Translating Globalizations

Once upon a time foreign language departments were small monadic re-creations of the homeland. If you walked down the hall of a French department, everyone spoke French. As a matter of course, you switched into the language as you entered the office space of the department. German departments did the same, they held department meetings in German, they hung around the mail room speaking German, classes were of course in German. If you saw each other in the supermarket, you spoke German. This had the great advantage of giving students the opportunity to practice their language skills, it also intimidated the younger folks and sealed the department culture off, creating an unusual cohesion inside the department that was distinct from the rest of the university.

Now the situation is quite changed. Foreign language departments can not carry on isolated in their own cultures. Translation, not of literary classics, but of basic cultural assumptions is constantly required. We are compelled as foreign language teachers to mediate between the US and other cultures, and not just the language we teach, but it seems increasingly that Europe as a whole has become a strange place to Americans, and so an Italian professor might easily have a wider function than representing just his or her own culture.

Germans have been making this transition for a while. When I teach German history, it really becomes a course in the formation of Europe from the Roman Empire onward. This has a lot to do with being a"good German," that post Nazi, old-Nato ethos of showing that Germans will in future work cooperatively with other Europeans, rather than taking over their countries.

Now, though, it also has this extra charge of explaining the post-Communist unification of Europe as well. There are many different varieties of globalization, and increasingly foreign language departments are required to translate one globalization into another. How do the European interconnections translate into the American mode of making global links? Obviously there are profound differences. The US model is driven enormously by military interventions whereas the European is more mercantile, more deliberative.