Karl-Heinz Stoll

Transfer. Übersetzen - Dolmetschen - Interkulturalität. hg. H. W. Drescher, Frankfurt, 1997, 291-312.

1. Terranglia

"And what should they know of England who only England know?" (Rudyard Kipling, "The English Flag")

In order to understand, analyse and translate communication, it is necessary to know its socio-cultural context. The interpreter or translator must widen his or her linguistic and cultural competence to a point where his or her personality will include being French, Russian, Chinese, American, Spanish not only with regard to the ability to talk and write or to use fork and knife or chopsticks like a native, but also, to think like one. Consequently, number of publications have demanded the bicultural education of translators and interpreters in their own culture as well as in that of another, i. e. one other society. (Cf. e. g. Mayer G-R M and Jahrbuch, von Schilling)

However, all of our students learn at least two foreign languages - and anyway, what does one language, one culture, one society mean in the case of English? English is used by almost 300 million native speakers in the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and also in countries such as Jamaica or Sierra Leone. In addition, to another 300 to 400 million it is a second language, but a daily means of communication in the areas of politics, economy and science, in about 40 countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, India, Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia.

No other language carries so much status and prestige in so many geographical areas of the world. English has become the lingua franca of international discourse. One of my former students told me that his first job as a freelancer was to interpret English-German for a Nepalese governement delegation in Bonn. As a matter of course the international police in Bosnia or Chinese mathematicians visiting German universities communicate in that language. Obviously English has also become the medium of the international entertainment industry, of computer software and networks and of scientific publications:

[...] the functional power of English in all parts of the world [...] is now recognized, though grudgingly, even by those who would like to see English replaced by regional or national languages in Africa or Asia. [...] Today [...] the English language is a tool of power, domination, and elitist identitiy, and of communication across continents. (Kachru VII and 4)

The name of the global village that high tech has built for all of us, is Terranglia (Cf. J. Jones), the English-speaking world, but at the same time, Terranglia, the world that speaks English, is a large part of the globe with its cultural variety. Globalization of culture also means an increased awareness of its fragmentation.

Over the last few decades, the English departments in many universities have, in the form of chairs, associations and series of publications, institutionalized not only American, but also, Scottish, Irish and Commonwealth Studies, the latter often being subdivided into areas such as Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Caribbean, Indian, African - and here again often into East, West, South African - Studies. In the second half of the 1980s German universities have offered an average of 70 courses per semester in the area of NEL (New English Literatures), most frequently about Canada and Africa. (Cf. Lehmann 207) Each one of the geographical areas comprises a multitude of discrete linguistic variants more or less removed from Standard English. "English [...] is now seen less and less as a European language and an exclusive exponent of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and is instead viewed more as a language with multiple cultural identities and traditions." (Kachru 1986, VIII) The study of culture has also received new impulses from the emergence of the new literatures:

Not long ago literary history and literary criticism in a traditional sense were more or less confined to a concept of culture that stressed the idea of nationalism. And it is an intriguing fact that today this concept is losing its normative power at least for Western scholars working in the field of cultural research. (Harth 40)

How can these aspects be included in the linguistic and cultural education or training of translators and interpreters? Education means "to lead out of", the etymology of training leads us back to "trahere, to pull" and I think for us this implies leading, pulling students out of the convictions and judgements with which their own culture has imbued them and which they hold to be truths; the most forming experiences would be those that "blow one's mind", that most thoroughly challenge received ideas and prejudices and open one's mind to different concepts, convictions, and life-styles.

This is why I think that Wole Soyinka from Nigeria and Samuel Selvon from Jamaica should be as much a part of the education of a Terranglian as Shakespeare and Sillitoe, Scott or Steinbeck. (Shakespeare and Soyinka are by no means as distant as they might appear at first glance. In my studies of the after-life of two figures from The Tempest, "Caliban's Caribbean Career" and "Prosperos Erben", I have mentioned, among other works of literature, Soyinkas Season of Anomy as an example of a new version of the central theme of Shakespeare's play. I found many literal quotations from The Tempest which are obviously so familiar to Soyinka and his intended readers that he did not even mark them as quotations - so much for an aspect of the cohesion, the common educational background, the interconnectedness of Terranglia.)

In literature, decolonization implies criticising the monocentrism of the dominant British language and culture, questioning the methods with which they achieved their hegemony and searching for the submerged and disdained identity of the colonized. Eurocentric views are deconstructed and colonial history is rewritten from a different perspective. (Cf. Ashcroft / Griffiths / Tiffin 195) 

Compared to the concept of a uniform, monolithic English language and culture, the inclusion of plural, fragmentary examples from Terranglia in the education of translators and interpreters constitutes not only a more realistic preparation for their future tasks, it also furthers their understanding of the characteristics of the language, of social and political developments all over the world and of the post-modern world-view that dominates today's Western culture.

