the least of the perverse effects of the current system of language use.
Cultural contamination
The most perverse effect may be the less obvious. We have seen that language selects people. It also selects what people watch and read. “Cultural goods” represent the second item in the list of US exports. No other country exports so much “culture”. Actually, this heading covers mainly TV films. Why has the whole world watched Dallas and Dynasty? Because they were produced in English and were thus in a language that was more or less understandable to the persons doing the programming for television in the various countries. “Because it’s so dominant and yet so varied, English can be both attractive and dangerous – dangerous because it exerts enormous power”, acknowledges Tom McArthur, the editor of the Oxford Companion to the English Language (12).
The result is that a single culture, the Anglo-Saxon culture, especially in its American variant, has in the whole world an impact which is not proportionate to its quality, simply because of the language structure of international exchanges. This introduces changes in mentalities which are not to be welcomed. Films that extol violence over gentleness, immediate, reflex action over thinking and meditation, having over being, noise over silence and youth over old age are transforming whole societies whose outlook used to be more adapted to the requirements of a serene, happy life. An enormous number of people all through our planet watch television, but what they see is very far from reflecting the extraordinary variety of our world. Diversity is completely submerged under the values and life patterns of just one culture, or rather of a very partial aspect of it that sells well abroad and is widely – and unfairly – confused with “America”.
The same can be said of light reading. A mediocre author can reach the whole world if he is lucky enough to have English as his mother tongue. Competition in the chances of being published is not fair, from a global point of view. Language is a writer’s basic material: whatever your talent, you cannot write, at that quality level, in another language than your own. Anybody who is not English-speaking is thus handicapped in the highly competitive world of writing.
This situation has a negative impact on the cultural richness of mankind because cultural influences are not reciprocal. They instill a particular mentality and flatten out differences. The whole world is conditioned by American (mainly Hollywood) productions, but the US public is not reciprocally influenced. “These days, Americans watch few foreign movies, listen to few foreign songs and borrow few foreign words”, says a New York Times senior journalist (13). Such a one-way transmission of models, outlooks and attitudes is not healthy for a global society.
The various systems in use
Ineffective, unfair or unethical systems
Essentially, there are three methods of international communication in use in today’s world, the third one being so marginal that it would hardly be worth mentioning, if it was not precisely the only one that succeeds in avoiding all the perverse effects that have been listed above.
One of the systems is the bureaucratic one. Several languages are used, and communication is ensured through translation and interpretation. As is usually the case with bureaucratic methods, it involves much waste and a lot of unproductive work. With this system, human energy is not put to efficient use. What has been said above about the unethical earmarking of financial resources refers essentially to this system. It presents all the negative features of the Soviet way of life.
The second system is the “jungle” one. It is based on the precedence of power. One language is in use. Those who cannot use it are excluded. In many cases, although they are victims, they are made to feel guilty (“I have been too lazy or stupid to learn the language that everybody uses; if I cannot communicate, it’s my fault”), so that they do not realize that they are the victims of an unfair method of communication. This system is not without common traits with the caste system of India. People have a lot of privileges if they were born in the right society: where English is spoken, i. e. where you can be lazy and selfish and still enjoy access to international contacts, and even expect, for what is felt as legitimate reasons, to be able to communicate wherever in the world you are traveling. An English-speaking physicist has been able to devote to physics the many hours that his colleagues from other cultures have had to devote to the painful and slow acquisition of English, (14) but he is unaware of his privilege. When you are a member of the upper caste, you take your advantages for granted. This caste system involves a hierarchy: people from Germanic cultures can reach the required level in less time than people with Romance languages, and the latter in less time than people with Slavic languages. Peoples with languages like Chinese or Indonesian are even more likely to be excluded, since the amount of time they need to master the language is enormous. Not only have people outside the upper caste been forced to devote many, many hours to the study of the upper caste’s language, moreover when they have to negotiate or discuss with somebody belonging to this upper caste they are at a disadvantage: their opponent can avail himself of a richness of vocabulary and a feeling of security in language use that they will forever be lacking. Their opponent has a mastery of the language weapon, they have not. We should meditate the following comment of a Hopi lady who sadly realized that by authorizing mining in the reservation, they had destroyed the harmony of their environment: “If, twenty years ago, our English had been better, we would never have signed that contract.” (15)
An effective, fair and ethical system
Contrary to what most people imagine, there is an alternative to both the bureaucratic and the jungle systems. A really democratic system exists and works perfectly. Its functioning can readily be observed in the field. When the various means of communication used to overcome the language barriers are compared in practice, with objective criteria, the third system, which is only marginally used, stands out as the only one which avoids all the perverse effects discussed above. It is called Esperanto.
