Translation, internationalisation and the university


London Review of Education
Vol. 7, No. 3, November 2009, 223–233

ISSN 1474-8460 print/ISSN 1474-8479 online
© 2009 Institute of Education, University of London
DOI: 10.1080/14748460903290108
http://www.informaworld.com

Translation, internationalisation and the university

Suzy Harris*

School of Education, Froebel College, Roehampton University, London, UK
Taylor and FrancisCLRE_A_429184.sgm10.1080/14748460903290108London Review of Education1474-8460 (print)/1474-8479 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis73000000November 2009SuzyHarriss.harris@roehampton.ac.uk The demands and challenges posed by the global economy help explain the growing

importance of the internationalisation of higher education in European, national and
institutional policy arenas. The discourse of internationalisation is driven primarily by
economic factors, and an emphasis on competition, standards and skills has shifted attention
away from considering internationalisation in relation to the aims, values and the purpose of
higher education. This paper considers the notion of translation as a way of thinking about
internationalisation. Translation is normally understood in relatively simple terms – as the
transfer of meaning from one language to another – and it is seen primarily as a technical
matter, albeit one that sometimes raises considerable difficulties. It is argued that that there
is something limited and mistaken about this way of thinking about translation. It is not only
between languages that translation occurs but also within a language. The question of
translation has to do with the nature of meaning, and meaning has been and must remain a
central concern of higher education and the university.

Keywords: translation; language; internationalisation; higher education

Internationalisation and the problem of language

Since the 1990s the internationalisation of higher education has become an increasingly impor-
tant aspect of European and national policy, driven by economic considerations and the need to
compete in the global knowledge economy. For example, a central concern of the European
Union is to improve the quality of European higher education in order to successfully compete
with the economies of the US, China and India. To this end the EU has concentrated its energies
on increasing transparency and comparability, and on improving quality assurance mechanisms
(IRDAC Report to the European Commission 1994). The Bologna Declaration (1999) can also
be seen in this light with its goal of a single European Area of Higher Education as a means of
increasing the international competitiveness of the European system of higher education. And,
at a national level, the UK government has vigorously promoted international education under
the Prime Minister’s Initiative (PMI). This initiative was launched in 1999 in a bid to establish a
UK ‘brand’ of international education and to increase the recruitment of international students
to HE institutions. In 2006 a second phase of PMI was introduced, this time a five-year strategy
to improve the national brand abroad, to secure the position of the UK as a leader in interna-
tional education, and to improve the student experience (Toyoshima 2007).

The term ‘internationalisation’ is used in a variety of ways – for some it refers to external
processes such as globalisation and the emergence of a competitive marketplace whilst others
use the term in relation to curricular issues and the need for an intercultural and/or global
dimension to the curriculum (see Knight 2004). Despite the various uses and understanding of
the term there does seem to be a consensus that internationalisation, however defined, is both
good and necessary for higher education. The benefits of internationalisation tend to be viewed

*Email: s.harris@roehampton.ac.uk



224  S. Harris

in economic terms; the economic is privileged whilst educational and cultural dimensions are
not addressed (Harris 2007a, 2008a, b). This paper attempts to redress the imbalance and does
so through a consideration of the notion of translation as a way of thinking about international-
isation and higher education. Translation is considered first in relatively simple terms – as the
transfer of meaning from one language to another – and it is seen primarily as a technical matter.
This way of understanding translation is limited and does not acknowledge that translation
occurs within a language as well as across languages. To say this is not merely to exploit the idea
of translation in a metaphorical way. It is rather to contest the terms of the opposition within
which translation is understood: of the security and stability of meaning in the supposedly pure
‘home’ language, on the one hand; and, on the other, of the vagaries and uncertainties of meaning
where this home language is translated into one that is alien. If our instinctive adherence to the
terms of this binary opposition can be weakened, the ways in which it is not a mere metaphor
to say that translation occurs within as well as between languages will become apparent. The
question of translation is then not just about how to accommodate people who speak different
languages in a system of higher education but rather about the nature of meaning itself. The
paper explores this more profound question of meaning which is at the heart of what higher
education is about.

