J’ai eu un examen le deuxième jour de mon arrivé à Aix. Mais ce qui l’a rendu encore plus difficile c’est que la veille j’avais eu un long trajet de Paris par le TGV (train grand vitesse). J’avais beaucoup de problèmes d’aller de la gare de TGV à Aix proprement dit, et après de la gare routière, à mon apartement loué. J’étais très fatigué et donc, parce que j’avais des problèmes à trouver l’école—j’étais un étranger à Aix—je suis arrivé en retard là-bas, mon premier jour, le jour des examens écrits et oraux.

L’examen écrit était très dur avec beaucoup de questions sur les temps des verbes, certains que je n’avais jamais étudié! Tous les verbes irreguliers! Les pronoms difficiles! Les constructions grammaticales complexes! J’étais totalement découragé. Puis on m’a pris dans une salle pour l’examen oral. Cet examen était un peu mieux parce que les questions étaient ouvertes: Qui êtes-vous? Où habitez-vous? Quelle est votre occupation? Pourquoi êtes-vous ici? J’avais donc plus de facilité avec mes réponses. À ma surprise j’ai été placé dans une classe intermediate.

Après ce premier jour, les choses se sont améliorées, mais je restais inquiet tout le temps. Tout était en français. À l’école, dans les rues, dans les magasins, et dans les restaurants je devais écouter intensément. C’était épuisant! Les différences culturelles, les différentes de coutumes, les différentes suppositions sociales me confondaient très souvent.

Même les petites choses devenaient un grand projet. Par exemple, une sangle de mon sac à dos s’est cassée. Je devais la faire réparer. Aux États-Unis je l’aurais pris à un “shoemaker/shoe repair shop.” Quel est le mot français pour shoemaker? Je vais à mon dictionnaire. <> Je cherche dans les pages jaunes pour un cordonnier. J’en trouve cinq. Je trouve les adresses sur mon plan d’Aix et je les marque. Je marche à la première. Elle n’existe pas! La deuxième et la troisième sont fermées. Pourquoi? Je ne sais pas. La quatrième est ouverte. Mon sac à dos a peut-être besoin de six points. Le cordonnier réparera-t-il ce sac à dos maintenent pendant que j’attends? Non. Je dois retourner dans deux jours. Deux jours! La vie était comme ça pendant un mois.

Pendant cette période d’un mois j’ai beaucoup étudié chaque jour et j’ai beaucoup appris. Et j’attendais le temps où je penserais en français quand je le parlais. Le temps n’est pas arrivé. Sauf la fois dans un restaurant en Avignon où le serveur n’a tenu aucun compte de moi pendant une demi-heure et je lui a dit <> sans y penser.

L’expérience de ce mois m’a rendu un meilleur professeur de beaucoup de manières. Je suis maintenant même plus compatissant aux difficultés de mes étudiants dont les langues maternelles ne sont pas l’anglais parce que je sais très bien les problèmes qu’ils confrontent. Mais, plus important, comme étudiant d’une langue étrangère, j’ai appris beaucoup de choses: des théories d’apprentissage, des pédagogies, des jeux de langue qui aident les étudiants à apprendre une langue étrangère.

In back alleys: “If I hear ‘you know’ or ‘like’ out of their mouths one more time….”

In muted tones: “The email said ‘culd u plz send 2days homwork.’ It makes my blood boil!”

As educators, it’s our job to recognize our students’ academic weaknesses and work toward their improvement. Furthermore, the ability to communicate clearly and effectively in Standard English is arguably the most important skill to be gleaned from an undergraduate education. So a certain degree of frustration with our students’ English is to be expected. But there are good ways to approach the challenge, and there are inappropriate and inefficacious ways. We should strive to avoid stigmatizing the ways our students speak and write. We should not draw unwarranted connections between our students’ fluency in Standard English and their level of intelligence. And we should teach our students to appreciate the power of language and rhetoric, so that they can harness their linguistic creativity to their benefit.

The first step is to establish a little empathy for our students. The kind of English we want them to speak, so-called “Standard English,” is a rough amalgam of a variety of grammatical and lexical features. Depending on how you delineate it, Standard English is the native dialect of very few English speakers, and perhaps of none at all. I, for instance, grew up in the Midwest, and, upon moving away, I quickly learned (through the ridicule of my pitiless friends) that what I knew as a “bubbler” was properly called a “drinking fountain” and that the lilt of my Wisconsin dipthongs made me sound like a Canadian. Like nearly all other educated people, my ability to use Standard English is very much an acquired one. The native dialects of Queens College students, who have by and large been raised in an urban environment characterized by extreme linguistic diversity, are still further removed from Standard English. Thus we should not be shocked and aghast when Queens College undergraduates lack the Standard English vocabulary and syntax that we ourselves have honed only through many years of education and practice.

Moreover, it’s crucial to remember that Standard English is only “standard” by convention. Just as, for example, French enjoys no greater depth of expressivity than Spanish, there is nothing that makes Standard English inherently better suited to academic discourse than the varieties of English that our students speak. The standard’s only advantage is that there is an established convention to use it in particular settings, thereby establishing a common mode of communication between thinkers. Yet a lack of facility in Standard English by itself says nothing about the intelligence of the speaker, and we would be amiss to let such a thought creep into our judgment of student work.

One might argue that the problem of youth literacy is deepened by modern forms of communication like email and text messaging, where initialisms, abbreviations, and various orthographic funny business preponderate. It is of course hard to deny that thumbing out a message on the keypad of a cell phone is likely to encourage typographical shortcuts, and it might very well be the case that an increasing majority of the English prose that our students read and write is of this less-than-Standard variety. Thus, the argument goes, students can’t help but to let their linguistic laxity creep into the classroom: It’s a result of our modern age.

Let’s assume this argument is sound: Young people are becoming less and less able to conform to the conventions of Standard English because of their overwhelming exposure to non-standard usage. A pessimistic educator might toll the bell for traditional literacy. But is all hope really lost? One could instead argue that students are incredibly enthusiastic about new media. On MySpace and Facebook, students are producing and consuming huge amounts of prose on their own, without the inducement of Writing-Intensive syllabi or English 110 requirements. Through these media, our students are developing an organic sense of authorship, an awareness of audience and tone that, without the Internet, probably would not have taken root. Of course, this sense of authorship is rough around the edges, far from what we expect of sophisticated writers. Yet it is far easier to teach the details of Standard English to someone who is interested and engaged than to someone who isn’t, and we have new technologies to thank for the seed of this engagement.

These observations suggest several strategies for teaching our students the mores of Standard English. By implementing new and evolving technologies in our courses—the very technologies for which students have an already-existing affinity—we can harness that enthusiasm and get them to care about the writing they produce. What’s more, the interactive, collaborative and public nature of technologies like blogs and wikis is ideal for getting students to think about whom they’re writing for and what purpose they’re trying to accomplish. The one-way dialogue of traditional essay writing, on the other hand, does not so explicitly encourage awareness of audience and motive. With their attention drawn to the essentially interactive nature of writing, students will have a practical motivation for mastering the rhetorical devices that Standard English provides.

Another, more general teaching strategy involves practice, and lots of it. The pessimist argues that the student is so inundated with bad English that their bad habits get deeply ingrained. If this is true, then exposure to a huge amount of reading and writing—with a focus on “good” English—has the potential to dislodge these habits. Provide samples of student writing that you’d like them to emulate, both in content and in style. Assign low-stakes writing assignments, like journals, so that students get used to the process of putting their thoughts on paper. Those explicit lessons that you give about the finer points of grammar and punctuation will be reinforced both by seeing the rule being followed in sample texts and by practicing the rules themselves.

Above all, be patient. The conventions of Standard English put Robert’s Rules of Order to shame for their complexity and sheer number, and they take many years and much practice to master. Angry whispers to your colleagues about the decline of literacy are less likely to excite change than prudent pedagogical practice.

Despite the fact that at Queens College the courses are taught in English, the complex ideas of science are common to every culture, so I did not expect the ESL students to be at any disadvantage. After my tenure as a TA, however, I found this assumption to be faulty. Until the ESL students became accustomed to the professor and his manner of speaking, it was very difficult for most to follow along, but as the semester continued, all understood the course requirements and how to fulfill them. As a result of my experience as a TA, I am now able to appreciate how hard it is for ESL students to succeed: not only by struggling with the complex ideas behind scientific theorems, but also by having to do so through the prism of standard English.

Faculty can demystify writing in several ways. Students must understand that writing is a process. We can share with students the process involved in writing our own papers/articles. Let students know that the struggle to transform ideas into a coherent piece of writing requires writing multiple drafts, sharing ideas with others, and even changing major portions of what has already been written.

We must teach the conventions of writing in our particular disciplines. Offer students an outline of expectations from documentation style and types of introductions (direct/indirect) to the types of discussion/argument/examples/illustrations that will meet the requirements of the assignment. Stress the difference between revision (changes in content) and editing (correction of errors in grammar and punctuation). Help students work on their drafts. A 15-minute conference can help both the instructor and student clarify ideas and expectations. Even a few minutes after class to review one paragraph of a draft can lead to major improvements in the final draft. This is often more efficient than using written comments to convey the same information. Peer editing with a half dozen guided questions will offer all students an opportunity to learn from the writing of others and learn to read with a critical eye. Peer reviews can be collected as a reference if needed.

Once a paper or draft is submitted, consider the following: First, read the paper for content. In other words, read past the errors. Was the assignment followed correctly and accomplished? Are all of the required elements present in the paper? What is the quality of the research? At this point, comment only on the content. What worked and what needs to be added or revised? To avoid confusion, offer specific comments. Next, read the paper for form. Where does the language interfere with the reading? Where does it lack coherence? Are proper transitions being used? Consider the surface errors (grammar/punctuation) last. Some of these errors take many semesters to eliminate, but you can contribute to the process in the following way. RESIST THE URGE TO CORRECT ALL OF THE ERRORS OR MARK UP THE ENTIRE PAPER. Instead, select three key errors that most interfere with the smooth reading of the essay and have students edit these errors to keep or improve their grades.

Writing is an ongoing process, so requiring drafts of your students will encourage them to develop their ideas and produce clearer writing. Let students know that you will collect an earlier draft of their papers. These can be used as a quick reference to help you determine where their weaknesses lie, but they needn’t be graded. For weaker students, require two drafts to be submitted with the final draft. Emphasize to the students that an early draft should be substantially different from (not simply shorter than) the final draft.

Finally, don’t forget to encourage your multilingual students. Offer constructive criticism. A positive comment offers encouragement to students who face the daunting task of delivering an academically sound paper in English, their second, and more often these days, their third or fourth language. Our students must meet the challenge of learning the language of the academy, the language of various disciplines and of improving/perfecting their ability to express themselves in English. In that respect, all of our students become multilingual in college. Let us rise to the challenge by expecting high standards and enabling our bright, eager students to meet these shared goals.

They understand because they all speak the language of science.

In this issue of Revisions, some forms of communication not traditionally thought of as “language” have been considered. Mathematical equations, for example, generally represent relations among physical objects or forces that could also be expressed in words (see “The Language of Mathematics,” this issue). This fact, the bane of many self-proclaimed “left brained” students, also has the fortunate consequence of articulating with equal clarity mathematical relations to those who speak different languages.

In addition to using mathematics, science also frequently uses statistics to objectively test assumptions and express research results. For example, the statement “t (20) = 5.01, p < 0.001” conveys a wealth of information about the results of an experiment, including the statistical analysis used and the probability that the results reflect a treatment effect, without the need for words. This statement indicates that the difference between treatment groups on some outcome measured in this experiment is substantially more likely due to the effect of the treatment than to chance alone. Thanks to the universal nature of statistics and its symbolic representations, scientists from a variety of countries and spoken languages would undoubtedly recognize this result.

Equally comprehensible and not dependent on written language are graphic representations of scientific data. Given an understanding of the principles underlying the data being presented and perhaps only a handful of words, a scientist who speaks most any language can grasp research findings represented by a graph or other similar visual display of data. A graph with a tall bar representing the average sleep quality of participants who received an experimental drug and a short bar representing that of participants who received a placebo can demonstrate with almost pictorial universality the benefit of the drug for participants’ quality of sleep, just as color change on a topographic map of the human cornea represents reduced corneal curvature that will provide a test patient with better post-operative vision.

Scientists who speak diverse languages are also brought together through the common use of terms that originate from a variety of languages and have found their way into the lexicon of the multilingual scientific community. The term vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF, which refers to a protein involved in blood vessel formation in the mammalian nervous system, is known to interested scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, as is umami, the term for a distinct food flavor made possible by specific chemical receptors in the human tongue discovered by Japanese researchers.

Science has developed and made use of forms of communication not completely reliant on written or spoken language. This has helped to foster a common understanding among individuals from a variety of linguistic backgrounds, which itself has allowed terms originating in one language to permeate numerous others. The result is a language of science that transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries, one that should be impressed upon students of science as not only an intriguing fact but also as a motivator for them to discover and find their place in this multilingual community.

Nevertheless, a common spoken or written language is often helpful and sometimes vital for two scientists to truly appreciate the nuances and complexities of each other’s work. At the very least, though, the mathematics, visual representations, and terms that constitute the language of science can be a springboard for effective communication between individuals of different linguistic backgrounds via the use of traditional written or spoken language.

