"Borders and Language" with guests Olivia Hellewell and Pierre-Alexis Mével

Liv is the translator of The Fig Tree by Goran Vojnović, which you can order directly from the publisher Istros Books, or via our friendly local Five Leaves Bookshop. She mentions Vojnović’s (untranslated into English) first novel, Čefuli Raus.
Liv wanted to share the following excerpt from The Fig Tree, connected to our conversation:

"You're on the other side of the border, you two, were her first words as she came through the door.
It's like someone's drawn a border through me. They've drawn borders through us, through all of us. They've drawn borders between me, my mother and my father. It's now up to someone else to decide if I can see my parents." (2020, 289)

Liv has also shared Boyd Tonkin’s review of the Fig Tree for Arts Desk (December 15, 2020), which gives quite a good bit of context about the history and the language.

Alex has been working with Impacd CIC.

You can read about Easy Language in Christiane Maaß’s open-access book, Easy Language – Plain Language – Easy Language Plus: Balancing Comprehensibility and Acceptability.

Alex discussed the politics and practice of subtitling Mathieu Kassovitz’s iconic film La Haine (1995). Apparently La Haine is 30 years old next year (eek!) – but since time is a patriarchal construct, we’re not worried about this.

Hardcore listeners may be interested in reading Alex’s work on subtitling La Haine – they can sate that appetite here.

Gillian shared the etymology of 'translation'  from the Oxford English Dictionary.

For photographic evidence of the “Thinkmetric” sign, see this photo by Matthew Redrich.

Joual is a version of Québécois French, with roots in working-class Montreal.

Find out more about the film Bye Bye Tiberias here.

Zalfa quoted from an article by Francesca Leveridge and Alex in which they argue that “subtitled films constitute hybrid spaces where languages come into contact.”

The winery Liv visited in “Borders I Have Known” was Radikon winery.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the University of Leicester's School of Arts, Media and Communication for use of recording equipment; to India Downton for her invaluable expertise; and to the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell.

Gillian Roberts: We are Zalfa Feghali and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands, from different countries, with multiple passports. Hello, and welcome to our episode on borders and language. 

We have two eminent guests with us today. Olivia Hellewell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham, in the Center for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, and the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies section, where she teaches Spanish and translation. She has published academic work on contemporary Slovene literature and translation, and has translated a number of Slovene texts into English, most recently Adam and His Tuba by Žiga  Gombač in 2023. She also has an academic monograph in progress provisionally entitled Supplying Literary Translation, Routes into Translation for “Small” European Nations. Fun fact about Liv: she has an exceptional green thumb and has been known to bring little bouquets of fresh flowers to writing group sessions. 

Zalfa Feghali: That's lovely.

Olivia Hellewell: That is true. I did do that. I'd forgotten that. It is really lovely.

Zalfa Feghali: This is the sort of thing that Gillian always remembers. Our second guest is the wonderful Pierre-Alexis Mével, who is Associate Professor in Translation Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, also at the University of Nottingham. He's also Course Director of the MA in Translation Studies. Alex is a really versatile scholar working in translation studies, sociolinguistics, and film studies with projects as diverse as Cinéma Monde, the translation of French banlieue literature and banlieue cinema and translating African-American Vernacular English into French. He's the author of the 2017 book Subtitling African-American English into French: Can We Do the Right Thing?, which is an excellent title, can I say, and the co-editor of two books, one with Helen Tatum, the 2010 collection Language and Its Context: Transposition and Transformation of Meaning, and the second with Jean-Xavier Ridon and Lédine Leporte, the 2012 collection, and I'm going to butcher this, I apologize, Européennes, Qui Sommes Nous, Alex is co-investigator on an AHRC-funded project for the next generation of immersive experiences entitled Integrated Immersive Inclusive Theatre, which explores the potential of new and easily accessible immersive technologies to assist in the creation of inclusive and integrated communication within theatrical performance. And my fun fact about Alex is that he has the most intriguing story anyone has ever heard about a broken down car and a baguette.

Alex Mével: That's true, I do. Thanks for having me today.

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome, both of you. Thanks for being here.

Gillian Roberts: Now I'm just thinking about baguettes, but we might come to that in due course.

Alex Mével: It is a pretty good story.

Zalfa Feghali: As our hardcore listeners know, we always wind back to food.

Gillian Roberts: We do, we do. Understandably. So we thought we would ask you both, first of all, about all the languages that you speak and understand and read, because there's some multiplicities going on in interest to our listeners.

Olivia Hellewell: Yeah. And I guess our experiences, how we came to those languages are completely different as well in some cases. So the languages that I know and have used and have known, all those words that have been in my head at some point in time have arrived there because I've proactively studied them. Like I've never been in a position where I've been surrounded by people speaking a second language from birth or from childhood. So it's always been a sort of, I guess, academic pursuit before knowing that that's what it was. And I think that definitely changes the way that you see language. It changes the way that you feel confident to use it and in which contexts. I often feel like I'm quite a theoretical language learner. 

Gillian Roberts: What do you mean by that? 