Esperanto is a language born of one century of international interactions in a small community of people spread all over the world and encompassing most cultures, most religions, most professions and social layers, linked by nothing else than the use of that language for international communication (16). This community developed simply because all over the world there were people eager to communicate across cultural barriers and to enlarge their horizons who did not have the time to acquire one of the prestigious languages. So they adhered to a communication convention proposed in Warsaw in 1887 by a young man, L. L. Zamenhof, under the pseudonym Dr Esperanto. By using it in practice in all sorts of settings, they transformed that project into a living language. Speakers of Esperanto use that language only in international communication, as a substitute either to interpretation or to the kind of broken English usually in use, today, in intercultural situations (17). They think that the language which has grown out of Zamenhof’s project offers the best means of preserving all mother tongues and of protecting the cultural diversity of our planet.
Esperanto can be learned in an eighth of the time required to be able to communicate in an acceptable way in another foreign language, and in a thirtieth of the time required to have an actual mastery of another foreign language. It can be said that one month of Esperanto is similar to one year of another language as far as the communication level is concerned. It is the only existing language in which the average person can have a communication capability equivalent to the one he has in his mother tongue.
Language and psychology
The neuropsychology of language
To demonstrate how this is possible I should give you a whole course on the neuropsychology of language acquisition and use. To summarize a very complex subject, let me say that using a language is a matter of reflexes. Two sets of reflexes intervene in the use of national or ethnic languages: innate reflexes, and conditioned reflexes. The first ones are the inner ones, the congenital ones; the others come from the outside world, they have been introduced in the natural, spontaneous, first-level functioning by a lengthy process of correction, which is two-pronged: correction by parents, relatives, friends and teachers; self correction by the child who wants to imitate its human environment as perfectly as possible. If you say feet rather than foots, many sheep rather than many sheeps, he came rather than he comed, it is because you have been conditioned to repress the first forms, to which your innate reflexes used to lead you, and to replace them by the standard forms.
Esperanto relies entirely on innate reflexes. You cannot make a mistake in the plural of a noun or in the tense of a verb, because the possibility to err simply does not exist. The same neuropsychological law that governs language use at the first level – it was called by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget generalizing assimilation – applies to word formation as well as to grammar. If you analyze the speech of small children, or of foreigners, you will notice that they manifest a very strong natural tendency to generalize any language element they have previously assimilated. For instance, your brain has registered that there seems to be a pattern in the derivation of the names of professions: report > reporter, farm > farmer, etc. Your natural reflex will be to generalize that pattern. So you will deduce that the man dealing with fish is a fisher. That is the word that many foreigners will use spontaneously, it may be the word you used as a child. But your human environment has blocked this natural formation and introduced a conditioned reflex so that you say fisherman. Esperanto differs from all other languages in that you can always trust your natural tendency to generalize a pattern. In English, after I have learned tooth and teeth, I am still at a loss if I need to speak of the professional who deals with teeth: dentist is a word I have to learn separately. And why do I have to write translator and not translater, following the general pattern? In Esperanto, once you have learned to form the name of the professional with the suffix -isto, you do not hesitate: there is no conditioned reflex to block your innate reflex, since the right to generalize a structure suffers no exception. Look at the translations of the words I have just used as examples: raporti → raportisto, farmo → farmisto, fiŝo → fiŝisto, dento → dentisto, traduki → tradukisto.
