Should humanities professors be multi-lingual?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m studying for my master’s degree in English, and in a seminar yesterday we were discussing the Symboliste movement in France. To make the point that poetry doesn’t have to be about beautiful things to be beautiful, the professor opened a book of French poetry, read some in French, then began translating. The lovely poem, it turned out, was about nuns picking lice from children’s heads.

What amazed me at first was that the professor could translate on the fly from the original French. I did some asking around and discovered that only four of the dozen English professors in the master’s program are fluent in a tongue other than English, and two of them because something else (1 chinese, 1 Spanish) is their native tongue.

Wasn’t there a time when professors in the arts – literature, art, music – were expected to be fluent in at least one language other than English? I’m a little surprised that I’m going to be credentialled to teach junior college students in the humanities without even a nodding acquaintance with any language other than English.

Shouldn’t college professors be required to be multi-lingual?

2

I think some colleges require it. When I was investigating the possibility of getting my Ph.D. in Spanish literature, it was also a requirement to know Latin – same for philosophy. In order to get an English Ph.D, there was a requirement for a romance language of your choice + Latin. But that didn’t apply to ALL graduate schools–maybe half of them, the ones notorious for rigorousness (Columbia & Berkeley, to name a couple.) This fall I will be applying for a Social Welfare Ph.D. No language requirement.

Basically I feel it is important for any humanities professor to know at least one language besides his/her native one. It just adds a depth to the learning experience, and the knowledge that may be imparted, that cannot be easily obtained in any other way.

3

I had to have two years of a foreign language to get my BA. Passed the courses, but don’t remember much of the language 20 years later. Can you get a BA with no language requirement these days?

4

Hm, I’m surprised. I wanted to get a MA in Middle Eastern Studies for awhile and all the programs I looked at required that you needed to be proficient in at least one Middle Eastern language at the end of the two years.

I suppose it depends on the degree.

5

I think it would depend. Certainly, most of the humanities professors I encountered in my undergrad work were: I took a political science course in the early 80s where the prof was fluent in Russian and would read and translate items to us from Pravda to demonstrate how the same item was reported in the Western and Soviet press. A literature professor, with whom I took a Russian lit course (in translation), spoke French and German in addition to English and Russian. And you would expect a linguistics prof to speak a few languages; I studied with one who knew seven languages fluently. These were practical applications of being multilingual though, and the extra languages were necessary to a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

On the other hand, I also knew an English lit prof who only knew English, and nothing else. It didn’t affect her adversely; certainly, it never held her back. Of course, she was perfectly comfortable reading and understanding Middle English and Old English in addition to modern English, so maybe that had something to do with it.

6

When I got my PhD (20+ years ago), we were expected to demonstrate a reading knowlege of two other languages, usually French and German – unless there was a compelling reason to substitute in a third language for one of these. (For instance, if you were doing a dissertation on Liberation Theology, you would be expected to know Spanish.)

I demonstrated said reading knowlege by intensive cramming in the few months before I sat for each exam, and then promptly forgot most of what I learned. I can still get the gist of a passage in French, but have long since lost every iota of any German I ever had.

7

For my Ph.D. (I should be done this semester), I was required to demonstrate reading knowledge of one language at a minimum. The operative words here are “reading knowledge,” measured at my university by an exam that is so ridiculously easy that they might as well not give it at all (some programs do have additional, more difficult requirements). However, even if one crams-and-forgets for the exams, most humanities scholars are forced to become fairly good at reading at least one language. Even people who work in 20th century English-speaking literature or theory will generally have to read someone who originally wrote in French or German.

/reads French, Old French and Middle English well
//reads classical and medieval Latin very slowly
///German and Greek…one day…one day

8

If your Humanities degree is in, say, Russian Literature, than it would make sense to have a handle on Russian.

Other Humanities such as Theatre or Religion probably shouldn’t require foreign language skills. (Though, to be fair, I think that all college grads should have a basic knowledge of a non-native tongue regardless of major or degree.)

For professors, it’s similar. Why would I want my theatre professor to be fluent in a foreign language?