1.1 Language

"'Dem say you give me juju to chop.'" (Ekwensi 53)

("They said you have / had given me magic to eat / you have bewitched / enchanted me.") Juju is an African noun, chop a verb from the Cantonese that is to be found in all English pidgins (chopsticks) - and that in African Pidgins can be replaced by nyam nyam where it means "to eat". In our example it is obviously used in a meaning that includes "to internalize", often it also means "to enjoy".

If we compare our example of Nigerian Pidgin to Standard English, we can observe:

- a simplification of grammar through the loss of case, tense and mode inflection

- the semantic expansion of simple words

- the borrowing of words from other languages

These are tendencies that have been inherent in the English language for a thousand years and which can explain why it is so easy and yet so difficult to learn.

Old English was a synthetic language with a dozen different classes of declension and conjugation and eight different ways of forming a plural. These complicated forms were largely lost in the middle ages because of the mixture of peoples and languages - a tendency towards morphological simplification which is continued in the process of pidginization: "[...] english (sic) has been historically subject to a large variety of uses and has therefore become an efficient tool for conveying cultural complexity, as well as functioning as an inter-regional language." (Ashcroft / Griffiths / Tiffin 40)

The semantic expansion of simple words has had the effect that e. g. in Standard English we can express almost any kind of mental and psychological process by the simple verb "to think" (in German, one has to use at least half a dozen different  words): Basic English manages to get by on a total of 850 words, among them only 4 verbs.

The "Secrétaire perpétuel" of the Académie française, Maurice Druon, was quoted in Der Spiegel ^{(Cf. Druon)} with the truism that no language can as easily be spoken badly as English. We could complete that sentence by saying that good English is harder than any other language. One of the reasons is that English has always most readily borrowed words from other languages so that today there is a huge dissociated lexicon composed of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, French, Latin, and, also, African, Hindi, American Indian and other words. "English has done substantial pick-pocketing from other languages [...] the English language shows typical characteristics of a 'mixed' language development in its layer after layer of borrowings, adaptations, and various levels of language contact." (Kachru 131, 160) There are many sociological and situational layers on the lowest of which one might say "to think", and on the highest of which it is agonizing to have to differentiate between "assume, believe, cogitate, consider, contemplate, deliberate, devise, fancy, guess, hold, imagine, intend, judge, mean, meditate, muse, ponder, presume, reason, recall, recognize, recollect, reflect, remember, ruminate, suppose, surmise, take" etc.

The possibilities of morphological simplification, semantic expansion and lexical borrowing that are inherent in English, "its capacity for absorption and acculturation in varied sociocultural and linguistic contexts", (Kachru 116) have predestined the language to be used as an international medium, to be pidginized, creolized, syncretized. More important for the spread of English than these linguistic idiosyncrasies was, of course, British colonialism; today, America's all-pervasive political, technological, economic and cultural impact and the difficulties of deciding for one or a few and against many of the numerous indigenous languages in countries such as India or Nigeria are responsible for the ever-increasing role of English.

The differences between RP (Received Pronunciation), i. e. educated speech in South East England, and the dialects in Great Britain as well as the geographical variants in countries such as the USA, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa basically consist in accents and a limited number of local words and metaphors. In India, the Caribbean and West Africa there is a continuum of variants ranging from local Standards, or "localized norms" (Kachru 96) such as Indian, West Indian (i. e. Caribbean), Filipino or West African Standard English (which, especially in writing, are close to British English) to pidgin- and creole-variants such as Nigerian Pidgin, Indian English, Jamaica Talk, Krio in Sierra Leone or Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. Mixed languages with English have come into being in Hong Kong with Cantonese, in the Philippines with Tagalog, in India with Hindi ("Hinglish") and in the US with Spanish ("Spanglish") and some German dialects ("Pennsylvania Dutch").

"English is acquiring various international identities and thus acquiring multiple ownerships." (Kachru 31) The manifold variants of English provide occasion for "a reinvigorating exploration of the potential of the English language". (Baugh 1989, 55)

The doyen of Nigerian writers, the novelist Chinua Achebe whose use of English became a model for the majority of his colleagues, pleads for an expansion of the register while preserving the general understandability:

The African Writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience. (Achebe, Morning 61)

By means of individual words from the Igbo-language (which are understandable from their contexts), numerous proverbs, metaphors and sayings that are literal translations from Igbo, the "Igboised English" (King 53) in his fiction provides authenticity, local colour and a traditional philosophical framework. "The narrator is addressing both an African and an western English-speaking audience." (Ngara 79)

Wole Soyinka goes beyond Achebe when, e. g. in his drama The Road, he mixes a stilted, old-fashioned English, the slang of modern Nigerian crooks, Pidgin and Yoruba - which entails the necessity of offering numerous footnotes with translations of Pidgin and Yoruba words and an appendix with a "Glossary of Pidgin Words" and "Translations of Yoruba Songs". 