Olivia Hellewell: Well, I would be really good at telling somebody why the grammar of a certain language is a certain way.

Zalfa Feghali: Gillian, this is her. This is Louise from Arrival. I did not realize that we were a) going to have a throwback to a previous episode and b) that you were going to save the world. Thank you very much in advance. So glad you're here.

Gillian Roberts: Tell us about Heptapod B.

Zalfa Feghali: Theoretical learner of languages.

Olivia Hellewell: So often in a situation on the spot, I will know which parts of the language I need to put together in that moment. I can see and my brain is going, I know that I need this verb and I need to conjugate it in this way. And I know that this preposition demands this case. We can go into that if that needs further explication. But sometimes those words don't immediately come together in the instance. So I kind of know the theory and I know the framework and I'm very interested in that. But in terms of conversation, I feel less confident sometimes in those on-the-spot situations.

Gillian Roberts: I feel like that's quite common, isn't it? People learning other languages, the speaking and the spontaneity of it can be the most challenging aspect.

Olivia Hellewell: Yeah, I think people do say that when there's kind of, you know, tropes, people say there's two kinds of language learners, there's probably many more than two. But yeah, I'm definitely one that has always been interested in the way that languages work, the way that they're constructed, and that kind of theoretical study is what attracted me to learning languages in the first place. And then later comes all the benefits and the joy of those interactions and the people that it leads you to, the conversations that it leads you to. That's a bonus. But yeah, my starting point was quite different. 

Zalfa Feghali: And what languages do you work in?

Olivia Hellewell: So in my day-to-day teaching work, I work from Spanish into English, teaching translation mostly. I have taught some language here at Nottingham, but now my teaching is mostly working with small groups of students who study translation and who also study Spanish. So we'll look at different kinds of texts and do practical exercises, thinking about what they are required to do in order to create a successful quote unquote version of that text in English. But I suppose my main working language in terms of translation outside of the classroom is Slovene. I started learning Slovene or Slovenian as it is also known over 10 years ago now. And that was the focus of my doctoral research. As an undergraduate student, I studied Spanish and Russian. But my Russian is sadly in a box somewhere at the back of my brain, and it rarely comes out these days. 

Zalfa Feghali: It'll come out when the heptapods arrive.

Gillian Roberts: [laughs] Famously, you’ll be speaking Russian on a mobile phone.

Olivia Hellewell: I could talk to people about Russian grammar in an abstract context, but I would struggle to string a sentence together now, which is a shame.

Gillian Roberts: So how did Slovene become your main kind of research and practice language?

Olivia Hellewell: Completely by surprise, I'd studied Russian and I really loved Russian and it got to a decent level at the end of my undergraduate studies. One of my professors at the time said like, oh, if you considered learning another Slavonic language to kind of add another string to your bow, I think it was a phrase that they used at the time, because they knew that I was interested in translation and I think at the time as going through undergraduate study I had this dream of like working in the European Union as if it was some kind of utopian centre where people spoke loads of different languages and everything was great and there was some funding at the time to learn another Slavonic language if you'd already studied one. It was an AHRC one year scholarship and I applied for jobs and I applied for the scholarship and that was the thing that I got so I could choose between Slovene and Serbian-Croatian as it was referred to then and I did a quick google and I thought Slovenian grammar looked amazing. It has a grammatical dual so it has singular, dual and plural and I was like that sounds like a challenge I really want to get my brain around and that was literally what decided it. It was so kind of theoretical and abstract, but it just sounded amazing. And then I went to Slovenia and I was like, oh, actually this place is amazing. And as the years went on, I found there were so many systems in place to support my learning of that language. There's an incredibly like well-coordinated and integrated system to support learners of Slovene as a second foreign language. There's a lot of investment from the government in supporting people to learn Slovene all over the world. 

Gillian Roberts: Wow.

Olivia Hellewell: Which, given there are two million speakers of Slovene is understandable, but nevertheless surprising somewhat that there is this whole network of language teaching outposts in universities all over the world, and there are summer schools, autumn schools, winter schools, like all these things that you can go to. And just that structure allowed me to gain a confidence and familiarity with that language that I hadn't actually experienced with Russian, for example. I found it quite hard living in Russia and gaining sort of authentic exposure to the language. Slovenia just provided a lot of opportunities and then I started reading more, getting really interested in their literature, history of certain authors and the role of literature in those kind of discourses of what it means to be Slovene. It just went from there. It spiraled.

Gillian Roberts: Amazing. Thank you. Alex, tell us about languages that you speak and read and how you came to them.

Alex Mével: So I originally studied English in my French university and ended up in the UK to do my year abroad, then found all sorts of creative ways to stay in the UK because I liked it so much. So I guess French is my first language. English is my second language. I have some Italian, but I mean very little and I never really use it. So I do work between French and English, but actually I end up working more within English than between languages. So within that particular language. And I work on a lot of projects to do with accessibility, accessible languages. Currently, I'm working on a project with a dance company based in Nottingham. They're called Impacd. I'm translating their website into something called Easy Language along with a colleague from the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies called Martin Gray. And if you've never heard of Easy Language... 

