Lost in Translation?

Language policy, media and community in the EU and Australia: some lessons from the SBS

Aneta Podkalicka

B.A. Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków;

M.A. Uniwersytet Wrocławski; Wrocław,

M.A. Ruhr-Universität, Bochum

A dissertation presented

in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

2007

Keywords

Language

Translation

Policy

Public service broadcasting

Cultural citizenship

TV programming

Abstract

Cultural diversity is a central issue of our times, although with different emphases in the European and Australian context. Media and communication studies have begun to draw on work in translation studies to understand how diversity is experienced across hybrid cultures. Translation is required both for multilingual (multicultural) societies such as Australia and for trans-national entities such as the European Union. Translation is also of increasing importance politically and even emotionally as individual nations and regions face the challenge of globalisation, migration, and the Americanisation of media content.

The thesis draws on cultural and media policy analysis. Programming strategies are reviewed and ‘conversational’ interviews conducted with broadcasting managers and staff at SBS Australia and across multilingual public broadcasters in the EU (BBC WS, Deutsche Welle, ARTE, Radio Multikulti Berlin, Barcelona Televisió). These are used to investigate the issues, challenges, and uses of the multilingual broadcasting logic for Australia’s and Europe’s cultural realities.

This thesis uses the concept of ‘translation’ as a key metaphor for bridging differences and establishing connections among multicultural citizens in the context of the European Union and Australia. It is proposed that of the two versions of translation – institutional in the EU and mediated in Australia respectively – the mediated version has achieved higher success in engaging ordinary citizens in more affective, informal and everyday forms of cross-cultural communication. Specifically, the experience of the Special Broadcasting Service (Australia’s multilingual and multicultural public broadcaster) serves as a model to illuminate the cultural consequences of the failure of the EU to develop translation practices beyond the level of official, institutional and political communication. The main finding is the identification of a need for more mediated interlingual exchange ; that is a translation of language policy in Europe into media experience for ordinary citizen-consumers, at both institutional and textual levels.

Acknowledgments

I thank my supervisor John Hartley, who assisted me with his guidance, insight and support throughout the whole candidature. The wise words of Christina Spurgeon, Lee Duffield, and Ellie Rennie (my associate supervisors) always pointed me in right direction. Acknowledgments also go to everyone who talked to me about my thesis, especially all my interviewees from the broadcasting industry. And finally, thanks to my family and friends, both in Australia and Europe, who always put up with me.

Statement of Original Authorship

This work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature

Date

Table of contents

List of figures ...... i List of tables...... i List of acronyms...... ii List of interviews...... iii

INTRODUCTION...... 1 PRESENTATION OF TWO VERSIONS OF TRANSLATION: INSTITUTIONAL VERSUS MEDIATED ...... 6 EUROPEAN MODEL ...... 6 AUSTRALIAN MODEL...... 11 RESEARCH METHODS ...... 18 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS ...... 21

1 THE EUROPEAN UNION AND POLITICS: EU LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION POLICIES...... 23 1.1 INTRODUCTION...... 24 1.2 A COMMON LANGUAGE VERSUS EUROPE’S MULTILINGUALISM..... 26 1.3 EU LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION POLICY...... 30 Equitable or asymmetrical communication...... 32 Multilingualism...... 35 Knowledge economy...... 38 Promotion of regional and lesser-used languages...... 39 1.4 CONCLUSIONS ...... 42

2 THEORETICAL CONTEXTS FOR INTERLINGUAL CITIZENSHIP POLICY: METHODOLOGY...... 46 2.1 INTRODUCTION...... 46 2.2 INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF TRANSLATION: ‘STATE’ MECHANISMS OF REGULATION AND POLICY...... 48 EU as a post-national experiment ...... 48 Language/translation and power relations ...... 52 2.3 ‘MEANING’: INTERPRATIVE VALUE AND ASSESSMENT OF EVERYDAY LIFE...... 59 Media, communication, cultural, and post-colonial studies...... 59 Cosmopolitanism ...... 68 Semiotics, literary and translation studies...... 70 Lotman’s translation...... 71 Flusser’s principle of dialogue and the concept of networking ...... 73 Translation studies ...... 75 Umberto Eco ...... 78 2.4 METHODOLOGY ...... 81 Voices in the text...... 84 2.5 RESEARCH METHODS...... 85 ‘Do you speak my language?’...... 87 ‘Knitty’-gritty of inter-language translation: things to consider in processing interview data...... 88

2.6 CONCLUSIONS...... 89

3 FROM POLITICAL TO CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP: MEDIATED POST-MODERN CITIZENSHIP...... 91 3.1 INTRODUCTION ...... 91 3.2 IDEOLOGY OF THE NATION-STATE AND UNIFORMITY OF THE OFFICAL LANGUAGE...... 92 3.3 PLURALISED POST-MODERN ORDER ...... 96 European citizenship ...... 97 3.4 CULTURAL/MEDIA CITIZENSHIP...... 100 Mediasphere ...... 103 3.5 CONCLUSIONS...... 104

4 EUROPEAN MULTILINGUAL RADIO AND TELEVISION STATIONS...... 107 4.1 INTRODUCTION ...... 107 4.2 INTERNATIONAL MULTILINGUAL RADIO BROADCASTERS IN EUROPE...... 111 A new map of broadcast languages: an Arabic phase...... 115 ‘Missing out on Europe’ or Europe missing ...... 117 European programs ...... 119 National markets ...... 120 International versus national ...... 121 Intercultural dialogue and new technologies...... 123 Co-operation...... 126 Translation practices ...... 127 Translation of genres and formats: transnational content that travels best133 4.3 ARTE ...... 136 Politics and culture united...... 136 4.4 RADIO MULTIKULTI BERLIN...... 143 From multilingualism to a universal language of music...... 148 4.5 BARCELONA TELEVISIÒ...... 148 ‘Informatius en Llengües Estrangeres’: subtitling ethnic communities news...... 148 4.6 CONCLUSIONS...... 152

5 SBS’S TRANSLATION PRACTICES: BETWEEN POLICY AND PRIVATE WHIM ...... 154 5.1 INTRODUCTION ...... 154 5.2 SPECIAL BROADCASTING SERVICE...... 155 Translation of policy ...... 157 Television beyond politics of language...... 174 5.3 SBS AS AN INFRASTURCTURE OF CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP AND TRANSLATION...... 181 Translation practices: subtitling ...... 184 5.4 COMMUNICATION AS TRANSLATION—LOTMAN AND SBS’s TEXTS ...... 186 ‘Foreignisation’ versus ‘acculturation’ strategies ...... 193

Foreignisation: imported texts, international perspective, and sport ...... 194 Acculturation: formats and local production ...... 202 5.5 CONCLUSIONS ...... 203

6 MULTICULTURAL PROGRAM ‘ALCHEMY’ AS A RADIO LABORATORY: IDEAS ABOUT CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION...... 207 6.1 INTRODUCTION...... 207 6.2 LIVING DIVERSITY – IMPLICATIONS FOR RE-INVENTION OF PSB... 210 6.3 MULTICULTURAL ALCHEMY, AND TRANSFORMATION PROCESS.. 212 Music and poetics of multilingualism...... 213 Stories, news, and current affairs ...... 215 Cultural translation and transformation ...... 216 6.4 CONCLUSIONS ...... 218

7 SBS AS A MODEL FOR EUROPEAN PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING...... 220 7.1 INTRODUCTION...... 220 7.2 THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT FOR MULTILINGUAL CITIZENSHIP ...... 222 Translation as a discursive frame for multicultural practices ...... 223 National public broadcasting in Europe...... 226 7.3 MULTICULTURALISM & MULTILINGUALISM: DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES BETWEEN EUROPE AND AUSTRALIA ...... 228 Cross-cultural ideas and strategies: programs that travel best across linguistic and cultural borders...... 234 Translation in international markets...... 240 7.4 CONCLUSIONS ...... 243

CONCLUSIONS: THE ROLE OF TRANSLATION IN INTERLINGUAL MEDIA CITIZENSHIP and MEDIA POLICY...... 245 Translation beyond linguistics: the search for connections in times of diversity...... 246 Translation practices: from EU language policy to media policy...... 248

REFERENCES...... 255

List of figures

Figure 1: Scheme of translation used in the thesis...... 6

Figure 2: Institutional versus mediated model of translation...... 14

List of tables

Table 5:1 Prime Time - Midnight Schedule (6pm-11.30pm), Week Mon 2 - Sun 8 April 2007 ...... 166

Table 5:2 Prime Time - Midnight Schedule (6pm-11.30pm), Week Mon 9 - Sun 15 April 2007 ..... 167

Table 5:3 Prime Time - Midnight Schedule (6pm-11.30pm), Week Mon 16 - Sun 22 April 2007 ... 168

Table 5:4 Prime Time - Midnight Schedule (6pm-11.30pm), Week Mon 23 - Sun 29 April 2007 ... 169

List of acronyms

ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation ARTE Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne BBC WS British Broadcasting Corporation, World Service BTV Barcelona Televisió DGI Directorate-General for Interpretation DGT Directorate-General for Translation DW Deutsche Welle EBU European Broadcasting Union EC European Commission EEC European Economic Community EU European Union LOTE Languages Other Than English NFSM A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism 2005 OzTAM Australian television Audience Measurement PSB Public Service Broadcasting RM Radio Multikulti Berlin RN Radio Netherlands SBS Special Broadcasting Service SBSi Special Broadcasting Service Independent TWFD Television Without Frontiers Directive

List of interviews

Radio Netherlands, Hilversum (Nov 2005) • Peter Veenendaal, Head of the Dutch Department • Jonathan Groubert, Executive Producer of European Affairs Magazine ‘EuroQuest’ • Theo Tamis, Radio Netherlands’ Online Services • Andy Clark, host of the weekly ‘Amsterdam Forum’

Deutsche Welle Radio, DW-Online, Policy Unit, Bonn (Dec 2005) • Irene Quaile-Kersken, the DW Head of Magazine Programming English Service • Miodrag Soric, Editor-in-Chief DW-Radio • Johannes Hoffmann, Head of Public Relations and Communications

European Platform or Regulatory Authorities, Düsseldorf (Dec 2005) • Joan Botella, EPRA’s Chairman, Council Member of the Catalonia Broadcasting Council

Deutsche Welle TV, Berlin (Dec 2005) • Christoph Lanz, DW-TV Director • Klaus-Dieter Seelig, Head of Foreign Language Services • Eberhard Sucker, Producer of the European magazine show, ‘Euromaxx’

Radio Multikulti, Berlin (Dec 2005) • Ilona Marenbach, Editor-in-Chief

ARTE, Strasbourg, France (Jan 2006) • Emmanuel Suard, Deputy Director of Programs, Head of Program Planning and Media Research • Olaf Grunert, Head of Documentaries • Elisabeth Krone, Head of Language Services

BBC World Service, London (Jan 2006) • Olexiy Solohubenko, Executive Editor, EurAsia • Santosh Sinha, Online Services, Interactivity Editor

iii

• Nicholas Caistor, Journalist and Translator

Radio SER, Barcelona (Feb 2006) • Josep Maria Marti, Director of SER

Catalonia Broadcasting Council (Mar 2006) • Joan Botella, Director of CAC • Mariona Codinach, International Relations, CAC • Josep Nubida, Linguistic Regulations (language quotas in Catalan media)

Barcelona Televisió, Barcelona (Mar 2006) • Amanda Bassa, Executive Producer of ‘Informatius en Ilengües Estrangeres' at Barcelona Televisió

TV3, Television Catalonia, Barcelona (Mar 2006) • Francesc Pou, Director de ‘Effecte Mirall’ • Toni Tortajada, Producer

International Federation of Translators, Barcelona (Mar 2006) • Peter Bush, translator, former President of the IFT

Special Broadcasting Service Radio, Melbourne (Dec 2004) • Mike Zafiropoulos, Station Manager, Melbourne • Christoph Wimmer-Kleikamp, Acting Program Manager • Simon Winkler, ‘ Alchemy ’ Producer

Special Broadcasting Service Television, Sydney (March 2006) • Jane Roscoe, Programming Executive • Georgie McClean, Policy Adviser • Phil Williams, Acting Head of Policy Unit • Olya Booyar, Manager Community Relations • Claus Hannekum, SBS television’s Manager of Overseas News Services • Robert Brennan, Manager, SBS Language Services • Glenn Mason, A/g Subtitling & Closed Captioning Manager • Andrew McCormick, Chief Subtitler

• Felicity Mueller, Editor & Subtitler • Rosamund Ziegert, Subtitler • Rod Webb, the former SBS Network Programmer

INTRODUCTION

When it comes to news, what has long attracted most attention is the price of petrol and football, defending fundamental democratic values without which we might not be able to enjoy either petrol or football, is dismissed as a matter for cranks. Yet without an active open civil society, a functioning democracy cannot survive. Without it, the political structures will wither away. So what we are hoping for is not a new democracy in Europe; either democracy exists or it does not. The greatest threat to democracy is our irresponsibility, indifference and resignation as citizens. We should reflect on this and stand up to face the challenge (Vaclav Havel).

This quotation served as an introductory passage for the presentation of the European Commission’s plan to improve communication in Europe. Launched in February 2006, the White Paper on a European Communication Policy represents a timely response to ‘no’ referenda over the European Union (EU) Constitution and to a perceived general indifference and resignation of citizens towards the European project. The public’s rejection of the proposed treaty reform was a psychological jolt to the ‘cadre’ of politicians, public servants, journalists and others most heavily engaged in European affairs. It caused massive reflection around the issues that will be canvassed in this introductory section.

Development of a democratic European public sphere through an effective and enhanced role of standard journalism and national, regional/local media lies at the forefront of the proposed reform. The European Community (EC), renamed the European Union in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, did not start on public squares, public meetings and demonstrations, but, as Bauman comments, it was initiated by ‘seasoned, adroit and cunning politicians’ such as Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, without seeking any direct public agreement (2004: 130). Transforming such an established union of politicians into a continent-wide community is a real challenge that all interested in furthering European integration need to face. The White Paper is an evident success of the European public who in voicing discontent with lived disparity between the politics of Brussels and politics of everyday, stimulated an overdue

discussion on communication within the EU, its accountability to citizens, and effective reflection on the treaty reform process.

In the 2006 White Paper, the European Commission explicitly acknowledges the failure of connecting with citizens by delivering messages of overtly political, elitist character, rather than portraying the consequences of particular EU policies and activities for their everyday life. A new approach, earlier spelt out in the 2005 Commission’s Action Plan, advocates clear and simple ‘layperson summaries’ instead of confusing and complicated ‘Eurospeak’ and ‘Eurojargon’. It proclaims the strategy of ‘going local’, tailoring information about Europe to particular national and local demographics in the ‘channels citizens prefer [and] in the language they can understand’ (The European Commission, 2005). Official European Commission Representations are to be employed in all member states to listen to what people think about the Commission’s activities, and to provide timely and relevant information about the EC of relevance to national, regional and local demands and concerns. New institutional in-house reforms are further proposed, in particular towards professionalism and uniformity of approach among its staff. The publication focuses on achieving a less centralised network of information distribution and feedback, including the participation of national, regional and local media.

However, according to this supra-national plan, the realisation of a European public sphere is derived and meant to proceed via a traditional model of hierarchical national political communication. This purposive communication by political actors about public affairs conventionally takes the nation-state as its primary framework and involves: the role of public authorities and associations in the member states to consult and inform citizens (Commission of the European Communities, 2006: 5), adaptation to national, regional needs and realities, monolingual channels (national, local language/s) (The European Commission, 2005), and a news-orientation.

What is strikingly missing in this expression of a renewed commitment to democratisation in Europe is the importance of a direct, peer-to-peer community building strategy instead of representative and top-down communication policy. In addition, translation as a necessary procedure for successful interlingual communication among citizens, and transnational

identification with the European idea continent-wide, does not figure either. In the context of Europe’s multilingual supranational and national communities this seems a significant absence, both in a practical and philosophical sense: it appears as a continuation of the ‘seasoned cunning’ of institutional players, if not of their former adroitness. It brings into sharp focus the tension between a polity founded on institutional action and one founded in citizens’ action.

In EU policy thinking, Europe’s linguistic diversity, regarded as a barrier to cross-national communication, accounts for persistence of national perspectives on European issues both across media and politics. The proclaimed multilingualism continues to be restricted to the political arena by advocating citizens’ democratic right to use their own languages in communication with EU institutions (Commission of the European Communities, 2006: 8). In many places where the usefulness of public, European forums for discussion (whether virtual or face-to-face) for connecting citizens is recognised, translation that is required for such multilingual exchanges is not accounted for. Transnational connection among European citizens beyond the political is omitted as well.

Significantly, no definition of ‘European narrative’ is offered. This makes the proposed ‘reform’ unengaging, abstract and elusive. This is important: the questions about what the European project is, where it is expected to go, what it means to be a European citizen, and what elements European forms of identification could encompass are precisely key areas where debate with populations in Europe might be activated as a part of active and participatory citizenship. These however remain unanswered, or somehow just assumed. Such an approach runs the risk of Europe continuing to be a vague idea, if anything concretised around nations and localised impacts of the EU policies for individuals rather than transnational communitarian groups. Without denying the importance of nation as a continuing primary point of political reference (hence the EC interest in building the European dimension into the national debate), the absence of strategies to invite horizontal relations of reciprocity, mutuality and respect beyond the vertical hierarchies of political communication is glaring.

To account for some, at times, quite naïve absences of the 2006 White Paper to ‘improve communicating Europe by the Commission’ it is necessary to consider the broader EU policy framework designed to advance the political objectives of European integration. Promoting communication with citizens should be seen as a key objective and as such an integral part of the EU activities supported in the fields of culture, education, and employment. Indeed, a part of the challenge to assess a normative value of the Brussels-based regulatory strategies is to follow a complex institutional dimension of policy-making across various departments, directorates and portfolios. Policy-making in the EU is a dynamic area of governance that proceeds via horizontal strategic alliance, interacting closely with other areas of external and internal EU strategies. The White Paper on communication is one part only of the EU political agenda. Multilingualism, created as a separate portfolio to ‘nurture a space for European political dialogue’ in January 2007, is yet another component. Linguistic diversity is also reflected across EU education strategies, employment, and culture policies. Transnational connections among European citizens beyond the political and via cultural exchange and co- operation feature for example in audiovisual and media policy (for example, television Without Frontiers Directive (TWFD)), which through its MEDIA-program supports subtitling of European productions to promote European cultural exchange and collaboration. The 2006 Media Literacy consultation and the Europe for Citizens Program 2007-2013 are the latest additions.

As a result, the Commission’s communication publication constitutes a point of departure for exploring citizenship and communication issues in my thesis; especially a mediated multilingual communication and translation well beyond traditional, monolingual political approaches that have dominated European life. Locating interlingual communication at the centre of citizenship, I develop a narrative of translation at three levels:

• Intellectual disciplinary formation • Institutional context • Translation practices of multilingual radio and television services in Europe and Australia:

My methodology is based upon an intellectual, disciplinary dialogue between different domains of knowledge, which are presented in detail in Chapter Two. This integrated formation is necessary to explain complexities of the research question in forms of: politics (sociology, political science, political economy) and experience/everyday (media/cultural studies with cultural policy research), re-connecting mechanisms of state in the shape of institutions, regulations, policies with everyday practices of meaning and audience production via translation (semiotics/literary studies). I intend to bridge a gap in literature on European integration (European studies), on multilingual communication and translation (media and communication studies), and on the role of media in democratisation (political science). Theoreticians of post-national order, democracy and citizenship rarely pay attention to the role of media (Bauman, 2004; Balibar, 2004) while media research does not normally address national, formal politics, being more interested in the politics of the personal. Still, there are notable exceptions that defy this traditional disciplinary divide between political science (institutions/formal politics) and media and communication studies (everyday life, personal experience) exemplified in the work of cultural policy researchers such as Tony Bennett and Stuart Cunningham, but also Stephen Coleman and John Keane. Additionally, the literature review in Chapter Two traces some other intellectual alliances, organised around the figures of ‘disciplinary translators’. Translation is needed for both methodology and methods, which I undertake in this thesis. The procedure of translation occurs among languages and cultures, as Umberto Eco calls it, between ‘two different cultural encyclopaedias’ (Eco, 2003), and here it applies to re-connecting different academic discourses as well as to qualitative interviews that I conducted in a number of languages, transcribed and translated into English.

This methodology grounded in translation corresponds to the structure of the thesis that deals with institutions and textual systems of multilingual broadcasting. This is provisionally summarised in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Scheme of translation used in the thesis

PRESENTATION OF TWO VERSIONS OF TRANSLATION: INSTITUTIONAL VERSUS MEDIATED

This ‘scheme of translation’ relates roughly to realties of the two models of citizenship – (formal) institutional and (informal) cultural – with translation and multilingualism bridging the discourses of the state and everyday respectively. The concern for interlingual citizenship is in the thesis anchored through a study of translation, with a particular interest in media translation practices and their potential for forging interlingual connections across hybrid cultures. It is argued that media, including public service broadcasting (PSB) (albeit redefined within wider conceptions of interlingual, transnational citizenship), can play an interventionist role in initiating multicultural practices around language issues at the level of populations rather than continue with legal prescriptions and firm language hierarchies characteristic of the EU institutional order (Balibar, 2004), something that is absolutely essential in times of intensified globalisation, migration and the so-called War on Terror.

EUROPEAN MODEL Citizenship, translation and everyday life: shortcomings of the EU communication model

The ‘European model’ of citizenship has followed the actual phenomenon of the EU political structure and involved a high-policy translation infrastructure. In Europe, as elsewhere, linguistic status quo has powerful implications for both intra-national and inter-national

relations. With this in mind, the EU’s language policy initiated with the European Economic Community (1958) follows normative assumptions of linguistic inclusion and equality for all member states to be represented and involved in democratic communication between Brussels and EU citizens. The history and current implications of the EU language policy are discussed in Chapter One. Importantly, as the EEC was primarily envisioned as an economic union with a common market as its ultimate political objective, no adequate communication model was secured. While it was clear for the makers of the new union at the time that contentious linguistic issues needed to be managed by a language policy to allow effective governance, building affective connections among citizens was not conceived nor addressed. The European Community came to be accompanied by a drive for translation of meanings to help and co-opt the publics into the project, but it continued to concentrate on the politics of international relations, and rather neglected the meanings to pan-European community. The translation effort focused on the formalities or protocols of use of official languages. The concern was with the rights and obligations of institutions and citizens in the language domain; for example British citizens’ right to receive Treaty documents 1 and EC directives prepared in English. This effort was more dirigiste than cultural in inspiration. It did not concern itself with communication of the street, of everyday life. There was, and continues to be, no relief from the process of top-down governance, instead of successful, mediated communication of ideas.

In addition, as a gesture of good intentions and in fact a horse-trading compromise of international diplomacy, EU language policy reproduces national government practices and concepts by permitting the use of official national languages only, as well as re-staging internal linguistic tensions that had accompanied the construction of modern nation-states. It has involved a struggle for dominance between the most powerful languages – English, French, German, as well as the recognition effort for sub-national languages such as Catalan, Basque and Galician. Confined to the area of international politics and economics, language

1 The Treaties of the European Union are effectively the basic constitutional texts of the Union. They set out the objectives of the Union and establish the various institutions which are intended to achieve those aims. Current treaties include: founding treaties (for example, The 1957 Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), or The 1992 Treaty on European Union (EU), signed in Maastricht), amending treaties (The 2001 Treaty of Nice), accession treaties (whenever new member states acceded in 1973, 1981, 1986, 1995, 2004, 2007), and budgetary treaties of 1970 and 1975.

policy has applied a restricted definition of the relationship between citizenship and the EU institutions and member states’ governments. Recent policy aspirations had admitted a socio- cultural dimension to citizenship, but these have not as yet been successfully cultivated (for example, Media Literacy initiative, see Chapter Three). As a result, a monoglossic language and translation regime is the current standard, and is far from becoming the expression of ordinary citizens’ actual heteroglossic everyday life that includes not only legitimised national languages but various generational, social class, regional and migrant vocabularies. The language policy has failed to translate between linguistically diverse audiences and bring Europeans together. European citizenship mediated to populations across the continent has been monolingual and national, actual mundane heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) masked by dubbing, polyvocality tamed by governmental agendas.

My critique of the EU model of citizenship with translation at the institutional level is not levelled at the EU’s normative foundations or its language policy framework per se. Many of the EU language strategies and initiatives are indicative of acute awareness of the role of cultural and linguistic diversity for a globalising world in the 21st century. As a part of its commitment to diversity, on 18 December 2006, the Community ratified the UNESCO Convention on cultural diversity. Finland, Austria, France, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Slovenia, Estonia, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Malta and Bulgaria took part. My thesis recognises the role of institutions and regulators in providing access to intercultural or multilingual communication both at the level of political and cultural organisations such as the EU or PSB. The key concern expressed here is thus the EU’s lack of a corresponding media infrastructure that could mitigate a disjuncture between bureaucratic elites and ordinary citizens, and foster an inclusive cultural citizenship in Europe. There is no pan-European multilingual broadcaster with significant audience, interlingual communication on nationally- based public service broadcasters is almost non-existent (with an exception of ARTE), dubbing is a commonplace translation practice, an exchange of European content is marginal, with American audiovisual products being a core component of the lingua franca of European and global culture.

The lack of relevant media infrastructure to mediate actual multilingual reality of many European citizens has serious implications. It has resulted in the widespread alienation and

disengagement of European populations from the European project, and in European multilingual citizenship remaining tokenistic and on paper. If the EU is a ‘multilingual community’ and all European citizens are ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of the EU’s translation services (Directorate-General for Translation, 2005), then a political agenda of ‘translating’ European affairs and promoting interlingual connections must take account of television practices and content. Broadcasting – and post-broadcast media – are a site where issues of popularity, appeal and pleasure have been tested thoroughly. As a result, the proposition being tested here is whether multilingual, multicultural citizenship can be constituted more successfully through multilingual broadcasting. Can the language of television help expand a basis for mutual and active participation that the EU aspires to?

By shifting the focus from a strictly political arena of inter-national diplomacy and administrative reforms (including language policy, translation services, and recently new communication strategies), I concentrate on the broadcasting that reaches across demographic and territorial boundaries, and brings together people from different language communities through entertaining and innovative content. It is a medium of actual experience meaningful to participants, and part of the everyday. The implication of my research is that the cultural domain of media, where politics and culture meet, where the public and the private, formal knowledge and everyday experience come in contact, and where democratisation processes take place, is the most important site for emergent practices of European citizenship.

Yet, EU language policy underpinned by value ascribed to linguistic diversity has not translated effectively into relevant media policy. After the failure of the EU experiments in multilingual broadcasting in the late 1980s, Brussels has been more concerned with the facilitation of ‘business without frontiers’ in the audiovisual sector rather than creating engaging media platforms to foster a European collective imaginary. Indeed, it is argued that the two revisions of the TWFD (that is Directive 89/552/EEC of 3 October 1989 amended by Directive 97/36/EC of 30 June 1997, and one still ongoing) for ‘pluralism and the control of media concentration’ testify to the significant power of economic over political agency in the EU (Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2005: 302).

One of a few examples of successful pan-European media collaboration is the long-standing Eurovision format. This is emblematic of the way cultural politics is undertaken within networked societies, and has been extensively researched, especially in the Scandinavian countries (Bolin, 2006). Such collaborations have powerful consequences for consumer- citizen formations (for example, Castells, 2001). However, the Eurovision model is in Europe often associated with parody and kitsch than a genuine effort to address different versions of existing Europeanness. It also reveals and reinforces systematic political and cultural preferences amongst European blocks in the voting system (Yair, 1995). Against popular academic accounts of the lack of a European public sphere, I sympathise with those scholars who argue that globalisation and new media technologies are in fact constitutive of European citizenship beyond the nation-state (e.g. Trandafoiu, 2006).

What is needed is a textual system able to activate participatory citizenship and to enable access to diverse perspectives and viewpoints via different languages and cultural expressions. Empirical research reveals that the EU has not contributed to superseding the prominence of the nation-state and nationalism in member states (Menendez-Alarcon, 2000). In the era of mediated citizen/government relationships, contemporary political issues such as European integration or social cohesion cannot be resolved through official policy only. Roger Silverstone observes, ‘politics, like experience, can no longer even be considered outside of a media frame’ (Silverstone, 1994: 144). On the example of indigenous mediasphere in Australia, John Hartley and Alan McKee argue that television mediates dialogue between various cultural groups in an ordinary, banal and familiar way without ‘encouraging antagonistic debates about policy’ or ‘subordinating individuals to an institution that represents them collectively’ (Hartley and McKee, 2000: 83). As I indicate in Chapter One, top-down interventions into the socio-cultural domain of language(s) – as has been the case with language policy in the EU – may well prove ‘stigmatising and unproductive’ (Edwards, 1994: 112). Developing a sphere of cultural manifestation and exchange through a broadcast popular mediation may lead to the revival of interest in language(s) and generally feelings of ‘commonality, reciprocity and toleration’ (Born, 2004: 508). Additionally, arguing in favour of multilingual television that can stage the emotional, the personal, I follow Mouffe’s call for the re-evaluation of the political realm by acknowledging the force of the

‘passions’, the affective dimension, that connects populations to a community or a collective identity as well as to the field of politics (Mouffe, 2005).

Beyond strategies to co-opt media into such purposes as promoting aspirations of the EU, the traditional model of nationally based media itself requires revision to accommodate the dynamics of contemporary multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual societies. Successful in mediating and constituting national, monolingual citizenship in modern nation-states through exposure to national narratives of unitary culture, history, identity via common language, this model works poorly once the national sameness has been destabilised by globalisation, migration and transnational media, and once international frameworks are called upon. Media’s citizenship role in constituting subjects as members of national community has been widely theorised (Schlesinger, 1991; Hall, 1993; Hartley, 1996). The model is reliant on political correspondence of mass media to structures of nation-states that have dictated suppression of social everyday heteroglossia, monolingualism rather than translation, and so displays unresponsiveness to audiences’ needs. Multilingual media, on the other hand, are mostly studied as minority, ethnic, and diasporic services. In the European context, a model of public service broadcasting (PSB) has traditionally focused on formal hard news in its mediation of ‘Europeanness’ (Kevin, 2003) rather than popular entertaining content, which often devoted to ‘human stories’, has potentially a wider, cross-demographic reach (Hartley, 1999) or cross-cultural appeal (Leurdijk, 2006; Hartley, 1999). As such, the traditional PSB proves deficient in connecting with and across diversified communities.

AUSTRALIAN MODEL Citizenship, translation and everyday life: success of Australia’s mediated communication model – Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)

The transnational/lingual citizenship policy recommendations that emerge from the critique of vertical models and methods in translation (see Chapter Two) focus on the role of translation practices situated within the cultural media sphere. I propose that media translation strategies in the form of multi-sourcing material and subtitling can bring together elements necessary to express a mediated relation between citizenship and everyday life, and thus actually advance the European project. These elements involve debate expressed in forms such as journalism

and news media, football, entertainment (popular culture, sport), and social heteroglossia (multiple languages).

Unlike the EU, the Australian model of citizenship has secured a relevant media infrastructure that complements the state’s multicultural and language policies. The invoked model is that of the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which has successfully translated between the ‘state’ policies and Australians’ practices of everyday life. Established as a vehicle of multicultural policy in Australia, the broadcaster has been endowed with a charter under the Special Broadcasting Services Act 1991 that stipulates:

The principle function of SBS is to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society (SBS, 2006a).

Drawing on the theory of translation from the semiotic perspective of Yuri Lotman, I show how ‘mutual unintelligibility’ and ‘asymmetry’ are among the conditions for communication, and how a textual system of television has a potential to resolve some political tensions at the heart of multilingual societies. Assessed exclusively through a lens of its low ratings, which according to Australian Television Audience Measurement (OzTam) is around an average of 4 per cent throughout a year, SBS might be seen as marginal in its social role (OzTam, 2006). However, much higher audience-reach figures of around 7.5 million Australians each week (SBS, 2006a) mean that SBS attracts substantial audiences, but in the viewing style of ‘cherry-picking’ niches rather than a mass of ‘couch potatoes’. This is how the broadcaster’s symbolic work is recognised (for example, Hawkins and Ang, 2006). SBS’s televisual commitment to translation extends beyond linguistic procedure and onto multicultural practices. In this way it is a statement on how to approach a project of reproducing Australian society. As such it contributes to a much broader vision for the future, not just one instrumentally measured solely in its actual practice (low ratings) but one which values both symbolic production and a communicative function.

Over the years, SBS has moved away from providing services exclusively for ‘new Australian’ migrant audiences, and instead, the broadcaster has become one that offers an

imagination of the national public sphere based on internal cultural difference and an openness to external cultural alterity. This cosmopolitan outlook positions the SBS audience with a vision beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, all the while fostering a sense of reciprocity and community amongst ‘all Australians’. In doing this, the broadcaster has not only tested limits and possibilities of television but also of multiculturalism as an everyday experience. For example, SBS’s contribution to the wide-spread acceptance of subtitling and multicultural points of view has been identified in Gay Hawkins and Ien Ang’s research into SBS’s impact on democratisation processes in the Australia (Hawkins and Ang, 2006), and SBS commissioned reports Living Diversity (Ang et al., 2002) and Connecting Diversity (Ang et al., 2006).

These two models of translation as represented first by the EU language and translation policies and practice and second the SBS media translation policy and practice can be summarised as follows:

VERTICAL institutional model versus HORIZONTAL media model

statist ↔ dynamic

dirigiste ↔ flexible

official/formal/protocol based ↔ unofficial/informal

obligations/rights ↔ choice

effective ↔ affective

standardisation ↔ flux/provisional

professionalism/fluency ↔ approximation

hierarchy/hegemony ↔ emancipation

de-contextualised ↔ contextualised

Figure 2: Institutional versus mediated model of translation

The characteristics of the first, institutional model (found on the left in Figure 1) are elaborated in Chapter One, which concludes with a brief discussion of translation in the new media environment (defined by the descriptors on the right). Chapters Five and Six explore in detail the televisual practices of SBS’s translation practices, pointing out the centrality of a more flexible language allocation determined by the audience’s choices, the contextual relevance of imported material, and its emancipatory function in building affective peer-to- peer connections. Chapter Four and Chapter Seven comment further on media-related translation that aligns itself with dynamism and approximation of communication rather than statism and fluency of the EU bureaucratic model.

The thesis’ main argument accentuates the importance of theory and practice of translation for cultural citizenship in times of complex interlingual and intercultural communication worldwide, with media being a central agent in the process. In referring to Australia and its media policy, with SBS’s as a successful model of media translation practices, I underscore

the failure of the EU bureaucracy to secure an adequate media infrastructure to engage ordinary citizens in an informal everyday cross-cultural exchange. However, I am well aware of empirical incongruence between the two contexts,2 both in terms of scale, histories, and political experiences. Australia is a small settler country, with population of 21 million; whereas the EU is an ever-expanding supranational regional entity of over 490 million (for a similar discussion see Chapter Seven). As regards languages, Australia is a multilingual society, with numerous migrant and indigenous languages, but with one uncontested official language, and, what Michael Clyne (2006) calls, ‘a monolingual mindset’. The EU has 23 official languages, not including the official languages of sub-national entities such as Welsh, Catalan, or Galician; and unlike Australia, the teaching of a second or third language in Europe has a long tradition.

It is also true − as my assessor pointed out − that the practical Australian distinction between English and ‘LOTE’, that is ‘the rest’, is explosive in the EU. English is not a universal lingua franca, except in specific areas of politics, economy, science, and so on, and even there its dominance is widely contested. The European politics of multilingualism often fails in the face of local and national tensions (for example, Catalonia, the Balkans, or most recently in Belgium), or diplomatic controversies (see Chapter One). These linguistic problems are also played out at the media level, where the politics of translation often informs services for immigrants. Equally polemical is however Australia’s multiculturalism, with local tensions often resurfacing in different guises and with different intensity: from ethnic unrest at football matches to violent incidents such as the 2005 Cronulla riots; from unease at use of LOTE in public to vigorous complaints regarding public service broadcasting programming for migrant constituencies.

However, in this thesis I am interested in neither the differences of scale nor political issues, nor the intricacies of language experienced in the EU or Australia. The comparison between the two contexts is instead based on structural problems they both confront in communicating across difference. The thesis is thus about interlingual media policy for community-building, and new practices of multicultural citizenship. Australia (with its multilingual, multicultural

2 The matter of the legitimacy of comparing the EU and Australia was also helpfully raised by an assessor.

PSB) features as a large laboratory for testing media translation applications which are relevant to European countries. The appropriateness of Australia as the experimental ground draws from it being multicultural, and heavily European – which qualifies its English monolingualism.

In 2005 the number of overseas-born Australians reached 4.8 million, representing almost one-quarter (24%) of the total population. The United Kingdom continues to be the largest source country, and although older European migration groups such as Greeks, Italians, and Dutch have decreased in numbers, European-born people represent over 11% of the total population. Additionally, Australia’s general multilingual experience derives from the large Asian component. For example, the China-born population increased nearly eightfold from 25,200 people in 1981 to 191,200 people in 2005, making up 4% of the overseas-born population, while the Vietnam-born population increased fourfold, from 40,700 people in 1981 to 177,700 people in 2005, also making up 4% of the overseas-born population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007). In 2001, 2.8 million people (16% of the population) spoke a language other than English at home, an increase of 213,100 people or 8% since 1996; including Australian indigenous and migrant languages (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007).

Australia remains also compatible and comparable with EU communities not only through migration and language but also social and economic factors. It is similar in size to many European nation-states. In comparison with EU members, Australia ranks 8 th in terms of size of population, 6 th in size of its national economy, and 5 th as regards wealth of its citizens, in terms of per capita GDP (Central Intelligence Agency, 2008). Importantly, European communication policy in the EU is managed at the supranational level, so it must be discussed as a Europe-wide phenomenon and challenge. However, with the continuing salience of nation-states, its impacts will be first of all on national communities comparable with Australia, which are still served overwhelmingly by national (or local) media. The comparison that I pursue here then relates to setting up a network based on the SBS model in single European counties rather than aspiring to develop a pan-European audience via a certain type of mediated ‘cultural Esperanto’. It would not be a dispersed network attempting to service several countries, but perhaps a re-defined, nationally-based public broadcaster.

This is endorsed by Robert Phillipson, a well-known linguist, who makes an explicit reference to the ‘one multilingual broadcaster in Australia [SBS]’ as a suitable model for Europe rather than Euronews (2003: 231). Europe is a compilation of socio-culturally diverse countries, which greatly limits the scope for a generic ‘one size fits all’ range of programming. That is because of national and local preferences regarding accents, vocabulary, viewing habits, but also due to some entrenched international antagonisms (see my discussion of translation challenges in the broadcasting environment in Chapter 4). It is argued here that SBS-style broadcasting can be ‘translated’ to single European countries, where the particular kind of broadcasting operation will be useful for multicultural bridging within the individual nation- states – and by extension to developing a more cosmopolitan outlook and the idea of ‘imaginary Europe’.

RESEARCH METHODS

As mentioned earlier, my methodology is a translation practice between the institutional model of interlingual communication (political science) and the community-building media model (media and communication studies). This theoretical foundation informs my use of the following research methods:

• cultural/media policy analysis, • archival research at respective television networks • review of programming strategies, especially in respect to language allocation, but also multi-sourcing and genre choices, • qualitative ‘conversational’ interviews with TV/radio stations’ managers and staff at SBS Australia and across multilingual public broadcasters in the EU.

These methods are used to investigate the issues, challenges, and uses of the multilingual broadcasting logic for Australia’s and Europe’s cultural realities. A map of experiences of those involved in multilingual broadcasting provides a means to discuss and interrogate the themes of my project in a more critical way than via a pure critique of policy in the normative domain. The recommendations on interlingual citizenship policy that I make are more of a philosophical task, rather than an account of all economic realities of stakeholders.

I employ a cultural policy studies approach that moves beyond the rhetoric of linguistic and cultural imperialism on the one hand and counter-hegemonic resistance on the other. This perspective towards cultural policy, inspired by a tradition of policy studies research in Australia known as the ‘policy moment’ of the 1990s (Cunningham and Flew, 2002), provides a basis for concentrating on the intersection of culture and government, and evaluating the rationalities and practices of public cultural institutions against the field of politics in which they are located. It is a useful research approach for considering how PSB (including SBS and European multilingual public stations) as cultural institutions are called upon to activate and reform the citizenry, and to reflect and shape the social realties, and for showing how requirements of cultural and linguistic diversity have informed language and

broadcasting policy both in the EU and Australia. It also critically comments upon the role of community and a human cultural element for policy-making processes.

Through a content and textual analysis of policy materials (including official Commission, Council reports, directives, the EU Constitution, pronouncements on the authorised EU website, etc.), the thesis considers how supranational policy in Brussels has responded to the contentious issues of languages both in its own governance practices, and – through its legislation – influenced other areas of culture. However, since the project had been established with the aim of identifying citizenship policy initiatives – with broadcasting at its centre – multilingual broadcasting policies and practices are central to my thesis. This has involved the investigation of broadcasting policy documents (for example, television/radio editorial guidelines, codes of practice, charter stipulations) to test whether broadcasters’ attitudes toward languages and cross-cultural communication have changed over time, accounting for changes in politics and society, culture and technology, and if so, how these have been translated into broadcasting policy and practice. The consulted literature has been divided into two groups; traditional references are listed at the end of the thesis whereas more ephemeral, electronic sources retrieved from the Internet are foot-noted along with their accession date.

The small amount of existing research into multilingual broadcasting demands a comparative approach to map out recurring themes essential in understanding its present and future directions. Analyses of broadcasters’ policies, programming content, and adaptation strategies (including, for example, movement towards digital broadcasting and media convergence) point to their respective identities, style of governance and their institutional settings, and describe the status quo. This comparative research into developments at SBS in Australia, Deutsche Welle, ARTE, BBC, Radio Netherlands, Radio Multikulti Berlin, and Barcelona Televisió in Europe, allows identification of options (or best practices) for an inclusive communicative cultural policy which is adequate for linguistically and culturally diverse European audiences. In particular, research into SBS policy rationales and translation practices provides an interesting model for a European multilingual broadcasting service. However, the material collected cannot be treated as a complete overview of multilingual television either in Europe or Australia. For example, Radio France International, an

important multilingual international service, has not been included, with the selection motivated by the logistical limitations and access to the stations, including languages that I speak. Instead the thesis is meant to provide a valuable source of information on the tensions of interlingual communication across those contexts.

Interviews with key staff responsible for programming and broadcasting policies are very important for my research. As the literature on multilingual television (Australian and international) is scarce, speaking to station managers, broadcasters and policy staff provided an opportunity to obtain important insights into the concerns of stations in the EU and Australia. The material collected is used to identify issues and tensions in the current state of multilingual broadcasting, and to survey gaps in approaches and opportunities, rather than to act as case studies. I believe that the shared experiences of those involved in multilingual television provide a means to discuss and interrogate the themes of this thesis which could not be captured through other methods.

All stations selected for the comparison are public multilingual broadcasters. They have been chosen because their television and/or radio models provide valuable comparisons for other broadcasters. They are all well-established public broadcasters, currently undergoing changes in broadcasting policy due to the introduction of digital technology and changing political structure (that is the subsequent expansions of the EU in 2004 and 2007 as well as the 2007 Treaty reform).

STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS

Chapter One provides background to the research question, looking at the history of a historically dominant institutional version of translation, that is the EU language policy. It outlines in detail strengths and weaknesses of this formal high-policy strategy in translation, arguing for the activation of (broadcast) media as an infrastructure of translation to bridge a gap between the formal and cultural aspects of multilingual citizenship in Europe. Chapter Two synthesises a number of disciplinary formations from a social science and the humanities to explore the concept of translation. By design, my theoretical approach is itself a practice of translation, focused on testing gaps and new connections across traditionally separate disciplines. In particular, the chapter considers the relationship between media, citizenship and translation, underlying the value of the latter for understanding of cultural diversity in times of globalisation.

In Chapter Three I discuss the evolution of citizenship from the modern political conception aligned with the one-nation-equals-one-language argument, to the cultural, mediated one. The context of cultural diversity, new relationships between broadcasters and the nation-state, and citizens and consumers associated with the rise of participatory culture make cultural citizenship a central concern. Chapter Four leads discussion into media environment. Instead of a front-door critique of the EU’s pan-European communication initiatives, this chapter offers a snapshot of the existing interlingual capacities across multilingual broadcasters in Europe. They include successful models of international, national and metropolitan multilingual radio and television services to explore the issues of politics of language, media translation practices and cross-cultural communication. Experimenting with content for international audiences and new distribution modes, the analysed public broadcasters point to challenges and opportunities in fostering interlingual, transcultural citizenship, especially via a concept of an imaginary ‘Europe’ for populations across the continent.

Chapter Five looks at the history of Special Broadcasting Service in Australia through a lens of its televisual practices in translation. SBS’s positive valuation of internal hybrid cultures and openness to external cultural difference is discussed as presenting a successful mediated

model of interlingual communication, particularly interesting in the era of globalisation. Chapter Six provides a detailed account of youth program Alchemy on the SBS radio as a model for inter-generational evolution of multicultural broadcasting. It reports on the broadcaster’s strategies to hail and encourage participation of youth audiences from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Through its diverse, international mode of address, Alchemy , like SBS-TV, is a laboratory of cross-cultural communication.

Chapter Seven brings the two geographical locations together, advancing an argument about SBS’s relevance to and usefulness for the European context. Drawing on my fieldwork, I present some cross-cultural media strategies to form transnational, interlingual citizenship with translation at its centre. The main point raised in conclusions is the importance of the concept of translation as a mechanism for ‘connecting diversity’ in the context of cultural citizenship for a globalising world. I also include some recommendations for relevant community-building media policy in the EU, and indicate areas for further research.

1 THE EUROPEAN UNION AND POLITICS: EU LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION POLICIES

The aim of this chapter is to present an institutional model that expresses the relationship between multilingualism, translation and European citizenship within the overarching philosophy of ‘unity in diversity’. Proclaimed as the official motto of the EU, the principle of ‘unity in diversity’ refers to cultures, customs, beliefs and languages, and encompasses an inherent tension of attempted integrity despite cultural and linguistic incommensurability. The symbolic politics of language at the level of supranational diplomacy plays a central role and is inevitably part of the discussion. The chapter proceeds with a description of multilingual communication in Europe and its two main domains: everyday versus ‘high policy’ (O'Regan, 1987). The key argument that follows is a need to reconnect everyday multilingualism and institutional multilingualism via a mediated form of translation. The role of translation is thus reconsidered away from its service function in the international relations and political communication and towards an active agency in enhancing multicultural practices. Translation becomes a link between language and media policies, facilitating a mobilisation of public television infrastructure (in addition to foreign language education) for the promotion of multilingual citizenship. In order to understand the EU language policy and politics of language I have consulted so-called ‘grey literature’ (Ahearne, 2002: 3) – EU legal documents, policies, reports, directives – and followed a wider academic and public policy debate around the topic. Despite the importance of official discourse and the political arena in general, of what Bourdieu calls the linguistic ‘habitus of the performative’, it is this wider public debate that sets a frame for categories and notions found in the politico-administrative documents. The language policy in the EU cannot be adequately understood outside the public forum constituted of different voices that co-exist, compete, and transform one another.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The everyday story for millions of Europeans is that of mundane contact zones between languages, variably peaceful or contentious or both at different times. On the streets of Amsterdam with a sizable Muslim (Turkish) population, a local baker counts Euros in his dialect, hands over the change with Dutch alstublieft , but grins happily if a client’s ‘goodbye’ is rendered in Turkish. A typical daily switching between one’s own home language and the language of an adopted home is familiar in the UK, Germany, France, and other countries affected by migration. But a different story is also true. At a weekly all goods market in a far south-eastern town of Poland one can haggle in Polish with mostly Ukrainian salesmen, but a deal is often sealed in Ukrainian or some in-between version of Polish-Ukrainian. This is an ordinary linguistic cross-border mix, a sign of ethnic and linguistic heritage that does not follow political ruling. In Barcelona some daily newspapers are simultaneously published both in Castillano and Catalan, the former edition marked in blue, the latter in red. Their apparently unobtrusive co-existence points to the failure of cultural oppression in the times of the Franco dictatorship, but might also remind us of the powerful desire for imposing hierarchy between languages within a national state. With the growing population of Poles in Ireland, legal measures are being taken to grant recognition to the language of newly arrived European-Polish citizens. Also here policies of assimilation are far from credible. Identity politics, including media representation, has become the dominant issue at the core of multilingual, multicultural societies of contemporary Europe.

Europe’s linguistic diversity – as geographically defined – is complex and multifaceted, albeit the poorest in the world (Sktunabb-Kangas, 2003). The latest number of both living and many known but extinct languages of Europe is around 275 languages (and more than half of these are in the former USSR). If we discount recent immigrants and count the autochthonous languages only, there are some 3 per cent of the world's spoken languages represented in contemporary Europe. North, Central and South America have around 1,000 autochthonous spoken languages, 15 per cent Africa has around 30 per cent, Asia a bit over 30 per cent and the Pacific somewhat under 20 per cent. Two countries, Papua New Guinea with over 850 languages and Indonesia with around 670, have together a quarter of the world's languages.

If we limit Europe to the political structure of the EU, language fabric comprises 23 official national languages of the EU, with the inclusion of Irish, Bulgarian and Romanian in 2007, and over 60 other indigenous European languages that predate the modernist project of hierarchy and national standardisation. The latter category feature sub-national languages that are recognised and widely used within a nation state (for example, Catalan as language of a region), those that are spoken by many but without official recognition (for example, Occitan in France), and those recognised but hardly in use any more (for example, Scottish Gaelic). Minority languages that spill over national borders constitute yet another thread, one that bears a dessin of historical convulsions, upheavals and often forced expatriation. Interwoven migrant languages – those of Europe’s colonial legacy, Cold War pedigree or encouraged by EU mobility – complement the linguistic picture. On a multinational continent of Europe, geography has informed history, history has informed geography; languages have followed or indeed effected those changes. This reality legitimises the humanities’ approach to citizenship, with linguistic forms of expression constituting the core of cultural expression and identification.

With 21 st century communication technologies, spatially defined interactions of proximity moved to a new transnational terrain of satellite broadcast media and the Internet, being often – paradoxically – distant yet closer to home. Visceral interpersonal linguistic diversity of ‘on a metro’, ‘on a street’, ‘at the market’, ‘at university’, ‘in a town’, ‘in a city’, ‘in the EU headquarters’, extended beyond the boundaries of space to include the whole world. Multiplicity of European and world languages can be experienced with the click of a mouse, at a press of a remote control, with some choosing the intimacy of media communication over the immediacy of interpersonal dealings.

How then should the complexity of the situation, both in real life and mediated life of the real be managed? How can linguistic diversity be addressed in a fair and ethical manner at the supranational, national and society level? How are compromises between the value of multilingualism and desire for effective communication to be achieved? Is it possible to make everyone happy?

In this chapter I address these questions in relation to the EU language policy. It is argued that media translation practices can open up possibilities for better communication through and an improved ‘mutual intelligibility’ between the domain of state/institutions and multilingual practices of everyday. Such clarity of understanding is something that EU language policy has failed to effectively enact. Reconfigured as a process, a strategy, and a practice that functions across these two domains, translation becomes a key instrument of multilingual policy, and not its mere service, at the centre of multilingual citizenship.

1.2 A COMMON LANGUAGE VERSUS EUROPE’S MULTILINGUALISM

It certainly has not been easy to make everyone happy in Europe; an unresolved tension between the use of a common language, English language hegemony, Americanisation, and Europe’s multilingual vocation has dogged debate on languages in Europe for a long time. While some scholars and media professionals offer numerous eloquent pragmatic reasons for maintaining linguistic diversity, others see a multitude of languages in Europe as a serious impediment to the European integration. For example, in 1997 the USA ambassador to Denmark, Mr Elton, stated: ‘The most serious problem for the European Union is that it has so many languages, this is preventing real integration and development of the Union’. In 2002 the Director of the British Council in Germany put it more bluntly: ‘English should be the sole official language of the European Union’ (Phillipson, 2005).

The European Union, with 23 official languages, and with the Catalan, Basque and Galician versions of certain texts also available, is ‘a multilingual functional empire’ that costs an estimated € 2.28 per citizen per year in translation software alone (Pym, 2003). The total cost of its language services, including the translators and interpreters who carry out the EU’s policy of multilingualism, is calculated to be of € 1.123 million, which is 1 per cent of the annual general budget of the EU.

Following the 2004 EU expansion, much criticism was levelled against the costly and ineffective EU translation services, followed by proposals (mostly British) to cut down translation expenses by reducing translation activities. According to these plans, some documents were to be made available in the language in which they were written originally

only instead of all official EU languages. The proposal met with fierce opposition from many, but most notably France and Germany. The Le Monde journalist, Marc Roche, called the proposal ‘a perfidious British plot in order to transform the EU into a sort of English-speaking area’ and ‘relegate [other national languages] to the status of quaint dialects’. 3 A joint letter from French and German ministers described any action that ‘could favour unilingualism in the European institutions’ as ‘unacceptable’. Consequently the proposal was withdrawn. What these formulations and efforts illustrate is not only the asymmetry of communication due to language hierarchies caused by economic and political power relations and comparative advantage of English in the European linguistic market, but also a level of resistance they are bound to encounter. The unambiguously close relationship between language, culture and identity raises the issue of the politics of recognition, inclusion and exclusion, at both micro and macro levels. In fact, most of the activities around language policy in Europe have been restricted to nation states competing for power and influence within the EU rather than any common ‘European’ perspective. This in turn warns of potentialities of nationalistic narrowness or homogenisation and imperialism, which in the European context can wear a simple label of ‘Americanisation’.

The resistance to the attempts to limit multilingualism in the EU governmental domain has been accompanied by demands to extend the status of ‘official’ European languages to sub- national languages such as Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Welsh. In fact, as a result of a Spanish government initiative, a special provision had been added to the European Constitution, allowing each country to nominate the languages (from those that enjoy official status in all or part of their territory) into which the Treaty may be also translated, at national governments’ expense. Languages such as Catalan, Basque, and Galician have gained a status similar to the one previously accorded to Irish, allowing them to be ‘official’ languages for Treaty purposes. It means, for example, that the European Treaties are translated into these co-official languages of the Spanish autonomous territories. Other regional languages of some member states such as Welsh, Sami, Sardinian and Breton have not been nominated for official EU language status by their governments. Also Luxembourgish, although the national language of Luxemburg, is excluded from the list. The acknowledgment of non-national

3 BBC News. 2001. EU translation plan provokes protest , news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1490243.stm (accessed April 22, 2004).

languages at the supranational level is a step forward to recognising the linguistic rights of close to 50 million EU citizens who speak languages other than the official language of their country (something that the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages picks upon as well, as discussed later in this chapter). In many instances, however, EU language and translation policies expose the modernist project of linguistic standardisation, and the way a value is assigned to a language according to its place within a normalised hierarchy of national and international idioms (for a more detailed discussion see Chapter Three).

Yet, each language, even peripheral, is a medium through which, what Eco calls the ‘genius’ of a particular ethnic group expresses itself (Eco, 1995: 351). There is no intrinsic order of languages, only politics and social evaluation. Commenting on the hierarchy of languages, a leading linguist, David Crystal, observes:

A language does not become a global language because of its intrinsic structural properties, or because of the size of its vocabulary, or because it has been a vehicle of a great culture or religion…A language becomes an international language for one chief reason: the political power of its people – especially their military power’ (in Craith, 2006: 48).

In a similar vain, Augusto Carli et al (2003) comment that some languages tend to be considered as more ‘prestigious’ or ‘dominant’, whereas others rather ‘stigmatised’, or ‘dominated’ according to their ascribed or acquired degree of power. This is well illustrated by the socio-linguistic asymmetries in the border areas in Europe where some languages are associated with ‘higher cultural capital’ such as German, Italian and others such as Polish and Czech with ‘lower’ investments (Meinhof, 2003).

Culturally, according to a weak version of the Wharf-Sapir hypothesis in linguistics, languages represent different ways of perceiving, mapping and classifying the world. Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir were among the first to suggest that languages are a vehicle of the cultural knowledge and localised wisdom, the worldview and lifestyle of a particular community. A standard explanation for this worldview-language metonymy is culturally-laden lexicons. Whereas a British English speaker has few words for trees of the

genus Eucalyptus – ‘eucalyptus’, ‘eucalypte’ borrowed from Latin and ‘gum’ – speakers of Nyungar, the local language of the Perth district of Western Australia, would need to distinguish between many different species and thus lexically differentiate between eight or more (for example jarrah , karri, malarad, marri , wandoo ) (Dalby, 2003: 254).With linguistic standardisation and imperialism as in the case of politically designated national languages or ‘Englishisation’ of other languages (Phillipson, 2003), the well-being of marginalised cultures and ethnicities is threatened, while a few dominant idioms become strengthened. As Dalby maintains, the resulting languages become less flexible, nuanced, and inventive as they grow increasingly homogenised (Dalby 2003). In his Language in Danger: the Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to our Future , he argues that humanity requires linguistic variety not only to communicate, but also to sustain and enhance our understanding of the world. People do not simply invent words out of thin air: our creativity and intelligence are, to a significant degree, dependent on other languages and alternate ways of interpreting the world. When languages interact, they borrow and feed off each other, and this convergence stimulates human imagination, sparking our intelligence and adaptability.

The concern for linguistic diversity has a prominent presence in the literature of theoretical and applied linguistics. The intricate relationship between language, environment, and memory is posited to account for the levels of adaptability and sustainability of ecosystems. Bernard warns that ‘any reduction of language diversity diminishes the adaptational strength of our species because it lowers the pool of knowledge from which we can draw’ (in Cronin, 2003: 74). This has been picked upon in Australia in an effort to tap into local Aboriginal knowledge on relation to climate change ( Living Black , SBS, May 2007). Relevantly, there is growing evidence of a correlation between linguistic and biological diversity on the planet (Sktunabb-Kangas, 2003). Some theories of human-environment co-evolution propose that cultural diversity might increase biodiversity or vice versa. Consequently, the preservation of the world’s linguistic diversity becomes a key objective in any bio-culturally-oriented programs for diversity conservation. And since it is indigenous and minority groups that are the carriers of most of the linguistic complexity of human culture (Cronin, 2003: 72), and with so many languages now on the verge of extinction, this argument cannot be overlooked. According to some predictions, 90 per cent of the world’s oral languages might disappear over next 100 years (Sktunabb-Kangas, 2003). Neither can arguments about the role of

languages for enhancement of creativity, communicative flexibility and critical disposition be left out of this discussion. Departure from a monolingual mode of thinking results in an increase of cross-cultural adeptness, something which in the era of globalisation is valued by not only linguists, but also by employers and politicians. The maintenance and promotion of linguistic diversity is vital for economic growth, and management of socio-political challenges.

In the Australian context, arguments in support of diversity and the benefits of immigration have been advanced from the socio-economic point of view. Mary Kalantzis (2002) promoted ‘productive diversity’ as a positive possibility for organisational life and culture. The diversity of communities, workforces and the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives that they offer, including language and cultural skills, can be harnessed as a productive asset and tailored to business objectives. Kalantzis (2002) argues that Australia’s competitiveness is indeed driven by ‘productive diversity’, with international cultural and economic links fostering dynamism and creativity.

In general, where different language communities come into contact, there exists a need for borrowings, multilingualism, translation, but also the use of standardisation or a lingua franca. Different modes of interlingual exchange historically shaped European languages, and remain a site of ongoing negotiation. The tension between a convenience of lingua franca and historical linguistic diversity is definitely a reality of the EU. It reflects persistent contradictions and fractures that govern the European politics of language, but does it also offer practical possibilities? In what ways has it informed language policy and affected the focal areas of the EU’s activity for maintaining and promoting linguistic diversity and multilingual citizenship?

1.3 EU LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION POLICY

There is no common language policy binding all member-states in the EU, unlike policies in the area of agriculture for example. According to the principle of subsidiarity, language provisions (as well as culture) remain within nation states’ jurisdiction. There is however the EU Language Charter that defines legal aspects of multilingual communication at the EU

institutional level and in dealings with EU citizens. Additionally, the commitment to Europe’s cultural and linguistic diversity is proclaimed as a core value of post-war European politics, and featured on the EUROPA homepage as ‘Languages: Europe’s asset’. The EU itself is a political community that is quite different from a traditional inter-governmental organisation in that its legislation often has an immediate and direct effect on people’s lives across member states. National bodies at different levels of governance – from national to regional and local – must be able to understand EU directives and regulations that are binding on all citizens. Importantly, translation provided by the EU is meant to support the widest possible debate of European affairs in language that is accessible to non-linguists and non-diplomats. Every European citizen has right to partake in the discussion in one of the EU official language of their choice. This has clear implications for the EU’s operations and policy-making, and necessitates one of the world’s largest translation services:

The mission of the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) is to meet the Commission’s needs for translation and linguistic advice with respect to all types of written communication, to support and strengthen multilingualism in the European Union and to help to bring the Union’s policies closer to its citizens , thereby promoting its legitimacy, transparency and efficiency (Directorate-General for Translation, 2005: − emphasis mine).

The goals and assumptions of the EU language regime underpinned by the value assigned to Europe’s multilingualism relate broadly to: • democratic equality, transparency and access to international political communication for all European citizens, • promotion of multilingualism across EU institutions and Europe-wide, which over years has received substantive, albeit varying, support in the form of a set of legal and language policy documents and relevant infrastructure across areas of education, culture, economic competitiveness, employment, as well as security and justice in the form of linguistic human rights.

In a characteristic fashion of a high bureaucratic language the European Union defends its Charter in following terms:

As the European Union grows, the practical difficulties of according equal status to the languages of its constituent nations also grow; but any approach that failed to respect the languages of the peoples of the Union would betray the very foundations of Union philosophy (Directorate-General for Translation, 2005).

