My banal cosmopolitan fridge magnets

In response to my post about the banal cosmopolitanism of multilingual welcome signs last week, a number of people suggested that they quite enjoy finding their language(s) in such signs. This made me think of the ways in which global linguistic hierarchies are being produced and reproduced through practices that ostensibly value multilingualism. Even being listed in such signage may be an index of privilege while the majority of the world’s languages and peoples are rendered invisible and speechless.

The fridge magnets in my house constitute a perfect example of banal cosmopolitanism: there is one in the shape of a rooster that says “Portugal” and “Macau Souvenir”; one that spells out “Abu Dhabi” (the model horse that used to be stuck under the name has come off); one that has a map of the North American West Coast and says “California – a view of the world”; there is one that says “New Zealand” and features four colorful kiwis; another one in the shape of the map of New York State that says “Ithaca of New York”; a round one with “Buddha Eyes” from “Nepal”, where “Nepal” is written in the Latin script but stylized in a way that looks vaguely like Devanagari; a doll-shaped one with Korean script and the English caption “hand made”; and then there are six magnets featuring a toy rabbit by the name of “Felix”, who plays with a globe, travels by plane and is placed against a bottle of “original American ketchup”.

“Letters from Felix: A little rabbit on a world tour” (Cover page, German edition)

The toy rabbit Felix is the main character in a series of German children’s books and animated films. The character has been immensely successful since it was first launched in 1994. Books in the series have been translated into 29 languages (which is highly unusual for German children’s books) and more than seven million copies have been sold worldwide. There is a feature-length movie and a huge range of Felix-branded merchandise including toys, lollies, reading glasses for children, travel accessories and much more. Since 2013 Felix has been an ambassador for the global charity SOS Children’s Villages.

In my house, we have a copy of one of the German-version books in the series, the well-read and much-loved Briefe von Felix: Ein kleiner Hase auf Weltreise (“Letters from Felix: A little rabbit on a world tour”). It is a prime example of banal cosmopolitanism: it presents the global sphere as mundane and socializes young children into the practice of tourism and international travel as normal.

It also presents the “world” of Felix’ “world tour” as an exclusively North-Atlantic world.

Felix’ letter from Paris

The plot is straightforward: it all starts with an airport scene and a family returning from their (obviously international but destination unspecified) summer holiday. Sophie, one of four children in the family, loses her toy rabbit Felix. After this sad end to the holidays, the new school year starts with a surprise: a letter from Felix. It turns out that the rabbit had ended up on the wrong flight and is now visiting London. The remainder of the book consists of the letters that Felix sends from his travels – in addition to London, he visits Paris, Rome, Cairo, Kenya and New York City. Each letter is read by the whole family and taken as an educational opportunity to learn more about each of Felix’ destinations. On December 06 – St Nicholas Day, when children in Germany get gifts – Felix comes back to Sophie with a suitcase full of souvenirs.

The book is highly multimodal: in addition to text and images, it also features airmailed letters that can be removed from their envelopes and read separately. The letters serve to connect the world of the German children as they go through the fall period between summer holidays and Christmas to the six international destinations visited by the toy rabbit.

In each letter, Felix proves to be a keen observer of language and culture and provides information about Paris, Rome, Cairo, Kenya and New York City that could be considered educational for children. One piece of information that children can take away from the book is that the world is multilingual; or, rather, that the Western world is multilingual. In other words, language is a topic of Felix’ letters from London, Paris, Rome and New York City but not of his letters from Cairo and Kenya.

The map of Felix’ “world” tour

In addition to these language fun facts, the letters from London, Paris, Rome and New York City also provide information about famous buildings and other tourist sights. Each letter then provides a learning opportunity for the family as Sophie asks her parents, grandma or aunt about further information, which they then look up in an encyclopedia, another book or even a photo album from previous travels. Through this kind of further research, Sophie, for instance, discovers that the “secret code” Felix refers to in his letter from Rome is actually Latin. Unlike her older brother who studies Latin in school, we learn that Sophie is too young to study Latin but that she really enjoys looking through her brother’s Latin textbook and looking at the images of ancient Roman buildings such as the Colosseum or the Pantheon.

By contrast to these four cities, Cairo and Kenya are represented differently.

Felix’ souvenirs: stickers – to represent fridge magnets? – for banal cosmopolitanism to colonize yet another space

In the letter from Cairo there is no mention of Arabic or contemporary life in Egypt; rather Felix visits the pyramids and it almost seems as if he had travelled back in time to the age of the pharaohs. The sense of time travel is reinforced through the fact that Sophie’s additional research is not undertaken through conversations with other family members and books but through a visit to the museum where there is a show entitled “ÄGYPTEN – ein vergangenes Königreich” (“Egypt – a bygone kingdom”). Further related learning is achieved by building a Lego pyramid.

Kenya – the only destination that is identified as a country rather than a city – has neither language nor culture: in fact, it seems empty of people. Felix only observes animals: elephants, zebras and lions; and to do further research about Kenya, Sophie visits the zoo.

There can be no doubt that the playful integration of multilingualism in this book is valuable for young children: they learn that there are many different languages in the world, that linguistic diversity is intriguing and that speaking different languages is enjoyable and pleasurable. It’s an important message.