In his theoretical writings Soyinka questions the use of English as a medium that will conserve hierarchical power structures. He pleads for a "second phase of self-liberation, the creation of a continental language as an instrument of the continuing continental struggle." (Soyinka Art, 141) Theoretically he considers Kisuaheli, "a language of symbolic and practical unity", (Soyinka, Art 143) to be best suited as the language of African unity. However, to my knowledge he has never yet used Kisuaheli in his publications, but always English. His justification: "[...] the majority of English-speaking nations regard the language they speak as being nothing more than a tool of convenience, to be discarded whenever something more self-belonging was made viable." (Soyinka, Art 135) And he is aware of the possibilities of adapting English to African needs:

And when we borrow an alien language to sculpt or paint in, we must begin by co-opting the entire properties in our matrix of thought and expression. We must stress such a language, stretch it, impact and compact it, fragment and reassemble it with no apology, as required to bear the burden of experiencing and of experiences, be such experiences formulated or not in the conceptual idioms of that language. (Soyinka, Art 107)

The language of the former colonizers could and should be forged into a tool of revolution and carry new cultural contents by offering

the possibility of creating a synthetic revolutionary culture in place of the bastardised or eradicated indigenous culture of the colonised. The unaccustomed role which such a language is forced to play turns it indeed into a new medium of communication and simultaneously forges a new organic series of mores, social goals, relationships, universal awareness - all of which go into the creating of a new culture. Black people twisted the linguistic blade in the hands of the traditional cultural castrator and carved new concepts into the flesh of white supremacy. The customary linguistic usage was rejected outright and a new, raw, urgent and revolutionary syntax was given to this medium which had become the greatest single repository of racist concepts. (Soyinka, Art 139)

The confrontation with such a language in which familiar lexemes will carry new sememes, familiar frames new images, will further the reader's scepticism towards the naive idea that words have certain fixed meanings. Meaning becomes, as Jacques Derrida, one of the protagonists of postmodernism, has put it, "emancipated". (Derrida 12) Ashcroft / Griffiths / Tiffin: "The post-colonial text [...] does not 'create meaning' through the mere act of inscribing it, but rather indicates a potential and shifting horizon of possible meanings." (187)

1.2 Literature

That Black Americans have their place in the political and literary history of their country is an obvious fact. There are also travel books by African authors about their experiences in the US such as John Pepper Clark's America, Their America and remarks about certain aspects of life in America as in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters  - in both works the approach is satirical rather than profound. A very revealing and sound book about the idiosyncrasies of the American South, its manifold historical relations with the Caribbean and the identity problems of its inhabitants is V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South. Naipaul is an "East Indian West Indian" who was born in Trinidad, where his grandfather had come as an indentured labourer. All of Naipaul's fictional and journalistic works, be they set in the US, the Caribbean, such as his great novels A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men, in Africa, like A Bend in the River, India or Europe deal - from the marginal perspectives of outsiders - with the political and economic aftermath of colonialism and decolonization, the rootlessness and search for an identity of individuals that have resulted from them.

We are much less aware of Blacks in British society than in American. However, there are about two and a half million coloureds of Caribbean, African Indian and Pakistani descent living in Britain. Already in the 18th century black authors, supported by English philanthropists, were protesting against the injustices of slavery which they had themselves experienced and thus contributed to the abolition, in 1807, of the slave trade in the British Empire. Concerning today's numerous fictional and autobiographical accounts, I have, in my study "Schwarze Englanderfahrungen", observed complaints about racist prejudices, discriminations and violence, descriptions of disorientation and uprootedness, but also the discovery of Black identity as a consequence of the rejection by White society. The significance of these books consists in their illustrations of social relations and in descriptions of individual experiences; their documentary value is usually greater than their literary merits.

In the works of such prominent African authors as Dei-Anang, Ekwensi, la Guma, Mpalele, Ngugi, Nwapa, Okot, Soyinka and Sutherland their years of experiences in Great Britain are of little or no importance. Wole Soyinka has excluded his four poems on race problems in Britain ("The Immigrant", "The Other Immigrant", "Two in London", "Telephone Conversation") from recent anthologies.

The study of colonialism and its consequences also offers some new insights into England and Europe. The enormous fortunes necessary for the construction of the great houses that dot the English countryside to the delight of tourists were in many cases the results of slave trade and slave ownership, mostly in the West Indies - a fact which is tactfully concealed in the English novel of the 19th century, e. g. in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. (Cf. Ashcroft / Griffiths / Tiffin 193) Modern art from Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) to D. H. Lawrence's Rainbow (1916) was influenced by African elements.

After these short glances at Black literature in the US and Britain let me look at Africa itself. The predominant theme in Chinua Achebe's novels is the - destructive - influence of colonialism upon African society and upon the psyche of individuals.

The classic Things Fall Apart (1958), selling in the millions and having been translated into over 40 languages, is probably the best-known and to many critics the archetypal African novel. (Cf. e. g. Larson 27) It begins in the second half of the 19th century, just before the advent of the white man. The reader becomes part of a well-ordered society that is held together by a network of close personal relationships and by the conviction that communal values are much more important than the pursuit of individual happiness. Traditional myths, fables and proverbs offer explanations and advice for any situation in life. The community is ordered and regulated by complicated rituals, ceremonies, customs, laws and punishments. Achebe wants to help his countrymen to rediscover their identity and self-respect that were submerged by colonialism:

African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans. [...] they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that many African people all but lost during the colonial period [...]. The writer's duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happens to them, what they lost. (Achebe in Killam 8)

The ending of the book records the falling apart of the old order in its confrontation with the colonizers. Achebe promotes our understanding for the tragic dignity of the failure and death of a hero and his culture that have convinced us of their humanity and strength - and in this way he questions the ideological basis of colonialism. He replaces the outside view of an Africa which, "in our Western tradition, has been so systematically misrepresented and misunderstood" (Gohrbandt 109) (and on which all of us have been raised), with an inside view.

Wole Soyinka's works are very different from Achebe's: the retrospective confrontation with Europe or colonialism is of no importance. The half-dozen main figures of his novel The Interpreters (1965) are all "been-tos" (i. e. they have "been to" Europe or America as students), but they are wholly and naturally Africans. The roles of the Americans, Germans and Englishmen who live in Nigerian society as "expat experts" or "expert expats" are marginal.

The following remarks by the hero of Soyinka's second novel, Season of Anomy (1973), about the experiences of Africans in Europe (and, implicitely, about all of the "look-white-man" themes) could be understood as programmatic for Soyinka and other authors of his generation:

'Who remembers much of those reactions now? I realize they were luxuries - the emotional responses I mean. Who cares ultimately how those stupid master races reacted to you and me. The problem now is to answer what is happening here.' (233)

Soyinka's education has been African as well as Western. His father, the rector of a mission school, very early familiarized him with Christianity. He studied English at the University of Leeds where G. Wilson Knight introduced him to the works of Nietzsche and Arnold Kettle to those of Karl Marx. As a script-reader for London's Royal Court Theatre he not only had a chance to put on stage and direct some of his early plays, but also to become acquainted with the works of the most important representatives of the New English Drama. In his plays, he makes creative use of the Greek classics, Shakespeare, the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty.

All of these elements are integral parts of a plural, postmodern and very African world. Soyinka's works are all situated in Africa and written for African audiences. (Cf. Schipper 138-139) In a traditional initiation, his grandfather introduced Soyinka into the cosmology of his people. He is a deeply religious animist who describes the pantheon, mythologies, ceremonies, rituals and festivities of his people in his works. In particular, he is fascinated by the god Ogun: "Ogun is [...] master craftsman and artist, farmer and warrior, essence of destruction and creativity, a recluse and a gregarious imbiber, a reluctant leader of men and deities." (Soyinka, Myth 27) The drums, masks, songs, dances and acrobats' numbers of the traditional Yoruba theatre highlight Soyinka's plays, the worlds of ghosts, spirits, gods, and figures from the past intermingle with modern reality.

Unlike Achebe, Soyinka does not mourn in a nostalgic way the loss of traditional values. He is firmly rooted in a vivid Yoruba-culture, but his attention is mainly directed to the present and the future. As a matter of fact, he has described the past as "a fleshpot for escapist indulgence". (Soyinka, Art 19) He is against any glorification of the past as practised by the francophone Négritude movement initiated by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. As early as 1962 Soyinka coined that frequently quoted phrase: "A tiger doesn't go round proclaiming his tigritude", and in 1967 he said in a speech:

The myth of irrational nobility, of a racial excellence that must come to the rescue of the white depravity, has run its full course. It never in fact existed, for this was not the problem, but the camouflage. (Soyinka, Art 20)

Soyinka's central subject is the internal social and political situation of contemporary African societies. He satirizes, denounces and viciously attacks any kind of pompousness, false romanticism and abuse of power by political leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Idi Amin (Uganda), Jean-Bedel Bokassa (Central Africa) and, recently, Sani Abacha (Nigeria). He attempts to mobilize the abilities of his readers to react in a cool, rational, spontaneously humane and positive way. In some of his later works he develops utopian ideas in order to further the potential for self-regeneration in Nigerian society.

2. Postmodernism

Since WW II there has been a radical transformation in communication, knowledge and energy technologies in the industrialized world. While the means of production have continuoulsy become more efficient, the question has arisen whether society will be the master or servant of the available instruments.