Gillian Roberts

I have not. 

Olivia Hellewell: Same here. 

Zalfa Feghali: Tell us. 

No one could really blame you for that. It's a version of English with a simplified syntax where you make a particular conscious effort to use lexicon that is going to be more accessible or more simple to understand for a broader public. So that's what we're doing at the moment, because the dance lessons that Impact try to provide are aimed at a variety of people with different backgrounds, people with disabilities, with learning difficulties as well. And so one thing that they wanted to do was to make their public facing bit and their website more directly accessible to a broader share of the public.

Zalfa Feghali: And it doesn't compromise on anything except make it more inclusive and open to everyone.

Alex Mével: Exactly. Exactly.

Olivia Hellewell: Is there a recognized sort of structure or pattern for Easy Language? Are there rules to follow?

Alex Mével: They are kind of rules to follow. So they are, you can actually measure how easy something is to read. And there are now programs that you can use. So you can write a bit of text and you can run it past the software and the software will spit out a number and will tell you what reading age or what grade it corresponds to. 

Zalfa Feghali

Oh, wow. 

Alex Mével: And you can work from that. And you can work on, yeah, turning the syntax into something that's a little bit more simple, like subject, verb, object in English, certainly. And easy language is something that's vastly more developed in some countries, particularly Germany, actually, where it's gaining more prominence. And we're trying to kind of push that in the UK as well, because as you said, Zalfa, you know, it's not really compromising on anything.

Gillian Roberts: It's so interesting that different languages, of course, will have their own version of Easy Language when they're constructed so differently. And what constitutes an easy version of one language, I imagine, might be quite different from others.

Alex Mével: Absolutely, yes. You know, what is a more simple or standard syntax in French or in English or in Slovene?

Olivia Hellewell: And how different it is to be able to perceive that and to notice those steps. I was in Ljubljana last weekend with a friend and a former colleague of ours at Nottingham, Matej Klemen, who works for the Centre for Slovene as a Second or Foreign Language. And he's been involved in creating a series of graded readers for students of Slovene. And you can see they use the European Union framework, A1, A2, B1, B2. And there are these books that go through these stages. It was really interesting for me, as somebody who speaks Slovene as a second language, to go through, to start from the simplest and then progress. And it was really noticeable to me, those different stages. And I really appreciated, as a language learner, how they were structured and the key vocabulary that's given to you and the way that sentences are broken down. So that's really interesting, whereas it might be difficult for me to judge how simple Easy Language was in English. I have a different relationship to that.

Alex Mével: Yeah, well, we can compare the old version of the website, which we thought was quite wordy and kind of technical, to what we're trying to come up with. And sometimes you find solutions and sometimes it's just that the text that you're dealing with is what it is and it's just very technical and it's difficult to kind of find a way around if you want. But we try.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I'm just imagining translating a lot of academic writing into Easy English. Getting rid of all of our sub clauses and technical lists where actually all we need to do sometimes is just communicate what we're trying to say. It's not about simplicity, it's just about caring about the meaning-making that you're trying to do and the person with whom you're trying to communicate.

Gillian Roberts: I'm really interested in how you both got into translation more generally. Obviously you have interest in language, but lots of people have interest in language or they teach language and they research it. But what is it about translation in particular that sparked your interest?

Olivia Hellewell: Big question. There's a story that I often tell, I think kind of encapsulates where it came from. I remember being quite young, I think under the age of 10 at my grandparents' house. And my granddad had two really big bookshelves that were always full of books. And I remember him taking a book off the shelf. and showing it to me and it was in French and he was reading it to me in French. My granddad was a really talented linguist and never got to do languages as part of his job but I always grew up around him talking about languages or being aware that whenever he went on holiday he would learn the language before he went and that was kind of my entry point into understanding that there was a world beyond English. but I remember him getting his French book out on the dinner table and reading. And then I remember counting the words. And so I'd ask him to repeat the sentence. And so I'd say, okay, well, that word, the third word in this sentence is the third word that you just said. And he would like, no, no, it doesn't quite work like that. And I was, as a child, I was mapping numerically, first word, second word, and thinking that's how it worked. And that was a moment of realization that other languages weren't a translation of English, but that languages existed as systems in their own right. And for my tiny child brain, I'd only ever been surrounded by English pretty much growing up. 

Gillian Roberts

Mind blown. 

Olivia Hellewell: My mind was blown.

Zalfa Feghali: That's a pretty clever realization for a child. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: Who's only living in one language in that moment. Yeah.

Olivia Hellewell: I have to say though, I do, I have cousins who are Finnish. And so I did, I did grow up with some Finnish at my grandmother's house I just mentioned. So I was aware of that, but yeah, that, that kind of, that understanding that languages were systems that worked on their own terms. That was the moment. And ever since then, just thinking about languages as systems and how you get them to, to work and to map onto each other. for me is what makes translation so exciting. And I think wanting to be part of that process and communicating something and the challenge of seeing if you can make it work, if you can express the same or a similar idea using a different set of tools, that to me is just the most exciting thing. 

