My course and my personal story aim to harness thoughts and discussion on the elusive, transitory and sometimes esoteric subject of that which is untranslatable between two languages. I had originally aimed to create a French teaching course, because as Levy (2009) and others have noted, email, chat, discussion forums, wikis, video conferencing, other web-based projects, and access to authentic materials in the target language are all rich 2nd language learning tools. However, I chose to shift my focus away from something I could use with my elementary students to something aimed more at French teachers like myself, or others just for general interest. My main reason was practical; I needed to make the course in English for my professor and course colleagues to be able to understand it.
Because the untranslatable is inherently difficult to describe in any language using words alone, for my personal story, image and sound were weaved together with language in a way that may be closer to art than academia to try to communicate these ideas that lie just out of reach of the English language.
Barbara Cassin (2014) and her colleagues, Apter, Lezra and Wood have a rich understanding of this dilemma through their efforts to translate the French Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles to the English Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. While they too were dealing directly with French to English translation, the dictionary contains several other European languages, and as a dictionary, aims to be comprehensive, a far more daunting task than creating a Moodle course around a few examples of English/ French untranslatables. Thus, reading the preface to the English version of their dictionary was helpful and enlightening in analysing my task. They cite Derrida’s Monolingualism of the other (1998) with the following quotation, that, while paradoxical and confusing, speaks to the paradox and confusion inherent in the task of translation:
“In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable; translation is another name for the impossible.” (Cassin, Apter, Lezra & Wood, 2014, p. xl).
Cassin et al. also raised another important idea relating to MET, “concerns about the global hegemony of English” (p. lx), particularly through English being the principal language of the world wide web. We like to think that we can find answers to any questions on the Internet, but despite Google Translate, online dictionaries, and learning apps like Duolingo, translation continues to be an extremely complex affair, and as we have probably seen with websites that were not originally in English, automated translation can be confusing, misleading and sometimes hilarious. This makes a course like mine all the more relevant and poignant, especially as it resides on the same medium, the web.
I chose technology that would accommodate text, voice, music, still images and video to enhance the viewer’s perception of the translation process, to fill the natural gaps between two languages with images and non-linguistic sounds. “The Web is quickly changing from a context defined by text content and interactions to one in which all forms of media are supported” (Anderson, 2008, p. 53). Dor (2015) talks about an infant pointing and saying the name of something as that which “constructs common ground between individuals whose experiential worlds are different” (p. 36). Still images, video and sound followed by discussion can serve a similar function.
The video is the only part of the Moodle course where students can hear my voice. By using a conversational style that Bates (2014) advocates in the “Teaching and Media Selection” part of his SECTIONS model, I accommodate better personalization, thereby deepening the interaction between my students and this particular learning material. Though the photo of my face is blurry and passes quickly in the montage, the story and the way it’s told can provide a personal connection with me even though it’s a web-based course.
While my video speaks directly to the untranslatability of “always” as “toujours”, it hints at a greater, sort of meta-untranslatable: the bilingual listener is acutely aware of the gap between the French audio narration and the English subtitles, while even monolingual (English or French) viewers are left with an unsettling feeling that they haven’t fully understood the story. “What is needed to get a comparative sense of things, is not a firmer or clearer translation of difficult words, but a feeling for how relatively simple words chase each other around in context” (Cassin et al. 2014, p. x). By choosing a video editor like iMovie, I was able to demonstrate this “comparative sense of things” that my course aims to teach.
References
Anderson, T. (2008). The theory and practice of online learning. Edmonton: AU Press.
Bates. T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from: https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/9-media-design-principles/
Cassin, B., Apter, E., Lezra, J., & Wood, M. (Eds.). (2014). Dictionary of untranslatables: a philosophical lexicon. Princeton University Press.
Dor, D. (2015). The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology. Oxford University Press, USA.
Levy, M. (2009). Technologies in use for second language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 93(s1), 769-782.