As with most disciplines, the legal literature has its own jargon. An understanding of certain historical events is necessary in order to adequately appreciate the legal jargon. Many phrases used in the legal discipline are in Latin, a relic of the two centuries of occupation of the British Isles by the Roman armies, and also, later, the subsequent role of the Catholic Church in the legal system.

The law has its own unique genres of literature. Like most academic disciplines, it has its textbooks, treatises, and scholarly articles. Unlike most academic disciplines, the legal textbooks, treatises, and scholarly articles are not considered to be primary sources; that role is fulfilled by constitutions, statutes, regulations, and judicial opinions. Indeed, because the Anglo-American legal system depends on precedents established in prior judicial opinions, the limited availability of judicial opinions in America during the Colonial period had a profound impact upon the development of the law in America.

The law addresses problems from all aspects of society, and therefore must be applied to emerging trends and technologies. Accordingly, the legal jargon associated with real property ownership contains terms such as fee simple, reverter, quitclaim and many other archaic English words and phrases in common use when real property laws evolved centuries ago, while much jargon associated with legal issues of computers and the Internet includes modern phraseology unknown a generation ago.

Faculty needs to explain the historical background behind many legal terms. For example, the term Statute of Frauds refers to a provision requiring certain agreements to be set in writing in order to be enforceable. The term frauds is not necessarily related to any wrongdoing by any of the parties but derives from the Statute for the Prevention of Frauds and Perjuries, enacted by the British Parliament in 1677, a time when, unlike 21st Century America, most of the population was illiterate and when parties to a contract were not permitted to testify regarding the contract. Accordingly, a legal proceeding involving a contract would often deteriorate into a contest of whose witness could tell a better lie to the court about who said what to whom. This promoted dishonesty before the tribunals, which had a corruptive effect upon the integrity of the courts. Parliament addressed the problem by requiring that certain agreements be reduced to writing in order to be enforceable.

Many legal terms, such as antitrust, can likewise be confusing without a historical context. Why would “trust” be something Congress would seek to oppose? The term antitrust arose with the Sherman Act of 1890, whereby the United States Congress sought to control abuses by the monopolists in the large industries such as steel, mining, transportation, and petroleum. The monopolists controlled the giant corporations, not through direct ownership of stock but by controlling trusts which were the legal owners of the corporate stock shares. Trustees of any trust have a duty to proactively assert the interests of the trust beneficiaries. The Sherman Act put to rest the monopolists’ argument that the trustees had no choice but to restrain trade, lest they be disloyal to the trust beneficiaries.

The law, then, must be studied—and taught—with regard for its unique language and literature.

When I announced to a group of friends over cocktails one night in the late spring of 2007 that I was to become a Writing Fellow at Queens College, the acid-tongued group amused themselves endlessly on my behalf. How appropriate that I of all people should be working at a college named Queens. The jokes seemed as endless as the gin and tonics. Admittedly, I think it’s funny as well.

Der er så mange forskellige måder at benævne sig selv? To put a linguistic label on oneself means so much more than that particular word. Am I a queen? Am I queer? Am I a gay boy rapidly approaching my mid-thirties at which time in American culture a gay male, maybe, can start thinking of himself as a man removed from the frantically youth-obsessed physical and linguistic culture of gaydom? Hvordan kan min krop genkende sig selv i et sprog der ikke for alvor er mit? How can my body recognize itself in a language that is not really mine? En hel verden af betydning eksisterer i rummet mellem ordet og eksistensen, mellem ordets betydning for mig and its larger contextual meaning. The queer words might mean something unknowable to me rolling off the tongues of others.

I don’t hang out with my friends. I hang out with “the boys”—also, at times, affectionately known as “the ladies.” This use of the female form to describe gay men is part of a historical strategy of reclaiming words that were used to oppress us for a long time. Queer, and its contemporary use as a badge of honor, as a rejection of straight society’s demands that we be, so to speak, normal, is an American creation that has spread all over the world. These days, queer, an old derogatory word, is used for self-identification in remote parts of the world. Does it still have the same connotations in foreign cultures? And, what happens when these words do not mean much to the gay foreign language student entering the American educational system and who has learned “straight” English and now must learn to also speak homosexual in a foreign language?

Da jeg først flyttede til New York med mit allerbedste skoleengelsk—komplet med dansk accent—kendte jeg ikke alle disse slangudtryk for homoseksuelle mænd. Jeg kendte naturligvis de danske og kendte, nærmest fysisk, deres betydning. Jeg vidste at jeg ikke var en svans eller en fisselette. Kunne aldrig betegne mig selv som sådan, men vidste også at de havde betydet meget for Bøssernes Befrielsesfront. At overtage ondskabens og hadets betegnelse for en selv er en grundlæggende frisættende handling. Paa amerikansk kan jeg være alle de ting jeg ikke kunne på dansk. På amerikansk kender min krop ikke betydningen af fordømmelsens ord.

