Babel No More is a scientific book -- not in the sense that it's laden with charts and figures, and not because the action takes place in laboratories, but because it attempts to provide reliable information about language superlearners, that is, information that's not self-reported or anecdotal, but that can be verified, compared, and synthesized with other knowledge. And that's never been done before, not on this topic, of people who can speak a lot of languages and who have an easier time than others learning them.

Researching my previous post on the web, I came across an Austrian-born, NY-based conceptual artist, Rainer Ganahl, who works in and around languages -- not in the way artists usually do (contrasting text with image) but getting at the political and cultural conditions for learning and speaking certain languages. This is very exciting for me, even though it's late in the game, book-wise. One project has been to learn foreign languages and document the time he spends doing it, mainly on video. As of 1997 (I think), he'd worked with 10 languages, which he describes in a quite brilliant essay, "Traveling Linguistics." Another project is a legislative movement to get the European Union to declare Chinese a European language and get it taught as a second or third language in schools. His motivation for doing this he articulates in his essay this way:

I have become increasingly aware of the psychoanalytical and identity-shaping consequences of my interest in studying foreign languages that can probably be best expressed in the "special note" of my file, basic linguistic services: "keep moving away from your mother tongue". However, I felt the need to question my own interest in the languages, their significance (romantic, powerful, marginal aspects, etc.) and the implications of the studies as well as the specific, privileged context within which I was able to free the energy to engage in these studies.

Hence the "traveling linguistics." Learning foreign languages, he claims, is informed by tourism and migration as a paradigm -- even if actual tourism or migration do not occur -- a paradigm that emerges in the 19th century in Europe, closely allied with Western imperialism and Orientalism (in Edward Said's sense). What existed before the tourism/migration paradigm? Before that was the nationalist paradigm, where one embarked on expertise in a language to shore up one's own claim to belonging to that nation and to no others. Before that was the scriptural paradigm, where the power of the church had to be engaged in its own language(s), but also in terms of the vernaculars. All this feeds the cultural fascination with polyglots and hyperpolyglots, and helps explain why the polyglot may be a distinctly Western cultural icon.

One of the best (and, sadly, only) stories I've read in a while about interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan is this piece by Neil Shea on NPR/Foreign Policy. What's so great about it is the way he shows how progress (if that's the word to use) on the ground depends not on the number of interpreters, the amount of money that the Pentagon pays to defense contractors to supply those interpreters, or the quality of the interpreters themselves. What matters is the interaction from all sides of the language barriers that occurs in the traffic of words. Both sides fail; they can't help themselves.

Shea writes:

U.S. troops rely on translators. There is no alternative. On the battlefield and in the shuras, young officers like Kearney, raised in the get-down-to-business culture of America and its military, often express themselves to their translators directly and with heaps of slang, roughly the way they might talk to a college buddy. The terp is then expected to decide not only how to translate the words but also how to bridge the gulf of propriety and custom. But although this colloquial language is informal, it is still complex. And unfortunately, it assumes even more common background and idiomatic understanding than a more formal diction would: Think of phrases like "man up," "freedom isn't free," or even "shoulder responsibility" and "build your nation." In the best circumstances, the most successful shuras, it would be unrealistic to expect all this meaning to pass intact to a group of old men from another world. Try filtering it through a translator who didn't attend college, was never your buddy, and didn't grow up surrounded by phrases Americans take for granted, and the chances for error or insult multiply rapidly.

This resonates in interesting ways with David Mitchell's new masterwork novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel, which I just finished reading. The novel takes place on a small trading island where the Japanese keep their Dutch trading partners contained, like dangerous viruses. They're managed by a guild of Japanese translators and interpreters (interestingly, whole families get into the language business, and fathers pass positions to sons) who not only communicate messages but also act as censors and procurers, and who even engage in corruption themselves. The Dutch don't learn Japanese -- except for de Zoet, who begins the novel as a wet-eared but canny lower clerk pining for a girl at home and ends up, many years later, as someone so inside the culture and language but who still couldn't be with the Japanese woman he loves. Over and over Mitchell shows how the real trade isn't in copper or porcelain; neither is it in ideas (an early scene has de Zoet fearful that his Psalter will be confiscated; Christianity is prohibited in Japan) and knowledge (the Japanese clamor for Western medical expertise). The real traffic is in words and what they mean.

As a depiction of the economy of language in a pre-colonial context, Mitchell's novel is excellent. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, translation and the economies of meaning determine outcomes -- not only in terms of geopolitical resolution but in terms of what has to happen in order for US soldiers to be able to leave those places and come home, alive.