Equitable or asymmetrical communication The examination of language structure in the EU includes a brief exposition of relevant articles and policies. This is both simple and complex. On the one hand, very little is said in the Treaty about language. Only two pieces of legislation are directly relevant. Article 314 of the Treaty which establishes the European Community (1958) states that the Treaty should be drafted in all four languages of the six initial EEC member states (Dutch, French, German and Italian), with all four texts carrying equal authority. With each enlargement this regulation was amended to incorporate the official languages of new entrant countries; English and Danish were added in 1973, Greek in 1981, Spanish and Portuguese in 1986, Swedish and Finnish in 1995, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak, and Slovene in 2004, and Irish, Bulgarian and Romanian in 2007. Currently there are 23 official languages of the 27 member states. The number of member states exceeds the number of official languages, as several national languages are shared by two or more countries. Namely, Dutch is official in the Netherlands and Belgium, French in France, Belgium and Luxemburg, and Greek in Greece and Cyprus. English and Swedish are also shared, the former by the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Malta, and the latter by Sweden and Finland. In addition, not all languages have been granted the status of official EU languages. These include Luxembourgish, which became an official language of Luxembourg in 1984, and Turkish, an official language of Cyprus. Also the Irish language has become one of the EU official languages since January 1, 2007 only.

Article 21 of the Treaty provides that every citizen of the Union may write to any of the institutions in one of the languages specified in Article 314 (above) and receive a reply in that language. In this way the Union frames its commitment to equality and mutuality in internal and external communication. According to a former President of European Language Council, the latter article demonstrates additionally the Community’s commitment to fostering Europe’s multilingualism, allowing citizens a free choice of a language to communicate with

the EU institutions (Mackiewicz 2003). Later this article became a foundational element of European citizenship rights as expressed in the Maastricht Treaty (1992).

There is no distinction between official and working languages established in Council Resolution No. 1 of 1958. However, ‘working’ languages are often confused with ‘official’ and ‘procedural’ languages of the EU across academic studies, media coverage, and political acts. For example, Irish was excluded from the list of EU official languages until 2007 despite its co-official national status in the Republic of Ireland. This is often attributed to the Irish authorities’ failure to grasp Regulation No. 1. Also, in the political climate of the day, the Irish government wanted to avoid mandating Irish as an entry requirement of the Irish civil service. Similarly, Fischer and Vedrine’s joint letter against a proposed reduction of Commission’s translation activities refers to ‘a single one of the three working languages of the community institutions’ (in Phillipson, 2003: 121). Adding to the confusion is the fact that English and French, which are also languages of international diplomacy, unlike German, are dominant in the institutional operations of the EU. They are called ‘procedural’ languages, which sometimes get misleadingly labelled ‘working languages’. In accordance with Council Regulation No. 1, the EU institutions are free to decide upon the procedural languages used in their internal workings.

Although national languages of member states have equal status within the EU, reality does not match the rhetoric of multilingualism. A small number of languages with strong national and cultural status are mostly used procedurally, counteracting parity in international communication. For example, a letter to an individual or an internal memo will be provided in one language only, which may or may not involve translation. Additionally, a committee may decide to work in a limited number of languages until it produces a proposal for a wider discussion. A truly multilingual translation occurs only when the Commission communicates with other EU institutions, member states or the public. Similarly, different institutions have different needs for interpretation that range from full, symmetric language coverage for elected representatives (for example, ministers in formal meetings, and plenary meetings of the Committee of the Regions) to asymmetric interpretation when participants speak a number of languages but interpretation is provided in a few only. They involve the use of various interpretation techniques such as direct interpreting, relay (interpreting via a bridging

language: language A is first interpreted into language B, then into C by interpreters working from B), and two-way interpreting or retour (the same interpreter who works from A into B also works from B into A). 4

This asymmetry in translation as well as interpretation in internal business, mostly carried out in English, French and German, is often justified by an economic rationale. However, as Phillipson observes, such a pecking order of procedural languages means that Danish and Swedish may disappear as languages of interpretation within a decade (Phillipson, 2006). And this is not completely unproblematic for minor languages such as Danish and Swedish, as translation/interpretation helps secure adaptability of the language vocabulary to the ever- expanding reality of the EU and its nomenclature.

Language asymmetries often cause political upheavals and a charged atmosphere at EU meetings. For example, during the Finnish Presidency in autumn 1999 it became apparent that member states whose own language is not a ‘procedural’ language generally prefer to use English as the sole language. Germany consequently decided to boycott the summit. Indeed, Germany has been resisting linguistic demotion for years. In 2000 France and Germany signed a joint ‘language directive’ pledging mutual support in the field of language policy; and in 2006, French President Jacques Chirac ‘led a French walkout from the opening session of the EU's annual spring summit…when a fellow Frenchman committed the grave offence of speaking English’ (Watt and Gow, 2006). This highlighted not only France's acute sensitivity towards the decline of the language which once dominated the EU, but also the impact of English on corporate globalisation when Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the French head of the European employers' group Unice, abandoned his mother tongue on the grounds that English is ‘the language of business’ (in Watt and Gow, 2006).

Indeed, political tensions around languages in the EU often reflect a wider anxiety about the naturalisation of a pecking-order of languages in EU affairs, manifested in, for example, job advertisements that favour competence in English, and the prevalence of English in websites and translations. This reflects, in turn, uneasiness about the strength of English in the wider

4 Directorate-General for Interpretation of the Commission, 2007.

context of a globalising world, including its role in e-learning, current foreign language learning and teaching practices, and distance education. However, moral and cultural panic surrounding the rise of English as lingua franca (likewise the popularity of American cultural products) needs to be qualified with approaches from diverse areas of literature that differentiate between multiple contextual uses of English, its various local hybridisations, and increasing numbers of speakers of English but as a second language. Also Europe’s long tradition of language barriers to trade and cultural interaction also explains this contemporary unease with English in the light of globalisation.

Multilingualism There are a few more Articles of the Treaty that are more loosely related to language. They complement provisions concerning equity in communication with those of the value of a polyglot European community. Amendments introduced to the Union Treaty at Maastricht (1992) included new provisions on education and culture. Article 149 (Education, Vocational Training and Youth) refers to the ‘cultural and linguistic diversity of the member states’, while Article 151 (Culture) notes their ‘national and regional diversity’. Paragraph 4 of the same Article stipulates that, ‘The Community shall take cultural aspects into account in its action under the provision of this Treaty, in particular in order to respect and promote the diversity of its cultures’. This was later reaffirmed in the Amsterdam Treaty revision (1997). Also, Article 2.11 of the Amsterdam Treaty restated that citizens of the Union are able to use their language in their dealings with the institutions. However vague those regulations might be, they are claimed to reflect a new and more inclusive vision of European identity.

Although EU language policy is often criticised for its preference for official national languages and negligence of languages of non-European, migrant communities (Craith, 2006: 168), more inclusive outlooks for ‘European languages’ have been advanced in EU most recent decisions and policy documents (Commission of the European Communities, 2005). While the EU language and translation provisions regarding the status of official languages and citizens’ communication with the EU institutions are binding for all member states, action plans and programs designed to promote multilingualism are, at the time of writing, a set of recommendations only. As a result, however noteworthy they might be, they lack legal power and are inadequately implemented by member states.

A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism 2005 (NFSM) is important in this context, as it sets up a complementary strategic framework to the Commission’s current initiative to improve communication between Europeans and the EU institutions (see Introduction) and restates the main objectives of the EU language policy. The three main aims are:

• To encourage language learning and promote linguistic diversity in society; • To promote a multilingual economy • To give citizens easier access to European Union legislation, procedures and information in their own languages.

With this document, multilingualism becomes a new field of the EU policy area that ‘promotes a climate (…) conducive to the full expression of all languages, in which teaching and learning of a variety of languages can flourish’ (Commission of the European Communities, 2005: 3). A Commissioner with responsibilities explicitly for multilingualism was appointed in 2006 for the first time to reflect the political importance of the new portfolio. Currently, this post is occupied by a Romanian official, Leonard Orban. As with other official documents within a broad category of culture, the Commission maps out previous programs, sets out priorities, but without law-implementing powers, recommends rather than prescribes that the member states take relevant actions.

The first recommendation promotes language learning at all levels of the education system. It addresses the correlation between the foreign language skill and intercultural outlook, something which in the Australian is exemplified by the work of Joseph Lo Bianco, the author of Australia’s language policy (Bianco et al., 1999). It follows resolutions of the Barcelona European Council summit (2002), at which representatives of the member states called for at least two foreign languages to be taught from a very early age. Significantly, NSFM (2005) warns against ‘a growing tendency for foreign language learning to mean simply learning English’, and restates that ‘English is not enough’ (Commission of the European Communities, 2005: 4; Commission of the European Communities, 2003).

The EU wants to invest in developing language skills and promoting linguistic diversity through a set of ongoing and new initiatives mostly around programs encouraging student exchange (for example, LINGUA, SOCRATES/ERASMUS, LEONARDO DA VINCI). The existing town-twinning projects, the European Voluntary Service, and the ‘Culture’ program to finance translation of literary work, along with proposed ‘Culture 2007’, ‘Youth in Action’, ‘Lifelong’ Learning, and research and technological development (especially machine translation) are examples of the Commission’s activity. A few of those, such as the education- oriented ERASMUS/SOCRATES or LINGUA, have proved quite successful — although on lesser scale than intended — moving students across multilingual European universities, even though not necessarily in all directions proportionally. One identified need to be addressed at the level of national strategies is teaching of regional and minority languages, with the latter addressing two-way measures for migrants to learn the host country’s language and for teaching migrant languages.

The priorities of multilingual agenda are well-defined in the following extract of the published interview with the Commissioner for Multilingualism, Leonard Orban:

Interviewer : Multilingualism is a key factor in communication between the European institutions and EU citizens. How do you intend to get the multilingualism message across to citizens?

Orban : First of all, adapting to national and regional situations is at the very heart of the Commission’s communication strategy. 'Going local' entails understanding the messages coming from the EU and listening more closely to citizens' needs, and language is an essential ingredient of that. The Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) and its Field Offices in the Member States are indispensable for providing citizens with information — in their mother tongue! — on the EU's key decisions and on what they could mean for the future. Another aspect is encouraging citizens to become multilingual … Interviewer: That’s the crucial one, I would guess.

Orban : Yes, no doubt about that. Actually, scientific research has shown that the best way to encourage lifelong learning is to ensure a high-quality initial education. Having

learned how to learn, people are usually no longer afraid to face the challenges of studying something new. Starting to learn foreign languages from early childhood is therefore an efficient way to contribute to multilingualism, and can be taken further by means of existing programs, such as ‘Socrates’, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, ‘Tempus’, ‘Erasmus Mundus’ or the new ‘Lifelong Learning Program’. Multimedia and the internet are also effective means of fostering multilingualism, while subtitling movies is a good way of encouraging people to learn foreign languages, as the experience of those Member States that do it has shown. And while on the subject of education, let me just remind you that in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, we will shortly be launching a translation contest involving many schools right across Europe. 5

Knowledge economy The second facet of the Commission’s multilingual policy is a pragmatic one, explicitly related to the contribution of language skills to the global competitiveness of the EU economy. Language skills are directly linked to business activity, job growth and labour mobility, particularly in the information society and media industries (a part of the i2010 initiative 6) with European ‘language industries’ 7 indicating an ever-growing potential. A number of programs, such as ‘eContent’, ‘eContent plus’, 8 ‘Media and eLearning’, assist in the production and distribution of multilingual European content and knowledge. There is a broad recognition of the importance of translation services across all markets — international/national bureaucracy, business, and entertainment — and in the realm of online content. Despite interest and support for development of translation-related technology, the NFSM (2005) offers a word of caution that ‘thought processes of a human translator’ cannot be replaced by a machine. The Commission’s multilingual policy also commits it to a study of

5 Orban, L. 2007. Multilingualism: less a burden than an opportunity , www.europa.eu/languages/en/document/94 (accessed May 2, 2007). 6 A flagship project on digital libraries to make multimedia sources more accessible and interesting. 7 ‘Language industries’ include translation, editing, proof-reading, interpreting, terminology, language technologies (speech processing, voice recognition and synthesis), language training, language teaching, language certification and testing and research. 8 eContentplus Program http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm (accessed November 29, 2006).

the potential for greater use of subtitles in film and television programs to promote language learning. It also makes a direct reference to the role of communication policy (discussed in the introductory chapter). This emphasis on economy has been a key driving motor of the EU’s integration, much to unease of some critics who urge exploration of alternatives to market forces and linguistic nationalism (for example Esperanto proposed by Phillipson, 2003).

Promotion of regional and lesser-used languages Although the EU as an institution supports multilingualism, this primarily applies to its official, national rather than minority languages. The European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages (1992) is a Council of Europe initiative with promising yet unrealised potential. Its goal is to protect and promote regional and minority languages as a threatened aspect of Europe’s cultural heritage, enabling speakers of those languages to use them in both private and public life 9. This Charter is not concerned with languages at the supranational level. Its strength lies in its recognition within a single document of ‘territorial’ languages such as Corsican or Basque and languages ‘of immigrants’ such as Arabic or Turkish, and proposal for concrete actions in specific areas of public life. The areas include: education, judicial authorities, administrative authorities and public services, media, cultural activities and facilities, economic and social life, trans-frontier exchanges. Yet, as Balibar observes, ‘[the Charter] does not unite them in a single concept, which means that it does not manage to conceptualise the equality between the different communities that contribute to the formation of the “European people”’ (Balibar, 2004: 272). It also lacks a legal stringency that allows for an unequal ratification by the member states, which have the latitude to apply it in whole, in part, or not at all. For instance, France, Greece and Turkey have been reluctant to acknowledge the existence of linguistic minorities within their territories.

All these areas of language policy in Europe are fluid and interconnected. The policy issue is further complicated by the unresolved tension between linguistic nationalism (monolingualism) and EU institutional multilingualism (see Chapter Three) as well as competing agendas at the European, national, and sub-national levels across Europe. For example, the prescribed equity in communication at the supranational level does not

9 The Council of Europe, http://www.coe.int/legal (accessed March 9, 2005).

necessarily translate into the protection of language rights for minority languages within the member states (according to the principle of subsidiarity). EU member states are merely encouraged to comply with certain resolutions (for example, the Charter for Minority and Lesser-Used Languages). The lack of a legal base for non-official language and in some cases their oppression within a state’s territory is seen as a serious drawback. Indeed, the language policies of EU member states rarely refer to language rights, except for some ‘regional’ minorities, leaving immigrant languages out of their provisions. Languages as resources and fundamental human rights do not constitute an integral part of general social policy or a state’s obligations, which is an important point of contrast with Australia’s 1987 language policy (Phillipson 2003, 143). Additionally, Phillipson points out that the EU goal to foster tolerance towards linguistic diversity for social enrichment is seldom realised through concrete implementation or monitoring; this includes national education systems (Phillipson, 2003, 142).

No wonder the question, ‘can the EU move from declarations to something concrete?’ often features in debates on language issues, as illustrated in the comments of Leonard Orban, Commissioner for Multilingualism, previously quoted. After a proposal to renew support for Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (BLUL) was rejected by the European Parliament (EP) in 2006, exposing once again ‘real priorities’ of the EU language policy, one Member of Parliament observed:

The unity in diversity slogan is nothing more than a mere formality taken absolutely out of context. For this parliament, multilingualism only refers to the official languages of the member states, neglecting a much richer and complex reality. Europe is not just a mere conglomeration of states and linguistic diversity is not only related to those languages with strong legal status. 10

Until now EU language policy has been confined to the domain of formal politics, political analysis, international relations, and language planning and policy studies. Consequently, the solutions have usually assumed the form of an institutional administrative reform in the EU,

10 Hicks, D. 2006. Unity in Diversity? European Parliament rejects Bernat Joan’s Report proposals , http://www.european-writers-congress.org/upload/eurolang.pdf (accessed June 8, 2007).

or economic propositions rather than the shared European citizenship that it actually describes. The economic solutions have included, for example, a German proposal to compensation for excluded languages and a market model for interpretation which stipulates that interpretation should proceed on request basis, and should be financed through national budgets. The purely economic model seems however quite problematic, as it inevitably advantages bigger countries with larger budgetary capacities.

In its current shape, Balibar argues, ‘European citizenship is not conceived as a recognition of the rights and contributions of all the communities present upon European soils, but as a postcolonial isolation of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ populations…a true European apartheid’ (Balibar, 2004). Indeed, EU language policy has often been perceived as an expensive and elitist, ‘benevolent sham, failing in its expressed desire to protect and promote so-called minority linguistic and other traditions’ (Gubbins, 1996: 125). According to Piron, it follows the bureaucratic approach to international communication, ‘consuming vast human and material resources – paper, time, money – for pitiful results’, and thus representing ‘an unequal, unjust and unfeeling solution’ far removed from a human, social domain (in Hoffmann, 1996: 127). This in turn is a cause of a European democratic deficit and the widely lamented lack of a European public sphere.

But the EU has attempted to bridge the divide between high policy and the social domain of the everyday by mobilising the following diverse infrastructure:

• EU policy-making (for example, subsequent language policy documents, Directorate for Multilingualism) • EU translation and interpretation services (organisation, technology, training) • Education (teaching and learning of foreign languages) • Research (student mobility) • Media

In this constellation, media as an important infrastructure of EU language policy is the focus of this thesis. In the late 1980s, the idea of creation of a European public sphere gave rise to

experiments in pan-European multilingual satellite television (see Chapter Six). However, these initiatives called ‘Eurikon’ and ‘Europa’ were plagued by disjunction between EU elites’ ideals and did not achieve expected popular success. The concern for linguistic diversity in media was resurrected much later in the form of much more modest MEDIA- scheme, which includes some subsidies for subtitling. The cornerstone of a common European audiovisual legal framework, TWFD sets a European programming quota, and the 2006 Commission’s Media Literacy consultation program explores media’s role in active citizenship and democracy. The 2005 multilingual policy signals the EU commitment to furthering translation in the realms of entertainments, especially online content, but practical outcomes are still to be seen. Otherwise, EU language policy has not translated much into media policy, institutions and practices.

It is well-established in the media and communication studies that broadcasting holds the potential for community building, constituting a public sphere and promoting the collective imaginary (Morley, 2000). Authors associated more directly with work on linguistics and language planning recognise the connection and argue for putting information and communication technologies into the service of linguistic diversity (Phillipson, 2003; Crystal, 2004). The postulated link between language policies and media is especially significant for my argument. For Phillipson (2003, 231), for example, the best media translation example for the European context is not so much Euronews but ‘one multilingual channel in Australia [SBS]’.

1.4 CONCLUSIONS

Having mapped out the institutional basis of translation in the EU, I argue precisely for a mobilisation of multilingual media infrastructure in order to communicate Europe and thus advance the process of integration. An EU language policy framework that organises formal aspects of multilingual citizenship along with the hierarchy of member-states’ languages (‘official’, ‘procedural’, ‘working’) both reflects and contributes to the politics of language played out in the EU, and globally. Until now, EU language policies have remained distanced from the everyday practices of cultural citizenship in Europe. This is a significant shortcoming as it leaves the potential to engage ordinary Europeans in vernacular translation

practices (including those mediated via technologies of television) highly unrealised. The role of translation as a necessary link between language and media policy is thus critical here. In fact, translation procedures make the EU quite an exceptional international organisation. Comparatively, the Council of Europe and NATO use two working languages only – French and English. The UN has six only. In this understanding, the highly elaborated EU translation and interpretation services that carry out the enormous task of translating amongst 23 official languages cease to be seen as a merely functional unit. While their input into the elaboration and modernisation of European languages and professional training is already a value, ‘translation’ as a process can be extended to become a resource, a key policy frame, a mode of mediated communication.

Multilingual interactions on the ground intensified by migration, both external and intra- European, are also enhanced by the emergence of new media technologies understood here as an infrastructure of language policy. They open up a new domain for participation in multilingual communication (for example, migrant websites and online initiatives at international public radio and television stations in Europe, as discussed in Chapter Four). Even though new media are not the primary concern of this thesis, their impact on language, policy-values, domains and other infrastructure is noteworthy. EU translation and interpretation services as necessary conditions to organise and manage linguistic exchanges in diplomacy and bureaucracy have followed a vertical model of translation. The Internet potentially unsettles these vertical relationships; by offering free translation services broadly defined to include Google, Altavista Babel Fish Translation, or fan-generated translations. It facilitates inter-communal horizontal relations between ‘ordinary’ people. This kind of translation practice contrasts with the EU translation and interpretation services which display a high degree of professionalism, quality, capital and human expertise. In the online sphere, such high quality or accuracy of translation is not paramount. Instead, whether for marketing, education, or recreational media consumption, access to information and different knowledges is critical. A disclaimer on one online translation provider’s website reads: ‘free translation is

ideal for instant, draft-quality results. It is a “gisted” translation, providing a basic understanding of the original text’. 11

The ‘gisted translation’ corresponds to Umberto Eco’s argument about a polyglot Europe, where ‘catching a glimpse of the particular cultural universe [expressed] in the language of ancestors and [our] tradition’ (Eco, 1995: 350-1) rather than achieving perfect accuracy or fluency is the solution to the continent’s cultural problems. This provisionality of knowledge implied by Eco may indeed be a post-modern version of approximating a plethora of cultural diversity that we are exposed to in the post-modern globalised world. Evidently, the Internet subverts also a mythology of the cultural and linguistic superiority of an English native- speaker for successful communication. On the example of Europe, Phillipson argues that English should be reconsidered as a Europe’s lingua franca, a democratic world language that does not necessarily need to follow subtleties, nuances inherent in the language and thereby discriminate between native speakers and speakers of English as a second language (Phillipson, 2003: 162-3). He quotes the EU and Council of Europe language policy, reinforcing the importance of communicative skills and intercultural competence:

Going beyond the cultural to the intercultural, the goal is not to develop native-like proficiency, but intercultural speakers, citizens able to mediate between cultures within national, regional and European identities (Phillipson, 2003: 147).

The very raison d’être of translation is precisely making intercultural communication possible. The digression about new media’s practices of translation – although only flagged here – is relevant to my thesis, as it indicates a different mode of translation to the one of in the bureaucratic and political domain where requirements for semantic precision and referential accuracy are stringent.

Additionally, in the case of EU translation services, translation’s inherent value to ‘always translate for somebody’ (Schaeffner, 1996: 162) is taken for granted, following a prescribed

11 Click2Translate, com, http://www.click2translate.com (accessed December 13, 2006). Additionally, the promotional slogan of on the Click2Translate.com that reads, ‘Trying to reach global customers, do not shout louder, speak their language’, indicates the centrality of localisation in the global economy.

transmission model of supply irrespective of demand, and marked from the start as an elite enterprise. Conversely, translation practices in the new media 12 environment are often generated on the basis of ordinary people’s interest and curiosity for a given product (for example, newly released films are instantaneously translated by fans and distributed through web 2.0, blogs, and so on). They also tend to be more flexible and tolerant of some inaccuracies or omissions for particular purposes and individualised uses, with stress on the centrality of the communicative function over the linguistic forms and resources. As a result, even though, some things such as humour and idioms might be lost in translation, gains are made in facilitating connections between different languages and cultures around a given text. This consideration for a mediated translation as a testing ground for cross-cultural communication runs throughout the whole thesis.

12 For discussion of translation in the context of news journalism see Chapter Four which quotes Susan Bassnett’s argument that media translation practices are in fact closer to what is by definition called ‘interpretation’ rather than ‘translation’ across translation studies and linguistics.

2 THEORETICAL CONTEXTS FOR INTERLINGUAL CITIZENSHIP POLICY: METHODOLOGY

2.1 INTRODUCTION

In the context of an argument that favours a new interlingual citizenship policy this chapter focuses on an interdisciplinary dialogue between several domains of knowledge: those referring broadly to ‘state’ (political science) and ‘meaning’ (media, cultural, translation studies). In this process, my position as a researcher-translator is to test ‘boundaries’ and ‘contact zones’ between disparate areas, to explore gaps and a series of new connections. Thus elaborated methodology is indeed a strategy in translation, or to adapt Bakhtin’s concept of ‘dialogue’, between different disciplinary languages, concrete points of view and socio- ideological conceptual systems represented within scholarship. As such it aims to provide a more comprehensive and a less reductionist or confined way for understating the complexity of the research question, exposing often polarised reactions and trying to find a middle ground. Such a dialogic, multi-disciplinary approach between social sciences and the humanities is well-suited to explain the tensions of shifting relationships between the many areas that constitute the meaning of translation in the European Union and Australia; globalisation, politics, media and culture. Specifically, by turning my attention to the cultural role of translation in the international circulation of media texts, I have sought not to ignore the crucial role of bureaucratic and institutional agencies which have influenced the material conditions for interlingual communication and exchange world-wide. Indeed, institutions and governments provide the context for economic and political forces at play in the globalisation and anti-globalisation movements, and as such need to be taken into account along with the semiotics of communication.

For my methodology, then, I have drawn upon theories from Political Science, Law, Language Planning and Language Policy, Political Economy and Policy Studies Research. These are grouped together as pertaining to the understanding of ‘state’ mechanisms

(institutions, regulations, policies), while Cultural, Media, Communication Studies and Translation Studies that centre on the analysis of cultural texts are located on the ‘meaning’ side (texts, interpretation, context). The body of works in the proposed ‘state’ category, based on social-science, helps to explain the features of globalisation that affect the production and transnational circulation of culture products, including the rise of supranational institutions (the EU), the economic power of specific languages, and national or supranational (language, broadcasting) regulation: in brief, the issues of language and translation within a specific economic and political system, constituted by relations between state, the economy, social institutions and practices, and media organisations (including, for example, PSB). On the other hand, text- or ‘meaning’-based perspectives that focus on culture can enrich accounts in the political economy of more complex and nuanced models that stress the role of negotiation and translation in cultural exchanges, including different readings of media texts. They also complement traditional accounts of globalisation in political science by underscoring the importance of mediated communication in an increasingly globalised world. The organising thread that links these many diverse theories across these intellectual fields is translation.

Surveying literature across those domains of knowledge I trace some exemplary work around languages and translation, indicating its disciplinary provenance in relation to the proposed ‘state-meaning’ typology. For the sake of clarity, the discussion in this chapter evolves around the work of specific theorists, ‘translators’, not necessarily those engaged in inter-linguistic translation themselves, but for whom the issue of translation, its contemporary role and status is more pronounced or addressed directly. Often their intellectual trajectory resists being placed in any determined position, or being bound to rigid notions of disciplines. Michael Cronin suggests that translators are practitioners of a ‘third culture’, which includes not only ‘the classic polarities of humanities and the sciences but also many other areas of human enquiry. In other words, the interculturality of translation agents is not only to be located in their travelling between languages and cultures but it is also bound in their necessary disciplinary nomadism (Cronin, 2003: 112). As this thesis relates translation to larger questions of culture, society and politics, I am keen to pursue those interdisciplinary alliances. The ‘in-betweenness’ of my research and of many others presented in the chapter corresponds metaphorically to a well-established view of translation as ‘bridge-building across the space between source and target’ (Bassnett, 2002). And this positioning is by extension

characteristic of the 21 st century’s negotiation between the global and the local, the foreign and the familiar.

2.2 INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF TRANSLATION: ‘STATE’ MECHANISMS OF REGULATION AND POLICY

EU as a post-national experiment The European Union, principally an international economic and political organisation, is often cited as an example of formations characteristic of the contemporary global system; fragmented and interconnected at the same time. It has been discussed as an experimental, ‘unfinished’, post-national project that stands for an historical shift in understanding of identity and citizenship beyond the category of the coherent, ‘modern’ community (Bauman, 2004; Balibar, 2004). Since states are willing to transfer regulatory functions to the supranational body of the EU, and in this way cede a portion of their sovereignty, traditional self-definition in terms of geographical borders, national sovereignty and an (imagined) unitary nation are questioned. Uncontrollable flows of migration further undermine a nation- state’s rhetoric of a single, unitary community using the same language and sharing the same values. All this requires revision of the cultural identity elements, and the role of nations within the EU, which is very often pursued by means of linguistic legislations (for example, ‘loi Toubon’ in France 13 ) and claims to national or minority language presence in international communication. The unambiguously close relationship between politics, culture, identity and language has rendered language issues a central concern at both the supranational and national levels, with serious implications for the efficiency of internal and external communication and the Europeanisation project itself.

13 The Toubon Law was promulgated in 1994 to assert that French is the language of education, work, trade and public services in France. As many critics maintain, it was not only devised to an active defence but indeed a legal justified purification of French which has taken place since the 1960s. French is often presented as ‘under threat’ is many official documents, paving the way for the explicit ban on the use of foreign terms whenever there exist French equivalents. Its clearly ‘protectionist’ attitude was precipitated by the increasing decline of the status of French as a major international language, including as the language of diplomacy. The law provoked much public unease, and generally insists on the continuity of the French language and the French nation over time, which, as Jacques Durand maintains, ‘is a fiction that does not resist even a superficial examination of either the history of French or that of France (Durand, 1996: 85).

In this chapter I list a few examples of studies that address the issue of language and translation from a philosophical perspective, not just in terms of the obvious socio-scientific approaches to various aspects of the legal, regulatory and political side of contemporary globality. This interconnection between philosophy and political analysis is not atypical; it indicates porous disciplinary borders and a value in new languages that emerge at the interstices of disciplines. Here concerns of multilingualism and translation are placed at the core of the European integration project. Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, is a declared European and, in my classification, a disciplinary ‘translator’. Best known for his extensive analysis of a range of modern processes such as the crumbling of the nation-state or the effects of globalisation, he has worked across a number of intellectual traditions, languages, and cultures, emphasising the ethical value of the European project in its promise of cultivating difference and dialogue. Bauman’s attention to the importance of translation and multilingualism in Europe is framed within the broader context of European thought and politics, from colonial imperialism to uniting Europe. In Europe: An Unfinished Adventure, Bauman asserts that Europe’s unique diversity made a dialogue necessary once religious and military conquests had been abandoned. Bauman argues:

Europe has been and remains a homeland of perpetual translation; in the process, it has learned to make a fruitful dialogue between cultural and linguistic idioms effective without effacing the identity of any of the participants. It has learned (to quote Franz Rosenzewig’s expression) to treat the partners in conversation as having tongues in addition to ears; as speakers, not merely listeners (Bauman, 2004: 89).

In this he draws on Umberto Eco’s idea of the ‘idiom of Europe’ which has been formed in ‘the practice of translation’. Eco is also quoted by another prominent political and social science scholar Etienne Balibar. In this discussion of transnational citizenship in Europe, Balibar (2004) lists a few ‘worksites of and for democracy’, places where European democracy faces major challenges and where transformations are seen as necessary. Amongst four areas of collective political action identified as critical to advancement of European citizenship are: questions of justice; and the convergence of trade union struggles and the associative movement around projects to reorganise labour time on the European scale,

democratisation of borders, and culture, particularly ‘the language of Europe’ (Balibar, 2004: 177).

Significantly for my discussion, in reference to the latter, Balibar mentions the need to initiate multicultural practices around languages rather than continue with ‘the law that organises both the hierarchy of state languages and the protection of unofficial idioms (the Charter of Regional and Minority Languages of 1992, whatever its usefulness may be)’ (Balibar, 2004: 177). As argued in Chapter One, EU language policy follows a bureaucratic approach to translation; it nominates ‘official languages of integration’, ‘working’, and ‘procedural’, and prescribes concrete translation procedures (that is, which documents are to be translated, and so on). In practice, the languages most frequently used for drafting purposes and in-house procedures are de facto ‘international languages’, reflective of the uneven economic and political power relations, which causes lots of friction. Most importantly, however, the EU management of language diversity secured by Treaties and policies – as necessary as it is for effective international communication – is inadequate for an active citizenship and the formation of European communal identities. Therefore, Balibar’s advocacy of ‘multicultural practices’ implies a more flexible, informal, and engaging mode of cross-cultural communication at the level of populations in Europe. In my thesis, the experience of television watching as primarily about getting along features precisely as such a more casual multicultural sociality.

In light of the history of the European continent, its interaction with world regions and perpetual translation, it is argued that Europe’s capacity in translation extends well beyond linguistics, placing the continent in the ideal position of becoming ‘an interpreter of the world’. This is a future envisioned by Bauman and Balibar: humanitarian interventions according to the Kantian rather than the Hobbesian style represented currently by the American politics. Interestingly, this definition of a European identity as an antithesis of America is also picked up by EU policies, although without a reference to translation as a cultural project (Kagan, 2003). In terms of the role of ‘the international globalised and globalising [English] language’ for European culture and politics, Balibar’s position is unambiguous: ‘English, in fact, is not and will not be the ‘language of Europe’. Instead, it is ‘a constantly transformed system of crossed usages; it is translation ’ (Balibar, 2004: 177-8).

This is congruent with another ‘translator’ Umberto Eco who, because of his disciplinary provenance, is discussed in this chapter under the ‘meaning’ category. I will return to Balibar’s conception of translation as ‘ the medium of communication upon which all other [social practices] depend’ in Chapter Seven (Balibar, 2004: 178 − emphasis in original).

These philosophical accounts of language and translation in Europe are a valuable contribution to a range of language planning and policy studies, mostly in the area of education (Hoffmann, 1996; Phillipson, 2003; Grin, 2003). A growing research interest across this field is the significance of linguistic human rights (Sktunabb-Kangas, 2003). Although quite late, legal developments in lending attention to the value of language as the most crucial expression of culture, humanity and identity, is long needed. It also needs to be noted that the politics of recognition for minority languages had been on the research agendas within media studies much earlier. The demands for media in minority or migrant languages precipitated the development of broadcasting services in Welsh, Catalan, or languages other than in English in Australia from the 1970s; those media initiatives have been widely discussed from a media studies perspective (see section below). There are whole channels in minority languages as well as minority-language soap operas in Europe, such as the long-running Pobol y Cwm in Wales or the Basque-language production Goenkale in the Basque Country (O'Donnell, 2001/2).

Europe’s linguistic diversity has been much too often confined to the domain of formal politics, political analysis, and international relations; presented in repetitious heavy-weight style of political statements and declarations in the official EU discourse. As mentioned earlier, in all those cases the solutions have usually focused on institutional administrative reform in the EU, or economic propositions. Although recent publications from the disciplines of linguistics and political science mention in passing the insufficiency of an approach that focuses on language regulation and planning from an exclusively linguistic perspective (Hoffmann, 1996: 84), they do not offer an elaborated alternative. However, some do point to the media direction. Phillipson, a British linguist, best known for his linguistic imperialism thesis, calls for more journalistic coverage of language policy to raise the awareness of linguistic issues Europe-wide and linguistic human rights, especially in regard to largely uncritical adoption of ‘englishisation, lingua economica/americana’ (Phillipson, 2003). In

similar vein, although referring not just to the EU but the whole world in general, David Crystal, a leading Welsh linguist, argues for the involvement of numerous public domains to raise language consciousness and to foster cultural heterogeneity. In his keynote address at the Dialogue on Language Diversity, Sustainability and Peace conference in Barcelona in 2004, Crystal lists specific measures to support linguists’ struggle against linguistic homogenisation and language endangerment intensified by globalisation. The Internet and other communication technologies, he argues, play a vital role in popularising the project at all levels, but most importantly, at the mundane level of the everyday (Crystal, 2004).

Although the Internet is not yet universally available, and in fact the areas of least Internet growth such as Africa and South America reflect the areas of greatest linguistic diversity and endangerment, the uses of online technology for linguistic diversity are already noted. A proliferation of websites in minority or endangered languages, language-specific online forums, multimedia and digital story telling projects are symptomatic of emergent virtual language communities. Along with the importance of the Internet and popular culture forms such as cinema and TV products, Crystal (2004) calls for the recognition of the input and needs of the young people, not only because of the clear association between the youth and new media technologies, but also because teenagers are the language users of the future.

Language/translation and power relations In an integrated interdisciplinary approach to language and translation, it is necessary to consider the meaning side of communication (texts/practices of reading) and a set of relationships between languages/translations and material conditions under which translation is produced, performed and distributed across societies through the lens of cultural policy and political economy. Practical examples in my thesis focus on the EU infrastructure of language policy (including translation services and initiatives for the promotion of minority languages) and a substantive reality of public service SBS Australia.

In the construction of a politics of recognition or the critique of homogenising forms of globalisation, the political aspects of language and translation have been discussed across many disciplinary fields. From the perspective of postcolonial studies, translation has been an instrument of control and management of knowledge, a means of establishing a hierarchical

relationship between different languages and cultures, but also a focus of dissent and contestation. In the history of colonialism, the asymmetrical political and economic relations within various geographical contexts led to colonial violence whereby colonial subjects were constructed through the imposed cultural and political forms which were ‘internalised as a condition of psychic reality, and then reproduced as the basis for normative social experience’ (Young, 1995: 171). The processes of translation which were to help universalise ‘modernity’ and overwrite cultural specificities of foreign text and culture, effacing otherness and producing the effect of transparency were consistent with the colonial ideology of the 19 th century. However, Homi Bhabha’s understanding of hybridity, or Young’s form of cultural dissemination seek to complicate the theory of cultural power and defy the concept of ‘cultural translation’ as a one way process that proceeds through a system of equivalences (Jakobson, 1956). 14 A large body of work, connected to theories about globalisation and modernity within cultural studies and sociology, emphasises the fact that these processes have not resulted either in the homogenisation of cultural ‘peripheries’ or the Americanisation of global culture. I offer a more elaborated approach that pays due attention to the politics of language and translation, including asymmetries, but also an attendant focus on the emancipatory potential offered by multilingual broadcasters in Europe and Australia.

Within education and language policy/planning interrogated themes have ranged from English as global language, marginalisation of local knowledges, western linguists’ power to name and determine curriculum and pedagogies across the world. For example, Suresh Canagarajah, in his book Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice , foregrounds the issues of power inequality and argues that the local is progressively ‘shortchanged by the social processes and intellectual discourses of contemporary globalisation’ (Canagarajah, 2005: xiv). Canagarajah’s work is in a way a response or extension of the larger debate on the English linguistic imperialism paradigm advocated by Robert Phillipson a decade earlier, and involving David Crystal, Henry Widdowson, David Graddol, and Alastair Pennycock. As it has been pointed out, the key figures in this debate are all white, middle-class British males (Karmani, 2005). Phillipson’s work on English imperialism, like the media cultural

14 Roman Jakobson's study of equivalence contributed to the theoretical analysis of translation since he introduced the notion of 'equivalence in difference'. Jakobson claims that in any interlingual translation there is no full equivalence between code units; instead 'translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes' (Jakobson, 1956: 233).

imperialism thesis, is often criticised for an unbalanced concentration on the supply side without doing justice to the ‘active audience’ and the emergence of new centres of cultural (media) production. In Phillipson’s case it involves the analysis of the British and American government policies of the 1950s and 1960s which were aimed at the global expansion of English language teaching, and assumed a passivity of recipients of English and its possible uses. Defined as ‘the dominance of English [that] is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstruction of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages (Phillipson, 1992: 47), English language imperialism is an example of ‘linguicism’ , which poses a threat to other languages.

The counterbalance to Phillipson, and other proponents of the cultural domination thesis, is provided by a great deal of work from within education, translation and post-colonial studies that analyses the uses of international English worldwide. The politically ambivalent significance of contemporary English which can work in different ways, sometimes conformist, but some time interventionist, depending upon the local situation and context, is noted by the editors of Traces , a multilingual series on cultural theory and translation (Sakai and Hanawa, 2001). Instead of taking a radical stance presented by English language imperialism, they investigate the ever-changing relation between the hegemonic English and other minor languages. They note for example, the use of English rather than Japanese in Taiwan when Taiwanese or Mandarin are not known. This debate has included the shift in language powers and the international status of the English language. The former has involved a discussion of the increasing importance of other languages such as Mandarin, Urdu, Portuguese and Spanish, which reflect the growing economic power of China, India and South America. The latter refers to English as a global language, progressively disassociated from its ‘original’ or ‘native’ English base. There is an extensive diaspora of British people in the world. English is also the dominant language of an international exchange, and indeed the lingua franca of global intellectual culture. The authors of a report on the status of English published by Demos acknowledge the necessity to change the outlook on the English language. Samuel Jones and Peter Bradwell observe:

Now, there could be about 1.3 billion speakers of English, and only about 330 million of those native. This is the reality of global English. The overwhelming majority of

speakers are non-native, and as people bring with them different cultures and contexts, and different experiences of using English, so the language itself changed. English is now more a language family than a single language with different forms appearing such as ‘Chinglish’, ‘Hinglish’ and ‘Singlish’. We need to recognise that English is no longer the language of Empire and that its capitalist and commercial dominance can be both a hindrance and a boon. This is as much about taking the opportunities that global English offers as it is about changing our outlook. Where we once directed the spread of English around the world, we are now just one of many shareholders in the asset that it represents (Bradwell and Jones, 2007: 12).

Indeed, critics of the language imperialism thesis point to the emergence of new centres of language generation, strongly correlated with their cultural media production, that challenge the status of ‘native English’ and/or American media domination. Brazil, for example, is considered one such success story in the development and dissemination of non-English cultural products internationally (Straubhaar, 2001), and thus ‘its’ Portuguese language is extended beyond the notion of the single centre. In similar vein, Toby Miller has pointed out the hegemony of the Mexican language in South America, resulting from the dubbing of American television products by Mexican stars. As a consequence, literally and metaphorically a ‘Mexican’ voice is heard across the American continent (Miller, 2006).

Of course, from the political economy perspective, English-language hegemony and an unbalanced translation market is just one area (next to television, news agencies, or deregulatory practices) of American cultural domination (Schiller in Durham and Kellner, 2001: 297). The asymmetries of globalisation and the current inequalities in the production of information and knowledge are mirrored in translation. Accounts of globalisation from within translation studies seek to expose the conditions and the directionality of meaning circulation among diverse linguistic and culture groups. In particular, the negative ‘balance of trade’ between translation from English and into English are an indication of the power distribution in global information flows, with those at the centre doing translation and those at the periphery solely receiving it (Held, 1999: 345-6; Janelle, 1991: 56-8; Lash and Urry, 1994: 28-9). The global hegemony of English is manifested in the number of books originally

written in English and accounting for 42 per cent of translations worldwide, compared with 13.5 per cent from Russian and 11.4 per cent from French (Janelle, 1991: 57).

However, as Lawrence Venuti warns, the dominance of Anglo-American culture is not expressed in a low number of books translated into English but also in particular translation values and strategies. A domesticating strategy based on transparency and fluidity seeks to ‘invisibly inscribe foreign texts with English language values and provide readers with the narcissistic experience of recognising their own culture in a cultural other’ (Venuti, 1992: 15). Additionally, pervasive power relations deem some works as ‘unworthy’ for translation, inferior or ideologically difficult and thus prone to either silence or ‘acculturation’. This point is made explicit by historian Sergio Romano, former Director General of Cultural Relations at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in relation to the Anglo-American publishing industry in Italy, when he says: ‘if one is intelligible within the outlook of American ideology, then one has a chance of being translated’ (in Venuti, 1992: 6). While Venuti’s arguments that limited access to foreign literatures and unavailability of translations can be useful in understanding the international context of Europe and Australia (including media texts), his general anti-Anglophone discourse needs to be qualified. His arguments often rely on binary oppositions that allow him to talk about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ translations in terms of hegemonic and minority culture, standard and non-standard language, critical studies and linguistics, without permitting more complex hybrid situations when languages come into contact (Pym, 1999).

The work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu whose writing is often located within a strand of political economy (for example, Durham and Kellner, 2001: 199), advocates an investigation of the structural factors in the international transfer of texts, as determined by a series of social/political operations. Questions should be asked about the process of selection in the sense of what is to be translated; who are the people doing the selecting, what interests do they have in appropriating and introducing an author to another country. The process of labelling and classification should in turn address the series in which it is to be inserted; the choice of a translator and a preface writer. And finally, the reading process should include considerations about how readers of a foreign text perceive the text in different ways, as the issues they have interest in are the result of a different field of production (Bourdieu, 1999).

While the political economy gives due attention to relations between economy and polity, culture and people, as well as the interconnection between the conditions of production, distribution and use of meaning/cultural texts in the global economy (Calabrese and Sparks, 2004; Mosco and Wasko, 1988), it seems to have devalued or ignored the role of translation. Illustrative of this point can be Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (2001) discussion of the global English as the ‘new planetary vulgate’ used by the international elite. According to them, this new lingua franca is the product of a new form of American imperialism that seeks to universalise the particularisms of the US society. This includes a one-way import of categories and concepts. They argue,

By imposing on the rest of the world categories of perception homologous to its social structures, the USA is refashioning the entire world in its image: the mental colonisation that operates through the dissemination of these concepts can only lead to a sort of generalised and even spontaneous ‘Washington consensus’, as one can readily observe in the sphere of economics, philanthropy or management training (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2001: 4).

Esperanca Bielsa, in her elaboration of a theoretical approach to globalisation as translation, stresses rightly that such a view leaves the questions of necessary translation or adaptation to a new cultural context out of the picture (Bielsa, 2005).

In summary, the focus on the political aspects of culture (including language and translation) dispersed across many disciplines (political economy, post-colonial or translation studies) is useful in addressing issues of rivalry between European languages, in particular French, English and to some extent German, as supra-ethnic languages of international communication as well as between official, recognised minority languages and those unrecognised in the EU. No study of language and translation can leave debates around the politics of language and its implications out of the discussion. Especially in the context of Europe where anti-American sentiments are vocal, often resulting in the adoption of protective measures whether in the form of broadcasting regulations or national language policies. The latter has been often employed in France, although, as linguists admit, there is

no empirical evidence that the threat to French is greater now than at any time in the past (Hoffmann, 1996).

To fully embrace the theory of English linguistic imperialism means to ignore many local situations in which English (and translations into English) can offer regulatory as well as emancipatory opportunities. In fact, under certain circumstances the English language as a common medium of communication provides a forum for sharing experiences and interests that would not be possible otherwise. The analysis of the multicultural youth program Alchemy on SBS radio – atypically for the station broadcast in English – shows how an ethnically and linguistically diverse young audience can be brought together by the language they have in common. In Chapter Six, I reflect on the ways in which the Alchemy radio program deliberately stages heterogeneous, often under-represented, multicultural music and story material in an attempt to appeal to, and in fact depict, the audience it targets, young Australians comfortable with their hybrid identities and ‘living diversity’ (Ang et al., 2002).

In doing this, Alchemy celebrates cultural diversity through innovative content rather than multilingual provision. Monolingualism has its own uses in certain times and places. The function of language can be also followed by comparing SBS Radio to SBS TV. Due to its more comprehensive modes of translatabitlity (vision as well as sound), SBS TV aspires to provide a diverse, multilingual programming that sensitises all Australians, independently of language. SBS Radio, on the other hand, reliant on the sound only, generally divides its audience along the language lines, allocating specific language programs in hourly time slots, minimising a concurrent cross-linguistic reception. It can be also claimed that SBS radio offers a mono-linear, uni-linear access: a broad spectrum of news/stories from community, national, and international sources (for example, news from Polish diaspora, Australia, Poland, SBS News Room) for Polish-speaking listeners, but no dialogue about Polish affairs with non-Polish speakers, as they are denied a possibility of listening to a Polish language program.

2.3 ‘MEANING’: INTERPRATIVE VALUE AND ASSESSMENT OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Of course, there are firm interdisciplinary links between those fields of inquiry clustered on the meaning side of my taxonomy. Cultural studies itself is located somewhere between its own program and other more established disciplines from the social sciences and the humanities. As Mimi White and James Schwoch state, the field has been shaped by borrowings from an array of disciplines, such as anthropology, art theory, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology (White and Schwoch, 2006: 4). It has also developed in many different contexts and directions, one of them being a strong branch of post-colonial critique and media studies. Similarly, explicit engagement with policy issues amongst cultural studies researchers has delineated a new prominent area of ‘policy studies research’ (Cunningham and Flew, 2002; Bennett, 1997). Similarly, there is an existing link between translation and post-colonial studies.

Engaging in policy questions, I follow a cultural studies approach to policy that moves beyond the rhetoric of linguistic and cultural imperialism on the one hand and counter- hegemonic resistance on the other. This perspective towards cultural policy is inspired by a tradition of policy studies research in Australia known as the ‘policy moment’ of the 1990s (see Cunningham and Flew 2002), and provides a basis for concentrating on the intersection of culture and government, and understanding the rationalities and practices of public cultural institutions against the field of politics in which they are located. It is a useful approach for seeing PSB (including SBS and European multilingual public stations) as a cultural institution called upon to activate and reform the citizenry, reflect and shape the social realties, and for showing how requirements of cultural and linguistic diversity have informed language and broadcasting policy-making both in the EU and Australia.

Media, communication, cultural, and post-colonial studies The questions of multilingual communication and translation have not received much attention across work carried out in media studies. This absence is clearly colluding with the long tradition of using a monoglossic model of public service broadcasting as a cultural agency of national monolingual citizenship, and, later, transnational channels broadcasting

mostly in dominant languages, or localising their content through dubbing into local languages. Albeit different in terms of uses and distribution, the result in both cases is a suppression of linguistic and cultural diversity. The centrality of language and translation as a key mediator of global communication has also been systematically neglected in the literature on globalisation. Translation’s role in the production and circulation of global information and news has been made invisible and transparent, leading to the assumption that information can travel unaltered across linguistic communities (Bielsa, 2005).

Until recently, media studies had the appearance of a monolingual discipline, neglecting not only the politics of translation at the heart of global intellectual exchange within the field, but also the materiality and complexity of translation implicated in any interlingual exchange. In spite of an intensified contact between different linguistic communities (migration, mass tourism, media technologies), and the exponential growth of translation markets across commerce, politics, administration, the mass media, there has only recently been an increasingly notable interest in translation. While earlier media studies did take concern in the politics of recognition, making media policy potentially more progressive than language policy in meeting challenges of globalisation, the attempt to address the complexities and indeed value of translation in a media-related context has only lately begun to be acknowledged by a group of media and translation studies (Gillespie, 2006; Hawkins and Ang, 2006; Bassnett, 2005). Similarly, the issues of translation in the sense of how English (or American) conceptions from media and communication research are translated and thereby influence other-than-English academic discourses have also begun to receive their due attention (Livingstone, 2005; Morris, 2006). Although this discussion is beyond scope of my thesis, these are important contributions, alerting readers (especially those who read in English only) to the practicalities of translation and its theoretical corollaries.

Traditionally, media studies’ central research concern has been a co-evolution of media and citizenship, historically, from a focus on the individual nation towards an increasingly inclusive framework of transnational processes and practices to account for the complexities of globalisation. Technological and market developments, including the emergence of interactive and narrowcast rather than mass media have underpinned this theoretical shift. Traditional national regulations are being challenged and changed due to this new economic

and technological expansion. The EU is a prominent example: for over two decades now, European media policy has been designed to meet the challenges of deregulation and global competition. Central in cultural terms is the legacy of European PSB (and its current crisis) widely theorised in its relation to a nation state and the public sphere. The system of public service broadcasting that prevailed in Europe until quite recently was nationally-based, implemented to serve the public interest and meet national and political objectives. It involved the provision of mixed programming but with strict controls on the amount of foreign material broadcast and made available to the whole population. Driven by the logic of maximising audiences across difference, and constructing national unity, it generally produced an abstracted, undifferentiated mass, demarcated by a common language and, what Billig (1995) calls, ‘symbolic flagging’ of the national community such as national celebrations.

A traditional neglect of difference, and thus of translation, institutionalised around one language and a universalist vision of modernist education, was challenged in the late 1970s by social movements pressing for equality of representation for various minority groups. These included the rights of minority-language speakers, migrant and diasporic constituencies. Since then there have been structural changes within broadcasting itself to allow access to a wider range of accent-types (not to mention minority languages) through the development of regional networks. As a result of such initiatives, in the UK BBC Wales was established in 1964 to broadcast a significant amount of programming in the Welsh language in Wales, and later Channel 4 was launched.

In Australia, a crucial moment in the politics of representation was marked by experiments in multilingual broadcasting from the 1970s that led to the establishment of a new, Special Broadcasting Service. Initially limited to a multilingual radio service for ethnic migrant communities from southern and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, it was extended to multicultural television with a broader remit to cater for all Australians in 1980. While other countries in Europe succumbed to a similar logic of equal representation for minority groups, SBS’s commitment to multilingual communication within one public television channel has been unique in world terms. In contrast with most state initiatives for minority recognition in public media in Europe, SBS television has been from the very outset conceived as a national multicultural broadcasting service for all Australians , rather than narrowcasting to selected

ethnic communities. There is a significant body of literature on SBS, illustrating this public vision for the broadcaster (Smaill, 2002; Hawkins, 1996; Lawe Davis, 1998, 2002; Nolan and Radywyl, 2004) and, importantly, its recognised popularity with Anglo-Saxon cosmopolitan audiences (Hawkins, 1996), or ‘AB’ audiences 15 (Jakubowicz, 1987; Lawe Davis, 2002). As Chris Law Davis argues, from the SBS ‘World is Amazing Place’ campaign in the 1990s, AB group was considered the core demographic in the SBS audience (Lawe Davis, 2002: 292). There has been considerable research on minority or ethnic broadcasting in Europe (Vertovec, 2000), including transnational research on representation of cultural diversity on radio and television as well as employment of ethnic communities in the European broadcasting industries (Ouaj, 1999).

With the proliferation of new distribution technologies, in particular satellite television, transnational broadcasting systems developed, generating not only a decisive shift in media regulation but also academic interests. Transnational television in Europe in its various forms of ethnic channels, multi-territory operations, pan-European channels and networks has received due attention in contemporary media studies (Chalaby, 2005). In this context, language issues are however mentioned broadly as challenges and the most common terrain of localisation practice for transnational broadcasters. The use of local languages and localised content is a marketing strategy to counteract a multiplicity of nationally conditioned audience tastes and viewing habits. Chalaby’s very rudimentary treatment of language issues in this context is exemplary:

The most common localising practice is to introduce local languages either through dubbing or subtitling, depending on the broadcaster’s resources, the nature of programming and the audience. Live programming such as news and sports tends to be dubbed, while documentaries and movies can be subtitled, which is cheaper. Territories where English is a strong second language, such as Scandinavia and the Netherlands, get more subtitles than the French, Italian or Spanish. Leading pan-

15 The SBS used three socio-economic categories, AB, C1, and C2/D/E, in the 1990s (Lawe Davis, 2002: 293). These categories correspond to the standardised OzTam occupation classification: AB: Managers, Administrators and Professionals (now OG1); C1: Para-Professionals, Clerks, Teachers, Salespeople and Professional Service Workers (OG2); C2: Tradespersons (OG3); D: Plant and machine Operators, Drivers and Police (OG4); and E: Labourers and Related Workers (OG5) (OzTam, 2007).

European channels broadcast in a minimum of four languages; the record is currently held by Eurosport which is available in 18 languages, including Finnish, Czech and Hungarian (Chalaby, 2005: 166).

More detailed studies on language and media translation for European audiences have been concerned with the broad category of pan-European broadcasting, particularly those services initiated by the EU in an effort to advance an integration process on the continent. Those studies, although not abundant (possibly due to mostly failures of such broadcasting undertakings), address important issues underpinning multilingual/multicultural communication. Significantly, there is recourse to the material complexities of the translation process, including different forms of translation available for broadcasters as well as audiences’ tolerance and expectations. One such useful work is Richard Collins’ study of the pan-European satellite broadcasting channels, ‘Europa’ and ‘Eurikon’, launched in the 1980s. In one section, he quotes editors, translators, and senior officials in the EU to illustrate not only the linguistic difficulty the broadcasters faced but also the evolving understanding of re- languaging and its implications for international broadcasting. However insightful this historical account is, the increasingly ‘cosmpolitianised from within’ context of the European societies (Beck, 2003) and more recent developments in new media technologies require a much more sustained, critical engagement with translation.

In addition, the meaning of ‘trans-national’ in European media studies has been construed mostly by reference to regulation and distribution across nations. The internationalisation of communications policy in Europe, and the role of international and supranational institutions in the process of decision-making, is well documented (Sarikakis, 2004). Similarly, questions of transnational media networks and their reach have attracted research attention (Chalaby, 2005). However, as some critics rightly argue, the focus has been largely on the medium (the existence of designated or de facto European satellite channels)’ rather than on the forms of programming ‘that are designated as “European”, and which attempt to be “European”, in their mode of address and content’ (Richardson and Meinhof, 1999: 75-6). There is also a significant literature available on the cross-border circulation of television genre and formats (Moran, 1998; Frau-Meigs, 2006), which addresses the acculturation process, micro-level

analyses of audience reception, particularly cultural differences and resistance strategies against the paradigm of cultural imperialism and Americanisation (Liebes and Katz, 1990).

Studies within the active audience tradition of media studies draw attention to audiences’ active interpretation of the consumed text and indicate directions for further research. These also reside on the ‘meaning’ side of my taxonomy. Ien Ang and Tamara Liebes come to the analysis of ‘meaning’ from a social science background. Ang together with Gay Hawkins have been recently involved in work on media and translation, specifically in the context of multilingual public television SBS Australia. My reference to these writers throughout the thesis is testament to their usefulness as ‘translators’ bridging ‘meaning’ and ‘state’ side of disciplinary traditions.

Significantly, this ‘postdisciplinary’ approach should involve revisiting the role of mediators, the transnational media gate-keepers, in addition to viewers’ cross-cultural readings. As Frau- Meigs observes:

Some gate-keepers are technological (like rating systems or search engines); some are human, like program creators and buyers, translators and dubbers, marketers ; while others are legal and institutional, like regulators and self-regulators. They all play key, yet often hidden and unattended, roles in the facilitation of the intercultural experience (Frau-Meigs, 2006: 53 - emphasis mine).

With the explicit focus on the programming choices and the material conditions and complexities of translation my research attempts to fill this gap.

Notwithstanding the studies on transnational or multicultural broadcasting in Europe, it is argued that the prevailing model for audiovisual cultures has been the national paradigm, whereby public conversation is carried out only between members of a relatively homogenous community, with mutuality limited to its members. A model that acknowledges and deals with diversity through the strategy of cultural minoritisation exclusively is however no longer sustainable, whether applied to the ‘real’ world media or media studies (Robins, 2005). In

times of complex processes of globalisation and media consumption, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity cannot remain a peripheral issue. As Robins argues:

A European approach to diversity in the media and cultural sectors must involve an approach that sees diversity not as a problem, but as a resource and opportunity, an approach that can accept diversity – rather than consensus and confirmation – as being at the heart of its project and imagination (Robins, 2005: 154).

This shift from a ‘minority’ to a ‘diversity’, and from a national to an international or transnational perspective, has significant implications for considerations of citizenship in a cultural industries sector that is supposed to ‘nurture the sources of diversity’ and economy. Also, commentaries on the need for redefining European PSBs towards more inclusive and plural forums for representation of cultural and linguistic diversity outside or within a nation, urge media scholars to focus on intercultural, transnational forms of communication rather than remain restricted to ‘nation’ as the only adequate site of media research. In the era of transnational and digital media, a new role of broadcasting lies in ‘re-imagining the nation’ beyond notions of unity and homogeneity – the ideals that characterised the limits of a centralised, exclusive ‘national’ public service – and towards the exploration and negotiation of difference (Born, 2004; Murdock, 2005). This has been complemented with studies into actual televisual practice, including scheduling and multicultural programming but not so much multilingual content in Europe (Leurdijk, 2006).

A range of emerging experiments across PSBs in Europe points to possibilities in orchestrating a culturally and linguistically plural public media space, enabled by the expanding media ecology. These creative inventions, mostly of international reach, will be sketched in Chapter Four, especially in relation to multilingual provision. It needs to be stressed that both Born and Murdock speak of the European context, with no national equivalent of broadcasting like the Australian SBS.

More recent research, represented by Marie Gillespie’s ethnographic study into audience uses of diasporic media in London, David Morley and Kevin Robins’ analysis of Europe’s media environment, and Asu Aksoy’s study of transnational media consumption, is a harbinger of

changing perspectives within media studies away from nation-centeredness (Aksoy, 2006). These transnational studies provide a useful theorisation of identity in the conceptual terms of postmodernity. They address the representation of cultural diversity, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and globalisation. Their contribution is additionally marked by consideration given to cultural translation within the field of media studies that my work is strongly indebted to. Coming from a social sciences background, both Gillespie and Morley actively engage with the studies of the meaning of texts, their varied interpretations and socio-cultural significances. In Gillespie’s case it is an ethnographic study of migrant and diasporic cultures combined with media consumption. Her book, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, takes concern with literal and metaphorical translation applied to the process of identity formation and transformation between migrant (parents’) traditions and the new host country socio-cultural context. The book gives vivid and real examples of how young people of Punjabi background are called upon by their parents to act as translators of the British national news agenda (Gillespie, 1995: 101), or to provide translation for particular programming shown in English, for example Neighbours (Gillespie, 1995: 96). Those cultures of translated cultural identities and hybridity are a product of the globalisation of mediated communication and intensified migration. Translation becomes a working definition for the process of globalisation itself; it is ‘a complex, highly uneven process of many-sided translation’ (Gillespie, 1995: 19).

David Morley and Kevin Robins adapt the concept of translation (in interplay with tradition) to the exploration of national (British) culture in its global context (Morley and Robins, 1995: 105). In similar fashion to Gillespie, they examine the cultural and political spaces of identity, transformed in the postmodern era of transnational communication technologies and migration. Extending their analysis to Europe, Morley and Robins argue that territories in Europe are undergoing complex transformations against the ‘postmodernisation’ of geography. This emergence of global-local connections has inevitable consequences for individual and collective identities, as it involves an ongoing mediation between different cultures, languages and societies.