Gillian Roberts: Amazing.

Alex Mével: You look at dictionaries and you think that there is a one to one correspondence between languages. And as soon as you start digging a little bit deeper, you find that it's all just an illusion. The watershed moment for me came later. It came in 2005, actually, and I remember it because I can point to the exact moment. I had borrowed a DVD from a friend. It was a DVD of a French movie called La Haine, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year. And it still feels very, very contemporary in lots of ways. It's still just a very good film. And because I borrowed it from a British friend, I was watching it with the English subtitles on. And I'd watched it before with English subtitles on and I couldn't remember those English subtitles. I was like, I'm pretty sure the first time I watched it, those subtitles were different. And they were.

Zalfa Feghali

Oh. Da-da-daaaaa!

Alex Mével: I know. Exactly. So the DVD I borrowed was the recent release for the 10th anniversary edition. And I'd watched an older version, an older DVD version, which had the original English subtitles on it. And they were very, very different.

Gillian Roberts: How were they different?

Alex Mével: The original subtitles were used for the Cannes Film Festival. Okay. and they were written by two British people who tried to give the subtitles a bit of an American twang. So there was almost like some gangster English in there, if you want. And all the cultural references were transposed to the US. So five francs, like the French money at the time was francs. 

Zalfa Feghali: Five bucks? 

Alex Mével: It became two bits. Two bits?

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, how random. Yeah. Well, not random in their minds.

Alex Mével: And Darty, the hi-fi retailer, became Walmart. And it goes on like that. Astérix became Snoopy. And therefore Obélix became Charlie Brown. Because of course.

[All laugh]

Gillian Roberts: I don't think I watched that version.

Alex Mével: The movie performed particularly poorly in the US when it was first released. And some people blame the subtitles for that. And there are all sorts of reasons why the movie didn't perform in the US. But so new subtitles were written for the 10th anniversary DVD edition. And those subtitles were vastly more neutral, let's say, a lot more standard. So all the profanity, the vulgarity was very toned down. It used UK British English as well, rather than American English. So neither set of subtitles felt particularly satisfactory. And when I realized what was going on, I was like, why aren't we talking about this, guys? We should be talking about this. What is going on here? How can it be so different? And I ended up writing my master's dissertation about this.

Gillian Roberts: Amazing. 

Zalfa Feghali

Fabulous. 

Gillian Roberts

I feel like this is a whistleblower moment, frankly, in the subtitling world. Two different sets of subtitles.

Olivia Hellewell: That was like a classic French A-level film in this country, like set text.

Zalfa Feghali: I'm wondering which one you watched.

Alex Mével: I've got both of them.

Zalfa Feghali: I think I've watched it with you. And I don't remember if there were subtitles or whether I was like, “Oh, no, no, I don't need subtitles.” I suspect you were generous. But now I'm curious which ones you would have put on.

Alex Mével: There are all sorts of interesting things happening with this film as well. For the 10th anniversary edition, they changed the grain of the image. So La Heine was actually shot in color and was released in black and white, and Kassovitz had to fight with production to get the movie to be released in black and white. But because it was shot in color and then converted to black and white, the blacks are very dark and the whites are very saturated, And so when you look at the 10th anniversary edition, they changed the grain so that it looks a lot more like a black and white movie would look like if it was shot in black and white. Does that make sense?

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, okay. Yeah. So lending some authenticity to a not inauthentic kind of situation.

Alex Mével: Exactly. Exactly. So they're also like that kind of differences between the two versions. How interesting.

Gillian Roberts: I think that's a really great example of language and borders in these two different versions of English, possibly more than two, with the British translators trying to mimic what they think of as American English. I often think about the etymology of translation, which is about transporting, according to the OED, transporting a person or a thing from one place to another or to remove, interestingly, a bishop although that seems very specific, from one see to another, or to transfer the remains of a saint or other significant person from one place to another. But this sense of actual physical movement that is embedded in the etymology of language. So this is a means of segueing, I suppose, to thinking about language in relation to borders. So I wonder how you see borders interacting with language or vice versa, how they interact?

Olivia Hellewell: That’s a really good starting point. And I wanted to ask you both that kind of where the connection comes in for you, like, why did you want to talk about translation and borders? And I guess that is a perfectly good entry point in explanation. And it's unusual, I guess, that I haven't properly sat down and thought about this from that starting point before, given how central it is. But I think translation and translation studies as an academic discipline is so full of metaphors. Sometimes it can be easy to dismiss those or overlook them because they're so commonplace. And I suppose the metaphor of translation as border crossing, it's clear why that has gained some traction as a translation as an activity that goes between two different sides. But I suppose one of the reasons that maybe I've never latched onto that so much or maybe it doesn't occur to me to be that straightforward is because, like many of those binary metaphors in translation, it actually obscures this really complex web of processes that are taking place. So I don't think I see translation as a transfer from one side to another. Of course, if I think about my context in translating literature, there is a source text and then there's the target text that you produce. So there always is one side and another. But within that process, there's this whole network of really complex social relations and negotiations that take place that impact what that final text, that translated text will be. So yeah, I'm grateful for the invitation to think about translation borders, but now I'm like questioning… 

Gillian Roberts: everything you've ever believed.