The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating, not so much in its own right, but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imagination to grasp, namely the whole decentered global network of the third stage of capitalism itself. It is therefore in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable other reality that the postmodern sublime can only be adequately theorized and understood. (Jameson 71)

The multinational, multicultural and decentered communications network of print media, satellite TV and computers has superficially made the world a global village, but at the same time it has increased our awareness that to understand the contents of what is being communicated, to separate essential from junk information surpasses the abilities of any individual. This has resulted in a profound feeling of disorientation.

The change in economics as well as in world-views has brought forth new kinds of literature, art, architecture and philosophy. Obviously, it was felt that something different from the "modern" age had developed, and that a new word was needed to describe it.

The term "postmodern" as we understand it today originated in the US, in the late 1950s. It was originally taken over from Arnold Toynbee's massive historical chef d'oeuvre A Study of History, but gradually was filled with new contents until it has come to mean a plurality of languages, models, methods - not only in different works, but in one and the same work.

This concept has been reached in two stages:

1. Literary critics such as Irving Howe and Harry Levin stated in 1959 that in comparison to the great "modern" literature (William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce), contemporary literature, which for the sake of contrast they designated "postmodern", was characterized by a lack of innovation and power.

2. Critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Susan Sontag gave up the orientation by the high, elitist standards of modern literature in order to describe particularly the combination of elite and mass culture as the specific qualities of the new literature by authors such as John Barth, Leonard Cohen, and Norman Mailer. A milestone in this development was Fiedler's essay in 1969, "Cross the Border, Close the Gap", which, significantly, did not appear in a literary magazine, but in Playboy.

From a negative term that described a slackening of creative energies, "postmodern" has developed into a positive affirmation of the values of a plurality of different intercultural and intracultural orientations and ways of life. In the public area of economics, postmodernism implies diversification, adaptation to special conditions and pluralisation of forms of organisation. In the personal area of human relations feminism has swept away preconceptions of gender roles; deviant forms of sexual relationships have become accepted not only out of permissiveness but out of the convinction that they can result in successful lives. In architecture, the sparse and clear functionality of the "Bauhaus" has been followed by baroque sandstone porticos in front of hypertechnical glass-and-steel buildings and paintings on lush marble walls that look like blown-up comic strips like those by Roy Lichtenstein. Postmodern buildings as well as texts and social structures toy with ambiguity and ambivalent plurality, they provoke and tolerate the tension between different meanings and interpretations.

2.1 Architecture

The most obvious and generally known examples of postmodernism are to be found in architecture. Charles Jencks, an American architect and literary critic who resides in London, transferred the term from literature to architecture, in 1975. Like Fiedler, he describes postmodernism as an expansion of stylistic means to allow for the simultaneous inclusion of elitist, popular and traditional elements and thus appeal to an elite as well as to the man in the street.

In Germany, a landmark of postmodern architecture is Stirling's Stuttgart New State Gallery built in 1984 which makes use of heterogenous traditional and modern, elitarian and pop-culture elements. The drastic pop-art colours of ice-blue and pink handrails, green floors, the stately sandstone architecture of Schinkel, and an hommage to Mies van der Rohe all mingle to form the rich pastiche of a complex architectural landscape - and possibly remind one a little of the incongruous scene described in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five: "The Americans marched stylishly out of the British compound. Billy Pilgrim again led the parade. He had silver boots now, and a muff, and a piece of azure curtain which he wore like a toga." (Vonnegut 147)

2.2 Literature

As I have mentioned, the discussion of postmodernism originated from the study of literature. One of the most obvious manifestation is what has become called intertextuality, i. e. the playful, ironic and parodistic use of established texts by means of quotation, allusion, persiflage, imitation but, also, the mixing of different kinds of texts. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose can be taken as an example here: in the framework of the familiar plot-structure of a detective story, he presents a history of late medieval ideas, intermingled with secret languages, writings and teachings.

Intertextuality is, of course, not a new, exclusively postmodern phenomenon:

From the earliest traceable origins onwards, literary texts have always referred not only to reality (imitatio vitae), but also to previous other texts (imitatio veterum), and the various intertextual practices of alluding and quoting, of paraphrasing and translating, of continuation and adaptation, of parody and travesty flourished in periods long before postmodernism, for instance in late classical Alexandria, in the Renaissance, in Neoclassicism and, of course, in "classical" Modernism. (Pfister 209-210)

What is different in the postmodern use of traditional texts is that they are not quoted in order to fill a new wine into an old skin, use an old vehicle to carry a new message, but to explore the tensions of life among fragments and ruins. Traditions have become pointless and useless, so they can be copied and imitated without consequences. Since no substantial centre, no valid ideology is recognized any longer, reality cannot be distinguished from fiction. The points of reference are no longer offered by reality, but by other texts and pretexts.