However, the fact that the message of the pleasure of language learning and multilingualism is restricted to European languages also carries another message: that Egyptians and Kenyans do not have languages that are intriguing and worth paying attention to. In fact, along with their languages, the people of Africa are neither heard nor seen: for all the reader learns in the book, they may not even exist.

Felix’ “world tour” reminds us that the world of banal cosmopolitanism is not flat, as many globalization pundits would have us believe. It’s a hierarchy where even being listed can be a privilege.

Related content

• Banal cosmopolitanism
• What makes foreigner weird? A quick guide to orientalism
• Chapter Two “Linguistic Diversity and Stratification” of Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a shopping mall in Munich, Germany

Have you recently seen a “welcome” sign? They constitute a strange genre: ever more ubiquitous on the one hand, yet utterly false and insincere – how can you be “greeted” by a piece of stuff? – on the other.

Whenever I see one of these “welcome” signs, I am reminded of an anecdote told by a colleague who had travelled in Japan in the 1970s: he had visited Japan for an academic conference and added a few days of sightseeing. For the latter, he had rented a car to drive around the countryside. It was the days before GPS and mobile phones and satellite tracking; all he had was an old-fashioned paper map. The map had all the place names in the Latin script while the signs he saw next to the road were all in Japanese. Illiterate in Japanese, he had no way of matching a name on the map with a name on a sign.

Sure enough, he got lost. Because some signs had the place name in both Japanese and Latin scripts, he just kept on driving in the hope of finding such a bilingual sign to regain his bearings. To his mounting frustration, the only non-Japanese signs he encountered for a long time said: “Welcome!” He knew he was “welcome” but he didn’t know where – or even what – it was he was welcomed to …

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a heritage village in Abu Dhabi, UAE

A similar story is unlikely to happen today. Not only because of the advent of GPS and Google maps but also because directional signage outside the Anglophone world and particularly in countries that do not use the Latin script has become bilingual and largely follows the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals. Article 14 stipulates that “The inscription of words on informative signs […] in countries not using the Latin alphabet shall be both in the national language and in the form of a transliteration into the Latin alphabet reproducing as closely as possible the pronunciation in the national language.” As more and more countries have become signatories mono-script directional signage outside the Latin-script world have largely become a thing of the past.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign in a shopping mall in Los Angeles, California

In fact, it is not only directional signage that has become bi- or multilingual but the same is true of “welcome” signs, which must be one of the most multilingual genres on the planet.

Any self-respecting institution today says “welcome” multilingually in a show of banal cosmopolitanism.

“Banal cosmopolitanism” is based off the much better-known concept of “banal nationalism”, a frequent topic here on Language on the Move. Banal nationalism refers to the mundane discourses – flags, maps, national references, etc. – that enact national belonging in everyday life. Similarly, banal cosmopolitanism refers to mundane discourses that enact globalization in everyday life. Banal cosmopolitanism is apparent in the “mediatization and consumption of spatially distant places, signifiers of cultural diversity, and opening up of lifestyles to new experiential spaces and horizons” (Jaworski, 2015, p. 220).

One linguistic form that banal cosmopolitanism may take is the excessive use of new letterforms, punctuation marks, diacritics, and tittles, as Adam Jaworski shows in a 2015 paper entitled “Globalese.” Their use, particularly in brand and shop names, serves to create “novel, foreignized, visual-linguistic forms increasingly detached from their ‘original’ ethno-national languages” (p. 217). Detached from their national and local linguistic context, they point to somewhere else, somewhere in the realm of the global.

English “Welcome” graffiti in Ramsar, Iran

Multilingual “welcome” signs are another such mundane index of globalization and banal cosmopolitanism. Multilingual “welcome” signs feature prominently in consumption spaces – as the examples from shopping malls show and tourist destinations show. However, they are not exclusive to those and are increasingly popular also in universities and similar institutional spaces that want to mark themselves as internationalized, diverse and inclusive.

That all this indexing of cosmopolitanism is indeed “banal” and only runs skin deep is best exemplified by those multilingual “welcome” signs that get one or more of their versions wrong. And I don’t mean home-made signs in developing countries that get their English spelling wrong. What I mean are huge signs professionally produced on durable materials that scream “welcome” in dozens of languages – certainly more languages than the designers of the sign could master or could be bothered to verify the translation for.

The versions that go wrong most frequently are those that use right-to-left scripts.

Multilingual “Welcome” sign, University of Limerick, Ireland

If a designer gets the Arabic and Persian translation of “Welcome” from Google Translate and then copies and pastes it into a selection of other translations, their word processor is likely to re-order the letters from left to right; as happened in this sign at the University of Limerick.

As a result of this linguistically-uninformed process, the Persian version, for instance, which should be “خوش آمدید” is scrambled to read something like the equivalent of “emoclew”; a line later (2^nd before last), half of the word, “آمدید” has been repeated, leaving a truncated version similar to “come”; again scrambled to actually spell something like “emoc”.