9

Be nice if he’d read Chekhov or Moliere in the original, wouldnt it?

I tried arguing that since I was studying American Literature, I should be allowed to use Brooklynese as one of my foreign languages. Didn’t go over too well, so i learned Spanish in six months (and forgot it in four), and already knew French pretty well.

10

From what I’ve read in and about Middle English, it is nearly a different language entirely from modern English: without knowing it, you won’t be able to understand most of what you read. I’ve also read chunks of Old English, and it bears no resemblance whatsoever to what I’m writing right now.

(All three are closely related, obviously, but they don’t really look it.)

11

I have a vague familiarity with written Icelandic, and upon reading the bilingual copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, I was able to pick out bits and pieces that looked familiar because of their closeness with Icelandic/old Norse.

I’m applying to grad school right now. If I get into one program, I’m required to have reading knowledge of either French or German. (Art history = lots of writings in both languages.) If I get into the others that I’m waiting on, I get my pick of languages. I don’t, however, need it for library science. (I’m expected to do a second master’s if doing academic specialization within library science, though.)

12

Perhaps this is an English department thing? In my area we also had to have at least German and French (or substitute something very relevant) and then maybe a third if relevant.

13

Twickster’s comments were spot on for my Ph.D. program. The French passage I had to translate was, perhaps, at an eighth-grade reading level, and people passed by producing a half-decent translation of just two pages in the two-hour time slot. Most of my colleagues are effectively monolingual.

I think all humanities professors should read multiple languages, but then, I just happen to like languages.

And per Captain Carrot’s comments, late Middle English (like Chaucer) is challenging but not actually all that difficult for a speaker of Modern English to follow. Certainly some Middle English poetry is unintelligible, but it’s not nearly as difficult as Old English in either the spelling system or grammar.

14

I’m sort of curious. Are you bilingual? Might this color your opinion?

I’m an engineering nerd. The part of my brain that processes language is nonexistent. I went to Japanese school for 7 years (Saturdays, like catechism). I speak no Japanese, even though it is extremely easy to pronounce and the grammar is pretty straightforward (except for that damn casual or respectful crap). I got an A in high school Spanish because I was a good enough student to do whatever I had to do to get an A.

I really have no propensity for foreign language. This is not because I haven’t tried, I’ve been to 68 countires, and I always try to converse in the native tongue if I need to. I certainly always try to learn to speak the pleasantries in the local language and I realize that most people outside of French Parisians appreciate any efforts, no matter how much I butcher it. Shit, I’ve got problems with English. My tongue is uncoordinated, paralyzed even. Nevertheless, I think I probably could have gotten a PHD in art history or film studies at an extremely podunk college, and taught at an even more podunk school. Both these disciplines would be enhanced by fluency in any number of languages (say understanding criticism of Picasso, Almodovar, Michaelangelo, Fellini, Monet, Malle, Hokusai, or Kurosawa). But suppose my specialization is American Film or American modern art. Does this matter?

My real hope would to be actually teach studio art, where any knowledge of foreigh language would be almost absolutely unnecessary, save for any techniques or materials with a foreign name (How do you pronounce gesso or intaglio, anyway?).

Oddly enough, I’m terrific at understanding people speaking English with a horrible accent or a poor grasp of the language. I’m actually actively looking into audio foreign language CDs as to try to improve my abilities. I sincerely doubt that I’ll ever be fluent in any language except English. Yeah, yeah, it’s a poor attitude, but I’ve met many people who have a magical ability to pick up foreign languages.

The bottom line is, are you making this statement merely because foreign language is a skill that you have? If not, I take this all back.

15

Yeah, I think I may have gotten a little mixed up there. I forgot that I’ve read the Canterbury Tales in the original Chaucerian (I’ve heard that Chaucer’s language is different enough from other Middle English that it’s really a separate dialect) and except for the odd word, understood and enjoyed it.