Let us begin be examining the way that translation becomes an issue in higher education.
First, developments like Bologna are responses to difference. In some ways this is just part of
globalisation but in other respects it is a characteristically European response. Bologna is
designed to manage difference, and it does this through endorsing standardised procedures, a
form of performativity. This is not to deny difference but to imply that difference can be
successfully encompassed within homogenised systems. Second, the internationalised universi-
ties of Europe, and elsewhere, face a practical problem in that many students do not speak the
lingua franca of the host institution. Hence, there is a need for special entrance tests and
special preparatory courses designed to compensate for this linguistic deficit. The lack of
command of the needed language is understood as a technical problem and these are means of
addressing it.

The diversity of national education systems which historically has been seen as important
becomes problematic when the imperative is commensurability. I do not want to suggest that
uniformity is necessarily bad or that education does not, nor should not, have any economic
benefit. The argument set out here is the need to be attentive to what is absent and the restric-
tive and narrow ways in which education is conceived. For example, it is striking that some 10
years ago the European Commission could state quite boldly that the aims of education need no
longer be debated: the purpose of higher education is to serve the needs of the economy. This,
it was implied, was self-evident; moreover, the distinction between education and training is
considered redundant (European Commission White Paper 1996). In his analysis of European
documents Pádraig Hogan notes the absence of moral purpose behind education policy; the
main concern is about performance in a market culture and the promotion of excellence and
the language used is one of competitive individualism (1998). And it is not only in education
where this instrumentalist language is found. Kevin Williams (2000) considers this in relation to
what he refers to as the new European project – a united and unitary ‘New Europe’ under-
pinned by a particular, and narrowly conceived notion of European citizenship. Underlying the
European project is a conception of human beings as self-interested consumers. The role of
education is to create ‘economic agents’ who will contribute to the development of an entre-
preneurial society.

It is useful in the following paragraphs to look at issues to do with language in the university.
The first thing to say is that language is especially complex in the university, for example, disci-
plines have their own specialised forms of language and these are quite different from the



London Review of Education  225

language of business or other institutions. Despite this the university is now expected to engage,
collaborate and enter into partnership with business and commerce. The growing closeness of
the university and its business neighbours, steered as it has been by successive governments is,
not surprisingly, transforming traditional academic discourse within the university, particularly
in terms of governance and management but also in relation to the curriculum. The language of
performativity and marketing is pervasive, the most recent example of which is the emergence
of enterprise as a core part of the business of the university. Enterprise is now an equally impor-
tant income stream but it is also spreading across the university into the curriculum with
modules designed to improve students’ entrepreneurial skills. For the new university this may
be an attractive way to identity itself because of the very different research profiles of the old
and new universities.

The relationship between the university and business is of course important; there is a prac-
tical and technical need for employees to possess good language skills in order to carry out their
job. Employers, naturally, expect university graduates to have acquired these skills before they
leave university. The danger is in privileging an acquisition of a portfolio of skills and competen-
cies over an engagement with ideas and ways of thinking connected with a disciplinary tradition.
The latter, historically, has been a central purpose of the university.

One of the features of a mass higher education is that the student population is much
broader and more international in composition, particularly so in the UK which has one of the
most diverse university student populations in the world (Watson 2007). Students will come to
university for various reasons and hold a range of expectations and assumptions about university
life. Student and parent satisfaction is increasingly important and an area that, in a highly compet-
itive market, universities cannot ignore. There is more demand on academics to make their
courses more student-centred, through, for example, using online technology and more trans-
parent assessment systems. One result of this is that less attention seems to be given to matters
of curriculum content; it is reduced to the most effective ‘delivery’. And the use of delivery here
is far removed from its Latin origins – liberare – to set free. The need for institutions to be
responsive and be seen to be responsive to student needs is an aspect of proceduralism that
pervades university life; there is an obsession with method where emphasis is on procedure
rather than the substantive and questions of value.