We are called and call each other (and here the question of who has the right to call whom what is absolutely essential) so many different things: flaming queen, rice queen, drama queen, opera queen, theatre queen, size queen, snow queen, drag queen and so on. Among all these different kinds of queens I definitely embody some and yet remain, in my own definition of my identity, a gay man. I have been called a queen (often in combination with drama), men jeg remain i bund og grund en homoseksuel mand. I have been called a faggot, a fag, and I have called my friends the same with love, trying to undo the hateful actions hidden in the looming shadows of those words. I have been attacked with the same word and wounded by it as a linguistic weapon. I have picked fights because of it! What did you call me? Disse ord er handlinger i sig selv.

Jeg er bøsse! I know exactly what I am in Danish, but it has taken me a long time and years of studies of identity theory to figure out which American label might describe my identity correctly. In Danish my body knows (because the body remembers the language of hate, remembers the feeling of physical danger when in high school a gay boy is bullied) the meaning of derogatory words that it doesn’t know in English. My body has no memory of childhood in the English language. This lack of bodily meaning sets my mouth free to identify the body that carries it around as the body of a multilingual queen. My body speaks Danish but whispers in English.

And through my whole linguistic life as a gay man runs Adrienne Rich’s observation from her poem “The Burning of Books instead of Children” that “this is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to talk to you.”

安定。うん。要するに、何だろう。その会社が、安定しているかどうか。別に給料はめちゃくちゃ高いとか、そんなのは別に俺どうでもいい。とにかく、職を失わずにいたい、うん。それが一番。

Antei. Un. Yōsuruni, nandarō. Sono kaisha ga, antei shiteiruka dōka. Betsu ni kyūryō wa mechakucha takai toka, sonnano wa betsu ni ore dōdemo ii. Tonikaku, shoku o ushinawazu ni itai, un. Sorega ichiban.

Stability. Yeah. In short, what would be. That company, whether being stable or not. Particularly salary is way high or not, that, particularly I don’t care. Whatever, job want not to lose, yeah. That number one.

Stability. Yeah. In short, how’d you say, whether the company is stable or not. I don’t care if the salary is way high or not. Whatever, I don’t want to lose my job, yeah. That’s number one.

(Thirty-year old male, High School graduate, worker at a waste combustion facility.)

Involvement in two American-based research projects in sociology in Japan has offered me the opportunity to interview over seventy native “informants.” These projects aimed to gain information about contemporary social issues, such as family relations and youth employment. Field work involved extensive interviewing of “informants” in Japanese, transcribing audiotaped interviews (the “source text”), and, ultimately, translating (into the “target language”). Personal accounts gained from the interview process reveal how individual experience is both unique and general. The interview brings a realization of the power and weight of the human voice, as does the transcription and translation necessary for scientific analysis.

Spoken language is often incomplete, ambiguous, and contradictory. Translating the spoken word (la parole) naturally poses both structural and contextual complexities. First, Japanese tolerates much greater ambiguity than English. Words—even phrases—are frequently omitted in conversation (the prime example being the subject) without leading to incomprehension in Japanese. Second, informants understandably make continual cultural references in dialogue. Given that the “target” text is to be analyzed in an American academic context, it is imperative for the translator to interpret native knowledge, which, though freely spoken, lies deeply rooted in the speaker’s “source” culture, and can thus be elusive to the reader. A further complexity has to do with the degree of vagueness (sometimes deliberate), informality and inconsistency of spoken Japanese. Since the spoken language is often a reflection of the social conditions of an individual (class, education, gender, etc.), an effort to retain the nuance of the informant’s “voice” is necessary for sociological analysis.

In going through reams of transcriptions, I have adopted three strategies which have proved useful in approaching the challenges in this kind of linguistic/cultural transmission. The first is to correct and refine the vague passages of the “source” into a coherent text in English. This becomes necessary when faithful, word for word translation produces an incomprehensible passage. The second strategy is to leave words or phrases as they are actually spoken. In this case, retaining the original may be judged best because of cultural specificity or significance. In such cases, I would either transliterate the original Japanese, or translate literally and include a translator’s interpolation to explain the background. The third approach—which I employ less frequently than the first two—is to omit minor words or phrases (such as unclear utterances or sentence constructions in the original) with the aim of achieving clarity for the English-speaking reader. The three approaches should be balanced within the translation, but clearly require creativity and selection in the production of the “target” text.

