3.1The Model of Negotiating “In-between” Positions

This liminality of migrant experience is no less a transitional phenomenon than a translational one; there is no resolution to it because the two conditions are ambivalently enjoined in the ‘survival’ of migrant life. […] The migrant culture of the ‘in-between,’ the minority position, dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability; and in doing so, it moves the question of culture’s appropriation […] towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity that marks the identification with culture’s difference. (Bhabha 1994, 224)

Homi Bhabha, the author of this somewhat cryptic statement, describes the migrant’s in-between position as a liminal, dangerous, ambivalent, and critical one. It is at the same time a “translational” position, with the potential to overcome appropriation and assimilation and to resist a culture’s staging of seemingly untranslatable cultural difference. From this perspective, migrants dwell in a split space, a “third space.” They appear to be a threat, as they hold the potential to translate and subvert dominant cultural discourses, even if they serve here only as a surface onto which collective fears and uncertainties are projected.155

At first glance, the characterization of migration as an in-between state that interrogates the assumption of assimilation or nationalization sounds plausible; it proposes a new liminal state of hybridity in which the migrant lives with a split personality and multiple belongings. The study of culture, in this way, seems to celebrate in-betweenness in its potential to break open the homogeneity of a national culture. It fosters a difference-oriented concept of culture to be derived from the coexistence of contradictory norms. But one might ask whether migration really corresponds to a condition of “in-betweenness,” as Bhabha claims – a condition that, after all, still indicates a binary system of polarities.

In her manifesto entitled “Against Between,” Leslie Adelson critically questions the worn-out claim that migrants oscillate in a vague intermediate state between two worlds (Adelson 2001, 245). This positioning, Adelson states – using the example of Turkish-German migrant literature – still takes as a given a territorialized concept of home and belonging, and with it, the idea of separate lifeworlds. In her view, migrants should instead be ascribed the capacity to create “Sites of Reorientation” (Orte des Umdenkens, 247) in which reimaginations of traditional national orders and belongings take place. But what does this mean in a concrete sense? We certainly cannot find an answer by adhering to the rhetorics of belonging, hybridity, and translation as a mode of difference, or to other formulas of global encounter. Instead, we need a more precise, non-metaphorical, and methodologically elaborated approach that considers translation as a social practice – as a specific form of communicating that could evoke a changed concept of “integration.”

3.2The Model of Integration or Assimilation

From Joachim Renn’s extended study on this subject (Renn 2006), we have learned that a society in its multiple voices cannot be grasped through its holistic ‘representation,’ but only through a dynamic of “translational relations.” Translation can become effective here not by aiming at any equivalence of meaning (as it would be the claim of ‘representation’), but as a vehicle for producing a specific “unity” of society in its coexisting plurality: This means that “the unity of society […] can only be realized in permanent translation in a variety of contexts” (Renn 2002, 209). Integration is thus conceived as a matter of constant translation activities between non-generalizable, divergent perspectives, interests, positions, and forms of life. As such, integration is seen as the outcome of pragmatic exchanges and negotiations, unfolding as a “countermeasure against disintegrative tendencies in concrete actions and situations” (Renn 2002, 211). Renn uses the category of translation to show how the fragmented units of a society do not necessarily remain stuck in parallel worlds, but from the beginning are infused by “translational relations.” In this sense, the notion of translation can be made productive for a sociological “revision of the concept of integration” (Renn 2006, 8).

Renn’s methodology finds expression in the investigation of a concrete historical example of migration, available in Peter Conolly-Smith’s book Translating America (2004), that also uses translation as a suitable tool for looking at integration or even assimilation. In this detailed study, Conolly-Smith explores how German immigrants to America at the turn of the 20th century cultivated an assimilation-oriented practice of self-translation and self-integration. These immigrants borrowed then-innovative American models of visual representation (such as cartoons or comic strips) for their own German-American newspapers (Hearst’s German Journal, the Staats-Zeitung, and others) that functioned as mediating agents of cultural translation. How, specifically, did this work? As Conolly-Smith explains, “The process that led […] to a state of cultural incorporation was […] a process of translation that, for immigrants, necessarily had to precede incorporation” (18). This finding evokes a general insight: we can only grasp the complexities of translation processes in the course of migration by searching for traces of those ‘pre-translations’ that precede any accomplishment of integration or incorporation. Should we, then, try to reconstruct decisive pivot points through which a particular migration process receives its direction?