Examples such as these are not at all rare: in a previous post, we featured an apron that combines both banal nationalism and banal cosmopolitanism in one item and where the Arabic version of “Australia” is spelled backwards.

So who are the recipients of these multilingual “welcome” signs? The signs are intended to send a message of cosmopolitanism, internationalization, diversity and inclusion – but it’s a message that is intended for the dominant population so that they can feel good about themselves. If a reader were not to speak English, the multilingual “welcome” featured here are just as useful as they were to the driver lost in the Japan. And if you are a reader of one of the languages that come in the garbled version, it’s adding insult to injury.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that the University of Limerick’s “Welcome” sign was intended to welcome members of an international conference devoted to multilingualism. That was incorrect. Attendees of that conference posed beneath the banner and shared it on social media – that’s how I came across the image – but the banner was not associated with the conference.

Reference

Jaworski, A. (2015). Globalese: A New Visual-Linguistic Register. Social Semiotics, 25(2), 217-235. doi: 10.1080/10350330.2015.1010317

The front cover of the tourist map of multilingual Macau

Last week I had the privilege of visiting the University of Macau and in Macau I discovered yet another unique variation on the many multilingual landscapes we have featured here on Language on the Move.

Macau, a former Portuguese colony, has been a Special Administrative Region of China since 1999. The official languages of Macau are Chinese and Portuguese. English plays an unofficial but highly prominent role: it is the medium of instruction at the University of Macau and at a number of secondary schools. Other schools use Cantonese as medium of instruction and there is one Portuguese-medium school.

Trilingualism in Chinese, Portuguese and English is just the beginning, though. The linguistic situation is further complicated by the diversity of Chinese and the importance of the tourism industry.

The version of Chinese that is local to Macau is Cantonese but Putonghua is gaining in importance. Macau has about half a million residents but welcomes a staggering number of tourists: close to 30 million tourists visit Macau each year. Most of these come from Mainland China and so it is not surprising that in tourism spaces I overheard much more Putonghua than Cantonese. Written Chinese, too, comes in at least three varieties: traditional characters, simplified characters and pinyin. Furthermore, pinyin looks different depending on whether the writer followed English-based or Portuguese-based conventions.

The languages of other tourist markets also feature with maps and signs in Japanese, Korean and Thai.

The linguistic landscape of Macau is thus extremely diverse and each tourist site has its own conventions, as the following examples demonstrate.

A-Ma Temple

Chinese inscriptions at the A-Ma Temple

The famous Taoist temple dedicated to the goddess of seafarers, Matsu, from which the name “Macau” is thought to derive, is enlisted on the UNESCO World Heritage List. On the day we visited it was crowded with Chinese tour groups. The languages on display were ancient Chinese inscriptions in stones and on the temple façades. The prayer tablets where the devout can record their wishes and prayers also seemed to be Chinese only (although there were hundreds of them so I cannot be sure that prayers in other languages were not also hidden away somewhere).

The direction and prohibition signs were either in Chinese only or in Chinese and English (of the non-standardized “Chinglish” variety). One stall selling incense sticks and other devotionalia featured Chinese and Thai signs. Portuguese and what might be called “standard English” were notable for their absence.

Our Lady of Penha Church

Latin and Chinese on a devotional card at La Penha Church

One of Macau’s many Catholic churches (Macau used to be the staging post for the Christianisation of East Asia and has the largest number of Catholic churches by square mile in Asia), Penha Church sits on a hill and affords an excellent view over the harbour and across the bay to the mainland. The church itself is not a tourist destination but the spiritual centre of a community of Trappist nuns from Indonesia.

When we visited, the church was empty. Outside, there were a few newly-wed couples in Western wedding garb who were out to have their pictures taken. As far as I could hear, they received their instructions from the photographers on how to pose in Cantonese.

The languages on the signage could not have been more different from the A-Ma Temple: inscriptions on the façade were also monolingual but monolingual in Portuguese rather than Chinese. Signs about the code of conduct came in three language combinations: Chinese-Only, Chinese-English and English-Chinese.

Signage relating to the spiritual life of the church was either predominantly in Chinese or English, with one or the other language predominating and a few expressions in the other interspersed. To my great surprise, I also discovered some Latin slogans on devotional cards. A collection box, which looked quite old and featured Portuguese, Chinese and English suggests that the English presence in Macau predates the tourism boom and globalized signage of the past decade.

Mandarin House

Trilingual poster at the Mandarin House about 盛 世 危 言 (Warning to a Prosperous Age)

The so-called “Mandarin House” is another UNESCO World Heritage listed building. It used to be the residence of the Qing dynasty reformer Zheng Guanying. When we visited, the building was deserted and other than the attendants we were the only people present making it a very serene space. Information and prohibition signs were relatively standardized and trilingual in Chinese, Portuguese and English although some prohibition signs were more haphazard and contained only Chinese and English.

What was most interesting was the posters about Zheng Guanying’s book Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age (Shengshi weiyan 盛 世 危 言). What little information about the book I could gather from the information panels suggests that it is a highly relevant text for Intercultural Communication Studies. One website sums up the argument as follows:

As a famous reformer of late Qing China, Zheng Guanying was the earliest advocate of representative and participatory political system in the 1870s, the earliest to call for “commercial warfare ” against Western economic imperialism, and one of the earliest to seriously study international law and its relevance to China’s national identity and foreign relations. He was also one of the earliest Chinese to emphasize the combination of Western medicine and Chinese medicine.

