Hilary Footitt

Incorporating languages into histories of war: A research journey

This article discusses the ways in which languages can be integrated into histories of war and conflict, by exploring ongoing research in two case studies: the liberation and occupation of Western Europe (1944–47), and peacekeeping/peace building in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1995–2000). The article suggests that three methodological approaches have been of particular value in this research: adopting an historical framework; following the “translation” of languages into war situations; and contextualizing the figure of the interpreter/translator. The process of incorporating languages into histories of conflict, the article argues, has helped to uncover a broader languages landscape within the theatres of war.

Introduction: Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building

For those who participate in military campaigns, report on wars, or study the conduct and cultures of conflict, war is largely a foreign-language-free zone. The tacit assumption has been that international wars are generally fought with allies and against enemies who obligingly speak our own language. However, a recent Arts and Humanities Research Council project, Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict, 1 took as its starting-point the centrality of foreign languages in war and proposed that languages should be seen as key to an understanding of armed conflict — for the military who are fighting, for the civilians who meet the armies ‘on the ground’ of war and for those academics from a range of disciplines who engage with the multiple meanings of war and conflict. This book, Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building, brings together these various constituencies to discuss the role of languages in military operations, a dialogue which began in the project’ international conference at the Imperial War Museum, London, in April 2011. The conference provided a forum in which war studies specialists, historians, cultural studies analysts, linguists and translation scholars could focus together on one key theme — the role of languages in war. An integral part of this multi- disciplinary perspective was the contribution of practitioners — the military who deploy soldiers in war, the professional interpreters who seek to protect language intermediaries in conflict zones, the agencies which develop languages as peacekeeping tools and the war museum curators who tell the story of war to the general public.

International Aid and Development: Hearing Multilingualism, Learning from Intercultural Encounters in the History of OxfamGB.

ABSTRACT This article explores the context of intercultural relations in the field of international aid and development. Examining the activities of a large UK-based transnational NGO (OxfamGB) through a detailed reading of its own 60-year-long archived story, the article seeks to reimagine the ‘contact zones’ of aid and development as multilingual and intercultural. In doing so, it offers an empirically grounded account of intercultural relations within a transnational institution, and seeks both to provide additional understandings of the politico-social power dynamics which frame such intercultural fields, and to contribute to current critiques of Western donor ‘upward accountability’ in development with its focus on the contractual, the standard and the quantifiable.

Languages at war: cultural preparations for the Liberation of Western Europe

Abstract While the cultural turn in war studies is now well developed across disciplines, an examination of the role of foreign languages within these cultural perspectives is largely absent. This article uses insights from the work of Bruno Latour in order to explore the presence of foreign languages in war, following the processes by which languages were translated into pre-deployment cultural preparations for the Liberation of Western Europe in 1944. Two contrasting cases are examined: material prepared for the massive number of troops entering continental Europe and the preparation of the smaller cadre of Civil Affairs officers. The article argues that foreign languages are not invisible in warfare, but are rather an integral part of the embodiment of war, and that their presence may challenge us to begin to broaden our understandings of culture and war and to review more traditional notions of what can be said to constitute foreign languages in war situations.

Another Missing Dimension? Foreign Languages in World War II Intelligence

Abstract This article argues that foreign languages are another part of the ‘missing dimension’ of intelligence. By examining the role of linguists in Y stations and at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, the article explores the institutional language policies developed for intelligence, and the working practices of those with foreign language skills. The article suggests that certain issues raised by this case study might be usefully examined in other intelligence contexts: the ways in which foreign language requirements are officially represented, the problematics of foreignness for recruiters, the status and identities of language workers, and the implications of professional translation practice within an intelligence environment.

War and Culture Studies in 2016: Putting ‘Translation’ into the Transnational?

The first issue of the ‘Journal of War and Culture Studies’ in 2008 mapped out the academic space which the discipline sought to occupy. Nearly a decade later, the location of war, traditionally associated with the nation-state, is being challenged in ways which arguably affect the analytical spaces of War and Culture Studies. The article argues for a reconceptualization of the location of war as broader in both spatial and temporal terms than the nation-state. It identifies local ‘contact zones’ which are multivocal translational spaces, and calls for an incorporation of ‘translation’ into our analyses of war: translating identities, including associations of the material as well as of subjective identities, and espousing a conscious interdisciplinarity which might lead us to focus more on the performative than the representational. The article calls for the discipline of translation studies to become a leading contributor to War and Culture Studies in the years to come.

