Abstract
There is a strong streak of homogeneity in academia. The conventions and norms constructed around academic research and communication, the pressures to conform to institutional and international metrics, the professionalised dispassionate blandness of our academic discourses, and the echo chambers of citations that amplify some voices and mute others can mean that differences—striking differences—of particular places, geographies, histories, political systems, and social networks and circumstances are often afforded less attention. It is a pity. It is precisely those differences of where (not only when) we are that shape us, our work, our thinking, and our practices. “In attaching significance to space,” Marais (2014, p. 4) argues, “one steps out of the Enlightenment ideal of universal knowledge. One immediately gives up knowledge for knowledges.”
A book on translating and interpreting in Australia and New Zealand is attaching significance to space. The histories of these land masses, one a continent, the other an archipelago, “are intertwined with their geographies” begins Judy Wakabayashi in her introduction, “and immigration.” From the migration of people to the Australian continent some 60,000 years ago, the landing of Polynesians in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 13th century, the waves of “European explorers, invaders and settlers” that have followed since the 17th century to the continued flows of migration from all over the world over the last 200 years, it is the “internal interactions” of these peoples and cultures that “have shaped translation and interpreting,” Wakabayashi argues, rather than “the external […] relations with other countries that have generally moulded T&I elsewhere” (p. 1). It is a convincing premise, and one that bears out in the research landscapes covered by this collected volume. The commonalities of, and divergent responses to, distance, geography, climate, invasion, multilingualism, migration, and the on-going complex processes of historical reckoning and nation-building are threads that run through the antipodean T&I landscape in the snapshot presented here.
Community T&I is a hallmark of that inward focus and Australian scholarship on the topic especially, together with associated concerns of training, accreditation, and professionalisation, has deservedly garnered international attention. It is unsurprising then that these topics comprise the bulk of the book; of the 15 chapters, 6 are concerned with some form of community engagement, education, and training, while a further two chapters also contribute to these topics through their specialisms of AVT and media accessibility. Grouped together under the two themes, “Perspectives from Community Engagement” and “Perspectives from Industry and Profession,” these are all solid contributions that collectively offer a comprehensive introduction to the historic and current states of the field. Jim Hlavic provides an insightful and informative overview of the development of “Community Translation and Interpreting in Australia” (Chapter 3). His account goes a long way towards explaining how Community T&I was established, and often pioneering, as a direct outcome of (Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Labour) government policies and shifting attitudes towards nationhood and multiculturalism in the wake of post-war immigration from non-English-speaking countries, marked, for example, by the (shamefully) belated rejection of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act (or White Australia Policy), eventually abolished by 1975. Increased activism in the decades that followed, with demands for rights, access and equal opportunities eventually recognised in various anti-discrimination legislation have created a discourse and a policy landscape where Community T&I as an element of service provision “is now standard across the executive and judicial arms of government and within the legal profession” (p. 70), as well as in healthcare settings, education, and the public service. The model has invariably overwhelmingly influenced training and education, curricula, institutions, and accreditation—an overview of interpreter education in Australia is given by Mustapha Taibi, Uldis Ozolins, and Amal Maximous in Chapter 4—although not always providing consensus; Heather Glass’ contribution (Chapter 7) gives a thorough, critical, insider account of the tensions between testing and training models, one driven by the Vocational and Education and Training (VET) sector and the other by academic research and the powerful National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI).