His ideas continue to be highly influential in contemporary China and a translation of Shengshi weiyan would be highly desirable. Unfortunately, I have not been able to discover an English translation. I hope this is not another case of “no translation;” if it is, a translation would be highly desirable not only for Chinese Studies but also for Intercultural Communication Studies.

Casinos

Official trilingual “no smoking” sign

A discussion of the touristic linguistic landscape of Macau would not be complete without reference to the casinos because that is where most of the 30 million annual visitors are headed. I got to visit two of them: the Venetian, which is operated by the Las Vegas-based Sands corporation and is an imitation of the Las Vegas Venetian, and City of Dreams, a joint venture between the Macau casino dynasty Ho and the Australian billionaire James Packer. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, the gambling areas occupy only a relatively small part of the casinos and while that is obviously where the action is, I did not enter.

Casino resorts are intended to be spectacular and novel. The Venetian, for instance, looks like a cross between a baroque church and Venetian canals and plazas and City of Dreams features a huge fish tank with (digital) mermaids. However, when it comes to signage there is no trace of the spectacular and unique. In both casinos, commercial signage was completely standardized in the non-language of other global consumer spaces. Direction signs were also standardized in Chinese and English.

Portuguese, by contrast, only had a tiny presence on state-mandated signs, particularly the ubiquitous no-smoking signs, which are in Chinese, Portuguese and English. The biggest surprise were the emergency exit signs: they did not contain any English and were in Portuguese and Chinese only.

Linguistic Pragmatism

Analysts of multilingualism in Macau have described multilingualism in Macau as “an illusion” because official societal Chinese-Portuguese bilingualism is rarely undergirded by individual bilingualism. Indeed, all the people I had extended conversations with were either English speakers from Australia, UK and the USA or Putonghua speakers from Mainland China and Taiwan. With three exceptions none of these had learnt either of the two official languages (the exceptions being an American and a Tawainese who had learnt Cantonese and an Australian who had learnt Portuguese).

Despite the amazing multilingualism in the public signage it may thus well be that the various language communities largely keep themselves to themselves. The fact that each space I visited has its own language practices with regard to signage seems to point in the same direction. If so, it is a pragmatic approach that seems to work perfectly well as a way to manage linguistic diversity and public communication with multiple audiences.

Pompei Restaurant, Karachi (Source: fcpakistan.com)

A few days ago I had an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Having lived all my life in Karachi, I had until then never heard of the Pompei Restaurant. I was invited there by a visiting British academic, who declined my invitation to have dinner at our house and wanted to meet me at the Pompei instead. He seemed very surprised that I had never heard of the Pompei, which he seemed to know well.

Armed with the Google map directions, I still managed to lose my way but arrived a few minutes before my host.  Stepping into the restaurant was like going down the rabbit hole: I left Karachi behind and entered Europe.

The furniture, the wall hangings, the light music, and the candle lit tables all made me feel as if I had been transported to Italy. I was greeted very politely by the valet and the gentleman at the reception and was taken to the table my host had booked for us. I sat down and looked around. The bar with impressive brass levers to pour beer caught my attention. I asked the waiter for a glass of wine in Urdu but my eagerness was met with a thin smile and the English response: ‘Sir, wine is not served here.’

At that moment, my host arrived. Before sitting down, he handed a bag to the waiter. The waiter took the bag and returned with two menu cards. The menu card was in English only but, despite the fact that English is the main language I use in my professional life, I did not recognize the name of single dish on the menu except for pizza.

My host graciously helped me with the selection of starters and the main course when he realized my ignorance of Italian cuisine. Before the starters were served, my host’s bag was brought back to him and a bottle of wine emerged. The waiter apologized to my host and said he wasn’t allowed to pour the wine for him. My host smiled back in the manner of a man of the world who understands cross-cultural differences and filled our glasses himself.

While savouring the novelty of eating Italian food and drinking alcohol, I did not omit to look around me and take note of the people who had by now filled the place. The majority were foreigners but there were also a fair number of locals. Nearly everyone was drinking alcohol and smoking. English was the only language I heard.

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the novelty of it all, it was good my host kept the conversation going by telling me about his interactions with Pakistani scholars, who he had been visiting as a UN ambassador in the previous weeks. His role was to provide consultancy on improving academic standards. ‘You guys don’t know how to write,’ he observed casually. In my mind, I was busy adding all the other things I had discovered in the last hour only that we didn’t know.

When we finished the meal, I of course tried to pay my share. However, I have to admit I was grateful to my host that he wouldn’t allow me. I also have to admit that I tried my best not to stare when he put his hand in his pocket and pulled it back out with a fist full of currency notes. The bunch of currency notes was so thick that he had a bit of a problem picking out 7,000 Pakistani rupee notes out of this thick wad of US dollars. He gave those 7,000 rupees (ca. 70 Australian dollars) in the same manner as if they were worth 70 rupees. We had just spent around 7% of the average annual per capita income in Pakistan on a meal!

