In an article written for a British newspaper last year, Audrey Gillan relates the following story. Since 1998, well over a thousand migrants are believed to have died trying to cross from Mexico into the USA. Arguably one of the most fiercely guarded, inhospitable ‘borderlands’ in the world, many of those who die do so through heat and dehydration. In a single day in 2001, for example, fourteen Mexicans died trying to cross the desert which geographically unites the nationally divided states of Veracruz and Arizona. It was this tragedy, and a growing disapproval of what they see as unjust immigration policy, which finally drove a small group of Tuscon volunteers to organise themselves into a grassroots organisation called Humane Borders. Daring to run the gauntlet of US immigration law, volunteers drive hundreds of kilometres every week to replenish large tanks of water which they have stationed across the desert borderland. As long as they do not give lifts to migrants, they craftily remain within the bounds of the law which, in Arizona, in fact makes it illegal to refuse someone a drink of water!

It seems to us that this story of ordinary people, is a parable of radical intercultural understanding and exchange, both in the sense of its being about politically progressive action, and in its description of people seeking practical ways to get to the root of a problem. This small group of interculturalists have not only transformed themselves into activists, but have also started to transform a harsh terrain of inequality and injustice into a ‘geography of resistance’ (Pile, 1997). As such, the story highlights a number of issues relevant to the project of language(s) and intercultural communication. For example, Humane Borders is a story of people working in ‘in-between spaces’ but who are concerned not with the elite mobility and motivations of business people, tourists, government workers and academics, but, in Zygmunt Bauman’s (1998) terms, are instead confronting the less volitional movement of ‘vagabonds’. Although newsworthy in its exceptional demonstration of human concern, it is a story nonetheless of the everyday and the local: people prepared to take up causes on their doorstep, responding to the deceptively simple challenge in the adage ‘charity begins at home’. Most importantly of all, the story of Humane Borders is one of transgression and the willingness to act in the face of power and in spite of their own privilege – a case of ‘all action and no talk’.

More specifically, however, this narrative of deeds speaking louder than words provokes in us the urge to engage more squarely with two potentially uncomfortable questions about the underlying principles (or assumptions) of language and intercultural communication. First, what are the realistic prospects for language in intercultural communication? Second, what, in the ‘real world’, can we really expect to achieve through intercultural awareness? These are not questions which we want to try and answer in any detail here – partly because, in their different ways, we think the main contributors to this issue offer useful ideas of their own; we would, however, like to wrestle just a little with the frequently taken-for-granted relationship between awareness and action, and its implications for a more radical practice and pedagogy in our field.

Often regarded as both means and ends in themselves, intercultural knowledge (or ‘competence’) and intercultural awareness are latent processes and, as such, restricted to the level of mere sensation. They describe a largely cognitive capacity for the dispassionate acquisition of information which may or may not shift towards recognition and assimilation. Raising consciousness, however, requires that people not only be aware of something, but also be concerned about it. In other words, there must be both sense and sensitivity. We talk often, for example, about praising people for being ‘considerate’ which entails their not only feeling respect but also being respectful. In much the same way, we commonly refer to people being ‘sensitive to someone’s feelings’, or of a system or person that is ‘sensitive to change’; in both cases, there is necessarily a reaction. It is this combination of concern and sensitivity that, for us, is ought to be a hallmark of critical awareness in intercultural communication. Raising awareness – intercultural or otherwise – demands not only an enhanced understanding but also a preparedness to accommodate and change.

As far as language and intercultural communication are concerned, however, this can only ever be the starting point. Awareness is less about what people know in an abstracted (or ‘knowledgeable’) sense, as it is about their real experiences and existing capabilities. It is, of course, also about confronting issues of power and inequality in communication – drawing attention, for example, not only to the inequalities of cultural and economic capital, but also encouraging a willingness to confront and resist these inequalities. This is what Hilary Janks & Roz Ivanic (1992) describe as ‘emancipatory discourse’, and by which they mean avoiding in our communication practices the disempowerment of others and, indeed, resisting our own disempowerment. In this way, sensitivity is more the stuff of Paolo Freire’s (1974:5) conscientização or what, closer to home, Alice Tomic & Laura Lengel (1999:80) describe as transformation. Where Freire is concerned with a critical pedagogy which demands that learners ‘add something of their own making’ to the world, Tomic & Lengel explain that transformation entails learners’ engaging in the self-reflexive processes of recreation, realignment, deconstruction and reconstruction. Thus both demand change and action – awareness and willingness are, in themselves, necessary but insufficient.