Robins’ account of the Turkish transnational diaspora in Europe is illustrative of the point. Against the nation-centric discourses, he argues that the Turks in Europe are involved in a

much more complex process of negotiation than a traditional belonging to one imagined community would have it. In fact, Turkish viewers’ engagement with the new transnational media culture positions them in relation to both their changing sense of Turkishness and their experience of the European societies they live in. The necessary cultural translation between home and adopted country renders them more self-aware and self-reflexive about issues of belonging, culture and identity rather than being passively ‘taken over’ by Turkish television channels. Robins argues:

What is different and distinctive about the migrant experience of television culture – and what would be instructive for cultural critics in the host societies, if they could only grasp this other kind of cultural experience – is precisely the experience of thinking across cultural spaces, with all the possibilities that this then opens up for thinking beyond the small world of imagined communities (Robins, 2005: 149).

What underpins that constant, and often uneasy and politicised negotiation and oscillation between tradition and translation, is the relationship to the others – other cultures, other states, other histories, other experiences, other languages. In this context, Morley and Robins remind us, the responsibility of cultural translation and learning to listen to others and learning to speak to rather than for and about others, is not unproblematic. Power relations and entrenched hierarchical orders of identity will not vanish quickly (Morley and Robins, 1995: 115). This established connection between culture/language/translation and political power is inevitably drawn upon in my study (see below).

Along with ‘cultural translation’, the concept of ‘hybridity’ has become one of the most useful for representing the meaning of cultural difference in the identity formation process and intercultural exchanges in general. Having evolved from the work of post-colonial authors such as Homi Bhahba and Stuart Hall as a critique of cultural imperialism to Marwan M. Kraidy’s theorisation of globalisation as hybridity, the term has been adapted across a vast body of writing in cultural studies and sociology. My use of ‘hybridity’ refers not so much to a product of uneven power relations between the coloniser and colonised which results in ambivalence and a shift in power authority, but to a process of culture and identity formation produced by the forces of globalisation. Neither is my understanding of the concept dependent

on the physical presence of strangers (as in racial mixing), which the term’s historical colonial origin assumed. Instead, the input from other languages and cultures proceeds now via developed channels of communication, which defy traditional spatio-temporal borders. In my application of the concept I draw on Kraidy’s (2005) Hybridity: or the Cultural Logic of Globalization , Nestor Canclini’s (2005) Hybrid Cultures and Nikos Papastergiadis’s (2000) The Turbulence of Migration, that examine hybridity more as a dialogical process rather than a mere integration of differences.

Kraidy, for example, asserts that the ‘cultural logic’ of globalization ‘entails that traces of other cultures exist in every culture, thus offering foreign media and marketers transcultural wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local communities’ (Kraidy, 2005: 148). These links or interconnections between different economic and political systems, the global and the local, the external and internal, constitute citizens globally. Nestor Garcia Canclini’s studies on cultural practices in Latin and South America have demonstrated the constant fusions of diverse cultural orders, rather than a disappearance of ‘traditional’ cultural forms. With his Hybrid Cultures Canclini contributes to a considerable body of writing that has argued against the simplified models of cultural imperialism, the homogenisation of peripheral cultures and/or the Americanisation of culture globally. Instead, he asserts that the dynamics of cultural transmission are marked by multifaceted rather than unilateral cultural negotiation. Significantly, this complex model of cultural exchanges between the national and international has not been restricted to elites, but as he underlines, ‘we must take into account that the whole field translates’ (Canclini, 1995: 28). Informed by the synthesis of the previous work on hybridity across disciplines, Papastergiadis concludes that hybridity offers a new way of understanding identity in the age of globalisation. It draws attention to simultaneously operating forces of displacement and connection, negotiation between different positions, perspectives, and world views (Papastergiadis, 2000: 15).

Cosmopolitanism Another powerful motif in the study of the globalised contemporary world is the heuristic term of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Similar to ‘hybridity’, it helps understand cultural mixed formations beyond the concepts of fixed, unitary and bounded cultures. Characteristic of the ongoing academic debate is an assumption that transnational communities, or Hannerz’s

cosmopolitans (1996), are manifestations of broader social trends without being constrained to migration or face-to-face encounters. With the expansion of media technologies, ‘ a management of meanings across spatial and cultural distances’ (Hannerz, 1996: 113) has become a daily practice of a large portion of populations around the world. A similar point about the influence of imagination enhanced by mass media over the everyday lives of ordinary people is also advanced by Appadurai (1996). By mediating experiences from different cultures, media (transnational or local) expose people to cultural and linguistic diversity, allowing for translation between the local, the global, and the national to take place.

This allows Hannerz to conceptualise ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a ‘state of mind’ or a ‘mode of managing meaning’. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ becomes a broader attitude of understanding and interconnecting ‘divergent cultural experiences’, a willingness to engage with the other, and ‘openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity’ (Hannerz, 1996: 102-111). Importantly for my research interest, Hannerz draws attention to intermediaries, or cultural brokers, exemplified in his discussion about intellectuals or foreign correspondents, indispensable in making ‘the world’ available to people. He argues:

The globalisation of consciousness also has its special personnel – to borrow C. Wright Mills’ old term, its own cultural apparatus. In its division of labour, partly old, partly new, different agents produce and circulate different representations of distant places, people, and practices, for different purposes (Hannerz, 1996: 112).

However, it needs to be noted that the notion of cosmopolitanism becomes challenged, especially if it is associated with a Eurocentric narrative and privileged classes in the West. For example, Mica Nava (2002) offers a critique of Hannerz’s model, which, according to her, excludes ordinary people such as migrant workers or exiles from the category of cosmopolitan, denying them an ability of reflexive cultural competencies (Nava, 2002).

Another useful way of thinking about the contemporary cultural mixing and innovation is in terms of ‘travel’. James Clifford’s revision of the traditional concept of culture as bound to particular places is challenged by a more dynamic trope of movement experienced by people today. According to Clifford, cultures are not separated, enclosed or ‘bounded sites’ but rather

places of both travel and dwelling, subjects to cultural exchanges. This line of thinking is taken up across many works on transnational communities and fluid identities in the age of globalisation. For example, Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair’s (2000: 25) examination of media consumption of global flows of audiovisual products within some of Australia’s Asian diasporic groups draws on Clifford’s ‘travelling cultures’ to account for many different kinds of ‘floating lives’ typical of our times. This reworked notion of culture in terms of hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and travel also provide a useful theoretical framework for my study of SBS’s programming and its ‘meaning’ for the everyday practices of ‘connecting diversity’ in the formation of active cultural citizenship (Ang et al., 2006).

Semiotics, literary and translation studies Discussions from within cultural and postcolonial studies hybridity have certainly sought to complicate the theory of cultural power. However, in an effort to move beyond the notions of ‘contamination’, Michail Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia’ (1981) and Yuri Lotman’s theory of ‘transformatory cultural translation’ (1990) have proven critical. They provide a more dialogical account of how the hybrid bits of diversity and difference can intercommunicate at a ‘higher’ level than mere self-expression. Both Bakhtin and Lotman pay a close attention to ‘meaning’, or, what Julia Kristeva, commenting on the centrality of the Tartu School for the development of the French post-structuralist movement of the 60s calls, ‘the very stuff of human beings’ (Kristeva, 375-6).

Bakhtin’s post-formalist theory of cultural dialogue and heteroglossia conceived as an interactive exchange between languages or texts with anterior or surrounding languages/texts immersed in history and society exerted a significant influence on Lotman’s ideas. Lotman is best known for his theory of language and communication that locates translation at the centre of the generative process rather than being a mere representation of the product. This provides a valuable conceptual framework to explain the dynamism and implications of the international exchange of texts, and a state of constant cultural interdependencies between inside and outside world, avoiding the imperialist discourse.

Lotman’s translation From this perspective of cultural semiotics, culture is the system that processes and organises the surrounding signs in the constant ‘communicating dialogue’ of different cultures and different texts. This dynamic process of influence, transformation, and coexistence within a culture is referred to as ‘semiosphere’. It is a functioning mechanism of meaning generation within ‘the whole semiotic space of the culture in question’, based on translation (Lotman, 1990: 123-5). It is only through the process of translation, involving the shift in value and position, that communication among heterogeneous elements (containing various degrees of translatability and untranslatability) as well as between the centre and periphery within the semiosphere can be possible.

Translation is also a means for semiotic exchange between different cultures, different semiospheres. The transfer of texts takes place in a process of dialogue. Permeable boundaries through which cultures come into contact with other cultures also facilitate translation of texts from alien semiotic spheres into their ‘own’ language. The whole process involves alternating periods of transmission and reception, from intensive semiotic production to a quiet reception. This reception period is synonymous with the intense process of translation, that is, the decoding and making sense of a foreign text. Perceived as a process of relative interpretation, or asymmetrical transformation, translation results in the creation of a new text. Cultural development and change are only possible through constant, dynamic contact with texts coming from the periphery and cultures behind the boundaries of a given semiosphere. These ‘impure’ translations, or ‘approximate equivalents’ stimulate creativity which is generative of new information and new meaning (Lotman, 1990: 37).

An interesting disciplinary dialogue between ‘state’ and ‘meaning’ can be traced by comparing Lotman’s approach to translation with that of Japanese cultural theorist Naoki Sakai, based at Cornell University in America. As Sakai (1997) argues in the introduction to Translation and Subjectivity , a collection of essays translated from English into Japanese and Japanese into English, his book assumes a paradigm of ‘heterolinguality’ rather than being written ‘within the interior of one language, within the putative homogeneity of one linguistic community’ (Sakai, 1997: 1). Crossing the boundaries of language and culture, Sakai suggests

that national identity and cultural politics are, in fact, ‘all in the translation’. Rather than perceiving translation traditionally (for example, representing language in its internal integrity and unity and arriving at equivalent translations between the two unified languages at the end of the translation activity), Sakai argues that translation is a practice that produces difference, and that the unity of language exists only through ‘a certain representation of translation’ (Sakai, 1997: 2). The formation of a monolingual culture achieved through ‘certain representations’ in the modern literary works appears to be of relevance. In fact, earlier literacy in Europe was comprehended within the context of multiple languages, for example, in the late-medieval and Renaissance periods. As Sakai admits, ‘literacy was not regulated by the demand that the primary function of writing should be to transcribe what is suggested by the ‘mother tongue’ (Sakai, 1997: 20). Therefore, it commonly accepted the use of ‘macaronics’ different from the familiar, native language in the written and spoken communication. Only after the constitution of modern literary culture, multilingualism and macaronics disappeared from literacy. Interesting also is his conceptualisation of translation as an instance of ‘continuity in discontinuity’ (Sakai, 1997: 13), the result of translational transactions based on difference and incommensurability among the agents of speech, writing, listening, reading and originating, as according to Lotman (see above), in a translator conceived of as a ‘subject in transit’.

Sakai’s ‘schema of co-figuration’ describes the means by which a national community represents itself to itself, thereby constituting itself as a subject, and also resembles Lotman’s approach. According to Sakai, the figure of the other is engaged in a translational relationship and is essential to the auto-identification of the national subject which it constitutes (Sakai, 1997: 52). Sakai shares the conviction with Lotman that dialogue/translation originates in the addresser. Manifested in the inadequacy between what is said and what is meant, translation is performed inside the human brain. Conceptualised in this way, translation (or dialogue) appears inherent to every act of communication. Finally, Sakai’s attentiveness to a two-way process of cultural exchange but with an acknowledgment of the politics inherent in translational processes can constitute a valid complement to Lotman’s valuable yet mostly de- politicised account. Indeed, as some critics argue, Lotman’s theory of semiosphere leaves out ‘the specific forces of access and exclusion’ (Papastergiadis, 2000: 187).

Flusser’s principle of dialogue and the concept of networking Another disciplinary translator important to my study is Vilém Flusser. A Prague-born philosopher and cultural critic of postmodernity, he was influenced by a variety of scholars, from Hussler’s phenomenology, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language philosophy and Walter Benjamin’s writings on art, technology and history. Discovered only recently in English- language academia via a small selection of translations of a number of his works (many are still available in Portuguese, French and German only), he’s already been avowed as ‘one of the most profound thinkers of technology and communication in the 20 th century’ (Cubitt, 2004). Locating himself not only in-between disciplines but, significantly, between languages and cultures, Vilém Flusser is a philosopher-translator whose writings reflect his own wandering life between Prague, Brazil and Europe. The process of translation and retranslation lies at the heart of his subjectivity as a philosopher, a public advocate and a writer. In a self-defining gesture in the opening section of his essays on The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism he admits:

I feel at home in at least four languages, and I feel challenged or even forced to translate and then back-translate everything I write (Flusser, 2003: 2).

Starting with the contested idea of the ‘concept of identity’, perceived as a self-definition irrevocably setting boundaries and habits constraining freedom, he suggests that the experience of a migrant is a liberating one. It allows for a meaning to emerge no longer from ingrained habits (thus ‘freedom from’), but from an actual encounter with the context of new culture. Flusser argues that ‘dialogic spirit that characterises exile is polemical and even murderous’ (Flusser, 2003: 87); ‘murderous’ as it endangers the ‘singularity of the settled inhabitants’. Indeed, writing from my base in Australia, it is impossible to overlook local examples of the ambivalence or even cruelty of such encounters. Cubitt in his review of Flusser’s works mentions the ‘shameful’ incident of Tampa, 2001 16 . Similarly, the continual marginalisation of indigenous populations in Australia with accompanying endangerment or irreversible loss of their languages needs to be considered. However, as with Lotman’s idea of

16 The controversial Tampa incident took place in August 2001 when 433 asylum seekers on route to Australia were rescued by a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa . These asylum seekers were refused entry to Australia, transferred to HMAS Manoora and (along with later arrivals) sent to the Pacific island of Nauru.

the assimilation of new ‘asymmetrical’ texts within a given culture (1990), such a polemical dialogue stimulates creativity, bringing alien and unpredicted elements into the life of culture. It is exactly at the points of meeting where the synthesis of collected, exchanged information takes place and creativity originates.

In conversation with different translation theories, Flusser’s idea of dialogue is based on nomadic anthropology and the metaphor of computer networks, locating his writings somewhere between semiotics and informatics. His allegiance to semiotics is however far from the Saussurean insistence on internal structures; instead he elaborates a theory of socially embedded codes, much in line with other cultural semioticians such as Bakhtin, Lotman and Eco.

Bakhtin’s and Lotman’s ‘existential essence of dialogue’ (Lotman, 2002: 37) means that the existence of ‘you’ is the precondition of ‘my’ existence, is also supported by Flusser. He clearly sees identity as a relational function of someone else, “’I’ is simply that of which someone else says ‘you’” (Flusser, 2003: 88). Instead of promoting individual self, he postulates the power of networks. It is only through bringing each other together, through a networked ‘confluence of potentials’ between ‘you’ and ‘I’, that a mutual realisation can be achieved. Flusser argues, ‘we are fleeting potentials that approach one another so that we may experience each other as concrete experience that we label “I” and “you”’ (Flusser, 2003: 51). As the author’s works demonstrate themselves, networked exchange is the initiator of new ideas, criticism and debate. His anthropological model of network thus postulates an ecological point of view, respecting complexity and the significance of ‘computing’ amongst dispersed potentials. Flusser’s proximity theory, on the other hand, which puts forward a case for moments of dialogue and exchange in a world characterised by globalisation, technology and cultural difference, interconnects closely with his notion of tele -society. It highlights the aspect tele - in human communication. All Flusser’s conceptualisations build on his hope for intercultural dialogue, exchange, and potential for bringing people closer via networks and as such are valuable for my research project. Flusser, among other authors, helps to understand the meanings of ‘borderland’, ‘hybridity’, and ‘interconnectivity’ (Flusser, 2003: 46-58; Ang et al., 2006) in relation to place and identity as well as ‘network’ and ‘convergence’ in relation to the arts and media in late modern democracies.

Translation studies The questions of translation have been theorised from the (socio) linguistic (Hoffmann, 1996), philosophical perspective (Venuti, 1992) and more recently from ever more popular translation studies that include a number of other disciplines (philology, comparative literature, ethnography, poetics, rhetorics) (Venuti, 1992; Bassnett, 2002). Recognised as a practice with profound political, social, and cultural implications, translation has been additionally re-defined in political terms, in particular in relation to language, cultural difference, ideology, and subjectivity, amongst others. The latter brings contemporary translation studies closer to the work on language and translation from a cultural and post- colonial perspective (Dutton, 1998).

Translation studies share with cultural and postcolonial studies an intellectual inspiration derived from the Russian school of formalism and semiotics rather than Saussurean linguistics. The process of translation that involves a whole number of extra-linguistic factors cannot be satisfactorily examined from the narrowly linguistic perspective that accounts only for the transfer of ‘meaning’ from one language to another via the use of a dictionary and grammar. As a result, Edward Sapir’s claim that language is the medium of expression for a particular society, and Yuri Lotman’s that language is the primary modelling system within the sphere of dynamic culture, laid foundations for a disciple that foregrounds translation in its cultural context (Bassnett, 2002: 22).

The major contribution of translation studies lies in its effort to reclaim significance and complexity for the act of translation against its widespread marginalisation as secondary, mechanical activity with a low status and value in the western countries. The research in translation studies has additionally exposed romantic conceptions of authorship and ‘original’ which argued that the original does not age but in fact ‘[transcends] the linguistic, cultural and social changes of which translation is a determinate effect’ (Venuti, 1992: 3). These theoretical assumptions were a cause for the translator’s subordination to the author of the original work. Contemporary translation studies theorists focus instead on the process of translation as a semiotic transformation and the translator’s interventionist role in the foreign and native text, and beyond the text, at a ‘higher’ level of culture in general. This thread of

argumentation is strongly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s article Task of the Translator , written as the introduction to a Baudelaire translation in 1923, but translated into English in 1968 only (Benjamin, 2000), and Lotman’s (1991) theory of translation.

There are indeed many points of contact between Benjamin and Lotman. Benjamin, a literary critic and a German translator of essays written by Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust, theorised the process of translation as always to some extent an interpretation. His oft quoted notion of interpretation as a ‘supplement’ to the original, only loosely corresponding to the original’s content (Benjamin, 2000), or his concept of ‘afterlife’ bear strong resemblance to Lotman’s theory of transformative translation. Assuming that two languages or systems are mutually incommensurable, divided by a boundary, an area of indeterminacy, which calls for the work of interpretation, translation cannot be seen as a search for equivalence or sameness but a dialectical work which both crosses a boundary and maintains this boundary. As a result, translations have the potential for innovation within the import culture and equally importantly, for survival of the original. Benjamin’s notion of afterlife – a condition of the original to survive and to be translated beyond and above the physical corpus of the text – is taken up to discuss issues of making locally produced, culturally and linguistically specific texts transcend their (national) source language to reach a wider transnational audience. This popularisation of texts beyond the constraints of a given culture and language – an ongoing dialogue between ‘us and them’ and the possibility of sustaining a collection of views of the world instead of one unitary monologic discourse – is the condition of cross-cultural communicative space.

Interestingly enough, the enrichment of a native language through translation was the underlying principle of moving between the source language text and the target language version in Roman times (Bassnett-McGuire, 1991: 44-5). The notion of a text’s survival in and through translations, particularly across cultures, has a particular significance for my study. This point is especially relevant discussing the media’s role in translating, or popularising texts beyond their original function in the source culture – emancipating the audience not so much through localised production but through a great variety of programs from different source locations. Finally, the acknowledged synergy between cultural

(linguistic) diversity, creativity and innovation is most relevant for discussion of translation, and is addressed throughout the thesis.

The other important contribution of translation studies is the conceptualisation of translation as a dialogic process, inspired by Lotman’s theory of the literary text as having both an autonomous and a communicative character. Accordingly, translation, like other artistic creations, is a semiotic structure which does not exist on its own in the world, but is implicated in a complex interrelated process of communication and signification between the internal organisation of a text and external signs and structures, which can be defined as its ‘syntactic’ relations. Translation is itself a sign and communication between its translator (receiver/reader/writer) and the reader, entering into relationships with the reader’s world and the reader’s ethical system. As Bassnett (2002: 36) comments, a translator must therefore bear in mind both [the text’s] autonomous and its communicative aspects and any theory of equivalence should take both elements into account. This communication scheme resonates strongly with the understanding of sense making widely accepted across audience-reception studies in response to the political-economic positions offered by cultural imperialism discourse (Ang, 1985; Liebes and Katz, 1990; Gillespie, 1995). As in the translation theories where translator is a reader, and in the process of reading must take a position, the impact of linguistic and cultural boundary crossings lie with the audience that becomes a translator of a text. The meaning of an original text always shifts by the very process of being moved from one place to another, from source to target language, of being translated.

This dialectic interaction between the text and the reader, proceeding via Lotman’s principle of ‘biopolar’ asymmetry is also extended to a situation of influence and exchange between two cultures. This active, generative role of translation within the context of a receiving culture is also emphasised by many theorists (Bourdieu, 1999). Eco cites the example of translations from Heidegger that had over recent decades radically changed the French philosophical style (Eco, 2003). First published in German in 1962, Jürgen Habermas’ volume on the public sphere had relatively little impact on the Anglo–American debate until the publication of its English translation in 1989. Since then, Habermas’ investigation on the socio–structural transformation of public opinion in civil society has set an important agenda for several decades of media research as well as of political science. In fact, the original

German term Öffentlichkeit has become far better known for its English translation ‘public sphere’.

Another prominent moment of intellectual exchange was the translation of Antonio Gramsci’s works from Italian into English. Originally published in the early 1920s, Gramsci’s model of hegemony and counter-hegemony was adapted to the study of culture by the now classic British cultural studies, led at the time by Richard Hoggard and Stuart Hall at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. Interestingly enough, Gramsci himself emphasized that a literal understanding of ‘translation’ should be connected to the larger processes of cultural translation involving cross-cultural analysis and altering both the source and target languages, which ultimately is a political project (Ives, 2006). Similarly, the translation of American writers by Elio Vittorini in Italy had contributed to the creation of a new Italian style, a new form of realism. He continues by saying that even when translations are full of mistakes and stylistically awkward, which was the case with the Italian translator who misunderstood American idioms, translation can greatly influence the generations of readers. More recently, the profound importance of English translations of the Prague-born media and culture philosopher, Vilém Flusser, was attested by Sean Cubitt in the following manner:

Imagine Walter Benjamin's essays of the 1930s had only just become available, or that Marshall McLuhan had died in obscurity but was now for the first time appearing in dribs and drabs. That is the significance of the translations of Flusser that have appeared in English in the last five years. Very soon, our students will no longer accept that we are unfamiliar with Flusser, as once we pilloried by an older generation for their ignorance of Barthes and Eco (Cubitt, 2004).

Umberto Eco One of the chief scholars of both theory and practice of translation has been Umberto Eco. His long-term theoretical considerations on the broad processes of interpretation that have ranged from the semiotics of literary texts to the study of cultural objects such as popular examples of TV serials, intelligent computers, or cinema invariably locates him on the meaning side, close to Russian cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman (for whom Eco wrote an introduction to his 1990 book, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture ). Additionally, Eco draws on his

own experiences in translation, either as a consultant, editor or a translator of his own works. In his book Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation , he argues that the task of translator is ‘to rely on definitions, contextual selections, lists of interpretants provided by dictionaries, but also to negotiate which portion of the expressed content is strictly pertinent in a given context’ (Eco, 2003: 34). Translation is a matter of negotiation between author and text, author and readers, the structure of two languages and the encyclopaedias of two cultures. He continues by outlining the characteristics of the translation process in broad categories of losses, gains and effects of translation, as summarised below:

• Accepting losses while adapting a translation to the receiving culture. Eco gives practical examples of the challenge to negotiate between two different languages. For instance, it is impossible for the foreign reader ‘to smell’ original Northern Italian vernacular fragrance, or appreciate comic effects of some curses or obscenities which have a different value and impact in different cultures and which get lost in translation. A good translation makes use of national repertoires while being aware that what counts is not absolute lexical faithfulness. • Adding and improving. In order to avoid a possible loss, a translation says more than the original. However, as Eco remarks, to say more perhaps means to say less, since the translator fails to keep an important and meaningful reticence and ambiguity (Eco, 2003: 50). Inevitably, additions are made to stress or reduce the ambiguity of the source text. • Effect . The aim of translation is more than producing any literal ‘equivalence’. Translation relies on achieving the same effect in the mind of the reader – according to the translator’s interpretation – as the original text aimed to create. It is the effect of the translated text that matters, and not the way it exactly reproduced the original. This emphasis on the effect raises a provocative question. To what extent, in order to preserve its proper effect can a text be altered without violating the equivalence in reference? On a number of examples from literary translations, Eco claims that to preserve the effect translators are entitled to make radical changes to the literal meaning of the original but also to its reference. ‘Mouse’ or ‘rat’ from the Eco’s book title is exemplary of such choices. Indeed, in the Italian translation of Hamlet a topo (a

mouse) instead of a ‘rat’ is used, but ‘rat’ remains ‘rat’ in the Italian rendition of Camus’s La peste . In the former case, for example, a topo is the proper translation of rat, because it evokes the idea of an unwelcome rodent that frightens people, is speedy, etc. The size of the rat doesn’t matter, but other aspects such as speed, propensity to frighten people, etc. do. What is at stake then is not only a denotative but connotative quality of a word. On the other hand, translating Camus’ La peste , ratto is mandatory since the distinction between a mouse and rat is vital in discussing the Black Death in Europe (the plague was spread by rats, as distinct from mice).

The transformative theory of translation as a process of negotiation, dialogue or indeed a compromise is widely accepted across the researched literature from semiotics to postcolonial studies and it constitutes the main point of reference throughout my project. As Eco argues:

Translation is always a shift, not between two languages but two cultures, or two encyclopaedias. A translator must take into account rules that are not strictly linguistic but, broadly speaking, cultural (Eco, 2003: 82).

Closely related is the conceptualisation of translation as a metaphor for the very process of communication of difference – emerging out of the encounter with the other, at the interstices of the foreign and the familiar, known and unknown languages, never complete but reciprocal, emancipatory and more patient. This is the assumed basis for cross-cultural understanding.

In the light of theoretical arguments commonly accepted throughout translation studies, especially focused on the notions of untranslatability, the incommensurability, the intransigence of languages, and the non-equivalence, translation would seem impossible. Yet, between those assumptions and the commonsensical statements that people do translate, and through translations intend to bridge the gaps between diverse languages, there is space for the idea of translation as a process of negotiation. Myer argues:

Rather than stating their theoretical impossibility, one should wonder what actually happens when meanings practically cross linguistic boundaries. Mutual intelligibility

between two languages is neither a given nor an impossibility, but something to be constituted by intersubjective dialogue across cultural boundaries. Translation, then, can be understood as interpreting and transforming the original statement, and thereby creating something of a new statement (in Papastergiadis, 2000: 129-30).

2.4 METHODOLOGY

Philosophies in translation derived through an interdisciplinary dialogue between ‘state’ and ‘meaning’ have inspired my methodology, informed my on-the-ground, hands-on research methods, and generated findings that I describe in the following chapters. As noted earlier, only the most recent work in media studies (Hawkins and Ang, 2006; Gillespie, 2006), journalism (Kapuściński, 2005) and translation studies (Bassnett, 2005) make an explicit connection between mediated (interlingual) communication and cosmopolitan citizenship in global times. Research currently undertaken in the area of translation studies has recognised the centrality of translation in the global circulation of information (for example, news), and thus fills in the gap not only between theories of translation and communication but also globalisation (Bassnett, 2005). A special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication was devoted to translation and its traditional invisibility as a research topic but also at the reception end of any communication, media consumption process. In Bassnett’s words:

We tend not to notice when we read transcribed conversations with survivors of disasters, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, for example, that although the text may be in English, the actual conversations must have taken place in any of dozens of different languages. Someone, somewhere, has recorded those conversations, transcribed them, edited them, cut them down, turned them into everyday standard English, reshaped them into newspaper house style, removed elements that would be incomprehensible to an Anglo-Saxon audience (Bassnett, 2005).

Apart from flagging a need to look beyond the text representation and to the production and circulation of translation, Bassnett sketches a process of translation that is well-known to any researchers dealing with subjects from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. According

to Andre Lefebvre, the founding father of translation studies, the goal of the discipline is to ‘produce a comprehensive theory which can also be used a guideline for the production of translations’ (in Bassnett, 2005: 16). As my fieldwork involved interviews conducted in a number of languages I follow Lefebvre’s approach to reflect briefly on some of practical challenges and ethical decisions, losses and gains, involved in the research and writing process of a doctoral thesis as translation. Subsequently, I consider some practical and ethical issues which arise from specifically multilingual research practice. Bassnett’s comment cited above is itself a useful starting point. Although it refers to news translation, it can be extended to apply to some material conditions and philosophical assumptions underpinning writing practices.

Generally, analysis, writing, the very context of writing up or the responsibilities of a researcher towards their audience are not clear-cut or smooth processes. Instead, as Pryke et al suggest (2003: 126), much can be gained if anxieties of the research done to date are acknowledged. In fact, they claim, much can be lost if ‘all the notes, the transcripts, and so on, all jumbled and untidy’, as unproblematic, worthless traces of the messiness, are left out from the writing. The write-up stage of the research is itself a creative process, involving ‘recombination, re-contextualisation, translation and transformation of materials’. Mike Crang argues that ‘through analysis we make interpretations, not find answers’ (2003: 127), and provides a very useful account of these analytic activities aimed at producing order and meaning out of masses of research material. His approach traces a progression of the data analysis from collecting notes and theoretical memos, to transcripts, coding, marking up material, and assembling, Benjamin’s montage of ideas into a coherent narrative. On a more macro scale, data analysis proceeds within the broader context of situating acquired knowledge within the perspectives, paradigms one ascribes to, and interpreting them accordingly (Pryke et al., 2003).

According to cultural transformation theorists such as Yuri Lotman or Vilém Flusser, meanings are generated in translation, that is, through a contact between the minimum of two different elements in the whole sphere of semiosis. Information swirling around us needs to be transformed into meaningful messages and to do that one needs to process data. As Flusser argues, data-processing is synonymous with creation (Flusser, 2003: 80). This creative

dialogue that results from the encounter of difference can relate equally to the relationship between the migrant and the settler in the experience of migration, to the media texts and their audiences in the identity creation, and also the intellectual processes. Meanings in research originate from the dialectical relationship between one’s own intellectual background (the familiar, or even habitual) and the others’ contributions – fieldwork, new literature, etc. (the unfamiliar). New information can be produced from this oscillation between the familiar and the unknown, between the private and the public.

These complex translation practices are involved in any intra-language research but what happens if research material transgresses linguistic borders, in other words, what challenges of translation does a researcher face moving from intra-language translation (that is, from ‘internal dialogue’ to ‘external dialogue’ with an audience within the same language) into an inter-linguistic context? What implications does inter-language translation carry for doctoral research? How does one mediate the content of an interview from a domain of one language into another? What are useful strategies that can guide us through this process? Naturally, multilingual communication complicates the research process further, by adding, what Eco calls, ‘another cultural encyclopaedia’ (Eco, 2003). In this section I want to sketch out some key considerations and practicalities of translation, each critically important for research purposes. In my thinking through the analysis of empirical data – the interviews with numerous people across different language contexts – I focus on the actual activity, ‘an active, involved, material process, not one that positions the researcher above and distant from the messiness of analysis’ (Pryke et al., 2003: 126).

By its very nature, the crossover between a source and target language unequivocally requires comprehension of the source text and the context it originated in, knowledge of the receiving audience as well as assuming ethical responsibility for transferring the truth from one language into another. These are necessary qualities of any translator at work, in so far as translation is a matter of individual interpretative choices and decisions rather than universal correct templates. It is however not to say that there are no formal principles to assist a translator. In fact, there exist formal codes of practice for the translation profession, accreditation bodies and translation ethics committees. Still, for all the rules and regulations,

there are many instances where practising translation, and by extension ‘practising ethics’, is much more blurred than ethics committees would like to have it (Thrift, 2003: 117).

Voices in the text Firstly, interview data processing is a multi-media exercise, involving a transfer of meaning from an oral conversation to a textual form of a written paper or a thesis: this is a function of an inter-language translation. The transfer inevitably includes instances of Walter Ong’s orality (1982) heavily mediated by the use of tools such as dictaphone, computer and print literacy: selecting, polishing, editing, ‘making spoken idiom more structured, professional’, in other words, more suitable for a written discourse. This is a moment when a complex politics of translation, both literal and metaphorical, determining how research material is made accessible to readers, comes to the fore. How to resist assumed transparency of academic language and convey the ‘embodied’ stories that were genuinely shared with me, recorded and later painfully transcribed? How can I allow the stories, pictorial anecdotes and emotions into the thesis, without translation being a controlling might or disavowal of difference? How to address dilemmas of acculturation and foreignisation in my own practice?

Irene Quaile-Kersken, Head of Feature and Magazine Programming, DW English Service (former head of DW Europe Desk), in her comment on translation practice in her unit observed:

The main thing for [radio] is to sound good, quality, the presenters sounding good…[diversity of accents] is a good thing as well; it arouses curiosity, it appeals to listeners…Ideally, we try to have traces of original languages, as it adds to authenticity (Quaile-Kersken, 2005).

I decided to settle on voices and maintain the oral texture of my heavily mediated interviews. The chapters that draw on my fieldwork (Chapter Four, Five and Six), include longer interview excerpts, marked by – as far as possible – the conversational and informal style of my discussions with interviewees. Rather than being overridden by a disengaged and distanced convention of scholarly discourse, I interweave voices with my analytical interpretations, with posed questions, and occasionally contradicting standpoints. My editorial

intervention is fairly limited, concerned more with imitation of the rhythm of spoken word, permitting repetitions, rhetorical excess or errors characteristic of dialogue. Despite the highly nuanced and ethically responsible orientation to maintaining the integrity of the original sources, as a researcher-translator I assume the ownership of the resulting text, which needs to be accurate and trustworthy for its intended readership. In similar vein, it might be posited for consideration whether this attention granted to voices extends an interpretive space for a reader to appreciate a diversity of not only styles, but also opinions, even at the expense of the text not flowing naturally. In any case, the intention was for voices to stand out for an intended stylistic, textual surface effect. Hopefully, my reader will be able to appreciate the informal, at times aesthetic flamboyance of real stories against the standard scholarly narrative, if not to tell difference between Rod Webb’s eccentric tone, or Jane Roscoe’s enthusiastic manner, or the softly spoken Elizabeth Krone from ARTE. Naturally, some of the idiosyncrasies of oral expressions are inevitably lost in translation into a written form. Unfortunately, a reader will be denied pleasures of accompanying conversations giggles, jokes or warm words of encouragement for the project. Or even scrutinising gazes, rushed exchanges, and everything that was ‘off the record’ as requested by my interlocutors.

2.5 RESEARCH METHODS

The methodological attempt in translating between state institutions/regulations and media texts has informed my on the ground, hands-on research methods. From a political approach I utilised strategies derived from the social science tradition such as qualitative empirical studies of the topic of politics of language and translation, and interviews with the staff from multilingual radio and television stations in the EU and Australia. A full list of the interviews conducted in the course of my fieldwork is found at the beginning of the thesis.

As the literature on multilingual television (Australian and international) is scarce, semi- structured interviews with key staff responsible for programming and broadcasting policies are an important source of my data collection. Speaking to station managers, broadcasters and policy staff provides an opportunity to obtain important insights into the concerns of stations in the EU and Australia. The material collected in this way has allowed identification of the

issues and tensions within the current state of multilingual broadcasting, showed up gaps in the approach to multilingual broadcasting taken by different broadcasters, and the limits to opportunities available to them. In this way they do not actually act as case studies. I believe that the shared experiences of those involved in multilingual television provide a means to discuss and interrogate the themes of this thesis which could not be captured through data collation or other such methods. In fact, I have managed to obtain an interesting comparative perspective by enquiring about a possibility of translating the SBS model into the European Union context. It is valuable data because it draws on broadcasters’ and policy-makers’ expertise as well as their individual sensitivities in interpreting events, whether it is sensitivity rendered as personal convictions and/or professional identity. For example, SBS Radio acting programming manager Christoph Wimmer-Kleikamp (2004a), commenting on new bilingual radio strategies pointed to two sources of influence: his professional background in journalism in Germany and Australia and his personal grounding in academic media disciplines.

However, using data from semi-structured interviews with television directors, managers, policy staff, producers and subtitlers is not without problems. Such data has to be carefully processed, since, as Buckingham (2000: 63) has remarked, interviews have proven to be ‘an exceptionally slippery medium. In interviews...individual speakers will often be incoherent, inconsistent, or downright contradictory’. By and large, interviews are often regarded imperfect, as they may make people express opinions on topics and issues that they had previously rarely considered or had little interest in. As Fetterman warns, the interview situation itself may ‘contaminate’ the data (in Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004: 94). In my fieldwork, this has not proven to be a significant challenge, as the large majority of my interviewees were highly experienced policy-makers or managers of television or radio stations, accustomed to ‘public relations’ as a part of their daily business. However, in my case, I had to be sensitive to the interviewees’ place within a particular institutional structure, and the ways in which such institutional perspectives shape the way they articulate their opinions or interpret events. As Wahl-Jorgensen (2004: 94) warns, interviews can become ‘exercises in the construction of self’, with interviewees occasionally rehearsing the organisational rhetorics they had been professionally socialised into. Within the public broadcasting field these would often include reference to PSB’s responsibility for democracy, commitment to impartiality and journalistic standards. Still, this particular construction of self and

broadcasting identity is as interesting as more concrete examples, comparative observations or detour anecdotes. Their enunciation as specifically multilingual providers informs their strategic decisions, while situating them in relation to competition within a broader media scope.

‘Do you speak my language?’ My fieldwork has involved conversations with a number of participants across national and most importantly linguistic borders. Linguistic exchange is invariably determined by linguistic resources available, and communicability parameters: for example, the languages that were at our disposal, what we felt most comfortable with, and the available lingua franca. My study has taken me mostly to the contexts whose languages I’m comfortable with as a speaker of a second language: German (DW, ARTE – although with headquarters in French Strasbourg), Spanish (Barcelona Televisió), and English (BBC WS, SBS Australia, but also Radio Netherlands). In fact, the Dutch situation was the only one to call for mutual use of English as a second language. In all other cases, I was able to ‘translate’ from an interviewee’s native language into my second language, finally rendering English translation, as my thesis is written in English. My position of a researcher with three international languages at hand mirrors a broader linguistic distribution of languages in Europe, a legacy of power relations as well as contemporary expediency (English as a definite ‘must’ for anyone in Europe – and elsewhere; German as a language of a potent neighbour for the Polish, and Spanish, an additional international – ‘will definitely pay off’ – language which could easily be substituted by French). My set of language competencies is also in a way an embodiment of the EU language policy aspirations: ‘a mother tongue plus two foreign languages’, 17 as well as an index of the effectiveness of the EU language initiatives. As a student in Europe I benefited from the EU-funded student mobility program ‘Erasmus’ in Germany and Spain, but I do not speak Russian even though I had a five-year Russian language education at primary school.

17 The Barcelona Summit 2002 set a target of at least two foreign languages being taught in addition to the mother tongue from a very early age in the EU, www.euractiv.com/en/culture/language-use-eu/article (accessed April 23, 2007).

What my fieldwork has also confirmed, against the grain of statistical data, is that my interviewees preferred to stick to a national language whenever possible rather than converse in English. This proved to be especially the case in Catalunya, although I spoke Spanish rather than Catalan, and, of course, in France. The willingness to use their national language was not motivated by any nationalistic imperatives per se, but rather by a natural easiness, comfort, and a relaxed expressiveness. I was conscious of that enhanced socialibility permitted by sharing the same linguistic code whilst designing my study. As could have been expected, another correlation could be observed: the higher up the professional ladder an interviewee had progressed, the higher was their aptitude and thus willingness to use global lingua franca (with few exceptions).

‘Knitty’-gritty of inter-language translation: things to consider in processing interview data I insist on taking a small liberty with spelling, to use ‘knitty’ as a word play for the process of handing research data. It connotes ‘knitting’, that is, weaving, binding, compacting, often coming back, correcting stuff, and paying careful attention to a detail. This is exactly what is at stake in the data-analysis stage of the research. These important details of my process of translation are made explicit here:

• Effect over stringent accuracy or faithfulness (following Eco’s discussion of the task of translator outlined above).

In the research context, the translator’s interpretations, lexical choices and style can be reviewed by the interviewees as a part of university ethical research conduct. Of course, this assumes the interviewee has knowledge of the language into which an interview is translated. For instance, I conducted numerous interviews in German and then translated them into English, providing my interviewee with an English translation.

• Challenges involved in translating puns, culturally specific jokes, or anecdotes, neologisms.

For example, Miodrag Soric (2005), Deutsche-Welle Radio Editor-in-Chief, commenting on DW radio’s future strategies used a German word ‘Einschaltradio’ to describe the broadcaster’s news-oriented identity in opposition to music radio stations. I decided to settle on a literal translation for ‘Einshaltradio’, which in English would be ‘switch-on-radio’. However, neither is the German word common, nor English literal translation meaningful in the Australian-language context. More descriptive language is needed to convey the meaning between German and English languages here. I elaborated on the used ‘switch-on-radio’, as providing access to news, which is selected and attended to, rather than being entertainment-oriented, for example providing musical company throughout the day.

• Terminology (differing concepts)

For example, the difference between a ‘re-narration script’ in the UK and what’s called ‘voice-over’ in Germany is hard to capture in translation (Mueller and Ziegert, 2006). In fact some terminology verges on the untranslatable (as with references to institutions that are non- existent in the English-, Australian-speaking world).

In the preparation to interviews, I found it useful to read policy documents and editorial statements in languages in which I conducted interviews rather than relying primarily on dictionaries. This has obvious benefits of contextual, actual use rather than abstracted dictionary definitions. Thanks to a set of languages at my disposal I was able to get information otherwise not available in English. For example, the ARTE website, along with annual reports and policy documents, is available in German and French only; similarly, the access to the Barcelona Televisió’s research materials (website, press releases, etc.) was possible in Catalan, with occasional information also provided in Spanish.

2.6 CONCLUSIONS

In contrast to academic approaches that tend to privilege one side of the communication process, either production of texts or practices of reading, I suggest an integrated and more

elaborated perspective that connects the two. Positioning myself between the two broad domains of knowledge of ‘institutions’ and ‘meaning’, and in-between the disciplinary formations of broadly social science and the humanities, I myself perform an act of translation. This approach is dictated by a complex nature of the research question that requires a comprehensive handling of the subject matter, but also a philosophical usefulness of theories of translation). There is a metonymic relation between my methodological point of entry, which then informs the structure of the thesis, and my research methods (especially multilingual interviews). Translation as a practice of meaning negotiation between a source and a target language/text takes account of the communicative context of both the ‘original’ and its production, and the ‘destination’ and its reception. This highly nuanced linguistic and cultural procedure has a bearing on quality of the final product, its translation.

As a result, I have drawn on literature that looks both into the material conditions of language/translation (institutions such as the EU, PSBs in Europe and Australia, and their policy frameworks) and texts (what texts are included in international exchange, how they are translated, how they are positioned in a new context) to assess citizenship claims and aspirations in the international context of the EU and the national context of Australia. This thesis grounded in translation opens up an area for further research, at the reception end of the communication process. It raises questions how translated texts are actually read, whether their foreignness is seen as an asset or liability, and whether, they really do have, what Lotman calls, a ‘transformatory potential’?

3 FROM POLITICAL TO CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP: MEDIATED POST-MODERN CITIZENSHIP

3.1 INTRODUCTION

In what follows I sketch the evolution of citizenship from the modern political conception aligned with the one-nation-equals-one-language argument, to the cultural, mediated. The former implies that a common national language is the social bond that holds nation together, defines a unique and shared culture, and is also ‘requisite to a viable democratic state’ (Bauman and Briggs, 2003: 302). Needless to say, linguistic standardisation and purification practices at the heart of nation-state building in the 19 th century, had excluded a large group of ‘linguistically unrefined’, landless and women from participation in civil society, denying them citizenship rights. The latter conveys the idea that citizenship in postmodern times, which is more about the individual choices than loyalty towards the nation, is mediated through television. In this sense, the current lack of identification with the European Union on part of the EU citizens (for example, as manifested in the 2005 rejection of the EU constitution by the French and Dutch) points to an insufficient mediation of the EU through broadcasting. Finally, in the context of today’s cultural plurality and the coexistence of alternative cultural choices (globalisation, the experience of transnational media, physical mobility), I argue that it is possible to move away from the 19 th century idea of a common language as a social glue that defined national citizenship to cultural citizenship beyond a shared linguistic code. Vilém Flusser (2003: 73) claims, these freely chosen associations ‘might include work and leisure-time communities instead of national communities. As [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe put it, relationship of choice rather than of blood’. In my thesis, these ‘leisure-time communities’ are brought together via a shared language of television and story-telling rather than linguistic unity.

3.2 IDEOLOGY OF THE NATION-STATE AND UNIFORMITY OF THE OFFICAL LANGUAGE

An abridged version of the historical developments in relation to language and nation/citizenship is offered by Zygmunt Bauman who argues that the birth and maturation of modern times was characterised by the ‘blending of [some] tribes into nations…then by nations gaining political sovereignty, and by the replacement of dynastic realms with nation- states as well as melting of their disparate subjects into nations – unified and indivisible’, with local dialects devoured by a national language (Bauman, pp. 4). The idea of the nation and the independent state on the European continent merged into one.

The direct link between the uniformity of the standard language and modern state is frequently addressed in a great deal of literature. A number of theorists contend that a modernist spirit was essential to state-making, which, for Billig (1995: 130), equals ‘the intolerance of difference’. The nation-states that emerged in the late 19 th century were organised by centralised polities that reduced traditional linguistic, cultural, regional and ethnic diversity in effort to install a nationalistic agenda of unification, homogeneity, and their own hegemony. The triumph of the ideology of nationalism was accompanied by the instalment of official languages within a nation-state, at the expense of other languages that were marginalised or totally suppressed. The acts of legitimating the official language, and its codification (for example, through the emergence of grammar as an academic discipline) and purification (through protectionist language policies) followed. The project of the German unification in the 19 th century, for example, did precisely this: it reduced to a common denominator the diversity of German dialects and characteristically united the nation under standard German (Flusser, 2003). Another excellent example is found in the modern French state, which consciously imposed a single language to unify a diverse population (Bourdieu, 1991).

Providing historical evidence from the European context, Billig claims that the very concept of ‘a language’ – that appears so ‘banal’ to us – in its essentialism and exclusion was constructed and developed during the age of the nation-state. He puts the matter plainly when he says ‘the mediaeval peasant spoke, but the modern person cannot merely speak; we have to

speak something – a language’ (Billig, 1995: 30-1). The provocative critique of the posited relationship between language and national identity is also offered by James Joyce in his final work, Finnegans Wake . The text is deliberately composed in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to know what language(s) had been employed. A possible interpretation of the linguistic denseness of the text is in understanding that it’s not written in a language, nor in many languages, but in language (Crowley in Hoffmann, 1996: 58-9). Joyce opposes fixed identity, purity and origins by saying, ‘It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations’ (Joyce in Hoffman 1996: 18).

In the model revealed by Joyce, words do not offer an illusive safety from the other, since the borders of the European languages had been crossed incessantly. Through the historical contacts between the languages, the foreigner and barbarian are indeed embedded within the imagined pure and unitary national language. Disrupting the metonymy between the language and cultural nationalism, language and national identity, he claims that language serves as a model for culture that is an array of many cultures, complex and intertextual. Neither linguistic nor cultural purity can be sustained, since multilingualism, multiculturalism, hybridity and cultural ecclectism are the signs of belonging as much in the past as in the presence.

In a similar way, Bourdieu’s (1991) writing on language reveals the interrelations between language, power, and politics. Offering a strong critique of Saussurean linguistics and its widespread tradition in literary criticism and philosophy, Bourdieu argues against perceiving language’s social character in an abstract way that fails to address specific social and political conditions of language formation and use. He opposes any forms of analysis that concentrate merely on the internal constitution of a text and disregard the social-historical conditions of the production and reception of texts. According to him, language is never formed as an autonomous and homogenous object, a Saussurean self-sufficient system of signs, but rather a product of a complex set of social, historical and political conditions. As for Sakai, a perfectly homogenous language or speech community does not exist in reality, it is rather an idealisation of a set of linguistic practices that emerged in a specific socio-historical environment and been granted the status of the dominant and legitimate. He refers to this as ‘the illusion of linguistic communism’ (Sakai, 1997). The official language – the dominant

and the victorious – linguists’ ‘langue’ or closely related to Chomsky’s (1965) ‘competence’ ,18 is in fact constructed and made a normative model of a legitimate use for a particular community. This process of making some languages dominant over others within particular geographical locations is closely linked to the formation of modern nation-states; ‘the official language is bound up with the state, both in its genesis and in its social uses’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 45).

On the example of development of the French language, Bourdieu demonstrates how linguistic unification contributed to the construction of a monarchical state, and how the opposition between the dialect of the Ile de France cultivated amongst the Parisian elites and regional, oral dialects patois was established. Later the political policy of linguistic unification, consistent with Condiallac’s theory of the purification of thought through purification of language, accompanied the French Revolution and made the upper classes the beneficiaries of the process by allowing their traditional linguistic competence in the language that was made ‘official’ and ‘national’ to be naturally used and valued. In contrast to those with regional and thereby dismissed language variants, the upper classes gained a monopoly of political power. The normalisation and codification of the official language through the production of dictionaries and grammar books followed, coupled with the development of educational system that established a scheme of educational qualifications with standardised value across the country, allowing access to a labour market, especially in administrative positions, and the constitution of a unified labour market (including the formation of state administration and the civil service). These developments contributed further to the devaluation of local dialects, whereas users of local language variants were made, as Bourdieu articulates it, ‘to collaborate in the destruction of their instruments of expression’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 49). The new hierarchy of linguistic practices was established in the operation of institutions and the social process, endowing some individuals with power, status and resources.

18 The concept of ‘linguistic competence’ was introduced by Noam Chomsky in 1965, and defines the system of rules that governs an individual’s tacit understanding of what is acceptable and what is not in the language they speak (Chomsky, 1965).

However, the progress of official languages is not attributable solely to the effectiveness of legal norms and constraints, in the form of language policy for instance. The success of symbolic domination requires an active complicity on the part of the subjugated, a recognition of the legitimacy of the official language and symbolic power, as though they were both a ‘natural order of things’. This complicity is unconscious and uncalculated, inscribed in dispositions, a ‘habitus’ of the social agents who in competition for linguistic or cultural capital, for material and symbolic profit, partake in the asymmetrical social relations and thereby maintain and reproduce the social order. Language as a system of relations structured around dominant and dominated positions helps reproduce the ‘cultural arbitrary’, that is, different power relations that pertain in our culture on a quite arbitrary basis.

Finally, through his original theoretical approach to linguistic phenomena, Bourdieu suggests that language is not only a means of communication, a purely referential, homogenous code, disconnected from social groups and sites as espoused by the advocates of the modernist projects. 19 Conversely, language is far from being an autonomous domain. It is a vehicle of power through which individuals pursue their interests and display their linguistic competence. Every communicative exchange, from the most mundane to the formal one, is tainted by the social structure and the power relations between speakers that it both expresses and helps to reproduce. Especially, the arena of politics is closely related to the field of language and symbolic power. In his Introduction to Bourdieu’s (1991) Language and Symbolic Power , Thomson claims that ‘[politics] is the site par excellence in which agents seek to form and transform their visions of the world and thereby the world itself: it’s the site par excellence in which words and actions and the symbolic character of power is at stake’ (1991: 26). Involved in the process of representation (production of slogans, programs, commentaries), agents in the political field seek to construct and impose a particular vision of the social world, while at the same time calling for the support of those who entrust them with power.

19 For example, Locke’s version of the linguistic reform advocated the task of purifying language to sever its ties to nature and society for the ‘philosophical use’. As a result, Locke helped paving the way for practices of language surveillance that aimed to contribute to a language credited with being transparent, neutral, representational, and autonomous rather than being associated with ‘common conversation and the ordinary affairs of life’ (Bauman and Briggs, 2003: 41-44). This was clearly to the benefit of the elites, while discriminating against most people’s vernacular languages.

The deconstruction of the ‘naturality’ of the official language, that is, the same language around which people wish to form national bounds, has had serious implication for the understandings of translation. Sakai claims that in translation languages are commonly represented in all their integrity and unity, rendering one language in contrast to another as if the two languages are clearly different and distinct. Yet, ‘unity’ and ‘distinctness’ of national or minority languages were not unproblematically established (Sakai, 1997), so linguistic and cultural purity is nothing but a fiction.

3.3 PLURALISED POST-MODERN ORDER

Many of my theoretical anchorages derive from a conviction that a modern (post-modern) democratic society has no need of ‘obsessive homogeneity’ (Webb, 1997: 112) or internal cohesion to guarantee its safety and well-being (Collins, 1990). The narrative of the nation- state formation that promoted a national cultural identity linked closely to a territory and national sovereignty, with monolingualism as its defining feature, has been complemented with supranational or transnational narratives. The proposition of hybridised ‘deterritorialised’ identities and delocalisation of culture due to migration flows and global communication technologies facilitating cross-cultural dialogues has found a substantial resonance amongst academics and policy makers (Appadurai, 1996). It has been argued that:

Transmigrants have multiple identities which are grounded in more that one society and thus, in effect, they have a hybridised transnational identity. This identity simultaneously connects them to several nations. In a deterritorialised context, the conventional one-to-one relationship between state and territory is increasingly questioned and challenged’ (Kennedy and Roudometof, 2002: 171).

Characteristic of the ongoing academic debate is an assumption that transnational communities are manifestations of broader social trends, and that their multicultural experience is appropriate to cultural life in a global age in general. The experience of exile or migration is conceived of as a form of intercultural dialogue and a source of creativity (Flusser, 2003). This is conterminous with Clifford’s (1992: 98) argumentation that cultures are not separated enclosed ‘bounded sites’, but conversely, places of both travel and dwelling,

subjects to cultural exchanges; they are ‘always exposed to numerous external influences and the movement of people in and out and often sites of negotiation whose members [have been] engaged in continuous encounters with other cultures’ (Kennedy and Roudometof, 2002: 9).

The process of globalisation has been found not to have produced an absolute cultural homogenisation, contrary to cultural imperialism theory that suggests that international exchange of ideas, texts, symbols results in the substitution of indigenous beliefs and value systems with those carried by the imported texts. Instead of the feared absorption of especially American values within any receiving culture, differences between national cultures might be reducing, as Billig (1995) claims, but they are certainly multiplied within the nations. The tension between homogenisation and heterogenisation; proliferation, polarisation, pluralisation of identities have been observed. The diverse responses of different groups to forces of globalisation and diversification have been conceptualised in terms of transformative cultural translation, and elaborated in the previous section (Papastergiadis, 2000; Gillespie, 1995; Kraidy, 2005). The primary meaning of ‘translation’ as a way of rendering of the source language (SL) text into the target language (TL) has been extended here to refer to the transformation and transition, oscillation between, fusion of, tradition and translation, crossovers and hybridity of identity in the contemporary culture.

European citizenship Due to socio-political transformations taking place as part of globalisation, commercialisation and pluralisation, the socio-political and philosophical limitations of the nation-state and nationalism have become apparent. International and supranational structures, with the EU as the prominent example, are becoming an attractive alternative to nation-states that are no longer capable of imposing a unitary culture and sense of belonging. Upon the establishment of free movement zones (i.e. the Schengen Agreement) within its communal borders, the EU has been faced with a task of redefining citizenship and national identity. This has called for development of a post-national perspective on citizenship and thus shifted the focus away from national territorial borders onto boundary-less human rights (Kennedy and Roudometof, 2002). But this ‘extraterritorial’ European citizenship is not without problems. Although an elaborate critique of European citizenship, both from the perspectives of political theory and

social science is beyond the scope of this chapter, a few points need to be mentioned, as they have direct relevance to the argument for interlingual citizenship advanced in this thesis.

The characteristic ‘disaggregating’ of national and cultural origin from the privileges of political membership is a key feature of European Union citizenship created in the Maastricht Treaty (1991). It includes a political right to vote in local elections, run for and hold office in the country of residence, union-wide elections for all EU citizens, and the right of petition or appeal for individuals to the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. The rule of law thus transcends the nation-state’s legal authority, opening up a space for cultural citizenship claims and a new site of governmentality beyond the nation-state jurisdiction. Indeed, the number of cases, including those concerning linguistic and ethnic discrimination constitutes an interesting development. Political citizenship rights decoupled from nationality are however reserved for member states’ nationals, to the exclusion of people coming from other countries. These third country nationals are mostly migrant workers, including Turks in Germany, Indonesians in Great Britain, Algerians or Chinese in France, and Moroccans in Spain. In their case, ‘ties between identities and institutions, between national membership and democratic citizenship rights are reinforced’ (Benhabib, 2004: 156). As Balibar argues:

…a new discrimination [is being created] that did not exist within each national space. The 13 million nationals of ‘third’ countries (who have been accurately compared with a ‘sixteenth European nation’), installed for one or several generations on the soil of the various European countries, and who as a whole have become indispensable to European well-being, culture, civility, become a mass of second-class citizens or subject residents ‘at the service’ of Europeans by full right, even when they enjoy long-term or permanent rights of residency’ (Balibar, 2004: 44).

This situation of discrimination on the basis of national origin by radically separating nationals of member states from those of non-member states, and thus creating a hierarchical structure of exclusion Balibar (2004) terms ‘European apartheid’.

Additionally, despite the European Union’s supra-nationality, increased efforts to construct a ‘common European will’ and identity, and the institution of the EU translation services,

member nation-states continue to remain the motor of this political project. As Benhabib points out, the EU’s motto of ‘united in diversity’ can be also seen as a tactic to ‘leave ambiguous whether it is member states or the peoples of Europe who are the source of this diversity’ (Benhabib, 2004: 165). Still, as a part of the geopolitical imperative of globalisation, discourse of citizenship in the EU is emblematic of shifts, ‘mutations in citizenship’ (Ong, 2006), and complex interworkings of the concept.

The Fifth Framework 20 project entitled ‘Citizenship and Democratic Legitimacy in the European Union’ offers a useful overview of different forms of citizenship as part of the larger context for a decoupling of the concept of citizenship from the nation-state. The project:

distinguishes between three different conceptions of citizenship, which are reflective of different conceptions of the EU qua polity. The first is economic citizenship , based on rights associated with the four freedoms, where the citizens are seen as producers, consumers, users, and customers and reflects the notion of the EU as a problem-solving entity. The second is social and cultural citizenship , based on a set of common values, aimed at establishing a material basis for societal membership, and reflects the notion of the EU as a value-based community. The third is political citizenship , based on a set of common civil and political rights, with the purpose of empowering the citizens to be ‘co-authors’ of the laws, and reflects the notion of the EU as a rights-based post-national union (The Fifth Framework Programme, 2002).

This three-fold composition at the heart of the European citizenship is useful for a more general consideration for the possibilities of mediated cultural citizenship in Europe on which my thesis centres. The ‘social and cultural citizenship’ is characteristically a site of cultural difference (ethnicity, race, language), based in Europe on a set of common values of cultural and linguistic diversity, at least in the domain of the normative.

20 The Fifth Framework Programme (FP5) set out the priorities for the European Union's research, technological development and demonstration (RTD) activities for the period 1998-2002. It was designed to help solve problems and to respond to major socio-economic challenges facing Europe. FP5 had two distinct parts: the European Community (EC) framework programme covering research, technological development and demonstration activities; and the Euratom framework programme covering research and training activities in the nuclear sector.

3.4 CULTURAL/MEDIA CITIZENSHIP

The concept of citizenship has evolved broadly from the political towards the cultural terrain, as Hartley admits (2002a: 32), from ‘obligations to a state towards self-determination by individuals’. Civic, political, and social freedoms, the three historical stages to citizenship acknowledged by T.H. Marshall, had been complemented by cultural and DIY citizenship. Historically, there had been three key components of citizenship identified by Marshall: civil citizenship which includes individual rights produced as a result of Enlightenment rationality and which leads to the ‘bourgeois’ freedoms of accumulation, contract, labour and exchange; political citizenship which refers to the rise of ‘representative’ democracy and government by public consent expressed in elections; social citizenship which stands for the ‘rights’ of welfare and education (Marshall 1992/1950: 8-10). The way in which marginalised people have reclaimed their place points to the extension of the citizenship schemata to cultural citizenship. Literature on cultural citizenship is ample, from meanings of multiculturalism and identity politics; for example, Renato Rosaldo’s (1999) work on the formation of Latino communities in the United States, Aihwa Ong’s (1999) discussion of ‘flexible citizenship’ to discussions of consumerism and taste formations (Canclini, 2001; Nava, 2002; Hartley, 1992). William Uriccho contends:

Cultural citizenship differs from political citizenship in the sense that the latter is acquired as a right of birth, but the former can be only acquired by assertion or action within a particular cultural sphere. Community, freed from any necessary relationship to the nation-state, and participation, in the active sense, then, are two prerequisites for the enactment of cultural citizenship (Uriccho, 2004: 148).

Contemporary media are at the forefront of these everyday expressions and variations of citizenly participation in communities of various kinds. Breast cancer activism as a substitute for rationally founded research, networked collaborative communities of the Internet cultures such as Flicker, or KaZaA, to global narrowcasting are practices of cultural citizenship within a civil society, by definition de-centralised and de-hierarchised, existing ‘over against the state, in partial independence from it’ (Taylor 1990: 95 in Miller, 2001: 3). It has been argued that patterns of consumption rather than loyalty to the national belonging play a vital role.

100

Featherstone claims that through development of niche-marketing particular groups are defined in terms of ‘life-style’ rather than class or nation (Featherstone, 1995). Narrow- casting, as opposed to broadcasting, does not aim to target a general national, but specialised audience. Indeed, on the example of the Asian diaspora’s use of media in the Australian context, the authors of Floating Lives argue for the emergence of ethno-specific but global mediatised communities, ‘public sphericules’, with their identity borne out of both commercial and public-supported activities (Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000: 27-8).