I thanked my host for his generosity and we parted ways.

Walking back to my car, I kept on thinking about my experience: I had just stepped out of Pakistan for a few hours without ever leaving Karachi. The material difference between the Pompei Restaurant and its surroundings was spinning in my head. I also thought about the role of language in this world of mirrors. Pompei exists in Karachi because of the development industry and the foreigners who come here as part of international institutions, which are supposed to help our poor economy. But are they really helping by creating islands of opulence that are unrecognizable to the average citizen? For me Pompei seems like a new sovereign state maintained by international money that has come to us from the World Bank, the IMF and other international bodies – ostensibly to reduce the deep and pervasive poverty in Pakistan but practically to be enjoyed by whom?

I was also musing on the intercultural nature of this encounter: a British and a Pakistani academic meeting in an Italy-themed space in globalized Karachi sounds very cool and postmodern and like a coming together in some global, hyprid, even ‘metrolingual’ space. But is that what had happened? To me, the encounter felt as one that accentuated difference and increased distance between people of different cultures. Had this encounter not turned me into someone utterly deficient: an academic who doesn’t know how to write? A customer who doesn’t know how to order? A local who doesn’t belong?

My last thought was about resistance: who is going to resist this new economy and its language? How can we truly achieve meaning in intercultural communication in a grossly unequal world?

Branded kids' products on display in an Iranian store

Recently, I had occasion to visit a toy store in Isfahan to buy a present for my seven-year-old cousin, who had invited me to his birthday party. Grand, impressive and splendid, the store in question offered a variety of products, from children stationeries and toys of different shapes and colours to XBOX games.

My original intention was to buy something of the Dara & Sara brand, an Iranian line of dolls, books and audio materials. Yet, to my surprise, the store had almost no trace of local toys such as these. I left the shop in disappointment hoping to find something more ‘culturally relevant’ in another shop but I failed again. Eventually, I gave up and bought a Ben 10 watch and a Ben 10 backpack as gifts.

The majority of the products in these toy stores had English messages or expressions and were clearly coded as “global” rather than “Iranian.” The prestige, the price and the quality of imported toys have consigned local products to a marginal role such that I, the customer, was just a passive and helpless recipient and left without any choice. Unsurprisingly then, it turned out that I was not the only one without a choice: at the birthday party, I was disappointed to find out that almost all the guests had brought more or less similar presents.

However, there is a further twist to this story: A few days after the birthday party, I met my little cousin again at yet another family gathering. He was wearing one of his birthday presents, a Spiderman t-shirt, which was emblazoned with the slogan “The Amazing Spiderman.”

As members of my extending family were spending time together, the TV was on in the background. The channel was set to one of the Iranian national TV channels and the program that was running was an episode in a crime series featuring the Iranian police, which in Persian is called naja. In one of the scenes a group of naja commandos raided a building and arrested the bad guys.

The word naja was printed in bold letters on the back of their uniforms and my little cousin obviously made a connection between the uniform of these TV heroes and his own T-shirt: he shouted in amazement: “The amazing naja!”

When I had started my quest for a toy that was culturally relevant, I had been disappointed. However, my cousin’s reaction demonstrates that global, cultural symbols are always appropriated locally – often in unexpected ways. The episode throws into question the long-established assumption that linguistic and cultural hegemonies always work in a top-down manner and paves the way for a totally different interpretation: the spread of English and its related cultural products operate in complex and at times contradictory ways. Ultimately, Spiderman t-shirts display their own ‘local’ orders of indexicality.

Now, that we are ready to return to Australia and have to think of souvenirs for school and club mates back home, we’ve been looking at pens and pencils as convenient bulk souvenirs again. Here in Dubai, there are plenty of pens that say “I love Dubai,” are adorned with little models of camels, or sport pictures of Dubai’s two landmark buildings, the Burj Khalifa and the Burj Al Arab. That’s only pencils, of course, and I won’t even mention some of the completely whacky souvenirs for sale, including a salt and pepper shaker in the form of an Arab man dressed in a white dishdash (salt) and an Arab woman dressed in a black abaya (pepper). All these souvenirs are made in China, too, (maybe even in the same factory as the koala and kangaroo souvenirs?) but, again, the models and images of camels, traditional local dress, or landmark buildings are supposed to be code for ‘authentic Dubai.’

So, do you want to know what my daughter chose as Dubai souvenirs for her mates? None of the above. We ended up in a Daiso store in one of Dubai’s mall. Daiso is a Japanese chain that sells Japanese knickknack and displays huge signs “Everything in store imported from Japan.” Japanese stuff is hugely popular with children and young adults globally and my daughter felt that an ‘authentic Japanese’ souvenir would be more popular with her Australian friends than something Dubai-ish. Do I need to mention that, despite being ‘imported from Japan’ most of the goods in the store, and certainly the ones we ended up buying are also ‘made in China’?