In teaching a truly critical intercultural awareness, therefore, a case is to be made for setting our aspirations higher than Michael Byram and Geneviève Zarate’s goals of savoir and savoir-faire, higher even than the additional savoir s’engager (see, for example, Byram, 1999). At the very least, and sticking with the French terminology, critical teaching insists on encouraging disposé faire et s’engager – a sense of one’s being also disposed and willing to engage . Radical approaches, however, demand not only engagement and conversion but also realisation. In fact, following Romy Clark & Roz Ivanic’s (1999:64) vision for language awareness, an essential condition for a properly rooted, critical awareness is action. As they express it, ‘Understandings gained by critical … awareness should equip learners to recognise, challenge and ultimately contribute to changing social inequities inscribed in [their] practices, and thus to be more responsible citizens.’.

Taking such radical perspectives into the language and/or intercultural communication classroom, in effect, means ‘teaching to transgress’ (hooks, 1994). In fact, in writing this editorial, we realise that the pointedly biblical use of ‘parable’ at the start seems appropriate also to the increasingly evangelical tone of our teaching nowadays. In an otherwise skills-driven, outcome-dictated, job-directed higher education, it appears that this is often all we have left to us: to enjoin our students to critical, self-critical and radical engagement with the world around them – regardless of the technical and theoretical protocols of academic discourse. It is the brave, transgressive spirit-cum-action of Humane Borders’ water bearing which we crave for ourselves and for those we teach. In Pierre Bourdieu’s (1998:92) terms, and as people who claim an intellectual life, we are obliged to reaffirm our commitment daily to the demolition of simplistic either-ors (e.g. either you’re French or you’re American), freedom from respect for those in power (e.g. knowledge experts such as ourselves), and a respect for the complexity of problems (e.g. the current overt disillusionment and anger towards the West). In short, as interculturalists, teachers and members of the global middle-classes, it’s time to get our hands dirty.

In this issue we have, for the first time, tangibly brought together the journal and the scholarly association to which it is affiliated. The second annual conference of the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), in December 2001, asked participants from a diverse range of theoretical, methodological and disciplinary backgrounds to respond to the theme ‘Living in Translated Worlds’. In the words of the officially stated aspirations drafted for the conference by the organisers, translation is surely the sine qua non of a communication scholarship interested in the ways in which encounters with Other and the crossing of linguistic, geographic and political spaces leads to new modes of thinking, feeling and experiencing the world. In this context, therefore, ‘translation is not so much a cognitive exercise or activity concerned with the technicalities of translation and verbal equivalences, as a metaphor for dealing with the behavioural and experiential dimensions of living in worlds different from our own and variously represented to our consciousness according to the different agencies which translate or mediate reality for us and shape our perceptions and reactions.’

As the papers in this issue demonstrate, like all intercultural encounters, translation too lends itself to acts of transgression. Although translators are often privileged encoders, they may also serve as busy mediators – both a voice of authority, but also a mouth-piece for the unknown, the excluded, and the ‘subaltern’ (Spivak, 1985). If they are to be more than mere technicians, translators are necessarily involved in ‘committed acts of understanding’ (see Jordan’s paper); they are compelled to resist the sloth of the already translated – those codified, fixed regimes of translated truth (cf. Foucault, 1980) which, like dictionaries and tourist phrase-books, promote the literal and denotative, the formulaic and reductive, at the expense of the subtle, the complex, the messy, the ‘lived’. Certainly, there are perils in translation (see Cronin’s paper), but there are also privileges and perks: most notably, the opportunity for the translator herself to be transformed through these processes of interaction and mediation. Walravens’ paper, for example, reveals the excitement and energy in seeking to recreate (or co-create) the intangibles of sexuality and ambience in a line or two of prose. Equally, translators (and other intercultural activists) are reminded of the need to resist the tendency to fetishize the key subjects – both human and conceptual – of their work, such as culture and difference, language and communication. For example, one salutary starting place ought always to be the recognition that all communication is miscommunication. Mistakenly, we are too often lulled into believing, and lured into promoting, the telepathic ideals of perfect translation and complete intercultural understanding. In truth, we can never really find equivalence, we can never truly understand. We can of course try. Indeed, as Jordan observes in her paper, none of us can afford not to try.