The art of translating social data resides in the balance between “making sense” and maintaining culturally specific meanings in the target text. Translation may be viewed as instrumental or simply as a means to convey pragmatic information from one language to another. But the act of translation is as creative and enriching as the act of writing. In transmitting information, the translator recreates the worldview constructed by a person in the “source” culture within the “target” language—while remaining as true to the person as possible. Indeed, the practice of the interview as a social research method should be an effort to get beneath both the clichés we use to express ourselves and the way we view others (Bourdieu [1993]1999). The translator of social data aims to reproduce the original voice—conveying the emotions, values, and prejudices of individuals—while shedding light on other cultures and histories. The process is fulfilling because it is a communicative exchange that is deeply human.

Reference

• Bourdieu, P. (1999). Understanding. In Bourdieu, P., et.al. The Weight of the World (1993). Stanford, CA. Stanford University Press.

Я аспирантка факультета психологии и сейчас заканчиваю работу над диссертацией. В этом месте я могла бы (должна была бы!) написать название темы, в работе над которой я провожу немало времени, но, как это не тяжело признавать, моего словарного запаса не хватает, чтобы объяснить, что такое «проспективная память» и как я ее исследую в своих экспериментах. Можно долго объяснять, что проспективная память -- это способность вспомнить запланированное на будущее дело тогда, когда это будущее настает. Честно говоря, я не уверена, что непосвященный человек в состоянии понять это предложение даже со второй попытки, не говоря уже о моих коллегах-психологах. Каждый раз, когда русскоговорящие друзья и родственники расспрашивают меня о диссертации, я начинаю краснеть, пыхтеть и стараюсь перевести разговор на такие темы, в которых я чувствую себя более свободно. Мне кажется, что у многих студентов, которые знают несколько языков (но при этом уровень владения языками варьируется в зависимости от темы и жанра), возникают похожие ощущения: мы легко объясняемся на одни темы на одном языке и с трудом связываем несколько слов на другие на этом же самом языке.

Among contemporary textbooks of psychology, a volume by famed developmental psychologist L. Vygotsky, in the original Russian.

In the paragraph above I struggled to describe the topic of my dissertation, and must admit near defeat: My inadequacy as a speaker of “psychology Russian” is blatantly obvious, even though, given enough time, I would [or could?] probably succeed in making myself understood. At the same time, I have no trouble expressing myself and thinking about the subject of my dissertation in English: My work is in the area of prospective memory, or “remembering to do things in the future”. I do not know the proper translation for the phrase “prospective memory” and even remembering the word for “remembering” makes me feel like a linguistic contortionist. For this reason, conversations with my Russian-speaking parents and friends about “what I do” are often embarrassingly short and end in my confused effort to steer the conversation onto some other topic (have you seen any good movies lately?). I imagine that this experience is familiar to many multilingual students: In a situation where the language of communication does not match the language of expertise, one is at a disadvantage that is nothing short of frustrating. And yet, I must find a way to make myself understood to others in a way that it all makes sense in my head—this is often tough work! The lesson I am learning is this: When someone starts explaining something to me and I do not understand it, I give myself another chance to listen. I only hope that others give me the same benefit of the doubt.

The MFA program and translation at Queens College

Starting our conversation, we began talking about the MFA program as such and its position within Queens College as a multilingual campus, answering questions such as: What is the function of the MFA program at Queens College? What is the relation between creative writing and translation? What is the art of translation? How does working with translation prepare students to work in the academy in general? The philosophy behind the MFA program is to combine a “traditional” program of creative writing with a program in literary translation. The literary translation program distinguishes the Queens College MFA program from other creative writing programs on the East Coast, allowing for students to focus on the relation between the “original” work, its translation, and the production of both, all within the same program. In this way the program has the potential of working not only on the students’ knowledge of translation theory and practice, but also on their literary abilities, combining literary translation as a teachable practice and as an art. The program currently has about 30 students primarily focusing on prose and poetry. However, playwriting and translation will eventually be core elements of the program as well, and the translation program will start accepting students in the fall of 2008.

In the current American educational system, bilingual academic programs traditionally operate within an English / Spanish paradigm, but the translation program at Queens wishes to work with other languages as well because of the large multilingual component of the college and the borough itself. Insisting on a truly multilingual program might also—and this is definitely the wish of the program—keep writing alive in the many local languages in Queens by translating some of these non-English works into English.