To sum up this madness: I’ve spent money on objects made in China in Australia and Dubai. Then, I schlepped the objects bought in Australia to Germany, Iran and the UAE and the objects bought in Dubai to Australia. Why? As an expression of affection and a way to establish symbolic connections between my child and other children in diverse locations and as a reminder of various places to which we have been (Australia) or that are widely thought of as cool (Japan).

The brisk business in souvenir shops seems to suggest that I’m far from being alone in engaging in such irrational practices. Indeed, “objects and language in trans-contextual communication” make up a fascinating area of enquiry and will be the focus of an upcoming special issue of the journal Social Semiotics. Check out the call for papers here. The deadline for abstracts is March 02, 2012.

Persian version of my blog post about English as the non-language of globalization.
Translated by Niloufar Behrooz (نیلوفر بهروز)

(نوشتار شماره ٢ در مجموعه نوشتار های کوتاه درباره ی نشانه های چند زبانه)

اغلب تابلوهایی كه در مكان هایِ عمومیِ حالِ حاضر يافت می شوند جنبه ی تجاری دارند. اين نوعی روشِ تبليغات است و انتخابِ لغات در تابلوهایِ تجاری از جمله اسامیِ مغازه ها و فروشگاه ها به خوبی بيانگر ارزشهایِ مرتبط با يك زبان خاص مي باشد. هدف اصلی اين است كه معنایِ ضمنیِ نامِ فروشگاه به گونه ای باشد كه مشتری های زيادی را جذب كند. از يك چشم اندازِ چند زبانه، نشانه هایِ جالب آن هایی هستند که در آن ها از زبانی غير از زبانِ پیش فرض – زبانِ رسمي يك مكانِ خاص – استفاده شده باشد. در بيشتر دنيایِ غيرِ انگليسی زبان علامت هایِ انگليسی البته باعث مباهاتِ آن مكان شده وانگليسی به طور گسترده ای با مفاهيمی چون نوين گری، پيشرفت، جهانی سازی و مصرف گرايی پيوند خورده است. در حالی كه زبانهای غير انگليسی غالبا نشانگر كليشه های قومی هستند، انگليسی نشانگر يك كليشه یِ اجتماعی است (همان طور كه با شرح جزئيات در اين مقاله به آن پرداخته ام). اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی قرار نيست همان طور كه  فرانسوی یا ايتاليايی برای آغشتنِ یک داد وستدِ اقتصادی به رنگ و بویِ فرانسوی و ايتاليايی مورد استفاده قرار می گیرد، يكسری كيفيتِ بريتانيايی و آمريكايیِ کلیشه ای را تبليغ كند.

ارتباط زبان انگليسی با مصرف گرايی به طور كامل در تابلویِ اين فروشگاه در فرودگاهِ مونيخ مشخص شده است. مونيخ پايتختِ باواريا يكي از ايالات ساختار فدرال آلمان است. لغتِ آلمانیِ موردِ استفاده برای باواريا بايرن (Bayern) است و بخش اول Bay-ern دقيقا مثل كلمه یِ انگليسیِ Buy (خريدن) تلفظ مي شود. اسم ِ فروشگاه نوعی معمایِ لفظی ِ به تمامِ معناست. رنگ ملی باواريا، يعني آبي، در پس زمينه یِ لوزی شکلِ تابلو روابط ملی (گرایانه) را تقویت می کند. به عنوان كسی كه در باواريا بزرگ شده، با پيش فرضی از نماد ملی كه در بچگی به من القا شده بود، عكس العملِ ناخودآگاهِ من اما نسبت به اين تابلو از نوع وحشت و رنجش بود.

زبان انگليسی در اين تابلو به وضوح هيچ گونه ارتباطی با هيچ كشور انگليسی زبانی ندارد، بلكه انگليسی را به نمادِ ملیِ ناحیه ای غيرِ انگليسی زبان، يعنی باواريا، پيوند مي دهد و مردمِ آن ناحیه را به عنوان يك هدف مصرفی عرضه مي كند. کالاهایِ موجود در اين فروشگاه از انواعِ سوغات به شمار مي آيند، سوغاتِ باواريايي، آلمانی، اروپايی، فرودگاهی، كريسمسی ( من اين عكس را نوامبر سال پيش گرفتم) و چيزهای ديگری كه تنها برایِ خريده شدن آن جا هستند. بخريد!

مثل بسياری از فرودگاه های ديگر، انگليسی اين مكان را به نا-فضایی برای مصرف ِ مفرط، گردشِ مفرط و نماد هایِ ملیِ مفرط تبديل می سازد. انگليسی زبانِ جهانی سازی است؛ در این شکی نیست اما جهاني سازیِ هيچ-چيز، همان طور که جورج ریتزر به ما می گوید! آيا اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی زبانِ هيچ-چيز است؟ نا-افرادی در نا-مکانی سرگرم ِ خریدنِ نا-چیزهایی در نا-برخوردهایِ تجاری و با استفاده از یک نا-زبان؟

References

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage.

The world in Arabia

I spent my last day in the Middle East at Dubai Mall, the self-proclaimed “Centre of Now.” The mall guide has the heading “Welcome to Everything.” Without a doubt it’s one of the most amazing places on earth! A huge temple devoted to the gods of consumption. One of the things that make Dubai Mall awe-inspiring is the way in which the signifiers of the global have been brought together in one space.