The hero of Kurt Vonnegut's largely autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim, witnesses, as a miserable American POW in Germany, the unbearable reality of "the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden" (Vonnegut 101). This account is interspersed with numerous hilariously amusing anecdotes from his life; Billy is not only a time- but also a space-traveller who, in his backyard, is "kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967 [...] from the planet Tralfamadore" (Vonnegut 25), where, together with a blue-movie star, he is exhibited naked in a zoo, "in a simulated Earthling habitat" (Vonnegut 112)  - and "Billy insisted mildly that everything he had said [...] was true." (Vonnegut 26) He finds his adventure described in SF novels by an unsuccessful "paranoid" (Vonnegut 167) author named Kilgore Trout (Cf. Vonnegut 108-111, 166-172, 201-205). "[...] the most valuable thing he had learned on Tralfamadore was so far [...] 'How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace!'" (Vonnegut 116) Peace obviously can only exist in the world of SF.

Vonnegut, in his novel, also reflects on some of the idiosyncrasies of his work, and postmodern literature in general:

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. (Vonnegut 164)

To a large extent, postmodern literature is about the loss of all the significant elements of literature, be they classical or modern: not only characters and plot as mentioned by Vonnegut, but also, rational understanding, language, reference to things and historical events. Like existentialism did earlier, postmodernism has stated the total loss of all traditional values, convictions, authorities. The author himself does not know a "message" and refuses to attempt an interpretation. (Cf. e. g. Stoll, Pinter 10-12) When Harold Pinter, during a rehearsal of one of his own plays, was asked what a passage meant, he answered: "We're not quite sure of the author's intention here." (Pinter in Stoll, Pinter 236)

To Leslie Fiedler, the crossing of borders is the landmark of postmodern literature, particularly, "The dream, the vision, ekstasis: These have again become the avowed goals of literature" ... (Fiedler 258) 

Like reality, language has lost its denotative references and so, Robert W. Corrigan could, as early as 1983, state the loss of meaning in postmodern American drama:

Language may be used or thrown away. At times it is a text, at others, a pre-text. Sometimes it is inflected, sometimes it is not, and at still other times it is little more than gibberish. (Corrigan 163)

Dialogue which used to be the essential means of presentation in traditional drama has lost its importance: noises, pantomime and choreography indicate subtextual meanings.

Lois McNay sums up the linguistic theory in Jean-François Lyotard's, La Condition Postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition):

Lyotard describes the language games which constitute the social bond as a 'pragmatics' which emphasizes the performative as opposed to the denotative uses of language. By this he means that the primary aim of language games is not their referential function, or their validity, but rather the effectivity of a particular language game upon its recipient. (McNay 139)

Excellent examples of postmodernism in contemporary British literature are the plays of Caryl Churchill, (Cf. Stoll, Feminismus) the most successful of female British playwrights. Her most inventive and highly experimental dramas question the traditional role of language. In The Skriker, a play about irrationality and possession, peopled with goblins, hags and ghosts from the world of British legends and fairy tales, the title figure engages in fantastic linguistic games. The play opens with the following sentence: "Heard her boast beast a roast beef eater, daughter could spin span spick and spun the lowest form of wheat straw into gold, raw into roar, golden lion and lyonesse under the sea, dungeonesse under the castle for bad mad sad adders and takers away." In Mad Forest large parts of the dialogues are in Romanian and in Top Girls in Latin - both equally incomprehensible to the average theatre-goer and not meant to be understood. Churchill's unique technique of overlapping dialogues and, in Serious Money, the international network of computers with its overwhelming, chaotic flood of information, are other examples of the largely performative role of language.

The identities of Churchill's characters appear fluctuating and oscillating. She has a white actor perform as a black servant, an adult man as a little girl, and actresses as men in Cloud Nine. In A Mouthful of Birds 40 roles are played by 4 actresses and 3 actors, among them the historical figure of a hermaphrodite. Schreber's Nervous Illness is about a transvestite - and interprets him in a way radically different from Freud who made Schreber famous, not as a case of paranoia, but of perfectly normal human behaviour.

Traps leads the audience from one trap into another by turning upside down the laws and facts of time and space, physics, medicine, psychology, logic, and categorically discouraging all attempts at rational or poetic explanations. The author states: "In the play, the time, the place, the characters' motives and relationships cannot all be reconciled [...] the characters can be thought of as living many of their possibilities at once." (Churchill, Plays: One 71)

Churchill rewrites the history of Cromwell's revolution from the point of view of the poor and of women in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Her play Softcops is based on one of the most influential books by the French postmodern thinker, Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Foucault as well as Churchill denounce the marginalisation and silencing of subversive citizens.

All conventional ideas about language, character, gender roles, authorities, ideals are questioned by Churchill. "Churchill's plays won't allow us the regular comfort of supposed truths about human nature, Western values, social organization, or historical progress." (Solomon 49) In most of her works, it is impossible to abstract a "message", the author confronts her audiences with the simultaneous existence of plural, contradictory truths.

Postmodernism and feminism do, in general, have a number of common elements. Brenda K. Marshall:

As a theory of resistance, postmodernism owes a great deal to [...] feminist theory and practice. [...] the theory and practice [...] of feminists have highlighted a refocusing on history, which I suggest is a first principle of the postmodern moment. [...] Such theories have also brought to the fore the relationship between [...] gender difference and questions of authority and power which are integral to the postmodern moment. (Marshall 10)

Consequently, Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson describe the goals of "Postmodern Feminism" in philosophy as follows:

It would replace unitary notions of woman and feminine gender identity with plural and complexly constructed conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others, attending also to class, race, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation. (Fraser / Nicholson 34 f)

Jane Flax postulates similar goals:

Feminist theories, like other forms of postmodernism, should encourage us to tolerate and interpret ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity as well as to expose the roots of our needs for imposing order and structure no matter how arbitrary and oppressive these needs may be.

If we do our work well, reality will appear even more unstable, complex, and disorderly than it does now. (Flax 56-57)

Caryl Churchill, in her combination of postmodernism and feminism, avoids the extremes of the two world-views. Her postmodern attitude saves her from "the tendency amongst certain radical feminists to construct women as a global sisterhood linked by invariant, universal feminine characteristics, i.e. essentialism." (McNay 2) On the other hand she does not fall victim to the total relativism, the nihilism and apathy of some representatives of the postmodern. Lois McNay:

[...] the fundamental problem is the extent to which a philosophical form of critique that rejects any type of certainty or value judgement conflicts with, or even undermines, feminist politics whose principal aim of overcoming the subordination of women necessarily rests on certain basic value judgements and truth claims. (McNay 2)

Churchill's feminism manifests itself in the striving for self-realization of all of her characters in the different circumstances of their lives (in Top Girls the First Act assembles, among others, the legendary female Pope Joan, a medieval Japanese courtisan, a 19th century Scottish Lady who travelled all over the world and a Thatcherite career woman). Churchill proves to be a postmodern feminist by expounding the problems of self-realization (the successes of her Top Girls seem increasingly dubious), by demonstrating the fragility of traditional norms and authorities and by her complete openness both for differing world-views and lifestyles as well as for formal experiments.

3. Postmodernism and Postcolonialism

According to Churchill, her play Cloud Nine, the First Act of which is situated in colonial Africa, exploits "Genet's idea that colonial oppression and sexual oppression are similar." (Churchill in Fitzsimmons, File 46) There are more parallels between postmodern and postcolonial thinking in aspects such as plurality, marginality, ambiguity, intertextuality. The postmodern stresses the value of the polyglot, ambivalent plurality of diverse, heterogenous intra- and intercultural orientations. Brenda K. Marshall's statement about the characteristics of postmodernism is, also, fully applicable to postcolonial literature:

Postmodernism is about language. About how it controls, how it determines meaning, and how we try to exert control through language. [...] It's about race, class, gender, erotic identity and practice, nationality, age, ethnicity. It's about difference. It's about power and powerlessness, about empowerment, and about all the stages in between and beyond and unthought of. [...] Postmodernism is about history. [...] History in the postmodern moment becomes histories and questions. It asks: Whose history gets told? In whose name? For what purpose? Postmodernism is about histories not told, retold, untold. History as it never was. Histories forgotten, hidden, invisible, considered unimportant, changed, eradicated. (Marshall 4)

The polyglot, multicultural and possibly disruptive aspects of postcolonial writings give vivid expression to theories of the "open", indeterminate text, or of transgressive, non-authoritative reading. We learn to accept that we cannot understand many elements they contain, we are constantly aware of the fact that our interpretation of individual words, scenes, or a plot may diverge from that of the author or of readers from another culture. The writers exploit

a stock of cultural knowledge that we European readers will never fully share, always leaving us at a disadvantage. But we can compensate by setting beside the both privileged and imperfect views from without that make up our own tradition. What we thus achieve is a stereoscopic view of Africa, a plural perspective, that may sometimes be confusing and contradictory but will always be revealing: of ourselves, of others, of the difficulty of knowing both. (Gohrbandt 116)

Both postcolonial and postmodern literature expound the provisional and fragmentary aspects of signification, the constructed nature of identity. Postmodern criticism reads postcolonial texts as symptomatic of the centrifugal pull of history. These texts demonstrate the fragility of "grand narratives", the erosion of transcendent authority, the collapse of authoritarian explanations of the world. They are concerned with plurality, marginality, ambiguity, parody, mimickry, possession. Soyinka's The Road has been described as "a dramatization of the limits of language". (Izevbaye 1980, 91) His Bacchae as well as Caryl Churchill's A Mouthful of Birds are adaptations of Euripides' play that explore pre- and nonverbal elements of myth, ritual, sacrifice, ecstasy and possession in complex interplays of spirits, gods and people.