In Esperanto you feel natural and at ease because you feel secure. You know that you can follow your natural reflexes. This is never the case in another language. I once pronounced indict as rhyming with convict. Why? Because I knew the word only through reading and I generalized the pronunciation pattern I had assimilated from derelict, depict, afflict and similar words. This happened to me forty (18) years after I had started learning English, a language I have never ceased to practice ever since. It shows that really mastering English is out of my reach, as is confirmed by the fact that, in spite of so much more practice than the average European, I still cannot publish a text in English without having somebody correct my language. The mistakes I make in English are simply impossible in Esperanto. Since, moreover, the latter is a foreign language for everybody, no one has a feeling of superiority, the relationship is adult-adult from the beginning. The fact that everybody has his own accent does not prevent communication to unfold quite smoothly. And the language is very rich. What determines richness and diversity is not the number of basic elements (a limited number in Esperanto) but the range of possible combinations, as can be ascertained by studying organic chemistry… or Esperanto poetry.
I can testify to this superiority of Esperanto as a means of intercultural communication because I have attended many meetings using it, many meetings using English only, and many meetings using various forms of simultaneous or consecutive interpretation. None of the perverse effects of the other systems can be evidenced where Esperanto has been adopted. For instance, in the meetings of the World Esperanto Youth Organization (TEJO), you find people from all over the world, including Koreans, Japanese or Latin Americans. What a contrast with this Forum! How many Russians would be present here if interpretation from and into Russian were not provided? In a TEJO meeting, as in all other gatherings using Esperanto, human contacts are direct, spontaneous, easy. They can always be confidential. After a few months of study, Esperanto speakers are in a better position to discuss delicate matters among themselves than Bill Clinton is when he meets Boris Yeltsin or Helmut Kohl.
Resistance
If Esperanto presents such a superiority over other forms of intercultural communication, how come it is so little known? Again, this is a highly complex problem – a sociopsychological one, in this case – that would require many hours to be explained fully. One of the factors is the power structure among nations. Another is that language is so linked to our emotions, our thinking, our identity that there is a very strong, albeit unconscious, psychological resistance to face up to what it really is. Learning our mother tongue meant submitting ourselves to the arbitrary whims of the adult world. When you said my foots and you were being corrected, nobody could give you a rational explanation: the form you used was quite consistent with the purpose of language, i.e. communicating, expressing oneself. Saying foots communicates exactly the same information as saying feet. “Why can’t I say foots? ” you might have said. “Because that’s the way it is”, was the only possible reply. Which means: there is no rational justification for that, you have to follow what our ancestors always did. For the child, who tries to understand, such an explanation is the equivalent of “you have to say feet because I tell you so”, period. People are not aware of it, but there is an extremely authoritarian model underlying language acquisition. It conveys a message which is never explicitly stated, namely, that the function of language is not just to communicate, it is also to tell if you belong to the good or to the bad group (socially, culturally or from the point of view of generations). A language which forgoes that function and serves only to communicate is frightening to a large part of the population, although people are not conscious of this feeling.
Of course, I do not mean that we should distort or debase our languages: respect for our ancestors and love for our culture are worth the effort made to learn our mother tongue as well as possible, and also, if we are interested, languages of other parts of the world. But what is sensible on the scale of a nation becomes absurd at the international level. There, effective communication is more important than any other consideration. To impose our ancestors’ whims on our partners is a tremendous lack of respect. If a German says, in his mother tongue, he helps to us and a Frenchman he us helps, why should he give up his habit when he talks with some other national? In Esperanto, the forms li helpas al ni (German structure), li nin helpas (French structure) and li helpas nin (English structure) are equally correct and frequent. Experience proves that this liberty facilitates, rather than inhibits, communication. Why should we forgo such freedom since, in international groups, it does not make sense to demand loyalty to one specific set of ancestors more than to all others?