This proceduralism obscures aspects of language and difference that can be seen particularly
clearly in relation to students for whom English is neither their first language nor the language
of their previous education. There are immediate concerns around language comprehension
and familiarity, for example, with academic and cultural customs when studying in a British
university. Consider, for example, Chinese students who come to study in departments of
social sciences or humanities. This will be the first occasion when they will be expected to read
texts written in English and to write essays conforming to western academic traditions. This
will require them to discuss the ideas and arguments in the texts and relate them to the context
of their native country. The experience of a Chinese student in this respect is so unlike that of
their Spanish or Italian counterpart because there is a lack of shared European etymology to
help decipher words and phrases. Both the student and their tutor have difficulty in finding any
common ground from which to begin to discuss problems of translation, interpretation and
meaning. Chinese students, like their peers, must be able to use the language appropriate to
their subject of study; some find academic writing easier than others irrespective of what their
first language is.

There are then, unquestionably, practical problems that face students whose first language
is not English; universities take this seriously and spend a great deal of time and resources to
supporting its students, through for example, English language centres and student support
services. There is, however, a danger that discussion rests on these kinds of issues and does not



226  S. Harris

move beyond these to consider other questions that are not technical and cannot be resolved
easily through devising practical solutions. This is something that is not confined to internation-
alisation specifically but to education more generally. In the UK, for example, much of the polit-
ical debate about HE in recent years has revolved around financial concerns. Very little time has
been spent discussing the point of higher education. As Richard Smith and Paul Standish point
out, ‘what kind of world we need a competitive economy for’ is not talked about (2001, italics
in original).

As numbers of international students continue to rise, there is a danger that problems will
continue to be constructed as technical that require technical solutions; this will perpetuate the
tendency to think in dichotomous ways. Language tends to be seen in terms of binaries – ‘native
language’ and the ‘non-native language’; ‘first language’ and ‘second language’; ‘native tongue’ and
‘foreign tongue’. The distinction between native and non-native speaker is, however, more
complex than this dichotomy suggests. In the UK, for example, nearly 15% of primary school
students speak a different language at home, and in several British universities a large proportion
of students are effectively bi-lingual (Watson 2007).

Matters to do with language are not confined to students whose native language is not
English. In UK universities and those where English is the medium of study, a vast number of
texts that are used on courses are translations. For example, in sociology Marx, Weber and
Durkheim will most likely have been read in translation rather than the original – by teachers as
well as students. Teacher educators discussing the relevance of Rousseau or Freire for schooling
in contemporary society are probably unlikely to have read these in the original, unless they
studied languages as undergraduates. In philosophy, students will not be expected to read texts
in the original when they discuss the ideas of, for example, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes or
Wittgenstein.

There are two points that I wish to draw attention to from what has gone above – the first
is to do with the danger that arises from globalisation, namely, the homogenisation of the theory
and practice of higher education, and one critical factor in this homogenisation is language. The
use of English globally implies that everyone can understand each other and that language is
primarily about communication understood in a technical sense rather than about meaning. A
language is generated that is full of abstract nouns – ‘internationalisation’, ‘harmonisation’, ‘qual-
ity’, ‘excellence’. The second area of concern, and related to the first, is the monolingualism of
liberal political discourse. In their paper Naoko Saito and Paul Standish (2008) refer to the
monolingualism of political liberal discourse in which there is, they argue, a blindness to differ-
ence, to what is other and to what is incommensurable.

Both the homogenisation of language and the monolingualism of policy discourse are
informed by performativity, a regime that demands standardisation, uniformity and commen-
surability; diversity as expressed through different and diverse educational traditions, is not
acknowledged. There seems to be an assumption that any problems or difficulties that
emerge can be ironed out and resolved; this is based on the view that language problems are
purely technical and arise from linguistic difference – not having a good enough grasp of the
language or not being able to make oneself understood; if someone does not have a good
grasp of language it is presumed that they need technical help to improve their language skills
(Harris 2007b).

One of the characteristics of performativity is that it is informed by an impoverished concept
of meaning. The problem of translation is understood only as a technical one; the central ques-
tion is one of better communication and delivery. This, however, has little to offer in the way of
understanding and engaging with difficulty and difference and meaning. In the following section,
therefore, I suggest a different way of thinking about translation that challenges this understand-
ing of meaning as operating in a technical way.



London Review of Education  227

Translation and transformation

As noted in the previous section the language of international policy is English so there is an
assumption that we can all understand each other. This international language is, however, read
and understood by people who encounter it from a wide range of linguistic, cultural, and insti-
tutional contexts. There are different connotations associated with terms when they are used
in the international language of English; strange things can happen. Some examples may be of
use here. Take for example a term I have used in this paper, performativity, which is an English
translation of a term first used by Jean-François Lyotard. Among native English speakers this
term has been taken up by many in education sometimes without acknowledging the origins of
the term or clearly stating how their use captures the subtleties of Lyotard’s original under-
standing. When this term is used, for example in Spanish contexts, the term is usually left
untranslated but sometimes it appears as rendimiento. Whichever version is used, the meaning
is not quite the same. There are negative connotations to the word in French and English usage
that is not always as strong in Spanish. Another would be the German word Bildung, a word
which has been said by some to be untranslatable. According to Maarten Simons (2006), a
feature of Bildung is an attitude or duty to truth. This is not captured in the English term
‘formation’ which is often used. And a third example would be that of ‘science’. The word
comes from the Latin scio – I know. In English the word has come to have a strong association
with natural science and for many people would conjure an image of a scientist in a laboratory
carrying out an experiment; the term scientist would not be associated with an historian or
philosopher. The equivalent of the word ‘science’ in German implies something different. In
German Wissenschaft means science and Geisteswissenschaft means human science; these terms
imply an on-going process, ‘to capture reality as a totality in concepts’ (ibid., 37). When a
German academic is using the term science in English – for example at an international confer-
ence – they mean something broader than a native English speaking person. They mean knowl-
edge in the round and reference to a scientist would include not just a physicist but an historian
or philosopher as well.

As George Steiner (1975) notes, each human language maps the world differently and differ-
ent societies have different ways of cutting up the world and describing the world. This means
that words cannot be simply translated. Every reading of a text is an act of translation where the
reader is trying to interpret the words and meaning for herself – whether one is reading the text
in its original or translated version. In the case of the latter, to translate a novel by Gabriel García
Márquez, for example, word by word would not capture the imagery and rhythms of his phras-
ing; nor is it a straightforward task to transpose the original Latin-American Spanish to German
or Chinese. There are good and bad translations; a good translation requires an understanding
of the context and view of world that informs the original text. The translated text is in some
ways an interpretation of the original.

There is transformation in translation; meaning is always in movement. Translation goes to
the heart of meaning and in the following paragraphs we shall see how this is so. The strangeness
of language can be seen in a particularly striking way in the work of translation from one
language to another. Wilhelm von Humboldt makes a distinction between Fremdheit and das
Fremde in relation to the translation of texts (Eco 2003). Fremdheit (which can be translated as
foreignness or strangeness) on the one hand is the term he used to describe the sense a reader
has when the translator seems to have chosen words that sound strange or odd, as though a
mistake has been made in the translation. Das Fremde (translated as the strange or the unfamil-
iar), on the other hand is the term used to describe a reader’s sense of reading something that
is recognisable, that has been translated appropriately, but that they are reading the words as if
for the first time – the familiar has been rendered strange or foreign. Humboldt shows that a



228  S. Harris

proper understanding of language in its original form is not transparent or unproblematic. It is
always strange, always open to disturb the reader.

The strangeness of language is thematised in Walter Benjamin’s writing. For him the essential
quality of a translation is not communication or imparting knowledge; a translation that intends
to perform a transmitting function is in his eyes a bad translation. It is rather the mysterious and
unfathomable (that is there in the original) that is essential to a good translation. The importance
of the mysterious also suggests that translatability implies untranslatability, an idea that is central
in Benjamin’s ‘The task of the translator’. The notion suggests both the impossible and the
necessary; we could not live or make sense of our lives without translation of all sorts but at the
same time it is impossible because it can never be absolute. There is no perfect translation.
Whilst the goal of translation is ‘undeniably a final, conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic
creation’ at the same time ‘an instant and final… solution to this foreignness remains out of the
reach of mankind’ (1996a, 257). This acknowledgment is central because it also suggests that it
is the role of the translator rather than the translation that is central. 

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among
alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the
sake of the pure language, he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language. (Ibid., 261)

A translation is not an ending but a beginning, a transformation and a ‘renewal of something
living – the original undergoes a change’ (256). The translator must allow her own language to
be affected by the foreign language. There is always an element in the translation that refuses
further translation, which is to acknowledge what is foreign, what is different, and to acknowl-
edge that which is incommensurable. For Benjamin the idea of untranslatability is not something
negative; there is a richness that is important to recognise and acknowledge.

The impossibility of translation suggests a loss; there is no perfect translation, no complete,
ultimate understanding or perfect communication. For Lovisa Bergdahl (2008) this loss
‘condemns us to never give up trying’ but this is not said in despair, it is to recognise that we
are always moving towards something rather than reaching an end point; it is an orientation
rather than a route. I would add that the loss is also a find in the sense that it is also a release
that invites or allows a response, to acknowledge the remainder – of what cannot be pinned
down or reduced to something that is familiar and rendered safe. The richness in the idea of the
untranslatable is that, as Bergdahl points out, it makes absolute understanding impossible: there
are limits to what we can understand of the other and of ourselves, but it is the impossibility
that means that we must not give up trying.

Bergdahl’s reading of Benjamin is powerful and draws attention to the ethical response
that translation summons. She considers Benjamin’s position in relation to that of Habermas
for whom translation is understood in terms of cooperation and negotiation and is ultimately
possible. One weakness of his argument that she identifies is that there are too many
assumptions that underpin it which effectively mean that there is already some kind of
consensus operating. This denies the very thing that is present and contested – difference
and incommensurability. For Benjamin there is a mysteriousness in the untranslatability –
what is beyond the translation is the mysterious – in between the lines of the text, particu-
larly so in the reading of the scriptures. It is not about communication1 – it is about a
response – a response that starts with the self then reaching out; it is an ethical responsibility
first and foremost that I am called to. I am singularised; I have to respond, nobody else can
make a response for me.

Jacques Derrida’s way of putting this is that translation is both possible and impossible. The
assumption that the literal translation of language involves a translation from a ‘pure’ meaning of
the native language into another language is mistaken. 



London Review of Education  229

Translation can… get everything across except this: the fact that there are, in one linguistic system,
perhaps several languages or tongues. Sometimes – I would even say always – several tongues. There
is impurity in every language. (Derrida 1982, 100)

Derrida makes this point deftly in ‘What is a “relevant” translation’. The inverted commas
around the word ‘relevant’ are used to draw attention to the untranslatability of the word. In
any text there is a question about the source language to which the words used are to be under-
stood. Words are always in the process of translation; the word, ‘carries in its body an on-going
process of translation’ (2005, 425). There is also a broader point that he is making and that is
the connection between the word relevant and the French verb relever which invokes a bringing
to life – and this meaning of relever is heard in the French usage of relevant, whereas it is
completely hidden in the English word. It is this idea of bringing to life again that is key. Following
Benjamin, translation should ensure the survival of the original – survival in the sense of living
on, and also of life after death.

Translation and the nature of meaning

The foregoing account draws heavily on poststructuralist accounts of meaning and translation.
It is then intriguing to find that similar ideas were also advanced, about a century earlier, in the
work of Henry David Thoreau. Consider, for example, his extraordinary and complex state-
ment, in Walden: 

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our
faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior
natures. (1986, 289, italics in the original)

What does Thoreau mean by these words, and what leads him to make such a claim?
Anything we say is partial, he helps us to realise, never the final word or the complete story.
Words cannot be pinned down; like birds they flutter and fly away – they are translated and
transformed. The best words like faith and piety do not try to say it all; they are more subtle,
not mundane or ordinary. Some things cannot be said directly and need to be subtle like
fragrances that linger and provoke images. He is saying also that we have a responsibility not to
keep words as monuments, that what is needed is to have a sensitivity to language and this he
expresses powerfully in terms of the mother tongue and father tongue: 

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even
to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is memora-
ble interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language
read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and
we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experi-
ence of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select
expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to
speak. (1986, 92–3)

The mother tongue is the language we are born into and cannot step outside of. It is seen
as natural; it is already part of language full-blown. The father tongue is a different kind of
language, not as natural as the mother tongue; it sensitises us to language and how we are not
in control of it fully. In calling it the father tongue Thoreau is also hinting at the spiritual and its
association with God the Father and His words spoken through the prophets. The father tongue
and mother tongue do not complement each other but we do need both. The responsibility not
to keep words as monuments is exemplified in the father tongue whereas the mother tongue
has no such responsibility. The language and culture of performativity perhaps can be seen in
terms of the mother tongue - the thinking underpinning it has come to be seen as natural,



230  S. Harris

common sense, taken for granted, unproblematic; words such as ‘quality’, ‘standards’ and ‘effec-
tiveness’ have become mere monuments.

