La Franja

Un llibre sobre traducció escrit a Calaceit

franja | 23 Febrer, 2007 12:47

Un llibre d'Anthony Pym

Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History

The first half of this book was written in a village called Calaceite in Spanish, Calaceit in the Catalan spoken there. Movements between Calaceite and Calaceit are performed in the village all the time, from one street corner to another, one social class to another, one side of a secretly remembered Civil War to another, and on periodically defaced and refaced roadsigns, since the village is in a part of the franja or 'fringe' of Aragon settled by speakers of Catalan. This is a diglossic border community, located within any line that would separate Catalan from Castilian (the name we shall be using for what others term the Spanish language). Within that line there is even a sense of identity expressed in the non-names for the local language, which is syntactically a variety of Catalan but is depreciatively referred to as xaporiao ('patois' or even 'slapped together') or 'what we speak' ('Ja parles com nosaltres', they say. 'So you now speak like us.'). The variety within the border has no name; it might be a candidate for intercultural status.

This village certainly has a border status, mixed languages, and a corresponding sense of unnamed identity. It is certainly quaint. But does it have any professional intermediaries? Does its livlihood actually depend on cross-cultural transfers? Could it usefully be called an interculture simply because of the border?

Those three questions must be answered in the negative. Although people in this village are certainly moving between languages on a daily basis, everyone understands both languages well enough to obviate any developed need for remunerated intermediaries. There are no professional intermediaries as such. No one is engaged to produce a discourse where the first person of 'I am from here' does not refer to the producer of the utterance. Nor is there any evidence that the village produces translators, no matter how metaphorically we take the term, simply because of its border status. It is an agricultural community; its olives, almonds and wine are sold in whatever language the buyer wants. To be sure, it has its separatists, who believe that authentic language and culture is on the Catalan side of the border; it has its regionalists, who identify more with the traditions of Aragon; and it has its nationalists, who call themselves Spanish. Yet there is nothing in this mix that particularly needs the name 'interculture.' More to the point, if the village were an interculture, most of the villages, towns and cities of Spain would have to be called intercultural as well, with various weightings of the same picturesque hybridity. True, this might usefully remind English-language readers that the world's societies are generally multilingual and subject to cultural overlapping. But the scope of our term 'interculture' would quickly become too powerful to answer our specific question.