Conolly-Smith’s historical example gives an explicit answer, revealing a truly translational ‘method’ in the increasing efforts of German immigrants to contribute to American culture. The ‘method’ lies in the practice of a “gradual translation” (19), which can be examined by considering its successive steps and agents: by adopting the new visual codes of the emerging American mass culture and entertainment industry, and at the same time by transforming or subverting them, the German immigrants gained a new tool for translating German culture. It allowed an overwriting of their ‘original’ idea of German Hochkultur and constituted a more modern practice of self-positioning in popular culture. The daily German-American newspapers served as crucial mediators, as agents of translation, by promoting and achieving a “subsequent incorporation of their readers” (50) and of the German immigrant community on the whole into American public life.

This mode of a “translational assimilation” (Cronin 2006, 52), however, seems to have a clear deficiency: it is one-sided and based on the condition of surrender to the dominant norms of the host society. In recent years, more attention has been paid to reciprocal processes of translation and the capacity to create a shared ‘third culture’ beyond any claims of national hegemony. This appeal for mutual translations is demanding for a society in its translational relationships between different social groups, between migrants and other parts of the population – certainly much more demanding than a one-sided integration offer from the dominant society as represented, for instance, by the highly controversial Einbürgerungstest (test for German citizenship) for immigrants in contemporary Germany. As Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny have pointed out, this test exposes migrants to political control through cultural inclusion or exclusion, by their getting “culturally translated into ‘being German’” (Buden and Nowotny 2009, 197), and by being translated into German citizenship. There is no doubt about the location of the hegemonic reference point in this act of translation: it is the unquestioned canon of asserted German values.

Thus, in such cases, it can be disputed whether immigration should be considered a mode of assimilation at all, as a mode of becoming similar to the destination society by reducing distinctions and differences (see Bartram et al. 2014, 16 on ‘assimilation’ vs. ‘integration’). Isn’t it instead a permanent process of transformation and, in this sense, a massive challenge for the nation-state? The process of transformation applies first to the migrant him- or herself: as a continuous demand for self-translation.

3.3The Model of Self-Translation and Appropriation

If migration is not to be understood as celebrating some vague sense of in-between, then perhaps it constitutes a state in which one is “lost in translation.” In the area of “migrant writing” (Gallagher 2014, 130ff.), of life writing in “borrowed tongues” (Karpinski 2012), a telling example is certainly Jewish journalist Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical report detailing the complicated accommodation process in her Canadian and US-American exile after leaving Poland in 1959: Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1990). What comes to the fore here is not only the linguistic confrontation with a new language, but even more a “sense of absolute division, between the past and the present, between my old self and the new self, etc.” (Phoenix and Slavova 2011, 340). It marks a biographical rupture that should also become an immense challenge for migration researchers who practice micro-sociology by biographical interviews (Lutz 2011). In Hoffman’s case we can observe the migrant’s effort to gain access to a new level of agency by practicing a cultural code-shifting and self-translation in the course of the migration process: “I have to translate myself” (211), Hoffman notes in describing the disturbing experiences she had to deal with after leaving her Polish home country and settling in the New World.

Self-translation means in this case not only translating one’s own works into another language, but translating oneself from one context into another – certainly not in a linear way, but as a multilayered “process of triangulation” (Frittella 2017, 372), trying to find a position as a person between two different frames of reference.156 Translation is further considered as a conscious effort to reach beyond words or beyond verbal equivalence and grasp the hidden pre-translations present in a society – by shifting gradually, though always incompletely, to meet the unfamiliar “common agreements of a society,” trying to adapt to their unspoken cultural connotations and “subtle signals” through which social meanings are signified (Hoffman 1990, 211, 172). Practicing self-translation in this way can indicate an active personal engagement with an enduring process of social integration; the effort of self-translation will not necessarily lead to integration or even assimilation, but also to displacement and alienation. Translation can even convey “an acute sense of dislocation,” an active “refusal to assimilate” (197). In this respect, Hoffman seems to assume the notion of a pluralized and fragmented society, by asking: “In a splintered society, what does one assimilate to? Perhaps the very splintering itself” (197). But her individual, emotional response exceeds any sociological approach by pointing to the unsettling personal effects of being drawn into a liminal form of existence. She describes her own experience with linguistic uncertainty that was accompanied by psychotherapy in the sense of what she calls “translation therapy” (271). Witnessing how this specific mode of “translation therapy” is also considered a generation-specific attitude to exile existence facilitates an important insight for further analyses of migration situations. It is always important to ask if there are generation-specific forms of translation and self-translation – for instance, the contemporary phenomenon of translating migration experiences with regard to the digital sphere, to social networks, and to a communicative exchange through cellular phones.