Another useful point of contact between the papers in this issue and the radical perspectives sketched above is one which both Cronin and Jordan underscore: the value in turning inwards to the local, to the home, to the Self – what, in Welsh, is conveyed nicely by the phrase y filltir sgwâr (‘square mile’). The work of intercultural communication too often appears preoccupied with the glamorous (national) boundaries of far-flung (tourist) destinations and the elevated (official) languages of Europe. Just as travel may be a journey of the mind, however, radical approaches in intercultural communication do not require grand resistance movements or mass organisation. The Third Space is not a space out there; it is a space right here and a space within. Eschewing the niceties of lexicon and evading intricate, semantic webs, we need to think also about ‘translating’ – in the most radical, material sense – unheard to heard, unvoiced to voiced, poor to rich. As Gayatri Spivak reminds us, it is our ethical responsibility to make room for marginalised voices (ibid.). As such, intercultural communication and translation need also to be expressions of self-sacrifice. Nor is it for us to pick and choose our Other. Other appears in many guises, most of which are often less fashionable, less exciting, less comfortable than those we favour. To pick just one, British example: intercultural communication ought to be as interested in the ‘home’ languages of Welsh, Pashto, Gujurati, Gaelic, Turkish and Kashmiri as it is about the languages of global employment and travel such as French, English, German and Japanese. The transformational promise of intercultural encounter is just as likely to be realised round the corner as it is around the world.

It is this willingness to engage with things closer-to-home which also offers a welcome antidote for, and a resistance to, the self-perpetuating myths and ideologies of ‘globalisation’. In some respects, amidst the great re-orderings of capital and communications, everything has changed; in other respects, however, nothing has changed. Global citizenship is not new. Even though different groups of people may be connected for the first time and in new ways, we have always all been interconnected and interdependent. In fact, in an age of information, one thing that has changed is our ability to plead ignorance of just how far and how deep the connections really run. While the work of the interculturalist (and the translator) may not be ‘global’, it is unashamedly mundane – both of-the-world and completely ordinary. It is about the tiny, unsung transformations of the earthworm (Cronin), the simplicity and humility of empathy (Jordan), the delicacy and precision of choices (Walravens) and the trying to get it just right (Harzing & Maznevski). Like the poet, proposes Kent Maynard (2002), the anthropologist (or the interculturalist and the translator) should be led by their curiosity for the details, diversity and ‘hurly-burly’ of human experience; all are also duty-bound to ‘examine and be explicit about their own morality’. Having recently read a newly published, contemporary reworking (or translation) of Oscar Wilde’s complex psychological narrative The Picture of Dorian Gray, we are reminded of a well-known aphorism from the original: ‘Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.’ In the context of more radical agendas in language and intercultural communication, to this we might also add, ‘So too do those who do not’

References

Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: The human consequences. Cambridge: Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (1998). Acts of resistance: Against the new myths of our time [trans. Richard Nice]. Cambridge: Polity.

Byram, M. (1999). Foreign language education for critical cultural awareness and democratic citizenship. In D. Killick & M. Parry (Eds), Languages for cross-cultural capability: Promoting the discipline: Marking boundaries & crossing borders. Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University.

Clark, R. & Ivanic, R. (1999). Editorial: Raising critical awareness of language: A curriculum aim for the new millenium. Language Awareness, 8(2), 63-70.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.

Freire, P. (1974). Education for critical consciousness. London: Sheed & Ward.

Gillan, A. (2001). A cup of mercy for the illegals. Guardian Newspaper, 21 July.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.

Janks, H. & Ivanic, R. (1992). Critical language awareness and emancipatory discourse. In N. Fairclough (Ed.), Critical language awareness (pp. 305-331). Harlow: Longman.

Maynard, K. (2001). An 'imagination of order': The suspicion of structure in anthropology and poetry. The Antioch Review, Spring Issue.

Pile, S. (1997). Opposition, political identities and spaces of resistance. In S. Pile & M. Keith (Eds), Geographies of resistance (pp. 1-32). London: Routledge.

Spivak, G. C. (1985). Can the subaltern speak?: Speculations on widow sacrifice. Wedge,7(8), 120-130.

Tomic, A. & Lengel, L. (1999). Negotiating a ‘third space’: Pedagogy which encourages transformational intercultural communication education. In D. Killick & M. Parry (Eds), Languages for cross-cultural capability: Promoting the discipline: Marking boundaries & crossing borders. Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University.

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