16

In almost any field in the humanities, there’ll be times in an academic career when it’s extremely useful to darn near essential to be able to read one or more foreign languages at least passably. While there are institutions that put a premium on teaching, in most cases career advancement depends on research and publication. Even in fields like American literature, etc., where most of the research is also published in English, there’s always a chance of an important piece of criticism appearing in another language and not being immediately translated. If you have a handle on French and German, or French and Spanish, you stand a chance of being able to use materials only available in those languages. If you don’t you have to hope someone translates the specific stuff you need (which may not happen in particularly narrow or arcane specialities).

Moreover, even if American academics wanted to become staunchly isolationist, the artists, authors, and other figures they study won’t let them. They allude to works in other languages, base new works on plots or themes from works in other languages, und so weiter :wink: . Sure, a lot of those are available in translation, but many aren’t, or the translations are weak or misleading.

I’m actually surprised at the relatively light language requirements for a lot of Ph.D. programs in the humanities. I dropped out of a well-respected English Lit Ph.D. program nearly twenty years ago, but not before I passed my French reading proficiency exam – meaning I would only have had two more (Latin and German) to go. IIRC, I was required to do all three because I planned to specialize in Medieval/Renaissance lit – I believe students specializing in later periods only had to do two. I expect I’d have passed those as well (French was actually my weakest of those three at the time, German my strongest; I’d studied all three in college, as well as Koine Greek and Old English). In my case, the test was producing translation of a literary journal article, with a time limit and access to a French-English dictionary – exactly the sort of thing we’d have been most likely to use our language skills for. The standards weren’t necessarily that high, but I’m confident that my translation was reasonably accurate. I’ve never been anywhere close to fluent in French (or German) – I can almost follow a conversation if I have some idea what the topic is – but that’s not the point of this sort of requirement.

17

My French was a little rusty the first time I took a language exam in grad school (I had lived in France, so I felt I had a chance even w/o studying) and I got a strange passage from (I think) “The Princess of Cleves” all about a female dolphin, who behaved and spoke like a human being.

Otherwise, I did okay on the verbs and the vocabulary and the tenses, but I had never seen the noun “La Dauphine” before.

18

Heh, we should all compare competency exam passages. I remember the German exam I took used a passage about Icelandic land-tenure law in the 12th century or something-- some business about being able to shoot an arrow across a river meant that the land over there was now yours and it seemed to surreal to be correct. French and Dutch exams were in my area though so less bizarre.

19

Yeah, I had that experience with my French exam – I really couldn’t tell whether my translation was totally screwy or whether the person whose text I was translating was talking out his ass.

20

Should humanities professors be multilingual? Sure. They also ought to be tall and good-looking, kind to students, deeply interested in education, excellent golfers, and gourmet cooks with a penchant for giving dinner parties.

Is it necessary for humanities professors to be multilingual? Unless they work in a foreign language area, then it depends on what their native language is. If it is English, then no–they can comfortably get away with not knowing anything else. If it isn’t English, they need to learn English. It’s the lingua franca of serious study, and there is no such thing (as suggested above) as an important piece of criticism that is not immediately translated into English.

Ignoring this fact, it’s pretty pointless to learn a language and say to yourself “now I’m safe! No important piece of criticism will escape me!” because if you learned French, there are approximately 6000 other languages the review might be published in, and knowing French won’t even help you with more than three or four of those. Not that a piece of writing you want to read won’t most likely be in French, German, Russian, Chinese (but which dialect?), or Japanese–or possibly Spanish or Italian, or maybe you want to read the classics in Greek and Latin, or maybe Middle and Old English, or Old Norse, or Irish Gaelic or Scots Gaelic, or Welsh, Pictish, Breton… returning to classics, Aramaic, Accadian, or moving to other parts of the world Arabic or Swahili or Sanskrit, Hindi or Urdu, Classical vs. Modern dialects of every language I’ve already mentioned… need I go on?

It’s nice to have studied a second and third language because it broadens your understanding of the human brain machinery, which is of particular advantage to people working in the humanities. Learning the second language to prevent you from missing important scholarship (unless you’re working in a foreign language discipline)? Silly.