Military history and translation studies: Shifting territories, uneasy borders

Both translation studies and military history are disciplines which occupyradically shifting territories, and it has been at their currently uneasy bordersthat this conversation on transdisciplinarity has been conducted. Themove from culturally as well as socially visible translational contexts tonon-hegemonicsocial actors and ordinary lives provides us with a space inwhich the traditional monolingual assumptions of military history can bechallenged, and in which the military terrain as a space of encounter can bereimagined as a linguistically embodied landscape. Combining the historian’sconcern to take account of the particularities of any situation with the translationscholar’s desire to address the multilingualism of war potentially movesthese disciplines beyond their traditional frontiers, forcing both of them tograpple with the messiness and disruptions which characterise any war andconflict ‘on the ground’.

Civilian Interpreting in Military Conflicts

Between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the conflict in Yugoslavia, civilian interpreting had become formalized as a profession. The technique of simultaneous interpretation through booths that had arisen during the Allied war crimes tribunals in Germany (Chapter 9) became a dominant image of the interpreting profession after its adoption by the United Nations. An international association for conference interpreters, AIIC (Association internationale des interpretes de conference), was founded in 1953 and laid down standards for working conditions and hours as well as committing interpreters to a code of professional ethics. The language needs of Cold War militaries, meanwhile, had developed in a more functional way. Linguists’ most overt military roles were in the Military Liaison Missions in Germany, in the arms control inspections that accompanied detente and as defence attaches in important embassies. Under greater secrecy, military intelligence services depended on linguists to make sense of intercepted communications and trained linguist/interrogators in anticipation of a conventional war with the forces of the opposing bloc. Although military linguists derived a strong sense of professionalism from their subjectivity as members of the armed forces, their role had evolved in the perennial trade-off between training times, costs and requirements rather than being conceived and re-conceived in step with the professionalized linguist in the civilian world. The professional model of language intermediaries’ careers and activities remained largely irrelevant to military language support even in the 1990s, 50 years after the formalization of professional civilian interpreting.

Searching for ‘Contact Zones’ in France’s War

Hilary Footitt’s ego-history recounts a journey across national and disciplinary borders in an attempt to find the in-between ‘contact zones’ of France’s Second World War experiences, bringing together en route the separate Anglophone and French narratives of 1943–1946. Paxton’s seminal book proved the impetus to examine Anglo-Saxon involvement in France, confronting French narratives of the period with the archives of foreigners outside. As the study progressed, it became clear that her real interest lay in what happened ‘on the ground’ of war, in the transfer of power between often quite junior Allied soldiers and French civilians, and in the ‘cultural hybridity’ of war. Approached through a combination of linguistics and ethnography, the words and experiences of participants could give life to these transnational ‘contact zones’.

Poetry, Parables and Codes

The Indian army on the Western Front between 26 September 1914 and Boxing Day (26 December) 1915 (some 138,600 men) was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and above all multilingual organization, with at least seven languages spoken among its troops. Censoring the letters written to and from these soldiers thus represented a task which was enormous both linguistically, and in the sheer volume of letters sent every week — from the families in India to troops on the Western Front (at least 10,000 per week), from Indian troops in France to India (about 20,000 per week) and from wounded Indian soldiers in Britain to India (between 1500 and 4000 per week).1 As far as censorship was concerned, by the time the letters reached the chief censor’s office at the India Base Post Office in Boulogne, it was expected that a preliminary security-type censorship, of varying degrees of efficiency, would have operated at regimental or local level. The job of the office was thus less the suppression of material, and rather the monitoring of states of mind and morale — that of the Indian troops at the front (it was the first time that Indian regiments had been deployed in Europe), and that of public opinion back home in India, in particular looking for signs of increased subversion as a result of anti-war sentiment.