A third factor explaining why Esperanto is so little known is a history of calumny first launched by those elements in society who considered themselves an elite because they could use the prevailing foreign language of the time. In India today, the thin layer of society that can really use English has also a monopoly on power. Would they rejoice if all Indians, even the poorest ones, were able to communicate across language barriers, not only in their own country, but in the world at large? Indeed, this is true of the whole so-called Third World, and, to a large extent, also of Europe.
Yet, in the last analysis, it may well be that the main factor preventing a faster spreading of Esperanto (it is spreading continuously, but at a slow rate) is simply the force of inertia. People do not want to devote time to thinking about all this. They are not aware of the perverse effects of the current communication system. It works smoothly enough as far as they are concerned. They do not imagine that language teaching in schools could be organized otherwise, or that language use in international activities could be arranged in a more sensible way, freeing large amounts of tax money for productive or social purposes. Why should they favor a change that seems unwarranted? Doing nothing is simpler than facing up to a problem and undertaking the comparisons without which it is impossible to determine where the best solution lies.
Conclusion
As has been emphasized in one of our plenary sessions, the Earth has shrunk. This means that contacts are closer and more frequent. Satisfactory contacts imply easy, spontaneous, precise linguistic communication on an equal footing. It is easy to verify, by comparing in the field the various methods developed by mankind to ensure communication among people with different mother tongues, that Esperanto is by far the system that gives the best results for the smallest investment in effort, time and money. It is the most cost/effective solution to the problem of mutual understanding, the best solution from a social point of view (unlike the present systems, which favor people rich enough to afford an education abroad in one of the main languages), and the best solution psychologically, because a language which follows without any trap the natural path of the verbalization process makes for ease in expression.
These are facts that have never been disputed on the basis of field study or of the analysis of the relevant data. They are easy to check. If we do not act on them, we might just as well acknowledge that the future of mankind does not interest us, that all our talk about development, ecology, fairness in the relationships between West and East as well as North and South is just a smokescreen for our inertia, an excuse for preserving our privileges and a pitiful mask concealing a lack of interest for those who were not born on the right side of the cultural frontiers.
If we really want to organize a “world society with a human face”, we cannot avoid dealing with linguistic communication, which has as crucial a function in the global human family as neuronic transmission in an individual body. Thinking is closely linked to language. If you learn a language which is free, your thinking gets free. As long as you deem it normal to think in English or in any other national language, you are not likely to develop a genuine global outlook. You will be conditioned, unwittingly, by the mentality embodied in your language, in its grammar, its semantics, its cultural references. Esperanto is the only language that has a fully intercultural substratum, that has been fashioned by intercultural contacts and that has received from a century of mutual adjustments a genuinely global mentality.
I do not ask you to believe me. I would like you to check my statements and to reflect on what I have said. I strongly hope that you will not engage in a priori thinking. A lot of nonsense is said about Esperanto by people who feel exonerated from having to consider the evidence. They have never attended a meeting using that language, they know nothing of its structure, its history, its literature, its diffusion in the world, they have never compared in practice the various systems of intercultural communication or measured the time required to reach a given expression level in the various languages, including Esperanto, but they do not hesitate to pass judgment. It is obvious that such an attitude vitiates the whole approach to the problems of our planet. If one is not fair in a field as basic to human relationships as language, how will he be in the others?
It may be that in listing the perverse effects of the system of linguistic communication currently in use I have forgotten the most important one: a subtle and hardly conscious manipulation of opinion designed to prevent mutual understanding among all layers of global society. Psychological research (19) shows that this unconscious manipulation derives, among other causes, from a fear of direct contact with the feelings, the aspirations, the philosophy, the experience of people that are perceived as Aliens as long as they do not lose that frightening status by entering the elite club of the English speaking community.
