Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Machine translation will always have severe limitations. When I consider the distance that separates English and Japanese, I can think of any number of reasons why asking a machine to bridge it would be like asking the sun to rise from the west. Let me just name two fundamental obstacles to machine translation of literature. First is the rhetorical function of language, a function that is essential to all natural languages and can be best summed up as “saying one thing and meaning another.” Whether a phrase is used rhetorically can be determined only by understanding the author’s intended meaning in context. “How can you translate with a machine?” an author might write. Is he asking a straightforward question? Or is he scoffing at the impossibility of machine translation? An automatic translation machine cannot be trusted to come up with a translation of that sentence in which the authorial intention is clear. Second, and perhaps even more important, a text that is translated by a machine simply cannot provide pleasure for the reader, and a text devoid of pleasure for the reader is simply not a real text. No one would actually read it.

However sophisticated machine translation becomes, it is unlikely that any translation device will hinder the increasing circulation of English as the universal language of the Internet. Added to this is the fact that English is the universal language of Internet technology itself: it is its meta language . People from all over the world inevitably find it easier to use English when communicating about the Internet.

FROM ACADEMIA TO LITERATURE

The dominance of English is most keenly felt in academia. There was no behind-the-scenes agreement among scholars of the world, nor was there any conspiracy on the part of native English speakers. Rather, the very nature of scholarship is gradually and inevitably unifying academic language into English. That various disciplines have become increasingly mathematicized in recent years is accelerating this shift even further.

Of the universities in the English-speaking world, top American universities today are in a class all their own. With its history as an immigrant nation, the United States has drawn talented scholars from the world over. Of the twenty universities reputed to be the world’s best, seventeen are in the United States; 70 percent of Nobel laureates have taught or are teaching in American universities. The spread of the Internet, however, will bring about a change in the opposite direction, for there will be less need for scholars to be physically concentrated in English-speaking regions. Already some American universities are building branch campuses overseas in non-English-speaking regions, while top universities in those regions are beginning to conduct some of their courses in English. Just as universities scattered around Europe once became centers of learning through Latin, so now universities scattered around the world are on their way to becoming centers of learning through English.

The shift to English is naturally taking place at a much faster pace in the natural sciences. Yet, given the nature of scholarship, this linguistic shift is inevitable in other fields as well, such as the social sciences and humanities — two fields in which the permeation of English is sometimes already visible. This change will entail unexpected consequences, making even “sacred texts” in academia circulate in English.

Going back to the difference between “textbook” and “text,” and the two kinds of “truths” existing in the world, Aristotle, as mentioned before, continues to be read today precisely because his writings are also texts that cannot be reduced to a textbook. To understand Aristotle, one must ultimately go back to his texts. In years to come, specialists in Greek philosophy will surely continue to read Aristotle in Greek. Yet as more scholars in social sciences and humanities begin to write in English, they will increasingly quote Aristotle in English from the translations they think are the best, making these translated texts circulate as new authoritative texts. The oldest extant text of the New Testament is in Greek, the universal language of the Mediterranean civilization at the time, but when the New Testament spread to western Europe, it did so as a Latin text. Similarly, Buddhist scriptures were originally handed down in Pali and Sanskrit, the universal languages of India at the time, but they spread in the Sinosphere as Chinese texts. Such is the power of the universal language, then and now. A growing number of canonical texts will begin to circulate in English in academia.

And there is no reason that what is already taking place in academia should not gradually affect how we look at our ultimate text — our literature. At some point in history, humans created national languages. With the arrival of an age that celebrated national languages, people began to look up to literature and see it as a conveyer of higher truths than scholarly knowledge. Today that age may be coming to an end. We who have learned to read and write in our own language are no longer what we were. We have become deeply attached to reading and writing in our own language. Nonetheless, when one’s own language circulates concurrently with a universal language in society, and when it is apparent that the latter is gaining force, an ever greater number of knowledge seekers will become bilinguals. In the process, how these bilinguals engage with their literature will inevitably be affected, which in turn will inevitably affect their literature — and their language. For the fall of language is first set in motion when these bilinguals unknowingly begin to read English and their own language on two different levels.

Let us bear in mind the essentially asymmetrical relationship between the act of reading and the act of writing. Writing in an “external language” requires an effort that most people would find too burdensome; most people have other business to attend to besides learning how to write in English. These bilinguals will continue to write e-mails and blogs in their own language. The fall of a language is set in motion when such people begin to take more seriously what they read in English . It is set in motion when, for example, they turn to English-language media to learn about critical international events — they may or may not be conscious of the Anglophone bias there — and use the media of their own country only to find out the results of home sports games or follow home celebrity gossip. It is set in motion when they hurry to order a heavyweight English-language book attracting media attention before it comes out in translation, while neglecting fine books written in their own language. (Watching American or British television dramas rather than their own is not unconnected to this process.) Finally, it is set in motion when, because they have gradually become accustomed to making light of what is written in their own language, bilinguals start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English — especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon.

A vicious cycle then begins. The more palpable this trend becomes, the more non-English writers would feel that writing in their own language will not reach the readers they are aiming for. To make matters worse, this would be correspondingly truer for writers who take their writing seriously. Without a trusted readership, those writers would have less and less incentive to write in their own language, and there would be fewer and fewer texts worth reading in that language. Through the process of negative selection, writers who continue writing in their own language would be those whose books do not deserve to be called texts. They would write books that are read one day and forgotten the next. This cycle, once it began, could only gain in force. Not only bilinguals but true readers of literature — not mere consumers of books — would eventually cease to expect their own language to bear the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic burdens it once did.