(note: the ISA is the International Sociological Association)
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From: isa@sis.ucm.es (International Sociological Association)
To: chriscd@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu
Subject: ISA President's Letter, no.3
Letter from the President, No. 3, October 1995
by Immanuel Wallerstein
The Language of Scholarship
We have a hard job communicating to each other. We speak
different conceptual languages. We speak different social
languages. We write differently than we wrote 50, 100, 200, 500
years ago. And of course we speak different phonetic languages.
Still, presumably, the object of social science is to say
something about the real world to other people, and first of all
to other social scientists. And, in order to do this, the other
people have to understand what we are trying to say. There
cannot be dialogue without a minimum of mutual comprehension.
Otherwise, a discussion is merely a counterpoise of multiple
monologues.
As an international association, ISA attempts to make
dialogue possible by being open to multiple conceptual languages
and multiple social languages. Doing this is thorny enough, but
it seems that being open to multiple phonetic languages is the
most controversial of all. We would think it abnormal to
suggest that conservative and Marxist sociologists express
themselves only in liberal language. But many do not think it
abnormal to expect French-speaking and Spanish-speaking
sociologists to express themselves in English.
Multilinguality - that is, the use of more than one
phonetic language, in reading to be sure, but more importantly
in public usage at scholarly congresses - is not a minor
technical problem but a major epistemological problem of
scholarship. We ought carefully to assess the trade-offs, the
gains and losses, of policy and custom in relation to the use of
multiple languages.
Let me begin by reminding us of the history of the social
sciences. What languages are used in international meetings has
always been a function of two vectors: geopolitics and the
demography of scholarship. In the period 1850-1945, the period
of the creation of the modern social sciences, virtually all
scholarship we call social sciences (up to perhaps 95%), was
located in just five countries: Great Britain, France, Germany,
Italy, and the United States. Five countries, four languages.
The geopolitics of the time placed at least three of these
languages - English, French, and German - on a par in terms of
prestige and influence (that is, the number of non-native
speakers who had learned the language as the primary second
languages).
The period 1850-1945 was the period during which the first
international meetings of social scientists were held. As far as
we know (and the research into this subject has been scanty
indeed), scholars felt free in these meetings to present papers
in any of the four languages (but probably in no other). There
seems to have been no translation services offered (not even
consecutive translation). It was apparently assumed that
scholars could understand the languages other than their own.
This was no doubt at most only partially true, but it was indeed
partially true at the time.
The Second World War transformed both the geopolitics and
the demography of scholarship. Germany (and Italy) lost the war
and lost thereby their claim to phonetic usage in international
meetings. As a result, potential scholars in other parts of the
world ceased learning them as a primary second language.
East/Central Europe, which had been a stronghold of German
linguistic usage, came under Communist role. Russian became the
official second language, and English became the de facto
informal second language.
The U.S. became not only the hegemonic power in the
world-system but, for at least the first fifteen years after the
war, the primary locus of world scholarship in the social
sciences. Of course, non-native-English-speaking scholars began
to adopt English as their primary second language, a process
that has continued and been amplified in the decades since.
The major locus of resistance to the dominance of English
was French. France was on the winning side in the Second World
War and French governments (of all persuasions) have been
anxious to reassert France's role as a primary geopolitical, and
hence geocultural, actor. The United Nations gave French equal
status to English as a working language. The demography of
scholarship helped too. There were native French users in a
number of countries with important social science communities,
and French as a second language was still primary not merely in
former French colonial territories but in Latin Europe and many
parts of Latin America as well. In the years since 1945,
however, both Latin Europe and Latin America began to foreswear
French as the second scholarly language in favor of English.
Hence, as the decades went on, the usage of French in
international meetings has steadily declined in terms of the
percentage of papers given in French.
Meanwhile, however, scholarly demography changed. The
numbers of Spanish-speaking scholars grew steadily, and they
have increasingly laid claim to the use of Spanish. The ISA gave
official recognition to this claim by amending its statutes in
1994, making Spanish the third official language of the
association.
Projecting ahead, both geopolitics and scholarly
demography are changing. The U.S. hegemonic role is declining.
The rise of Germany and Japan is quite evident. The collapse of
the Communisms in East/Central Europe has been followed by a
renewed German influence in this part of the world, and we may
anticipate a revival of the usage of German by younger scholars.
The European Union has placed great emphasis on multilinguality,
and in practice this is helping both French and German to
reassert themselves in other European countries. Scholars will
react accordingly. Finally, the number of scholars for whom
German is their native language has grown considerably and will
continue to grow as a percentage of the world total. It is not
difficult to predict that, despite the widespread usage of
English in German-speaking countries as the principal second
scholarly language, German-speakers will shortly be making the
same demand on international organizations that Spanish-speakers
have successfully made in recent years.
Will others come after? It is hard to say. The Japanese
have a claim based on both geopolitics and scholarly demography,
but Japanese is a non-Indo-European language and classified by
most world scholars as difficult to learn. The claims of
Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese would not be
absurd but at present would not be readily admitted by other
scholars. Where would or could the list end?