It is furthermore important to reflect upon the sequence of translation activities in migration processes beyond the rather narrow understanding of adapting to the conditions of the host society. The ‘regime’ of translation here is much more complex. As Cecilia Alvstad has shown in the letters of Swedish transatlantic migrants to Latin America in the early 20th century, it already defines earlier stages of the extended transit experience: “the translational process started long before the migrant arrived in the new continent” (Alvstad 2013, 103). And again, with regard to Eva Hoffman’s memoir one should take into account – as Alvstad claims by referring to the letters of these migrants – that translation in the course of migration requires two audiences: the addressees of the home country, and those of the host country (107). This insight is certainly eye opening, above all with respect to the ambivalent translational ‘management’ of the split affiliations that signify the life stories of contemporary refugees.

3.4The Model of Positioning between Multilingualism and Labeling

Of course, we cannot neglect the fact that those and other migration situations are – apart from the socio-cultural dimension – always characterized by complex multilingual conditions. We should not underestimate the impact of “translational relations” (Renn 2006) in the field of language use, as well as in the multilingual challenges for a homolingual nation-state. Such translational relations and circumstances can be made visible by following the practice of translation as a “bottom-up localization” (Cronin 2006, 30), as a tool for dealing with migrational spaces of multilingualism in small-scale communities and communication units: “With the intensification of migration, diasporal communities and hybridity, translation operates increasingly across small spaces, ‘at home’” (Simon 2009, 209). A transcultural approach is thus not confined to the big movements and context shifts between and across cultures, but can instead focus even on shared, “‘internal’ spaces,” for instance on specific urban migrational spaces that reveal “the complexities of translation across the shared spaces of today’s cities” (Simon 2009, 209). The practice of translation in such shared migrational spaces can be conceived as a small-scale “model of intense, though conflictual, cultural movements across language lines” (Simon 2008, 8): a translational laboratory of linguistic movements in processes of ‘internal migration’ that can also be found on a larger scale, that is, in the national sphere.

With regard to a national context, Boris Buden (2012) discussed artist Alexander Vaindorf’s stimulating video installation, Detour (2006), that can be seen as a great example for translating migration into images, media, and artistic forms.157 The film deals with the migration of Russian women to work as housekeepers in Italy. Because of their initially insufficient language skills, these women started in the south of Italy; after improving their Italian they moved northward in a kind of internal migration within their host society, and in so doing were able to achieve a better standard of living. This migration scenario demonstrates the translation of migrants into citizens – by gradually accommodating with a homogeneous national language. Another way of turning migrants into citizens is represented in the previously mentioned German Einbürgerungstest (test for German citizenship). Here we see that migrants are not only translators themselves, but often desperately need translators and interpreters to come to their aid, for instance, in asylum hearings, in legal trials, in health care institutions, and in the multitude of naturalization procedures (Einbürgerungsverfahren) (see Mokre 2015; Inghilleri 2005). It is an example, however, that does not apply to other forms of migration, such as those cosmopolitan migrants with apriori privileged positions who draw their translational competence from their acclaimed intellectual or professional authority – performing a widely known mode of academic nomadism.

The example of a hierarchical south-to-north migration within Italy again shows that social accommodation depends on the institutional, political, and economic ‘pre-translations’ at work therein: on the invisible intersection of language skills, social hierarchies, and institutional translations as an “instrument of political exclusion and control” (Buden 2012, 366). Whether migrants are labeled as refugees, as economic migrants, as temporary labor migrants, as climate change migrants, or even as potential terrorists makes a difference. And through this bureaucratic process of designation we experience how “stereotyped identities are translated into bureaucratically assumed needs” (Zetter 2007, 39): translated into the institutional needs of specific programs, for housing and food aid, but also for control. These institutional needs are mostly incongruent with the self-perceptions and responses of the migrants themselves, who are in this case dealt with as objects of a translation from individual identities into stereotyped identities or even from “foreign others into political categories” (Giordano 2014, 10). They are objects also of a translation between the new bureaucratic language, in which they are categorized, and their own social language, which draws on different past norms and experiences. Their translation movement can, in this way, be understood not as a reference to an ethno-national “origin,” but rather as a social “movement between and across” (Bassnett 2011, 74) that is experienced as a spatial movement between lifeworlds and different conditions of living. Shifting between the migrants’ self-perceptions and the categorizations imposed on them externally, translation often becomes an important instrument of converting migrants into citizens, as Cristiana Giordano has shown in her ethnography of migrants in Italy:

