Moving Political Meaning across Linguistic Frontiers
| Author | Richard Oliver Collin |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00965.x |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
Moving Political Meaning across
Linguistic Frontierspost_965282..300
Richard Oliver Collin
Coastal Carolina University
Diplomacy,international commerce and the academic study of international relations are all based on the assumption
that we can cross linguistic borders with very complicated words and concepts in our cognitive luggage. This article
studies the complexities of communicating political words and concepts fromone language/culture to another, noting
that traditional political science has shown little interest in this process or its dangers.From linguistics, however, come
two opposing theories: the effability principle defends universal translatability, while the linguistic relativity/Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis holds that meaning (particularly abstract conceptual thinking) is locked within the grammatical and
semantic structure of individual languages and can be transmitted with difficulty or not at all. After considering these
rival positions,we conclude that the translation of political ideas from culture to culture can be more problematic than
we have commonly believed.
Keywords: languages; political science; translation; Sapir-Whorf; effability
Talking across Cultures
In Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 motion picture classic The Silence, a professional translator
named Ester, her estranged sister Anna and Anna’s young son Johann are travelling by train
through an anonymous, war-torn countr y with an unknown language. When Ester
becomes ill, the three Swedes take refuge in a crumbling grand hotel. The lonely Anna
seduces a waiter, first commenting: ‘It’s good that we can’t understand one another’, but
then pouring out her torment to her uncomprehending bedmate. For her part, Ester tries
to communicate her needs to an elderly porter, discovering that none of her working
languages (Swedish, English, French and German) are understood wherever they are.
Johann suggests making a word list,so Ester begins assembling a lexicon, pointing to objects
and transcribing the porter’s response.
As artistic cinematography, The Silence is a powerful metaphor on the difficulty of
communicating; the two sisters cannot manage a meaningful conversation even in their
shared Swedish. On a more immediate level, The Silence speaks to the nightmare of being
caught without a phrase book in a country where we do not speak the local language and
where no-one speaks ours. How do we function in a multilingual world if we cannot move
meaning across language barriers, either by mastering the relevant foreign tongue ourselves
or by employing a professional like Ester?
Granted enough time,Bergman’s Ester would have mastered all the obvious words in the
mystery language, and made a start at sorting out the grammar. It would have been a long
time, however, before she would have felt comfortable discussing democracy or civil rights
or ethnic conflict. How do we talk across a linguistic divide about political life? One of the
few political scientists to think about this problem is Raymond Cohen of the Hebrew
University (2004, p. 27) who identifies the inherent difficulty in transferring political
meaning from one language to another (emphasis in original):
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00965.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013 VOL 61, 282–300
© 2012The Author.Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
Words attached to basic objects such as foot,sun, and tree translate without much loss or
distortion of meaning from one language to another.However,more abstract nouns like justice,
soul,sovereignty, and leader are embedded within overall signification systems and possess special
associations that may be conveyed only with difficulty,if at all.
Cohen’s pessimistic ‘if at all’ is worrisome. There are some 6,000 separate languages
currently spoken by humankind (Collin,2010, p.426). With translated texts and interpreted
speech, can we speak intelligibly to one another about serious political topics, venturing
across this babel of languages? No-one can possibly learn all the languages in play in a given
situation and anglophone political leaders do not generally even try. None of the major
American and British politicians actively involved in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, for
example, speaks either Arabic or Hebrew. Negotiations are conducted in English which is
not spoken competently by many Palestinians and is only a second language for most Israelis
(Cohen, 2001,p. 25).Somewhere in the process, is there a supremely competent Ester able
to move what a Palestinian leader says into Hebrew via English without loss of semantic
cargo?
Effability versus Relativity
Some linguists believe that all natural languages possess what is awkwardly called effability,
the capacity to express any idea (Katz, 1978, pp. 209–16; Kibbe, 2003, pp. 52–3; Malpas,
1989, pp. 233–64; Searle,1969). If accepted as universally true,the effability pr inciple would
make this a shorter article, since a political concept in any source language should be
directly translatable into its precise semantic equivalent in any target language.Some author s
prefer the term ‘universalist’ to describe what we are here calling effability.
The opposite end of the scale is generically called linguistic relativity, a hotly debated
cluster of ideas challenging the notion that we can reliably move meaning of any sort from
one language culture to another. In the field of linguistics generally and specifically within
linguistic anthropology, there has been a half-century’s quarrel over the notion that our
language influences, channels or even controls what we can think and say. In this view,
words and texts are defined solely or principally from the point of view of a given culture.
We are nudged or even constrained to think one way in a given language and another way
in a second tongue, making real translation – particularly of complicated concepts deeply
encoded in specific cultures – difficult or impossible. In his important new book, Linguistic
Relativities, John Leavitt explains the effability-versus-relativity debate in deep historical
terms, showing convincingly that it is an enduring conflict in Western intellectual thought
and not merely a technical quarrel among modern linguists (Leavitt, 2011). The term
essentialist is sometimes used to describe the belief that a given language evolves to describe
the essence of a given culture in a way that cannot easily be translated into other languages
and other cultures.
Let us briefly examine these two rival theories. All supporters of the effability pr inciple
have qualified it with a commitment to context, since no-one believes that a successful
translation can be achieved by the mechanical substitution of words in one language with
‘equivalent’ words in another.‘Translatability’, as it is sometimes called, could clearly only
happen within a given narrative setting.We might not be able to render specific words or
MOVING POLITICAL MEANING 283
© 2012The Author.Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013, 61(2)
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