If you discuss Esperanto with friends and colleagues, you will very often elicit negative responses. I hope you will not accept them at their face value. Let the people who react that way tell you what data they have collected, where they compared Esperanto to the other means of intercultural communication, what testimonies they have analyzed. If they cannot answer those questions, how could they be credible? I trust not only your sense of fairness and responsibility, but also your firmness in demanding evidence. These qualities are indispensable to choose the optimal method of linguistic communication. And solving the problem of communication in a world divided into a multitude of separate entities by tight language barriers is an indispensable first step if we want to create a “global society with a human face”.
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REFERENCES
1. Mark Fettes, “Europe’s Babylon: Towards a single European Language?”, History of European Ideas, 1991, 13, 3, pp. 201-202.
2. The international youth forum used two languages, English and Russian. Speeches and interventions were translated sentence after sentence.
3. Claude Piron, “Le défi des langues” (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), pp. 31-32 and 107-115.
4. Pp. 34-37 and 115-121.
5. Stan Sesser, “Forgotten country”, The New Yorker, 20 August 1990, p. 64.
6. World Health Organization, Twenty-Eighth Assembly, Use of working languages: Report by the Director General, Document A28/50, p. 3.
7. Evaluation of the Translation Process in the United Nations System (Geneva: Joint Inspection Unit, 1980, document JIU/REP/80/7), Table 9.
8. Roman Rollnick, “Word mountains are costing us a fortune”, The European, 20 December 1991, p. 6. Comparison with other organizations suggests that this figure is a serious underevaluation.
9. “India faces up to the foreigners”, The Economist, September 10, 1994, p. 71.
10. Jay Branegan, “Finding a proper place for English”, Time, 16 September 1991, p. 51.
11. Mr Winkel, Mayor of Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands Television, AVRO Channel, 3 August 1990, 08:45 PM.
12. Interview by Daniel Petersen and Deborah Curran, “What Was That You Said?”, Newsweek, April 26, 1993, p. 56.
13. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Benefits of Borrowing Le Bon Mot”, International Herald Tribune, July 26, 1994.
14. A Korean or Japanese physicist has had to invest some 3000 hours in the study of English, to be able to communicate with his Anglo-Saxon colleagues at a level still far from being really adequate; 3000 hours, that is 75 weeks at 40 hours per week: one year and a half, full time.
15. Quoted by Jean-Claude Buffle, “Indiens américains: 1991″, L’Hebdo, March 7, 1991, p. 31.
16. Richard E. Wood, “A voluntary non-ethnic, non-territorial speech community” in Mackey, W. F. and Ornstein, J., ed., Sociolinguistic Studies in Language Contact (The Hague, Paris and New York: Mouton, 1979), pp. 433-450.
17. An interesting description of this use of broken English in today’s world, and its impact, can be found in Barry Newman, “Global Chatter – World Speaks English, Often None Too Well; Results Are Tragicomic”, The Wall Street Journal, Midwest Edition, March 22, 1995.
18. Typing up my notes, I first wrote fourty. Since I was not sure, I looked it up in a dictionary. This is another example of the natural inclination to generalize the most frequent form. Since you spell four, fourth, fourteen, fourteenth, why not fourty? Such an irregularity would be unthinkable in Esperanto.
19. Claude Piron, “Un cas étonnant de masochisme social”, Action et Pensée, 1991, 19, pp. 51-79. A shortened version of this article has been published in English under the title “Psychological reactions to Esperanto”, Esperanto Documents, No 42A (Rotterdam: Universal Esperanto Association, 1994).
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Posted by fajro
They told me, when I was a kid: “Don’t be afraid to ask your way. Use your tongue and you’ll go to the ends of the world.” But just a few miles away people spoke another language. To ask them anything was maddeningly useless. They told me: “To discuss with foreigners, learn languages at school.” But 90% of the adults can’t properly express themselves in the foreign language which they chose as students.