Many of the more than 1,200 retail outlets explicitly reference other places, as in “Baldi, Firenze 1867” (interior decoration) “Dockers, San Francisco” (clothes) or “Kozi, Africa” (a coffee shop decorated with the flags of a number of African nations).

The referencing of other places is complemented by the brands’ multilingualism. Elsewhere, I have described this multilingual branding as an emerging non-language, the global consumption register. In addition to Arabic and English, and Arabic written in the Latin script and English written in the Arabic script (more on transliterated brand names here), I’ve mostly noticed French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian. I’m sure that that is only a partial account, as I only spent a few hours there and was there as a consumer, not a linguist. I hope someone will do some systematic research of the linguistic landscape of Dubai Mall soon!

The languages apparent on the signs are complemented by the languages you actually hear spoken by the people who work and visit there. Most transactions seem to take place in English, the language of everyone and no one in this world. The people who stroll around in groups, pairs and families, spoke more different languages than I could count. Both workers and visitors seem to hail from all the lands on earth. Dubai unites people from all races, creeds, colors and languages. I will miss being in the centre of now and everything!

The billboard is in fact an ad for Swiss Tourism – I know the characteristic red, the emblem with the Swiss Cross inside an edelweiss and the slogan “get natural” all too well from a research project into the linguistic and communicative challenges faced by the Swiss tourism industry I conducted a few years ago. The billboard is in Hakone because apparently the railway I was travelling on, Hakone Tozan Railway, is a sister railway of Rhätische Bahn.

No sooner had I got over my surprise of finding myself staring at the Swiss Alps instead of Mt Fuji, I found myself in front of the Cafe St Moritz. There is some serious devotion to Graubünden/Grischun in Hakone! The Cafe St Moritz was also liberally displaying the Swiss flag, including on its tables. Banal nationalism again, of course, but with the imagery of another nation! The menu of the Cafe St Moritz, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be Swiss-inspired. Hot dogs must probably be considered un-Swiss

Advertising takes cultural symbols and images from one place and uses them in another to create authenticity. The use of national imagery from elsewhere in marketing coffee-shops, restaurants, food and drink (and all manner of other products and services) is a feature of contemporary symbolic landscapes the world over.

My first reaction to finding Switzerland in Hakone was one of dismay: I felt like I’d stumbled upon yet another non-space of globalization where globally circulating images make one place exactly like another and Hakone becomes Disentis/Mustér, and Disentis/Mustér becomes Hakone. However, on reflection and after reading up on gaikoku mura (“foreign villages”), country-themed theme parks, I have changed my mind: if local tourism can create an exotic tourism experience, then that is a much more sustainable way of travelling. Why would you make a long and tedious journey to travel all the way to Switzerland and create a huge carbon footprint if you can experience Switzerland 70 min outside downtown Tokyo? And considering that it’s entirely possible that in the meantime some marketeer has come up with a Japanese theme for St Moritz …

London Dairy ad on a building in Abu Dhabi, UAE

Igloo ad on truck in Abu Dhabi, UAE

به تازگى به يك پايان نامه ی کارشناسی ارشدِ نوشته شده در دانشگاهِ آفريقاى جنوبى در سال ٢٠٠٦ که درباره ی تبليغاتِ مربوط به فست فود در کشور عربستان تحقیق کرده بود برخوردم. نويسنده، ال آقا، به اين مهم رسيده بود كه:

” ٩٧% پاسخ دهنده ها عقيده داشتند كه ترجمه ها در زبان عربى غير قابل فهم هستند. ٣درصد باقيمانده گفتند كه گاهى ترجمه ها را مي فهمند” (ص. ٩٢.)

حتی اگر اندازه ی مجموعه ی تحقیق نسبتا كوچك است، نتايجِ شگفت آوری در آن وجود دارد: در حقیقت نویسنده اظهار می دارد كه تمام جميتى كه هدفِ يك پيام تبليغاتى هستند آن پیام را متوجه نمي شوند. جای تعجب نيست كه عرب زبانان اغلب از اينكه زبانِ عربى با انگليسى “آلوده” (اصطلاحی که نویسنده انتخاب می کند، ص. ٨٢) شده است ناراحتند.  ال آقا به اين  نکته اشاره مي كند كه روش مورد استفاده برای ترجمه در مجموعه ی تبليغاتی او نویسه گردانی است و نه ترجمه. نویسه گردانی در جای ديگرى در جهان عرب هم يافت مي شود. اين چهار مثال را در نظر بگیرید. من دو عكس اول را در ابوظبى گرفتم. عكس سوم در قاهره گرفته شده و توسط گولف نیوز منتشر شده.  عكس چهارم را هم، با نهايت تعجب، در مونيخ گرفتم.    

وجه اشتراك اين نشانه ها این است كه دو زبانی به نظر مي رسند حال آنكه در واقع تک زبانی در دو ساختار نوشتاری متفاوت هستند.