Why does this matter? The question has to be discussed at
two levels - epistemology, and pragmatic organization of
communication. At the level of epistemology, the use of
multiple languages is a question of the diversity of cultural
perspectives. Phonetic languages are no more the mirror images
of each other than are conceptual or social languages. Even
languages that are quite close to each other present many
difficulties in translation and, of course, as the linguistic
gap grows, so accordingly does the possibility of translation.
This presents a far graver problem than monolingual persons
realize. The core of communication among social scientists are
what we call concepts, and each "concept", usually represented
by a single term or phrase, contains an implicit theory of
history (or if you prefer of social structure). The theories are
not identical from language to language, because the cultural
histories are quite different. Reducing discussion to a single
language eliminates whole viewpoints. Dialogue edges toward
monologue. Linguistic diversity has all the merits attributed to
biological diversity. It is equally worth preserving and is
equally something of which we must avail ourselves actively in
order to maximize scientific gain.
This would suggest that every scholar ought to
utilize effectively a very large number of languages, logically
all languages. But, as with most processes, after a certain
point, the marginal gain would not be worth marginal cost. The
question of costs is of course very relevant. There are
individual costs and collective costs. The individual costs are
largely the investment of time to learn another language. We
know, however, two relevant things about language acquisition.
In general, it is easiest to learn a second language when one is
young. And in general the first other language is the most
difficult to learn and subsequent ones are easier. Hence, to the
degree that there are cultural norms in favor of scholarly
multilinguality, more persons will learn languages in younger
years, and more persons, having acquired a second language
young, may move on to a third and fourth. It is of course
scholarly organizations that are the primary creator of
scholarly norms.
There are however in addition the collective costs. The
use of multiple languages in a scholarly association costs money
and time. The more languages are admissible, the more money and
time it costs. For ISA, the immediate question is
straightforward. Our statutes state that we have three official
languages. How do we implement this in order to maximize real
communication? There are basically three ways in which an
association like ISA can treat the linguistic issue at its
congresses, or smaller meetings.
(1) Allow the use of all three languages for papers and
discussion, but segregate sessions linguistically. This
eliminates the need for phonetic translation. But it eliminates
the epistemological merits of cross-linguistic dialogue.
(2) Allow to use of all three languages in any session and
provide translation services. This permits everyone to speak in
the preferred of the three languages and presumably allows
everyone to understand what is said. This is the most difficult
organizationally, and it is expensive in money. If consecutive
translation is used, it is also expensive in time. If
simultaneous translation is used, it is extremely difficult to
verify the quality of the translation. If persons hear what is
said in other language via a translation, are they really
getting the value of cross-linguistic dialogue, or will the
nuances be lost in the rapidity of the translation?
(3) Allow the use of all three languages in any session
and provide no translation (or at most, allowing so-called
whispered translations). This is as easy organizationally as
monolingual sessions. It maximizes cross-linguistic dialogue.
But is assumes all present can comprehend (at least more or
less) three languages. At present, in ISA, trilingual members
are probably no more than 10% of persons attending congresses
and bilingual ones probably less than half. (I am speaking only
of the three official languages.) De facto, in recent
congresses, we have used solution (1) except for certain
plenaries for which we have used solution (2). In practice, this
has meant that over 90% of the communication has come to be in
English.
Many members shrug their shoulders and say, so what?
English, they say, is the Latin of our time. It is a great
virtue that we have achieved a lingua franca of scholarly
communication. I do not believe this is a sensible reaction. In
the first place, I do not believe the trend toward English usage
will continue. I believe that geopolitics and the demography of
scholarship have begun to reverse the tide and that the scene
will look very different 10-20 years from now. Secondly, I do
not believe we should dispense so casually with the merits of
linguistic diversity. Quite the contrary, I think we should
nourish and accentuate them. Thirdly, I do not think we actually
communicate all that well in our lingua franca. The fact is that
at least half of our non-native-English speakers speak English
badly. Many find it impossible to speak with the nuances and
sophistication they intend. Many speakers are quite difficult
for others to comprehend. Many of our members are consequently
silent. We lose participants in our dialogue.
The ideal situation of course would be if we all were
trilingual (perhaps later quadrilingual) and if everyone spoke
their preferred language of the three - without translation. But
this ideal requires a social situation in which say 50-75% of
world scholars were trilingual. We are by no means there. There
is no simple solution to this problem. But it is one we can
ignore only at our great intellectual peril. We must search for
organizational solutions. We must transform the norms. After
all, a mere 50 years ago serious social scientists were expected
to read, really read, at least three languages (at that time
English, French, and German). Is it so unthinkable that we can
reachieve what was the expectation of our predecessors?
ISA shall be engaging in a reflection on these issues over
the coming three years. We welcome the views of our members who
come from so many different linguistic backgrounds.
Note: I have written a paper on the problems of written
translation in the social sciences which is forthcoming. I will
send a copy upon request. It is entitled "Scholarly Concepts:
Translation or Interpretation?" and is due to appear in Marilyn
Gaddis Rose, ed., Translation Horizons: Beyond the Boundaries of
Translation Spectrum (Translation Perspectives IX, 1996,
109-119).
Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA
tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu