Translation accommodation

The other strategy that is used by immigrants to cope with the alien culture they find themselves in, and which can be thought of as the opposite of assimilation, is translation accommodation. Immigrants hold on to their mother-tongues in a bid to resist being absorbed or assimilated by the culture they find themselves in. Cronin defines this as a situation “where translation is used as a means of maintaining their languages of origin though this does not rule out limited or indeed extensive acquisition of the host-country language” (52). This can be a defiant act of protest against the insensitivity that is often displayed by the host country when it comes to recognition of ‘minority’ languages or cultures like Arabic or Bosnian. The current situation, especially in Anglophone countries, is to expect the immigrants to master the dominant language while their linguistic and cultural differences are not even acknowledged minimally. This breeds a feeling of being marginalized and out of this comes the defensive attitude of having to retain one’s identity in terms of language and culture.

Immigrant communities within a country pose problems of other sorts too. Visiting a doctor and explaining illness or vindicating yourself before a court of law requires a level of proficiency in the language. The host country has to be sensitive enough to supply interpreters or translators for these communities. Cronin cites the example of the Racial and Intercultural Office of the Irish police which produces booklets in English, French, Romanian, Serbo-Croat and Russian (58). He points out how “translation scholars will have to look at complex, internal translation relationships metonymically linked to global flows rather than focusing exclusively on what happens to languages and cultures beyond the borders of the nation-state” (58).  So translation is more of an attempt to understand and communicate with the native society than a concern with foreign languages.

Thus we see that migration and cosmopolitanism are not phenomena that are confined to the socio-political realm alone, but are factors capable of altering our languages and cultures, perhaps even forcing us to perpetually occupy an in-between ‘translated’ space between two languages.