The MFA program—as of now—has mostly native speakers and monolingual students, primarily native English speaking students, enrolled. However, the translation program wishes to develop the entire student body in a more multilingual direction in order to create a space for several languages working within the same classroom. Working with undergraduates on issues of translation and forcing them to work in several languages will also ultimately help them as graduates. When working on issues of translation, students are forced to pay much closer attention to the English that they read and write in other classes and, ultimately, pay closer attention to their own economy of language. By having worked with each and every word while translating a text, students will have gained the important knowledge of choosing the right words that best and most concisely describe what they are aiming to say.

Translation within CUNY and the Borough of Queens

Following this discussion, our conversation turned specifically to translation within CUNY, Queens College, and Queens as an incredibly ethnically and linguistically diverse borough. Questions discussed were: What is the potential for the MFA program in translation within the CUNY system? Are there particular qualities that Queens College students have in relation to an MFA translation program?

For the program to become truly multilingual it cannot be an insular program. So the program intends to help identify professors throughout the CUNY system who will work with students in different languages and cultures. Consequently, a multilingual program in translation at Queens cannot exist only as a multilingual program, but must also be a multi-disciplinary program—having translation majors work with professors from a wide variety of different schools, programs, and disciplines. In this way, Queens College and the MFA program in creative writing can serve as an example of how languages can work across campuses—helping to establish solidarity between campuses, within the CUNY system, and, ideally within multilingual New York.

A large number of students at Queens College already have tremendous experience in working with issues of translation. For example, many students will have experience with naïve translation—translating on the spot for family members who do not speak English, translating contemporaneously in class, and so forth. Multilingual or bilingual people will almost all recognize a situation in which naïve translation is needed. However this impressive ability often remains under-utilized in writing—be it creative or academic—because when translation is defined as an art or a scholarly task instead of a lived practice, it becomes hard for some students (and others) to do. In order to utilize this already existing ability to translate, the students in the translation program will be working with a wide variety of documents: textbooks, advertisements, legal documents, official letters and so forth. Many students will have experiences working with such materials and will therefore be truly able to investigate the purposes and strategies of different kinds of documents. One of the difficult elements in translating some of these documents, as in any translation, is to be able to find the right tone, which is of course not just a question of language but is also always culturally determined.

Translation as Preservation

From this point, our conversation turned to the question of translation as preservation. Can translation be considered linguistic archaeology in which something new emerges from the artifacts of the old? In her article in this issue, Nicole Cooley writes that “Our MFA focuses on translation across cultures, between continents, between and among theoretical approaches to literary texts, between and among various cultures that make up the diverse and varied landscape of Queens,” and my conversation with Rigoberto González touched on this aspect as we slowly centered in on the notion of translation as an act of preservation.

The Queens program in literary translation wishes to tap into the population of Queens and thereby elevate the value of literature written in other languages, expressing different cultures. This process can happen by translating local literatures into English. For example, it would be helpful to have English translations of Middle Eastern protest poetry. Such work would allow students and faculty at Queens College to get another view of how Middle Eastern poets, whether in Baghdad or in Bay Ridge, respond to the war.

Having a translation program at Queens College is a perfect combination in a creative writing program. Queens is a tremendously diverse borough—both linguistically and culturally—and still has very insular cultural pockets. As gentrification takes place throughout the outer boroughs, languages and cultures disappear or lose their specificity. Working within these cultures before they disappear can help preserve their texts and develop literary practices. Sending students out to work with local cultures can serve the function of preserving these cultural identities. The translation program wants to participate in these communities and to foster bi- and multilingual creative communities, not just inhabit the land of Queens and the language of English. It is a goal of the program to educate students who will keep discussing “the word” in multiple languages and keep translating texts into a multitude of languages. Keeping these unknown bodies of foreign words, produced either globally or locally, alive through giving them life in another language is an important act of multilingual literary preservation.

All of us on the faculty have been talking a great deal about how creative writing intersects with language and culture. This, I believe, is what makes our new MFA unique. Throughout the United States, there are many MFA programs. Since the 1930s when the first creative writing program, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was founded, interest in creative writing at the graduate level has continued to rise. In fact, in the past twenty-five years, the number of MFA programs has grown from 15 to well over a hundred. (And this statistic does not even include creative writing MA and PhD degrees.)

Yet, typically, most of these MFA programs are cast very narrowly. Most programs still offer degrees only in poetry and fiction. Many do not focus on the study of literature. And almost none offer a track in translation. With more than 160 languages spoken in Queens, whose population we serve, our new MFA is ideally situated to offer a diverse population of students training in creative writing and to nurture an important generation of writers. Our program is groundbreaking not only because it is the first in the most multicultural county in the United States, but because it is one of the first creative writing programs to raise questions about the writing and translating of multinational literatures.