Olivia Hellewell: How about you Alex?

Alex Mével: I think both Liv and I are probably linguists at our core. So we're very aware of the kind of fuzzy edges around languages. And for me, as I was kind of prepping for this and thinking about this, I came to the realization that maybe it's not so much about borders as it is about the barriers. So also because I do more and more work on accessibility and inclusivity, it seems to be more about breaking down barriers. or overcoming them somehow. But I guess you could apply that to the translation process in general, you know, just to go back to the etymology, you're carrying something over. Over what? You know, is it an ocean or a physical barrier? Or is it an informational barrier or a psychosociological barrier? There's all sorts of barriers that we can sort of talk about and explore when we talk about translation or about, you know, language accessibility, I guess.

Gillian Roberts: I've actually written down in my notes, language barrier, etc. 

Zalfa Feghali

etc. is doing a lot of work, 

Gillian Roberts: Doing a lot of heavy lifting. I love what you said, Alex, about the fuzzy edges, because I think there are lots of fuzzy edges geopolitically. And then there are the ones that Zalfa has memorably referred to as Sharpie drawn not so fuzzy edges in terms of geopolitical. So that makes a lot of sense, but also the constructedness of even those Sharpie lines came out of somebody's imagination. So in a sense, borders are often metaphorical, but they do have real impacts on people's lives and on the movements of some people. And sometimes that is articulated linguistically in some capacity. I have many stories to tell of Canada-US border crossings, but one of the things I've always thought was kind of clever, but also indicative is when you drive from the United States into Canada, you may be confronted with a sign that says, think metric, with the K and the M kind of smushed together to remind Americans that the speed limit is not going to be in miles, it's going to be in kilometres. And that's just, you know, the signs in English, the expectation is that most people are speaking English and then they're on either side of the border, depending where you are, obviously, and it doesn't hold for the entirety of Canada, quite famously, but there's this understanding that, okay, even if you can read this line without any problems, what you have to translate instead is your speed limit, right? But that's just one little example of these signals that something has changed. You're going to have to reorient yourself in some way as you cross that border and drive Canadian roads. So do you think there's something about language navigating or negotiating those geopolitical borders or other borders, perhaps?

Olivia Hellewell: Who is doing the navigating, I guess, would be my first question. There are definitely sites where it is either the translator's job or an individual's job to do that navigating. And I can think of lots of different contexts where the varying degree of pressure or urgency on those moments could really shift. If I think about my own sort of limited context of literary translation and translating from a language that is rarely represented in the Anglophone publishing world, translating from Slovenian into English, that navigation definitely has less of a geopolitical urgency to it. It's not as fraught as many of the contexts that we could think of. But there's definitely a lot to navigate in terms of the different actors that you would be involved with working, talking to an author. speaking to the publisher in the source context, thinking about are those rights available, trying to generate some kind of interest from a publisher in the UK. There are several stages in which there is a metaphorical border to cross in order to negotiate a certain challenge or hurdle to that work being available. So I definitely would see that as a process of navigation. How about you, Alex?

Alex Mével: I was thinking about this in the context of film translation. And so after working on La Haine, I worked on the subtitling of African American English into French. And I was particularly looking at movies by Spike Lee, and what you often find in the French subtitles for these films is that they rely on a kind of version of suburban French which is a spoken variety and therefore not particularly equipped to be written down in the form of subtitles. But what you find is that this also creates or conjures up another form of border, a border within a border, if you want. So you're crossing the language barrier, but then within the language, you have to select a particular language variety, and that creates a kind of Russian doll effect almost. You can always find a particular language variety or some linguistic features that are going to be inclusive for some people and then of course exclusive and alienating for others. Absolutely.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, that's really interesting because when I was in elementary school, I went to a bilingual school, so I was exposed to French a lot, but I always struggled to even watch Québécois TV or, you know, without some assistance. It wasn't the same. You know, I suppose this maybe goes a little bit back to that kind of technical learning, but it wasn't the same as being fully immersed in Québécois linguistic life. And of course, within that, I can't really cope with joual, and it was really, really difficult. But I think I knew from quite a young age that there were still these other barriers in place because of that multiplicity.

Olivia Hellewell: And I think it's really important to kind of recognize what Alex just picked up on is that translation is often seen as this kind of open and empowering process where we grant access to a text or a resource and it's generally seen in positive terms as this kind of celebration of cultural transfer. But often within that process there are many points in which translators either consciously or subconsciously create further barriers or borders within that work. The decisions that you take can have varying degrees of effects or negative impacts for certain groups, if you're not thoughtful in the way that you approach that process. And even if you are...

Zalfa Feghali: Even if you want to be deliberately ideological in the way that you are translating one thing or another in the decisions that you're making, absolutely. We see that all the time. 