The father tongue is what is required in an education for grownups because it offers a
mature relationship to language that can challenge the common and the taken for granted – it is
about uncommon schooling. Thoreau is not proposing an institutional form of schooling but
rather a schooling that goes on through life, a kind of continuous learning into adulthood. We
can see how the father tongue also resonates strongly with ‘higher’ education; students need to
be sensitised to language and this is possible through the father tongue which is needed to
disturb the unproblematic view of language. It is perhaps not without significance that in the past
a person went to university to read philosophy or read chemistry. Nowadays the verb most
often used, outside Oxbridge, is to ‘do’ a subject (‘I’m doing music’).

We can see then that Thoreau’s concern is with the question of meaning and understanding
the world. Walden is about the possibility of living and can be seen as a kind of perfectionist writ-
ing. Thoreau was disappointed in America – it had not lived up to the Pilgrim Fathers’ ideas of
the Promised Land. His book is not an easy read; there is ambiguity and it is difficult to read him
and to work out what he means or how to interpret a particular word or phrase, but it is also
difficult in that he challenges his readers. He is writing in the father tongue; we have to learn to
read, but not just literally, we also have to read the world. In a chapter entitled ‘Reading’ he
draws the reader’s attention to an important feature of the written word: ‘it is the work of art
nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually
breathed from all human lips’ (94). Writing and reading are quite different from the spoken
word. It is easier to be shocked or wrong-footed by the written word. Whilst this is possible
when you listen to a good orator, the difference is that the orator wants to win you over rather
than to shock.

Thoreau and Benjamin are fascinated with the creation of the world by the word. They take
us back to the scriptures and the opening words of St John’s Gospel (Jn. 1:1). ‘In the beginning
was the Word; the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ This is such a profound state-
ment that shows that language and meaning and the human are connected, and we cannot
unravel this; we are mutually dependent on one another. It is, however, precisely because of this
interconnectedness that there is volatility – we give words to the world and we receive them.
In ‘On language as such and on the language of man’, Benjamin considers the way in which this
is expressed in the Bible; ‘God breathes his breath into man; this is at once life and mind and
language’ (1996b, 67). Benjamin uses the creation story to construct in effect a philosophy of
language, in the light of which the content of a thing is not expressed through language but in
language. Benjamin’s ‘through’ and ‘in’ subtly distinguish what is at stake here: the distinction
serves to resist the idea of language just as a means to something, or as technical. It is, rather,
constitutive of what we are as human beings. God calls into being Adam, and this creating word
is also a naming word, Adam (adamah, meaning earth). The human being-in-the-world is then an
expression of God’s inner substance, an expression in which the human being, world, things, are
generated through language. Yet God remains incommunicable and inscrutable, and, that is,
untranslatable. In ancient Hebrew, the language of the Torah, God’s name appears as YHWH; it
is literally unpronounceable. For Benjamin every language, apart from divine ‘language’, which
would be pure, can be thought of as a translation of all others. Language depends upon differen-
tiation, and differentiation is the stuff of translation. But a divine ‘language’ would be a language
without differentiation, a language seeing all at once without differentiation, and hence without
identification, and hence no language at all. This impossible language nevertheless remains as a
kind of ideal of perspicuity to which all too human thought aspires.

Human languages can only ever be partial and different societies and cultures have different
ways of making sense of the world and hence the multiplicity of languages. There will always be



London Review of Education  231

difference but the problem is that we tend to accept the differences that our language gives to
us as though these were fixed. The father tongue challenges this. Our own words are new
objects that we bring into the world; what you give back is not what you received. Whereas the
father tongue acknowledges and understands this, performativity and technicism understand
only the mother tongue and everything is reduced to ‘a translatability without remainder’
(Standish 1999, 11).