They told me: “With English you can get along anywhere in the world.” But in a Spanish village I saw an accident in which a French and a Swedish car were involved. Neither with one another nor with the police could the drivers communicate. In a small town in Thailand I saw an agonized tourist trying to describe his symptoms to a local doctor. He strained himself in vain. I have worked for the United Nations and the World Health Organization on all inhabited continents, and on a few islands, and I found out in the Congo, in Poland, in Japan and in many other places that English is of no use outside of major hotels, big stores, business circles and airports.
They told me: “Thanks to translations even the most remote cultures are now accessible to all.” But when I compared translations with originals, I saw so many distortions, so many omissions, so little respect for the author’s style that I was forced to approve the Italian saying Traduttore, traditore: ‘to translate is to betray’.
They told me that the West helps the Third World with due respect for the local cultures. But I saw that it has no regard for language dignity, it imposes its languages from the very start, taking for granted that they afford the best means of communication. I saw that the cultural pressures linked to English or French change the mentalities and exert their destructive effects on age-old cultures whose positive values are remorselessly ignored. And I saw the countless problems encountered in the training of local people, because Western technicians don’t know the local tongues and in these languages textbooks do not exist.
They told me: “Education for all will guarantee equality of opportunity for the children of all classes.” And I saw rich families in the developing world send their young to Britain and USA in order to master English, while the masses, imprisoned in their own languages, subjected to all sorts of propaganda, only have a bleak future, maintained as they are by language in an inferior position.
They told me: “Esperanto has failed miserably.” Yet in a mountain village of Europe, I saw farmers’ children chatting with Japanese visitors after only a six month Esperanto course.
They told me: “Esperanto lacks human value.” I learned the language, I read its poetry, I listened to its songs. In that language I received confidences of Brazilians, Chinese, Iranians, Poles and a young fellow from Uzbekistan. And here I am – a former professional translator – owing it to honesty to say that those conversations were the most spontaneous and profound I ever had in a foreign language.
They told me: “Esperanto is worthless, because it has no culture.” Yet when I met speakers of Esperanto in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, most were more cultured than their fellows of the same socio-economic level. And when I attended international debates in that language, the intellectual level really impressed me.
I tried to explain all this around me. I said: “Come! Look! Here’s something extraordinary! A language which solves the communication problem between the peoples of the world! I saw a Hungarian and a Korean discussing politics and philosophy in that language only two years after starting to learn it. This is impossible in any other tongue. And I saw this, and that, and also these…”
But they replied: “Esperanto is not serious. And, anyway, it’s artificial.”
I fail to understand. When a man’s or a woman’s heart, their feelings, the finest nuances of their thoughts are expressed directly from mouth to ear in a language born of a luxuriance of intercultural communications, they tell me: “It’s artificial.”
But what do I see as I wander through the world? I see travelers longing to share with local people ideas and experiences, or maybe just recipes, and sadly giving up. I see exchanges by gestures leading to grotesque misunderstandings. I see people thirsting for information prevented by language from reading what they want.
I see masses of people, after six or seven years of learning a language, hacking away at it, unable to find the right word, wearing a laughable accent, missing the point they mean to make. I see language inequality and discrimination thriving throughout the world. I see diplomats and specialists speaking into microphones and hearing through earphones a voice other than that of their partner. Is that “natural communication”? From heart or brain to mouth to ear, that is artificial, of course, but from microphone to earphone through an interpretation booth, this is obviously natural! Has the art of solving problems with intelligence and sensitivity ceased to belong to human nature?
They tell me much, but I see different. So I wander, bewildered, in this society which claims for everyone the right to communicate. And I wonder if they’re deceiving me, or if I am just plain crazy.
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Posted by fajro
Linguists don’t bother with artificial languages.
This is a rather offhand generalization. The field of linguistics is extremely vast and there are quite a few linguists who are also interested in that part of it.