As one of the authors of the proposal that helped to launch the MFA, I was able to imagine what shape our MFA might take. As I reflected, I kept returning to an experience I had when I began teaching undergraduate creative writing at Queens College. My first semester here, I employed a pedagogical strategy—the anonymous creative writing workshop—that I’d used effectively in another liberal arts college with a homogeneous student body. Student texts circulated in my creative writing classes with no name on them—only I, the teacher, knew who had written the work. I explained to my students that this strategy emphasizes that we are discussing the writing, not the writer, and ensures that the writer can’t defend his or her work.

At first, this teaching method seemed, again, to work well. But something troubled me: In this class, composed primarily of students who were recent immigrants from the Philippines, several Soviet breakaway Republics and Afghanistan, there was a curious lack of character and setting in the students’ work. Places, people, landmarks were not named. There was a flatness in the stories the students wrote, and even an odd similarity in their narratives.

To understand the problem, I invited students to come to my office hours to talk about their work. Over and over, they told me they had left out all references to place and time so that no one could identify them as the author. They explained: If they named their native countries, or used words from their native languages, everyone would have known they wrote the story. If they told a story located in the worlds they knew, derived from their own experience, they told me they would have done the assignment wrong.

I realized that a crucial part of becoming a writer is believing that your own experience, your own background, has value and can be written about. For my students, whose voices had already been disenfranchised and silenced, anonymous workshop invalidated their experience. The students in my class believed that they should erase individual difference—language, culture—in favor of the creation of a “universal” narrative in order to be good writers.

This experience forever changed my thinking about creative writing pedagogy and has played a large part in my hopes for our new MFA. The teaching of writing, I learned firsthand, is inflected by language and culture in complex ways. A single, universal narrative is not the goal of a creative writing class. And thus, the inclusion of translation and the focus on serious literary study in our MFA program became central. Training our students in creative writing and multiple literatures and languages, using our campus-wide interdisciplinary resources, is a way to give our students the freedom to write their own stories and to show them that their stories matter.

Thus, our program seeks to bring together the translation and creative writing tracks of our MFA. Student translators will take workshops in their genres and attend readings, but the other students in poetry, fiction and playwriting will try their hand at translation exercises, attend our “Trends in Translation” series of talks, and participate in this lively aspect of our writing community.

Finally, for all of us in the MFA program, translation is not simply the transformation of one language to another but a way of thinking about language. Our MFA focuses on translation across cultures, between continents, between and among theoretical approaches to literary texts, between and among various cultures that make up the diverse and varied landscape of Queens.

Juan Nicolás Tineo, a graduate from the MSEd in Spanish at Queens College, has been a full-time Spanish teacher at the Susan B. Anthony Middle School for eight years. Juan completed his BA in the Dominican Republic and is a published author of collections of poetry, a novel, and a short story, all in Spanish. He founded and is Executive Director of the Hispanic and Latino Cultural Center of NY, an organization that promotes cultural activities related to Spanish literature. Last September his organization offered the well attended “Feria del Libro Hispana y Latina de Nueva York” in honor of Dr. Gregory Rabassa, Distinguished Professor from Queens College.

Prórroga

Prórroga pido al día
a la navidad
que nuevamente ya vendrá.

Prórroga pido a la rutina
al Año Nuevo
que aquí otra vez está.

Prórroga pido al afán
al trabajo
a la agonía diaria.

Prórroga pido
—y sé que no obtendré— al día
porque no hay ser humano
que haya podido escapar
al umbral de la muerte.

Hasta en los buenos días alguien muere

Hoy será un buen día.
Azotó la última tormenta del invierno, quizás
quizás mañana podamos despejarnos de la ropería
hoy como ayer, los poetas
y hasta soldados, por la vida
mueren sin algarabía.

Ayer fue como hoy,
mañana será como siempre
hoy salió el sol, hasta en los buenos días alguien muere
quizás, quizás mañana sea un buen día…

Errante

Desdibujar el tren que no pasa
mientras, disfruto ver saltar las ratas por los rieles.

Olvidar que me dieron un ticket
Saber que el canal del tiempo anunció una tormenta para mañana.

Estar pediente que a final de mes hay que pagar la renta
las credit cards
el celular
el student loan.

Comprar las tarjetas de llamadas prepagadas,
asegurarme que mi familia no me olvide en la República…

Llegar a casa, sentir que no quiero hablarle a nadie
necesitar más espacio
saber que no quepo con nadie.
¡Ni conmigo!

Seguir la rutina diaria es el aporte,
la huella más profunda de mi existencia en esta tierra…

Tierra ajena.