Article,
Traduire: défense et illustration du multilinguisme
The Translator, (2014)
Abstract
Traduire: défense et illustration du multilinguisme, Francois Ost, Paris, Fayard, 2009, 421 pp., 23€ (pbk), ISBN 978-2-213-64366-3 A distinguished francophone jurist hailing from the ‘civil law’ tradition (the familiar misnomer referring to legal cultures worldwide that feature epistemologically influential traces of Roman law), Francois Ost pleads against the supremacy of English which technological, financial and cultural processes of globalisation have been facilitating. Specifically, Ost conjoins his opposition to anglobalisation with the view that ‘the fight in favour of the promotion of the French language is a priority of extreme importance’ (17). Throughout, the argument unfolds from an interdisciplinary vantage, an unusual stance within the civil law world where, whether in Germany, Mexico or Japan, academic writing remains stupefyingly obsessed with futilitarian aggregations of concepts and with the desire to keep legal discourse immune/safe from what it deems to pertain to the non-law (which it variously calls ‘anthropology’, ‘economics’, ‘literary criticism’ or ‘\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_’ fill in the blank, the only ascertainable exception being mathematics, whose inevitability it has expressly wanted law to mimic for centuries).
