Addressing a gathering of university presidents attending a conference at the State Department on January 5, 2006, President George W. Bush spoke about the country’s dire need for translators to shore up national security. He promised to spend $114 million to expand the teaching of so-called critical languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and so forth, at the university as well as K – 12 levels as part of a new federal program called the National Security Language Initiative. He illustrated the importance of learning such languages with the following analogy: “In order to convince people we care about them, we’ve got to understand their culture and show them we care about their culture. You know, when somebody comes to me and speaks Texan, I know they appreciate Texas culture.”¹

Bush initially links translation, entailing the learning of a foreign language and culture, with “care” and “appreciation.” If I were to learn “Texan,” for example, I would be showing my capacity to defer to his idiom, suppressing my first language in favor of a second, foreign tongue. My deference would be evidence of my ability to recognize and respect his difference and, more generally, to know the difference that the other makes in any speech act. Such knowing is, of course, anything but disinterested, especially when it involves those who have some sort of “Texan” or some other American idiom as their native language. Such becomes evident in the rest of Bush’s remarks: “When somebody takes time to figure out how to speak Arabic, it means they’re interested in somebody else’s culture. . . . We need intelligence officers who when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, know what they’re talking about.” Here, “somebody” who “takes the time to figure out how to speak Arabic” is one who shows “interest” rather than “appreciation” in “somebody’s culture.” There is a curious doubling of the word “somebody” in this passage. The first is one who “takes time” to learn the other’s language — Arabic, Farsi, or Urdu — while the second is one who, we might assume, is a native speaker of such languages. The first acts to know what the second is “talking about,” while the second simply talks. Unlike the “somebody” who sets aside his or her first language in order to speak “Texan,” and so show appreciation for Texans, this other somebody, for example, “intelligence officers,” learns Arabic or Farsi because he or she is interested only in the content of the other’s speech, listening for that “something” that could be anything, but might also be just the thing from which “we,” as non-Arabic and non-Farsi speakers, need to be protected. In this case, translation occurs not in order to welcome and care for the other but precisely to ensure us that the other stays where it belongs.

Learning to translate thus entails two distinct but related movements. On the one hand, one is required to recognize the singularity of each idiom, for example, Texan or Arabic, that makes one distinct from and irreducible to the other. It is for this very reason that speaking the other’s language necessarily means deferring to it, giving it primacy, and thereby keeping one’s own out of mind. On the other hand, by promising the transportability and substitutability of one language for another, translation raises the possibility of mastering the language of the other, hearing in it some things that the other him- or herself did not mean or did not intend to be heard. We see, then, how translation looks two ways. It opens up a passage to the other in all its otherness, drawing near what at the same time will always remain far. Faithful to the original, it thus allows for the appreciation of and care for the foreigner whose very foreignness becomes an element of oneself. Translating the other’s language, one is transformed, becoming other than oneself. However, translation is also a medium for hearing as well as overhearing what others say even if they did not mean to say it. It is in this sense a kind of instrument of surveillance with which to track and magnify the alienness of alien speech, decoding dangers, containing threats, and planning for interventions. Rather than dwell in the hospitality of the other, translation in this latter sense is unfaithful to the original, seeking to put the other in its putative place, apart from the self.