The very idea of such a thing as a functioning artificial language is hopelessly naive.
Not if you observe it in its practical use. In countries like Poland, Hungary, Finnland, Latvia, Russia, Japan, China, Uzbekistan and many others, Esperanto proves to be quite useful, especially in small towns, where English is not of much use. I know of Americans who had a similar experience in France. I’ve had access through Esperanto to a segment of the local populations with which most foreigners have no contact, and a possibility of discussing in depth various topics with much more ease and comfort than in any other language. Esperanto is no more naive than E-mail. It’s a method of communicating which has many advantages over others and which doesn’t need to be available in every household to be worth the small investment in time and effort. In my experience, it is much more cost effective than English.
The successful examples (viz. Esperanto) are an excellent reflection of Western imperialism.
Sorry, but perusal of Esperanto publications and contacts with members of the Esperanto community reveal this to be a prejudice. A majority of people in this community learned the language precisely to have at their disposal a language free of political, economic and other power connotations. Esperanto was not born in the West, is not especially widespread there and is so different from Western languages in most of its linguistic traits that you would be very hard put to defend your opinion on the basis of factual analysis. Only the word roots (but not their semantic scope, which results from a century of global interaction) are to a large extent Western, but no serious scholar can base a judgment on such a superficial feature. The lexical part of most Caribbean Creoles is more Western in origin than Esperanto’s. If such a Creole language is used as a means of intercultural communication, do you see it as a reflection of Western imperialism?
Languages such as Esperanto reveal considerable ignorance of the structures of other languages.
What other languages? As I have established in my article “Esperanto: A European or Asiatic Language?” (Esperanto Documents No 22, Rotterdam: UEA, 1981), Esperanto is more an isolating language than an agglutinating or flexional one. Derivation of ‘my’ from ‘I’ or of ‘first’ from ‘one’ (mi > mia ; unu > unua) is something you find in Chinese and in Esperanto, but not in Turkish, Hungarian or any Indo-European language. In no Western language do you have infinite series like the Esperanto samlandano, samrasano, samlingvano, etc, corresponding to the Chinese tongguo, tongzu, tongyu, you have to use other words like fellow-citizen, person of the same race, speaker of the same language. In Chinese, you don’t have to learn a special word to express the idea ‘coreligionist’, you use the ready-made pattern: tongjiao, just as in Esperanto: samreligiano. Structurally speaking, Esperanto has very little in common with Western languages.
Languages such as Esperanto are no easier for non-Europeans to learn than French or English.
When I observed communication in Esperanto in Eastern Asia, especially among Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans, I made it a point to ask people how much time they had devoted to acquiring the language. Since I was comparing communication in international settings according to whether they used English only, simultaneous interpretation, consecutive interpretation or Esperanto, I asked the same question of people using a language other than their mother tongue. Most of these Asians with a rather crippled English had devoted some 2000 hours to learning it; those who used Esperanto had studied it for less than 200 hours. Yet, their level was much superior whatever the criterion (fluency, lack of misunderstandings, spontaneity, nuances, humor, etc.). Obviously, your conclusion is based on erroneous data. (See my research report “Esperanto: l’image et la realite’”, Cours et Études de Linguistique contrastive et appliquée No 66, Paris: Institut de Linguistique appliquée et de didactique des langues, University of Paris-8, 1987, and my book Le defi des langues, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994, e.g. pp. 243-254; a review of this book can be found in Language in Society, 26 (1), 143-147, 1997).
Proponents of languages such as Esperanto buy into the “language is/can be logical” myth.