Other chapters included in these two themes (“Perspectives from Community Engagement” and “Perspectives from Industry and Profession”) include a contribution from the European Union (EU)-funded (2017–2020) INTERACT Crisis Translation Network team on crisis translation training of members from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in New Zealand (Chapter 6, Federici et al.), and the valuable reflections from a team of primary health care clinicians (Chapter 5, Gray, et al.) on the importance and pragmatics of language assistance in healthcare settings: “There must be a broader focus,” they conclude, on not just achieving adequate interpretation but achieving the best health outcome available. […] The onus must be on clinicians, with input from patients, to ensure that the language assistance used when consulting with a language-discordant patient is adequate for that particular situation. (p. 121)
Insights from practitioners are also offered by subtitlers Mary Carroll and Felicity Mueller (Chapter 8), who give a fascinating account of multicultural public broadcaster Channel 0/28, established in 1980 and still running as SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) Television. The station was a direct outcome of the 1978 Galbally Review of Post-Arrival Programs and Services for Migrants [which] advocated expanding information services for migrants, establishing programmes to address migrant social exclusion and disadvantage and taking steps to make Anglo Australians more open to and tolerant of different cultures and identities. (p. 174)
According to its Charter, SBS was “to provide multilingual and multicultural broadcasting and digital media services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society” (p. 174). Subtitlers were at the heart of the enterprise. The initial staff of 15, working from six languages into English, were recruited through advertisements placed in the Sydney Morning Herald and included “teachers, poets, psychologists, accountants, interpreters, actors, civil servants and nurses” (p. 176). With no pre-established guidelines, the subtitlers, enthused by the novelty and the remit of the exercise, eventually forged, through trial and error and collaborating on good practice, a set of agreed standards collected into an internal manual that continues to be updated to this day. “In a time when acknowledgement of the work of translators was rare,” Carroll and Mueller write, “subtitlers and editors were both credited at the end of each programme. New challenges were met with novel approaches, such as when two subtitlers with musical training developed a rhythmic practice of subtitling opera which is still in use” (pp. 177–178), and since 2012, the station has also begun telling immigrant stories in immigrant languages by subtitling some programmes into languages other than English (LOTE). As a reader from Australia myself, aware of SBS in its early days through watching what felt at the time like obscure, late-night foreign cinema, I was quite taken by this unfamiliar history of the channel and the progressive spirit it conveys. The chapter also briefly covers accessibility—New Zealand’s changing media accessibility landscape is covered more comprehensively by Wendy Youn (Chapter 9)—and the development of Australian Indigenous media content with English and Indigenous-language subtitles. Such content is at long last, Carroll and Mueller note, “gain[ing] traction […] in the twenty-first century, a period of change in political attitudes and action, as well as recognition of past injustices on the part of white Australia, accompanied by growing Indigenous language revitalisation, reclamation and self-empowerment” (p. 181). Readily available digital technologies, they point out, are contributing to the proliferation of content and information on streaming platforms and, the chapter concludes, “have put Australian Indigenous languages and AVT on the map again and are helping to promote a resurgence in their use” (p. 183).
I have dwelt on these stories because they are examples of some of the book’s welcome notes of surprise and discovery that lie beyond the dominance of Community T&I that has arguably come to limit and define the field of translation and interpreting in New Zealand and Australia. Other surprises include Chapter 2, “The Emergence of Māori Interpreting and Translation in Precolonial Aotearoa,” by freelance interpreter and translator Te Tumatakuru O’Connell, who brings a refreshing perspective to regional histories by tracing Māori interpreting and translation in relation to four phases of Pākehā (non-Māori) settlement before colonisation in 1840 (following Smith, 2020): exploration (1769–1791), sojourning (1792–1814), permanent settlement (1814–1830), and dispersal (1830–1840). O’Connell’s attention to stories of people and places, including the biographies of key figures navigating and involved in the intercultural encounters and interpersonal relationships occurring during these different phases, creates nuance and granularity usually missed in larger, settler historiographies. It is a world marked by violence and populated by men, but also by agency and mutual engagement, “woven together by interpreting and translation,” which, O’Connell claims, “also reveal the aho-tāhuhu (original guiding weft) of intercultural communication in contemporary Aetearoa” (p. 59).
Literary translation is another dominant theme. As Wakabayashi acknowledges in her Introduction, “alongside its community orientation, local research shares the disproportionate emphasis on literary translation of TS elsewhere” (p. 16). However, the three chapters on Literary Translation, grouped under the theme “Perspectives from Translators and Their Readers,” are all strong, and I read these with real interest. Brigid Maher provides an excellent overview of “Literary Translation into English in Contemporary Australia” (Chapter 11) that includes a discussion on “translation culture” (p. 234), prizes and awards, and perspectives from 11 literary translators based in Australia; their voices add texture to the chapter. The remaining two chapters in this theme hail from New Zealand. Translator Jean Anderson offers what amounts to a translation commentary on the translation into French of literary texts written by Māori authors. Her reflective discussions on practice and theory include plenty of illustrative examples, and the chapter provides a model of commentary which would be helpful, in my view, for Master’s students struggling with the form. Mohsen Kafi’s chapter, drawing from his PhD study, offers results and participant comments from a reception study of reader perceptions (n ≈ 280) of translated literature, finding that multilingualism and exposure to multilingualism “proved to be the strongest predictor of positive perceptions of translated fiction among this sample of readers” (p. 283). I also warmed to Kafi’s observation on the positive effects of te reo Māori’s visibility. Even though currently only some 4% of the population identify as fully conversant, the language enjoys official status in Aotearoa New Zealand and is frequently deployed in place names, signage, government documents, media, and popular culture. “Not only can this daily exposure create understanding and acceptance of Māori language and culture,” Kafi argues, “‘it can also foster broader acceptance of representation of languages other than one’s own” (p. 271).
The book concludes with chapters by Anthony Pym and Minako O’Hagan, who give an overview of the translation and interpreting field in Australia and New Zealand, respectively. In many ways, I found these chapters to be the core of the book, especially Pym’s contribution which deliberately “seek[s] out discourses on translation in the margins: among translators, translator trainers, missionary linguists, critical historians and the writers and filmmakers who increasingly make language alterity a feature of Australian cultural products” (p. 291). I have long considered Australia and New Zealand to be incredibly rich, yet largely untapped places in terms of the serious potential of the countries’ knowledges, perspectives, and sources, all wrought through their unique historical, geographical, environmental, social, political, migrant, settler, Indigenous, written, oral, artistic, and grassroots entanglements, to significantly shape and influence future manifestations of the interdisciplinary field of translation and interpreting studies. I am not arguing for exceptionalism—every place has much to offer—but the traditionally limited horizons of the field, its institutional settings, and professional loyalties have, in my view, which chimes with Pym’s, resulted in a paucity of scholarly debate and research in contrast to its potential.
Pym suggests some seeds and leads: Indigenous languages, multilingualism and translation and interpreting practices “in which there may be other kinds of translation within languages, and other reasons to translate” (p. 298); critical studies of language and translation in historical missionary-linguist encounters (as in Bible translator, forensic linguist, and court interpreter David Moore’s work and contribution to this volume, Chapter 1); language loss, endangered languages, documentation, and revival; a revisiting of the “monolingual mindset” that has tended to neglect or gloss over the multilingual and translational dimensions of Australian settler history and historiography; the exploration of innovatively multilingual literature and film and accompanying disruptive translation practices. Minako’s chapter on New Zealand finds that potential research threads are found already outside of translation studies departments, including issues of language hierarchy in a super-diverse immigrant country; Samoan and Oceanic languages, histories, religions, and cultures; the classification of knowledge in library systems according to Māori knowledge (mātaurunga Māori). The point is not only that translation studies can bring particular perspectives to these fields, but that the region holds a wealth of “potentially innovative approaches applied to T&I issues
Australia is currently debating The Uluru Statement of the Heart, which is expressed as an invitation to all Australians and is calling “for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution” and a “Makarrata [treaty or agreement-making] Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making and truth-telling about our history” (https://ulurustatement.org/). Any changes to the Constitution can be made only by a referendum, so these are discussions that are taking place in private and public spheres across a vast, diverse, multilingual country. What the Indigenous Voice to Parliament sounds like; whose it will be; how it will be heard, listened to, and acted upon; what truth-telling looks and sounds like; how histories are retold and remembered, commemorated, and mourned; how agreements can be forged, negotiated, enshrined, and kept; all of these are urgent, immediate issues that are interlaced with translation and interpreting, and which can bring to translation and interpreting transformative perspectives, voices, and stories, the kind we need to disrupt a prevailing academic homogeneity and reimagine our precarious futures; Australasia and Oceania are also experiencing the devastating and challenging effects of climate change, with unprecedented floods, fires, droughts, and rising sea levels. These are places characterised by distance and diversity, features that shape and constitute them. This book offers welcome insights into their particular and vernacular knowledges and into the valuable, necessary potential knowledges of their places, insights from which the field of translation and interpreting can genuinely benefit.