In similar vein, Mica Nava (2002) in her critique of cosmopolitan modernity argues for the expanded attention to the role of the commercial and entertainment sector in the development of a popular cosmopolitan consciousness. Like Sinclair and Cunningham (2000: 28) who stressed the neglect of the ‘affective’ to the ‘effective’ in the discussions of the public sphere(s), Nava advocates interest in ‘the non-rational, affective aspect of our selves’ in the establishment of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’. The notion is used to refer to the reality of global modern everyday and an imagined inclusiveness that transcends the more immediate structures of family and nation. ‘Cosmopolitan aspirations’, she argues, ‘can be rooted not only in a political and intellectual critique of nationalism but also in a sense of psychosocial dislocation and non-belonging’ (Nava, 2002: 89-90). She illuminates this ‘structure of feeling’ on the examples of a female counterculture against the parents and the parental culture, and thus not only in a sense of the literal migrant’s non-belonging but also in ‘a desire to escape from family, home and country’ (Nava, 2002: 90). The key point here being that women’s capacity to participate in consumer culture, whether as shoppers, readers, theatre- and cinema-goers, allowed them to ‘become investigators and mediators of narratives about the allure of difference and elsewhere. ‘Other’ fashions and cultural products bought by them increasingly transformed the female body, penetrated the intimacy of the home, seeped into the imagination’ (Nava, 2002: 92). Although Nava’s examples are located in the socio- political conditions of early 20 th century Britain, her argument is useful for my discussion – and in fact a defence – of the SBS’s role in establishing cosmopolitan taste cultures in addition to its social agency in empowering marginalised ethnic communities in Australia (for similar argument see Hartley, 1992; Hawkins, 1996; Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000).

101

As the power of nation-state is undermined within the forces of globalisation, cultural and DIY citizenship are increasing in socio-cultural relevance (Hartley, 2002a). Both, cultural citizenship conceived of as identity rights and DIY culture implying a voluntary active cultural affiliation irrespective of territorial, national borders are conterminous in the contemporary democratic environment of cultural diversity and dynamic cultural negotiations/reconstitutions. Likewise, the concept of media citizenship refers to the importance of media for the modern public-government relationship and communication. In Hartley’s (1993) Politics of Pictures we read: ‘popular media of the modern period are the public domain, the place where and the means by which the public is created and has its being’ (Hartley, 1993: 1). In the time of mediated public sphere(s), diversified media citizenship, a common culture and heritage as well as belonging to a geographically distinguishable, (illusionary) homogenous national community ceased to constitute a credible base for citizenship. Instead, as Hartley argues, these more virtual and voluntary communities of popular media contain mutually incompatible segments, with the people’s membership and participation constantly re-verified and extended without entailing the erasure of difference (Hartley, 1999, 2002b).

In this sense, Hartley’s well-argued ‘emancipation’ of television to be studied as a site for the construction of media citizenship and the public sphere(s) rather than a negative object and an impediment to the political process remains central. In fact, the potential of a television (republic) for cultural engagement and civic participation while reinforcing/asserting new forms of cultural citizenship in modern democracies is the premise of my work. Specifically, the EU’s current political context, characterised by a woeful absence and/or passivity of the ordinary publics from the EU publics debate and Brussels’ workings (for example, alarmingly low participation in the last EU Parliament elections held 13 June 2004), demands a careful investigation of communication structures in operation at the moment. Transnational public broadcast television, independent from national states and the market forces, serving the public interest and not merely a narrow political elite, could alleviate a democratic deficit (Ward, 2002: vii). In this sense, Hartley’s idea of ‘television republic’ (Hartley, 2002b), the elaborated concept of cultural citizenship (Hartley, 1999, 2002b) and the notion of mediasphere (Hartley, 1999) are very valuable in the discussion.

102

Mediasphere The evolution of citizenship in the modern times has been achieved upon the constitution of the ‘mediasphere’, a prerequisite for emergence of postmodern public sphere(s) and civic and political emancipation and freedom. The ‘mediasphere’, which includes media production and foremost media readership and consumption, is encompassed within Lotman’s semiosphere, a semiotic space of general cultural meaning-generation, itself enclosing the ‘public sphere’ of political and democratisation processes (Hartley, 1999: 217-18). These ‘Russian dolls’ (Hartley, 1996: 79), defined by mutual interdependence and infiltration of meaning between the spheres, deserve consideration in relation to the challenges of the democratisation processes in the EU. Can public broadcast television be a suitable medium for translating knowledges to and from different political, cultural and public spheres in the EU? Can public television constitute a communicative space across Europe, mediating to and from the ordinary public (media citizens), guarantee a better representation of dialogic tensions and culture-political struggles? Can a European public sphere and a sense of European citizenship come into existence through the creation of an EU viewing public? The republican television studies advocated by Hartley (2002) can help address these questions.

In contrast to ‘the nationalism’ of nation-state-based television services, post-broadcast forms such as cable TV, satellite and online video streaming extend the meaning of citizenship to culture, identity, affinity, and choice, gathering ‘disparate populations in virtual, or imagined communities where difference could be celebrated rather than eradicated’ (Hartley, 2004: 13). While in media, the 19 th century concept of the nation-state was being tested to the point of destruction, nation was becoming detached from state, media convergence and participatory culture of the 21 st century are making ‘media citizenship’ migrate to sites based not on national identity but more fragmented communities, more international, more virtual, and more voluntary than before’ (Hartley, 2004: 8). The notion of active audience being high on the agenda, with ‘internally differentiated, customised, interactive, and individuated audience segments [making] their own choices, increasingly act[ing] as producers as well as consumers of mediated meanings, and [who] identify less with nation-states and more with constituencies of taste and affiliation that were local and international at once’ (Hartley, 2004: 23).

103

3.5 CONCLUSIONS

The considerations of nation-state and citizenship have come under scrutiny due to the rapid increase of more hybrid identities and communities caused by the forces of globalisation and media expansion. As a result, ‘political institutions need to relearn what sovereignty is about in polymorphous sovereign states that are diminishingly homogenous in demographic terms and increasingly heteroglossic in their cultural competence’ (Miller, 2001: 3 − emphasis mine). One of the lessons for the EU bureaucracy, in the light of the apparent apathy and ignorance of the public about European citizenship, is to ‘see beyond the formal political system’ and recognise active everyday practices of cultural participation as a matter of identity, of belonging and of lifestyle (Livingstone, 2005: 19). Media are certainly crucial in shaping those identities and lifestyles. This raises a question of access to the technologies of communication, besides traditional economic endowments guaranteed by state (as in institutions of welfare).

In fact, there is no invocation of citizens’ access to existing or potential media to foster dialogue and exercise their right to communication and thus to actualise EU citizenship (Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2005: 23). In the context of the broader shift in a three-fold definition of European citizenship discussed earlier, the aspirations of transnational pubic sphere require due attention be given to the mediation of public matters, including European affairs, people’s engagement with their society, and of special relevance to my thesis, Europe’s mundane heteroglossia . First activities have been initiated. As a part of the EU audiovisual policy and media, an EU-wide public media literacy consultation was launched in October 2006, with findings and proposals planned to be published in 2007. This is an explicit acknowledgment of the key connection of media and citizenship in present times:

Media Education is part of the basic entitlement of every citizen, in every country in the world, to freedom of expression and the right to information and it is instrumental in building and sustaining democracy. Today Media Literacy is indeed one of the key pre-requisites for active and full citizenship and is one of the contexts in which intercultural dialogue needs to be promoted. Also, media education is a fundamental

104

tool to raise awareness on intellectual property rights issues among media users and consumers. 21

Yet, in other related policy areas the potential of media remains unacknowledged. For instance, in the ‘Europe for Citizens Program 2007-2013’ , which was set up to establish the legal framework to support a range of activities and organisations promoting ‘active European citizenship’, the involvement of media is not explicitly mentioned (The European Commission, 2007). Yet, Vilém Flusser observes:

Until now those who never left their home were seen as ‘idiots’ in the original Greek sense of the word, that is private people who knew nothing of the world. That has changed as a result of the Information Revolution. Information is now distributed to private homes, and presently it is the person who leaves his home and goes out in public who is seen as the idiot. It looks as if this rushing about is now purposeless [as opposed to the past, when people had to go back and forth between their homes and the village square, walk up and down the hill, and go down to the stream to refill their buckets with water] and that it is now finally possible to remain seated. [Consequently] it is information and not possessions (software not hardware) that empowers, and communication, not economics, now forms the substructure of the village (society). What this two-part formulation makes clear is that the settled form of existence − the home – and a fortiori the stable, field, hill, and stream are no longer functional. (Flusser, 2003: 42-3).

From the political philosophy I take two observations relating to an increasingly inclusive conception of a unified Europe. The first one is Ulrich Beck’s statement that ‘the ultimate goal of the European project is to separate state and nation’ (Beck, 2005: 166). This relates closely with Vilém Flusser’s approach when he advocates pan-Europeanism as the abolishment of borders but not the creation of a reunified Europe as attempted by Constantine or Chalemagne. Rather, a new Europe should abolish nation-states to allow people to ‘enter

21 Audiovisual and Media Policy, http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/index_en.htm (accessed July 13, 2007).

105

into freely chosen associations [which] might include work and leisure-time communities instead of national communities’ (Flusser, 2003: 72-3).

In the chapter that follows I pick up on this idea of ‘choice rather than blood’, exploring limitations but also successes of mediated multilingual communication in Europe. Whenever the issue of ‘communicative deficit’ or what Kaitatzi-Whitlock (2005) calls ‘mediatic deficit’ is raised in Europe, insurmountable challenges of multilingualism are spilt out. Despite undeniable problems associated with the lack of a common language, I test out some strategies for seeking ‘criss-crossing connections’ firstly in the international and national institutional contexts of multilingual broadcasting services in Europe, exposing their weaknesses and strengths. The thesis then proceeds with the discussion of the national network of SBS Australia, catering to a national, albeit arguably globalised audience either of migrant or cosmopolitan taste communities. Both, international multilingual broadcasters in Europe and the national SBS can be argued to share a similar commitment to multicultural audiences catered for by multicultural programming. My discussion of multilingual public broadcasters aims to elaborate on a participatory cultural citizenship activated in the Hartley’s ‘mediasphere’ rather than a formal status of European (or Australian) citizenship with a set of nominal rights attached to it (including language rights). This approach to citizenship underscores ‘real’ and dynamic forms of cultural competences and expressions – language of culture – but with possibilities of both political and cultural communication. As such it differs significantly from a more statist view of citizenship associated with law, structure and obligation, in other words – language of state.

106

4 EUROPEAN MULTILINGUAL RADIO AND TELEVISION STATIONS

4.1 INTRODUCTION

Drawing on the models of multilingual public broadcasters currently operating in Europe, I attempt to unravel the reciprocal shaping of broadcasting and cultural citizenship around the broader issues of language and inter-linguistic exchange. An ongoing evolution and adaptation of communicative functions and strategies to new political, societal, and technological requirements is documented across the selected examples. This chapter, that follows a thread of argumentation in my thesis, proposes a redefinition of transnational connections in Europe on the level of populations rather than political elites. A mediated and more casual conversation with the public rather than top-down driven communication initiatives by the EU bureaucracy (for example ‘Eurikon’ and ‘Europa’, or the idea of online European forum postulated by the EC in the 2006 White Paper) could provide a response to popular lack of identification with the European project. The proposition derived from the analysed data suggests that interlingual forms of engagement can be effectively fostered across lines of difference via adaptations and developments of existing media formats as well as the emerging participatory patterns of interaction (for example online discussion forums) and transnational content. They have the potential to provide a valuable de-politicised and unifying media environment for a quotidian cross-lingual experience and entertainment despite the current proliferation of public spheres.

Instead of a front-door critique of the EU’s specifically pan-European communication initiatives such as Euronews or ‘Europa’ and ‘Eurikon’, this chapter offers a snapshot of the existing interlingual capacities across international and national multilingual broadcasters in Europe. International in their mode of production, transmission, and audience, and successful as media models, the analysed radio and television stations invite a useful discussion about politics of language, translation practices and cross-cultural communication. Local services such as Radio Multikulti or Barcelona Televisió offer yet another version of translation

107

practices and intercultural agenda. Both international and local multilingual broadcasters point to challenges and opportunities in constructing an imaginary ‘Europe’ for populations across the continent.

Multilingual pan-European television has long been recognised as a means of uniting a linguistically and culturally fragmented continent and fostering a collective European identity. In the late 1980s, the idea that broadcasting holds the potential for European community building and is capable of bridging the divide between ‘high’ language policy and the ‘low’ social domain of the everyday, gave rise to ‘Europa’ and ‘Eurikon’ experiments. The centrality of language was brought to the fore. To this end, multilingual pan-European channels were recognised as being potentially superior in fostering mutual knowledge of European nations and peoples over the projects based on a single language (such as the common French-language television joint-venture among France, Belgium and Switzerland, TV 5). The former model was believed capable of realising comprehensive access for European viewers and broadcasters to European television culture. The latter, as stated by the EC, had an inherent disadvantage, in that it could ‘only confirm and reinforce a cultural reality which has existed for a long time. By their very nature, [single-language television services] cannot come to grips with this new multilingual European reality’ (in Collins, 1998: 124-5).

Still, neither ‘Eurikon’ nor ‘Europa’ met expectations of EU media policy. For many critics, they were too ‘idealistic’ or ‘utopian’ in the light of the access limitations to satellite communication, culturally heterogeneous viewership, and Europe’s extensive multilingualism (Ward, 2002). Collins in his extensive analysis of both satellite broadcasters ascribes their failure to a clear disjunction between conservative ‘top-down’ agendas of European political and cultural elites akin to national public broadcasters and ‘bottom-up’ demands of the audience, along with ‘re-languaging’ challenges that the pan-European channels at the time could not cope with (Collins, 1998). Generally, the unwillingness of the viewers to take up an alternative to familiar, national content was blamed for the failure. However, Kaitatzi- Whitlock (2005: 287) argues that to assume ‘a ready made Europeanised audience right from the start…is to confuse means with ends’. ‘Europa’ and ‘Eurikon’ were to support the emergence of a European public and not the other way round. She adds that the lack of

108

political (for example withdrawal of BBC and France’s Antenne 2) and economic support, and indeed sabotage of the experiments, should be included in the assessment (Kaitatzi- Whitlock, 2005: 287). All in all, ‘Europa’ TV closed down after a year only of operation.

What survived from the Europeanisation initiatives of the 1980s are a modified version of the TWFD, thematic channels in the form of a largely localised Eurosport available with commentary in several languages, the multilingual faceless, ‘hotel’ news service Euronews, and the predominantly bilingual, French-German cultural service ARTE, in addition to the long-standing European Broadcasting Union (EBU). 22 For many, the EBU continues to be synonymous with conservatism and boredom and of course with the still-alive, successful, and possibly aberrant ‘Eurovision Song Contest’.23

Since the failures of the multilingual satellite public television channels, the discussion around European television and European identity has been animated by a mantra of unbridgeable linguistic and cultural differences, differentiated viewing habits, and a general preference for domestic, national television products. Europe’s linguistic diversity, defined as a practical barrier to cross-national communication, but also as the core of European identity, has informed much of the cultural and media policy-making up to date. In this thinking, the importance of translation in the EU institutions has been promulgated, whereas language transfer as ‘a means of access to life-styles, thoughts and creative productions of peoples from other regions of Europe and elsewhere’ (Luyken et al., 1991: 28) has seen dubbing and subtitling prioritised 24 in the form of the EU-funded MEDIA projects. Re-languaging challenges faced by the pan-European PSBs, as well as general failures of pan-European television, as theorised extensively by Collins (1998), proved to be very instructive in the longer term. Although Collins’s work From Satellite to Single Market should be

22 The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is the largest professional association of national broadcasters in the world. It has 72 active Members in 52 countries in Europe, but also in North Africa and the Middle East. The Union was funded in 1950 by western European radio and television broadcasters. It negotiates broadcasting rights for major sport events, operates the Eurovision and Euroradio networks, organises program exchanges, and coordinates co-productions. With the office in Brussels, the EBU represents interests of public service broadcasters in the European institutions. 23 Indeed, the analysis of the Eurovision Song Contest as a major success story of the EBU pan-European initiatives would be a very telling case study. In particular, its highly popular plebiscite format that attracts significant viewing audiences not only in Europe but also outside (for example, SBS Australia) warrants study. 24 Audiovisual and Media Policy, http://ec.europa.eu/comm/avpolicy/media/index_en.html (accessed June 14, 2006).

109

contextualised within the author’s broader anti-public service orientation, many of his arguments are well-founded and will be alluded to throughout the chapter.

The present map of multilingual broadcasting in Europe is complemented by nationally-based international public broadcasters of imperialist or Cold War antecedents, which not only survived until the 21 st century, but also in many cases expanded their operations. BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands, discussed in my analysis, provide services in many languages Europe-wide and globally. There is also a number of local or regional multilingual, multicultural media services run by migrant communities (ethnic, diasporic channels), or anchored within regional, urban public broadcasting, such as Multikulti Radio Berlin, and Barcelona Televisió. This media fabric of publicly funded channels − featured in my chapter for their existing capital in inter-linguistic communication – is additionally interwoven with a mix of commercial national and pan-European services that operate across Europe (for example CNN, MTV). The media choice is ample. However, this chapter argues that the existing network of media in Europe does not offer a potent response to Habermas’ theory of public sphere, in particular as regards European public communication as complementary to the existing national and sub-national.

Close attention to the social changes (migration, new technologies) that lie at the heart of the ongoing processes of simultaneous globalisation and fragmentation is required. Specifically, significant tensions around new media’s applications and functions in transnational communication require a critical consideration. Use of satellites and the Internet allows maintaining connections to home culture and cultural expression through a native language, but these can as effectively isolate people from a host country culture and from a sense of belonging as provide a bridge back home. These linguistic problems are very acute and very familiar for migrants’ countries of origin (to help retain emigrants’ cultural and linguistic identity) but particularly for their host countries (to provide multilingual services helping integration and social harmony). The examples of dramatic social exclusion via language are multiple. Whether these are generational (for instance, deteriorating German language skill of the third generation migrants in Berlin enclosed within large consolidated communities 25 , or

25 The example quoted by editor-in-chief of Multikulti, Ilona Marenbach (2005).

110

ideological (for example, the English-bred Muslim youth in London responsible for the 2005 underground bombing), the point remains the same. For the enactment of policies of cohesion, isolationist, fragmenting processes intensified by transnational new media, need to be minimised by public initiatives that invite cross-cultural interactions and feelings of mutual recognition and belonging together. The same inclusive cultural project needs to proceed to foster inter-European identifications. The centrality of language and translation is obvious; and so is the role of alternative pluralist media spaces where the concerns of all – minorities and majorities alike – can be experienced rather than merely debated in the name of unity-in- diversity.

Following Georgina Born’s call for a new post-Habermasian normative thinking about public communication, 26 and Mouffe’s idea of affective dimensions in politics, in my research of multilingual stations I look precisely for those broadcasting practices that orchestrate interlingual, unifying spaces constructed across lines of difference, those forms of mediated cross-cultural communication and exchange that contribute to what Born, after Benhabib, defines as ‘politics of complex cultural dialogue’ and mutual cultural recognition (Born, 2004: 508).

4.2 INTERNATIONAL MULTILINGUAL RADIO BROADCASTERS IN EUROPE

International broadcasting in Europe has a strong tradition of multilingualism. Both radio and later television services, such as BBC World Service (BBC WS), Deutsche Welle (DW), or Radio Netherlands (RN) which I discuss here, have long been protagonists of international diplomacy, political dialogue, and cultural mission endowed unto them by their respective nation-states.

As early as 1920, the Soviet Union broadcast in a foreign language, German, the ideals of the Russian revolution; later followed by French and English broadcasts. Political ambitions and concerns in the ferment of pre-World War II developments caused many countries to mobilise broadcasting capacities in order to advance their own goals, or counteract others’ agendas,

26 G. Born’s public lecture Digitising Democracy: Digitalisation, Pluralism and Public Service Communicators , CCCS, University of Queensland, July 25, 2006.

111

already transmitted in many languages and to many regions. International services, initially directed at the Empire and the expatriates, although not necessarily for the same reasons, soon expanded their foreign language operations to compete for prestige and influence in what was to become known as a radio war. For example, BBC ‘Empire Service’ was intended for British colonialists to maintain their links with the home country; similarly RN’s first broadcasts to the Dutch East Indies constituted a radio bridge to its colony; whereas the Nazis’ transmissions to Germans in North America in English and German were to champion their cause (Walker, 1992).

The intensification of military operations across the world proceeded with shortwave bands becoming exponentially crowded with various versions of the news and the broadcasters’ attitudes to it. A national interest carried by propaganda machinery ushered in not only languages of broadcast, but also innovation of radio practices, and increased consideration for audiences’ tastes. Important languages such as Arabic, English, Russian, Spanish, or Portuguese were heard on the air always, promptly accompanied by less likely tongues such as Gaelic or Afrikaans, depending on the political expediency of the moment. Letters from listeners, competitions, leaflets with program details, re-broadcasting, and radio language courses were developed in parallel with discourses of quality and reception patterns. The serious issues of editorial (in)dependence from governments’ control arose and have remained polemical up to today.

International broadcasters have come a long way from governmental control over the allocation of foreign language services since the years before and just after World War II (BBC Overseas Service later the WS), and the ideological pressures during the Cold War. Each of them has a different history of negotiating their way through conundrums of political pressures and global changes. They have been dependent on their governments for funding, but insistent on their own values of impartiality and critical journalistic enquiry in program production, which on occasions meant an outright opposition to orders from their respective foreign offices. All the mission statements of the analysed broadcasters refer to the journalistic independence of their programs and program-makers. The goals of RN, for example, have been laid down as:

112

…to contribute, on behalf of and to the benefit of the Netherlands, to a better informed world through a combination of independent journalism and services. 27 While, [DW] carries out its legally defined mission while remaining journalistically independent…We report independently, comprehensively, truthfully and on a pluralistic basis. 28 And BBC WS operates: …to provide the most trusted, relevant and highest-quality international news in the world and an indispensable service of independent analysis and explanation, with an international perspective that promotes greater understanding of complex issues. 29

The very first Arabic news bulletin in Arabic in 1938 showed its independence from the FO, reporting the murder of an Arab of Palestine by order of military court (Walker, 1992: 32). Sir Ian Jacob, Director-General of the BBC at the time of the Suez crisis of 1956 observed:

…but, of course, ministers do not like us as a rule…the BBC is generally speaking an annoying sore in the flesh, and of course they take it out on the overseas services because they feel very strongly that they should be spouting their policy only (Walker, 1992: 75).

Interestingly, judgements about BBC WS’s, DW’s, or RN’s broadcasts in relation to their respective nation-state’s agendas, made by interviewed managerial and professional staff across those broadcasters, displayed telling shades of opinions. For instance, Irene Quaile- Kersken, Head of Feature and Magazine Programming, DW English Service, remarked:

Although we are a German radio, we are not too Germany-centred. Being British myself, I find that BBC world coverage can be very Britain-centred. There are many places where people want something different than that. Voice of America has a very

27 RN’s mission statement, www.bureauafrique.nl/autresdepartements/africa/Radionetherlandsturns60 (accessed August 21, 2006). 28 DW’s mission statement, www.dw-world.de/dw (accessed September 20, 2006). 29 BBC WS’s mission statement, www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/us/annual_review/2004/index.shtml (accessed August 15, 2006).

113

bad reputation, but DW is perceived differently; it is praised for perspectives [that people] do not get on their own media (Quaile-Kersken, 2005).

Olexiy Solohubenko, Executive Editor of America and Europe Region, BBC WS, commented:

I think BBC WS is particularly strong having an independent line from the government and of the government, but Voice of America provides a commentary that very often refects the view of the American government. This is totally impossible on the World Service, you won’t ever hear that. If there is a view of the government, it will be challenged, so I think editorial integrity and independence and also reputation that we built many, many years. It just works to the brand, the BBC as a brand is quite strong. I’m not saying that Deutsche Welle is doing bad things, they are doing very good things, Deutsche Welle television is quite a challenger. It’s a crowded place but nevertheless there is a space for lots of international broadcasters (Solohubenko, 2006).

Peter Veenendaal, Head of the Dutch Service, RN, observed:

We are the smallest one…BBC, Radio France International, very government- orientated, DW possibly as well. They do not do propaganda, because they are independent, but they are focused on authorities and we are focused on people − that’s what gives our voice a little bit more independence. Nobody cares what the Dutch government thinks; we do not have to voice the governmental position (Veenendaal, 2005). An informal consensus about Voice of America’s propagandist reputation was apparent in the interviews I conducted. The evaluation of actual media practices by international broadcasters is beyond the scope of this thesis. Still, audience research cited in their own publications outlines a favourable perception of the services provided. RN is valued for an ‘objective and reliable reporting’ (RN in Indonesia), BBC WS praised also for ‘objectivity’ and increasingly – at least by some diaspora populations – for its ‘usefulness as a forum for debate’, and DW for ‘an alternative perspective’.

114

This established, ‘arms’ length’ relationship with foreign offices, permits now an independent decision-making regarding operational changes. Unlike the early days, when the WS had to ‘run to the Foreign Office for permission to do something new’ (Walker, 1992: 157), strategic decisions are now based on a mixture of an independent market and political analysis, technological considerations, and a revision of the broadcasters’ priorities informed by financial resources. Still the entanglement of politics and nation at the heart of international broadcasting continues to be apparent in relation to the allocation of language services.

The closure of Central Eastern European languages at DW-radio was followed by the WS in 2005. DW-Radio Editor-in-Chief, Miodrag Soric, and BBC WS Executive Editor of America and Europe Region BBC WS, Olexiy Solohubenko, attributed these decisions to a diminished relevance – albeit not interest – for listeners in the region in question. The fact that most of the Central Eastern European countries joined the EU, developed their own democratic media systems (and consequently want more domestic rather than international news), served as a justification for the biggest reorganisation at the WS and DW for decades. But reorganisation of this kind also introduces an opportunity to save money and shift focus to other strategically more important regions, or, as some critics of the WS decision argued, market benefits and bigger audience ratings (Fray and Dear, 2005). In the case of DW radio, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian inter alia were closed down to create room for Ukrainian and possibly Belarusian language services. The same languages, but also Bulgarian, Kazakhstan, and Thai at the WS, deemed by Nigel Chapman as ‘parts of the world that probably do not need the BBC presence’, made way for Arabic language service. 30 What emerges from these recent directions towards language offerings is a re-drafted map of international relations, with international broadcasters traditionally competing for their presence, voice and influence.

A new map of broadcast languages: an Arabic phase This prevalent desire to compete and at no rate be left behind in the race for ‘hearts and minds’ is particularly notable in the present focus on the Arabic market. As in the early days, when the Empire Service introduced Arabic programming in direct response to the Italian propaganda in Arabic broadcast to the Middle East, competition now unfolds against other

30 Interview with Hosam El Sukkary, Head of the BBC Arabic Service, www.tbsjournal.com/sokkaryinterviewpf.html (accessed August, 18, 2006).

115

European international stations but also against the incredibly successful Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera. The French government funded an Arabic TV project launched in 2006; 31 the Germans responded by increased offerings in Arabic on DW-TV; the British followed suit by announcing the revival of BBC Arabic TV to be broadcast in 2007. Lanz, DW-TV Managing Director, confirmed that the increase of Arabic-language content is now the priority for DW-TV (Lanz, 2005).

Indeed, DW-TV is the first European station to present news in the Arabic language anchored by Arabic-speakers, including a three-hour Arabic language program window on the Nilesat satellite and the trilingual Internet portal quantara.de. The current Arabic phase seems to be a consequence of media market pressures and Realpolitik , coupled with cultural sensitivity regarding today’s social requirements: concern about Arabic diasporas within European societies and the Arab crisis after the September 11. This unrest in polities at home and international politics at large opens up (business) opportunities for some, and international broadcasters are keen to be players in the game. Indeed, the flexibility of programming and allocation of new language services is justified by the international mission of reacting effectively to political developments, in particular wars and crises. It is, ‘an everyday job for DW-Radio’. 32

Not openly acknowledged are the political priorities within the international relations agenda, most visible in the attempt to set up an Arabic TV channel (for example, BBC, RFI). This ‘obsession’(Caistor, 2006) on the part of European international broadcasters, has obvious enough indications of political interests. 33 Continuously publicly funded and accountable to their governments, international broadcasters substituted ‘détente’, the original public diplomacy mission of ‘dialogue and understanding amongst the nations’ from the Cold War times with ‘intercultural dialogue’ and/or ‘dialogue with Islam’ (DW website). This shift is arguably fully justified, considering their long-standing expertise in this area. For example, DW General Director, Erik Bettermann, maintains that DW has been fulfilling their mandate

31 France 24 inaugurated an Arabic television service on April 4, 2006 comprising four hours broadcast daily to the Maghreb, Levant and Europe with plans to grow in stages to six, then 12 hours daily (Heil, 2007). 32 DW-RADIO, A success story in many languages , www.dw-world.de/popups (accessed June 28, 2006). 33 As of May 2007, 280 Arabic language satellite TV channels are available for viewers in the Middle East and beyond. And more are on the way (Heil, 2007).

116

of facilitating ‘dialogue and understanding amongst the nations’ for the last 50 years’. As a result, DW is now perfectly suited to take on the mission of ‘intercultural exchange’ internationally as well as to contribute to social discourses domestically because of its multinational character.34 For instance, the Internet portal quantara.de, jointly launched by the Goethe Institute, the Institute for Foreign Relations and the Federal Office for Political Education, with editorial participation of DW, aims to ‘promote dialogue between Germany and the Islamic world [by] reflecting both similarities and difference in the cultures’ in Arabic, English and German, yet ‘without barring contentious issues’. 35

This new emphasis has taken place in the vacuum of decolonisation (in the wake of collapse of European empires) and the end of Cold War. Changed political circumstances, along with intensified globalisation processes and advancement of empowering media and communication technology, and as a result, a more complex set of world relations require an elaboration of an equally sophisticated paradigm: where in the past attention was given to ‘inter-national understanding’, now ‘intercultural dialogue’ is prevalent. This is however not to undermine the potentialities of the European services in Arabic as alternative voices for the Middle Eastern audiences despite their political origins. Against the competition with a well- developed Arab satellite television market, for example, independent, multi-perspective content informed by professionalism and long-standing expertise (as in the case of the WS), may still invade ‘the monopoly of a viewer’ held now by Al-Jazeera in the Arabic world. Similarly, North America is growing in importance for the international broadcasters. Americans are considered to have low-quality national media, and so European programs are seen as a legitimate alternative that can play an empowering role in the mobilisation of disenfranchised Americans – and also as an attempt to match the increasingly popular Al- Jazeera as an alternative source of news in America.

‘Missing out on Europe’ or Europe missing What is of concern to me is that this new international space leaves ‘Europe’ a theme of media coverage, transmitted centrifugally outside Europe, in non-European languages, and recently most zealously in Arabic. Europe itself as a polity, with its aspirations and concerns,

34 DW-WORLD, www.dw-world.de/popup (accessed December 4, 2005). 35 DW-WORLD home page, www.dw-world.de/popups (accessed June 28, 2006).

117

is not a significant enough place to talk to and interact with. The General Secretary of NUJ, Jeremy Dear, observed, ‘at a time when British business, the Government and civil society talk about the need to engage with the rest of Europe…Britain’s voice [is] silenced in significant parts of the continent’ (Fray and Dear, 2005). BBC journalist and translator Nick Caistor confirmed:

No, [Europe is not the key region for the WS]. It’s just shut down the Central Eastern European languages; BBC claims to be impartial but is funded by the foreign office so to some extent, maybe not the content, but where the content is directed is a part of political interest of the UK, and so in the foreign office you see the whole change of emphasis, of course they had to open new embassies in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and of course they are obsessed with the Middle East, so to some extent the radio, even though it claims to be apolitical, it follows Britain’s political aims (Caistor, 2006).

The key markets in Europe in terms of language services for both DW and WS – outside the Islamic world, Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent, respectively – remain part of the Balkans, Ukraine, Russia and Turkey. In my interviews with WS, DW and RN staff, Europe was confirmed as an important region for…the rest of the world , interesting for its environmental technology, economic potential and democratic legacy. DW redefined its editorial brief accordingly, espousing a ‘European perspective’ in its news services; RN set up a Media Desk, a resource centre for accessing stories about Europe; BBC retrained its staff to ensure an unbiased and informed coverage of European issues. 36 Christoph Lanz, managing director of DW-TV, explained DW’s current positioning ‘At the Heart of Europe’ – quoted both in German and English – as both the political and practical marketing manoeuvre. The former is motivated by the commitment to Europeanisation, the latter by the desire to expand the broadcaster’s traditionally German identity in order to broaden its media niche worldwide (Lanz, 2005).

36 See The BBC News Coverage of the European Union, Independent Panel Report (2005), http://www.bbcgovernorsarchive.co.uk/docs/reviews/independentpanelreport.pdf (accessed June 17, 2005).

118

European programs Each of the analysed broadcasters has specific thematic programs devoted to European developments, informative and entertaining, artistically sophisticated, often innovative, yet mostly projected outside of Europe itself. For example, DW radio has a couple of information/current affairs programs such as Inside Europe, At Home in Europe, Network Europe, and Update Europe . The lifestyle magazine Euromaxx broadcast daily in German and English by DW-TV via satellite to over 200 million households worldwide has been a huge success. Its updated reports and features on popular culture in Europe and Germany, ranging from music to fashion, food and drink, to art, travel and architecture, reach all DW- TV’s target regions at their respective prime times. 37 Their audiences however are mostly in North America, Brazil or Argentina (Sucker, 2005). In addition, there are the WS broadcasts for Europe in English ; DW radio in German (Nb German Service has been on the air 24 hours for years); DW-TV, available in English, Spanish, and Arabic (some of them subtitled), and RN in Dutch and English which can be heard across the continent.

Although some of these radio and television products provide a forum for various perspectives on Europe, with a softer approach and creative features, and which could potentially be interesting for the European audiences , executive producer of magazine-style program Euroquest , Jonathan Groubert , at RN argued:

There is no expectation that there is interest in ‘Euroquest’ from Europe. There is a language barrier; there is a very small group of people who do not speak English as their first language but seek out programs in English. There is an obvious limitation with radio, which as an exclusively audio medium bound to one language does not permit subtitling. But even with TV this is problematic: television Without Frontier requires that all European broadcasters have a certain amount of European content, but there is still little sharing across Europe (Groubert, 2005).

A similar point regarding MTV’s initial overestimation of the level of comprehension of English among young people across Europe was made by Roe and Wallis (in Wieten et al.,

37 DW-WORLD, DW-TV: Karen Webb joins Euromaxx , www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1992820,00.html (accessed June 28, 2006).

119

2000). Additionally, a producer of the DW-TV’s Euromaxx blamed linguistic differences across Europe, and in fact unwillingness to speak a foreign language, as primary barriers to even building up international partnerships in media industries (Sucker, 2005).

There is also a certain twist in the logic behind international broadcasting: journalism funded by foreign offices (BBC WS and DW), directed at advancing democratic principles worldwide, and often exposing governments’ failings in foreign countries, is legally banned from their domestic national markets. Not permitted to advertise domestically – although directly or indirectly funded by taxpayers in their respective countries – they suffer from the lack of recognition for their services and influences they wield outside their nation-states. Many interviewees, especially DW staff, perceived the vital necessity for an improved communication about their services within domestic markets. The situation seems to be slightly better for the international broadcasters in the UK and Holland.

Interestingly, because of the increasing prevalence of online streaming, domestic audiences can for the first time actually listen to ‘their’ international radio. This increased accessibility of the content for local or diasporic audiences has serious implications for translation as a journalistic practice. It requires navigating between values of target ethnic communities and ‘native’ home audiences, whilst maintaining the key value of journalistic impartiality. The same goes for the international audiences who can get an impression of what’s being broadcast, even though they might not understand all languages.

National markets It seems astonishing that potential uses of international broadcasters for domestic – increasingly multi-ethnic and multilingual markets – whether in Britain, Germany, or Holland, have not been fully explored so far. The fact that these organisations have access and translate material from around the world has value of relativising nation-centric points of view. Still, their long-standing multilingual tradition and expertise, a network of multilingual connections that span the world, are just slowly being taken advantage of for services intended for national, albeit multilingual audiences. For example, RN is a regular source of expertise for domestic producers, and DW contributes to PSB programming in Berlin. Although intensified co-operation with ARD regional broadcasting companies and with ZDF

120

is on the DW agenda, and the partnership with Radio Multikulti Berlin (RM) (discussed in detail later in this chapter) can potentially be expanded, Miodrag Soric, DW-Radio Editor-in- Chief, commented that DW’s primarily international focus will not change in the near future. On the other hand, Peter Veenendaal commented:

Political policy of the moment is to steer away from special programming for special groups. Everybody is now asked to integrate…The trend is [away from multicultural policy]. We [as RN] are not concerned with this as an organisation, but we could contribute here [to special programming]. The Dutch section has special editorial staff producing for Surinam and Netherlands Antilles, former colonies, also in different languages. We are in negotiation with national partners so that they could use our programming for people here inside Holland. And that would be perfect, because we could bridge the communities there and here (Veenendaal, 2005).

International versus national This ‘international’, ‘outward-looking’ positioning of the European international broadcasters has at least two consequences. Apart from information services of quality for world audiences in undemocratic regions – and for many people they are still the only source of information about the world – there is a clear role they (can) play in industrialised countries. In fact, one of the major challenges for international broadcasters is how to keep a niche in developed radio markets. The endorsed ‘international perspective’ – often defined as a competitive advantage over national media in target markets – translates into coverage from more countries, from more regions, especially from those which through being economically unappealing to Western capitalism are marginalised or totally abandoned by national broadcasting. International broadcasting in this sense offers a viable alternative to the frequently insular, nationalistic imagination expounded by national broadcasters. Irene Quaile-Kersken, Head of Feature and Magazine Programming, DW English Service, observed:

People in Australia told me that they like listening to us [DW] because of the topics we cover; take for example a 50-minute radio documentary about trafficking of women in the Philippines…They said they could hardly ever get such an in-depth

121

treatment of the subject – even though they are geographically closer than we are (Quaile-Kersken, 2005).

The BBC WS has, for example, succeeded in finding a niche in the US public broadcasting schedules. Program ‘The World’, which is one hour long and available via satellite, is one of few that has found its audiences from one coast to the other (Caistor, 2006). The challenge of successful engagement with world audiences who have restricted access to media, remains the same. As in the past, it entails making content relevant – translating it – to each individual audience; the process being reflected in journalistic sensibility to limit the distance between the broadcaster and its audiences, to be able to ‘speak people’s own language’. Nick Caistor explains:

[According to] comments from radio stations in South America, the BBC is broadcasting from Mars, because you have to stand so far back not to get involved in local arguments that you do not engage at all, it does not sound as though it had soul, so there is a danger of reducing everything to the minimum (Caistor, 2006).

In the case of South America, which is a compilation of socio-culturally diverse countries, there are challenges on many levels. Nick Caistor adds:

There are problems with voices, because people in Mexico do not want to hear someone with an Argentine accent, or a Cuban, but also vocabulary is different; also different nations do not get on; it is an imaginary Latin America that does not fit into any definition; it does not exist on its own, really, but only on the radio (Caistor, 2006).

Ramifications of the international as opposed to national agenda on programming content were metaphorically captured by Christoph Lanz, managing director of DW-TV. He exploited a simile of family relationships, characterised by more detailed and critical engagement with debated issues (‘we could be a better family if we did this and that…’) versus neighbourhood connections. As with neighbours, not every single argument gets broadcast, ‘not only because one does not want to make themselves look bad but because it is not interesting in first place’

122

(Lanz, 2005). Stories that producers think would be of interest to ‘neighbours’ are accompanied by more explanation than when addressed to local, or national audiences, and possibly leaving some ‘arguments’ out. What is implicit in this reflection is the importance of the consideration for international audiences, with their different listening needs and habits, within the broader framework of international broadcasters’ editorial commitment to credibility, impartiality and plurality of opinions.

Peter Veenendaal at RN pointed to particular packaging of news and current affairs for international as opposed to national audiences. Dutch radio programs sent abroad contain a complete picture of what happened over 24 hours in Holland and Europe rather than what is happening . The latter is the task of national broadcasters which ‘continue with their coverage from where they left off in the morning and they continue in the evening from where they left off in the midday’ (Veenendaal, 2005). They do not have the kind of summary of news that is a typical product for international broadcasters.

Intercultural dialogue and new technologies The output and future of the World Service, DW and RN – and of all international broadcasters – has been informed as much by geopolitical as technical developments. Regionalisation in content has been paralleled by technological considerations for specific regions. From traditional to digital short-wave, from re-broadcasts on partner stations worldwide, medium and high quality FM frequencies in some areas, to online services and multi-platform delivery, international broadcasters have been under pressure to improvise, adapt and change. Technological challenges and concern about associated cost, along with communicative opportunities that they open up, were amongst the most emotionally charged issues in the interviews. Re-broadcasts as well as online services – as opposed to traditional but increasingly less popular short-wave – are additionally viewed as the technological future of these media across the broadcasters (Groubert, 2005). Nick Caistor observed:

It was a big debate a few years ago about who the radio in particular supports, and some people said it could be for the poorest sectors of the society, that we should promote development, that radio should be an equivalent to Doctors Without Borders and all the NGOs. But there is much resistance to that. We cannot say whether development is a good

123

thing; we have to be something else. I suppose this means that the BBC cannot be seen to be representing anyone other than themselves; they [BBC] cannot be the voice of anyone else…. And although that debate was lost by the people who thought that it should connect up with development gaols, I think that the actual developments in the broadcasting itself, that is, Internet, cheap phone calls, interactivity has in fact changed WS quite a lot. A lot of programs now are interactive, for example, last week, I was on a one-hour phone in program with Africa on voodoo; people were calling from all over the world – this represents an attempt to get voices into the program rather than saying this is what you should be listening to. There are also many online forums, and I think [WS] has been quite good at it (Caistor, 2006).

Indeed, this observable commitment to involving users in the process of interactivity is believed to enrich the content of voices unheard elsewhere. As opposed to large news agencies and organisations that offer roughly the same stories, interactive relations between a broadcaster and its audience offer distinctiveness and unique communicative engagements. As Sinha, interactive editor at BBC WS, argues, it helps WS enrich the content through featuring and exchanging ‘voices that are not BBC voices, which is a great thing and honour’ (Sinha, 2006).

Traditional multilingual radio services that conventionally followed the model of concentric and monolingual communication (in a target region language) have been enhanced by more dialogical multilingual web services. The range of languages offered has been expanded, with no exponential cost increase (for example, Arabic service on RN; notably thanks to withdrawal of some other language services), and new modes of two-way communicative, often collaborative engagements amongst language services and international audiences are being explored. Interactivity in the form of discussion forums, audience feedback, and creative production is ascribed a pivotal role in ‘the dialogue between cultures’ as now advocated by international broadcasters. Interestingly, there are various, often culture-specific strategies in attempting to attract international audiences. The BBC WS online feature, Send your Pictures for instance, operates on a simple assumption that some cultures are better with pictures than words, arguably e.g. Iranian. Santosh Sinha elaborates:

124

…new ways are being worked through which to attract people, if they’re more comfortable with words, we encourage them to come up with words. If they’re politically charged individuals, [we’re thinking about] a way to give them voice in terms of discussing. It works even though not everyone makes a comment or actually speaks, but there are lot of people who just love to read what the other users contributed. We try to use similar competitions or use a common theme and contributions from different cities across the world. We collect them and see what differences are like, so people – our audiences – are kind of helping us talk to other people (Sinha, 2006).

Examples have included: • Your Voice website, which was recognised as the ‘Best Global Website’ awarded by the Localisation Research Centre for the most innovative multilingual and multicultural website, • Who Runs Your World , a forum in eight languages, • Have Your Say • Talking Point • Global Conversation forums.

As a consequence of online possibilities, new journalistic principles for each language and their respective Internet markets have been recognised. For instance, the Chinese online editors at DW-WOLRD.DE are required to report from a German or European perspective, but also to ‘keep an eye on’ any bilateral, German-Chinese stories. An integrated multimedia offer next to ‘compelling’ interactive content is also perceived as a competitive advantage in attempting to win new audiences in new markets, especially in the Middle East. 38

A significant word of caution about ‘dialogue’ as serviced by television rather than Internet was offered by the DW-TV Managing Director. Christoph Lanz pointed out technological limitations of traditional television as a medium that does not allow for much audience feedback. Instead, Lanz talked about seeking to enact ‘intercultural dialogue’ as a way of

38 Interview with Hosam El Sukkary, Head of the BBC Arabic Service, www.tbsjournal.com/sokkaryinterviewpf.html (accessed August 18, 2006).

125

explaining to other cultures how ‘we are’, and in this way confront prejudices that others might share. According to him, international co-operation, for example, a monthly talkshow Meet Europe co-produced in Berlin and broadcast in Arabic into the Arab world by DW-TV and Abudabi TV, are best examples of broadcasters’ intention to promote cross-cultural education and understanding (Lanz, 2005).

Co-operation Indeed, huge importance is assigned to co-productions across the international broadcasters which have been subjects of this research. The increased collaboration amongst international, and gradually also national, broadcasters holds a potential for an interesting, multi-perspective programming suitable for international audiences. The examples from DW radio include co- operation with RFI within Arabic and Russian language programs in which journalists from both stations [RFI, DW] discuss issues of migration in their respective countries. This two- perspective approach to programming on the universal issue of migration in the European metropolises is an interesting attempt to display a diversity of opinions, and critically engage with and learn from experiences of others. This networking potential was also alluded to by SBS policy adviser Georgie McClean (Chapter Seven). In my interview, Miodran Soric, the Head of DW-Radio, underlined the educational benefits of such a co-production and exchange especially for the EU-candidate countries that can obtain an overview of the structural, policy status quo of migration across Europe (Soric, 2005).

The prominent example of European radio co-operation is Radio E, a joint venture among BBC, DW, RN, and RFI. Originally funded by the EU, the experiment was to explore the technological possibilities of streaming several languages on digital channels under a banner of Europeanness : the promotion of a sense of belonging together in Europe’s diversity, with national, cultural, and linguistic differences brought into dialogue. The project that was about producing and sharing programs in English, French and German among the participating stations soon exposed a perplexed logic of co-operation: on the one hand the ongoing need for every station to maintain its own identity profile, and on the other, the contemporary necessity to pool resources by collaborating with others. Despite all the structural altercations over the

126

longevity of the project,39 what is symptomatic of this co-operation – and international radio co-productions in general − is the importance of access to broadcast windows on partner international and national stations. Due to continuing anxiety borne of Cold War distrust, transnational radio is only allowed to broadcast on partner stations in co-operation with them (for example, DW TV’s ‘Meet Europe’, talk-show co-produced with Abu Dhabi TV). In the case of DW English-language, life-style magazine ‘Weekend’ produced for distribution within Radio E the situation is more perverse. The program legally banned from the domestic market, re-entered German mediasphere via broadcast on a BBC-owned frequency in Berlin. The program recorded a lot of listeners’ responses, although no exact audience figures are available (Quaile-Kersken, 2005).

Translation practices Santosh Sinha, interactivity editor at the WS, stressed the significance of translation as a unique strategy to offer multi-perspective, multi-vocal programming, often unavailable to listeners because of language barriers. Multilingual online debates converge around a story, an idea, or discussion.

Because we’re all over the world, we are in unique position to provide perspective from all around the world. If you are a Russian speaker, very often you only get to hear the views of other Russian speakers. The challenge is how to get people to see perspectives on the same issue from different languages. So, we brought all these languages together. To give you an example, people from Russia may have a certain view or a position of Israel, but this may or may not be matched by the view in the Arabic-speaking world. So, what we do is put out the same debate on different language websites. We then make a selection of comments – reflecting a balance of views – from these websites and present it back to the user. As I said earlier, this is unique because a user generally does not have access to views from across the world. They think ‘Hang on, I am familiar with some of the comments but these others are different and make sense’…As a user, it informs his/her perspective on an issue…and different views take a debate forward (Sinha, 2006).

39 For example, BBC decision to pull out after closing down its German program and ‘overproduction’ of its own content in English.

127

This important point of providing ‘different views that take a debate forward’ bears a relationship with general assertions of cultural translation theorists like Lotman (1990) and Flusser (2003). According to them, the introduction of different observations and differing points of view results in transformative shifts in perspectives. This in turn lays down conditions for cultural evolution, change and enlivenment. Constant, dynamic contact and exchange of heterogenous elements that come from cultural peripheries or cultures behind the boundaries of a given culture stimulate creativity and progress.

Peter Veenendaal makes an important point about the role of inter-linguistic communication and translation for expanding the broadcaster’s audience:

One of the strategic focus points [for Radio Netherlands] is providing the world with a forum – which is ambitious – to discuss in various languages problems that connect the world; November 2005 for example migration was the central theme. All different language departments were asked to make special programs with a theme of migration. We make different programs but we share information across the language groups. We use the internet to facilitate the cross-border communication. [In 2006] a theme is Rembrandt, an icon for Holland, but not just things about his works, [to make it more appealing] we have developed an entertaining and funny radio play, worldwide quest for the missing parts of painting ‘Night Watch’ (based on the same idea as ‘Da Vinci Code’). We commissioned it ourselves, and it includes [also] South America into the story, Indonesia, England, to reach out many different audiences; it’s produced in four languages. We’re also selling it to Italians (Veenendaal, 2005).

One crucial aspect needs to be highlighted: international radios have conventionally been about bilingual, centrifugal relations. In contrast to television, radio by its nature is tied to a language (Burgess cited in Madsen, 2005). Their nominal multilingualism has stood for a quantity of separate languages transmitted and available in target regions around the world and a de facto bilingual form of linguistic interaction. It has involved a national language of the radio’s country of origin – its headquarters – as a default working language and the language of the news desk, in which material is passed onto other language groups – frequently regardless of a region’s cultural specificity – and a delivery language. Translation,

128

or, as interviewees preferred, adaptation, would happen at an interim stage between the employment of both languages being used, that is, between the news room central service and specific language groups. This procedure is common across international broadcasters, and often justified by limited financial resources. For example, Irene Quaile-Kersken remarked:

If I asked for a special version [for DW English program] from a German correspondent in Mexico, I’d have to pay for it from my budget, but if I use a German version, which is available anyway, and you can translate…I have to pay for translation, a speaking talent, or use my staff for that, but we do not have to pay for reports (Quaile-Kersken, 2005).

What is different now is that the actual translation procedure is carried out by journalists with specific language skills rather than translators. The journalists are arguably more sensitive about the particular needs of the target audience, background knowledge, and skilled in assessing ‘on the ground’ predicaments. Most importantly, many interviewees underlined diverse areas of interest across international audiences, for example, differences between the English- and German-speaking audiences at DW-radio. Again Irene Quaile-Kersken:

I personally feel that you do not want a [centralised] translation service, because there are areas that our correspondent would deliver material direct in English, which is of no interest to Germans…German-speakers constitute a different target group and as a result prefer different topics. And if you have journalists from another country you get a much more attractive programming than when people just translate everything (Quaile-Kersken, 2005).

There is another important point about translation’s role as a censoring or authorising devise made by journalist-translator Nick Caistor, from the Spanish-American service, BBC WS. As recently as the 1990s, English translators and not journalists were employed at the WS to adapt, culturally and linguistically, news items for radio audiences in target countries. So- called ‘talkwriters’ would pick up material, make an annotation about the significance of it, and then pass it on for translation by a target-language native speaker. The completed translation would undergo a subsequent scrutiny by a British translator with adequate

129

language skills. For instance, a news item about Mexican elections composed by an English translator would be translated into Spanish by a native speaker Mexican. This elaborated translation sequence was intended to eliminate any partiality that ‘the locals’ might have displayed. The procedural change was ushered in by telephone technology that enabled communication with a couple of analysts in the target countries who would give their opinion on the subject. From then on, the employment emphasis shifted onto radio producers/journalists. ‘This is a mixed WS culture’, says Nick Caistor, ‘you tend to get older people who say “I’m a translator”, and who do not know anything about journalism’. A new problem came about with the Internet: language services are so small that they cannot generate their own news items, so they unavoidably need to resort to translation from English- language websites (Caistor, 2006).

There is an ongoing debate concerning the ethics of translation, and that of quality in the era of incredibly fast information production and transmission. Strict editorial controls of impartiality, carried out every few months, are applied to closely compare the original English and its translated version in order to avoid bias and to ensure fairness of coverage. According to Nick Caistor, the best translating practice is using ‘the most neutral terms possible, even though this means losing emotional impact – for example, the BBC used to say that the word ‘dictator’ should never be used, because that is an obvious value judgement – the same with ‘terrorist’. The task of journalist-translator is to ‘make the very different circumstances in different parts of the world intelligible to everyone’ (Caistor, 2006). Problems of bias carried in translation arise especially within problematic language-groups. For example, the Vietnamese language service is by and large staffed with people who left Vietnam in the mid- 1970s because of their rejection of the communist regime. There was a similar situation with the recently closed Greek service, which was for years run by Greek migrants who came to Britain fleeing Greek military dictatorship, or for example, the Polish language-group originated during WWII, and later recruiting Polish Cold War dissidents. ‘Translation’ considerations at stake here are three-fold: the differences between translators and journalists, connectivity to the home country culture, and political motives that dictate certain translation and programming choices.

Yet another aspect of translation is addressed by Santosh Sinha, interactivity editor, BBC WS:

130

Lots of organisations offer content in languages such as Spanish, Arabic and Russian, but most are doing a mechanical job of translating either through machines or translators. Our websites have a soul – they actually talk to people like someone speaking their own language (in BBC World Service, 2005).

Sinha underscored the two related issues of translation practice: not only the danger of ignoring translation’s commitment to specificity and differentiation through the use of generalising, universalising machine translations, a response to the time pressures of contemporary ‘informationalism’ (Cronin, 2005: 113), but also ‘proper’ translation’s ability to highlight cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. ‘Speaking their own language’ points to media content being a product of particular language and culture, of a distinct time and space. Reference was made to journalists’ interest and indeed passion in making the stories for particular audiences as opposed to professional translators. Translators were argued to be much less involved and motivated to do the job, with their task often seen as being ‘to finish off translations, get their money and go out’ (Sinha, 2006). Time constraints in the news/media organisations were additionally brought up as disadvantaging translators, who often prefer to have time to reflect rather than work to tight deadlines. Consequently, in the context of news production, the communicative function prevails over aesthetic considerations. The knowledge of a target culture and language, especially in the case of languages that do not have a uniform or standard linguistic format, such as Urdu or Hindi, was additionally deemed central. This importance of cultural rather than linguistic translation, and indeed a new role for journalists in the array of postmodern public sphericules is captured by Santosh Sinha as follows:

We do not use translators; we prefer to steer clear of translators [in Interactivity]. I come from a Hindi background and would not like to be called a translator. I am a Hindi-speaking journalist, and when I am re-versioning a story from English, I’m not translating it. I am creating a story that would make sense to the Hindi-speaking audience. So when a Russian journalist comes in, he would not only translate a story into Russian but re-version it. We have sharp journalists with strong editorial skills, and they will present comments that are not straight translation. It’s important what you as a user have expressed…if you only translate it and do not understand how it

131

had been written, you could make a mess of it. But as a journalist I know what had been written, and I reflect that well in the English version.

I think journalists reflect [cultural nuances] better – they understand the newsy aspect of it and they speak the language. They are not specialist language speakers but they understand how close they can get this phrase in their language. They are not linguists, they would not get it 100 per cent right but they would write it in a way that makes sense to their audience and this is the ‘soul’ that I’m talking about. When I read a piece I should think that it was written in Hindi – I should not think it’s translated (Sinha, 2006).

There are two points that emerge from these comments. Firstly, talking to journalists working across languages, it became apparent that journalists resist defining themselves as ‘translators’. Translation in its linguistic sense is associated with some type of formal language structure transfer, and ‘inferior, more derivative practice’, something that Bassnett noted during her research project on ‘Politics and Economics of Translation in Global Media’ (Bassnett, 2005: 123).

Another significant issue is with definition problems around the hybrid nature of translation processes in news production and circulation. The difference between cultural and linguistic translation that I refer to above, or possibly journalists’ term ‘adaptation’, is analogous to Bassnett’s theoretical speculations regarding interpretation versus translation in creating global news. In a special edition of Language and Intercultural Communication , Bassnett argues that a news story that originates in one cultural context and gets translated into another is totally different from the process that we customarily define as ‘translation’. Familiarly, translation assumes scrupulous work on a written text, which is directed at rendering the source language in ‘as close an approximation’ as possible for readers who have no knowledge of the source language.

In the media story context, the situation is different. A series of textual (for example, summary, paraphrase, addition, reshaping to suit target culture expectations) and media practices (for example, phone interview, personal conversation/interview, translated, and

132

globally distributed news) shape – and in fact – transform the story. This process is dominated by strategies of acculturation, that is, methods aimed at bringing a text more completely into the target system rather than rendering the closest possible approximation of the source system (with foreignisation being an opposite). As a result, what happens to news stories is more similar to the process of interpretation of the text transmitted orally than the process of written translation. Bassnett explains, ‘an interpreter, rendering a speech into another language, reshapes, alters emphases, adds and subtracts where necessary, seeks to maintain a suitable linguistic register, in short recreates a version for the target audience. News reporters appear to operate in the same way, with the emphasis on the destination of the story’ (Bassnett, 2005: 124-5). This is an interesting point that suggests different levels of accuracy or expertise employed in the process of translation, depending on ‘destination’ and purposes. The two extreme examples on this continuum can be a written translation of an EU directive, which requires an ultimate precision and fluency, and approximate translations facilitated by new media, online translation services.

Interestingly, in the Polish language, the verb ‘tłumaczyć’ (‘to translate’) has two different meanings, but their semantic proximity, is very significant and particularly telling in the multicultural world of today. In his meditation on the critical importance of interlingual communication in the contemporary era, Ryszard Kapuściński, a Polish journalist-traveller, traces the semantic trajectory of the word. The first meaning, ‘przekładać’, refers more narrowly to a linguistic ‘transfer’ between the source and target language, indicating a close relationship between the both, and translator’s limited scope of freedom. The other, ‘tłumaczyć’ has a wider definition of ‘to explain’; ‘to interpret’ or even ‘to make aware’. This sense of ‘making people aware’ of other literatures and cultures, the existence of the other, cultural specificities and uniqueness is paramount to cross-cultural understanding, acceptance of difference and peaceful co-existence. Contrary to an English differentiation between the oral and written act of translation (that is interpretation versus translation), the Polish word ‘tłumaczyć’ covers both media, albeit carrying two varying senses (Kapuściński, 2005).

Translation of genres and formats: transnational content that travels best Despite cultural and linguistic differences across international audiences, my interviewees identified a lot of examples of programming that travels well transnationally. Santosh Sinha

133

argued for topics that tackle issues of ‘shared experience’, which allow cross-cultural appeal and a simultaneous mediation by many language groups (including via pictures rather than words).

Stories definitely work where there’s scope to help other people. People like it, there’s an emotional binding. There’s appeal around reading from different languages, reading from other people, not just your own language group, is quite a thrill. Those ideas work well (Sinha, 2006).

The examples have included: ‘Universal Children’s Day’ – a day explored through the eyes of kids living out on the streets in India, Russia, Pakistan, Latin America; and Sadness – a web initiative that explores human stories through pictures.

Olexiy Solohubenko, Executive Editor, EurAsia Region until March 2006, then America and Europe Region, BBC WS, also offered some insightful comments in the following conversation:

Interviewer : So maybe this [the task of international broadcasters] is not only about languages; as in dividing services into various languages but finding the common ground for engaging audiences with the topic…cross-nationally…

Olexiy Solohubenko : It is a balancing act, because yes, you have to be global but also you have to be relevant and this where the trick is. You can be as global as you want to be, when you do not do the story well, you do not explain well, if you do not put it into context, someone in Venezuela won’t be interested in what’s happening in Iran. It’s all about finding connections and [answering the questions] ‘why Iran’, ‘the nuclear option’, ‘why gas’, ‘radicalism of whatever side’, ‘why religion’? When you explain it, you can find relevance in many other markets. The editorial task, my task, is trying to find those connections, making stories sexy, exciting, interesting for whatever audiences…And making them relevant, not necessarily [to make them] travel across various audiences, because there are always stories that travel better than others…

134

Interviewer : Which are…

Olexiy Solohubenko : Sex, violence, gossip. If you want to take people down-market, it’s very easy to do it. If you put a semi-naked star on the Golden Globe Award first page you get lots of clicks. But this is not what we are about…it’s not that we are shunning away from soft culture; we do need to be varied but it’s not what the BBC is doing best. It’s about analysis, discussion, relevance. In terms of stories that travel well, the challenge is to make the stories that do not travel well, travel well (Solohubenko, 2006).

The financial constraints upon high-quality radio production also work to increase the content sourced from European international broadcasters:

The main market for BBC Spanish is feature programs because none of the radio stations in South America will invest money to make a serious series about the climate change or, they just do not have money to invest (Caistor, 2006).

International interest for travel features, and general magazine-and life-style content, was indicated in my interview with the Euromaxx producer, at DW-TV. Seventy-five per cent of Euromaxx ’s international audience values travel programs most (Schlinker and Schuerhoff, 2005). Whether for North American, Brazilian, or Argentinean audiences, entertaining programming produced by DW was argued to be in high demand (Sucker, 2005).

Despite all the multilingual, especially promising online experiments, and translation practices at the heart of their operations, international broadcasters are ‘diasporic contact zones’ for transnational communities (Gillespie, 2006), but they often struggle to remain relevant to specific local communities and not to ‘broadcast from Mars’ (Caistor, 2006). In the second part of this chapter I consider a different model of mediated translation, operational within the context of mostly France and Germany, represented by ARTE, and local urban multi-ethnic community of Berlin and Barcelona. The later is serviced by multilingual metropolitan public broadcasters Radio Multikulti (RM) and Barcelona Televisió (BTV) respectively.

135

4.3 ARTE

Politics and culture united Popularly associated with high culture, to the extent of being accused of being too elitist, ARTE emerged in the late 1980s as a purely politically motivated television experiment. The product of diplomatic efforts between Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, it was awarded a frequency of the Sept Channel to strengthen the Franco-German friendship through mediation of culture ‘in a broader sense’. This initially bi-national identity, characterised by bilingual broadcasts to France and Germany, was extended to support the ‘European’ idea, a project for unified Europe that was crystallising in the post-Cold War era. ARTE started broadcasting in 1992, with the Maastricht treaty entering into force and the procedure for Central Eastern European accession under way. Since then, the channel’s original national duality, shaped by international relations and technological limitations (especially challenges of translation – see section below), has been replaced by a more inclusive vision of Europe. Through its Europe- wide transmission (via satellite and cable) that encompasses geographic areas under the Council of Europe rather than the EU, extensive co-operation with partner broadcasters (Belgian, Swiss, Spanish, Finnish, Dutch, Polish, and Canadian PSBs), or a daily schedule that includes a plethora of content of non-German, non-French origin, ARTE reasserts its Europeanness and its mission to showcase the continent’s cultural diversity (ARTE, 2005).

The physical proximity between European institutions based in Strasbourg and ARTE’s head offices there adds colour to the station’s pro-European orientation. The ARTE managerial and journalistic staff argue however that this factor is not ‘too penetrant’ (Grunert, 2006). Socio- political realities of Europe in the new millennium determine de facto the station’s strategic directions and content. Recently, intense debate over Europe’s future, especially in the wake of ‘anti-European’ constitutional referenda results in France and Holland in 2005, informs the current trend in ARTE’s thinking and programming orientation. For example, a documentary- style magazine with a global issues focus will be replaced by ‘Europa Magazin’ in 2007. Another program struggling to find an audience, ‘Forum der Europäer’ (‘Europeans’ Forum’), will be either reformed and moved to a more attractive time slot, or dumped from the schedule. Popular disengagement with the EU bureaucracy across European populations was recognised and intermittently addressed in the channel’s broadcasts. Olaf Grunert, Head of

136

ARTE’s themed evenings (‘Themenabend’), now a distinctive part of the channel’s brand image, commented on the success of European topics featured in the series before the EU expansion:

‘Menschen Europa’ (‘People’s Europe’) was an amazingly popular program, even though we talked about farmers across candidate countries! It was still interesting for people, although one needs to bear in mind that our core audience is mostly highly educated, and not farmers, although I wish there were, but I do not believe there are… As long as it’s about people it works, but as soon as some EU commissar turns up on the screen, gives an interview, people immediately run away (Grunert, 2006).

Similarly, Emanuel Suard, Deputy Director of Programs, Program Planning and Media Research, argued in favour of programs that communicate Europe by dealing with concrete issues relevant to people, and by drawing international comparisons, rather than abstract discussions of the EU elites. Against criticisms of ARTE’s elitism and cultural ghettoisation, he declared as a positive element the station’s interest in a mixture of programming that combines topics on everyday life in Europe with chic and high culture. ‘Television for All’ (‘Fernsehen für Alle’) is now high on the agenda, with ‘accessibility’ written in capital letters, agreed Grunert. The channel’s early dedication to high-brow material is traced back to ARTE’s very origin, its overnight transformation from an elitist cable station in Paris, transmitting to a couple of thousands of households, to a public broadcaster with a cultural remit to fulfil. Today, with the largest budget in the world for a cultural channel, and continuing abstinence from live sport coverage, ARTE is a growing public service both in France and Germany. However, overall audience ratings remain low. Its satellite television is also increasingly popular in North Africa and the Near East, with ambitions to broadcast to the Iberian Peninsula and South America in Castilian Spanish.

As with the previously described multilingual models, my attention is drawn to ARTE’s existing capacity for cross-cultural, interlingual communication, and the particular challenges and opportunities it entails. There are several main strategies indicated in the interviews that the channel pursues ‘to promote understanding and rapprochement among Europe’s nations’.

137

One is informed by Article 2 of the contract establishing ARTE G.E.I.E. 40 and which defines its role in these terms: ‘The purpose of this grouping is to conceive and produce television programs which, in a broad sense, are cultural and international in character and conducive to promoting understanding and rapprochement among Europe’s nations and to broadcast these programs or to authorise their broadcasting’ (ARTE, 2005). So, for example, cross-cultural education is conceived as a graduation of accessibility/intelligibility of material in ARTE’s programming. This is particularly true of the theme evenings, where light entertainment is often followed by more demanding content.

Co-operation with other national television channels, the flagship task in ARTE’s policy framework, is another important strategy. Extending internationalisation of television production, within and beyond Europe, as well as partner agreements, are strongly endorsed in the station’s plans. The already existing capacity for co-production and distinctive international perspective in the ‘Themenabend’, as opposed to national German or French channels, can possibly be further expanded. Although seeking out news about, for example, Germany from German national services is still unchallenged, ARTE’s potential lies precisely in its ability to report international stories that are left out by national broadcasters, topics that are ascribed a marginal importance or are simply absent (for example, conflicts in Africa, voices of Arab opinion from the Lebanon, Qatar or Syria). Programming strategy in the style of a publishing house to showcase foreign material is also highly rated. Instead of always sending the ARTE journalists abroad to report, the channel is committed to inviting in different, alternative perspectives. Grunert comments:

[We want] a Pole to tell us a story about Poland, but it does not mean that TVP is obliged to provide all the stories about Poland. For God’s sake no! But about other things…otherwise you end up with what we call it ‘Stadt-Land-Fluß’ 41 here at

40 ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne), a consortium of European economic interests (G.E.I.E.) was founded on 30th April 1991 by its two shareholders: ARTE France and ARTE Deutschland TV GmbH. ARTE G.E.I.E. has also signed a partnership agreement with RTBF (Belgium) and co-operation agreements with SRG SRR Idée Suisse (Switzerland), TVE (Spain), TVP (Poland), ORF (Austria), RAI (Italy) and YLE (Finland) http://www.arte.tv/de/alles-ueber-ARTE/38566.html (accessed May 24, 2006). 41 To translate the German ‘Stadt-Land-Fluß’, a name of a popular knowledge game, into English is another instance of challenges posed by translation. Literary, it translates into ‘city-country-river’ to denote most common pre-defined categories featured in the game, for which participants need to find corresponding words starting with a given letter. The closest translation in English would be ‘scategories’, however, being a broad

138

‘Themenabend’…so we make something on Chopin, Henryk Sienkiewicz, then Gdansk, Krakow, Warszawa…what is achieved then? What does a French or German learn about Poland? This is not how it should be done. It should have some tension, some twist, like a story about Cold War that spins Poland, US, GB, USSR, double espionage, and so on (Grunert, 2006).

He offers also some words of caution:

We need to be careful [about co-operation and partnerships]…we cannot afford to become humanitarian aid for some now developing screen industries, especially since our budget is not growing’ [for example, Romanian television was recently interested in co-production]. We also need to be mindful of what material we can bring in [through those co-operations], as our audiences are still primarily German and French (Grunert, 2006).

This remark on funding limitations touches on the challenges facing an international broadcaster to attract simultaneously various national target groups. Andre Lefebvre’s comment on translators’ work being performed within a universe of discourse (for example, a particular genre that is dominant in the target culture inevitably informs audiences’ expectations regarding the translated work, and if the genre does not conform to those demands, its reception is likely to be made more difficult) can apply to such programming and scheduling considerations (in Bassnett, 2005: 122). Indeed, every day ARTE has to account for its audiences’ socio-cultural differences, reflected in their preferences for particular content and genre. For example, programs about Palestine and the Middle East are more popular in Germany than in France, and there is a larger interest in French cinema in Germany than vice versa. German television is also generally more educational, including more commentary than French. Prime times vary in both countries, with dubbing being an overwhelmingly favourite method of translation in Germany, as compared with more tolerance of subtitling on French TV. game played with a dice, it only loosely fits the German meaning. The meaning of the comment can be derived as an attempt on the part of program-makers to depict a certain culture beyond tokenistic definitions and categories, with due attention to the narrative, including the context and relations between separate cultural/historical elements.

139

Translation, both as cultural and linguistic practice, is the main challenge for any international broadcaster, including ARTE. Amongst the content that has proven popular internationally are history documentaries on topics as diverse as archaeological discoveries, Egypt, Cleopatra, antiquity, the Middle Ages, Third Reich, an evergreen topic of Nazis, and Hitler – although the latter decreasingly so. Classic literature, music, arts, especially the big names such Rembrandt, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo; theatre performances, and experimental films are also popular. The high culture orientation of programming, that according to Jerome Clement, president of ARTE France, allowed the emergence of an ‘ARTE Generation’, is to continue (Suard, 2006).

ARTE’s translatory practice is unique in Europe. It comprises a mixture of voice-overs, simultaneous interpretation, dubbing, and subtitles, depending on the specific material, genre requirements and broadcast times. All programs are transmitted in two languages, French and German; in search for larger audiences, dubbing is prevalent in prime time. As a result, although around 200 languages and dialects is drawn upon for the 3500 hours of programming broadcast each year by ARTE, viewers can hardly hear any of them. Elizabeth Krone, Head of Language Services, justifies this practice in terms of a low acceptance of subtitling across Europe, which unaccustomed viewers in Germany and France find too energy-consuming and very demanding. Also the older age of ARTE’s core audience is noted as a practical barrier to round-the-clock subtitling. On the other hand, French audiences prefer feature films in original languages rather than dubbed, for example, Italian classics. Popular films would be more likely dubbed. This arguably points to differing translation practices between high- and low-culture products. In the light of ARTE’s claimed preference for subtitling as a form of translation, Krone contemplates a possibility of subtitling programs featured throughout the day, and of course, late at night, as she says ‘for the most curious’ (Krone, 2006).

There is no in-house subtitling unit and external translation services are commissioned. However, for talk-show formats, studio-discussions, or the culture information magazines ‘ARTE Kultur’ and ‘ARTE Info’, simultaneous interpretation is provided by the in-house Language Service. Over the years, ARTE’s language unit has elaborated a set of required qualifications and codes of practice to minimise the challenges of translation. Professional

140

translators, with relevant broadcasting training (for example, voice training, cultural adaptation of journalistic texts, stress management, and timing of simultaneous translation) are employed rather than journalists. Elizabeth Krone, who helped set up the Language Services, pointed to a number of typical shortcomings displayed by translating journalists in the past. According to her, journalists were less apt and able than professional translators to prepare translation at short notice or to deal with unexpected situations. As Krone maintains, without a professional translation background, journalists tended to make mistakes, in particular when the specific lexicon from either a legal or policy area was involved. Nuances in register and word meanings, often determined by pronunciation and intonation, rather than pure semantics, were more successfully dealt with by translators (Krone, 2006).

However well-trained and experienced translators may be, simultaneous interpretation still poses major problems for an international broadcaster like ARTE. This is particularly the case with translated studio discussions, frequently hosted by German and French reporters speaking their own language. Huge differences between both languages (for example, duration and syntax of a sentence, pace of speaking, pitch of voice) demand ultimate linguistic and cultural competence as well as mental composure. Elizabeth Krone provided an interesting example:

Stress affects interpreters’ voice, especially by women, they tend to speak higher – men not necessarily – translators can get short of breath, and when French women are stressed they tend to speak even higher than normally; German female interpreters who have been working in France for a long time tend also to emulate the French original, both in terms of voice pitch and language structure, their translations can become a sort of its shadow – so for viewers at home, what…should be a pleasant comfortable experience can turn into a real discomforting, unbearable experience.

She added: French presenters in studio discussions tend to talk together simultaneously or they do not finish sentences, because the French sentence formula follows subject plus verb in the beginning, but with German this is totally different. The verb comes last, so you need to wait till the last moment. French presenters can start 10 sentences and not

141

finish any – it all needs to be translated in a way that is pleasant for the Germans’ ears (Krone, 2006).

What such translation methods do, whether voice-over or subtitling, is to take away the spontaneity or charm of conversation. On the other hand Olaf Grunert argued that ARTE’s complex efforts of translation pay off and indeed work in emotionally laden discussions. When bureaucratic themes around political institutions or health systems are addressed, people normally get discouraged and go away (Grunert, 2006). Consequently, ARTE significantly limits the number of talk-shows so popular on other stations. With documentaries, especially Spanish, new commentaries rather than translations often need to be prepared to compensate for an incommensurable pace of speaking. Additionally, emergent formats of visual rather than audio-based plays are ARTE’s response to difficulties of multilingualism.

With respect to future developments, great expectations for re-languaging programs across partner stations and thus strengthening ARTE’s European image are stored in digitalisation. My purpose here is not to chart the development of new re-languaging technologies, but rather to call attention to the way a new transnational culture has the potential to emerge. New technologies already allow multiple audio streaming and choice of a preferred language version. ARTE’s managers argue that this may soon be used for provision of voice-overs and/or subtitles (Suard, 2006; Grunert, 2006). My concern is that in many cases the advancing technology might not be enough to change the existing status quo as regards media translation practices. Transnational exchange of content, whether European or non-European, will still proceed via traditionally monolingual channels, that is, they are most likely to be dubbed into a national language.

Wherever there is linguistic proximity, which ARTE’s managers describe as ‘natural partnerships’ (for example, with Switzerland, Austria, or Belgium), ARTE’s content however can prove too ‘European’ (Suard, 2006). In these situations, program windows on national partner PSBs that increase identification and relevance to particular audiences can be a valid solution for an international station to minimise distance from its audience. On the other hand, Olaf Grunert warns of bureaucratic problems around such co-operations (Grunert, 2006).

142

Such an experiment is presently being carried out with a Belgian public service broadcaster, whereby ARTE wants to be seen as much more than solely an import station. It wants to produce Belgian culture for Belgian audiences. If successful, it might be an ARTE model for European television: a mixture of programming that consists partly of locally and partly ARTE-produced content, linguistically adapted. Interested partner stations would pay for re- languaging themselves. Such an idea is also being considered for Spain and Italy. Additionally, the construction of the ARTE brand as ‘a correspondent for Europe’ (Grunert, 2006) is envisioned to be reinforced through implementation of strategies such as Europe- wide waivers of broadcasting licence fees for ARTE material (which currently continues to be exclusive to France and Germany), and networking between ARTE and public broadcasters across Europe.

4.4 RADIO MULTIKULTI BERLIN

In its 12-year history, the multilingual public service, Radio Multikulti, operating in Berlin, has been the subject of academic and public debate around multiculturalism. Recognised by media researchers and listeners alike for its distinct cosmopolitan philosophy and content, it features in my analysis, with a discussion of the existing capacity of this metropolitan, local media experiment in inter-linguistic communication.

Born out of a widely-perceived necessity to counteract increasingly racist and anti-migration sentiments within German society in the early 1990s, Radio Multikulti has been endowed with a public multicultural charter of twofold functions, and with two main target groups in mind. It is required to aid ethnic minorities in their integration into the host society and to stimulate Germans’ interest and embracing of other cultures. Rather than to refer to the facilitation of ‘intercultural dialogue’ as its main raison d’être , RM defines itself as an ‘intercultural service wave’ (‘interkulturelle Service Welle’). This seemingly semantic nuance is elaborated by RM chief editor Ilona Marenbach:

We started really ambitiously, with all the bombastic words and Enlightenment rhetorics and we did manage to win some interested, cosmopolitan listeners amongst

143

the German public but also amongst minority communities via foreign languages. What we have not succeeded in is to bring those two groups together; so the Poles listen to the Polish program, Turks to the Turkish, and they do not necessarily tune in for the German programs, because it’s too ambitious, too multicultural…What interests do Poles in Berlin have for Turkish pop music, or Arabs for Italian topics? We’ve discovered that a ‘dialogue’, exchange, the openness toward the other cultures is typically a German feature. Migrants are foremost interested in the bilateral exchange between German and ethnic culture, for the integration purposes. This is their reference point. The openness towards others comes only later, in the second, third generations, after they have settled in properly into the new socio-cultural environment. With ‘intercultural’ persons this [cosmopolitan] interest is always there, but with the minorities not really. They want first to protect and maintain their own culture and then to get to know and understand the German culture and society so they can grow into it easier (Marenbach, 2005).

It is an important point. It demystifies a celebratory and often too abstract notion of ‘intercultural dialogue’ and indicates actual differences in cosmopolitan disposition between the endemic and immigrant populations. While breaking the ground in normalising the difference (for example, in radio’s acceptance of non-German accents or promotion of non- Anglo music), RM points to the limits of a cosmopolitan agenda, in particular when the needs of cultural maintenance and integration among migrants are involved. This tension between a multicultural approach that emphasises inherited cultural boundaries and cosmopolitanism that challenges single affiliations is at the heart of Marenbach’s quotation. However, success in mobilising the German audiences towards engagement and appreciation of cultural diversity is notable and praised (RM has received a couple of international awards). It has indeed become a kind of media role model for intercultural exchange (Vertovec, 2000: 21).

Anchored in an immediate life-world of multi-ethnic Berlin, the station promotes itself as the radio with information about ‘cultural living-together’ (‘das Zusammenleben der Kulturen’) among people in Berlin and elsewhere, characterised by a local-global perspective and world music. The centrality of international issues but with relevance to migrant communities, as

144

well as general living together amongst Germans and migrants was highlighted in my interview with the RM chief editor. Marenbach commented:

Our strength is our staff from all around the world, so we can look into the world more than other stations…We try not to talk only to correspondents in our preparation of the news bulletins, current affairs, but we insist on finding relevance of the big issues to [the Berliner]. Whether there are common topics like fundamentalism, terrorism, Islam…We have 180 nations in Berlin, so all sorts of themes can be represented in this microcosm (Marenbach, 2005).

The daily structure of programming as well as actual broadcasts that range from an overview of developments among refugees in Berlin to discussions about the EU budget and dual citizenship reflect this multilayered cosmopolitan strategy. In a more detailed description of RM’s hybrid programming, Vertovec argues that RM succeeds in communicating a variety of meanings of cosmopolitanism; cosmopolitanism as a socio-cultural condition (programs on Berlin implicated in the globalisation processes), as philosophy or ideology (spectrum of topics around universal values), and as a political project of transnational institutions (with references and support for political frameworks such as the EU) (Vertovec, 2000). What is of particular interest to me is how this philosophy of cosmopolitanism or ‘intercultural service’ is played out around languages. Structurally, the multilingual fabric of the city is embraced within language slots, starting late afternoon after the programming in German and leading well into the night with the radio shows in other languages (for example, Portuguese, Finnish, French, and Spanish). The current allocation of most languages represents the legacy of past decisions reached in consultations with Berlin Foreign Office.

Multikulti inherited ARD 42 programs established in the 1960s, being half-hour programs hidden amongst other programming in the evening schedule. These SFB’s 43 services started

42 ARD is a joint organization of Germany's regional public-service broadcasters. It includes amongst others Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) (Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting), which Radio Multikulti is a part of, and Deutsche Welle. ARD operates a national television network, Das Erste ("The First"), produces a digital package of three free-to-air channels (EinsFestival, EinsPlus and EinsExtra) and participates in the production of cable/satellite channels Phoenix (events, news, and documentaries), KI.KA (children's programmes), 3Sat (cultural/traditional programming), and ARTE.

145

for Yugoslav ‘guestworkers’ 40 years ago and where originally broadcast in Serbo-Croat. Now, reflecting new political realities, separate programs for Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Bosnians, and Macedonians are produced. In brief, the current language offer is based upon considerations about the quantitative and socio-cultural requirements of respective groups. Languages of the large migrant communities living in Berlin are featured (for example, Polish, Turkish, Arab, Kurdish). There are also European languages of neighbouring countries (for example, Russian), as well as languages of so-called high-need migrant groups, provided for reasons of their poor integration and unavailability of other media outlets in their languages (e.g. Farsi, Vietnamese). The language provision is constantly under revision with pressure to account for social changes and shifting demands. For example, there are now more requests for extended content for the growing Portuguese and Chinese communities, although the available radio times remain the same. These pressures, however recognised, are assertively kept at bay by the RM managerial staff:

We are an intercultural wave (‘interkulturelle Welle’) and not a station that produces isolated language material. We cannot let/afford that the core programming component – which is in German – gets squeezed even further in favour of particular interests. Contrary, it is crucial to strengthen people’s interests in German-language program and not merely in their own language space (Marenbach, 2005).

This attempt to navigate through inter-linguistic terrain rather than to service individual language is noteworthy. The insistence on an intercultural mandate is visible in strategic decisions to retain broadcast hours in German; in plans for digitalisation that could enable a parallel streaming of non-German languages rather than place them one after another; and also in bilingual experiments on the RM website that its management would be keen to enhance (for example, coexistent texts in two languages, play with ‘visible translation’, German-Bosnian, German-Arabic). Interestingly, these sorts of bilingual experiments are seen as of doubtful use to on-air production in the light of already low audience figures. The official low ratings that RM generates should be however contextualised. While the figure is

43 Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) was the public radio and television service for West Berlin from 1 June 1954 until 30 April 2003, and part of the ARD. In 2003 it merged with Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg (ORB) (East German Broadcasting - Brandenburg) to establish Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.

146

low 44 , it still represents a higher audience reach than many other radio stations, in particular pubic radio, in a city serviced by around 36 radio stations. Also, audience measurement methods are strongly criticised for over-representing German-speakers and under-representing foreigners. The station’s informal surveys reflecting close co-operation between RM journalists and serviced ethnic communities, indicate a huge audience share amongst ethnic groups (Vertovec, 2000). The ideal scenario envisioned by the chief editor would be an additional digital frequency so that the language offering does not need to be compromised in favour of music that is much more data-intensive than spoken word material. Indeed, parallel streaming could well elicit more attractive language programming opportunities and tap into the listening habits of target migrant groups that are similar to the programming preferences of the Germans, that is for morning and late afternoon radio consumption. As it stands now, Kurds, Poles, and Arabs are relegated to listening between 17.00 and 20.00, or otherwise the Internet − of itself a great benefit.

As in the case of international broadcasters, the diverse backgrounds of RM staff are branded as the station’s cultural capital that translates into actual broadcasting practice and holds a great potential for engaging content of relevance to a globalised, intercultural world. However, the station presently faces tangible linguistic and qualification limits. Marenbach admitted that the German language proficiency of the radio staff is not good enough to present German programs. Migrants born in Germany, on the other hand, lack required journalistic training, and as a result RM journalists for respective language groups need to be imported from the home countries! The third generation of migrants from large consolidated communities speak neither good German nor the community language. Marenbach argues:

This is a real shame. This generation is potentially best-equipped for the globalised world, because in principle they live in the situation of the interculturality and bilingualism, while a typical German has to strive troublesomely to learn languages. So I believe the politicians as well as the migrants have missed a great opportunity (Marenbach, 2005).

44 For example, one survey showed that MK held only about 0.7 per cent audience share for Berlin (Vertovec, 2000: 21). This roughly 1 per cent audience share was confirmed in my interview with the MK Editor-in-Chief, Illona Marenbach, in December 2005.

147

As with other international broadcasters, RM strongly desires an improved co-operation between language groups, and also better opportunities for migrants to access professional media training and to increase their chances of employment in German media.

From multilingualism to a universal language of music Music is in fact the prime ingredient of Multikulti’s hybrid mix, the enticing element that makes inter-linguistic encounters possible. However, Maranbach also in this case voiced reservations contingent on the radio’s experience over years. Too much diversity in the music offer can be de facto off-putting and alienating for listeners.

After a stage of ambitious music offer, a mix of pop, folklore, classic, world music, we learned that it’s too much for an average listener…Our listeners are normal listeners who want to listen to a radio in the first place as an accompaniment to a daily life. They want to be addressed, they want to receive info, listen to interviews; in general listen to a very service-orientated radio plus of course music. And when the music is the primary factor that makes them tune it to 97,3 we have to try to hail them through music. However, the music we used to offer was too demanding. We had to narrow down the diversity of music offered as well as to cut down the length of the spoken contributions. The comments that we were receiving were ‘good that you are there for us, but to listen to you all day through is ‘zu anstrengend’ (that is ‘too demanding’) (Marenbach, 2005).

4.5 BARCELONA TELEVISIÒ

‘Informatius en Llengües Estrangeres’: subtitling ethnic communities news Yet another model of multilingual service for linguistic heterogeneous urban communities is a Barcelona-based public television station. Established six years ago on limited budgetary resources and as an independent initiative of the Barcelona Televisió (TVB), it currently provides information services to Barcelona ethnic communities in 20 languages and different dialects. Each language included in a fortnightly schedule (marked as ‘semana A’ and

148

‘semana B’, that is, ‘week A’ and week B’) is broadcast in a half-hour timeslot either on Saturday or Sunday.

Informatius en Ilengües Estrangeres, 45 as the program is called in Catalan, originated from the program about culture in Barcelona, Agenta . This structural inheritance results in some programming aberrances, such as the absence of information services for the South Americans despite the large numbers of immigrants from South America. The old Agenta did not include South American culture news, presumably assuming Spanish-speaking immigrants’ natural language and cultural proximity to the host country.

Informatius operates on a volunteer basis, attracting collaborators from and for the ethnic communities. It largely resembles the early days of SBS radio and community media’s working arrangements, and their social rationale in general; a provision of information in migrant languages and contribution to the maintenance of their cultural identities. However, contrary to the language allocation on SBS radio, which broadly follows a census data regarding the size as well as English-language competence of a given language community, the information programs are driven by direct demand or initiative from migrant groups. BTV, however, evaluates the relevance of a pitching institution, its representativeness of a community, and a general importance of a community within Barcelona’s social fabric. Still, even a small, but a reasonably active language community could secure its place within the Informatius schedule. Reverse is equally true as well: Polish and Romanian, two relatively significant migrant languages in Barcelona, were added in 2006 only. A similar situation exists with English being spoken by a large number of English-native and English as second- language speakers in that city. Given the absence of explicit interest from any cultural organisation, and an abundance of mainstream media outlets in English, English does not feature in BTV local news.

With PSB resources stretched and availability of time schedules exhausted, new additions are highly unlikely in the near future under the current scheme of things. Financial limitations also mean that co-operation between the BTV and respective cultural centres and institutes are

45 ‘Foreign Language News’ in English.

149

much valued and cultivated. Often those organisations provide television talent, including news presenters, translators, and program content. From its own part, the BTV guarantees technical and translatory support and monitoring, that is, corrections are done by the BTV program producers and professional linguists.

Amanda Basa, the executive producer of Informatius , commented on the centrality of volunteers for the project:

The most common profile of the volunteers who work with us is that of mediadores sociales (social/cultural mediators). These are people already involved in the life of the community, and are highly motivated to help out; they are not journalists, so we [need] to provide them with technical support, to record stuff…[They are] always accompanied with a camera person from the BTV. They operate as mediators, and are seen as keys to open the doors to a certain community group, especially through the languages they speak; otherwise we could not reach out to all the language communities we work with. They also help us get feedback from [their] communities. After many years of working with us, it is in the end a personal investment for them, as they learn to become journalists (Bassa, 2006).

BTV’s information programs generally include a mixture of local news from Barcelona and Catalunia, especially those related to integration services (such as health, education, work, and so on) and some advertising for local, migrant events as well as businesses (for example, a newly opened Russian deli in the Barcelona centre district, Las Ramblas). Initially broadcast in original languages only, some of them are now accompanied by Catalan subtitles 46 , prepared by volunteers from Barcelona-based UNESCO group 47 and financed by the Catalan Government, Politica Linguistica de la Generalitat, as a direct response to interests from the mainstream Barcelona ‘indigenous’ community. 48 This interesting model of news media translation practice is argued to have a key objective to:

46 Subtitling trials proceeded for Chinese and Arabic, the two biggest ethnic communities in Barcelona, with plans to subtitle half the programs by September 2006. 47 Amigos del UNESCO de Barcelona (that is, Friends of UNESCO, Barcelona). 48 El Pais.es, Barcelona Televisio subtitulara en catalan sus informativos en lenguas extranjeras , www.elpais.es/articulo/elpepiautcat/2005052elpcat_19/Tes/cataluna/Barcelona (accessed February 12, 2006).

150

…facilitate a mutual getting-to-know-you amongst communities that live in the city, and to support bringing them closer together. 49

With the profile of immigration [in Barcelona] changing, and with many migrant groups having consolidated, there is no need for those groups to receive all the information about the culture they inhabit and services available in their languages. Amanda Bassa elaborated on a new social dynamic that has prompted the inclusion of subtitling:

Now people start to feel curious about their new neighbours. Until now we proceeded with uni-directional communication which resulted in producing some cultural and social closure. Now subtitles enable an opening of communities to the rest of Barcelona, and a facilitation of intercultural exchanges, and [possibly also] amongst ethnic communities. People are also interested in learning languages that they might find useful in the most immediate environment. There simply are no many spaces like this elsewhere (Bassa, 2006).

This is a familiar integration pattern, noted by the RM editor-in-chief, Ilona Marenbach, in the previous section, and observable also in Australia (see Chapter Five and Six). As with RM, the BTV social mission relies in contributing through local content to the integration processes within a much localised space of the metropolitan Barcelona. This has arguably been achieved successfully, with up to 80 per cent of migrants claiming to watch it on a regular basis (Bassa, 2006).

Crucially, Amanda Bassa spoke eloquently about communication in general, in a fashion that closely relates to Yuri Lotman’s ideas on the need for dialogue, the ‘dialogic situation, [which] precedes both real dialogue and even the existence of a language in which to conduct it’ (Lotman, 1990: 143-4):

The most interesting aspect to working [for Informatius ] is to realise how communication happens beyond language. We have a very ample spectrum of linguistic

49 Info Idiomas home page, www.barcelonatv.com/programacio/detail.php (accessed, March 3, 2006).

151

competence [in Barcelona]: from Swedes who speak a perfect Catalan to people who barely speak it. Yet, if you want to communicate with someone and be understood, you will communicate and be understood [despite not sharing the same linguistic code], especially through doing other things together (Bassa, 2006).

4.6 CONCLUSIONS

This chapter maps out different approaches to translation in the broadcast media context. As my fieldwork revealed, there are sites of mediated interlingual communication within the European mediascape. The international multilingual broadcasters such as BBC WS, DW, and RN, for example, provide such contact zones for diverse languages, now particularly keenly developed in the online and multi-media environment. They manifest commitment and interest in European affairs and a ‘European perspective’; though they are mostly broadcasting outside Europe. The bi-national public broadcaster ARTE constitutes an interesting model of a cultural service with an international outlook and translation practices, especially in the light of its gradual increase in audience-reach in both France and Germany, compared to a generally decreasing popularity of European PSB. However, despite its expanded pan-European orientation noted in the broadcaster’s editorial statements and arguably programming, ARTE continues to cater predominantly to French and German audiences.

The metropolitan public broadcasters such as Multikulti Radio Berlin and Barcelona Televisió broadcast in the tradition of a reformist multicultural, multilingual service for the integration purposes in their respective migrant societies. Although some experimentation into translation has been initiated (for example, world music and some bilingual content on the RM home page; or Catalan subtitling of ethnic news on BTV), their social impact is arguably limited, with their broadcasts confined to small geographical areas, or, as in the case of BTV, allocated unattractive timeslots.

In the next chapter I explore another approach to translation in the media context of great relevance to the ‘European’ project. The evoked model is that of the national public

152

broadcaster, SBS, mandated with social charter to service multilingual and multicultural Australia.

153

5 SBS’S TRANSLATION PRACTICES: BETWEEN POLICY AND PRIVATE WHIM

If you are not offered the possibility of understanding another language or culture, there will be no awareness of what you are missing. What you do not know, in short, won’t influence you (Cronin, 2003: 134).

If we [SBS] could get a film from Galicia, but in Castillano I would still call it Galician rather than Spanish. I started to break up Spain into its constituencies whenever talking about culture, so we have more cultures (Webb, 2006).

5.1 INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I discuss SBS TV content, and in this context the relationship between multilingual and English-language programming. Whenever two different languages are involved, translation is necessarily called upon. In the broadcasting environment, a number of translation mechanisms such as dubbing, voice-over, subtitling, or a mixture of them are used. SBS also broadcasts untranslated news shows. Here, SBS’s extensive and philosophically motivated practice of translation, whether in the use of subtitles or importing foreign programming, is evaluated drawing on Yuri Lotman’s theory of translation. In this context, the idea of ‘translation’ is stretched from merely linguistic to the broader cultural level. A strand that runs through the whole chapter is that of an uneasy politics of multilingualism at the heart of a public service broadcasting entrusted with multicultural and multilingual brief. Specifically, this involves weighing and juggling the question of how to maintain the special interest of ethnic, multilingual constituencies while appealing to monolingual Australian audiences at the same time. How does SBS broker this tension while doing ‘quality’ television? How important is this tension to the channel? It is argued that SBS’s uniqueness lies in representing this dialectical relation, which means translation. To this end, commentaries of the players involved such as executive programmers, policy advisers, and decision-makers are presented.

154

The focus of this chapter is on the particular broadcasting practices of SBS TV and its televisual operations in relation to its multilingual charter and mediation of Australia’s languages. Unavoidably, discussion of concrete decisions and programming changes that have occurred over years takes account of politics of language and different constituencies involved in the process. In this respect, the analysis follows Hawkins and Ang’s ‘mutuality and translation’ approach to the study of SBS’s history with attention given to ‘the actual ways in which the logics and structures of radio and then television mediated multiculturalism, gave [SBS] a distinctly media modality’ rather than policy determinism and derivation (Hawkins and Ang, 2006: 1). Recognising research into SBS’s contribution to issues of access and politics of representation (Lawe Davies) and Australia’s multiculturalism (for example, Smaill, 2002), I take interest in one fragment of the SBS world – its televisual translation practices, interpreted from Lotman’s semiotic perspective. First however I will describe SBS’s policy context.

5.2 SPECIAL BROADCASTING SERVICE

When the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) made a start in the late 70s, assuming responsibility for the ethnic radio 2EA and 3EA in Sydney and Melbourne, 1.5 million migrants or 60 per cent of all post-war settlers were non-British. In 1947 only 9.8 per cent of the population was non-Australian born with the figure increasing to 21 per cent and 39 per cent who were born overseas or had one parent born overseas by 1976. Now over 200 languages are used in Australia, with more than two million Australians using language other than English on a daily basis (Besemeres and Wierzbicka, 2007).

The SBS-TV signal is now available throughout Australia. SBS’s analogue signal reaches 95 per cent of all Australians, while its digital service, which began in 2001, reaches an estimated 80 per cent of Australians. 50 SBS transmits in more than 60 languages and claims to reach 7.5 million viewers per week, with more than half of the programming in languages other than English (SBS, 2006a). It features foreign and innovative local material drawn from international and local sources to ‘communicate Australia’s living diversity’ and show that

50 SBS home page, www.sbs.com.au (accessed March 30, 2007).

155

‘The World is an Amazing Place’. SBS Radio broadcasts in 68 languages, delivering reportage of local, national and international news, and coverage of cultural, arts, music and sporting events within specific language communities across Australia. SBS Radio and SBS TV, and more recently SBS Independent (SBSi) and its new media department, play their complementary role in executing the responsibilities of a multilingual and multicultural broadcaster in the service of broader social and multicultural policy in Australia.

SBS is a niche broadcaster. Compared to its commercial counterparts, its annual ratings are low, around 4 per cent (OzTam, 2006). However, SBS has 5.44 million regular viewers in the five state capital cities and 2.71 in regional areas (SBS, 2006a: 14). It enjoys a large casual viewing audience (for example, 8.8 million, that is 63 per cent population, tuned in for the coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2006). As noted in the Introduction, its symbolic significance is furthermore not to be underestimated. In a Newspoll survey 2006, almost 90 per cent of Australians surveyed agreed that SBS plays an important role in today’s culturally diverse society, with over 90 per cent of respondents believing that it provides a valuable alternative to commercial stations. 51

The history and political rationale for the establishment of ‘ethnic services’ and later ‘multicultural’ SBS are well-documented (O'Regan, 1993; Ozolins, 1993; Lawe Davis, 1998, 2002). In brief, these accounts point to an epochal shift from great suspicion and resistance to linguistic diversity under the policy rubric of assimilation, to the acceptance and even encouragement of language maintenance in line with the policy of multiculturalism. These different policy ideologies and social attitudes in the area of broadcasting are marked by the progression from strict control over number of hours broadcast in Languages Other Than English (LOTE) to the establishment of ethnic radio services and SBS with its ‘ethnic television’. Indeed, until the 1970s Australian broadcasting regulation reflected a deep suspicion of non-English speakers. It prescribed a 2.5 per cent quota of total programming in LOTE, minimal amounts of non-English advertising, mandatory accompanying translation of the LOTE content, returned and made available for inspection for up to three months after broadcast. This is not to argue that tensions around languages have disappeared

51 SBS home page, media release, www.sbs.com.au (accessed July 31, 2006).

156

unconditionally from the Australian public sphere. In fact, they still exist, and get vocalised in an uneasy climate of more pervasive than ever forces of migration, globalisation and the ‘war on terror’. The current SBS manager of policy and research, Georgie McClean (2006), admits that people still contact the broadcaster, saying that it is divisive to have different languages and everything should be in English. To the point, after 1978 broadcasting was at the centre of volatile political debates, but as Ozolins observes in his monograph on language policy in Australia, the issue that ‘LOTEs could and should be broadcast became very generally accepted and non-controversial’. Instead, public debate was dominated by considerations about ‘organisational forms, political content, efficacy and efficiency’ (Ozolins, 1993: 164).

Translation of policy A number of policy documents prepared in the late 1970s sketch the legislative environment that was to influence but not over-determine the direction of SBS television as a specific communication medium. The 1970s constituted a period of a review of attitudes towards migrants in Australia. As the earlier politics of assimilation became untenable in the 1960s and 1970s, the Malcolm Fraser government commissioned Migrant Services and Programs: Report of the Review of Post-Arrival Programs and Services for Migrants (1978), chaired by Frank Galbally. Key recommendations of the report focussed on ways of helping migrants settle into Australian life, maintaining their cultures, and ensuring they had the same rights and access to services as other Australians. These included education, translation services, implementation of ethnic and community help agencies, and creating ethnic media. The policy interest in providing ethnic media – like with other services – was driven by the principle of ‘equity of access and provision’, and the practical need to provide essential information about government services (for example, Medicare system, elections, and so on) to newly arrived migrants with insufficient English language skills.

Significantly, however, the report inaugurated the development of multicultural policy in Australia. It emphasised the migrants’ right to maintain their cultural and ethnic identity, stressed the value of LOTE for all Australians, adding that Australia’s cultural diversity must be reflected in education designed to foster intercultural and inter-racial understanding (Galbally, 1978). At the time, only the foreign language press, which had existed for many years, was well-read by non-English speaking Australians. The question of ‘intercultural’

157

communication and understanding had to be moved beyond the existing infrastructure (radio, press), with television becoming an accepted option. Indeed, the Galbally Report (1978) foreshadowed the development of ethnic television along with the establishment of an Institute of Multicultural Affairs.

The prospect of multicultural television was explored in more detail in the Interim Report of Public Consultations on the Establishment of an Ethnic Television Service (1979). The First Report of Ethnic television Review Panel (ETRP) in charge of the study was chaired again by Frank Galbally (1979). The Panel stated that ethnic television would be valuable to all Australians by promoting tolerance and appreciation of the diverse, multicultural nature of our society. It also set out broad objectives of ethnic television with reference to politics of representation and access (that is, to reflect the right of ethnic communities to broadcasts in their own languages) and a public service model of provision (that is, to be an educational and informational service for all Australians and to entertain the public through a wide diversity of programming). Significantly for the subsequent discussion on subtitling, there was no intention to ‘overdub’ into English. There were ideas about providing an ‘alternative English Soundtrack’ on an additional sound channel, but never a ‘replacement’ of the original language with English:

English is the common language in Australia and the use of English in sub-titles or in spoken form on a particular soundtrack could enable most viewers to enjoy. Technically it is possible to achieve a multilingual service using sub-titles, a second sound-channel or a combination of both. In the future it may be possible to use more than two sound channels (Ethnic Television Review Panel, 1979).

The Third Report published a year later in 1980 substituted reference to ‘ethnic television’ with ‘multicultural/multilingual services’, outlining their particular features as provision of a large proportion of LOTE programming, obtained from overseas sources, locally produced programs, especially those reflecting Australia’s multiculturalism, news and current affairs, and documentaries of interest to the general public. Most significantly, the television service to emerge was to be ‘multicultural’ rather than ‘ethnic’, with programs chosen for general quality and appeal rather than their ability to target particular ethnic and linguistic

158

communities. SBS television was to play a different function to that of ethnic radio services, which had important ramifications for languages (Ozolins, 1993: 166-9). This shift meant a clear division between ethnic radio (later defined by SBS also as ‘multicultural’) with its broadcasts predominantly in LOTEs, for speakers of those languages, and a multicultural television service with considerable English-language programming and subtitling for LOTE products. The Third Report was also a little more articulate about the importance of actually reflecting cultural diversity rather than ‘masking’ it with dubbing (Dabboussy, 2006).

High-quality entertainment, made accessible through English sub-titling for a general audience and transmitted in peak viewing periods, will both reflect cultural diversity and have a wide appeal. In this context, it should be emphasised that programs that are entertaining are essential to the effective pursuit of multicultural goals. Programs that indirectly reveal cultural characteristics within a general context of entertainment will most effectively involve the audience and assist in promoting intercultural awareness and understanding (Third Report of the Ethnic Television Review Panel, 1980).

Five years after the start of SBS television in Melbourne and Sydney, the Connor Report (1985) into the Australian Broadcasting Service restated the value of LOTE on ethnic radio, accepting ‘The Language Balance’ for multicultural television. This occurred against contrasting SBS proposal to shift its radio services to a multicultural programming strategy by increasing English programming on SBS radio stations, and encouraging greater networking of local ethnic content through community radio sector. As a result, a clear differentiation was made between SBS ethnic radio and multicultural television. The report argued for the role of the latter as motivated by the:

Importance of Anglo-Australians simply being exposed to television programs in languages other than English cannot be underestimated…Hearing other languages spoken helps Australians overcome their isolation from the rest of the world (Connor Report Committee of Review of the Special Broadcasting Service, 1985).

Since around 53 per cent of all programs were already in English, a television service was less bound by language considerations. The representativeness of languages in the communities

159

across Australia was not to be the sole factor in broadcast language allocation, recognising challenges of accessing overseas material. In line with the ‘overall policy emphasis on multiculturalism’, the increase of locally produced programs and 50 per cent of English- language programming in prime time was additionally expected (Ozolins, 1993: 172-3). As Ozolins (1993: 173) admits, ‘the report’s strong support for the importance of languages for ethnic communities retreated in the face of the ideology of multiculturalism’. It is noteworthy that this direction away from ‘ethnic’ – especially non-English speaking – towards ‘multicultural’ broadcasting increasingly in English has generated a lot of criticism up to date. Arguments against ‘mainstreaming’ have been raised by those concerned with reduction of those LOTE services as a result of cost-cutting and political expediencies of the moment, rather than perceiving them as a legitimate way of transcending specific migrant or ethnic interests (Jakubowicz, 1987).

In 1991 SBS was established as a corporation under the Special Broadcasting Service Act, up to that date the broadcaster was incorporated under general broadcasting legislation. The SBS Act contains the SBS charter which stipulates that:

The principal function of SBS is to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia's multicultural society (SBS, 2006a).

SBS is a hybrid public/commercial service with an ‘arm’s length’ relationship to the state. As such it is supposed to conform to the statutory remit while maintaining a degree of formal independence. This situatedness within the field of political relations and practices unavoidably informs SBS operations. For example, for the last decade of the conservative Howard government there has been a marked retreat from the policy of multiculturalism resulting in financial cuts and government appointments made to the SBS Board. Rod Webb, the former SBS programmer, is indignant about the fate of the SBS in the period of the conservative Howard government:

The story of SBS over last 3-5 years has been of marginalising LOTE, pushing it to the margins. [It is] degradation of multilingualism due to political pressures, right-wing

160

Howard government, the board [that] hates SBS, Shaun Brown as the Head of SBS television… when he arrived to SBS he admitted he had only seen one subtitled documentary in the whole of his life! (Webb, 2006)

However, the current political milieu clearly influences but does not tell the whole story about how SBS professionals translate their understanding of the SBS mission into actual televisual practice. In fact, SBS has been also argued to provide a countervailing force to the current neo-liberalism. From the multi-dimensional Foucauldian approach to policy, SBS is best understood as both mediated and mediating, a product and producer of the key conditions set in place by Australia’s multicultural policy (albeit also constantly contested and negotiated) as well as an extension to the very possibilities of multiculturalism (Hawkins and Ang, 2006). The practices of SBS management and staff have resulted from a complex interplay of factors and influences, thus rendering incomplete any theoretical approaches that view SBS history in binary terms as either the top-down exercise of governmental power or romanticised expression of ethnic self empowerment.

This constant negotiation can be illustrated well on the examples that centre on language representation. Apart from the multilingual charter, there is not much in the way of SBS policy in relation to a language or translation regime. The Codes of Practice and editorial guidelines are the only policy documents used in-house. Their interpretation is guided by whoever is manager at the time. An in-house document, Ethnic Broadcasting in Australia (1979) outlines the responsibilities of public service broadcasting and upholds that:

The commitment of the Special Broadcasting Service cannot be listed in every detail. Such an approach would lead to frustration and could only result in a vast accumulation of bureaucratic regulations. The SBS does not wish to stifle initiative by the issue of directives designed to accommodate every aspect of our broadcasting effort beyond the minimal needs of accountability under the Act. Even if it was desirable, the infinite variety of circumstances surrounding any given program makes it impossible to subject the producer and/or editor to rigidly prescribed rules. It is only by the conscious and willing acceptance of certain attitudes, responsibilities and philosophical principles that

161

all associated with the SBS shall be able to provide the service entrusted to the Service and which the SBS believes to be essential (SBS, 2000: 44).

In the area of news, with a possible extension to other domains, the document explains:

Between enunciated SBS policy and any specific broadcasting problem there is an area that allows a degree of free choice. It could be described as the “gap between declared policy and private whim” – the liberty to do that which should be done creatively to satisfy audience needs and that of the broadcaster – although the broadcaster is not compelled to do it. It is an area which includes duty but extends beyond it; it covers all cases of fair dealing where there is no one to make broadcasters want to do it but themselves (SBS, 2000: 45).

This ‘gap between declared policy and private whim’ is the line I want to pursue. During my research I had a chance to interview former SBS programmer, Rod Webb, and the current network programmer, Jane Roscoe. Their anecdotes on the editorial judgments and practical programming choices are illustrative of the fluidity of translation at the heart of SBS programming and practices of scheduling. They also point to the evolution of televisual practice over time and the impact of translation, policy, strategy, research, and finances on creative outputs, outputs that can arouse awareness and curiosity in ‘foreignness’ (see also Hawkins and Ang, 2006).

A language quota that prescribed 50 per cent of material to be broadcast in LOTE had been included in early SBS strategy papers and policies, even before the proper ‘codes’ were produced. Despite the strict rules in place, programmers and producers would exercise certain personal latitude and indeed creative transgression was possible. Initially, SBS television was modelled on the predecessor SBS Radio and tried to allocate language air-time according to census data (that is, to be representative of the size of the communities in Australia and the number of language speakers). Such a strategy was abandoned in the later 1980s/early 1990s as too simplistic and unworkable for the network servicing ‘all Australians’. Quality cultural criteria rather than linguistic measures were applied instead. In his time as SBS programmer, Rod Webb pushed the agenda against what he derides as ‘LOTE fundamentalism’.

162

Recounting his experience at SBS he noted that the balance between English and LOTE was carefully monitored by Sir Nicholas Shehadie, who would only intervene in Webb’s programming decisions if he thought there was an inadequate representation of LOTE. This was taken as an explicit demonstration of SBS loyalty to its ‘deal with communities’ (Webb, 2006). A strong advocate of programming in LOTE, Webb believes however:

50 per cent LOTE does not need to be all in prime time; there is no point of being artificial about [language quota]: if we want to show a documentary about Iraq, better docos are in English and not in Arabic. Language is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The SBS subtitling philosophy meant that we could show any programming from the world. It was not important that it’s French or Italian, it was important that we can subtitle it, and that it is of relevance to communities in Australia. This is the main point (Webb, 2006).

Webb gives concrete examples of television products, which are hard to classify under a linguistic rubric:

For example, a documentary on [Polish general Władysław] Anders 52 was shown [on SBS] but Poles did not like it because Polish was not spoken; yet it is stories that are more important. According to a ‘fundamentalist quota’, this program would be classified as English but in fact it was about Polish and New Zealand cultures. It’s equally odd to classify sports programs as English, even though Brazil is playing Argentina. I had complained about it and we’d overcome this crude quota. This was taken up by the current board but − in my view − they have taken it too far (Webb, 2006).

The language quota was taken out in the 2001 codes review but ‘even the internal documents are quite vague [as to why]’ (Dabboussy, 2006). The official explanation refers to a written quota being ‘limiting and inflexible, serving no purpose on television, especially as radio was providing the kind of language maintenance services that many first generation migrants

52 Władysław Anders was a General in the Polish Army known for his capture of Monte Cassino in II WW and later in life a prominent politician in the Polish Government in Exile in London and inspector-general of the Polish forces-in-exile.

163

desired’ (Dabboussy, 2006). But the commitment to multilingual practice arguably has not changed. McClean notes, ‘no one is exactly counting but in practice we are still around 50per cent’ (McClean, 2006), whilst Roscoe elaborates:

There is lot of pressure for us to change this from both sides – communities that want more material in their languages, on the other hand, the pressure to grow SBS is to increase English-language program. It’s the conflict we deal with on a day to day basis, but the bottom line is to achieve at least 50 per cent in LOTE, so in terms of my job looking at the schedule on a week by week and day to day basis, to make sure that we do have a range of languages. If we have a run of English documentaries we need to think…hang on, we need LOTE (Roscoe, 2006).

Maintaining this balance across the schedule as a whole is quite typical in a programmers’ job. But the value of a specific place within a schedule is not to be underestimated. The meaning accredited to a particular program comes out of the syntactic allocation within a schedule. In its current shape, the ‘unregulated yet practiced’ 50-50 per cent quota for LOTE is largely served by World Watch , a morning window for untranslated, unsubtitled news bulletins from international news sources. This cluster of programs corresponds to SBS Radio’s logic of intra-cultural communication that allows minority to speak to minority (or to itself), potentially sectioning or ‘ghettoising’ audiences along linguistic lines. An intercultural communication approach occurs when ‘minority speaks to majority and to other minorities (Born, 2004: 516), and is what SBS TV’s main focus is on. World Watch , initially broadcast without subtitles for financial reasons, now points to a spectrum of transnational speech, particular uses of translation and a common language on SBS TV. Its very presence within the schedule fends off potential criticisms of SBS’s ‘going English-only’ but on a more philosophical level demonstrates SBS’s capacity to disrupt the myth of a common language as a prerequisite for national cohesion (Hawkins, 1996). Further, subtitled feature films sourced from around the world, which became a prime ingredient and SBS’s trademark in the past, have been reduced in number and/or moved to later timeslots. It is an interesting re- arrangement. According to the former SBS programmer, Rod Webb, movies are the most important artistic endeavour in many countries and as such offer the most effective means of

164

representing ‘the many cultures [and languages] of the world and Australia’ in a familiar, non- threatening form (Webb, 1997).

The shift towards a higher proportion of English language in prime time reported to me is apparent in my content analysis. This analysis highlights LOTE content on SBS TV over a four weekly period between the 2 nd and 29 th of April 2007, showing that English is by far the dominant language, and that foreign-language movies have indeed been allocated late time within the SBS schedule (see Table 5:1 – 5:4).

165

J J E P E D D RU RU = T (Brazil) (Brazil) (US) (US) F / A / E, / F ARR A / after 11.30 11.30 after Movie Focus Movie the to Pathway Clouds Movie Wort StJohn’s (Japan) XY Movie No.1 Rule (Denmark) Shorts – SOS Screen on / (Switzerland / Palastine Australia) Australia)

= Russian, = Russian, E E E E E (US) (US) RU 11 11 (Germany) (Germany) 10.30 10.30 Showcase Movie Movie Showcase II Paul Pope John (UK) (UK) The UEFA League Champions Autopsy-Life & Death Death & Autopsy-Life = Rajasthani, (Russia) (Russia)

E E E RA 10 10 Wilfred (SBSi) Docs Hot Diamond The White Movie Festival The Return The Mighty The Mighty Boosh (UK) XY Doc Taboo The Last - Gay Hollywood (Canada) Big Brother & the Holding Holding the & Brother Big Company VIP Pass Pass VIP

= Portugese, = P (SBS) News News News News News World World World World World World World World World World RocKwiz RocKwiz 9.30 9.30

E E E D D E, J E, A (SBSi) (SBSi) = Japanese, J (Australia) (Australia) (US) (US) 9 9 World Pizza Record

E (UK) (UK) (Denmakrk) (Denmakrk) (Jap an) an) (Jap Turkish (US) (US) (SBS) (SBS) = German, = G Showcase Documentary Documentary Showcase A Lion in the House House in the A Lion Iron Chef Iron Chef 8.30 8.30 Park South Edge Cutting War Your My Home The Eagle It As Happened Sugihara Dateline Dateline

E E E E E G G = French, (SBS) (SBS) F E, F, E,T F, (UK) (UK) (UK) (UK) 8 8 Australia Inside Bush Going Rex Inspector (Austria) Top Gear Top Gear = English, E

E E E (Canada) (Canada) (US) (US) (SBSi) (SBSi) (SBS) (SBS) (SBS) (SBS) (UK) (UK) = Danish, D 7.30 7.30 Mythbusters Black Coffee Podlove Podlove Insight Insight Lost Worlds Lost Worlds Treasures Boudica’s Cooking in the the in Cooking Zone- Danger China Hotline Hotline

= Arrente, News News News News News News News World World World World World World World World World World World World World World 6.30 6.30

ARR F E E E E

F, A F, RA = Arabic, 6 6 Village Global (Australia) Village Global (France) Village Global (France) Thalassa (France) Living Black Black Living (SBS) Global Village Village Global (Australia) Nerds FC Nerds (SBSi) A I T T F T E E S S N N U D H U R A U N O O M W W

Table 5:1 Prime Time - Midnight Schedule (6pm-11.30pm), Week Mon 2 - Sun 8 April 2007

166

I I F

GR GR SW (Italy) (Italy) E M/ DU, DU, G

(France) (France) = Turkish after 11.30 11.30 after Movie The Embalmer (Italy) Movie Delivery (Greece) Cult Movie Man Blind Shorts – SOS Screen on (Australia) T

E E E E 11 11 XY Movie Modemoselle E = Swedish, SW (UK) (UK) (Sweden) (Sweden) 10.30 10.30 The UEFA The UEFA League Champions (UK) (UK) Autopsy-Life & Death Death & Autopsy-Life

(Holland) (Holland) E E (Sweden) (Sweden) (SBSi) (SBSi) (UK) (UK) = Spanish, S Future Focus Future Focus The Planet 10 10 Wilfred Movie Festival Movie Twin Sisters VH1 Illustrated VH1 Illustrated (US) XY Doc XY Doc Machines Obscene Cream Cream A Song for Martin Song for A VIP Pass Pass VIP

E F, EF, = Mandarin, = News News News News News World World World World World World World World World World RocKwiz RocKwiz (SBS) 9.30 9.30 M

E E E E D D (UK) (UK) (SBSi) (SBSi) = Hindi, H E, G, F, SWF, E,G, (Sweden) (Sweden) 9 9 World Pizza Record E (UK) (UK) = Greek, (Denmark) (Denmark) (Japan) (Japan) (SBS) (SBS) (France) (France) GR Dateline Dateline Iron Chef Iron Chef 8.30 8.30 Park South Future Focus World the Save to Ways Five The Eagle Future Focus Expectations Great Future Focus The Cell

E E E E G G = German, E, G G (SBS) (SBS) E, F, E,T F, (UK) (UK) (Germany) (Germany) = French, 8 8 Australia Inside Bush Going Rex Inspector (Austria) Top Gear Top Gear F

E E E (Canada) (Canada) (US) (US) (SBSi) (SBSi) (SBSi) (SBSi) (SBS) (SBS) (SBS) (SBS) = English, = E 7.30 7.30 Mythbusters Black Coffee Future Focus yeas 50 in The World Podlove Podlove Insight Insight Future Focus Future Focus Eco House Challenge Hotline

= Dutch, = Dutch, News News News News News News News World World World World World World World World World World World World World World 6.30 6.30 DU

F E E E E

F, SF, F, H = Danish, D Living Black Black Living (SBS) 6 6 Village Global (Australia) Village Global (France) Village Global (France) Thalassa (France) Global Village Village Global (Australia) Nerds FC Nerds (SBSi) I T T F T E E S S N N U D H U R A U N O O M W W

Table 5:2 Prime Time - Midnight Schedule (6pm-11.30pm), Week Mon 9 - Sun 15 April 2007

167

S E G G M

(UK) (UK) E, F, E,MF, E / F / DU DU / E F / F, CF, E, RU E, RU F, CF, (Spain) (Spain) = Spanish after 11.30 11.30 after Movie Flashback (Germany) Future Focus Disasters Five to Waiting Happen Movie Warriors Island Kong) (Hong Shorts – SOS Screen on / (Canada / France Holland) S

F E E E 11 11 XY Movie 5.0 Faust (Canada) (Canada) = Russian, E, J RU 10.30 10.30 (UK) (UK) Cult Movie in Music The Saddest (Canada) the World Autopsy-Life & Death Death & Autopsy-Life (UK) (UK) (Canada) (Canada) (US) (US) E E (France) (France) (SBSi) (SBSi) = Mandarin, = M A Perfect Fake Perfect A Frank Zappa Frank Zappa 10 10 Wilfred Docs Hot Yamakasi Movie Festival Moon the Side of The Far XY Doc VH1 Illustrated VH1 Illustrated (US) Movie The Zookeeper VIP Pass Pass VIP

E News News News News News World World World World World World World World World World = Japanese, RocKwiz RocKwiz (SBS) 9.30 9.30 J

E E E E D D

(SBSi) (SBSi) E, F, E,MF, (France) (France) (UK) (UK) = German, = German, 9 9 World Pizza Record G E (UK) (UK) (Denmark) (Denmark) (UK) (UK) (Japan) (Japan) (SBS) (SBS) = French, F 8.30 8.30 Park South Future Focus Worlds Cyberspace New The Eagle Dateline Dateline As It Happened It As Happened Bodyguard Churchill’s Iron Chef Iron Chef Future Focus Future Focus Pandemic

E E E E G G E, G = English, = English, (SBS) (SBS) E E, F, E,SF, (UK) (UK) (Germany) (Germany) = Dutch, = Dutch, 8 8 Australia Inside Bush Going Rex Inspector (Austria) Top Gear Top Gear

DU E E E (Canada) (Canada) (US) (US) (SBSi) (SBSi) (SBS) (SBS) (SBS) (SBS) = Danish, D D 7.30 7.30 Hotline Future Focus Future Focus Eco House Challenge (SBSi) Podlove Podlove Mythbusters Mythbusters Black Coffee Future Focus yeas 50 in The World Insight Insight

News News News News News News News World World World World World World World World World World World World World World 6.30 6.30

E E E E E E

F, SF, = Canadian French, 6 6 Village Global (Australia) Thalassa (France) Global Village Village Global (Australia) Living Black Black Living (SBS) Global Village Village Global (France) Global Village Village Global (Australia) Nerds FC Nerds (SBSi) CF I T T F T E E S S N N U D H U R A U N O O M W W

Table 5:3 Prime Time - Midnight Schedule (6pm-11.30pm), Week Mon 16 - Sun 22 April 2007

168

F SP F, IF, GR GR E,F E, DAR = Thai = (Greece) (Greece) (France / / (France F, DU, TH F, DU, TH after 11.30 11.30 after Movie (Spain) Movie The King Movie Morning Monday (France) on Shorts – SOS Screen Thailand) / Holland KnotHome at (SBSi) Art of Dying Art Dying of (France) (France)

F E E E E

= Spanish, Spanish, = SP 11 11 XY Movie Lila Says Life Support (SBSi)

(UK) (UK) E E = Russian, Russian, = 10.30 10.30 The UEFA The UEFA Champions League Future Focus Future Focus More No Oil 2013: (Frande) Death Death Autopsy-Life & & Autopsy-Life (France) (France) (US) (US)

RU E E E (SBSi) (SBSi)

(SBSi) (SBSi) = Polish, Polish, = Festival Movie Festival Pool Swimming XY Doc XY Doc about Film A Secrets: Sexuality Teen (Canada) Future Focus Future Focus Impact Crude (US) 10 10 Wilfred VH1 Illustrated (US) Punk: Attitude Attitude Punk: VIP Pass Pass VIP POL E

= Irish, = Irish, News News News News News World World World World World World World World World World RocKwiz RocKwiz (SBS) 9.30 9.30 Showcase Movie Movie Showcase Travelling Light IR

E E E E E D D (SBSi) (SBSi) = Italian, = Italian, I (UK) (UK) E, F, POL E,POL F, 9 9 World Pizza Record

E = Greek, (US) (US) (UK) (UK) GR (Denmark) (Denmark) (Japan) (Japan) (SBS) (SBS) (Greece) (Greece) As It Happened It As Happened Bodyguard Churchill’s Future Focus Future Focus Impact Crude The Eagle The Eagle Future Focus ice the Next and Stream The Golf Iron Chef Iron Chef Dateline Dateline Age Age 8.30 8.30 Park South = German, German, =

G E E E E E G G E, G (SBS) (SBS) (UK) (UK) = French, F (Germany) (Germany) 8 8 Australia Inside Bush Going Rex Inspector (Austria) Top Gear Top Gear

E E E (Denmark) (Denmark) = English, English, = (US) (US) E (SBSi) (SBSi) (SBSi) (SBSi) (SBS) (SBS) (Australia) (Australia) = Dutch, = Dutch, Royal Family Royal Family Insight Insight Mythbusters Mythbusters Future Focus yeas 50 in The World Podlove Podlove Future Focus Future Focus Eco House Challenge Hotline 7.30 7.30 DU

News News News News News News News World World World World World World World World World World World World World World 6.30 6.30 = Dari, Dari, =

E E E E E DAR

F, RU F, E, E, F,IR = Danish, = Danish, 6 6 Village Global (Australia) Village Global (France) Thalassa (France) Global Village Village Global (Australia) Global Village Village Global (Australia) Nerds FC Nerds (SBSi) Living Black Black Living (SBS) D I T T F T E E S S N N U D H U R A U N O O M W W

Table 5:4 Prime Time - Midnight Schedule (6pm-11.30pm), Week Mon 23 - Sun 29 April 2007

169

‘A new emphasis of the charter’ (McClean, 2006) is justified by demographic changes. As a public service, SBS is entrusted with a responsibility to respond to the changing fabric of the Australian society. Particularly, the tension between the SBS’s institutional rhetorics of a ‘multilingual’ broadcaster, increasingly insufficient knowledge of LOTE by the second, third generation Australian audience, and the charter’s directive to promote and encourage multilingualism is acutely discernible in SBS Radio’s language programming policies. The English-language, multicultural youth radio program Alchemy is an important illustration of this new trajectory (discussed in Chapter Six). Another important issue for both SBS Radio and SBS television alike is the need ‘to extend its appeal and reach to younger audiences’ (Corporate Plan 1999-2002: 5), a difficulty which was widely expressed in my interviews with SBS Radio and SBS TV staff, as well as in the report Connecting Diversity most recently commissioned by SBS (Ang et al., 2006). The current SBS TV programming executive Jane Roscoe observed:

A big shock to me was finding out that in fact our core audience, the people who are most likely to come to our (smiles)…are men over 65. We do want more women, and we do want more young people; (grins) that core audience is very important to us, but we want to grow from there. So a big part of my job is constantly thinking: what am I doing with these young guys who come in on Monday night? It’s great that they come on Monday, but can I get them anywhere else in the schedule, so they become more regular viewers of SBS (in Huijser, 2006).

In this debate, Cunningham and Sinclair (2000: 25) argue that ‘SBS simply cannot successfully program to meet the diverse and incommensurable needs of Australia’s multifarious communities within the constraints of a single-channel service’. Although subtitling is available for television, the increasing number of second and third generation Australians from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds with English as their first language has also taken SBS TV in this direction. Georgie McClean, manager of policy and research, states (see also discussion above):

In light of the most recent changes [that is demographic changes] – our strategy now is to focus on ‘all Australians’, if we’re only reaching 4 per cent – 5 per cent we are not

170

reaching enough Australians, only preaching to the converted…there is been more emphasis on engaging more Australians (McClean, 2006).

This strategy to broaden SBS’s audience, as well as connect different audience groups, and to improve ratings, has been pursued since SBS’s 1994 advertising campaign The World is an Amazing Place . Increasingly, the focus on ‘all Australians’ has been translated in terms of practical decisions, among others 53 , into mostly English-language programs in prime time. This is claimed to be uncontroversial as:

There is always been understanding that it would be the case. Our news bulletins have always been in English so we could find a common point, so people could engage…A lot of the SBSi produced local content is either in some languages but not all of them, for example, a ‘Maternity Board’ series looked at broader cultural issues through a story and not just – look, we are a community. [It is about] finding a way for people to feel a sense of connection, to find cross-cultural points of engagement (McClean, 2006).

The search for ‘cross-cultural points of engagement’ is no doubt a mission of a public service broadcaster entrusted with the multicultural charter. The reference to ‘all Australians’ harks back – more generally – to a traditional universality of mixed programming offered by public service broadcasters to attract a mass audience. In her study of the BBC, Georgina Born demonstrates and cautions that obsession with increased ratings and ratings-led research extensively undertaken under Birt 54 can be perceived as a ‘cynical hook for popular legitimacy and, increasingly, for legitimacy within the BBC’ (Born, 2004: 274). She continues that according to this logic, the increased ratings are evidence of the broadcaster’s improved responsiveness to the viewers’ tastes, seen in turn as ‘the prime democratic duty of the public broadcaster’ (Born, 2004: 274).

53 This strategy has produced for example an increased emphasis on quality lifestyle programming such as The Iron Chef, Food Lovers and Wine Lovers Guide to Australia , and Fashionista . In most recent years, programming has focused on youth audiences, attempting to hail them via popular programs like South Park and Mythbusters . 54 John Birt served as the Director-General of the BBC from 1992 to 2000, having previously been deputy director-general from 1987.

171

This quest for improved ratings, while at the same time maintaining the traditional mission of PSB to provide quality and an alternative to commercial media programming, is illustrative of the broader structural changes and market pressures effecting public cultural organisations. Importantly, from its inception, SBS was not required to feature programming of universal appeal , something that is traditionally regarded as a core characteristic of public service broadcasting. The station was modelled more on the British Channel 4 (or BBC2) than the Reithian BBC. Because the Ethnic television Review Panel (1979) recommended that the SBS be generally accessible, many critics claimed SBS was best understood as a ‘narrowcaster’, catering for specific minorities, rather than as a broadcaster (Hartley, 1992). Indeed, as Nolan rightly observes, SBS history ‘can be viewed as a gradual transformation from ‘narrowcaster’ to ‘broadcaster’ (Nolan and Radywyl, 2004: 52).

The controversial appointment of Shaun Brown as Head of Television (now Managing Director), has triggered public concern that the broadcaster may completely succumb to economic logic, adopting a liberal rationalisation and value assessment through ratings, rather than embracing principles of multicultural, public station, committed to diversity in programming and cultural, not monetary, worth (Nolan and Radywyl, 2003). In fact, Brown proposed that ‘SBS would better fulfil its charter through increased revenue resulting from greater audience numbers’, instead of acknowledging SBS’s success in executing its role in its current organisational shape and with modest government funding (Nolan and Radywyl, 2003: 43). SBS TV has always been able to generate advertising revenue, unlike its SBS radio or ABC radio and TV. More policy accident than design, SBS has always exercised this ability to earn discretionary income with care and attention to the impact of advertising on the integrity of the schedule, and viewer tolerance. For example, commercial breaks usually occurred between. However, recently, SBS TV introduced advertisements slots within and opted for even more ‘popular’ programs. Critics argue that it has succumbed to the imperatives of political climate and resultant resource pressures.

In this context, the question of language representation lingers prominently. What seems to be implied in the statements of public service vision articulated by SBS senior staff is the assumption that cultural ‘connectivity’ and ‘popularity’ in general, perhaps particularly amongst young people, is contingent on a common language – English – in prime time. In this

172

thinking, however, the line between SBS’s imaginative uniqueness and its conforming to pressures are at risk of its mainstreaming being eventually transgressed. This extends critiques that view SBS’s current populist strategies as unjustifiable in public policy terms, for example, because they compromise SBS’s ‘obligation towards ethnic communities’ (Nolan and Radywyl, 2004; Lawe Davis, 1998). SBS TV’s publicised image might be unchangeably ‘see what the rest of the world has to offer’, but with multilingual output pushed to the margins of the schedule (see Table 5:1 – 5.4), the world picture might be narrowed. It is true, however, that to glance over its evening program guide for any week we find an interesting amalgamation of material.

In the week between the 2 nd and 8 th of April 2007 SBS program schedule included: Monday’s range of popular programs designed to appeal to younger audiences: a quirky popular science program Mythbusters (US) as well as an American animated television series South Park (US). In prime time on Mondays SBS has featured also Drawn Together (US), Shameless (UK) and Top Gear (UK). Tuesday is customarily a documentary night, included in the Cutting-Edge and Hot-Docs program slots, having ranged from the focus on climate change, War on Terror, and relationships.

Wednesday’s prime time opens up with the SBS national indigenous current affairs program Living Black . This was followed by Lonely Planet television series Going Bush , depicting the quintessential tourist experience of outback Indigenous Australia lived by the Aboriginal 2000 Sydney Olympic champion, Cathy Freeman, and a popular Aboriginal actor, Luke Carroll. Australia's longest-running international current affairs program, Dateline , features before the late edition of World News Australia at 10.00, after which it movie from Russia, Return , was shown. Thursday’s criminal drama, Austrian Inspector Rex, a flagship of SBS’s programming, is back to back with a Danish Emmy International Award winning television series The Eagle – A Crime Odyssey, with both having achieved significant success with Australian viewers. Mighty Bush , a British cult comedy was screened afterwards, followed by the review and analysis of all match-day games, UEFA Champions League Hour, hosted by popular SBS presenter and football expert, Les Murray, and a former Socceroo, Craig Foster. Friday showcases a range of documentaries, with that week’s program telling history of coffee in Black Coffee – the Irresistible Bean (Canada), followed by regular program slot XY

173

docs that broadly focuses on the exploration of the social topics related to sex (e.g. Gay Hollywood – The Last Taboo (Canada). Popular car show, Top Gear (UK), cooking show, Iron Chef (Japan) and music quiz show, Rockwiz , produced by SBS kick off on Saturday evening. Sunday features often quirky topics such as the one about an archaeological treasure hunt, Lost Worlds – Boudica’s Treasures (UK) and an American documentary about children with cancer, A Lion in the House .

As mentioned earlier, in the 1990s the service shed some of its ‘migrant’ appearance and took on programming that targets lucrative, ‘AB’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ Australians via a mix of entertaining and educative programs (Lawe Davis, 2002). SBS has long been the home of foreign cinema and international sport events such as the Football World Cup. Indeed sports, especially the major soccer events, generate good revenues and great ratings. SBS programming is clearly about a diversity of sources, multiple topics, perspectives and styles. Roscoe is aware of the critique of SBS’s current more popular strand of programming, commenting:

Nobody wants to watch the same style program over and over again and things change as well…we are interested in innovation and exciting our audience; we do not want them to get bored and feel worn out, so we do give attention to entertainment, fun and pleasure side of television in addition to serious hardcore docos (Roscoe, 2006).

For all the mixed programming from many but increasingly English-speaking countries, the SBS strategy to reduce LOTE in prime time raises concerns about significantly ‘softening’ mediated cultural difference. There is still a diversity of voices but incrementally less audible. In the light of a broader context of dramatically uneven international trade in cultural products and translation this is not without significance.

Television beyond politics of language Prior to SBS, Australian television culture was characterised by what Hawkins and Ang call ‘a profound lack of curiosity about the foreign: a complete absence of any sort of exogamous drive to understand other [than the Anglophone] cultures’ (Hawkins and Ang, 2006). This, as they add, was not exclusive or peculiar to Australian TV; it was the norm with PSB in other

174

countries as well. In the Australian context, the ‘nation-building’ role of television in national life, embedded in concepts of ‘an Australian look’, and ‘Australian content’ displaced the rhetoric of the ‘public interest’ associated with European PBS, especially the BBC. As in Europe however, nationally-based broadcasting was driven by the logic of maximising audiences across difference and constructing national unity, demarcated by a common language. Imports were divided between US programming on commercial TV and British programming on the ABC (O'Regan, 1993: 12). With SBS, the terms of the national had been redefined in a more inclusive fashion. SBS was set up to take on an active leadership in ‘promoting multilingualism’ rather than merely reflecting linguistic and cultural realities of Australia (SBS Charter). If language is a primary conduit of identity, difference, and particular worldview, then favouring English-language programming in prime time on SBS has the potential to weaken the broadcaster’s contribution to stimulating multicultural/cosmopolitan imagination of the Australian audience, and stabilising further what Clyne calls monolingual mindset of multicultural society (Clyne, 2006). In terms of broadcasting ecology, it might compromise SBS charter’s requirement to ‘contribute to the overall diversity of Australian television and radio services’, ‘providing an alternative’, and instead making SBS come closer and closer to what the ABC offers.

And indeed, any discussion on the relationship between media institutions and contemporary culture should include considerations for ‘a creative ecology’ (Born, 2004: 491-2). As Born reminds us, against the grain of neo-liberal ideology and the sovereign consumer, ‘audience tastes do not exist in some pristine state, arriving perfectly formed in the marketplace. Audience tastes are not autonomous. They are cumulatively and historically conditioned by interaction with what is produced. In the ecology of broadcasting, production precedes, conditions and sets limits to consumption (Born, 2004: 491). Born says that this is often taken for elitist tastes and advocacy of interests of the producers. Broadcast culture, in general, exists in a dialogic relation with broader cultural and ideological developments: it draws them in as a substance for its televisual practice; and it broadcasts 55 them, contained in its programming. Born further questions a positivist mechanism of a ‘perfect mirror’ of audience tastes in production and argues for deployment of producers’ creative autonomy and

55 The etymology of the verb ‘to broadcast’ goes back to ‘scatter seed abroad with the hand’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

175

responsibility. She says, ‘creativity requires that producers exceed and confound the expectations of audiences, the better to renew their desires and interests’ (Born, 2004: 492). Secondly, public services such as the BBC or SBS are influenced by the wider media ecology. In order to remain ‘popular’, public service broadcasting needs to imitate the programming that the competition offers, or ‘risk becoming isolated from the general drift of programming and so from popular tastes’ (Born, 2004: 492). This symbiotic nature of media requires public service regulation not only for state but also commercial providers, and thus impacts on audience tastes across all genres and platforms. This again is a polemical issue, pointing to inherent tensions at the heart of public service broadcasting as it struggles to remain relevant and popular in an increasingly competitive and fragmented media market.

SBS’s imperative to mediate complexities of cultural dialogue in a broad public interest is as relevant now as in the past. There are not only waves of new immigration to Australia, most recently from African countries, but also a prevalence of anti-LOTE social attitudes. The most recent Connecting Diversity report, commissioned by SBS, notes that multilingualism – one of the key elements of a broader multiculturalism – generated great discomfort among the focus group participants: ‘The fact that many migrants speak languages other than English is often frowned upon. It makes people uncomfortable, even those who have a family history of speaking LOTE at home. Migrants speaking their native tongue in public is often seen as a refusal to integrate’ (Ang et al., 2006: 20). These are-on-the ground tensions that the SBS management is well aware of. Geogie McClean admits:

This sentiment, known from years back, is re-emerging in Australia. There are a lot of reasons for that: the whole reversion to an isolationist idea of what is the nation…That’s a real shame. A lot of people point finger at global terrorism, but I think it is much more profound than that. It is about having leadership in this. To be truly ‘relaxed and comfortable’ as a nation, you have to be relaxed with the internal diversity of the nation, rather than pretending that you have an ethnic core that you can rely on (McClean, 2006).

This is clearly set in a relationship to a broader political context. It makes reference to conservative Prime Minister John Howard’s famous pre-election speech where he

176

characterised the national psyche under his leadership as ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia (Lyneham, 1997), and carries a critique of the government’s insistence on the Australia’s ‘proud’ Anglo-ethnic past and a backlash against multiculturalism in Australia.

Michael Clyne, renowned for his activism for LOTE in Australia, is outspoken about the situation in relation to languages. He argues that monolingual thinking has resulted in fallacies undermining multilingualism – ‘the crowded curriculum’ which does not permit the presence of a second language, ‘monolingual literacy’, ‘global English sufficing’, and ‘more than two languages being too much’ (Clyne, 2006). Instead he considers the benefits of multilingualism – cognitive, economic, cultural and social. He points out the cognitive, cultural value of understanding the arbitrariness of language, a sign, difference between a form and a context for multicultural setting, as well as economic advantages of international significance. Clyne emphasises Australia’s privileged situation, in which multilingualism can be practised here and now, reducing costs it would otherwise assume.

SBS’s links to national economy in Australia are also clearly discernible in the effort to develop a single commercial language service business, combining SBS radio and SBS TV multilingual and multicultural resources. The translation units established in Sydney and Melbourne already provide a valuable service for people and commercial organisations who want to market in languages other than English, recognising that proficiency in English will in future be so widespread that high competence in other languages will be crucial for commercial success (Phillipson 2002: 5). SBS Language Services offer a range of services on a fee-for-service basis, including translation of any material into any language; software localisation, typesetting of print and electronic material, voice recording utilising multilingual voice talent; and subtitling for all kinds of media, into all languages, including English captions for the hearing impaired. In 2003-04, SBS Language Services worked on a record 1,460 jobs (Annual Report 2003-04). Zafiropolous views the role and value of multilingualism for Australia’s national economy in a similar fashion. In parallel to providing justification for the SBS radio’s multilingual policies aimed at sustenance and development of LOTEs for the station’s own survival, he adds that ‘the trade with other nations is bound to benefit from people who speak language of these countries’ (Zafiropoulos, 2004). Mary Kalantzis has similarly articulated the case for ‘productive diversity’, whereby the

177

multilingual human capital is regarded as a resource for increasing Australia’s economic competitiveness in a globalising world (Kalantzis, 2002).

As already noted, the other important value guiding programming choices at SBS is that of quality rather than language. Webb recalls arguments with ethnic community leaders over programming and pressures to ‘show quiz shows from Italy where women take their tops off’ (Webb, 2006). SBS scheduler at the time, Webb believed that people who watch SBS inevitably use its programming to judge a given culture; showcasing Antonioni instead of ‘Italian quiz shows’ would thus be a more respectful representation of Italian culture to a wider audience. His conscious decision to ‘remove all the trash from the bottom’ (‘women taking their tops off, you do not need it in languages, anyway, do you’?) was not only a concern for quality programming but a wider accessibility. It was not without problems though…Webb admits:

Sometimes ethnic communities would say, you’re being a snob, you said this stuff was trash and I’d say there are problems with this because it’s not accessible to a wider Australian audience, and one of the big arguments introduced in the early stages was that SBS is not just for “wogs” but also for an enemy. The enemy is the overwhelming majority of the population, 60 per cent that is not wog, they really need SBS as much as “wogs” do, because they are a problem for “wogs” and “wogs” can help themselves by showing their culture to the rest of people. People if they smell something nice coming out from a neighbour’s kitchen next door, they want to know what it is, and if they watch SBS they can get to understand other culture that it is relevant, valid culture worth celebrating. So I’ve never argued that it all should be in LOTE, it should be accessible to an Anglo part of the society – so at least 50 per cent – these people are important people as well - a level of accessibility needed (Webb, 2006).

His programming decisions were criticised by ethnic communities and the subsequent (now current) board for ‘being too intellectual, too concerned with high quality, high-brow material’:

178

My reply would be: “But why cannot “wogs” be high-brow?” In fact demographic studies show that there is a greater proportion of people with tertiary education amongst immigrants than amongst the rest of population. When people watch SBS, they judge your culture – I’d answer. But they [board] were right too; people did want more popular stuff as well (Webb, 2006).

This is a significant shift in perspective on diversity and representation of ethnic and linguistic identities, something that European public service broadcasting started to recognise only recently. For example, in 2002 the BBC formulated its change in the perception of ethnic audiences as follows:

[We] shifted the perspective from a tendency to see black and Asian audiences as the 3D’s – Dispossessed, Disenfranchised, Depressed – and start seeing key sections of these communities as the 3 A’s – Articulate, Ambitious, Affluent (BBC, 2002).

Webb’s programming strategy on SBS has since proven to be particularly smart to attempt to address these AB viewers which now constitute an enviable portion of its audience and are attractive to advertisers. The broadcaster managed also to arrive at a successful mix of programming, comfortably shifting between Webb’s modernist vision of ‘high-brow content also for wogs’ and entertainment with wider appeal. Far from being a contradiction, the mixture of high and low-brow, the local and international has become a part and parcel of the current specificity and popularity of the broadcaster. As Webb himself admits:

David Stratton would choose quite high-brow movies before me, Antonioni, and so on…Then we would show more popular ones and this is when it started working: David once a week, and the rest more popular stuff – Kung Fu, sexy Spanish, a nice variety and a maximal level of accessibility (Webb, 2006).

Since Brown’s appointment, SBS has been subject to a number of criticisms, most of which concentrate on increasingly populist strategies pursued by the station. Shifts in programming to broaden the SBS audience via even more popular programs are defended by the current executive programmer. Roscoe comments:

179

I’m aware of these arguments, and they are often barking up the wrong tree. You can have a serious issue but dealt in an entertaining way through a popular form (for example, Brian Hill 56 uses styles, codes, conventions from popular culture). Across the schedule we try to find spaces where we can deal with serious issues in a playful way. I’m not opposed to entertainment, it is not bad for you, and if we deliver to all Australians we need to cater to all our tastes. Even I like to watch something more entertaining rather than hard-core political docos everyday (Roscoe, 2006).

The reasons provided for an over-representation of certain language material (for example, French movies over Vietnamese) are also those of quality, along with accessibility and relations with program providers. Roscoe notes:

There are lots of things that guide our choices for different slots throughout a day: we want the best movies from around the world, and it might happen that one year there are many fabulous films from Italy or South Korea, but we still have to balance it with other languages…It is all about the balancing, but the movies need to be good, because otherwise no one is going to watch it, so what’s the point? [Over-representation] has simply to do with particular film industries, for example, the French film industry is much bigger than other smaller countries which do not produce lots of films, so for us, with the objective to provide multilingual, multicultural material, it means that we have less to choose from. We might push it to next year and see what comes out then. There are a lot of German documentaries; Germany and Denmark produce the best docos around key issues and current affairs, so in our Cutting-Edge strand, for example, we cannot be as balanced in our language representation as for example in movies slot…

And this is indeed the major issue: SBS’s priority of ‘good TV’ over ‘good representation’ (as in language quota):

56 Brian Hill is an award winning British director of independent television programs and films. His musical hybrid documentaries Drinking for England, Feltham Sings, Pornography-The Musical were screened in the SBS documentary strand Hot Docs in 2005.

180

What’s most important is to have access to a range of material throughout the schedule, but there are certainly slots dominated by certain cultures; for example, Monday drama slot is intended for edgy, innovative drama and they tend to be English language – British, American (like Queer as Folk , Shameless ). They are important not so much because of language but the style of the programming and the issues they tackle; other parts of the schedule are about accessing other cultures through language and their stories (Roscoe, 2006).

In times of high competitiveness and wide availability of media products, discourse of quality is legitimate as long as it does not tread on universalist assumptions that cancel innovation and experimentation. Similarly, categorisation into types that apparently set the benchmark for ‘the rest’ (for example, German and Danish documentaries) and reserving timeslots for them might with time provide a rather circumscribed viewing experience.

5.3 SBS AS AN INFRASTURCTURE OF CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP AND TRANSLATION

Why does SBS as an infrastructure of cultural citizenship and translation matter? What can SBS tell us about production of citizenship and democratic interaction among the citizens of plural societies in the era of political upheavals, war on terror, increased globalisation and new media fragmentation? My argument is that SBS matters because it assigns a value to the philosophy of cultural-diversity-in-unity, constituting a platform for intercultural communication and media citizenship across linguistic boundaries. In Roscoe’s words:

[SBS] actively promotes that cross-fertilisation between cultures. In times when issues around race, ethnicity, identity are absolutely crucial to many of the conflicts around the world, SBS provides a space to renegotiate those issues of identity. SBS is trying to work out what it means to be an Australian (for example, Connecting Diversity report) and that is done through the mix of local and foreign content (Roscoe, 2006).

181

SBS is important as an infrastructure of translation, that is a cultural process which makes ‘exploration of difference’, negotiation, and creativity possible. What emerges from my literature review and argumentation is that translation is particularly well-suited to multi- ethnic, multilingual, and internationalised societies, Australian or European alike. Defined broadly as a dialogue, an access, an invitation to experience the different or/and unknown, translation thrives on precisely the kind of diversity and negotiation that is called upon for inclusiveness in the Australian and European context to work, and as such needs to be considered useful for the media policy formulation and practice.

Additionally, Born (2004) observes that the primary agency of the post-modern public broadcasting service is to offer a uniting yet plural space for communication across diverse communities within modern states, a forum for mutual cultural recognition and social engagement aside from ethnicity. Public service broadcasting should assume a two-fold function: stage a complex pluralism and cross-cultural dialogue, and counterbalance the fracturing of the societies brought about by what Turow describes as ‘global niche media’ (Turow, 2006). Similarly, Murdock (2005) argues for a space of exchange and negotiation of differing, partial perspectives, and sectional claims against Reithian ideals to construct a unified nation. Both Born and Murdock agree that this should be achieved not only through free-to-air provision of a multiplicity of information and opinion, but affective, aesthetic and imaginative forms of communication that would inspire feelings of commonality, reciprocity and toleration (Born 2004: 508; Murdock 2005: 179). As a public service broadcaster with a multilingual and multicultural remit SBS attempts to provide programming that ‘reflects a diversity of experiences, lifestyles, beliefs, cultures and languages within Australia’ (SBS, 2006b: 6). While it is committed to ‘the benefits of Australian multiculturalism as the most effective way to counter racism and promote social cohesion and harmony’ (SBS, 2006b: 7), it reaches beyond the national. Devoted to multi-sourcing of fresh, interesting stories from places that most Australians normally do not have access to, it simultaneously introduces its audiences to a wide range of less-known multilingual programming from around the globe and presents familiar topics with a distinct attraction for ‘the multicultural’. It ‘cosmpolitanises the national’, connecting Australian audiences within the nation and beyond, into to wider imagined international communities, with clear implications for media citizenship.

182

It is important however to resist too idealised approaches regarding SBS simultaneously as an integrative and pluralising role in Australian culture. I have already raised the issue of SBS potentially compromising its ‘pluralising’ dimension via increasingly English – language programming in prime time. Although SBS’s effective performance of this dual function – narrow and broadcasting – have been acknowledged across literature (Smaill, 2002), the intrinsic tension at the heart of the ‘unity in diversity’ dictum never goes away. It has reflected conundrums of political support and its withdrawal from ethnic communities, market forces (to increase ratings versus commitment public policy), as well as more individual dispositions of SBS management or senior staff. More generally, it reminds us about the unreconciled conflict underpinning the broader role of public service broadcasting in the production of citizenship. While supporting the view that media constitute audiences as members of national community, David Morley argues that broadcasting is always unavoidably both exclusive and inclusive for particular audience groups:

By the very way (and to the very extent that) a program signals to members of some groups that it is designed for them and functions as an effective invitation to their participation in social life, it will necessarily signal to members of other social groups that it is not for them and, indeed, that they are not among the invitees to its particular forum of sociability. Only a program constructed within the terms of some form of cultural Esperanto 57 could hope to appeal equally to all, without favour or division. Sociability, by definition, can only ever be produced in some particular cultural (and linguistic) form – and only those with access to the relevant forms of cultural capital will feel interpellated by and at home within the particular forms of sociability offered by a given program (Morley, 2000: 111 - emphasis mine).

My perspective on translation explains how modes of exclusion and inclusion can be effectively negotiated in citizenship formation.

57 Indeed, while interviewing professionals across the broadcasting stations I have specifically asked about programs that tend to travel best across cultural and linguistic borders. Even though a provisional list of such transnational programs can be indeed constructed, the failure of Esperanto itself shows how difficult it is to achieve in practice.

183

Translation practices: subtitling SBS, a self-professed multicultural broadcaster in world terms, has a long tradition of embedding translation into its televisual practice. Interestingly, the Charter does not say anything about its translation regime, outlining instead the broadcaster’s requirements for multilingual and multicultural representation. Yet, as Ang and Hawkins’s (2006) and my research reveals, subtitling as a translation practice was from the beginning conceived as much more reflective of the SBS’s multicultural brief and suitable for appreciation and promotion of Australia’s cultural diversity. In its submission to the Committee of Review of Special Broadcasting Service, the Subtitling Unit noted:

Televising in their original languages with English subtitles retains the integrity of the original languages and allows for adequate representation of Australian languages other than English (The Committee of the Review of the Special Broadcasting Service, 1895).

This belief was most recently confirmed in Codes of Practice 2006:

SBS seeks to reflect faithfully the cultural ambience of imported programs. SBS believes the interests of viewers are best served by subtitles and voice-overs which carry the impact of the original language (SBS, 2006b: 11).

Although subtitling was a common international practice at the time, it was not popular on Australian television for a simple reason that most international programming in Australia was English-language. In European subtitling countries such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland, translation proceeded from English into the national language, whereas SBS TV reversed this direction: it offered programming translated from foreign languages into English (Hawkins and Ang, 2006). Significantly, SBS’s preference for subtitling rather than dubbing was not only motivated by lower costs of the former. Intact televised programs in original language, with English subtitles were to act as an adequate representation of Australian languages other than English but also as a unifying factor for the diverse audience, turning Australia’s paradoxically emphatic public monolingualism to advantage.

184

Indeed, the Subtitling Unit was one of the first divisions set up in SBS, quickly gaining an international reputation for its quality translations (especially, idiomatic renditions) and innovation (format, font, font colour, and so on). From its commitment to a much more sensitive engagement with translated text, it has elaborated a unique team-based approach to subtitling, where a skilled subtitler and native speaker of the originating language, and native English speaking editor work together on a script. This professional practice remains in opposition to subtitling countries in Europe where most of the subtitlers are native speakers of the language they translate into. Subtitles are directed at one particular audience, so the meaning emerges at the junction between the comprehension of the source text and the knowledge of the receiving audience. Another transformation results from a necessary change from longer linguistic units into shorter ones. Glenn Mason from SBS Subtitling Unit comments on these more technical aspects of subtitling:

SBS subtitles are unique in that they’re timed to go on when the person begins talking and come off when person stops. Timed to speech wherever possible, to get a feeling that the person is speaking to you and also to ensure that there is time allowed for the viewer to read the subtitle whilst still having time to view the program. We have been experimenting with our font as we have recently installed new subtitling software called Swift in January 2006. It is a British product which was chosen after testing a range of alternatives. We are currently using a two-pixel black edging, and a one-pixel drop shadow. Our Chief Subtitlers have been responsible for research into how to make subtitles friendlier through experimentation over many years (Mason, 2006).

The practical choice of subtitling underpinned by philosophical considerations was and continues to be one of SBS’s central features of communication with its audiences. It takes into account audience’s expectations (for example, maximised time for subtitle screen display for viewers of LOTE background) but also cultural and political sensitivities in the multicultural society. Notions of ‘sensitivity to word’ (SBS, 2006b) and ‘authenticity’ point to complex politics of language and translation. Webb gives an illuminating example:

It was important for the world to know that President Yeltsin was slurring words and SBS was able to show it because of subtitles. Other channels would dub it. Many people

185

in Australia come from places where media were well-organised and controlled, Hungary, Romania, China, Yugoslavia…so often they would have a reporter reporting what people were saying, so people would be sceptical about the news. Subtitling allows verification and monitoring, so people are more likely to believe (Webb, 2006).

A much more comprehensive and culturally inclusive mode of translatability (vision and sound) than radio or dubbing, subtitling works also on another level; that of accessibility and connection. Subtitling provides an exposure to an original language, a sound of difference, forcing the audience to familiarise themselves and partake in the linguistic encounter. The former manager of SBS Radio Melbourne, Mike Zafiropolous, admitted that it may even be particularly important for ‘those mono-cultural, monolingual Australians to appreciate cultural diversity and therefore feel comfortable within the wider society that has been built by diverse cultures’ (Zafiropolous 2004). This level of accessibility and horizontal interlinguistic communication for community-building is also stressed by Webb (Webb, 2006).

5.4 COMMUNICATION AS TRANSLATION—LOTMAN AND SBS’s TEXTS

The translation process is not merely a linguistic activity involving the technical transfer of meaning from a source to a target language, but a more sophisticated engagement with a foreign text. This might raise questions of definition (translation versus adaptation, localisation, and so on) but as Andrew McCormick from the Subtitling Unit argues:

[Questions of definition] do not address the complexity of the act of translation. It may be of interest in a theoretical sense but in the end we do our job and the answer to this is irrelevant to us. Just an anecdote: people who come to SBS translation unit from a background in court translation have considerable difficulty in the job since their training involves an absolutely full rendering of what’s said. Court translators experience huge obstacles in reorienting their translating work within the context of subtitling (McCormick, 2006).

Felicity Mueller and Rosamund Ziegert, SBS senior subtitlers elaborate on their profession:

186

Translators do more than simply translate. They’re not editors but may point out what should be cut, for example, “fuck” prior to 7.30 pm, too much violence…In a “re-narration script” (called “voice-over” in Germany) a historical fact, for example, may be grossly wrong and require amendment. This means that if a documentary is German and would not hold general appeal to an Australian audience, the emphasis may be re-directed to suit the audience; make it lighter or whatever.

People in this department hold conflicting views [as to whether subtitling is translation or adaptation]; for example one editor believes that meddling creates unauthenticity, and translators should reflect texts warts and all. Others believe in correcting errors and making changes, for instance [an] Israeli doco about Lithuanian Jews, in which Lithuanians, who were four years old at the time were accused of complicity in the genocide etc… one editor took an interventionist role. Similarly, for example, pruning back the embellishing narration style of a German nature doco, the translator takes on the role of an adaptor and localisor (Mueller and Ziegert, 2006).

In the light of these comments, televisual translation is a cultural mechanism for translating texts of foreign semiotics systems into ‘our’ familiar language, something that features prominently in the contemporary translation studies. In her seminal introduction to the discipline, Susan Bassnett draws on Lotman’s theory of a text that distinguishes between the internal and external structure of the text, which requires that ‘a translator must therefore bear in mind both [its] autonomous and its communicative aspects and any theory of equivalence should take both elements into account’ (Bassnett, 2002: 40). This intricate contextualisation of all languages and texts invokes the subtitlers’ craft, such as Felicity Mueller or Andrew McCormick, not only in the technical aspects of both the home and target ‘languages,’ but a wider knowledge of a text’s communicative dimension.

The attention to a text’s communicative context and particularly ‘approximation’ rather than fidelity to the original and translation had been earlier argued by Walter Benjamin. According to Benjamin, ‘the task of translator’, which is also the title of his frequently quoted article,

187

consists in ‘finding that intended effect upon the language into which he/she is translating which produces in it the echo of the original’ (in Papastergiadis, 2000: 130). In this attempt to ‘echo’ the meaning of the original, the original is transformed but also, importantly, so is the language into which translation occurred. The contextual and transformative aspects of translation theorised by Lotman and Benjamin can assist in understanding of the multiple and complex levels of cultural interchange in modern societies. Here, specifically, Yuri Lotman’s (1990) model of communication as translation and Benjamin’s notion of afterlife are drawn upon to account for SBS’s translation practices and its way of ‘doing television’. However, these semiotic theoretical approaches are critically tested against broader issues of politics of language and translation. It is claimed that only such a critical inter-dialoguing can unravel complex structural tensions implicated in the operation of SBS. These are ongoing anxieties at the heart of a public service broadcaster mandated to orchestrate a pluralist yet unified community (Born 2004) as well as operational challenges between the function of media agents (for example, programmers), the foreign texts and audiences. Additionally, a hybrid model of SBS as a public service broadcaster substantially funded by advertising has had obvious commercial consequences on programming, policies and practices.

Lotman’s dialogic model of translation which stresses the role and value of foreign texts and cultural ideas in the development of cultural knowledge and innovation has been adopted across various studies. Hartley and McKee, for example, have used the approach to explain the negotiation of an Australian national identity (Hartley and McKee, 2000: 9, 40-2, 71-93), Irene Portis Winner uses it to account for the relation between ethnic and mainstream texts within a culture (Winner, 1984); and Green to consider the nexus between Australian young people and American teen drama (Green, 2005). The model’s communicative orientation that includes the function of media agents, the foreign texts as well as the audiences is clearly a more dialogic and comprehensive than a Saussurean version privileging an abstract and self- sufficient linguistic structure. As such it can be replicated at the level of text-reader interaction (Green, 2005) or the whole culture (the semiosphere) (Hartley and McKee, 2000). Applied to SBS’s televisual practice, Lotman’s theory of dynamic process of translation is especially useful in explaining how SBS television has worked textually .

188

This textual provenance of public communication is located within the contemporary media studies discourses that hold television – and post-broadcast media – to be a principal site of citizenship formation (Hartley, 1999). Directly related is the argument about television as a major source of popular education of difference – such as the way different sections of the population look, speak, live, act, socialise, vote, tolerate, and so on. It has been a primary ‘people watching medium’ across demographics. As Hartley claims, television mediates dialogue between various cultural groups in an ordinary, banal and familiar way (Hartley, 1999: 183) without ‘encouraging antagonistic debates about policy’ or ‘subordinating individuals to an institution that represents them collectively’ (Hartley and McKee, 2000: 83). In the case of SBS, a recognised potential of the medium to ‘communicate Australia’s diversity’ to all Australians, as the current promotional campaign has it, via innovative and entertaining programming, resulted in a crucial shift away from a multicultural programming determined by Australian demographic statistics to the SBS’s commitment to ‘a good television’ (its focus on reception). In other words, the demands of the politics of recognition that underpinned SBS’s operational strategies from the beginning were coupled with considerations for the audience’s tastes and cross-demographic affiliations beyond the confines of language and ethnicity.

To describe his concept of translation, Lotman introduces the notion of the ‘semiosphere’ which is the product and the condition for the very process communication. It is ‘necessary for the existence and functioning of languages, not the sum total of different languages; in a sense the semiosphere has a prior existence and is in constant interaction with languages’ (Lotman, 1990: 123). This ‘constant interaction with languages’ – translation – is founded on the model of dialogue rather than linear communication, and presupposes ‘asymmetry’ of languages and semiotic systems within the semiosphere. Indeed, for Lotman ‘asymmetry’ (difference) is the generative mechanism of meaning in any semiotic system, which occurs in the context of difference from single texts to national languages and cultures:

It has been established that a minimally functioning semiotic structure consists not of one artificially isolated language or text in that language, but of a parallel pair of mutually untranslatable languages which are, however, connected by a “pulley,” which is translation. A dual structure like this is the minimal nucleus for generating new

189

messages, and it is also the minimal unit of a semiotic object such as culture (Lotman, 1990: 2).

As Lotman argues, the semiosphere is an asymmetrical system organised into core and periphery dissected by multiple porous boundaries, including the boundary that separates the semiosphere from the external space surrounding it. The role of (abstract) boundary in Lotman’s sense can be also considered as existing in real terms of self-identification. It connects as much as divides. For example, SBS as a special national network emphasises its distinctiveness from other Australian television stations and from a global dominance of the Hollywood productions. This identity as ‘the other’ had been constructed through the ‘external’ Charter requirements and the pursuit of ‘in-house’ directions. The latter has been most notably reflected in promotional campaigns such as ‘See what the rest of the world has to offer’, ‘Holly would’, and so on. But it also connects, allowing a cultural exchange between the local, national and global spheres of semiosis, while drawing on a common context of signs, regulations, and audiences constituted in a specific way. Within a given semiosphere, the core is the key site where the dominant culture is produced (for example, law-forming norms) whereas the periphery is characterised by intensive translation of the foreign and the creation of new elements. As such, the periphery is a site of diversity within the semiosphere, threatening the unity and laws formed at the core. According to Lotman (1990: 146), this process of dialogue/interaction takes place in five stages which enables a reflection on the process of exchange facilitated by SBS within the receiving Australian semiosphere. While different stages can often be identified, in general they co-exist and blend into one another at any given point in time. In particular many domestic productions occupy this ‘in-between’ place between concept revisions and extensions in the stage two and their development in stage four (O'Regan, 1996: 202-3).

First, a text arrives from the outside, retaining its ‘strangeness’. It is read in the foreign language, considered superior to the receiving language, and thus offering a positive contribution, for example subtitled European art-house movies, or now Asian cinema. Also, because of its international prestige and positive connotations, snippets of French language are often incorporated within programming, whether within promotional spots (for example, SBS Movie Show viewer competition announcement to win a trip to Paris, ‘C’est magnifique’,

190

July 2007) or within the Australian re-narration of material such as Global Village . At this stage, international style, genre, or social problematic are introduced to the Australian semiosphere.

In the second stage, transformation process occurs, whereby both the ‘imported’ text and the ‘home’ culture begin to restructure each other. Translations, imitations and adaptations multiply. The foreign text is idealised as it offers the local culture an opportunity to break with the past; it is experienced as with salvific qualities. Examples of this stage include a large number of television remakes mentioned earlier − when a format for a television variety, quiz or sports show is purchased and adapted to fit the local context. For instance, SBS’s Nerds FC indigenises the Danish football reality show. However, there is more to this stage than adapting or modelling of the existing international models. This includes local experimentations, for example with European or Asian cinema’s aesthetic values or narrative structures, which are a result of a transformation and a negotiation than a mere imitation (see O'Regan, 1996: 200-1 - emphasis in original). Importantly, a counter-tendency begins to emerge in which the foreign text is linked to a latent element in the receiving culture, interpreted now as an organic continuation of the familiar culture (Lotman, 1990: 147). In the time when SBS TV started, mainstream media in Australia were generally quite conservative. Sexually permissive representations of ‘foreign’ culture featured by SBS prompted not only many popular jokes about SBS as a ‘sex before soccer’ television, but over time shifted the normative boundaries of Australian mainstream media. Their liberating effect opened up the ways of thinking about the home culture, eventually becoming part of a larger narrative of a semiosphere undergoing transformation.

There emerges in the third stage a tendency to find a ‘higher content’ within the imported text, separate from the actual culture in which the text originated. The true potential of the text is realised by being integrated into the receiving culture, which is now its ‘natural heartland’ (Lotman, 1990: 146). Reception of the text has led not only to transformation but also to a kind of transcendence, from localised, particularistic to a more universalistic appeal. The home culture product’s value recognised internationally, lies in its renovation and innovation of the ideals of the original creation.

191

In his Australian National Cinema , Tom O’Regan (1996) gives the examples of Jane Campion’s film-making, Mad Max and Newsfront as indicative of the third stage. These locally produced Australian products ‘outdid’ the original Hollywood precedents, and received international appreciation. A similar argument can be made about Adam Elliot’s plasticine animation, Harvie Krumpet , commissioned by SBS. This highly idiosyncratic claymation uses a traditionally kids’ medium to introduce adult (worldly-wise) humour, minority identities, and social issues − unlike the otherwise excellent plasticine animation Wallace & Gromit . As such, it heightens the form in general, for which it won the Best Animation Oscar in 2004.

After the imported text has been entirely assimilated into the receiving culture, in the fourth stage it is no longer experienced as distinctive, opening a way for the culture’s activity in producing new texts. The local now produces the new and original texts based on dynamic transformations. For example, SBS’s The Circuit (2007) completely indigenises an international format of drama mini-series, and makes it a distinctively localised depiction of the community life in the remote Kimberley region of outback Australia. This compelling story about dispensing justice to Aboriginal communities, with all its vernaculars and social specifics, potentially provides an original structural model for its genre, recognised in its own right and with international consequences, claimed earlier by the Mad Max trilogy , Gallipoli, The Piano, Crocodile Dundee, and the Australian soap-opera (see O'Regan, 1996: 202-4).

Another possible example of this stage is Kick , which takes a familiar popular format and makes success of it without losing its multicultural credentials or appeal. In the light of the Connecting Diversity report ’s (2006), that recommended programming strategies move beyond attacking or defending multiculturalism, and instead focus on cultural interconnections, SBS invested in the production and broadcast of this original multicultural 13 x half-hour drama series. Set in a Melbourne suburb, the series focuses on everyday lives of its culturally diverse protagonists, living on working-class Hope Street. Kick explores an array of topics ranging from personal aspirations, love, friendship, family, and football, all which constitute a mundane life in a multicultural Australia. This innovative and entertaining treatment of Australia’s cultural diversity can be argued to provide an original structural model for its genre internationally.

192

The receiving culture is now, in the fifth stage, a transmitter, which results in ‘issuing forth a flood of texts directed to other, peripheral areas of the semiosphere’ (Lotman, 1990: 147). In relation to this stage, rather than focusing on individual cultural productions and texts, this thesis proposes that SBS itself, as a channel, might be exported as a model for broadcasters elsewhere in the semiosphere. In other words, what began as vehicle for the import of largely European television and film has transformed into a model of the television of difference, so to say, which can in turn be imported into Europe.

‘Foreignisation’ versus ‘acculturation’ strategies In what follows I draw on Lotman’s dialogic perspective to illustrate SBS’s current forms of mediated interlingual /cultural communication exchange. SBS as a national multilingual channel constitutes a platform for exposure to and connection with cultural and linguistic diversity. SBS acts as a special filter, selectively letting in texts from other cultural domains, both the imported foreign texts (if not English-language then made intelligible to Australians via subtitling), and local productions that engage experiences of minorities (ethnic, linguistic, sexual, etc.) from the Australian semiosphere. As a result, there are two related translation phenomena: the translation process, which tries to explain contact between imported, extra- systemic or extra-national and traditional domestic elements, and concrete strategies employed by cultural translation. As Bassnett (2005) admits, cultural transfer from a source text intelligible in a target language hinges on two modes of translation: acculturation and foreignisation. She identifies a distinction between:

whether a translator should seek to eradicate traces of otherness in a text so as to reshape that text for home consumption in accordance with the norms and expectations that prevail in the target system, or whether to opt for a strategy that adheres more closely to the norms of the source system. Acculturation, it can be argued, brings a text more completely into the target system, since the text is effectively aimed at readers with no knowledge of any other system. On the other hand, foreignisation ensures that a text is self-consciously other, so that readers can be in no doubt that what they are encountering derives from a completely different system, in short that it contains traces of a foreignness that mark it as distinct from anything produced from within the target culture (Bassnett, 2005: 120).

193

The remainder of this chapter considers then SBS’s translation practices, and its consequences for the Australian semiosphere, in terms of these strategies of ‘foreignisation’ and ‘acculturation’. In SBS case, the preferred translation method appears to be, uniquely, the foreignisation, and includes: original foreign programs with subtitles, repackaging of foreign texts (with English-language commentary added), and original foreign programs without subtitles. Still, SBS also adapts some foreign formats, as well as produces − and increasingly so − local programs, but with arguably a distinctly transformatory potential (especially, programming including Aboriginal languages). These are more characterised by acculturation.

Foreignisation: imported texts, international perspective, and sport As mentioned earlier, in the first stage of Lotman’s translation process, imported texts are valued by the receiving culture for their foreignness. SBS receives the texts and makes them comprehensible for Australian audiences via the use of subtitles. SBS’s insistence on authenticity in its use of subtitling rather than dubbing is a clear gesture towards a method of ‘foreignisation’. It does not intend to ‘eradicate traces of otherness,’ conversely; it seeks to invite readers to explore a clearly marked distinctiveness of the foreign. It can be argued that the value of such a method consists in showcasing the heterogeneity of voices and worldviews in a dialogic manner rather than overwriting them according to cultural codes of the receiving culture, which is mostly the case with translation of formats (see discussion below). Rod Webb emphasised the role of original but subtitled feature movies as a familiar, non- threatening form of entertainment in offering the most effective means of representing the Australia’s cultural and lingual diversity (Webb 1997: 107).

According to the Lotman’s translation schema, imported texts are subsequently imitated and adapted across the receiving culture. However, Lotman’s schematic alternation is not only a more sophisticated critique of asymmetrical economic and power relations than the political economy of media, commonly associated with concerns of Americanisation and cultural imperialism. It allows for the inherent complexity and variations of the cultural transfers. Indeed, Lotman implies that some texts might not leave the first stage, remaining un- indigenised and valued for their foreignness. Still, these ‘untranslatable’ texts can spawn other texts in the subsequent stages of the Lotman’s schema (stage 2-5). There are numerous examples of imitative practices that range from individual copies (for example, a viewer goes

194

off and makes things like the loved text) – a feature of any cultural artefact – to ‘imitations’ that become an integral constituent of national models. Some examples of the latter are noted by Hawkins and Ang (2006) in their research on the impacts of SBS’s translations upon the Australian mediasphere.

For example, the way SBS viewed news material by privileging the international in its nightly news bulletins had influence on Australian mainstream media. Hawkins and Ang indicate that there was a recognisable increase in international stories, and whether it was sustained or not, it revealed public interest in an international perspective (Hawkins and Ang, 2006). The current news bulletin called World News Australia continues to merge the multicultural objective to provide news access for migrant communities with a cosmopolitan perspective that aims to hail non-migrants interested in a broad overview of world and national affairs. This unique orientation, eloquently articulated in SBS’s 2006-7 tagline, News From Home , If You Live in the World , provides SBS with high audience figures – 700,000 viewers (SBS, 2006a: 16).

The impact of SBS’s innovative programming on other TV stations is also noted as regards entertainment. Popular educational such as the highly ranked Mythbusters or South Park were first shown on SBS, with other channels now starting to show interest in similar. Jane Roscoe observes in her response to criticisms of too much low-brow programming on SBS:

Take Mythbusters for example; nobody was doing such popular science stuff before; now it’s more a commonplace, similarly animations which have proven a big success; so we should not feel too defensive about what we do, it is about delivering a full range of services to people (Roscoe, 2006).

In a similar vein, Webb remarks, indicating some cultural and political implications:

I wanted to put South Park on so I had to fight. It was neither LOTE nor multicultural, but I indicated that the content was: innovative, cutting-edge, sometimes shocking…Priests and politicians started to have a go at it. When we started it, we did

195

not think it was worth fighting for, but then it was, because we were getting people telling us to stop showing it, so it became an issue of free speech (Webb, 2006).

These examples indicate a more frequent use of subtitling across other networks as well as a wide spread acceptance of subtitling across Australian audiences and within the Australian national semiosphere. Indeed, as Ang et al. reveals in their report on media consumption, the vast majority (68 per cent) in the national sample (including both English and NESB groups) watch subtitled films, mostly on SBS (Ang et al., 2002: 32). This widespread acceptance of subtitling can be argued to be evidence of Australia’s more cosmopolitan orientation, with SBS’s contribution not to be overlooked. Andrew McCormick from Subtitling Division maintains:

Subtitling, like SBS itself, was a new concept that people had to come to terms with, and from my personal experiences, I think they did (McCormick 2006).

Additionally, success of many foreign programs broadcast by SBS relates to Benjamin’s notion of afterlife , whereby a translated text transcends cultural codes of the context in originated it, gaining a more universal appeal. Although this thesis does not examine a practice of audience behaviour, other studies refer to the popularity of SBS’s foreign programming with niche audiences within Australia’s fragmented media market (Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000). For example, Joshua Green (2005) argued that for some young viewers SBS’s LOTE programming is a strategy of distancing themselves from American content and positioning themselves as sophisticated consumers. Green quotes Lauren, one of focus group participants in his study of translation strategies of the Australian commercial networks:

Lauren : I was wondering, like everyone’s assuming that the alternative [to American products] is to show more Australian [Josh: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking] and I was thinking about sort of more foreign . I actually like, sometimes even if it’s not something I’d be interested in, it’s fun just to watch a show from a completely different country on SBS. And it’s just interesting to get such a different cultural perspective. And I think, when you look at the show on mainstream channels like 10, 9, 7, apart from, you know, American sitcoms, there are not really that many from other countries,

196

apart from America. Whereas on SBS you know they are. I guess they’re largely catering for people that have immigrated and people that want to keep in touch with back home, because we pride ourselves on being a multicultural country, I feel like they should be encouraging us to take in a bit more of other cultures. We were in the German immersion program and I think a lot of us watched, did you watch Inspector Rex ? [Tom: Yeah] I still watch it; that is a great show. It replays at the moment but that is a good show. And when I was over in Germany recently they had a lot of other good shows. And I was like, “It’s a pity we do not get these” (Green, 2005: 255-6).

Indeed, the Austrian cop show with a dog as Inspector Rex has gained broad popularity, enjoying cult status with SBS audiences. Similarly, other crime dramas on SBS such as the imported Swedish TV thriller, The Eagle or numerous Italian police dramas have found committed niche audiences. It is noteworthy that development of Italian police series is itself an exemplary transition from an original corpus of stories, largely ‘foreign’ to recognisably ‘domestic’. As Milly Buonanno illustrates the formation and transformation of the Italian police series proceeded from a dynamic exchange between national and international to build ‘a genre consciously and proudly replete with features of “national identity” and heritage’ (Buonanno, 2005: 56). Now, what Buonanno terms the formula all’italiana is transmitted from Italy and successfully broadcast also on the Australian SBS network (for example, Inspector Montalbano , Don Mateo , or classic Octopus ).

SBS’s strategy of foreignisation includes also the previously mentioned unsubtitled morning news, World Watch . This program, motivated by an extended politics of recognition, is part of a programming strategy which recognises some matters do not need to be translated in the public sphere. This stands against the moral panic surrounding the use of LOTE in Australia (which can be seen as sites of conspiracy, and/or terror). Additionally, SBS makes an explicit gesture to the untranslated foreignness in a disclaimer made before each of the imported news bulletins: ‘SBS wishes to advise that it does not endorse the content’. It is in no way insignificant; it recognises ‘asymmetry’ or ‘untranslatability’ of imports in relation to domestic cultural codes while disclaiming SBS’s limited mediation. Claus Hannekum, Overseas News Services Manager at SBS, gives concrete examples of some disparities between the Australian and imported text’s cultural system:

197

You do not show animals being killed in Australia, whereas in Spain torero is a national entertainment often featuring on the national news; also the Spanish are much more explicit and accustomed to showing carcasses of car accidents. The Spanish are notorious for it. Especially around the Easter break it’s much of it shown. [In light of this cultural incommensurability], SBS’s assumption is that viewers who watch them have a required linguistic and cultural competence to make sense of this content (Hannekum, 2006).

Interestingly, most complaints about SBS’s programming come from ethnic constituencies in relation to World Watch . This is indicative of the political nature of news-programming: its production in a home country and reception by the Australia-based ethnic groups. Georgie McClean explains the logic of the foreign news bulletin in the following way:

[We don’t subtitle World Watch for] a very practical reason. The time it’d take us to subtitle, it would no longer be news – and people can more easily access news on Internet anyway, but it’s also very costly to subtitle that amount of content. [There is] also an ideological position behind it, we can targe particular communities through news services…to give them a cotemporary sense of what’s happening in the home land, that they would not get through our news package…A lot of academic research on the impact of World Watch , traditionally migrant communities ossify to a certain point, but to provide them with a contemporary events is to offer them a possibility to see it from a totally different angle (McClean, 2006).

Arguably World Watch ’s appeal can also extended to those ‘monoglot’ audiences, those who do not have necessary linguistic codes, but can rely on a familiar shared code of television news. In Lotman’s terms, desire for dialogue is the precondition for communication. Here, interest and curiosity in the foreign can hook audiences to a program despite a language barrier. Hawkins refers to it as ‘a pleasurably dislocating experience’ of switching on a national TV service and not being able to understand a word. She suggests that these transnational programs are not exclusive to migrant constituencies, as they may also be relevant to other marginalised groupings, for example, gays, environmentalists, who seek international connections beyond the boundaries of the nation (Hawkins, 1996). SBS’s

198

commercial channels, World Movies or World News, dedicated to non-English programming can work in similar fashion. Even without subtitling, news stories from different countries but in a familiar format are always to some extent intelligible.

The second stage of translation – still on the side of foreignisation – is apparent in a variety of SBS’s programs, re-packaged and accompanied with English-language commentary, across a range of genres. Some documentary, sport (especially soccer) and the Eurovision Song Contest are considered here.

Global Village is one of SBS’s longest running documentary series that looks at the multiple ways other people of the world go about their day-to-day lives. Produced in France in collaboration with other countries, each episode contains two stories from different parts of the world. English language narration and commentary is presented by Silvio Rivier. Rod Webb commented on a specific mode of address of the national publics through introducing audiences to external ‘otherness’ rather than evoking familiarity by saying:

SBS is committed to showing travel programs, because Australians are big travellers. [While] the German travel show, for example, is usually about “Where to get Wurst 58 in Barbados?” We have Global Village on SBS (Webb, 2006).

In the Australian mediasphere a textual presence of soccer can be considered ‘peripheral’ in contrast to the ‘core’ football codes such as Rugby Union, Rugby League, or Australian or Football League. As Lotman argues, not all languages are equal within any given culture; there are many that are partial or functionally specific, fitting into a hierarchy with other languages within the semiosphere (Lotman, 1990: 125). As noted previously, this binarism and asymmetry between periphery and the core constitutes Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia’ (a plurality of social languages) and a condition for communication and creativity. This intensive dialogue within a single semiosphere, as well as between semiospheres in contact, is premised on turn taking and fluctuations between low and high status activities over time. A dynamic exchange between languages from periphery and the core induces a change within a

58 That is, a traditional German ‘sausage’.

199

permanently diverse and heterogeneous semiosphere. Lotman argues, the ‘development of culture is cyclical and like most dynamic processes in nature is subject to sinusoidal fluctuations. But in culture’s self-awareness the periods of least activity are usually recorded as intermissions’ (Lotman, 1990: 144). These periods are not ‘inactive’ but characterised by ongoing translations of peripheral or foreign texts into core or domestic languages.

Lotman’s framework enables us to conceptualise SBS’s long-running commitment to providing extensive coverage of soccer, traditionally marginalised on Australian TV as a model for a new meaning-generation and cultural transformation. After significant success of the 2005 Ashes series and the 2006 FIFA World Cup , other networks have been expressing interest in acquiring the sport rights to those events. The currently broadcast football magazine The World Game presented by Les Murray and Andrew Orsatti which features football events from around the world is praised for its comprehensive and entertaining format, setting a benchmark for other networks. In 2007 SBS won Logies for Most Outstanding Sports Coverage (for 2006 FIFA World Cup coverage), which confirmed the broadcaster’s position as a premier sports network.

Cycling has been another focal point of SBS sport programming, with broadcast rights to the Tour de France secured until 2009 and a continuing relationship with Cycling Australia, promoting the sport on the network. SBS coverage ranges from road cycling, to ring and cross-country. Both soccer and cycling are also examples of SBS’s innovative multi-platform initiatives, which have included an ongoing online presence www.sbs.com.au/worldgame and broadcast of Tour de France through broadband video in Australia in 2006 (www.sbs.com.au/tdf ). Jane Roscoe reaffirmed the significance of sport on SBS:

Sport will continue to be a big issue. SBS is known as a sport broadcaster, especially for soccer, World Cup…not just for sport fans but also ethnic communities that can relate to it; it can serve their interest. In this way we fulfil our multicultural and entertainment obligations. We took the Ashes last year [2005], and it was an enormous success, we do not know if we’ll ever get a chance to do it again. It takes a lot of time and it’s expensive, it was so good last year that I suspect we’ll also have a lot more competition (Roscoe, 2006).

200

Indeed, sport such as soccer can function as a kind of lingua franca , or ‘cultural Esperanto’ (Morley, 2000), intelligible despite language differences. In the case of SBS, soccer raised issues of programming strategies, questioning the adequacy of language quota. The question: ‘Where to place a football match between Brazil and Germany yet with English-language commentary? (Webb, 2006) summarised the conundrum faced by the broadcaster. SBS has exploited soccer’s multiculturalism for its own public means: World Cup matches for example are broadcast in English but a complimentary LOTE commentary is also available on SBS Radio. This simple mix of languages allows people to watch in English but also to hear other languages for the sake of cultural maintenance.

The large amount of airtime devoted to sport has consequences for other programming; it squeezes other programs out of the schedule. Its importance for the network’s identity and cultural impact is however recognised even by those within the organisation for whom sport significantly reduced their role. The head of subtitling unit Andrew McCormick observed:

There has been a decrease of non-English programming over the 25 years. Documentaries, co-produced by SBS are the main product; they reflect multicultural Australia and are made here. Sport also encroaches lately. Soccer in itself is an example of the work SBS does, and the cultural impact of it (McCormick, 2006).

Advertised as a show ‘Before World Idol , before Australian Idol , before Popstars 59 ’, the Eurovision Song Contest has regularly featured on the Australian national network, acquiring a ‘cult’ status. In 2003 the contest attracted 1.6 million SBS viewers nationally, with figures however dropping in 2006 to around 0.5 million. Whether its appeal to Australian audiences is due to its ‘bad taste’ as some argue or not, the event is the world’s most watched song festival, featuring multi-ethnic participants and Europe’s multilingualism, a mix that SBS is always keen to explore.

59 SBS, www.sbs.com.au (accessed May 12, 2007).

201

Acculturation: formats and local production The acculturation strategy is most evident in SBS’s locally produced content, with adaptation of TV formats being a rare practice. Generally, formats are a basis for the insertion of textual cues that pertain to the national or local culture: language, characters, settings − which makes them relate to the function of covert translation. An authorised copying of TV programs is certainly expensive for any PSB. However, financial limitations are not just a practical consideration for the network underpinned by multicultural brief. As my interviewees admitted, revenues generated from advertising, especially from SBS’s sport coverage such as the 2005 Ashes series – which attracted a record 8.5 million in capital cities and around 3.5 million in regional areas (SBS, 2006a: 11) – or the 2006 FIFA World Cup, are used to fund multicultural productions rather than acquisitions of successful commercial formats like Big Brother or Who Wants to be a Millionaire . SBS has adapted a Danish TV reality program Nerds FC , a highly localised football show featuring Aussies nerds, settings and the local vernacular. However, as argued previously, the program that recruits nerds ‘to prove the beautiful mind can take to the beautiful game [soccer]’ can potentially be innovative in the Australian mediasphere.

In recent years, more and more local multicultural content is produced through the network’s commissioning arm SBS Independent (SBSi) and broadcast on SBS. Over time, SBS has manifested a particularly strong commitment to stories about the lives of Australia’s indigenous communities. SBSi has been involved in the production of numerous indigenous television drama series and full-length features. Most recently RAN Remote Area Nurse, shot in the Torres Strait Islands in Australian English and the local Creole; film by Rolf de Heer, Ten Canoes , in Ganalbingu language and with the English subtitles, and the TV series Going Bush with Olympic champion Catherine Freeman and actor Deborah Mailman, are an interesting inversion of the translation regime in Australia. Not often are the majority of English-speaking Australians allowed an opportunity to both hear and be able to understand indigenous languages, as opposed to languages of migrants in Australia. SBS also features a weekly indigenous current affairs program Living Black , which although presented in English is Australia’s only indigenous program of that kind.

202

The importance of maintaining and developing media pluralism is an essential value of SBS stipulated by its brief. The broadcaster’s diversification of television practices is evidenced in the creation (rather than reception) of its own local formats best suited to mediating Australia’s diverse cultures rather than buying foreign TV formats. One of the most recent examples is a TV reality show, The Colony , the first living history series where early colonial life in Australia is put to the test. The TV series is a product of collaboration with RTE Ireland and History Channel UK to produce a new reality series in which participants will recreate life in a New South Wales colony 200 years ago.

Another is highly successful RocKwiz – Australia’s most original music trivia quiz show recorded live in the Gershwin Room at the legendary music venue, St Kilda’s Esplanade Hotel. Hosted by popular comedians, Julia Zemiro and Brian Nankervis, each episode features ‘two mystery musical maestros’ 60 and four lucky persons from the audience who make up two teams and play against each other in six rounds of music trivia. The show ends with live performance by invited music guests. SBS’s original multicultural drama series Kick discussed earlier is yet another example.

Crucially, because of SBS’s interesting televisual practice of translation, as outlined in this chapter, the Australian broadcaster can itself be considered as a format, with possible applications in other multicultural/multilingual contexts. This idea is further elaborated in Chapter Six which demonstrates how SBS can relate to Europe, and how the concept of translation becomes an organising metaphor for cultural citizenship in a globalising Europe and generally world-wide.

5.5 CONCLUSIONS

SBS’s dedication to the foreign in the context of national television’s general trend to ‘localise’ by the deployment of the national language or domestic production is exemplary. Its commitment to translation via subtitling allows the inclusion of imported texts within its schedule, making them a part of ‘national’ imagination but without suppressing the original voice. With a parallel investment in local production, the broadcaster’s televisual practice

60 SBS home page, www.sbs.com.au (accessed September 27, 2007).

203

indicates a unique value assigned to representing the dialectical tension between local and foreign, monolingual and multilingual, public and commercial in the contemporary setting. In this way, SBS redefines the meaning of national in a global setting through its attraction to difference, or heteroglossia rather than monoglossia traditionally cultivated by national PSBs (both in Europe and Australia).

SBS’s commitment to linguistic and cultural diversity can be also considered within broader public discourses on diversity. In the 2001 UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity , cultural diversity is claimed to be as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature. Accordingly, cultural goods must not be treated as mere commodities, and public radio and television have a responsibility to promote diversified content in the media (UNESCO, 2001). In a similar tone, the statement of International Network for Cultural Diversity argues that cultural diversity is a source of social and economic dynamism which has potential to enrich human life in the 21 st century, as it inspires creativity and stimulates innovation (International Network for Cultural Diversity, 2007). Importantly, an unmasked diversity of knowledge and ideas is crucial in a world of post-industrialised societies where information is the most valuable commodity. Translation provides access to other material, knowledges, with implications for programming as observed by Webb:

I often have to get rid of documentaries because they are in other languages than English; 75 per cent in English but the rest in LOTE. If I could arrange for this 25 per cent to be subtitled there would be much more programming, often you have to reject something good due to a lack of subtitles (Webb, 2006).

This is where SBS’s active agency in translation comes in. In the absence of a national translation, SBS is Australia’s window to the world. It is responsible for creativity and expansion of cultural referents, which requires that television stimulates and renews the interests of Australian audiences; indeed exceeds their expectations. Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere is valuable in accounting for the semiotic transformations within a single cultural system, which I argued by drawing on examples from SBS’s televisual practice. However, it seems to leave out the structural conditions of what happens to texts prior to their entry into that semiosphere, for instance political questions of access and exclusion. Since the political

204

dominance of market logic in the Anglophone world leads to a well-documented resistance to translation (Venuti, 1998, 1995), these theoretical considerations influenced by the Lotman’s semiotic perspective need to be complemented with contributions from political economy. As Cronin argues, even in languages where translation is widely practised the stress is on accessible, readable books which favour a translation strategy of least resistance and maximum acculturation (Cronin, 2003: 121 - emphasis mine). This comment is made regarding the publishing market but can be extended to screen material. Nikos Papastergiadis notes that Lotman’s theory says little about:

the distinction between language and silence, between coherence and babble, between comprehension and confusion, the determining patterns of selection that influence what languages will be learnt, and what thresholds between axioms of transparency and opaqueness in language will be sustained in order to stimulate particular forms of knowledge and permit the emergence of particular claims (Papastergiadis, 2000: 187).

I have previously addressed some of those political issues in relation to the role of professional figures such as programmer and subtitlers within the SBS as a cultural organisation. As argued above, the task of SBS programmers, such as the former Rod Webb or currently Jane Roscoe, involves the knowledge not only of the textual aspects of television (intertextuality, reception in a receiving culture, what makes a good TV) but also those of international markets, conditions of production of both screen products and translations. These are clearly issues beyond semiotics and pertaining to the political economy of production, and importantly, politics of language and translation: what texts are rendered ‘translatable’ despite inherent differences and asymmetry, on what basis can a selection be made, what are available resources and inventories of products, which translation is accepted, and what are the values motivating the relation between the translator (with resources and cultural capital) and ‘ordinary’, often ‘monolingual’, ‘monocultural’ public. There are finally questions regarding the value system and acts of judgment implicit in the translation practices of a public broadcaster such as SBS, itself a translator, within a broader context of political and cultural expediency of the moment.

205

Michael Cronin’s reference to Joyce’s echoland defined as a constant coexistence of multiple other languages, but always troubling for ‘the unilingual visionaries of Odell’s millenarian fantasies’ is illuminating:

Translation on a planet which currently has more than 6,000 language communities is an increasingly complex and challenging. The last thing we want in the Echoland that is our planet is to be condemned to the sounds of our own voices (Cronin, 2003: 7).

This chapter does not consider developments in new media at the SBS, although much innovation is taking place in SBS’s online and multi-platform environment. Indeed, the importance of SBS TV’s textual ‘dialogic’ model that facilitates interaction of heterogenous cultural elements within the Australian ‘mediasphere’, is now enhanced by new media technologies that allow differentiated transnational connections around taste; rather than nation-state-centred and increasing identifications around content creation. The most recent Movie Show is a good example of SBS’s multi-platform initiatives, as is the transition of SBS from a cosmopolitan agenda of the 1990s, The World is an Amazing Place , to Your Space is an Amazing Place of mid-2000. The latter prioritises the viewer’s experience, rather than the perspective offered by the network in the construction of SBS’s audience community. Such a direction is in line with the localisation at the centre of participatory culture and user-led content, found especially in citizen journalism.

206

6 MULTICULTURAL PROGRAM ‘ALCHEMY’ AS A RADIO LABORATORY: IDEAS ABOUT CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION

Our times are characterized by intensified interconnectedness and interaction between different socio-political systems, complex flows of migration, and fluid identities. Radio stations have to re-invent themselves to accommodate these dynamics; they face the challenge of fragmentation and new possibilities for creative combination. Considering a youth multicultural program Alchemy as a model of radio laboratory, I demonstrate the ways in which its hybrid content provides a forum for staging cultural pluralism and new forms of cross-cultural engagement with and amongst audiences. Some recommendations are proposed to assist SBS Radio in responding to the changing Australian social fabric in line with its multicultural public mandate.

6.1 INTRODUCTION

Every night between 11 o’clock and midnight on the SBS national radio, young listeners are drawn into the laboratory of the radio alchemist, a multicultural youth feature. Explosive sounds and jingles intermingle with diverse voices and stories, creatively combined, contrasted and shared, extracted and fused, interwoven and celebrated. Through a myriad of arrangements – combining radio genres and styles, cultures and languages – local and global connections are endlessly tested. The transforming processes of Alchemy ’s auditory experimentations are unpredictable and non-conclusive: they are always speculative and negotiated, always including the inevitable syncretisms and hybridities that occur across stylistic and cultural borders. Like the medieval alchemic endeavour, radio Alchemy is not only about the transformation of physical substances (of lead into gold, or, in the case of radio, sounds and voices) but about parallel changes in states of mind, shifts in perspectives towards a ‘plural other’.

Visual media retain a distance between the audience and the object, and thereby favour scrutiny, control and detachment. Sound, on the other hand, enters the listener; it is

207

immersive, incorporating, holistic. Vision dissects, isolates, individualises; speech and music unify and strive for participation and harmony (in Ong, 1982: 26). W. Welsch observes that hearing – a precondition for perceiving speech and speaking – means ‘connecting with people, with our social existence’ (in Leeuwen, 1999: 197).2 Eco, instead, points to the egalitarianism of points of view (in the listening experience), where ‘all available perspectives are equally valid and rich in potential’ (in Leeuwen, 1999: 196). This enveloping nature of the auditory experience implicates dynamic interrelationality and acceptance of difference within the shared acoustic and social space. Additionally, Tacchi argues that radio listening aids individuals in their ‘everyday enterprise of affective identity creation and maintenance’(Tacchi, 2005). All this makes the low-cost, low-tech radio medium an engaging proposition to advance the ‘unity in diversity’ model and to contribute to more inclusive, non- uniform (Crisell, 1986) and multi-layered senses of belonging in the contemporary world.

Alchemy represents an important strategy on the part of SBS to hail an increasingly cosmopolitan youth demographic. Improving the appeal to young audiences is a challenge generally faced by PSB across the world, and SBS has been making some inroads into this space. Seen as a working model of multicultural broadcasting, the Alchemy radio program offers ideas for representing and engaging with complex and multiple cultural identifications and cross-cultural communication. This chapter does not set out to prove the transformative nature of Alchemy , but to identify its innovation. Using program and policy analysis, I suggest that a new type of multicultural broadcasting is emerging.

In what way is Alchemy a ‘radio laboratory’? Markedly different from traditional minority language programming on SBS Radio, it mirrors the SBS TV model: English as the lingua franca and a cross-cultural target audience. By stimulating hybrid content it deliberately stages heterogeneous, often under-represented, multi-cult music and story material. In doing this, it tries to appeal to, and in fact depict, the audience it targets; young Australians comfortable with their hybrid identities. This includes not only those ethnic or hyphenated Australians who live daily in a position of cultural multiplicity, but also Anglo-Celtic Australians open to cultural pluralism out of interest and pleasure in ‘otherness’. According to Living Diversity Report, this audience experiences an ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ (Ang et al., 2002). Studying the Alchemy program as a radio laboratory – that is, a place for trying out

208

new ideas and recruiting young broadcasters – also affords a means of understanding the wider developments of SBS Radio. As a public broadcaster, SBS is bound by its multicultural and multilingual charter to respond to the redrafting of Australia’s social contours and to changes in the media landscape. It also has an obligation to foster common identities and bind Australian society together. As an English-language program, Alchemy opens and closes a wide spectrum of language on the SBS’s airwaves. Its very presence within 67 non-English voices marks an interesting moment in the history of SBS radio – a self-conscious assessment of the place that the multilingual, traditionally LOTE broadcaster has reached and where it may evolve to. It signals an awareness of changing demographics among its traditional audience. Many aging language communities are not being fully replaced by new migration. There is also a decreasing knowledge of LOTE amongst second and third generations of migrants’ children. These audiences have different needs and expectations from SBS. Paradoxically, for its own survival, SBS Radio is confronted with the need to undermine its own foundations as a multilingual broadcaster by providing more bilingual output (half- LOTE, half-English within a language program), and features solely in English, for instance Alchemy .

The German language group, for example, has introduced ‘a type of multilingual programming’ (Wimmer-Kleikamp, 2004a). This is due to a change in the community profile, specifically the arrival of well-qualified, young migrants with a high proficiency in English and cultural assimilation rate, as well as the second generation born in Australia but not speaking the German language. In addition to a transnational ‘EuropaMagazine’ and a Saturday youth program, there are two weekly programs that have a bilingual content. Dutch and Hebrew language programming indicates a similar linguistic tendency: more English and youth content on air. Yet, the Alchemy program, located at the extremities of SBS Radio’s daily schedule, continues to be an ambivalent amendment to ethnic language broadcasting. Other producers see Alchemy either as a program with a high level of experimentation in style targeting a ‘new’ audience profile or, as an odd, raucous, disruptive and music-centred anomaly on a multilingual bandwidth. Whether merely a generational comment or a justified argument, the presence of the English-language Alchemy program is nonetheless consonant with SBS’s principal function to ‘inform, educate and entertain all Australians’(SBS, 2006a) – not just, as it is still prejudicially believed by some, ethnics, migrants, and linguistic

209

minorities. Additionally, its innovative and engaging magazine format is an attempt to reflect and reinforce increasingly diverse and cross-cultural dynamics, involving voluntary and cosmopolitan identity construction.

6.2 LIVING DIVERSITY – IMPLICATIONS FOR RE-INVENTION OF PSB

The 2002 Living Diversity: Australia’s Multicultural Future report, commissioned by SBS to inform its policy decisions in relation to its multilingual and multicultural mandate, revealed

• There is no evidence of stereotypical homogenous ethnic ghettos; • Cultural diversity is a growing trend for the “mainstream” Australia, especially with the increasing numbers of the second and third-generation Australians of NESB (Non- English-Speaking Background) who express positive views on multiculturalism and cultural diversity.

The report suggests that ‘Australians from all backgrounds, NESB and English speaking alike, both city and country, experience everyday cosmopolitanism: this occurs in parallel to their connections with their families and cultural traditions’ (Ang et al., 2002: 6). These hybrid lives of Australians, defined by multiple cultural influences, were identified by the study as a primary concern for the future directions of the multicultural broadcaster. Yet, the report’s findings on this matter barely impacted on SBS Radio’s provision of services. Cross- cultural segments comprise 0.88 per cent of SBS content (McClean, 2003). Similarly, even though there is a broad understanding within SBS Radio management and amongst language broadcasters that the programming priority needs to be given to the youth audience (which eventually will become the core demographic), youth make up only 1.15 per cent of SBS radio’s ethnic language broadcasting (McClean, 2003).

Some language groups, especially those with a high percentage of cross-ethnic marriages and a high level of integration within the Australian society, have been addressing their youth audience on individual programs. Others, such as the French program, incorporate features for the young audience within their weekly programming. The allocation of explicitly youth- orientated depends on the number of hours per week a particular language group has at its

210

disposal, which is based on an assessment of particular qualifiers of the community (size, age, socio-economic status, qualifications, mixed marriages, and so on) and its English language competence. Still, almost all language groups express difficulties in reaching and maintaining young audiences. They will not succeed as long as their program is ‘conservative and inward looking’, a collection of patriotic songs, coverage of folk festivals and pre-recorded interviews with visiting officials from the home countries (Wimmer-Kleikamp, 2004b). A ‘rejuvenation’ of content seems to be in order – possibly produced and transmitted by the young broadcasters themselves. One solution would be to obtain another frequency that could be devoted to youth, world music, and cross-cultural segments – for which English would have to be a bridging language. Christoph Wimmer-Kleikamp, the acting program manager, agrees:

Unless we manage to translate what we’re doing at the moment into the future, we’re making ourselves increasingly irrelevant in most language groups … we should look at cross-cultural phenomena and reflect them in our programming; one of possible solutions would be to include English language radio frequency (Wimmer-Kleikamp, 2004a).

The idea that broadcasting holds the potential for community building, constituting a public sphere and promoting the collective imaginary, has been envisaged from the early days of radio and television. Its integrative function was especially exploited in the modern era of the nation-state. In our times of multiple satellite and internet communication services, the penetration of broadcasting has been extended beyond territorial boundaries, with transnational stations simultaneously fragmenting and binding constituencies across national borders. Much research exists on the role of diasporic and international media in the creation and sustenance of identities (Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000). These transnational and deterritorialisation processes have been accompanied by dynamic cross-influencing and hybridisation of multi-national populations. As ‘Australianness’ is re-defined in terms of multiple, multi-layered identities rather than fixed and stable cultural forms, paternalistic models of nation-state broadcasting can no longer be sustained. Public service broadcasting’s traditional role of promoting national belonging needs to be reformulated beyond notions of unity, homogeneity or a monocultural set of values and beliefs. According to Raboy, ‘we need

211

a new definition of PSB suitable to a new public culture, global in scope and experienced locally’ (Raboy, 1995: 5).

SBS Radio, like any other PSB, faces the challenge – but also the excitement – of following the rhythms of globalisation and cultural diversity. It needs to reflect our contemporary everyday existence which is improvised across a plethora of micro-societies and interweaving systems of cultural and linguistic habits and inhibitions, aspirations and opportunities. A culturally hybridised Australia requires that public broadcasting finds new ways to cater for changing habits and desires of the audience (its media citizenry), particularly demands for more cross-cultural interaction and participation. While mainstream media compete for populist programming, SBS can provide access to a wider and, many would say, fairer, expression and representation of different cultural components. It can recognise legitimate alternative world views without losing sight of what binds people together in particular settings. Such has been SBS’s mandate throughout its history as a multicultural broadcaster in Australia. While SBS’s television services have been popularly linked to an explicit cosmopolitan, cross-cultural agenda, SBS Radio has been instrumental in the empowerment of largely marginalised LOTE audiences. Both have contributed successfully to Australia’s multiculturalism on a limited budget and within frequently unstable governmental rationalities.

6.3 MULTICULTURAL ALCHEMY, AND TRANSFORMATION PROCESS

The Alchemy program taps into these strategic developments to address a hybrid youth audience and to meet the requirements of a culturally intermingled reality. Initially a dance music program on SBS TV, it moved to radio in 2002, assuming a more cross-cultural orientation than its television predecessor. It constitutes an aesthetic hybrid that makes the most of the profusion of choices available narratively and technically. This is analogous to the constitution of hybrid personal identities. Alchemy ’s abstract, magazine-oriented, intentionally heterogeneous radio structure differs significantly from the predominantly news-oriented language featured on SBS radio. It is also quite distinct from commercial radio stations’ programming. The practice of experimenting in style, content, and format renders the comparison with a laboratory useful. Indeed, the whole radio program becomes material for

212

the Alchemist’s mixing desk: manipulation of the sound, overwriting, multilayering; transforming voices extracted from archives, TV stations or advertisements; word accentuation, sonic distortion and acoustic animation; a blend of local stories with the global ones, the familiar with the foreign; fabrication of a bricolage, a hybrid, mimicking the complex and diversified world, indexing the multiple sub-streams that constitute our mainstream. Compacted into a one-hour time slot, this dense radio style occasionally carries an air of over-production at the expense of improvisation and on-air participation with the audience. Especially, frequent repetition of particular phrases throughout the program and application of sounds that either distort or emphasize certain words or lines within interviews create, at times, an exaggerated or forced feeling. Alchemy ’s producers, however, perceive these sound techniques as deliberate efforts to construe an identifiable, sensuous radio texture.

Music and poetics of multilingualism By and large, radio has succeeded in bringing communities together through music, comedy and drama rather than classically political content. Music is the prime ingredient of Alchemy ’s hybrid mix, the secret element that makes ‘synthesis possible’, to borrow from Michael C. Keith (Keith, 2002). The program’s music content has ranged from African hip-hop and German dub to Japanese electro and Polish ragge. Unconstrained by commercial pressures, Alchemy offers a viable alternative to radio stations dominated by pop-chart music formats. It is not so much the introduction of a wide range of less-known musical styles sourced from across the globe that distinguishes it from the rest of the stations on the Australian mainstream airwaves – on other stations such as Global Village on the ABC’s Triple J youth network do this also. Rather, it is the selection, style and presentation of multilingual music. Alchemy operates on the non-tokenistic premise: authenticity and polyvocality are preferred over mono-cultural Anglo-Celtic assumptions of ‘what represents’ other cultures.

The segment ‘Beyond Borders’, for example, has developed a particular type of transnational radio speech that connects its listeners to global beats and local tunes from around the world in proper Alchemy style. Its hosts (who both source and present multilingual music) are from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This allows the commonly silenced linguistic difference to be heard and recognised. It is a medium for showcasing diverse accents on the national radio airwaves, something that other public or commercial radio stations rarely do

213

(apart from SBS Radio). Through a simple strategy of repetitive foreign language inserts, short announcements and greetings, Alchemy subtly conveys the otherness of the voices popularly suppressed in the Australian media. As the survey results from Broadcasting Commission of Ireland indicated this is a successful method to stimulate interest in other than a dominant language (Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, 2004). It allows the diversity of languages, out of which the Australian linguistic map is fabricated to be disseminated and audibly experienced. In refusing to cover up linguistic and cultural origin, the program unmasks the processes of translation at play. Global beats are re-territorialised and indigenised (for example, Aboriginal hip-hop), and English, a foreign language for many, is learned and translated. These strategies render cross-cultural, international communication possible.

Former Alchemy producer Brendan Palmer admits that a multi-lingual agenda is strongly woven into the roots of Alchemy . Featuring tracks that are partially or fully in a language other than English is considered to be a political statement. However, in Palmer’s words, this is often as simple as ‘this exists – please take notice’ (Harrison, 2003). In the Alchemy ’s music laboratory, different variants of English serve as a means to connect multicultural audiences. Music, as a universal language, remains the primary strategy by which Alchemy producers try to engage as broad an audience as possible. Through or around music it tells stories about the places particular pieces come from. In doing this, Alchemy ’s team have been particularly devoted to promoting ‘underground beats and bring[ing] together the sounds of Australia’s multi-cult music makers’ by providing airtime and editorial support to talented emerging artists. 61

Hip-hop style dominates the music selection. Being the most active lyrical modern music and a significantly verbal form, it has proven especially important for musicians of various language and racial backgrounds to manifest their cultural diversity. In the Australian context, it allows them to define themselves as either ethnic, indigenous, local Australian, or ‘as an integral part of a transnational, global formation’ (in Mitchell, 1996: 198). To this end, hip- hop’s glocality (a hybridised coexistence of the local and the global) fits in perfectly with

61 Alchemy’s editorial, http://www.sbs.com.au/alchemy (accessed 4 May 2005).

214

Alchemy ’s internal programming logic. Its denial of top-down (mostly American) mono- cultural style and preference for clearly local inflections manifest in the use of a specific local idiom, slang, accent and local themes. Beats of traditional music mixed with a jingle from an advertisement on the local TV station, and so on, are seen as attractive material for Alchemy ’s radio experiment. Whether in the Australian or non-Australian productions showcased by the Alchemy ’s Beyond Border (2004-2005) contributors, hip-hop style localises itself beyond community and national borders. While maintaining a local, culturally specific flavour, it appeals to a wider, international audience.

Stories, news, and current affairs Along with music and multilingual announcing, broadcast stories and current affairs also form Alchemy ’s radio identity and define its target audience. The program’s editorial states that by ‘challenging mainstream media’s perception of our world, Alchemy crunches down current affairs and puts a subversive spin on traditional sounds and stories from all corners of the world’ ( Alchemy ’s editorial, http://www.sbs.com.au/ Alchemy (accessed 4 May 2005). Alchemy provides a multi-cult mix of cultural and political stories, in tension to unitary and fixed worldviews on the mainstream media that tend toward cultural assimilation. The program attempts to engage popularly disengaged young sections of the Australian public through a more inter-national perspective than particular SBS language groups. It is widely acknowledged that youth all around the world are uninterested in news delivered via the mainstream media (Sinclair and Turner, 2004: 44). Young audiences often feel alienated by the news coverage, seeing it as sensationalising their group and maintaining a paternalistic relationship between the program and the audience it addresses. Alchemy , produced by young broadcasters themselves, reverses this trend by holding conversations about current affairs with young people, and doing so with respect to multiple perspectives and contexts.

Simon Winkler, a Melbourne producer for Alchemy , points out:

Alchemy is trying to be more intelligent in its analysis, presenting a number of different views and contrasting them; making them accessible but also, in terms of formatting, we refrain from straight interviews, adding sound effects, excerpts of documentaries that have been made, audio editing, cutting edge sounds, a little bit glitch...[By being] a little

215

more irreverent with the subject material, we take a humorous look at some news event while covering a story, we talk to young people who might have a contrary perspective, instead of automatically going on to experts, officials (Winkler, 2004).

Alchemy ’s mix of topics have stretched from interviews with young Greek-Australians pondering their sentiments about a wide-spread use of the word ‘wog’, conversations with a Russian SBS broadcaster on dilemmas of translation between two languages, documentaries involving young Israelis and Palestinians from the region commenting upon Ariel Sharon’s plans to evacuate 8,000 thousand settlers from the Gaza strip, and stories about indigenous artefacts returned to local communities from overseas museums.

Cultural translation and transformation Sean Cubitt and other cultural translation theorists have asserted that ‘the fundamental attribute of communication is mediation’ rather than flawed representation (Cubitt, 1997). If a community refers to the lifeworld which it inhabits and shares in the conversation (which affects its discourse), then the introduction of different observations and differing points of view results in transformation and shifts in perspectives. This in turn lays down conditions for cultural evolution, change and enlivenment. Constant, dynamic contact and exchange of heterogenous elements that come from cultural peripheries or cultures behind the boundaries of a given culture stimulate all creativity and progress (Lotman, 1990).

Alchemy ’s mediatory radio practice attempts to do that. Through a range of programming across local and global contexts, it exposes its listeners to cultural otherness, creating a space for co-existence of differences and simultaneity of provisional (never quick or conclusive) knowledges about the world. It introduces a variety of identity positions that contribute to what Tomlinson calls ‘modern imagination of subjectivity’, the construction of a very sense of what it means to be an individual and to belong to a place and community (in Sinclair and Turner, 2004: 26). The way in which a diversity of perspectives are brought together and represented in Alchemy ’s radio texture could be seen as a working model for a new type of multicultural broadcasting on SBS radio. This hybrid format can be conceptualised as metonymic to a composite hybrid identity of young Australians, a forum where a sense of cultural attachment could be structured in challenge to the dominance of national identity or

216

territorial borders and in favour of development of a more cosmopolitan cultural outlook (Tomlinson, 1999). It is where complex forms of identification could be defined, not only by ethnic and/or national origin or heritage, but also free cultural associations around specific transnational radio consumption.

In Alchemy ’s case, by shared interest in the international contemporary music scene and diverse irreverent underground stories from countries of origin for some listeners, for others, from unknown distant places instead stereotyped, tokenistic versions of cultures that feature on the commercial networks. Additionally, a program that focuses on a youth cosmopolitan demographic rather than minority language communities has potential to advance multicultural broadcasting beyond mediation of fragmented, supposedly self-contained components of Australia’s multiethnic, multilingual environment. Rather than merely staging cultural heterogeneity and linguistic difference, it could promote modern tendencies of cultural interplay, mutual influencing, co-existence and fusion. The commitment to actively establish connections between different genres, geographical locations and young Australians from NESB and Anglo-Celtic backgrounds is inherent in Alchemy ’s internal logic.

On the one hand, the program’s imaginative experimentation with diverse sonic and narrative material from diverse territories across the world, with foreign and familiar, local and global elements represents a complex web of political and cultural relations characteristic of twenty- first century world. It reminds us of the multicultural, hybridised condition of the Australian society and the interconnected global world at large, which, as Ulrich Beck observes, ‘is turning into an open network with blurring boundaries, where outside is already inside’ (Beck, 2003). On the other hand, the investment in cross-cultural content (whether hip-hop music or alternative topics) demonstrates an effort to bind youth audiences together across the multicultural spectrum. Not only is this true for ethnic background Australians who, as part of their migrant condition, have developed cultural identities that are constantly in a state of transition and negotiation but also young citizens of Anglo origin. These cosmopolitan Australians are already interested in other cultural experiences – others could potentially be educated in living in diversity through an appealing radio material. As a result, the Alchemy program could offer transformatory potential to accommodate and contribute to development of multi-layered cultural identities a more inclusive sense of cultural experience and

217

belonging required by the contemporary globalised multi-ethnic societies. Indeed, the Connecting Diversity report (2006) identifies what it refers to as ‘interactive cultural diversity’ – which describes people at ease with difference despite continuing tensions – as an increasingly mainstream experience for many younger Australians of culturally diverse backgrounds. As noted by respondents in the study, the most valued experience of multiculturalism is one where difference interacts, in a ‘connecting diversity’ fashion (Ang et al., 2006: 25).

Alchemy ’s cross-cultural journey towards a new, plural and multilayered belonging is often structured within a framework of a travel, highlighting the process of identity formation characterised by fluidity and hybridity. The complexity of varied cultural influences and hybridisation are captured by sounds of moving across the world in Alchemy ’s jingles and thematically in the distinct segments such as the multilingual music program ‘Beyond Borders’ – a sound trip that defies borders and spans continents of multilingual/ multi-form/ multilayered/multi-cult musicology from Icelandic electronica, Parisian chill, Berliner tech- house, Arabic dance, City-scope (global travel across global cosmopolitan cities), and Sound- e-scape (an allusion to virtual escapes enabled by modern technologies). The constant presence of travelling narratives in the form of stories about metropolises, machines and movements operates as a metaphor for a certain vision of the Australian society: cosmopolitan, dynamic, interconnected.

6.4 CONCLUSIONS

While SBS Radio has achieved a great deal in giving voice to the marginalised LOTE audiences and contributing to Australia’s multiculturalism, the greatest challenge faced by SBS management is how to remain socio-culturally relevant for the new generations of its audiences. SBS radio’s services are still required by specific language communities. In particular, minority constituencies with a low proficiency of English who cannot access the news provided on mainstream media (for example, Vietnamese) are strongly reliant on SBS radio. Similarly, well-established groups who mostly speak English value SBS for the LOTE programming to assist their maintenance of cultural and linguistic heritage (for example, Dutch, German). Reflecting more actively on the changing social fabric of the Australian

218

society, SBS radio nevertheless needs to seek new integrative formats to bring people together across languages and cultures. In doing this, the major objective for the broadcaster lies in attracting the missing generation, the youth on SBS radio.

Alchemy ’s hybrid radio format indicates as an emerging strategy of multicultural broadcasting. Devoted to multi-sourcing of fresh, interesting stories from places that most Australians normally do not have access to, it introduces its listeners to a wide range of less- known multilingual music from around the globe, presenting familiar topics in a more creative manner. Such a distinct, cross-cultural content – alternative to most of mainstream media output – offers potential for engagement with young Australians. The analysis of the program’s structure demonstrates how culturally and linguistically diverse young audiences can be brought together by music and stories in English. Conversely, reliant on sound, SBS Radio generally divides its audience along linguistic lines, allocating specific language in hourly time slots, and thus minimising a concurrent cross-cultural/linguistic exchange and dialogue.

In rethinking the future of public service broadcasting, the power of radio sound in the constitution of social relations should not be underestimated. As a most intimate medium, radio can ‘add to the textured environment (or material culture) within which everyday lives are lived, and social selves are created, re-created and modified’ (Tacchi, 1998: 43). Through the affective and aesthetic qualities of the sonic representation, different realities and identity possibilities are more readily and informally imagined and experienced. This powerfully emotive form of communication contributes directly to the work of imagination and can have both cultural and political value in building empathy, tolerance and cross-cultural understanding.

219

7 SBS AS A MODEL FOR EUROPEAN PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

Interviewer : What are your reflections on the idea of translating the SBS model into the EU?

Jane Roscoe : Take it anywhere! [laugh]. It’s the best model we have here. What surprises me is that there are not other stations that look like SBS; I’m surprised that other countries do not have SBS, how come are we so unique? (Roscoe, 2006)

7.1 INTRODUCTION

In previous chapters I have argued that SBS’s ‘uniqueness’ as a multilingual, multicultural service is due to a combination of structural and philosophical factors that have come to define the broadcaster’s operations over time. One is a particular logic of this public service broadcasting that allows for a creative mix of a modernist vision of acculturation with popular entertainment, Antonioni meets Mythbusters . Hand in hand with this goes a strong commitment to the value of quality and media pluralism (including multilingual programming) but paralleled with ‘credit given to audiences’ intelligence’ (Webb, 2006). Another balancing strategy between the public and commercial is secured by a hybrid model of financing which requires that the SBS observes also market discipline. In the light of Europe’s institutional efforts to promote European multilingual citizenship via the EU translation services, but without an effective infrastructure for national or pan-European multilingual broadcasting, the chapter discusses how the SBS relates to the EU context and what lessons can be learned from the Australian experiment in multilingual and multicultural television.

The SBS model is proposed here as a model for national or possibly regional broadcast network; it is not thought of as a model for a pan-European broadcast service. The thrust of argument is that such a system bring together material from multiple sources to be managed within a functioning cultural system. Here is an articulation of the translation function in a

220

concrete form: translation from many into one field; translation of foreign material from multiple sources to a target culture.

Drawing on my fieldwork, I present some cross-cultural strategies developed by editors and program-makers to address diverse audiences both in Europe and Australia. I argue that SBS’s traditional ‘in-betweenness’ might stand as a model for developments in a globalising and pluralizing world generally, with translation at the centre of transnational/interlingual citizenship formation, rather than fulfilling a secondary function. My argument is aimed to contribute to the elaboration of such a project for Europe based on mediated interlingual exchange. However, SBS is not argued to be a panacea for all European problems around linguistic diversity, whether at the supranational or national levels. Instead, the broadcaster presents an interesting model of a mediated translation, indicative of how tensions between mainstream monolingual versus special multilingual audiences can be brokered via broadcasting. This is important in the context of the new media uptake. The Internet, for example, is a far less heavily politicized medium than a traditional PSB; it has a broad appeal to people (especially young demographics) irrespective of national and cultural boundaries. It also offers a plenitude of LOTE online content with an on-hand opportunity for translation for every one. Issues of translation quality aside, it can bridge linguistic differences in a democratic fashion, posing a question about the future directions of a multilingual broadcaster like SBS.

Ideas about linguistic diversity, translation and multilingual models of broadcasting from the EU and Australia pulled together make up a possible prototype and aim to enrich an ongoing debate on mediated interlingual citizenship in a globalised world. It should also be noted that the Australian ‘original’ cannot be fully reproduced or realised in Europe for reasons of differing cultural histories and geopolitical contexts. Broadcasting is deeply rooted in, and dependent on, a society’s political experience, institutions and resources – not to mention its journalistic traditions and resources – so that each society must evolve its own translations . Still, many European-based authors mention SBS as an example of successful multilingual/multicultural public television, more suitable than Euronews or MTV to be considered as a model for Europe (Phillipson, 2003; Born, 2004). In this sense, following

221

Lotman, I propose the SBS as a format for media translation that can be adapted and localised to non-Australian context, including the EU and its constituent member states.

7.2 THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT FOR MULTILINGUAL CITIZENSHIP

The emergence of a European public sphere as a prerequisite for social cohesion in Europe has been widely discussed amongst political and academic circles in Europe. Two differing stances dominate the research in European studies: one perspective emphasises the widely grieved absence of European identity while the other argues that a common identification is in fact evolving as part of the natural process of globalisation. They both provide evidence in support of their position. ‘A narrative of absence’ uses examples of national rather than ‘European’ framing that still is manifested in national media Europe-wide; Eurosceptism in public opinion, anti-European votes in the Constitution referenda of 2005, Americanisation of screen culture, and unbridgeable cultural and linguistic heterogeneity continent-wide. ‘A narrative of presence’ for its part quotes global phenomena of migration, grass-roots transnational, the Internet and new media-based media consumption, travel, common public responses to international events (for example, opposition to war in Iraq), European research networks, and establishment of English as a connecting lingua franca (for example, Trandafoiu, 2006).

Despite different conclusions, the theoretical point of entry for both accounts is the Habermasian concept of a public sphere (that is, a communicative space between state and citizenry), and the role of mass mediated communication central to binding citizens and consumers into Anderson’s ‘imagined community’. They also agree on the existence of unresolved tensions between ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’, the issues of linguistic differences and the inherent limits of translatability of information or ideas. The area of culture, particularly the aspect of languages in Europe, harbours constraints. As Balibar reminds us, every genuine political entity and community needs an idiom; this is ‘the condition under which one can speak of a public sphere’ (Balibar, 2004). The linguist Abraham de Swaan perceived advantages and disadvantages:

222

The variety of languages and cultures in Europe surely is a wealth, but it is also a burden. Barriers of language and culture are an almost insurmountable obstacle to the exchange of opinions among Europeans. They impede the emergence of a European public sphere, where political and cultural debate may be carried on beyond borders. The Europeans do not understand each other well enough even to disagree (in Sktunabb- Kangas, 2003: 2-3).

De Swaan’s portrayal of Europe’s languages as an asset but also a hindrance to the formation of a European communicative space met with criticism from his own colleagues (for example, Sktunabb-Kangas, 2003). It is however a popular frame in European discourse, and something that the European Union has been at pains to accommodate through its language policy provisions and action plans, since its earliest years. On the face of it, European undertakings in this area are driven by the official policy of multilingualism: it guarantees equal status to all the official languages of the EU member states, as well as promoting minority languages and language learning. Its policy and regulations are meant to promote an indiscriminate access to information about the EU’s workings and effective inter-European communication, for the greater purpose of advancing a continental socio-political order. Yet, this process of language management has proven very complex, due to the ‘explosiveness’ of language issues, and also due to a multitude of overlapping international, national, regional and local arenas of language and debate in Europe. Across the whole debate and practice runs uneasiness with the established hierarchies of national and international languages, an urge for a common language, English language hegemony, and standardising ‘Americanisation’ versus Europe’s historical multilingual vocation. It has been difficult to reconcile a need to ‘heal Europe’s linguistic fractures’ while maintaining its linguistic heritage (Eco, 1995).

Translation as a discursive frame for multicultural practices Within translation studies and ever more frequently cultural and media studies, theoretical works argue that translation is ideally placed to cope with both the transnational processes of globalisation (or Europeanisation), and anti-globalisation (or anti-Americanisation), with migration, multilingual societies and new media at the forefront of change (Born, 2004; Cronin, 2003). My argument is aligned with those broad proposals that conceive of translation not as a sole province of linguists or literary scholars, but as one of the resources people draw

223

on to respond to the effects of economic, social, and cultural shifts in their lives (Morris, 1997). In this chapter I follow particularly Umberto Eco’s and Etienne Balibar’s approach to translation as a fundamental discourse for understanding contemporary Europe’s past, present and future.

As mentioned in Chapter Two, one of the four ‘worksites’ where European democracy faces major challenges, and where transformations are seen as necessary is the domain of culture, ‘but above all “the language of Europe”’ (Balibar, 2004: 177). Balibar argues:

…the ‘language of Europe’ is not a code but a constantly transformed system of crossed usages; it is translation ’. Better yet, it is the reality of social practices of translation at different levels, the medium of communication upon which all others depend (Balibar, 2004: 178 − emphasis in original).

This position is very congruent with Umberto Eco’s account, when he observes:

Generalised polyglotism is certainly not the solution to Europe’s cultural problems…The solution for the future is more likely to be in a community of peoples with an increased ability to receive the spirit, to taste or savour the aroma of different dialects. Polyglot Europe will not be a continent where individuals converse freely in all the other languages; in the best of cases, it could be a continent where differences of language are no longer barriers to communication , where people can meet each other and speak together, each in his or her own tongue, understanding, as best they can, the speech of others. In this way, even those who never learn to speak another language fluently could still participate in its particular genius, catching a glimpse of the particular cultural universe (Eco, 1995: 350-1 − emphasis mine).

Such an understanding hints at the ‘community of translation’ rather than universal intelligibility of the pre-Babel situation, with the role of ‘interpreter’ depending on ‘configuration of exchange’ being central (Eco, 1995: 350-1). Translation then becomes a metaphor for a mode of sociality in the European multilingual context, a vision of negotiation

224

and mutually enriching social relations in a multicultural present. Indeed, as Meagan Morris argues in her introduction to Naoki Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity , translation as a social relation is a practice always conducted in the company of others and structuring the situation in which it is performed (Morris, 1997: xiv). Within such a conceptual framing practical questions of what people actually do and how they achieve access to communication across different languages are central. Translation, like acquisition of foreign languages, is an unevenly distributed skill. In Balibar’s words it is located at the two ends of society: one represented by ‘the intellectuals and writers of uprooting and exile (inheritors of Heinrich Heine, Elias Canetti, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad)’, the other, by ‘anonymous migrants who occupy the lowest posts in the division of labour’, while for the intermediary levels this competence is prevented, blocked by almost uniformly monolingual national education systems’ (Balibar, 2004: 178). He argues for the need to mitigate the established inequalities in the style of the great ‘cultural revolutions’ of learning (that is, via popularisation of literacy and schooling).

This thesis complements Balibar’s and Eco’s philosophical stance on translation as the public discourse of multiculturalism with arguments for the role of the textual system in ‘mitigating the established inequalities’ while providing a popular forum for interlinguistic engagements in Europe. SBS features as a prominent example of such a mediated communication, which, like the EU dimension of study, allows thinking beyond the bounds of the national and towards translation. SBS’s experiment in providing an interlingual media space is as desirable as it is daring at times. It is ridden with asymmetries, power plays and tensions; tactical manoeuvres and endless negotiations around essentialisms and ethnic stereotypes. However, in contrast to the EU inspired PSB initiatives, SBS’s version of multicultural is not…dull. SBS’s former programmer Rod Webb compares the two:

Eurovision is considered a joke and so is EBU. They are pissing in the wind, dreadful; each country [has] different attitudes towards its audience, lowest common denominator, no humour, patronising, well-meaning and extremely boring. SBS used to be like EBU: patronising, educational, not-edgy, but well-meaning and…incredibly boring (Webb, 2006).

225

National public broadcasting in Europe The history of broadcasting in Europe as a largely national project has not been much about translation. Implemented to serve the public interest and meet national and political objectives, it was driven by the logic of maximising audiences across difference and constructing national unity. Broadcasting was thus addressed to an abstracted, undifferentiated mass, demarcated by a common single language and cultural unity, or, what Max Dorra describes, as the ‘group illusion…ferociously eliminating all difference’ (in Morley, 2000: 260). The cultural-pedagogic mission of European PSB and a commitment to high quality content meant additionally that television was to lead rather than follow public tastes. This model of modern citizenship, based on sameness rather than difference, runs counter to a new type of cultural or ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) citizenship, characterised by ‘privatised, individuated, mediated consumption’ of subscriber-choice entertainment (Hartley, 1999: 165). Also, intellectual frameworks cultivated in Europe – in particular critical theory and post-Marxist critique – have worked in support of cultural policy based upon strong cultural protection of cultural industries by the nation state, especially in response to alleged Americanisation of European culture. According to Wieten et al., ‘Europe is still trying to come to terms with American television popularly associated with entertainment,…chaos, tastelessness, stirring images of freedom, enterprise and imagination’ (Wieten et al., 2000: xi). Wieten et al. (2000) offer also a more comprehensive analysis of PSB across Europe.

Yet television has become the world’s leading entertainment and popular culture resource (Hartley, 1999: 158). Fiction and entertainment are indeed the principal uses of television for most viewers, including European audiences (see Collins, 1998). Characterised as a teacher, television has been a major source of popular education of difference – such as the way different sections of the population look, speak, live, act, socialise, vote or tolerate, etcetera . It has been a primary ‘people watching’ medium. As Hartley observes, its uniqueness relies in its apparent ordinariness, banality and familiar structure:

Like so much of popular culture…TV is not trying to play any clever tricks on the viewer – not presenting them with the opportunity to be stretched, tutored, discomfited or embarrassed by its formal apparatus; viewers can trust it and therefore ignore it and,

226

of course, by that very fact, can enjoy the repetition of its familiar semiotic and narrative rhythms in a way that assists with (teaches) the cultural transmission of story-telling structures, narrative and plot sequences and television semiosis. [Popular entertaining programs] quietly teach its viewers cultural-linguistic form, genre, character, action by being reliable in these matters, allowing the viewer to apprehend them while actually attending to the ‘surface’ structures of plot, scene, dialogue (Hartley, 1999: 183). 62

Central to discussion of a European public sphere is then not only the mediatory role of journalism (as in how the European Union is reported by media), but broadcasting’s expressive and affective dimensions (as in to watch and to get to know each other). As Born remarks:

For in the face of international conflicts and domestic tensions, [broadcasting provides] not only common platforms for public reasoning and exchange, [but] astonishingly powerful expressive and imaginative forms which underpin the growth both of empathy and of unified experience (Born, 2004: 508).

This staging of the emotional, the personal advocated by Born (2004) is highly consistent with Mouffe’s (2005) call for the re-evaluation of the political realm by acknowledging the force of the ‘passions’, the affective dimension, that connects populations to a community or a collective identity as well as to the field of politics. In this sense, television’s propensity to effectively teach cultural difference via popular entertainment has to be taken seriously. For example, Laborde and Perrot agree that news should not be put above entertainment, ‘in terms of intrinsic value or when talking about construction of European identity’ (Laborde and Perrot 2000: 111). Kevin (2003: 146) reinforces this viewpoint in providing a review of general viewing fare on ‘European’ themes, or from European locations, in six countries, remarking on the purposive approach of the broadcasters in identifying such subjects and finding timeslots and viable audiences for them, the evident affinity with audience members’ life experience, the wide range of program types and formats. The BBC2 and Channel 4 offerings are seen as indicative, ‘presenting several pictures of Europe: a political Europe;

62 For example, the research done in Holland revealed that readers of Asterix comics are significantly better and more accurately informed about actual ancient history than those who studied at school (in Hartley, 1999: 183).

227

Europe as business; Europe as exotic playground; Europe as a holiday destination; and European sports events’. The significance of not exclusively news but ‘a more attractive or emotive’ manner of ‘connecting with a wider Europe’ is acknowledged (Kevin, 2003). My own fieldwork across multilingual international broadcasters in Europe (2005-2006) confirms these observations. In the interviews with program managers, policy-staff and journalists responsible for so-called European slots, it became clear that popular topics might be a way of talking about Europe. I will return to the issues of cross-cultural address later in the chapter.

7.3 MULTICULTURALISM & MULTILINGUALISM: DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES BETWEEN EUROPE AND AUSTRALIA

In this chapter I suggest a way to build practically on the ideas put forward by Balibar, Eco, Hartley, Born or Mouffe, in the form of a specific type of television service. I argue that the mobilisation of an innovative media infrastructure in the form of multilingual public television services (to exist in addition to EU language learning plans and Balibar’s schooling) is necessary if gains are to be made in Europe. To foreshadow the main statement, the model is based on the Australian television channel SBS. By shifting the focus from a strictly political area of inter-national diplomacy and administrative reforms (including language policy, translation services, and recently new communication strategies), I concentrate on activating the potential of broadcasting to reach across demographic and territorial boundaries, and bring together people from different language communities through entertaining and innovative content.

Structural and historical differences preclude any direct homology between Australia and Europe (see also Introduction). Europe, unlike Australia, is traditionally not a continent of immigration. However, the forces of post-colonisation, globalisation and the EU supranationalism have significantly re-shaped the landscape in Europe. The EU as an international organisation is an often cited example of the contemporary global system; fragmented and interconnected at the same time. Flows of migration undermine a European nation-state’s rhetoric of a single, unitary community using the same language and sharing the same values. This includes not only migration from the third countries but also the

228

encouraged mobility of European workers and students (for example, Erasmus exchange). As a consequence, there is no country in Europe that contains a single political grouping and has not become a multinational state. Ulrich Beck observes that ‘Europe today has been cosmopolitanised from within’, containing roughly 17 million people who do not fit ‘the ethno-cultural definition of Europeanness, but they understand themselves, identify and organise themselves culturally and politically as Europeans…Europe, like the rest of the world, has been turning into an open network with blurring boundaries, where outside is already outside’ (Beck 2003).

This multicultural composition of societies has traditionally been a defining feature of European metropolitan cities such as London, Berlin, Barcelona, and Paris. However, with the subsequent EU enlargements and influx of immigrants from non-European countries, even peripheral places become homes to diverse nationalities. The intra-EU migration now is a major issue. An estimated 10,000 Polish people now live in Wrexham, North Wales, many of whom moved after 2004. Whether compared with the town’s population of 43,000, or the whole metropolitan area of over 100,000, the proportion of immigrants is still very high. The social scale of labour migration in Europe was noted in the 1970s by British writer John Berger, who observed that every seventh worker in Europe is a migrant (Berger, 1975). This multi-ethnic social fabric is very congruous with the Australian multicultural society.

There is no ‘critical mass’ of any non-Anglo Celt ethnic group in Australia that could undermine the continuing hegemony of the English language. At present over 150 ethnic groups speak over 100 languages (Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000: 135). In Europe, on the other hand, Punjabi is spoken by 1.3 million people in the UK, Arabic by 5-6 million people in France, which makes it a significant proportion. In any event, it justifies a critique of the limits of a scholarly concern with Europe’s traditional indigenous languages such as Breton and Gaelic, while ignoring immigrant languages − see Karmani’s (2005) critique of Phillipson’s English-Only Europe . In the European media sphere, minority and migrant languages are hardly represented, whereas in Australia, lobbies in favour of multiculturalism in Australia in the late 1970s succeeded in gaining recognition for community languages. The provision of a range of services in languages other than English was secured (for example, telephone interpreter service, which is now operating in about 90 languages (Clyne, 1997:

229

98), the SBS, and an extensive community media network. As a result, despite the limits of ‘monolingual mindset’ (Clyne, 2006) and Howard’s anti-multicultural backlash and increasingly militant rhetorics of ‘Australian values’, SBS multilingual television is as important as ever, or arguably even more so. In spite of an unfavourable current political climate, it has demonstrated that it can hold on to the most important symbolic values of multilingualism/multiculturalism that underpinned its establishment in the first place. SBS in fact ensures a positive valuation of Australia’s internal hybrid cultures and an openness to external cultural diversity. It is argued here that the EU and its individual member states lack a similar media infrastructure of cultural and linguistic inclusion.

Nonetheless, a questioned ‘European’ − or cosmopolitan culture − is an existing reality at football stadiums and Eurovision Song Contests. What authors of the Living Diversity report (2002) commissioned by SBS term ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ in the Australian context is also a part of the European experience. In a globalising world cultural diversity has become an inevitable fact of life, both in a more superficial sense of diversity of products, foods, cuisines and a more profound experience of cross-cultural communication that Europeans are now gaining or have gained at work, at school, in residential areas and in shopping centres. Globalisation – as SBS’s current promotional identification, News from Home, if you Live in the World, has it – begins at home.

European national broadcasting has been rather slow in responding to those changes, particularity with respect to a diversity of languages. 63 Although the increasing linguistic and cultural diversification within European nation-states is gradually registered in national policy documents (BBC, 2005), the most recent overview of broadcasting policies across Europe, including for the first-time comprehensive data from both Western and Eastern Europe, indicates that there are no legal quotas for minority programming. With very few exceptions, broad multicultural requirements only are placed on European public service broadcasters, and as a result programming that reflects lives of other ethnic communities is allocated small and unattractive timeslots on PSB, and is non-existent on almost all commercial stations

63 For example, report Who’s Talking Cultural Diversity, Public Service Broadcasting and the National Conversation , recognises that broadcasters have been slow to make progress on cultural diversity, that is, reflecting the full variety of people and perspectives that make up Britain today (Campion, 2005).

230

(Open Society Institute, 2005). If they are to be adequately discharged, these general public service obligations require the provision of a full program service that is representative and accessible to all groups in respective EU member states. However, such an overview of broadcasting policies needs to be qualified. Andra Leurdijk observes that public broadcasters in Europe, whose brief does not include explicit requirements on minorities or cultural diversity, still provide some kind of multicultural programming that deals with minorities or with multicultural themes (Leurdijk, 2006: 28). Very few PSBs however have to fulfil any quantitative goals in this respect. While exploring the strategies of multicultural programming on national PSBs in Europe in some detail, Leurdjik leaves questions of language (migrant versus host, accents) and translation out of her discussion of cross-cultural television.

Some ideas about multicultural television need to be included as it represents yet another category of programming that deals with minorities or with multicultural themes on national public broadcasters in Europe. Although it is generally considered to be a type of programming with little audience appeal in many European countries, the popularity of some of those programs indicates that they can be both valued by majority and minority and become a part of the mainstream. The popular British television series Goodness Gracious Me (BBC 1998-2001) and Polish talk show series Europa Da sie Lubic ( You Can Like Europe Too ), both explore some stereotypes of minority or national groups, and are good example of this sort of programming. Andra Leurdijk in her article In Search of Common Ground observes a shift from the earlier targeted special minority programs on national PBS to programs aimed at both majority and minority audiences. While the programs in the past expressed the enrichment of western societies by immigrant cultures in the form of food, customs, and arts, and dealt with social and political injustice, now they focus more on the universality of human emotions and experiences. As she argues, in the new multicultural programs of the Dutch PBS, the NPS, the English BBC or Channel 4, cultural differences are no longer explained or problematised but explored as ‘challenging and exciting subject matter that lends itself to comedy, dramatic storylines and investigative journalism’ (Leurdijk, 2006: 37). This is exemplified by SBS’s mini-series Kick , as discussed earlier.

In relation to languages, an observable shift away from minority media provisions has been confirmed in my interviews with broadcasting staff. A gradual disappearance of the original

231

minority programs in the mother tongue is due to widespread availability of satellite and cable channels in migrants’ language and the PBS’s desire to attract higher audience figures in a competitive television market. Of course the development and present reality of minority and multicultural provisions vary greatly across European broadcasters. For example, daily broadcasts for minority groups in their own language have been enormously limited by the Dutch government (Groubert, 2005). Commenting on the situation in the UK, the BBC WS journalist Nick Caistor remarked:

There are over 300 languages spoken in London but the BBC has not reached out to them. The BBC has been avoiding doing it. Apart from an Asian program in Birmingham now, there are lots of local stations but all of them broadcast in English and none is national in scope (Caistor, 2006).

Over most of Europe today, passionate debates are being waged about finding definition and cohesion in a world of flux. The dominant political mood seems to have shifted away from multiculturalism and toward more assimilation, stressing obligations and responsibilities amongst migrants in the name of protecting national cultures and languages. As Morley and Robins argue on the example of contemporary Britain, prevailing concerns with so-called traditional values are reflective of ‘an insular and narcissistic response to the breakdown of Britain (Morley and Robins, 1995: 106). The combination of anxieties and fears produced by Europe’s mass migration or world’s terrorism are compensated by ‘protective illusions’ in the political and cultural sphere across European nation states.

According to journalists I have interviewed, the EU is ‘good’ as long it remains at a comfortable distance; newcomers are only tolerated as long as they speak the host country’s language and pass the citizenship tests. The argument can be taken further to relate to the supranational, European integration. Kaitazi-Whitlock proposes that European identity should be constructed via pan-European, independent and non-national media channels. The existing national media are unlikely to take up an integrationist role on the continent. Kaitazi-Whitlock argues that in their own self-perception, PSB task is to ‘sustain cultural diversity, national citizenship, language, culture and identity (EBU in Kaitazi-Whitlock, 2005: 37 – emphasis added):

232

In the era of post-social responsibility, PBSs, indeed, belong to the rear-guard of an ancien regime (Nieminen 2000: 131) with horizons that rarely extend beyond the boundaries of their country of origin. They cannot cater for needs that supersede the national definition (Kaitazi-Whitlock, 2005: 37).

As a result, she goes on to suggest, traditional European PSBs are unable to respond to the changing situation in the EU. Indeed, empirical studies indicate that Europeanisation or cosmopolitanisation of national media discourses is notoriously unrealised, presumably for the fear of exposing some inner problems and undermining the image of social unity. Migrants are not counted in France, cosmopolitanism is meant for elites, nationalistic backlash legitimised against all odds Europe-wide. In this context, public service broadcasting in Europe is increasingly regarded as a bastion of a national language against globalising tendencies. This obsession of member states to control the symbolic sphere of media and culture at the national level proceeds within the framework of cultural diversity in Europe. In practical terms it translates into television schedules dominated by local or US programming, with the exchange of European content almost non-existent (Buonanno, 2000). While there is a lot of transnational broadcasting available in Europe, the various foreign satellite channels have very little impact. Empirical data from several European countries indicate, despite access to 30-100 channels in most European nations, the loyalty to the national channels (PSB, commercial or hybrid-channels) is still very high (Bondebjerg, 2001).

Additionally, imported foreign-language television programs (mostly from the US) are predominantly dubbed in the larger and economically more powerful countries such as France, Italy, Germany, Spain, while the use of subtitling is a common mode of adaptation in Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The dubbing of foreign language programs is also used in European ‘nations without states’ such as Wales and Catalonia to ensure that their language is granted due respect and importance. Hearing one’s own language, as Kilborn observes, has a greater bearing on a sense of national identity or autonomy than reading a subtitled text (Kilborn, 1993: 644). (The spoken word is argued to be closer to the ‘living heart’ of the language than writing, the point elaborated in the previous chapter on Alchemy .) These different traditions of language adaptation result in audiences’ varied expectations as to the presentation of television material (for example, my discussion of ARTE’s international

233

audience – Chapter Four). They also differ in terms of cost, with dubbing a program calculated to cost 10 to 15 times more than a subtitled version of the same material (Kilborn, 1993: 646). The significance of a preferred conversion method should be considered not only in relation to finances and a type of material to be translated but also national television’s values and constraints.

On the theme of the significance of format imports, and foreign programs in general, Albert Moran asks why countries such as Germany or France produce their own localised versions of a television program such as Wheel of Fortune , while other countries such as the Philippines and Colombia opt for a cheaper direct import of the US version. The answer he gives is a mixed one. If the consideration is predominantly financial, the US version will be purchased and screened. Such a product will however be always ‘foreign’, with American-English as the language for national-audience to translate via subtitling, dubbing or voice-over, with American hosts and contestants, and the cultural knowledge and literacy specific to America (Moran, 1998: 262). A more expensive, locally-produced version, on the other hand, replaces the original with a set of national cues and is thus likely to secure better audience ratings. It can be argued that formats accompanied by the format ‘Bible’ are at the other extreme of television products originally meant for local audience and then acquiring an afterlife in the process of translation. The format ‘Bible’ as a set of elaborate and exact rules/codes facilitates the creation of a local program, in a similar way as religion sought to unify countries around the sacred text. The formats destined for international transfer put forward trans-cultural principles but applicable to all countries, requiring a homogenous adaptation. In the case of imported by SBS, there is an element of unpredictability and energy which translation, according to Jacques Derrida generates. This is clearly in opposition to an intended structure and order of the ‘Bible’ rules homogenously applied across receiving countries (as in the format of Big Brother ).

Cross-cultural ideas and strategies: programs that travel best across linguistic and cultural borders SBS’s characteristic commitment to translation as a multicultural project is textually realised by an eclectic mixture of LOTE in parallel with English, sport, life-style such travel, cooking, gardening shows, music, quizzes complemented with high-culture art-house movies and news

234

and current affairs. This provisional classification of the SBS’s content corresponds to everyday sites where ‘Europeanness’ is claimed to be found in real and mediated life. Football matches attract fans to stadiums and television screens around Europe. Sport in general is a sort of cultural Esperanto as Morley calls it. So is fashion in Europe, although it is a gender issue. Similarly, music is commonly regarded a universal language, confirmed by a pan- European success of Eurovision Song Contest. The multilingualism of the competition is not seen as a potential hindrance for a mainstream appeal but in fact a quirky addition, an added value. Similarly multicultural foods and customs are not only a feature of special multicultural festivals but an everyday mundane reality for many Europeans, and as such are frequently used ingredients in multicultural programs.

This multiculturalisation of everyday life mans that life-style programs emerge as easy but nonetheless important points of access to foreign cultures, a point that was noted in my interviews with European-based program-makers. This is considered as an interesting way of introducing foreignness to mono-cultural but also cosmopolitan audiences. SBS has explored the theme of food and cuisine in a number of shows devoted to either a culinary tour around Australia ( Food Lovers’ Guide to Australia ; Wine Lovers’ Guide to Australia ), or a feverish cookery competition show among world-class chefs – each an expert in French, Chinese, Japanese and Italian cuisine – accompanied by sports-like commentary in American English but with Japanese judges ( Iron Chef ). A gardening program, Vasili’s Garden, invites viewers to explore ‘the private world of backyard gardeners to discover passionate characters willing to share their knowledge about their plants and produce’. 64

Program-makers also indicated a similar cross-cultural value for travel programs as reflective of either imaginative longings or experiential practical interests. A former producer of English-language Euromaxx at Deutsche Welle TV, Eberhard Sucker remarked that 75 per cent of surveyed international viewers of the magazine ranked travel as the most interesting subject matter (Sucker, 2005). SBS’s cross-cultural journey towards a new, plural and cosmopolitan belonging is often structured via a metaphor of travel. The SBS schedule has included many popular programs about travelling around Australia and the world, including

64 SBS home page, www.sbs.com.au (accessed May 2, 2007).

235

explicit references to the experience: A Fork in the Road , Mediterranean/Africa, Lonely Planet Six Degrees and Lonely Planet Bluelist , Tales from a Suitcase , VIVA (a series of musical travel documentaries), In Siberia Tonight (a program of interviews, live music in tradition of the presenter’s forefathers), Thalassa (a French documentary series about the traditions of those connected to the sea), and of course SBS’s flagship Global Village .

This interesting mix of entertainment corresponds to a frequently highlighted fact that television experience is primarily about entertainment and relaxation. As interviewed program-makers at SBS and European stations argued, this requires that issues are presented in a lighter and humorous way, even those politically or socially difficult topics. Andra Leurdijk argues that the ‘cross-cultural’ mission of some PSB in Europe, especially in the Netherlands and the UK, is realised by a number of strategies that involve a ‘search for common points of reference’, exploring so-called universal experiences such as love, friendship, loneliness, death, and so on. Despite audiences’ cultural differences, presenting the impacts of such events on people’s life makes them recognisable across diverse backgrounds. Leurdijk’s interviewees claimed, the supposedly universal conventions of producing popular television and a number of tested formulas can supersede potential differences and hail cross- cultural audiences. One of these formulas is depicting remarkable individuals, something that fits closely with a dominant convention of western television production. It follows that television works best when focusing on individuals, human interest and emotions (Leurdijk, 2006: 32-3). An interesting character ushers viewers through the story, itself expressive of the basics of life in contemporary multicultural societies. This relates to Christopher Booker’s typology of Seven Basic Plots , in which he fleshes out the thesis that popular culture ‘teaches’ narrative structures while telling stories. The seven basic plots are: overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; rebirth’ (Booker, 2004).

