Lost and Found in Translation

By Paulo Moreira

This piece is part of a series by the Global Vision Initiative titled “Lost in Translation”. To read more, please head to our Medium account or to our website here.

As soon as we’re born, we feel the need for language. And soon enough we live inside language as naturally as a fish lives in the water. Our mother language feels like a natural habitat, but, as every other language, it is the creation of a community over time, a shared heritage, a place to be. We are molded by it and we mold it continuously, gradually, through generations. We grow up a bit, leave home, and begin our long, lifetime career as translators. We learn and translate the school language, street language and later work language — all expansions of the home language of our first years. Our circle expands beyond the family as we venture further away from home, sometimes beyond our languages towards other communities with other heritage and habitat. We may dream about reaching out to the whole world, but there are so many different languages. We have to count on the work of professional translators to clear our paths into other worlds.

When Franco Moretti researched the circulation of translations in Europe around 1850,[i] he found out that Russia was the largest consumer of foreign literature, and that could explain the amazing creative boom of Russian literature. On an opposite direction, Alberto Manguel described in the following terms the state of English-speaking cultures in 2006: