Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building

262 Pages·2012·1.27 MB·English

by  Hilary Footitt

Languages and the Military
Palgrave Studies in Languages at War
Series Editors: Hilary Footitt, University of Reading, UK and Michael Kelly,
University of Southampton, UK.
Languages play a crucial role in war, conflict and peacemaking: in intelligence
gathering and evaluation, pre-deployment preparations, operations on the ground,
regime-change, and supporting refugees and displaced persons. In the politics of war,
languages have a dual impact: a public policy dimension, setting frameworks and
expectations; and the lived experience of those ‘on the ground’, working with and
meeting speakers of other languages.
This series intends to bring together books which deal with the role of languages
in situations of conflict, including war, civil war, occupation, peace-keeping, peace-
enforcement and humanitarian action in war zones. It will offer an interdisciplinary
approach, drawing on applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, translation studies, inter-
cultural communication, history, politics, international relations and cultural studies.
Books in the series will explore specific conflict situations across a range of times and
places, and specific language-related roles and activities, examining three contexts:
languages and the military, meeting the other in war and peacemaking, and interpreting/
translating in war.
Titles include:
Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly (editors)
LANGUAGES AT WAR
Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict
Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly (editors)
LANGUAGES AND THE MILITARY
Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building
Forthcoming:
Hilary Footitt and Simona Tobia
‘WAR TALK’
Foreign Languages and the British War Effort in Europe 1940–46
Michael Kelly and Catherine Baker
INTERPRETING THE PEACE
Peace Operations, Conflict and Language in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Palgrave Studies in Languages at War
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–35516–3 Hardback
9780–230–35517–0 Paperback
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing
order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of diffi culty, write to us at the address
below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Languages and the Military
Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building
Edited by
Hilary Footitt
University of Reading, UK
and
Michael Kelly
University of Southampton, UK
Selection and editorial matter © Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly 2012
Individual chapters © their respective authors 2012
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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First published 2012 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-34948-7 ISBN 978-1-137-03308-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137033086
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Contents
List of Tables and Figure vii
Preface viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction: Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation
and Peace Building 1
Hilary Footitt
1 One Army, Many Languages: Foreign Troops and Linguistic
Diversity in the Eighteenth-Century French Military 12
Christopher Tozzi
2 ‘Amidst Clamour and Confusion’: Civilian and Military
Linguists at War in the Franco-Irish Campaigns against
Britain (1792–1804) 25
Sylvie Kleinman
3 Fighting Together: Language Issues in the Military
Coordination of First World War Allied Coalition Warfare 47
Franziska Heimburger
4 Languages at War: a UK Ministry of Defence Perspective 58
Lieutenant Colonel Justin Lewis RE
5 The Language Policy of the Italian Army in the Occupied
Slovenian Territories, 1915–17 70
Petra Svoljšak
6 Mediating for the Third Reich: On Military Translation Cultures
in World War II in Northern Finland 86
Pekka Kujamäki
7 When Bosnia was a Commonwealth Country: British Forces
and their Interpreters in Republika Srpska, 1995–2007 100
Catherine Baker
8 A Bilingual Officer Remembers Korea: a Closer Look at
Untrained Interpreters in the Korean War 115
María Manuela Fernández Sánchez
9 Victims of War: Refugees’ First Contacts with the British in
the Second World War 131
Simona Tobia
v
vi Contents
10 Jailtacht: the Irish Language and the Conflict in
Northern Ireland 148
Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost
11 The AIIC Project to Help Interpreters in Conflict Areas 175
Linda Fitchett
12 Learning the Language of ‘The Other’ in Conflict-Ridden
Cyprus: Exploring Barriers and Possibilities 186
Constadina Charalambous
13 Resolving Conflict via English: the British Council’s
Peacekeeping English Project 202
Peter Hare and Nicholas Fletcher
14 Did Serbo-Croat Die with Yugoslavia? A Different View of
Language and Identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina 217
Louise Askew
15 Exhibiting the ‘Foreign’ in a National Museum: Imperial
War Museum London and Languages at War 227
James Taylor
Conclusion: Communication, Identity and Representation
Through Languages in War 236
Michael Kelly
Index 244
List of Tables and Figure
Tables
4.1 K ey features of STANAG 6001 63
4.2 E mployment factors for dedicated linguists 65
13.1 The two phases of the PEP 204
Figure
4.1 Organizational chart of the governance of language
capability in UK MOD 60
vii
Preface
The contributions in this volume come from an international confer-
ence held at the Imperial War Museum, London, in April 2011 as a result
of the Arts and Humanities Research Council project Languages at War:
Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict (http://www.reading.
ac.uk/languages-at-war).
We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their
support for the whole project and to the British Academy for its contribu-
tion to the final conference. The Imperial War Museum, which hosted the
conference, proved to be an excellent and supportive venue for our discus-
sions, and we are particularly grateful to Samantha Heywood, James Taylor,
Suzanne Bardgett, Roger Tolson and the Director of the Churchill War
Rooms, Phil Reed.
The conference provided a forum in which war studies specialists, histori-
ans, cultural studies analysts, linguists and translation scholars could meet
together with practitioners in order to explore the place of foreign languages
in war and conflict. The discussions we had were marked with openness and
a genuine desire to cross disciplinary boundaries and learn from each other,
and we are immensely grateful to all who participated.
Hilary Footitt
Michael Kelly
viii
Notes on Contributors
Louise Askew has been a professional translator, interpreter and reviser
working between English and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian for, amongst oth-
ers, the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and the NATO
Stabilization Force HQ in Sarajevo where she set up and headed the trans-
lation and interpretation service from 2000 to 2004. She has a PhD on
international language policy in post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina from the
University of Nottingham. Louise would like to thank her interviewees for
giving so generously of their time and the Centre for Russian, Central and
East European Studies based at the University of Glasgow for providing
funding for her PhD research.
Catherine Baker is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of
Southampton and Teaching Fellow in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict at
University College London. Her research interests are in the socio-cultural
impact of international intervention and in the politics of popular culture
and entertainment, drawing on research in former Yugoslavia. She is the
author of Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in
Croatia since 1991 (2010). Her articles have appeared in journals such as War
and Society, Europe–Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers and Ethnopolitics.
Constadina Charalambous is a Lecturer in Language Education and
Literacy at the European University of Cyprus. She specializes in language
education in contexts of conflict, and her broader research interests include
linguistic ethnography, intercultural communication and peace educa-
tion. She has recently co-written ‘Other-Language Learning, Identity and
Intercultural Communication in Contexts of Conflict’ (in The Routledge
Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication, 2011).
María Manuela Fernández Sánchez is a Senior Lecturer in the Department
of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Granada, Spain.
A teacher of Interpreting Techniques (French–Spanish) and Translation
Theories at both undergraduate and graduate levels since 1986, she has also
taught abroad in Belgium and Mexico. She has published widely in the areas
of translation theory and interpreting history. She is currently researching
the diplomatic and international situation which required high-level inter-
preting during the first two decades of the Cold War era.
Linda Fitchett is a member of the International Association of Conference
Interpreters (AIIC) and coordinator of the Interpreters in Conflict Areas
project. She may be contacted at [email protected]. She has recently been
elected President of AIIC.
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