In Europe and America, postmodernism is an expression of the fact that all linguistic, cultural, political or theological authority has disintegrated. Postcolonialism has at its roots the falling apart of Western imperial authority, the questioning of assumptions respected in former times.

However, at the same time, postcolonial texts are also a manifestation of local culture and history in their own right. Achebe has not only demonstrated that things have fallen apart, but also that the past of his people has always had dignity. Soyinka's African identity is self-confident and unquestionable. Religion, morals and thinking in colonized countries were never as fully submerged and pervaded by colonialism as authorities wanted to make us believe; they represent locally rooted and unique perceptions.

4. The Education of Interpreters and Translators

Terranglia is so huge an area that no individual is able to survey it any longer: "It would not be too much to claim that post-colonial writing now dominates, at least numerically, and perhaps in other ways too, the publication of literature in the english (sic) language." (Ashcroft / Griffiths / Tiffin 194) Heinemann's African Writers Series alone long ago surpassed the number of 300 volumes. It is certainly neither possible nor desirable to try and introduce all of our students to all of the many Englishes and the many more cultures presented in them. They are not to be prepared to become fluent in Nigerian Pidgin or to translate V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie or Wole Soyinka into German (although, of course, all of these are being translated right after their publication in English, and former students actually have sent me books by African authors which they translated). It is a matter of course that translators and interpreters for English must be offered a solid basis of British English or American English and the respective cultures. They should expose themselves to anglophone culture preferably in GB or the US. The NELs (New English Literatures) have, of course, also been influenced by the Great Tradition of English as well as by the great diversity of American literature. However, it is a fact that a great deal of interest and enthusiasm for other areas of Terranglia exists among the students at our institution. Quite a few of the German ones have grown up in Hong Kong, Trinidad or Australia because their families lived there for a number of years, others have travelled in distant countries. We have almost 700 foreign students from about 70 countries. Political commitments, enthusiasm for music such as Reggae or Highlife or plans for a way of life or a career directed towards exotic areas or employers also contribute to a demand for surveys in the form of lectures and more profound exemplary studies in seminars.

A large number of theses ("Diplomarbeiten") has been written on new developments and regional variants of English based e. g. on their documentation in newspapers, playscripts and novels, studies of the use of vernacular proverbs in literature, of the localization or "nativization" (Kachru 165) of metaphors in bible translations into pidgin and creole languages, of the role of aborigines in Australian or women in Ghanian society.

The status of English as an international lingua franca has, of course, also had the effect that other languages such as French ("Franglais") or German ("Denglisch") have been invaded by a multitude of Anglicisms, or, rather, Americanisms: particularly in the area of technical language in different fields of technology, economics and medicine numerous theses, a doctoral dissertation (Cf. Schmitt) and parts of a "Habilitationsschrift" have been dedicated to their study.

The training of interpreters and translators at university level should imply more than an accumulation of a (more or less superficial) encyclopaedic knowledge, the competence to understand and analyse a source text and to develop strategies that are adequate to the intended purpose of the target text. The cultural studies component of our curriculum ought to contribute to the formation of personalities with open-minded, plural and multicultural world-views, with an intercultural literacy, who are able and willing to accept the complexity of issues under discussion in our multi-layered, complicated, fragmented global village. To have learned how to view things from an alien perspective is a prerequisite in any effort to mediate one's own culture to aliens by anticipating their viewpoints. English as the window to the world thus also becomes a window to one's own culture. (Cf. Kachru 91)

An essential contribution towards these goals can be the study of postmodern authors from Europe and America who uproot our preconceptions about language and history, about societal and gender roles such as Caryl Churchill and Kurt Vonnegut, and of postcolonial authors such as V. S. Naipaul who conveys deep insights into the world from the position of a marginal outsider, Chinua Achebe who shakes the eurocentric blindness for the dignity of other peoples, or Wole Soyinka with his sound African identity, his innovative cultural potential, plural openness and uncompromising will to fight any corrupt misuse of power. Unlike the postmodernists, Soyinka is concerned with the shaping of the future of his society.

In these areas, too, numerous theses have been submitted, the doctoral dissertation of a Ghanian about the traditional roots of the theatre in Ghana was published in 1991, (Cf. Edorh) and one about the philosophy of history as mirrored in the works of Soyinka, Wilson Harris and Naipaul is in progress.

I wish to conclude this study with a short quote from the late Ferdi Schneider, a Germersheim alumnus who worked as the Russian and English interpreter for several federal chancellors and then headed the "Bundessprachenamt". When I asked him what he considered the most important goal of the education of interpreters and translators, his spontaneous answer was: 

"Allgemeinbildung!"

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