لاندن دِیری درساختار نوشتاری عربی و لاتين همان لاندن دِیری نوشته می شود. اگلوو نيز درساختار نوشتاري اين زبان ها همان  اگلوو است. مکدونالدز و سمارت نيز دراين زبان ها همان مکدونالدز و سمارت نوشته مي‌شوند. مکدونالدز ممكن است تك زبانی به نظر برسد اما اين فقط به اين خاطر است كه نه نسخه ی لاتينی و نه نسخه ی سيريليك كه زينت بخش فروشگاه مکدونالدز در ماريين پلازِ مركزیِ مونيخ هستند، درتصوير گنجانده نشده اند.

Clothing store in Cairo, Egypt; source: http://bit.ly/duKNKV

McDonald’s outlet in Munich, Germany

بعضي از اين نويسه گردانی ها راحت تر از بقیه با الگوهای زبان عربی سازگار مي شوند اما تمامی آن ها مي تونند لغات قرضی محسوب شده و جزیی نامتعارف و بيگانه را در اين زبان جا دهند. بدون تعجب، ‌بعضي از عرب زبانان این لغات را آزار دهنده مي‌دانند. ال آقا ادعا می ‌كند كه اين نوع تبليغات بلادرنگ “توسط فرهنگ مقصد رد می شود” (ص.vi) .  در مورد این ادعا اطمینان قطعی ندارم با توجه به اينكه می بینم چقدر اين کار متداول است ورستوران های فست فود با چه رونقی درمنطقه مشغول کسب وکارند.

البته، انتقال نام های تجاری از يك عرصه ی زباني به عرصه ی ديگر ذاتاً دشواراست به این دلیل که ضرورتِ حفظِ نام تجاری به منظور شناخته شدن آن با ضرورتِ پاسخگو بودن به ویژگی های بازار مقصد درتضاد است. بسياري از مردم بعضي از اسامي بی مسمی ِ عجیب را شنيده و مورد تمسخر قرارداده اند. اسم هایی مثل پاجرو كه شركت میتسوبیشی قبل از معرفي آن به كشورهاي آمريكاي لاتين، زحمت چك كردن معناي آن را به خود نداد (پاجرو معادل يك فحشِ چهار حرفی دربعضي كشورهای منطقه است). فورد هم زمانی كه نُوا را به اسپانيايی زبان ها معرفي كرد، مرتكب همين اشتباه شد (نُوا در زبان اسپانيايي به معناي حركت نكردن است). من درپايان نامه ی دكتری خود يك فصل را به غلط های فاحشِ نام هایِ تجاریِ بين زباني اختصاص داده ام كه از قسمت منابع قابل دسترسي است. با اين حال، ‌اشتباهاتي از اين قبيل اساساً مربوط هستند به دوره ی قديمي، غيرحرفه اي و ابتدايي تر تبليغات، مطمئناً پيش از ظهور بازاریابی تنوع گرا (سياست همخوانی تبلیغات با گوناگونی مخاطب).

بازگردانی مکدونالدز به چند زبان (آيا بازگردانیِ چند زبانی می تواند اصطلاحی براي اين پديده باشد؟) درمونيخ واضح ترین مثال برای تدبیری است كه تا به امروز به آن رسیده ام: تلاشی آشكار برای نشان دادن تنوع به صورت نشانه ای توسط يكی از متحدالشكل ترين کمپانی های جهان.

برعكس نام های تجاری برجسته ايالات متحده همچون مکدونالدز كه درپي فاصله گرفتن سمبولیک (نشانه ای) خود از همه ی انواع سلطه، ازجمله سلطه زبانی هستند،‌ تا بتوانند تجارت سلطه گرانه ی خود را ادامه دهند، فروشگاه هاي كوچك محلي همچون سمارت درقاهره به پشتوانه و اعتبار زبان انگليسی برای جذب مشتری دلگرم هستند.

Frontpage of the IT section of the Jam-e Jam newspaper, Iran

يكي از دلايلي كه من اساساً موافق نويسه گردانی نيستم، جعلي و تقليدی بودن نام های تجاریست . سطح اين نشانه های چند زباني را اندکی خراش دهید و تك زبانی انگلیسی را در پس آن مشاهده کنید. با اين حال، من يك نمونه از نام های نوشته شده به چند زبان را در مجموعه ی اطلاعاتم دارم كه نه از جهان عرب، بلكه از ايران است : نام  بخش آی تی (فناوري اطلاعات ) روزنامه ی ايرانیِ جام جم، کلیک نام دارد. کلیک واژه ای فراتر از يك نويسه گردانی ساده است از آن جايی كه می تواند به هر دو صورت خوانده شود:

از راست به چپ بخوانيد، درساختار نوشتاری زبان عربي کلیک به دست مي‌آيد و از چپ به راست هم کلیک درساختار نوشتاری زبان لاتين حاصل مي شود. ابتكارِ چند زبانی به بهترين نحوش!

كسي  هست که مثال هايي از نويسه برگردانِ نام هایِ تجاری و تبليغات داشته باشد؟ من هميشه برای افزايش مجموعه ی خود به حالتِ آماده باشم.

Al Agha, Basem Abbas (2006). The translation of fast-food advertising texts from English into Arabic Unpublished MA dissertation, University of South Africa