Olivia Hellewell: And sometimes that's a consequence of the translator's actions, but as I always try and say, like it's very much not a one agent process and the decision-making that goes into creating a final literary text, for example, will involve the decisions of other agents, of copy editors, of editors, of the overall publishing house's style or demands. I had experience of working with a novel that I translated from Slovene into English called The Fig Tree by a very celebrated Slovene author called Goran Vojnović, but his texts tend to include characters who speak Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, which reflects his own personal heritage. And there's a lot of big decision making and responsibility involved in translating a text that is in many ways multilingual, that the majority of The Fig Tree is written in Slovene. But one of the central characters is Bosnian, and for a Slovene reader, particularly Slovene readers of a certain generation who lived through Yugoslavia and who grew up with Serbian-Croatian being a second language and the language of the state, it's completely unproblematic for them to read that character in the context of the novel and to understand. But if I'm translating the novel into English, I can't just then leave that one character speaking Bosnian because a reader in English is not going to have access to what they're saying in the slightest. And so thinking about how you represent that linguistic diversity in the text and how you don't completely erase that identity and that presence without exoticizing it and leaving just like the “flavour,” which is a phrase I really hate, in the text is really challenging.

Gillian Roberts: So what did you do?

Olivia Hellewell: I think of all the translation jobs I've ever done, that one really demanded the most internal debate and reflection and speaking to a lot of people, speakers of Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, really reflecting on what would be the best thing to do. I felt it was really important to at least record and kind of justify my decision-making process, so I was really insistent on having a translator's note at the start to show my workings. And for the most part, I did translate the Bosnian characters' speech into English, but there were sections where they might refer to a song lyric or something that would be in the source language. And so I thought, I always feel that it's important not to underestimate your reader. And if a reader wants to know more about that song, they're going to need the song in its original title to be able to research it. So I kind of left those references in and I think there were a couple of occasions where I did footnote because it's complicated to explain but there are points in the book where a character's shift in language has real political or personal significance and so to just erase that would be taking too much away from why that shift in language had taken place. So as always, it was a balance of trying to find ways in which to communicate that multilingualism without just peppering the text.

Zalfa Feghali: That's a lot of responsibility though. And it makes the text itself a space where these borders are being crossed and recrossed or are uncrossable by certain readers, a translator. I mean, is there a text that you've attempted to translate and decided, no, I should not be doing this?

Olivia Hellewell: Well, interestingly, Goran Vojnović's first novel, which is called Čefuli Raus, hasn't been translated in full and published in English the last time I checked. That was like his first book that really kind of stormed onto the Slovene literary scene because it was written from the perspective of a young teenage boy that grows up in the kind of outskirts of Ljubljana and he's speaking the dialect of that region in Fružina. And some people have been approached and have been asked and nobody has taken up that mantle. And I've always said, I would not touch Čefuli Raus. 

Gillian Roberts: Wow. 

Olivia Hellewell: Because I always say to my students that I don't believe anything is untranslatable. There's always a way that we can communicate something. But that book as an expression of a moment in time and everything that it represents, it wouldn't have the same value, and I don't think it would have much value in this watered down, tamed English version than it would inevitably be. And I feel a sense of sadness and defeat saying that out loud because it was such an exciting book. And I'm sure in some ways you could do quite a creative translation but within the confines of the UK publishing industry that would demand a level of fluency and readability and not so many footnotes. I don't think I could do a job that I would be happy with.

Alex Mével: Let someone else do it.

Gillian Roberts: One of your students maybe one day will take on the challenge. We shall see. I'm really interested in the difference between the translation on the page where you've got the availability of footnotes and what Alex does in terms of subtitling and the world of film.

Zalfa Feghali: I grew up speaking primarily English because that's what we spoke at home, but the languages that I grew up around were also Arabic and French. And part of the way that I learned them other than at school was through subtitles, simultaneous subtitles. So there was one line in French and one line in Arabic right underneath. And so you'd be watching Friends and a lot of my French and Arabic, formal written Arabic, I should say, was learned through that process. And the Arabic was terrible. I mean, because it was also ideologically censored. So there's only one swear word according to formal Arabic, you know. And then it goes from idiot to the bleepable stuff.

Gillian Roberts: There's nothing bleepable in Friends in English though.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, yeah, I mean, Friends isn’t a good example. Maybe La Haine would still have the same... 

Alex Mével: There would be some bleepable stuff. 

Zalfa Feghali: There would be a slight amount of bleepable stuff. So I always remember thinking, wow, you know, in my very naive youth, I remember thinking, oh, well, so Arabic is a language you can't really translate things into. And obviously that isn't the case. In the same way that we're sort of asking Liv, are there films that are unsubtitleable?

Alex Mével: So I was thinking about what Liv said and how translation is a kind of messy and violent process, especially when you're looking at objects that are embedded within a particular culture. One thing we're seeing more and more of in films, I think, is multilingualism. I think it used to be the case that films were fairly monoglot, particularly Hollywood productions, which would be like in English 100%. And now I think it's maybe the case that most films feature at least another language at some point. So it seems there seems to be some kind of a some kind of reckoning here. And what this does is it creates relationships like a hierarchy between the different languages that are portrayed. And then you have to kind of think about that and try to replicate it into whatever language you're translating into. And that can be quite complicated. I don't know if anything is untranslatable as such. I think if I said something was untranslatable, I'd be, I'd be selling my soul, essentially. I don't want to believe that something is untranslatable. You can look at botched translations to see where things go wrong and where the points of failure actually are. And one good example is the movie Babel.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh yeah, ironically.