Through conceptual acts of translation, a complex interplay of therapeutic, bureaucratic, and religious apparatuses transform foreign others into political categories – the ‘migrant,’ ‘refugee,’ and ‘victim’ – that the state can recognize and use to legitimize their difference. (Giordano 2014, 10)

The transformation, however, is ambivalent, even as “this translation gives foreigners access to services and rights” (10). But beyond this accessability, it continually demands a differentiating question: “How is the voice of the migrant rendered, translated, heard, erased, and produced in different institutional settings” (Giordano 2008, 597)?

3.5The Model of Reference to a “Third Idiom”

Today, we are concerned by racist anti-refugee demonstrations and the struggles against the allotment of homes for asylum seekers occurring in Germany and other European countries. Can a reference to translation really prove its worth in situations like these, where stateless and rights-less refugees are attacked and their claims for social and legal recognition are at stake? Isn’t their liminal state – without passports, without rights, without work, and without recognition – a signal that all possible attempts to translate are bound to fail? Even so, we can point to critical public statements such as “Refugees Welcome!” signs. And we could even go further and try to explore hidden dimensions of the possible translation process to be activated, whether in the critical reexamination of polity categories or the relation to third, common reference points in order to gain recognition. The advocacy of pro-asylum groups and the migrants/refugees themselves often refer to human rights as a shared normative point of reference (see Mokre 2015, 56). I would call this practice translation through the use of a detour. This strategy can also be applied to translate one’s own immediate social or political claims into a “third idiom.”

For a better understanding, we can turn to the thought-provoking findings that sociologist Martin Fuchs has drawn from research on the Indian Dalits, a marginalized group of Untouchables living mainly in the slums of Indian megacities. The Dalits, Fuchs maintains, need translation existentially, as an everyday tool for survival: to make themselves recognized in their marginal position, the Dalits translate their discriminating experiences explicitly into a universal “frame of reference,” into global, religious or civil society idioms. In this case, the religious language of Buddhism is utilized for its promise of social recognition: “The participants undertake what can be called a ‘translation’ of their claims and concerns into a new or ‘third idiom,’ which ideally is not owned by any one side […]” (Fuchs 2009, 30–31). At the same time, the shift to shared idioms activates an effective social context where translation serves “to open the self towards the other, thus extending and developing target and source languages” (Fuchs 2009, 24). Making use of reference systems like this one is more than a mere reference back to an original. Instead, translation as a social practice is, in this case, a forward-facing model of social addressing, a means of pushing for action by an “attempt to reach out to others” (Fuchs 2009, 30). With this claim, Fuchs describes translation as an intentional, goal-oriented social practice for self-empowerment. This exact practice can also be found in migration scenarios. The same model of translation applies especially to those situations where migrants do not have sufficient agency to achieve self-translation, but attempt to translate nonetheless, by making detours.

A detour like this can use the reference to universal norms, such as human rights, as a strategy for gaining recognition and winning new regional or particular rights. Sociologist Walter Nicholls has shown a similar modus operandi in the context of “undocumented immigrants” in the US who also use translation as detour. They rely on “support organizations” and alliance networks that “possess the knowledge and culture needed to translate immigrant claims into powerful mobilizing frames that resonate with the norms of the national political field” (Nicholls 2013, 93). Here too, the translation of equal rights claims into “mobilizing frames” is used as a strategic detour to “gain recognition for undocumented immigrants” as legitimate subjects.

With regard to migrants and asylum seekers in general, it could be argued that these social groups might adopt translation in the form of a pragmatic detour. Their struggle for recognition can also engage with a third idiom – in this case, by making an explicit link between human rights and the right to claim asylum. Here too, the model of address can, in fact, become a model of action.

