English and the ‘Global World’
By: Daniel Burke
Tags: Philosophy, Globalization, Language, Translation, Japanese

A translator introduces some Japanese thinkers who engage with the topics of globalization and language.

An old book fair held on the grounds of the Shimogamo shrine in Kyoto.

Is there anything particularly novel any more about the ‘global’ scale of events? The manner in which the virus turned into a pandemic in weeks might be an unprecedented situation. So too is the extent to which we have had to turn to digital technologies in order to talk with family or do our work. Yet underneath the novelty we can find a lot of assumptions that we already take for granted. We substitute the verb ‘to skype’ with the verb ‘to zoom’, and on we go as before. Yes, the whole planet is dealing with a single crisis at once, but this is also an idea we are familiar with in the form of global warming, or the threat of nuclear war. Personally, as a translator I already spend much of my time looking at a screen and working remotely. There is nothing particularly surprising about the idea that I can instantly send a document to the other side of the planet.

What if we go back a little further in time? Although we take it for granted that we are now living in an interconnected world, it was really not so long ago that people were witnessing the establishment of modern shipping, and the laying of transcontinental telegraph lines. The vastness of the globe was shrinking before their eyes at a rate that must have been disconcerting. Philosophers in the early 20th century grappled with the question of what this meant. We see this in the United States, for example, with William Earnest Hocking (1873–1966) speculating about the coming of a ‘world culture.’ Japanese philosophers were also concerned with understanding this new ‘global’ context. In the 1930s, Nishida Kitarō made the following observation in an essay titled “The Problem of Japanese Culture” (Nihon Bunka no Mondai):

世界が真に一つの世界となったのである。昔、ローマが武力によって欧州を一つの世界とした。今は英国の自由貿易が世界を一つの世界とした。而してその背後に近代科学の発展と云うものがあるのである。 The world has truly become one world. In the past, Rome turned Europe into one world through force of arms. Now, the free trade of Great Britain has turned the world into one world. And behind this we find the development of modern science.

For us, the idea that the ‘world’ and ‘the globe’ are the same is hardly something we would think to question. We use these terms interchangeably. And so when Nishida says that “the world has truly become one world” we might initially feel a bit perplexed. Has not the world always been singular? After all, there is only one planet. Here, we need to distinguish between two senses of ‘world.’ There is the ‘world’ as the globe, as the earth, that single geographical entity we all live upon. And there is ‘world’ as that meaningful place that we collectively live within. Put simply, the ancient civilizations of Central America might have been on the same planet as the ancient civilizations of East Asia, but they were not in the same world in the way that we all are today, whether we are in China or in Mexico. Nishida observes that in the past, large regions of the planet such as Europe were united by great empires such as Rome. However with the coming of industrialization, modern science and technology had enabled the British Empire to stretch across the entire globe, creating a single global system.

The production of traditional Japanese paper, ‘washi’ (和紙).

There are many different angles from which we could consider what this development means. There is a significant overlap here with Heidegger’s writings on technology for example. Here I would like to do something a little simpler, and link Nishida’s observations with a more recent argument on the topic of language by another Japanese writer. In 2015, the novelist Mizumura Minae wrote a book that has since been translated into English under the title The Fall of Language and the Age of English. In the original Japanese edition she makes the following comment:

英語の世紀に入ったとは何を意味するのか。 それは、〈国語〉というものが出現する以前、地球のあちこちを覆っていた、〈普遍語／現地語〉という言葉の二重構造が、ふたたび蘇ってきたのを意味する。近年、伝達手段の発達によって地球はいよいよ小さくなり、それにつれて英語という今回の〈普遍語〉は、その小さくなった地球全体を覆う大規模のものとなりつつあった。そこへ、ほかならぬ、インターネットという技術が最後の仕上げをするように追いうちをかけたのである。 What does it mean to say that we have entered the English century? It means that we are returning to the old structure of “universal language / regional language” which previously existed in different parts of the globe, in the time prior to the emergence of “national languages.” Recently the world has become smaller and smaller, and alongside this development the “universal language” that is English has grown to the scale that it can now cover the whole of the shrunken earth. Here, it is the technology of the internet which has been the like final nail.

I think there are some interesting echoes of Nishida here. When Mizumura speaks of “universal languages”, she is referring to written languages such as Latin, which for a time were used within empires to communicate across regions that contained vast cultural and linguistic diversity. Recall how Nishida speaks of Rome turning Europe into one world. The spread of Latin was surely a central part of this achievement. Whether you were in Italy, or Spain, or Poland, if you could read and write Latin, then you could communicate your ideas with other literate people throughout the subcontinent. Mizumura notes that such universal languages were eventually displaced by the new national languages. Europeans stopped writing in Latin, and began to write in English, in French, in German. In Japan, there was a similar process whereby a writing system that was based on the “universal language” of classical Chinese gave way to modern Japanese.

Students hard at work.

Yet the world continued shrinking even more. In Nishida’s day the students of the elite schools still studied German and French alongside English, but even then it was becoming increasingly clear that English was the most essential. The further development of technology has meant that the age of the universal language is back; this time not to cover a single portion of the globe, but all of it at once. As Mizumura notes wryly, the “national languages” that once prided themselves on their quasi-universal status are have now been demoted to “regional languages” with all the rest. “Welcome”, she says, “you’re down here with us now.”

The internet, for Mizumura, is the final achievement of this process observed by Nishida: the shrinking and uniting of the world through science and technology. She is not sanguine about the prospects for the world’s literary traditions in the face of the dominance of English. In her view, they might cease to exist within our lifetime as living traditions. Yes, we might continue to read in different languages, certainly. But the contents of what people read will continue to trend towards a uniformity that mirrors that of the uniformity of a global civilization.

I sometimes wonder about my role in this process as a person who translates Japanese into English for a living. Like the software engineers who enable the convenience of a zoom chat, we make things easier, and this is difficult to argue against. Learning a language requires a good deal of time, and time is a luxury for most of us. There is something egalitarian about such convenience that is attractive. But translators are not simply chipping away at ‘barriers’ that prevent ‘communication’ in some neutral manner. In a way, we are contributing to the shrinking of the world by helping things far off seem near. And going further, English translators such as myself are also strengthening the single global language even more by adding to its stockpile of words. We are helping to facilitate a future where nobody ‘needs’ to step outside of English in order to read anything at all. Of course, this is an illusion. The original text cannot ultimately be separated from the language in which it was written, because despite what some technologists seem to think a language is not an imperfect reflection of an underlying, universally applicable system of symbolic representation. The truth is that language and world are intertwined, and that what we translators provide is a new creation that cannot truly be said to be the ‘same’ as the original work it is supposed to be a ‘copy’ of.

Originally posted at japaneseincontext.com/blog/english-and-the-global-world.

Photography by the author.

Texts quoted:

西田幾多郎『日本文化の問題』（第12巻『西田幾多郎全集』）２８５頁。

(Nishida Kitaro, “Nihon Bunka no Mondai”, in Nishida Kitaro Zenshu, Vol. 12, Iwanami Shoten, p. 285.)

水村美苗『日本語が滅びる時：英語の世紀の中で』、ちくま文庫、２０１５年, ３０１頁。

(Mizumura Minae, Nihongo ga Horobiru Toki: Seigo no Seiki no Naka de, Chikuma Bunko, 2015, p. 301.)