Television’s mix of local and foreign stories additionally corresponds to the categorisation made by Walter Benjamin as regards popular storytelling. According to Benjamin, there are two archaic types of narrator or narration, one captured by a metaphor of the ‘sailor’, the other by the ‘peasant’. In his essay Angelus Novus , Benjamin notes the pleasure that people have always experienced on hearing stories both of distant lands, recounted by sailors who have

236

travelled around the world, and stories replete with a sense of local place, tradition, told by sedentary peasants who have never left their home village or town (Benjamin, 1996).

Program-makers also stressed the centrality of mundane everyday life topics, both multicultural and European issues, as a way of attracting culturally diverse audiences. As with the depictions of remarkable characters, general social and human dilemmas are believed to unpack a present day life in culturally mixed societies. This is exemplified in the following exchange with Andy Clark, the host of the weekly Amsterdam Forum , produced, broadcast and distributed by Radio Netherlands.

Interviewer : What do you consider a general way forward for European content to succeed with European audiences?

Andy : Especially to shift interest from a political, abstract agenda to issues of direct importance to people. That’s why there is this shock after the rejection of the [European] Constitution. The political elites here in Holland were all for it. There was a universal support for it; the socialist party was against it but for a very specific reason, the mainstream for it. [The problem] is that [public discussion] has been so abstract and yet peoples’ lives are influenced by Europeanisation on everyday levels, for example, the introduction of the Euro made everything more expensive and nobody bothered to explain that.

The idea [behind Amsterdam Forum ] is to represent all streams of opinion from all countries. We speak to big players but from right wing, anti-European to pro-European. I do my best to bring the politicians down to earth and get them explain things, instead of letting them talk in Eurospeak. The value of the program is to get them speak in simple terms, what various policies mean…Programs have to be lively and not dull, intellectuals with the best credentials cannot sound dull on the radio, because otherwise no one is going to listen to them (Clark, 2005).

An important strand of present multicultural broadcasting is an exploration of the communication and connectivity between minority and majority, of a mixture of

237

cosmopolitan life styles, and cultural identity as a source of both pleasure and anxiety in multicultural societies of today. Georgie McClean from SBS policy unit observers:

A lot of the SBSi produced local content is in some languages but not all. For example, a documentary series Maternity Unit looks at broader cultural issues though a story and not just “Look, we are community”. It is about finding a way for people to feel a sense of connection; the whole idea is to find cross-cultural points of engagement (McClean, 2006).

Indeed, SBS’s Maternity Unit is a great example of the focus on general human emotions and experiences through a universal story of giving birth. At the centre of the story is Rosalie Nunn, a midwife practitioner at Canterbury Hospital who admits:

Birth is a very unique but also a universal occurrence. Even though women all over the world are having babies every day, how they approach it, what birth means in each culture and the associated traditions, are different. Nearly 80 per cent of the women who attend Canterbury Hospital were born outside Australia and Rosalie’s role caters for their cultural needs. 65

The idea behind the series is to show Australians that life starts in the same way for everyone and most people go on to have children of their own. Yet the lead-up to giving birth and the process of birth seems like one of the few remaining taboo subjects in the Australian society. Director Janette Howe’s intimate and emotional documentary breaks down the remaining taboo of giving birth and cross-cultural barriers.

The Australian SBS, as I argued in the previous chapter, has significantly challenged some of traditionally dominant assumptions about the expectations and tastes of a national audience via its televisual practice developed around translation. The broadcaster showed that there can be public interest in an international perspective (such as World News Australia ), that subtitling can become widely acceptable, and that there are plenty of sources of stories

65 SBS home page, www.sbs.com.au (accessed May 3, 2007).

238

beyond the British/US nexus that can appeal to national multicultural viewers (see also Hawkins and Ang, 2006). In its mission to be Australia’s ‘window to the world’, SBS is a complementary service to a traditional national model of PSB such as the Australian ABC. In this project of ‘extending and propagating towards outside’ (Sakai, 1997) the translator’s position is vital. And, as SBS senior subtitler, admits, more acknowledgement still needs to be awarded to the role of translators in the TV operation:

No one ever cites the translator in the success of dubbed films, although it’s a major contributing factor to the success of a film, translator is nothing, good job as long as it’s understood (Mueller, 2006).

Due to its unique approach to translation SBS can potentially be translated elsewhere. Of a particular relevance for the EU context is SBS’s success in gathering linguistically and culturally diverse demographics via subtitling and cross-cultural strategies. Media translations offer a means to reduce the gap between multilingual elites and anonymous multilingual migrants, including Balibar’s ‘intermediary levels of almost uniformly monolingual education systems’ (Balibar, 2004). Uniquely democratic, they provide an opportunity for mixed linguistic groups ‘to taste and savour other dialects’ (Eco, 1995: 351) via the common language, English. This is important in so far as it proposes an alternative way of dealing with dilemmas of cross-cultural programming identified also by European program-makers. One of them is having to explain things obvious to minority audience but unfamiliar to mainstream viewers. Andra Leurdjik gives an example of the issue of headscarves taken up by the German magazine Babylon . As noted by the program-makers, an easy solution in early days of broadcasting was to accompany a program with two separate soundtracks, the German and the foreign language soundtrack. Each contained a different dose of explanation in a voice- over, suitable for each linguistic and cultural group respectively (Leurdijk, 2006: 31). SBS insists on subtitling, in which it follows Sakai’s conception of translation as a practice producing difference out of incommensurability rather than equivalence (Sakai, 1997).

The fact that SBS has been Australia’s window to the world draws attention to the role of PSB as translators not only within national but also international markets. SBS was set up and still operates as a complimentary service to the ABC, a public broadcaster modelled on the

239

Reithian vision of broadcasting with the function of unifying the nation. SBS focused initially on migrant demographics to later service ‘cosmopolitan’ citizen-consumer audiences. What remained unchanged is the broadcaster’s worldly outlook, with a vision beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, but, importantly, also beyond Anglo-Saxon nexus enabled by translation strategies.

Translation in international markets In the English-speaking world, a ‘miserable 3 per cent of books [is] translated from the total massive output’ (Bush, 2004: 29) as contrasted with 30 to 40 per cent in Spain or France, or 80 or 90 in Iran or Brazil. There is a policy issue embedded in this statistical picture. As with other minor but English-language speaking countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia does not have a national translation policy to secure translations of other languages into Australian English. This holds true for both publishing and media text market where a bulk of Australian programming flows from the centres of the English language, i.e. the US and Britain (O'Regan, 1993: 12-3). In contrast, the large markets such as Brazil or Mexico, where population size and regulatory frameworks contributed to the development of a domestic production industry, are able of challenging the high US import rate. Again, the prominent presence of imports from the US and Britain on Australian television is due to ‘the English language system’ with UK and US ‘the largest and wealthiest nations in that system’ (O'Regan, 1993: 86), and other ‘extra-televisual factors’ such as immigration composition and colonial past.

Tom O’Regan makes the point that these UK and US programming on Australian television is less of a global nature screened locally but rather ‘of a common cultural area based on the Anglophone information and cultural system’. He further observes that ‘this cultural area rivals the national culture as [Australian] culture adjusts [itself] in relation to nodal points of the English language, the UK and the USA (O'Regan, 1993: 88). Interestingly for my discussion, O’Regan in his discussion of the relationship between the international and the national makes a reference to an issue of translation. He observes that television ‘works ceaselessly to cover over gaps, reduce the dissonance between itself and its audiences, and make imported programs local to the audience’ (O'Regan, 1993: 89). US programming meant for culturally mixed domestic audiences is believed to be most successfully translatable into

240

Australia’s multicultural space. But to attribute the high degree of translatability of American screen products into other cultural contexts due to their intrinsic multicultural negotiations – which is a common argument for justification of their popularity across Europe – it is to ignore underlying mechanisms of production and political economy of American (or French) film industries. As Cronin notes, cultural influence cannot be dissociated from economic power, and indeed cultural prestige further enhances economic might because culture has become such a significant factor in selling goods:

What we get to read in translation in the era of global communication is significantly determined by the economic position of the source-language country. And this, in turn, affects what might be called the intertextual hinterland for any group of readers and writers, i.e. the writers who are likely to be able to exercise an influence on, provide inspiration for, give new direction to, a culture (Cronin, 2003: 134).

It is true that intrinsic difficulties of translation in broadcasting set limits to international exchange of television programmes. Linguistic and rhetorical differences are the key factor. Dubbing and subtitling involves ‘such factors as equivalence of genre, equivalence of text quality, equivalence of meaning in a way that plot-carrying meaning elements must be translated and atmospheric meaning elements must be expressed in some form or another in the translation, equivalence of character (including regional and social status), equivalence of cultural context’ (Herbst in Collins, 1998: 176). But not to translate would mean to ignore a massive diversity that exists in the world. It would also mean to leave out significant cases of success of non-American programmes such as Inspector Rex , Asian animations, or world movies on SBS TV. Once translated these texts acquire Benjamin’s ‘afterlife’, and popularity that might well exceed intentions and appeal in their cultural and linguistic place of origin. As SBS drifts from broadcasting to a post-broadcasting model with its multi-media and retail initiatives, it is interesting to see whether SBS will not be even more successful in aggregating small interests for its SBS branded niche products and remaining economically viable. As Chris Anderson advances in his long tail argument, also the title of his book, a more efficient delivery system for niche products, such as for example DVD rentals/purchase, has an unlimited capacity and ability to show media products on an infinite number of screens as opposed to a distribution bottleneck which suppresses measured demand for niche products

241

(Anderson, 2004). This argument might be here particularly convincing because of positive values attributed to the channel. Georgie McClean noted on the importance of branding and opportunities for SBS in the multi-channel digital environment:

Digitalisation [poses] a unique opportunity [for us], because we’ve always been able to brand the whole range of content as SBS and people have a very strong identification with a Chinese cooking show, French film or South Park. They understand that SBS is really different in nature and showing a different take on the world. It’s not commercial but story based, it is people based, it is very specific and it is localised, but also made global by being attached to all this localised content. The SBS is one of the most known and loved brands in Australia, it’s like a “Tim Tam SBS” (McClean, 2006).

This comment on the importance of the SBS brand is relevant also for a reverse direction of translation, that is, the SBS’s role in popularising Australia in the world. Non-English speaking countries, whether small like Finland or larger like Poland, have special translation regulations or programs that support international flows of their cultural material. Also the EU-wide funding for translations both in literature and media market is another point in the case 66 . The ‘australianisation’ of world culture outside the English language group is not significant. 67 This thesis makes proposition to consider translating SBS as a working model of a mediated multiculturalism into other contexts.

66 For example, the ‘EmLit Project’ was set up to support translations of literary texts written in a number of minority languages in the EU. They included: Galician, Arabic, Catalan, Gun and Amazic (formerly known as Berber) from the Spanish territory; Sicilian and Albanian from Italy; Sorbian and Slavic regional variants of Cottbus and Bautzen from Germany; Walloon, Picard, and Lingala (a language brought to Europe by migrants from Subsaharan Africa) from Belgium, and the ancient Celtic languages of the British Isles: Scottish Gaelic, Welsh as well as many South Asian migrant languages used in the UK today such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Sinhala (Introduction to the EmLit Projet, http://www.brunel.ac.uk/4042/entertext3.3/EmLit_Contents.pdf (accessed August 3, 2007). The EU ‘Culture Programme 2007-2013’ includes support for cultural actions in the area of literary translation to promote transnational circulation of artistic and cultural works for the benefit of intercultural dialogue and European citizenship (Official Journal of the European Union, C184/9, http://eur- lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2007/c_184/c_18420070807en00090010.pdf (accessed August 10, 2007). 67 This however might be slightly different in media market where collaborations with Australian counterparts are often valued for a default input of ‘high quality’ English language into production. As my interviewees at European multilingual stations observed, the involvement of Australian PSBs such as ABC or SBS has a practical financial significance reducing costs for translation if a product is meant for global distribution.

242

SBS presents an interesting model that matches a more dynamic practice of citizenship in the globalised era by a skilful interplay between national, local and worldly, global. It is a nationally-based infrastructure of translation that holds a mirror up to both Australia’s internal cultural diversity and that of the world at large. This work in (media) translation is a compelling reminder of the cultural hybridity typical of a today’s Europe at different social levels, but largely overlooked due to power of the dominant languages and cultures. Finally, SBS managed to translate between Australia’s multicultural policy rhetoric and the cultural sphere of the everyday, something that Europe has been at pains to achieve (see Chapter Four for my discussion of the EU media initiatives Europa and Eurikon, and European national PBS).

7.4 CONCLUSIONS

Yet, as Eco reminds us speaking about ‘the search for the perfect language’, a story of failures need not be itself a failure. Whatever impossible dream a story might tell, ‘it is still of some interest to know how this dream originated, as well as uncovering the hopes that sustained the pursuers throughout their secular course’ (Eco, 1995). Many of my interviewees are actively contributing to the particular story of translation that this thesis seeks to tell. It is the concept of translation; drawing multicultural products into one cultural domain or territory, be it as a national (public) broadcast system or perhaps a regional network. In the interview excerpt given below, Georgie McClean from SBS refers to the way diversity is appropriated within a large, mixed yet interconnected community.

Interviewer : What are your views on the possibility of applying the SBS model into the European Union?

Georgie McClean : I definitely see the possibility there, the issues that came up in Europe recently and of course they came up here as well about the limitations to multiculturalism and cultural diversity within Holland, France, Italy. There is a real need for the recognition of difference within each nation, the thing about young Arab men in Paris not even being counted, so there is no registration of them having any social

243

issues. They are not in the census as different but as French. The principle there can be defended but I think you have then these disenfranchised groups that are not being served by any form of engagement. In this situation having media that tells stories of these people and finding a way of engaging with its audiences is really important.

Interviewer : What about the EU’s effort to construct a sense of Europeanness beyond the nation-state…

Georgie McClean : The SBS model is based on the idea that you have many languages but also a common language in Australia, but in Europe people would be terribly resistant to having English as a common language, for example the French. You have interactivity so you could have subtitles coming in different languages and that would be fantastic, but if you do not have this receptivity and engagement from the audience (and audiences in Europe are used to dubbed versions), then it is a problem. It would be quite pioneering to consolidate the audience; it might be a slow uptake because people might be too habitually resistant to reading subtitles. In terms of news bulletins, you’d have to do it in a whole range of languages, rather than in a common language.

Also, the idea of PSB has always been linked to nation-building so you’d be really testing the limits of how much people are willing to embrace the EU as opposed to a nation, but in terms of representing migrant groups you could really do interesting things, you could look at diaspora in a really creative way. For example, the Indian community in Paris, and the Indian community in London... You could find a way of engaging across those diasporas rather than being from the centre out. The principle of diversity that SBS is based on has always been to draw people into the national identity of a diverse Australia and the Charter stipulates that we promote social harmony and to have a really decentralised model would change this a little bit (McClean, 2006).

244

CONCLUSIONS: THE ROLE OF TRANSLATION IN INTERLINGUAL MEDIA CITIZENSHIP AND MEDIA POLICY

My thesis demonstrates the failure of the historically dominant institutional model of multilingual communication in the EU and offers some suggestions for constructive responses to the lack of citizen engagement with the European project. The EU language policy enunciated at the time of establishment of the European Economic Community in 1958 has remained primarily an instrument of ‘effective’ top-down political governance, with peer-to- peer ‘affective’ community-building strategies remaining under-developed.

Organised vertically around the principles of international politics and formal, procedural translation practices, the EU’s model of communication has failed to connect with the lived experience of European citizens, reinforcing a communication deficit and general feelings of disinterest at the level of populations. Although justified historically by the initial political objective of creating a peaceful and effective economic community, it has since lagged behind the EU’s redefined socio-political agenda designed for Europe in a globalising world – with the role of culture and the knowledge society as its main facets. Indeed, the reforms proposed in 2005 and 2006 follow the same model of hierarchical political communication (Commission of the European Communities, 2006). This approach to communication has also been outdated by the geopolitical developments of postmodernity, with migration and communication technologies reshaping forms of social engagement and meaningful participation in the ‘cosmopolitanised from within’ 21 st century Europe (Beck, 2003).

The media communication model of translation practice that I develop in this thesis through the example of multilingual broadcasting, and in particular the SBS, helps us to explore mediated connections amongst citizens and not just the legalised relationships between citizen and political institutions. Organised around horizontal peer-to-peer connections, this understanding of translation practice underscores the affective dimension of public communication, everyday lived experience and a cultural sense of identity, expressed also in language.

245

Translation beyond linguistics: the search for connections in times of diversity Cultural diversity is a central issue of our times and the European Union wants to be an important player in this field. For example, in Communication on a European agenda for Culture in a Globalising World , the Commission lists an inventory of the EU’s actions to support culture and cultural diversity (Commission of the European Communities, 2007). In addition, media and communication studies have begun to draw on work in translation studies to understand how diversity is experienced across hybrid cultures. Translation, as a cultural practice beyond linguistics, is growing in importance politically 68 and even emotionally as individual nations and regions face the challenges of globalisation, migration, and American hegemony in cultural production (Balibar, 2004; Born, 2004; Cronin, 2003; Gillespie, 2006; Hawkins and Ang, 2006).

Grounded in a disciplinary dialogue between the institutional and communication model of translation and interpreted critically from a political science and media and communication studies perspective respectively, the thesis proposes the concept of translation as a mechanism for ‘connecting diversity’ in the context of cultural citizenship for a globalising world. The Figure 1 (pp. 7) introduced at the beginning of the thesis illustrates my methodology. In the middle – between traditionally separate intellectual formations and between political and cultural practices of citizenship – exists a strong role for translation. While Chapter Two sets the groundwork for theoretical dialogues, subsequent chapters reconsider dialogic relationships between:

- public discourse of multilingualism/multiculturalism - politics of recognition - institutions (regulation, policy) - media practices, and brings them into an alignment.

68 Especially in the wake of the September 11 and War on Terror, the attention of scholars across various disciplines has been increasingly focused on significance of translation in the current socio-political climate. For example, Mary Louise Pratt, at the Gift of the Gab conference, Melbourne, November 2006, addressed issues of language as an instrument of warfare in the context of contemporary military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly, a special issue of Social Semiotics, vol. 17, issue 2, 2007, is devoted to Translation and Conflict.

246

This conceptualisation is supported by the work of contemporary translation studies scholars who, drawing on seminal work of Russian semiotician, Yuri Lotman, ascertain the importance of the linguistic as well as cultural factors in translation. Since any act of translation involves taking account of cultural context, translating from language to language is de facto translating from culture to culture (Schaeffner, 1996; Bassnett-McGuire, 1991; Bassnett, 2002). Significantly, while translation accepts limitations and incommensurability of cultural and linguistic codes, its very raison d’etre is precisely an attempt to overcome the ‘untranslatable’. It offers a possibility to turn Lotman’s ‘asymmetry’ into an effective mediation, a communication borne out of mutuality and reciprocity implicated in the process of translation. This makes translation a testing ground for the functioning of communication and constitutes its emancipatory potential.

In addition, translation’s communicative focus encompasses commitment to diversity (a text’s origin) while seeking relatedness and meaningful connection (a text’s destination) (Bassnett, 2002). In a world of post-industrialised societies where information is the most valuable commodity, access to diversity of knowledge and ideas is crucial. Translation admits connection to alterity, which, despite an abundance of choices in media use and content, is constrained by language and culture. As such, it ceases to be just a practice of linguistic endeavour, and becomes a mode of cross-cultural communication and sociality in multilingual contexts. It is a way of thinking about new forms of polyglossic identification rather than projections or assimilations, which is an integral part of progressive politics of recognition and interlingual, transnational citizenship (Cronin, 2003: 35). It aligns itself with a social project of multiculturalism, which is a process of ongoing negotiations, always a work in progress.

This thesis expands the parameters for thinking about translation in the context of transcultural citizenship. Further work is needed in the field of media studies to address these translation questions and issues. Media studies as a discipline has rarely engaged with multilingual material, as shown in Chapter Two. More empirical research into multilingual media would contribute to this; for example, the reception end of the communication process. This may address questions such as: how are translated texts actually read, is their foreignness

247

seen as a value or a drawback, do they really have, what Lotman calls, a ‘transformatory potential’?

Another area for further research is an emerging multi-platform experimentation in translation in partnership with well-established multilingual broadcasters such as international BBC WS, DW, or RN, or national such as SBS. Indeed, laboratory-like online services, where languages and cultures meet, where extensive translation takes place and inter-personal exchanges are encouraged are the most interesting and prolific sites of ‘cross-cultural dialogue’ at the analysed stations. Closer textual analysis and reception studies are required to develop a better understanding of new patterns of media participation in such a mediated multilingual environment.

Similarly, interlingual communication in the online, new media and user-led content environment at the grass-roots level represents another prospective research area (e.g. peer-to- peer translation of new film releases, YouTube clips, collaborative multilingual digital arts projects, etc). The next step might involve empirical studies on the extent to which multilingualism facilitated by new online translation services extends beyond traditional intellectual elites, artists, and often disenfranchised migrants to reach also ‘intermediary levels’ (Balibar). Do developments in new media technology and interactivity invite interlingual communication and creativity? Around which content in the online context are ‘communities of translation’ formed? What are the best practices and limitations to multilingualism in online and new media environments?

Translation practices: from EU language policy to media policy My focus on translation as a means of engaging with cultural diversity offers also some implications for media policy. In particular, the context of the EU’s multilingualism, policy- making, and debate, as outlined, invites a set of questions:

• How can translation understood as the search for connections between different linguistic and cultural codes inform institutional policies and procedures? • Can well-meaning European language policy produce relevant media policy that epitomises contemporary European multilingual citizenship, and foster transnational

248

connections at the level of populations rather than political and economic elites in Europe? • How can translation help overcome the disjunction between the EU official language policies and lived cultural and linguistic heteroglossia, to foster a sense of transnational/interlingual citizenship? • What ready-made broadcasting models might be used in this intellectual exercise?

Drawing on the example of media policy in Australia and its effective enactment through the multilingual, multicultural SBS, one practical recommendation is that the EU language policy needs to translate into relevant media policy and practices. To actualise the translation of the SBS model into the EU context, it would be vital, however, for further research first to generate more detailed policy frameworks, including technical alternatives for media translation.

Still, the thesis raises a crucial point that the development of an inclusive society in the context of both the EU and Australia in times of diversity requires mobilisation of the institutional (government/polices) and media infrastructure to foster social connections and intercultural engagement. The EU language policy has not translated effectively into media policy, whereas Australia has secured an adequate communication model, with SBS’s media translation practices as its ‘spine’. In Europe, since the EU-funded pan-European satellite public service initiative Eurikon and Europa in the late 1980s, very little has been done to provide a communicative platform from which to speak to Europe, about Europe and from Europe. While my fieldwork into multilingual broadcasting within the EU mediascape found some pockets of a mediated sense of interlingual community, these are rather limited initiatives. International multilingual broadcasters, for example, display commitment and interest in European affairs and so-called ‘European perspective’ but they are predominantly speaking outwards. It is true that the internet-based delivery of content is starting to unsettle this traditional direction outwards from Europe, but their international vocation and marketing efforts still lie predominantly outside Europe.

There are also locally-based multilingual initiatives, responsive to the most immediate and mostly urban environment. Radio Multikulti Berlin and Barcelona Televisió are interesting

249

examples of multilingual provision but arguably short of SBS’s national reach and symbolic value within the Australian society. Both Multikulti Berlin and Barcelona Televisió correspond to the traditional multicultural media provision conceived as a management of difference among groups of discrete ethnic ‘minority’ communities rather than a mainstream exploration of intercultural connections. Although some experimentation into translation and multilingual content has been made (world music and bilingual content on the Multikulti website; Catalan subtitling of ethnic news on Barcelona Televisió), their broadcasts are either restricted to small geographical areas, or in the case of Barcelona Televisió allocated short timeslots on weekend days. In fact, the logic that motivates their operation is very similar to that of SBS radio.

This might be indicative of different temporalities of multiculturalism in Europe and Australia: a difference between a ‘matured’ multiculturalism in Australia, with the second and third generation Australians from linguistically and culturally diverse background constituting now mainstream Australia (Ang et al., 2006) and relatively recent migration to some countries/cities in Europe. Mass migration to Barcelona for example is only a 10-year old phenomenon, although Berlin’s history of immigration is definitely much longer. In any case, longstanding migration and the resultant demographic changes in the Australian context underpin shifts in the academic discourse from ‘multiculturalism’, ‘critical multiculturalism’ to ‘living diversity’ and finally ‘connecting diversity’. This maturity of Australian multiculturalism is described by Ang et al. as a need for cross-cultural connections in parallel with unceasing rights to cultural maintenance:

Cultural diversity has become mainstream for younger Australians, particularly second- and third-generation Australians, in a way that differs radically from the experiences of their parents’ or grandparents’. The multiculturalism embraced by younger people is based on intercultural connection , not separate communities, although there is endorsement for the freedom to maintain one's cultural heritage and language (Ang et al., 2006: - emphasis mine).

The ongoing negotiation between the demands of a politics of recognition and intercultural connections expressed by young Australians and mediated by SBS provide a useful reminder

250

for the understanding of the ‘unity-in-diversity’ slogan in the EU context. Especially, against the backdrop of the lack of adequate media infrastructure to communicate Europe to Europeans and broker any cultural or political tensions, the EU’s rhetoric of cultural diversity needs to be critically scrutinised. As an overarching framework in the EU, it has served, as some critics rightly argue, ‘a recurring rationale for divisive policy options in the EU’, especially in culture and media policy. Kaitatzi-Whitlock maintains:

Extreme emphasis on diversity in the endo-European context may well become a trap, as we are no longer just nationals of our closed nation-states and bearers of our idiosyncratic cultures…this obsession, may indeed have a boomerang effect on the European integration process, as, logically, strong communities cannot arise out of a Babel of extreme diversities and discrepancies. In other words, apart from a measured diversity we also need common understanding and a new ‘common’ sense. So, given the urgent need for common trans-cultural, trans-linguistic political fora for the European civil society, the discourse of unconditional diversity is in fact undermining the process of community-building (Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2005: 40).

Additionally, ‘excessive diversity’ at the expense of any sense of ‘Europeanism’ might be seen primarily as an anti-American strategy, an attempt to resist American economic and cultural dominance, the latter symbolised by the almost total domination of American screen products.

My thesis picks up on Kaitatzi-Whitlock’s investigation into the structural causes of the alarming disaffection of European citizens with Europolitics but takes it beyond a problem of political communication. It suggests the ready-made model of SBS that has successfully brokered tensions between ‘diversity’ and ‘community’, LOTE and English as a lingua franca . However, this is not to argue that SBS that can provide a solution for all Europe’s challenges around language issues. Grappling with political and market pressures, the Australian broadcaster has increasingly been criticised for its overtly commercial direction in

251

pursuing its public mission from its even most loyal supporters. 69 This is coupled with the challenges associated with the rise of participatory culture and new content distribution models; it remains to be seen where SBS evolves from here.

The two principal expectations of participants in a 2006 qualitative Eurobarometer study on cultural values and a sense of European citizenship are the maintenance of diversity in the light of globalisation and exchanges , by providing citizens with more opportunities to meet and explore the cultures of their European counterparts. One way of fostering better mutual understanding is through ‘media specialising in Europe and its cultural news; regular columns in the press; a specialised television channel; specific programs; trans-European “cultural games”; and the distribution of a “European cultural calendar”, a “European guide” or a “European recipe book” (Directorate-General for Education and Culture, 2006: 60). Additionally, as noted by the survey participants, the risk of supranational uniformity must be avoided along with a too heavy- focus on an ‘elitist’ culture, from which the general population feels excluded. Instead of a single ‘specialised television channel’, I recommend a network of nationally or regionally based SBS-like broadcast initiatives. The limits of a single, pan-European television channel were exposed during the Europa and Eurikon experiments in the early 1990s. With European countries internally so complex and different from each other (in terms of, for example, the composition and pattern of migration, linguistic fabric, media landscape, and so on), it seems reasonable to argue in favour of more proximate communication services. ‘The task of translator’ could arguably be taken over by European public broadcasters that would support horizontal relationships between communities with due attention to content, context and human element.

This redefined socio-cultural function of the European PSB system would then involve re- imagining community beyond a single language and cultural unity, by providing access and contextual relevance to both internal and external cultural diversity. SBS, as argued in Chapter Five and Six, is organised around such horizontal media translation practices of ‘everyday life’. Multi-centric in its style of importing diverse content from around the world

69 The discontentment with the SBS’s current programming strategy resulted in the symbolic departure of some SBS senior staff and personalities such as an iconic World News presenter Mary Kostakidis in August 2007. In addition to her role as journalist-presenter, Mary helped set up SBS Language Services in the early days of SBS TV operations in the 1980s.

252

and subtitling it for linguistically diverse audiences, SBS forges connections beyond the crude politics of language. International multilingual broadcasters, including the BBC WS or DW, discussed here, also offer contact zones for communities, but, in contrast to SBS, reflect their orientation to national foreign affairs agendas in the international domain. Similarly, diasporic media forge a connectivity worldwide but mostly defined by use of the same language (Sinclair and Cunningham, 2000).

For the EU context, I argue for an extension of media translation practices to connect or network diversity via nationally-based PSBs. The example of SBS has shown that interlingual connections can be established via a shared language of television, of story-telling. In the multi-platform environment, fostering interlingual peer-to-peer communities is particularly viable. The argument for enhancing opportunities for intercultural connection and understanding is proposed against the entrenched assumptions of European media consumption patterns that see domestic national and American products as the only attractive feed for Europeans. Firstly, domestically produced content can itself be intercultural or heterolingual in its address like SBS’s RAN or Kick . Secondly, European media scholarship and screen industries need to move beyond the search for a kind of ideal and transcendental ‘European content’ despairingly labelled ‘Europudding’. It is true that some transnational European film or screen co-productions are successful in more than one European country 70 , but to try to ‘engineer’ European commonness through such projects is to miss out on the existing diversity of good stories already produced in different countries around Europe. Multicultural television shows do exist across Europe, some of them quite successful with national audiences (Leurdijk, 2006).

As my research indicates, there is also more room in European media for a greater diversity of sources, including voices of ‘real’ people rather than ‘experts’ and human-experience based stories in relation to European citizenship. Peer-to-peer connections require an affective component, a mutual understanding of commonality of a shared human experience, in whatever language. When affective relationships are formed, cultural difference is appreciated for stimulating new ways of connecting with others.

70 For example, L’Auberge Expanol about Erasmus students in Barcelona.

253

We need to expand our thinking about a mediated interlingual, trans-cultural citizenship for Europe, away from singular programs or films and towards a devoted special network. SBS as a multilingual and multicultural network seeks connections and tests limits of connectivity across the whole television schedule and across platforms. This allows for a brokering of the tension between ‘diversity’ and ‘community’ in a more systematic, comprehensive way. It allows a globalised local/national narrative that can accommodate elements of both Benjamin’s ‘peasant’ and ‘sailor’, that is local and from distant lands, typical of story-telling (Buonanno, 2005). Crucially, an intercultural/interlingual format within a network creates a possibility for a more dialogic relation between different subject positions, with respect for ‘I’ and ‘you’ rather than a united ‘we’ (Flusser, 2003).

254

REFERENCES

Ahearne, J., eds. (2002) French Cultural Policy Debates: A Reader , Routledge: London & New York.

Aksoy, A. (2006) 'Transnational Virtues and Cool Loyalties: Responses of Turkish-Speaking Migrants in London to September 11', Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies , 32 (6): 923 - 946.

Anderson, C. 2004. The Long Tail , http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail_pr.html (accessed May 4, 2007).

Ang, I. (1985) 'The Battle Between Television and its Audiences: The Politics of Watching Television', In (eds.) Drummond, P. and Peterson, R., Television in Transition: Papers from the First International Television Studies Conference , BFI Publishing, 250-266.

Ang, I., Brand, J., Noble, G. and Sternberg, J. (2006) Connecting Diversity: Paradoxes of Multicultural Australia , Special Broadcasting Service Corporation: Artarmon.

Ang, I., Brand, J., Noble, G. and Wilding, D. (2002) Living Diversity: Australia's Multicultural Future , Special Broadcasting Service Corporation: Artarmon.

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization , University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

ARTE (2005) Annual Report 2004-2005 , Strasbourg.

Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2007. Statistics by topic , www.abs.gov.au (accessed February 4, 2008).

Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination , University of Texas Press: Austin.

Balibar, E. (2004) We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship , Princeton University Press: Princeton.

255

Bassa, A. (2006) Executive Producer of 'Informatius en Ilengües Estrangeres' at Barcelona Televisió, Barcelona, March 2006 [Personal Interview].

Bassnett, S. (2002) Translation Studies , Routledge: London.

Bassnett, S. (2005) 'Bringing the News Back Home: Strategies of Acculturation and Foreignisation', Language and Intercultural Communication , 5 (2): 120-130.

Bassnett-McGuire, S. (1991) Translation Studies , Routledge: London.

Bauman, R. and Briggs, L. C. (2003) Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Language , Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Bauman, Z. (2004) Europe: An Unfinished Adventure , Polity: Cambridge.

Bauman, Z. Europe of Strangers , http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/bauman.pdf (accessed February 10, 2005).

BBC. 2005. Review of the BBC's Royal Charter: A strong BBC, Independent of Government , www.bbccharterreview.org.uk/publications/cr_pubs/pub_bbcgreenpaper.html (accessed April 15, 2007).

BBC World Service. 2005. Annual Report 2004/2005 , http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/us/annual_review/2004/index.shtml (accessed August 15, 2006).

Beck, U. (2003) 'Cosmopolitan Europe: The European Union: A Confederation of States, A Federal State or Something Altogether New?' In Lecture given at the London School of Economics , London.

Beck, U. (2005) European Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitan Europe , Council of Europe: Strasbourg.

Benhabib, S. (2004) The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens , Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

256

Benjamin, W. (1996) Angelus Novus , Einaudi: Turin.

Benjamin, W. (2000) 'The Task of the Translator', In (ed.) Venuti, L., The Translation Studies Reader , Routledge: London, 16-25.

Bennett, T. (1997) 'Culture, government and the social', Culture and Policy: Journal of the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy , 8 (3): 169-175.

Berger, J. (1975) 'The Seventh Man', Race and Class , XVI (3): xx-xi.

Besemeres, M. and Wierzbicka, A. (2007) Translating Lives : Living with Two Languages and Cultures , University of Queensland Press: St. Lucia.

Bianco, J. L., Liddicoat, A. J. and Crozet, C. (eds.) (1999) Striving for the Third Place: Intercultural Competence through Language Education , Language Australia: Melbourne.

Bielsa, E. (2005) 'Globalisation and Translation: A Theoretical Approach', Language and Intercultural Communication , 5 (2): 131-144.

Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism , Sage Publications: London.

Bolin, G. (2006) 'Visions of Europe: Cultural Technologies of Nation-States', International Journal of. Cultural Studies , 9 (2): 189-206.

Bondebjerg, I. (2001) 'European Media, Cultural Integration and Globalisation: Reflections on the ESF-programme Changing Media-Changing Europe', Nordicom Review , 22 (1): 53-64.

Booker, C. (2004) The Seven Basic Plots , Coninuum: London.

Born, G. (2004) Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC , Secker & Warburg: London.

Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power , Polity Press: Cambridge.

257

Bourdieu, P. (1999) 'Social conditions of the international circulation of ideas', In (eds.) Butler, J. and Bourdieu, P., Bourdieu: A Critical Reader , Blackwell, 220-228.

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (2001) 'New Liberal Speak: Notes on the New Planetary Vulgate', Radical Philosophy : 2-5.

Bradwell, P. and Jones, S. 2007. As You Like It: Catching Up in an Age of Global English , www.demos.co.uk/publications (accessed June 8, 2007).

Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (2004) Turning on and Tuning into Irish Language Radio in the 21st Century , BCI: Dublin.

Buckingham, D. (2000) The Making of Citizens : Young People, News, and Politics , Routledge: New York.

Buonanno, M. (2005) 'The 'Sailor' and the 'Peasant': the Italian Police Series Between Foreign and Domestic', Media International Australia (115): 48-59.

Caistor, N. (2006) Journalist, London, January 2006 [Personal Interview].

Calabrese, A. and Sparks, C. (eds.) (2004) Toward a Political Economy of Culture , Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: Langam.

Campion, M. J. 2005. Look Who's Talking Cultural Diversity, Public Service Broadcasting and the National Conversation , http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/guardian/lookwhostalking.pdf (accessed March 26, 2006).

Canagarajah, S. A. (ed.) (2005) Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice , Lawrence Erlbaum: New Jersey.

Canclini, N. G. (1995) 'Modernity and Postmodernity', In (ed.) Mosquera, G., Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America , INIVA: London, 20-52.

Canclini, N. G. (2001) Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts , University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

258

Carli, A., Guardiano, C., Kaucic-Baša, M., Sussi, E., Tessarolo, M. and Ussai, M. (2003) 'Asserting Ethnic Identity and Power Through Language', Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies , 29 (5): 865-883.

Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society , Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Central Intelligence Agency. 2008. The World Factbook , https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html (accessed February 5, 2008).

Chalaby, J., K (ed.) (2005) Transnational Television Worldwide: Towards a New Media Order , I.B. Tauris: London.

Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax , MIT Press: Cambridge.

Clark, A. (2005) The host of the weekly 'Amsterdam Forum' Radio Netherlands, Hilversum, November 2005 [Personal Interview].

Clifford, J. (1992) 'Travelling Cultures', In (eds.) Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P., Cultural Studies , Routledge: London, 96-116.

Clyne, M. (1997) 'Managing Language Diversity and Second Language Programmes in Australia', Current Issues in Language & Society , 4 (2): 94-119.

Clyne, M. (2006) 'Australia Between Multilingual Society and Monolingual Mindset', In Gift of the Gab: Australia and Languages , Unpublished Conference Proceedings, The Law School, University of Melbourne, 16-17 November.

Collins, R. (1990) Culture, Communication and National Identity. The Case of Canadian Television , University of Toronto Press: Toronto.

Collins, R. (1998) From Satellite to Single Market: New Communication Technology and European Public Service Television , Routledge: London.

259

Commission of the European Communities. 2003. Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004 – 2006 , http://ec.europa.eu/education/doc/official/keydoc/actlang/act_lang_en.pdf (accessed December 15, 2006).

Commission of the European Communities. 2005. A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism , http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/lang/doc/com596_en.pdf (accessed May 17, 2006).

Commission of the European Communities. 2006. White Paper on a European Communication Policy , http://ec.europa.eu/communication_white_paper/index_en.htm (accessed April 23, 2006).

Commission of the European Communities. 2007. Communication on a European Agenda for Culture in a Globalising World , http://ec.europa.eu/culture/eac/communication/pdf_word/COM_2007_242_en.pdf (accessed May 15, 2007).

Connor Report Committee of Review of the Special Broadcasting Service (1985) Serving Multicultural Australia: The Role of Broadcasting, Part One , Government Publishing Service: Canberra.

Craith, M. N. (2006) Europe and the Politics of Language: Citizens, Migrants and Outsiders , Palgrave: Houndmills.

Crang, M. (2003) 'Telling materials', In (ed.) Pryke, M., Rose, G. and Whatmore, S., Using Social Theory: Thinking through Research , Sage: London, 127-144.

Crisell, A. (1986) Understanding Radio , Routledge: London & New York.

Cronin, M. (2003) Translation and Globalisation , Routledge: London.

Cronin, M. (2005) 'Burning the House Down: Translation in a Global Setting', Language and Intercultural Communication , 5 (2): 108-119.

260

Crystal, D. (2004) Creating a World of Languages , http://www.linguapax.org/congres04/indexang.html (accessed October 24, 2005).

Cubitt, S. 1997. Online Sound and Virtual Architecture: Contribution to the Geography of Cultural Translation , http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/lmj/cubitt.html (accessed July 12, 2005).

Cubitt, S. 2004. Review of Books from Vilem Flusser in English , http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e- journals/Leonardo/reviews/apr2004/flusser_cubitt.html (accessed April 4, 2004).

Cunningham, S. and Flew, T. (2002) 'Policy', In (ed.) Miller, T., Television Studies , British Film Institute: London, 50-53.

Dabboussy, L. (2006) [email].

Dalby, A. (2003) Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to our Culture , Columbia University Press: New York.

Directorate-General for Education and Culture (2006) The Europeans, Culture and Cultural Values: Qualitative Study in 27 European Countries , Optem: Gambais.

Directorate-General for Interpretation of the Commission. 2007. http://scic.cec.eu.int/europa (accessed April 25, 2007).

Directorate-General for Translation (2005) Translating for a Multilingual Community , The European Commission: Brussels.

Durand, J. (1996) 'Linguistic Purification, the French Nation-State and the Linguist', In (ed.) Hoffmann, C., Language, Culture and Communication in Contemporary Europe , Multilingual Matters LTD: Clevedon, 75-92.

Durham, M. G. and Kellner, D. (eds.) (2001) Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks , Blackwell Publishers: Malden.

Dutton, M. (1998) Streetlife China , Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Eco, U. (1995) The Search for the Perfect Language , Blackwell: Oxford.

261

Eco, U. (2001) Experiences in Translation , University of Toronto Press: Toronto.

Eco, U. (2003) Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation , Weidenfelf & Nicolson: London.

Edwards, J. (1994) Multilingualism , Routledge: London.

Ethnic Television Review Panel (1979) An Ethnic Television Service for Australia , Commonwealth of Australia: Canberra.

Featherstone, M. (1995) Undoing Culture: Globalisation, Postmodernism and Identity , SAGE: London.

Flusser, V. (2003) The Freedom of Migrant: Objections to Nationalism , University of Illinois Press: Urbana.

Frau-Meigs, D. (2006) 'Big Brother and Reality TV in Europe: Towards a Theory of Situated Acculturation by the Media', European Journal of Communication , 21 (1): 33-56.

Fray, J. and Dear, J. 2005. National Union of Journalists in Britain and Ireland Slams Plan to Silence 10 BBC Language Services , www.nuj.org.uk (accessed August 3, 2006).

Galbally, F. (1978) Migrant Services and Programs: Report of the Review of Post-Arrival Programs and Services for Migrants , AGPS: Canberra.

Gillespie, M. (1995) Televison, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change , Routledge: London & New York.

Gillespie, M. (2006) 'Diasporic Contact Zones at BBC World Service', In CRESC 2nd Annual Conference "Media Change and Social Theory" , Unpublished Conference Paper, Oxford, England, 6-8 September 2006.

Green, J. (2005) 'Acts of Translation: Young People, American Teen Dramas, and Australian Television 1992-2004', Ph.D. Thesis: Queensland University of Technology.

Grin, F. (2003) Language Policy Evaluation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Palgrave Macmillian: Basingstoke.

262

Groubert, J. (2005) The producer of ‘EuroQuest’, Amsterdam, November 2005 [Personal Interview].

Grunert, O. (2006) ARTE Head of Documentaries, Strasbourg, January 2006 [Personal Interview].

Gubbins, P. (1996) 'Sence and pense: an alternative language policy for Europe', In (ed.) Hoffmann, C., Language, Culture and Communication in Contemporary Europe , Multilingual Matters LTD: Clevedon, 124-131.

Hall, S. (1993) 'Which Public? Whose Service?' In (ed.) Stevenson, W., All Our Futures , BFI: London, 23-38.

Hannekum, C. (2006) Manager of Overseas News Services SBS Television, Sydney, March 2006 [Personal Interview].

Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places , Routledge: London.

Harrison, D. 2003. Cover CD Story - Noise and SBS Alchemy , http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/article.php?article=355 (accessed May 7, 2005).

Hartley, J. (1992) Tele-ology: Studies in Television , Routledge: London and New York.

Hartley, J. (1993) The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media , Routledge: London.

Hartley, J. (1996) Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture , Arnold: London.

Hartley, J. (1999) Uses of Television , Routledge: London and New York.

Hartley, J. (2002a) Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts , Routledge: London.

Hartley, J. (2002b) 'Republic of Letters to Television Republic? Citizen Readers in the Era of Broadcast Television', In (eds.) Spigel, L. and Olsson, J., Persistence of Television: From Console to Computer , Duke University Press: Durham, 386-417.

263

Hartley, J. (2004) 'Television, nation, and indigenous media', Television and New Media , 5 (1): 7-25.

Hartley, J. and McKee, A. (2000) Indigenous Public Sphere , Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Hawkins, G. (1996) 'SBS: Minority TV', Culture and Policy: Journal of the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy , 7 (1): 45-64.

Hawkins, G. and Ang, I. (2006) Inventing SBS: Televising the Foreign , Unpublished paper presented at the TV History Conference, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, December 2005.

Heil, A. L. 2007. Rate of Arabic language TV start-ups shows no sign of abating , www.arabmediasociety.com/articles/downloads/20070513132640_AMS2_Alan_Heil. pdf (accessed August 01, 2007).

Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations , Polity Press: Cambridge.

Hoffmann, C. (ed.) (1996) Language, Culture and Communication in Contemporary Europe , Multilingual Matters LTD: Clevedon.

Huijser, H. 2006. Does Reality Really Bite? Between Academia and 'the Real World': An Interview with Jane Roscoe , http://dialogue.media-culture.org.au/node/12 (accessed July 30, 2006).

International Network for Cultural Diversity. 2007. Ensuring the Effective Implementation of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions , http://www.incd.net/docs/INCD%20position%20on%20implementation.pdf (accessed August 13, 2007).

264

Ives, P. (2006) 'The Mammoth Task of Translating Gramsci', Rethinking Marxism , 18 (1): 15- 22(8).

Jakobson, R. (1956) 'On Linguistic Aspects of Translation', In (ed.) Brower, R. A., On Translation , Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 232-39.

Jakubowicz, A. (1987) 'Days of Our Lives: Multiculturalism, Mainstreaming and 'Special' Broadcasting', Media Information Australia , 45: 18-32.

Janelle, D. G. (1991) 'Global Interdependence and its Consequences', In (eds.) S.D. Brunn and T.R. Leinbach, Collapsing Space and Time. Geographic Aspects of Communications and Information , Harper Collins: London, 49-81.

Kagan, R. (2003) Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order , Alfred A. Knopf: New York.

Kaitatzi-Whitlock, S. (2005) Europe's Political Communication Deficit , Arima: Suffolk.

Kalantzis, M. 2002. The Benefits of Immigration and a Case for Civic Pluralism , http://www.apop.com.au/MaryKalantzisse2402speech.pdf (accessed May 12, 2004).

Kapuscinski, R. 2005. Tlumacz - Postac XXI Wieku , http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/kapuscinski (accessed March 6, 2006).

Karmani, S. (2005) 'Linguistic Imperialism 10 Years On: An Interview with Robert Phillipson', ELT Journal : 244-9.

Keith, M. C. (2002) 'Turn On...Tune In', In (eds.) Hilmes, M. and Loviglio, J., Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio , Routledge: New York, 389-405.

Kennedy, P. and Roudometof, V., eds. (2002) Communities across Borders: New immigrants and Transnational Cultures , Routledge: London & New York.

Kevin, D. (2003) Europe in the Media: a Comparison of Reporting, Representation, and Rhetoric in National Media Systems in Europe , L. Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah.

265

Kilborn, R. (1993) ''Speak my Language': Current Attitudes to Television Subtitling and Dubbing', Media, Culture and Society , 15: 641-660.

Kraidy, M. M. (2005) Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalisation , Temple University Press: Philadelphia.

Kristeva, J. (375-6) 'On Yuri Lotman', Publications of the Modern Language Association , 109 (3): 375-6.

Krone, E. (2006) ARTE Head of Language Services, Strasbourg, January 2006 [Personal Interview].

Lanz, C. (2005) Director of Television at Deutsche Welle, Berlin, December 2005 [Personal Interview].

Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space , Sage: London.

Lawe Davies, C. 'Multicultural Broadcasting in Australia: policies, institutions and programming 1975-1995', PhD Thesis: University of Queensland.

Lawe Davis, C. (1998) 'SBS-TV and its Amazing World', Media International Australia (89): 87-108.

Lawe Davis, C. (2002) 'After South Park: the SBS Audience', In (eds.) O'Regan, T. and Stenberg, J., Mobilising the Audience , University of Queensland Press: St. Lucia, 283- 307.

Leeuwen, T. v. (1999) Speech, Music, Sound , Macmillan: London.

Leurdijk, A. (2006) 'In Search of Common Ground: Strategies of Multicultural Television Producers in Europe', European Journal of Communication , 9 (1): 25-46.

Liebes, T. and Katz, E. (1990) The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas , Oxford University Press: New York.

Livingstone, S. (ed.) (2005) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere , intellect: Bristol.

266

Lotman, M. (2002) 'Umwelt and Semiosphere', Sign Systems Studies , 30 (1): 33-40.

Lotman, Y. (1990) The Universe of the Mind , I.B. Tauris & CO. LTD: London.

Luyken, G.-M., Herbst, T., Langham-Brown, J., Reid, H. and Spinhof, H. (1991) Overcoming Language Barriers in Television Dubbing and Subtitling for the European Audience , European Institute for the Media: Manchester.

Lyneham, P. 1997. Interview with Prime Minister John Howard , http://www.pm.gov.au/media/interview/1997/lyneham.cfm (accessed September 22, 2006).

Madsen, V., M. (2005) 'Radio and the Documentary Imagination: Thirty Years of Experiment, Innovation, and Revelation', The Radio Journal - International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media , 3 (3): 189-198.

Marenbach, I. (2005) Multikulti Radio Editor-in-Chief, Berlin, December 2005 [Personal Interview].

Mason, G. (2006) Subtitling Unit, Sydney, [Personal Interview].

McClean, G. (2003) SBS Radio Melbourne: Content Analysis , SBS Radio: Melbourne.

McClean, G. (2006) Manager Policy and Research, Sydney, [Personal Interview].

McCormick, A. (2006) Subtitling Unit, Sydney, [Personal Interview].

Meinhof, U. H. (2003) 'Migrating Borders: an Introduction to European Identity Construction in Process', Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies , 29 (5): 781-796.

Menendez-Alarcon, A. (2000) 'Spain in the European Union: a qualitative study of national identity', International Journal of Cultural Studies , 3 (3): 331-350.

Miller, T. (2001) 'Introducing Cultural Citizenship', Social Text , 19 (4): 1-5.

Miller, T. (2006) Academic, QUT Brisbane, April 2006 [Personal Interview].

267

Mitchell, T. (1996) Popular Music and Local Identities: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania , Leicester University Press: Leicester.

Moran, A. (1998) Copycat TV: Globalisation, Program Formats and Cultural Identity , University of Luton Press: Luton.

Morley, D. (2000) Home Territories : Media, Mobility and Identity , Routledge: London.

Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995) Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries , Routledge: London.

Morris, M. (1997) 'Foreword', In (ed.) Sakai, N., Translation and Subjectivity , University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, ix-xxiii.

Morris, M. (2006) Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture , Sage: London.

Mosco, V. and Wasko, J. (eds.) (1988) The Political Economy of Information , University of Wisconsin Press: Madison.

Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political , Routledge: London.

Mueller, F. and Ziegert, R. (2006) Senior Subtitlers SBS Subtitling Unit, Sydney, March 2006 [Personal Interview].

Murdock, G. (2005) 'Public Broadcasting and Democratic Culture: Consumers, Citizens, and Communards', In (ed.) Wasko, J., A Companion to Television , Blackwell: Malden, 174-198.

Nava, M. (2002) 'Cosmopolitan Modernity: Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference', Theory, Culture & Society , 19 (1-2): 81-99.

Nolan, D. and Radywyl, N. (2004) 'Pluralising Identity, Maintreaming Indentities: SBS as a Technology of Citizenship', Southern Review , 37 (2): 40-65.

O'Donnell, H. (2001/2) 'Peripheral Fissions? Soap Operas and Identity in Scotland, Ireland and the Basque Country', Enter Text , 2 (1): 173-197.

268

Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality , Duke University Press: Durham.

Ong, A. (2006) 'Mutations in Citizenship', Theory, Culture & Society , 23 (2-3): 499–531.

Ong, W. J. (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word , Routledge: London.

Open Society Institute (2005) Television across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence , EU Monitoring and Advocacy Program and Network Media Program: Budapest.

O'Regan, T. (1987) 'Towards a high communication policy: assessing recent changes within Australian broadcasting', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, 2 (1): 135-158.

O'Regan, T. (1993) Australian Television Culture , Allen & Unwin: St Leonards.

O'Regan, T. (1996) Australian National Cinema , Routledge: Hoboken.

Ouaj, J. (1999) More Colour in the Media: Employment and Access of ‘Ethnic Minorities’ to the Television Industry in Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands and Finland , The European Institute for the Media: Duesseldorf.

Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com (accessed April 13, 2007).

Ozolins, U. (1993) The Politics of Language in Australia , Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

OzTam. 2006. 5 City Share Report , http://www.oztam.com.au/weeklyDownloads.aspx (accessed December 2006, 2006).

OzTam. 2007. Occupation Classifications , http://www.oztam.com.au/pdf/tv_ratings/occupation_classification.pdf (accessed September 22, 2007).

Papastergiadis, N. (2000) The Turbulance of Migration , Polity Press: Cambridge.

269

Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism , Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Phillipson, R. (2003) English-Only Europe , Routledge: London.

Phillipson, R. 2005. English in Europe: a catalyst for multilingualism or monoculturalism and monolingualism , www.glendon.yorku.ca/englishstudies/events.html (accessed September 15, 2005).

Phillipson, R. (2006) 'If language policy issues are explosive, how should they best be handled?' In United Europe and its Languages , Warszawa.

Pryke, M., Rose, G. and Whatmore, S. (eds.) (2003) Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research , Sage: London.

Pym, A. 1999. Venuti's Scandals , www.tinet.org/~apym/on-line/reviews/venutireview.html (accessed May 28, 2007).

Pym, A. 2003. The Moving Text: Localization, Translation, and Distribution , http://www.tinet.org/~apym/publications/PYM00_contents.pdf (accessed January 8, 2007).

Quaile-Kersken, I. (2005) Head of Feature and Magazine Programming DW English Service (former Head of DW Europe Desk), Bonn, December 2005 [Personal Interview].

Raboy, M. (ed.) (1995) Public Broadcasting for the 21st Century , Luton University Press: Luton.

Richardson, K. and Meinhof, U. H. (1999) Worlds in Common? Television Discourse in a Changing Europe , Routledge: London.

Robins, K. (2005) The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Transversal Study on the Theme of Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity , Council of Europe: Strasbourg.

Rosaldo, R. (1999) 'Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism', In (eds.) Rodolfo D. Torres, Louis F. Mirón and Jonathan Xavier Inda, Race, Identity, and Citizenship: A Reader , Blackwell: Malden, 253-262.

270

Roscoe, J. (2006) Programme Executive SBS Television, Sydney, [Personal Interview].

Sakai, N. (1997) Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism , University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Sakai, N. and Hanawa, Y. (eds.) (2001) Specters of the West and Politics of Translation , Hong Kong University Press: New York.

Sinha, S. (2006) BBC WS Interactivity Editor, London, January 2006 [Personal Interview].

Sarikakis, K. (2004) Powers in Media Policy: the Challenges of the European Parliament , Peter Lang: Oxford.

SBS (2000) Ethnic Broadcasting in Australia 1979 , Special Broadcasting Service: Sydney.

SBS (2006a) Annual Report 2005-2006 , Special Broadcasting Service: Artarmon.

SBS (2006b) Codes of Practice , Special Broadcasting Service: Artarmon.

Schaeffner, C. (1996) 'Translation as Cross-Cultural Communication', In (ed.) Hoffmann, C., Language, Culture and Communication in Contemporary Europe , Multilingual Matters LTD: Clevedon, 152-164.

Schlesinger, P. (1991) 'Media and Political Order and National Identity', Media, Culture & Society , 11: 135-66.

Schlinker, U. and Schuerhoff, R. (2005) Euromaxx: Unterhaltung, Information und viel Neues , Deustsche Welle: Bonn.

Silverstone, R. (1994) Television and Everyday Life , Routledge: London.

Sinclair, J. and Cunningham, S. (2000) Floating Lives: the Media and Asian Diasporas , University of Queensland Press: St. Lucia.

Sinclair, J. and Turner, G. (eds.) (2004) Contemporary World Television , British Film Institute Publishing: London.

271

Sktunabb-Kangas, T. (2003) 'Why should diversities be maintained? Language diversity, biological diversity and linguistic human rights', In Ontario.

Smaill, B. (2002) 'Amidst a Nation's Cultures: Documentary and Australia's Special Broadcasting Service Television', Ph.D. Thesis: Monash University.

Solohubenko, O. (2006) Executive Editor of America and Europe Region BBC WS, London, January 2006 [Personal Interview].

Soric, M. (2005) DW Radio Editor-in-Chief, Bonn, December 2005 [Personal Interview].

Straubhaar, J. (2001) '(Re)Asserting National Television and National Identity Against the Global, Regional, and Local Levels of World Televison', In (eds.) Durham, M. G. and Kellner, D., Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks , Blackwell Publishers: Malden, 680-702.

Suard, E. (2006) ARTE Deputy Director of Programmes and Head of Programme Planning, Strasbourg, January 2006 [Personal Interview].

Sucker, E. (2005) Unterhaltungs-Abteilung, Berlin, December 2005 [Personal Interview].

Tacchi, J. (1998) 'Radio Texture: between Self and Others', In (ed.) Miller, D., Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter , University London Press: London, 25-46.

Tacchi, J. (2005) 'The Power of Media Sound', Resonance , 10 (1): 28-32.

The Committee of the Review of the Special Broadcasting Service (1895) Serving Multicultural Australia - The Role of Broadcasting , Australian Government Publishing Service: Canberra.

The European Commission (2005) Action Plan to Improve Communicating Europe by the European Commission .

The European Commission (2007) Europe for Citizens Programme 2007-2013 , Official Journal of the European Union: Brussels.

272

The Fifth Framework Programme. 2002. Prospects of a Citizens' Europe? , www.arena.uio.no/news/bulletins/CIDELNews.html (accessed June 22, 2007).

Third Report of the Ethnic Television Review Panel (1980) Programming for the Multicultural/Multilingual Television Service - Objectives and Policy , Australian Government Publishing Service: Canberra.

Thrift, N. (2003) 'Practising ethics', In (ed.) Pryke, M., Rose, G. and Whatmore, S., Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research , Sage: London, 105-121.

Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture , Polity Press: Cambridge.

Trandafoiu, R. (2006) 'The Whole Greater than the Sum of its Parts: An Investigation into the Existence of European Identity, its Unity and its Divisions', Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture , 3 (3): 91-108.

Turow, J. (2006) Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age , The MIT Press: Cambridge.

UNESCO. 2001. Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity , http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001271/127160m.pdf (accessed April 29, 2007).

Uriccho, W. (2004) 'Cultural Citizenship in the Age of P2P Networks', In (eds.) Bondebjerg, I. and Golding, P., European Culture and Media , intellect: Bristol, 139-163.

Veenendaal, P. (2005) Head of the Dutch Service Radio Netherlands, Hilversum, November 2005 [Personal Interview].

Venuti, L. (ed.) (1992) Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology , Routledge: London and New York.

Venuti, L. (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation , Routledge: London.

Venuti, L. (1998) The Scandals of Translation , Routledge: London.

273

Vertovec, S. (2000) 'Fostering Cosmopolitanisms: A Conceptual Survey and a Media Experiment in Berlin', Transnational Communities Working Paper Series (6): 1-31.

Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2004) 'A "Legitimate Beef" or "Raw Meat"? Civility, Multiculturalism, and Letters to the Editor', The Communication Review (7): 98-105.

Walker, A. (1992) A Skyful of Freedom: 60 Years of the BBC World Service, Broadside Books Limited: London.

Ward, D. (2002) The European Union, Democratic Deficit and the Public Sphere , IOS Press: Amsterdam, Berlin, Oxford.

Watt, N. and Gow, D. (2006) 'Chirac leaves EU Summit as Frenchman Speaks English', in, Guardian , March 24, 2006

Webb, R. (1997) 'Enter the dragon: SBS-TV and the remaking of Australian culture', Culture and Policy: Journal of the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy , 8 (2): 105-113.

Webb, R. (2006) Former SBS Programmer and now Head of ABC Australia, Sydney, [Personal Interview].

White, M. and Schwoch, J. (eds.) (2006) Questions of Method in Cultural Studies , Blackwell: Malden.

Wieten, J., Murdock, G. and Dahlgren, P. (eds.) (2000) Television Across Europe: A Comparative Introduction , SAGE: London.

Wimmer-Kleikamp, C. (2004a) Acting Programme Manager SBS Radio, Melbourne, October 2004 [Personal Interview].

Wimmer-Kleikamp, C. (2004b) Melbourne.

Winkler, S. (2004) Alchemy Producer, Melbourne, October 2004 [Personal Interview].

274

Winner, I. P. (1984) 'Some Comments upon Lotman's Concepts of Semiotics of Culture', In (ed.) Halle, M., Semiosis: Semiotics and the History of Culture , Michigan Slavic Contributions: Ann Arbor, 28-36.

Yair, G. (1995) ''Unite Unite Europe': The Political and Cultural Structures of Europe as Reflected in the Eurovision Song Contest', Social Networks , 17: 147-161.

Young, R. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race , Routledge: London.

Zafiropoulos, M. (2004) SBS Radio Manager, Melbourne, December 2004 [Personal Interview].

275