Alex Mével: Well, ironically, yes, but it's precisely because it's so very multilingual that it created some problems.

Zalfa Feghali: Kind of feel like that's a failure at the first hurdle.

Alex Mével: Well, yes. And the way they went about it for the Italian dubbed version was deeply problematic because more or less everything anyone said in the film was dubbed in Italian. So you ended up in a situation where people originally spoke English and Arabic, and the whole point is that, well, they don't speak each other’s language, so they can't communicate with each other. And now everyone speaks Italian, but they still can't communicate with each other.

[everyone laughs]

Gillian Roberts: There's something else going on there.

Alex Mével: So the mind boggles. You do wonder what happened in the- 

Zalfa Feghali: I want to read the translator's note for that. Wow.

Alex Mével: So that's the interesting thing with subtitles as well, is that you precisely don't have translator's notes. You don't have footnotes. You don't have an introduction that you can sort of rely on. Is there something that can happen one day? Is it something that we can develop? Sure. Why not?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, I recently saw a film called Bye Bye Tiberias, which is in French and Arabic, primarily. And it was really interesting because I noticed just toward the end of the film–it's a documentary so that the people in the film are moving in and out of these two languages. And then I was always reading the subtitles. I'd like to think sometimes that I wouldn't need to read the subtitles in French, but then I also really like to see what the gaps are and there was one moment where I came out of the cinema and said, oh, and then this word was different. And this was quite annoying to go to the cinema with.

Zalfa Feghali: We've covered this in a previous episode.

Gillian Roberts: We have covered this in a previous episode. But there was a moment towards the end where I was listening to the French and then it took me a while to realize I didn't know what they were saying because they'd moved into Arabic. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh wow!

Gillian Roberts: But there was no signal in the subtitles that anything had changed. And so every viewer of a film, depending on their own linguistic backgrounds and capabilities, is going to have a different relationship to different parts of the film. This was one of my takeaways.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, now I wish that I'd been with you watching that film because we would have been whispering to each other about the errors throughout and then our hardcore listeners would have just walked out on us. Interesting. Well, following on from that, thinking about the space of the film, you've written, Alex, sorry, I'm going to embarrass you here, maybe. You recently published a piece with Francesca Leveridge and you say in it, and I'm going to quote you, “subtitled films constitute hybrid spaces where languages come into contact.” And I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the idea of film as a linguistic contact zone, but also as a liminal borderland space.

Alex Mével: Sure. And it's a great example, I think, that you gave, Gillian, just now as well. We talk about translation, in the context of films as well. But I think usually when we think about translation, you remove the original and you replace it with something else, new text in whatever the new language actually is. With subtitling, it's a little bit different because you're not taking anything away and you're not replacing anything as such. You're just adding an extra layer of information in the form of written text at the bottom of the screen, usually. And therefore, what you have is languages interacting on the screen as well. If you're watching a documentary in French and Arabic and everything is subtitled into English because it's all information and we need to give access to that information to English speaking viewers, then, of course, everything is going to be into English. But some viewers may be able to pick up on switches between the different languages, but others won't. And you can't tell. You don't know. And sometimes there's code switching within a sentence as well. You're going to be saying something in Arabic and dropping a word of French in it. So all of these interactions are quite complex and it's very, very hard to know how viewers are going to perceive this. And, you know, you can do very elaborate reception studies to try and figure that out. Or you can just accept that, well, actually those languages are together on the screen, they interact. So what happens as a result of this interaction?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, that's amazing. Continuing on with our ever-running theme of borders, we have a segment called “Borders I Have Known.” So we would like to ask each of you for a story of a border that you have known.

