My latest reading project is Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past, by Jeremy Black. It's an interesting read, describing how perceptions of history affect atlas design, and vice versa. The most entertaining passages demonstrate techniques of distorting information to suit overt propaganda, but the most illuminating address the maps I used in grade school (or maps very much like them).
But the book has a fault that I just have to carp about, because it's common among scholarly books which are still accessible enough to make it to the shelves of Barnes & Noble. The author, presumably fluent in French, thinks nothing of quoting lengthy passages entirely in French, without further word of explanation. At several points, Maps and History reads something like:
By the turn of the century, cartographers began adopting an entirely new, non-nationalistic approach to maps, and especially to educational atlases. This stemmed from several complaints, most explicitly described by M. LeBoeuf:Frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrenchfrenchfrench frenchfrenchfrenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrenchfrenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrenchfrenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrenchfrenchfrench.But some printing houses went even farther. M. Allouette prefaced his Atlas de frenchfrenchfrench Afrique et frenchfrench with his protest thatfrenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrenc frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrench frenchfrenchfrenchNotwithstanding these developments, color printing was becoming increasingly affordable for small printing houses?
Now what good is that? I've thought this through; large passages of foreign languages are, as I said, common in scholarly works, and I need to consider whether I'm missing something. I put together the best argument I could to justify such obfuscation. Here are the words I would put in the mouths of Mr. Black and his fellow academes:
?This book is written to assist researchers at the graduate and postgraduate level, who we may reasonably assume are fluent in French as part of their degree requirements. [UofI requires math grads to learn any two of German, French, and Russian; I presume other fields have similar responsibilities.] Translating important passages would do little good for the target audience, and might do harm by obscuring subtleties of the original writing. Non-academics are welcome, even encouraged, to read this book, but we cannot justify weakening its content for such audiences.?
Well, okay, I can buy that. The sin then lies on the heads of the publishers squeezing out a few more bucks from a printing by selling to unwary readers among the unwashed masses. Or rather, I could buy that, if those same books did not laboriously translate even brief phrases in German, Russian, Greek, or Chinese, languages which interested scholars should be equally fluent in. Maps and History, which thinks nothing of free-standing eight-line passages in French pauses to let us know that ?Versklavung? is the supposed ?enslaving of the Germans as a result of the post-war conferences,? and ?Uchebnyi Atlas po Russkoi Istorii? is ?The Student's Atlas of Russian History.? I can't help but conclude the author is less concerned with preserving meaning than flippantly dismissing readers who are not fluent in French and Latin. Perhaps translating the Russian and German exhausted him, and doing the French, too, would be too much work. Or perhaps it simply never occurred to him that not everyone in the world has mastered French.
There's a solution to the problem, and I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest it. Translate everything. If you write in English, put it all in English. If the original text is too tender for the coarse hands of translation, include the original as a lengthy footnote, and let those who absolutely must have the original find it at the back of the book, or at the bottom of the page. Then the rest of us can join in the discussion, too.