Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2016. xii, 255 pp. (B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6074-2.
In Motherless Tongues, Vicente Rafael relies upon the historical method to address questions deeply related to the field of translation studies: How do translators function? What is the purpose of translation? Why do we translate languages? And, what are the political implications of translation? The project has broad appeal to historians, political scientists, linguistics experts, and individuals in the field of translation and literary studies. Among the most notable aspects of the author’s approach in Motherless Tongues is that it is scholarly, theoretically vivid, and, at the same time, deeply personal. In Rafael’s own family, the parents spoke Ilonggo and Kapampangan (but the mother spoke only broken Ilonggo), which the children understood, but could not speak. And so, they would reply to the parents in English and Tagalog (3). Meanwhile, the languages of the Philippines referenced throughout the study include Taglish, English, Tagalog, Conyo-speak, collegiala talk, Arneo accents, Spanish, Hokkien, Hakka, German, and French—even as English, Tagalog, dialects, and Spanish became the “big four,” historically (4). Nevertheless, rather than portraying a blend of happy hybridity and multiculturalism that inevitably emerges out of cosmopolitan settings, the book focuses on conflict, on language wars.
The organization of the book is divided into three parts: Vernacularizing the Political, Weaponizing Babel, and Translating Lives. In part 1, the first three chapters deal with Spanish as a counterrevolutionary force during the movement toward Philippine independence in 1898; Filipino vernaculars politicized in the fight against colonial education systems; and texting as a means of circumvention in Manila, particularly in the EDSA II uprising, which sought to oust a corrupt president at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Throughout the chapters, there are also distinct themes that emerge, such as telecommunication and translation as a function of everyday life for the Philippine middle class.
By contrast, the second part of the book, Weaponizing Babel, is a commentary on American empire. Chapter 4 is an in-depth discussion of the origins of American area studies programs, featuring the intimate connection between area studies and the American empire. This chapter additionally functions to connect the earlier discussion on the Philippines to a broader, regional, Southeast Asian context, while bridging the discussion to the topics of the following chapter, which focuses on automatic translation and personal translation in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the context of the post-9/11 American military. The latter third of the book, then, uses translation as more of a metaphor, from Rafael’s perspective (15–17). It focuses on the discussion of “accidents” in the field of area studies, the notion of “nostalgia,” and the concepts of “language, history, and autobiography,” and how these concepts translate across different historical settings. The final chapter is a publication of the tape-script of an interview with Siri Nergaard, editor of Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, which took place in 2013 (189ff). Scholars seeking a traditional historical narrative that unfolds entirely in a chronological fashion will not find it here. Instead, the reader is offered a series of interlocking essays, organized innovatively, based predominantly on theoretical and conceptual connections.
There are a few facets of the author’s argument that are particularly important to highlight. First and foremost, the dynamics of language, vernacular, and colonial education do not unfold in a particularly surprising fashion. As elsewhere, school systems created a linguistic hierarchy, relegating local languages to the background, forcing students to translate every day (54). What is surprising, however, is the degree to which English-language education penetrated the Philippines, as, by the 1930s, 35 percent of the population was literate in English, making the citizenry of the Philippines the most literate in a Western language of any Southeast Asian society at the time (45). Early successes spreading English contrast wildly with the almost comically tragic attempts to fund polyglotism by the American military, as depicted in several of the book’s chapters. Indeed, since WWII, language has been weaponized as a skill taught to soldiers. Between at least 2007 and 2009, Fort Lewis Foreign Language Training Center has taught ten-month courses in Arabic. The model operates somewhere between the adage that “language is power,” and the idea that language is a type of equipment you can add on to a standard pack of military gear (124). Language training takes longer than the process of invading and occupying. Therefore, “the language-enabled solider thus becomes obsolete even as he or she is being trained” (126). Even more tragic, however, is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Babylon Program, aiming to develop live translation interface software. “This mechanical model conceptualizes the surge in language capabilities as the complement to the surge of combat forces” (127). But the inputs are constrained to DARPA-identified tactical scenarios, and the early model “Phraselator” is only capable of translating English to an output language (129).
But this book isn’t just about the imperialists. Rather, it is also about the translators: the “traitors” who act as cultural spirit mediums (135). Hence, situated within this entire discussion, it seems that the central innovative argument to the text is that, in the words of Rafael, “If translation is like war, is it possible that war is also like translation? It is possible, I think, if we consider that the time of war is like the movement of translation. There is a sense that both lead not to the privileging of order and meaning but to the emergence of what I have been calling the untranslatable” (118). This central argument, coupled with the notion that translation is ultimately a compulsion (201), has grave implications for the human condition: if contestation is such a compulsion, then, so is the desire for understanding. Hence, the world of Motherless Tongues is encouraging to a degree that is, perhaps, even beyond the author’s intentions stated at the outset.
William B. Noseworthy
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA
pp. 187-189