Olivia Hellewell: Okay, I think there's a couple of contenders here. Having lived in Wales for a fair amount of time in my life and having family there, it would be remiss of me not to mention the England-Wales border. Mostly a site of joy and relief once you cross into Wales thinking, ah, OK, it's green. However, in terms of a concrete story, there's one that immediately comes to mind. And I think especially I've just come back from Ljubljana and Trieste or Trst as it is known in Slovene. And the Slovene-Italian border is one that I've spent a fair amount of time traveling around, visiting. And in 2014, I was there on what was ostensibly a holiday trip, but as is often the case when on holiday with my partner, there was a brief mention of, “oh, by the way, I made an appointment to go and visit a winemaker. It's just 10 minutes around the corner. It won't take long.” And we had been staying on the Slovene side of the border in Goriška Brda, the winemaking region. and we crossed over the border to go and visit this winery which is the Radikon Winery and I find the history of winemaking in that region so fascinating because the land on both the Italian side and the Slovene side has changed hands several times throughout history. And there's quite a traumatic past connected to those border changes related to Italian fascism and the Second World War. And so there were times when the people that lived in those regions, many of whom are winemakers, were separated from family property, industry, and the difference between being a winemaker in Italy and then being a winemaker in what was then Yugoslavia and now Slovenia is quite significant in terms of market share and worldwide reputation. Anyway, I do remember being on this trip and at some point somebody told me when the borders were redrawn after the Second World War, the vineyards were on one side, but the cellar was on the other side. And it was the cellar that decided where the wine was from. So the grapes were grown, I think, in this story on the Slovene side, but it was marketed and sold as Italian wine. And this one particular visit to the Radikon winery will always stay with me because I always get a little bit nervous on the Italian side because I'm in that region because I know Slovene and I'm ostensibly going to Slovenia. And then when we cross over into Italy, I'm like, “oh, actually, I don't have very much Italian.” And I get very stressed when I don't know how to speak a language because that's something I always try and know how to do. And so this winery was in Italy and I was thinking, how am I going to say this? Because usually I act as an interpreter, even if I don't speak that language, that's what my family tends to assume very helpfully. And so we arrived and I tentatively tried, I just said, “Is it okay if I speak Slovene here?” I had no idea about this family's history or background. And the woman that welcomed us, who is the, she was the wife of the chief winemaker who was called Stanko Radikon, I think her name was Susie, she welcomed us. And when I started speaking Slovene, she immediately set off in Slovene and she was so happy that I'd started speaking that language and I think the expectation on their part would be that if there were any tourists or people visiting if they were to know any language at all it would be Italian and I just sort of tentatively hopefully asked if I might be able to speak Slovene and then from there she took us on this most amazing walk around the vineyards and the winery explaining how everything was made, their ethics and their process and the history of the place. And we just had this most amazing conversation. And I think of all the moments that really encapsulate why I feel it's so important to be able to communicate with other people in their language, like as an act of generosity and showing willing that you want to enter into their world and their kind of day-to-day experiences. That really summed it up for me. I was so grateful in that moment that I did know Slovene and that that knowledge led to that opportunity to meet those people and to speak with them. When we left they gave us a bottle of wine and we kept it for a very long time and at first we didn't know much about it other than what they just shared and we knew that it was natural wine and that was something we were very interested in. When we got home we looked it up and we couldn't believe how much this wine cost. And it's not that I attach a value to the price of the wine, but I was so moved that what had seemed like a simple act was actually a huge act of generosity on their part in return. And I've never forgotten that. It was a very tangible border crossing moment and a reminder of how speaking one language can really bring you closer to people.

Zalfa Feghali: What a meaningful gesture on both parts.

Gillian Roberts: It's such an amazing story of hospitality and being a guest. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you.

Alex Mével: I'm afraid I don't have anything as good or as moving. I feel we should have saved that one for the end. You can tell us the baguette story. I was going to tell the baguette story of course. Well, it's one story I can tell.

Zalfa Feghali: I am absolutely delighted. Everyone's going to love it.

Gillian Roberts: “Baguettes that we have known.” Alex, take it away.

Alex Mével: So I was driving back to France from the UK, in my little Polo, and finally got home after, you know, an 18-hour drive or something silly like that, parked my car at my parents, spent the day with them. And the following day, I want to take the car out and I have to reverse to kind of get out of their front yard, if you want. And the car is stuck in first gear. and there's nothing I can do. The car will not move and will not come out of first gear. So I do what I do in these situations. I call my dad. My dad's a mechanic in fairness. He's a good person to go to in these kinds of situations. And he pokes around, he does what I did trying to force the car into first gear but nothing's happening, it just won't budge so he pops open the bonnet and starts poking around and he can't find anything and it's getting dark outside and now it's starting to rain. So he gets under the car. And at one random point he goes, ah, well, well, well–in French, of course. I'm just translating. 

Zalfa Feghali

Subtitling. Yes. We can see them here. 

Alex Mével: And he comes back from underneath the car with half a baguette in his hand. So somehow, at some point, half a baguette had come to lodge itself somewhere that was preventing gears from changing. So we don't know at what point this happened, whether it happened when I was driving or whether it happened when the car was parked there. And I don't know, some gremlin brought half a baguette and sort of stuck it there. And then the car was fine. And I was able to kind of... 

Zalfa Feghali: Go on your merry way. 

Alex Mével: Go on my merry way. But it really felt for a second there like France was telling me not to go. No, you have to stay here. 

Gillian Roberts

Yeah. Don't cross the border. 

Zalfa Feghali: The symbolism wasn't lost on me. And I have multiple witnesses who can corroborate this story as well. So as unbelievable as it is, both my parents were there and will corroborate.

Gillian Roberts: The land, it speaks.

Zalfa Feghali: Nature is healing itself.

Gillian Roberts: Thank you both so much for your amazing stories and for the wonderful discussion that we've had.

Olivia Hellewell: Thanks for having us. Thanks for inviting us to think about translation from that perspective. I think I'm definitely going to go off and the cogs shall continue whirring. 

Zalfa Feghali: Wonderful.

Alex Mével: Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.