The idea of untranslatability in Benjamin and Derrida’s work suggests that there are limits to
what we can understand of the foreign but also of ourselves. The relationship between the
foreign and the native is also addressed by Stanley Cavell who has been extremely interested in
Thoreau’s writing. One of the themes that run through his book, The senses of Walden, is under-
standing other cultures. He wrote this at the time of the Vietnam War and was thinking not just
about relations between America and Europe but about America and Asia. He is interested in
the idea of the native and the foreign but not simply in terms of native speakers and foreign
speakers, but in terms of how we see things as foreign in our own lives because they are differ-
ent. Cavell is concerned with the more profound notion of the native and the foreign, and with
the ways in which we can be anxiously preoccupied with the foreign and not question the native;
this raises questions about our native culture and language and our relation to others. He offers
a rich and more complex way of thinking about intercultural understanding, recognising the role
of education in helping us to observe the strangeness of our lives. 

For a child to grow he requires family and familiarity, but for a grownup to grow he requires strange-
ness and transformation, i.e., birth. (Cavell 1972, 60)

Cavell’s philosophy as translation is about encountering the strange in the familiar. His is a
call to discover and rediscover, continually, the strange and the familiar in our selves. It is not,
he says, ‘the other that poses the first barrier to knowledge of him or her, but myself’. Language
is important in rebuilding the self’s relationship to culture and to others, to our neighbour. Our
relation to language is important because it is about ‘placing ourselves in the world’ (ibid.). To
do this we need, as Saito and Standish (2008) have noted, a more subtle language that moves
beyond the monolingualism of policy discourse and performativity; the university should be a
place where this can begin.

Higher education in translation

As we saw earlier language is especially complex in the university and the language of performa-
tivity pervades university life. Such a language is inappropriate for the work of the university
because it denies the need for translation – everything is transparent and commensurable and
translation is reduced to a technical problem. The discourse is persuasive but impoverished. Take
for example accountability – it is conceived in terms of quality assurance systems with the result
that a richer sense of accountability, of being accountable for our words and actions, of being
held to account for our words and how we behave towards each other, is suppressed. This is
particularly important in the university and all institutions of higher education; the father tongue
is needed here otherwise it is not truly ‘higher’ education. Difficult and uncomfortable questions
must always be asked and be allowed to be asked. Students, especially those in higher education,
should be disturbed by what they read in the sense that taken-for-granted assumptions are chal-
lenged, that they see the strange in the familiar. This requires a sensitivity and humility, and a
way of thinking that is not found in the language of transparency and total quality systems that
pervade policy documents and education more generally.

If the previous argument holds, then the following is perhaps a key point. Often the cultural
richness of the university is viewed primarily in terms of the diversity of the student population.



232  S. Harris

It is important also to consider the diversity of ways of thinking about the world and our place
in that world that comes to us through, for example, our engagement with the written word –
the texts or canon of a subject. Texts need to be read and re-read, argued over and re-interpreted,
for every generation. In so doing new ways are opened up to explore the question of how we
are internationalised by an education that is higher, rather than how higher education is interna-
tionalised; this is a question to be engaged with not only in a teaching context but throughout
the cultural life of the university. It is also a question that draws attention to ourselves not so
much as independent, fully autonomous beings, but as always in relation.

In this paper the language of the internationalisation of higher education has been taken as a
point of departure – an occasion for thought – from which to consider the concept of transla-
tion. The internationalised university is a place where it is possible to acknowledge the richness
that comes from different languages and cultures coming together – it allows moments of
conversion which our cultural life needs and depends on. We have seen, however, that an
understanding of translation as a merely technical matter of moving from one language to
another is both limited and mistaken. The question of translation is not simply about how to
accommodate linguistic diversity within a system of higher education but rather it is about the
nature of meaning and this is and must remain a central concern of higher education, the univer-
sity, and the wider public.

Notes
1. ‘Communication’ is the term Bergdahl uses; in my translation of Benjamin the term used is ‘information’.

Notes on contributor
Suzy Harris is Professor of Education at Roehampton University. She is Director of the Centre for
Research in Beliefs, Rights and Values in Education (BRaVE) and the Secretary of the Roehampton Branch
of the Philosophy of Education Society Great Britain. She is also Editor of International Studies in Sociology
of Education. Her current research is on the internationalisation of higher education in the UK and Europe,
especially Spain where she has strong collaborative links. This work adopts a more philosophical approach
to theorising higher education policy.

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