3.6The Model of Transformation and Creating New Contexts

A quite different example is the explicit future-oriented mode of translation that can be accessed through the case of Erich Auerbach, the German Jewish philologist and humanist, who arrived as an exile in Istanbul in 1936. He was one of numerous exiled academics from many disciplines who fled Germany to teach at Turkish universities or practice at hospitals. Kader Konuk describes how Auerbach “found himself at home” in Turkey (Konuk 2010, 17), a country that today forces numerous academics from its own universities into exile for political reasons (see Konuk’s contribution to this volume). It was in Istanbul that Auerbach wrote Mimesis, his pathbreaking book of literary criticism, by which he initiated the translation of Western humanism into the reform process of Turkish Westernization (Konuk 2010, 2008). Though still speaking and teaching in German, while constantly relying on a Turkish translator, he thus translated an established Western cultural habitus – thereby helping to trigger the transformation of a whole nation. Could we thus say, with Andreas Langenohl’s cultural theory of translation, that Auerbach followed a practice of translation by referring to and opening up a future context that did not yet exist (Langenohl 2014, 24)?

In Auerbach’s case, translation means transformation – not from a vague in-between state, not through a “detachment” from the German origin(al), as exile has been conventionally seen, but through the adoption of a state of “multiple attachments” in exile, as Kader Konuk concludes (Konuk 2010, 13)158 . This situation of multiple affiliations and associations provided exactly the right conditions for a forward-facing, active effort of cultural translation. Auerbach’s example of migrant translation shows how specific migrant situations can generate cultural works (like Mimesis) that have the potential to set a transformative force for an entire society in motion. This future-oriented view of migrants’ ability to initiate cultural translation and to create new cultural contexts differs from a view that always falls back to originals or fixed, already-established systems of reference. Andreas Langenohl’s notion of the context-creating force of translation applies here: translation effects “a configuration of the target context, in the sense of a perspectivization, anticipation, or envisioning. Together, text, speech act, and act of address assemble hopes, as it were, of what they might become in the target context” (Langenohl 2014, 24). This reference to future contexts accentuates the agency of translators, like Auerbach, who generated new idioms and cultural values in the target society (insofar as he contributed to the development of a Turkish humanism). Such far-reaching translation endeavors indicate that migration need not necessarily amount to dislocation, but can also become a fruitful relocation.

In the specific case of exile, translation thus can become effective as a cultural technique for supporting transnational knowledge transmission or even the transformation process of a society.159 This can be seen to operate in a broader translational field that is open to the reception of more than just a transfer of ideas. Such an expanded horizon is marked in a letter to Walter Benjamin that Auerbach wrote during his Istanbul exile in January 1937:

We teach all the European philologies here […]. We try to influence the instructional life and the library and to Europeanize the administrative management of scholarship all the way from the instructional grid down to the card catalog (“vom Stundenplan bis zum Zettelkasten”). That is naturally absurd, but the Turks want it, even if they occasionally try to get in the way. (3 January 1937, Auerbach et al. 2007, 750)

Translation – in this rather optimistic statement, with its hegemonic overtones – appears to be an all-encompassing cultural practice, transmitting not only European scholarly ideas and results, but also the practices, instruments, and equipment of European-style research. Nowadays this could be interpreted with reference to the insights of Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory, which reflects translation as a collaborative network including the instruments of research themselves as well as the instrumental facilities in acts of translation.

It is certainly remarkable that intellectual migrants, émigrés, and refugee scholars establish their translational impact not only with the transfer of ideas, but with the transfer of material and economic developments as well. Gottfried Bermann Fischer, for instance, made an impact on the re-education and democratization process in postwar Germany by way of a specific medium: the import of the American pocket paperback. This led to the development of the Taschenbuch in Germany, which can be seen as the starting point for a transformation of the German publishing industry. Here, translation worked in the sense of what we would today call ‘innovation management.’ An analogous process of a materially based ‘knowledge transfer’ can be observed in the case of Jewish refugee scholars to the United States. As émigrés and active cultural translators in the 20th century, they contributed to a transnational modernism in America. Walter Gropius, for instance, translated the “Bauhaus ideals to the world of American business” (Logemann 2017, 425), paving the way for a marketization of these ideals through American design companies.

Examples like these could help to support an understanding of translation in migration contexts as not only a single practice, but rather, in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, as a broader translational “field.” This too could perhaps be expanded further toward a practical understanding of translation as a specific kind of network, represented by Actor-Network-Theory. Here again, we see more than a ‘cultural translation’ at work, but rather a ‘creative adaptation’ pushing toward future developments.160 Nonetheless, even migrants with a high degree of potential intellectual, academic, and social agency might continue to be caught in a hazardous state of liminality. Even as they promote new developments or transformations in their respective fields, their positions as translators could often be precarious, and even quite risky.