No, sir. A linguist knows that a language should not be confused with what its speakers say of it. Esperanto is based on an all-encompassing law of trait generalization, which is something quite different, and which is the reason why it is so much more pleasant to use than any European language. In Western languages, you cannot generalize patterns. The student who has noticed the pattern in farm > farmer, report > reporter cannot generalize it to fish > fisher (fisherman) or teeth > teether (dentist). In Esperanto he can: farm’ > farmisto, raport’ > raportisto, fiŝ‘ > fiŝisto, dent’ > dentisto
Whenever I have to speak English I regret that it lacks a similar structure. The last time I had to improvise a speech in your language, I stumbled on the past tense of cost and said costed, I said ununderstandable instead of incomprehensible, I pronounced indict as rhyming with derelict, convict and could not remember which syllable to stress in alternative. So I always feel handicapped in English, never in Esperanto, where none of such problems may arise.
Proponents of languages such as Esperanto pretend that languages don’t change or can somehow be regulated
This is not true. I challenge you to quote a document emanating from the Esperanto community with such an absurd pretension. Most users of Esperanto are well aware that their language developed naturally, through usage in a kind of diaspora, on the basis of Zamenhof’s project, with which it should not be confused. A fellow linguist, Jouko Lindstedt, Head of the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages at the University of Helsinki, Finnland, is the moderator of an Internet list, “Denask-L”, whose participants are mostly members of binational families having Esperanto as their family language and the children’s mother tongue. Simply reading their exchanges and comparing their language with similar texts from before WW2 and with texts from the 19th century proves beyond doubt that the language has never ceased to change, not under any agency, but spontaneously, as any other tongue. On that subject, see my article “A few notes on the evolution of Esperanto” in Klaus Schubert, ed., Interlinguistics No 42 of the series Trends in Linguistics – Studies and Monographs (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989), pp. 129-142.
I believe that a scientific, scholarly approach is as warranted in linguistics as in other fields. Many linguists seem to be unaware that before spreading opinions on Esperanto, it is worth taking one’s tape recorder, attending encounters of speakers of the language, visiting families where it is in daily use, analyzing the tapes and all kinds of published or written documents (handwritten correspondence is linguistically quite interesting) and, well, just behave as a proper linguistic scholar does for any Bantu or Filipino language.
The amount of untruths to be found in linguistic publications on Esperanto (as on Chinese) is appalling. All the more so since they’re formulated in good faith. Isn’t it an interesting socio-psychological phenomenon?
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Posted by fajro
Claude Piron (born 1931), a linguist and a psychologist, was a translator for the United Nations (from Chinese, English, Russian and Spanish into French) from 1956 to 1961. After leaving the UN he worked for the World Health Organization all over the world, as well as being a prolific author of Esperanto works. He has spoken Esperanto since childhood and has used Esperanto in many countries, including Japan, the People’s Republic of China, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, a few places in Africa and Latin America, and almost all European countries.
He is a psychotherapist and taught in the psychology department of Geneva University (Switzerland) from 1973 to 1994. His French language book Le défi des langues – Du gâchis au bon sens (The language challenge – From chaos to common sense) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994) is a kind of psychoanalysis of international communication. A Portuguese version, O desafio das linguas, was published in 2002 (Campinas, São Paulo: Pontes, 2002).
In a lecture on the current system of international communication Piron argued that “Esperanto relies entirely on innate reflexes.” and “…differs from all other languages in that you can always trust your natural tendency to generalize patterns…The same neuropsychological law…- called by…Jean Piaget generalizing assimilation – applies to word formation as well as to grammar.”
His diverse Esperanto writings include instructional books, books for beginners, novels, short stories, poems, articles and non-fiction books. His most famous works are Gerda malaperis! and La Bona Lingvo (The Good Language). Gerda malaperis! is a novella which uses basic grammar and vocabulary in the first chapter and builds up to expert Esperanto by the end, including word lists so beginners can easily follow along. In La Bona Lingvo, Piron captures the basic linguistic and social aspects of Esperanto. He argues strongly for imaginative use of the basic Esperanto morpheme inventory and word formation techniques, and against unnecessary importation of neologisms from European languages. He also presents the idea that once one has learned enough vocabulary to express oneself, it is easier to think clearly in Esperanto than in many other languages.
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Posted by fajro
