The First World War claimed 9 million lives and wounded 21 million people. It started in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were shot by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip and, from there, the world splintered into the Allied and Axis powers until 1918. What followed was four years of intense suffering that recharacterized the scope of war and its psychological impact. This shared suffering taught the world its first major lesson about the importance of cooperation. In spite of the foolhardy turn of some countries to isolationism, it bore the League of Nations, the world’s first attempt at a stabilizing international organization. This impact on world history and international relations is why we study the war and why we continue to celebrate Armistice Day each year to commemorate its end.
For the past 100 years, the 21st century society understanding of World War I has relied on the distance of history books and documentaries. Yet, “Translations from the Trenches” takes on a more intimate exploration. In this project, Susquehanna University French students had the unique opportunity to translate a collection of letters, diaries, and other documents written by French writers, including everyday writers such as Raoul Pinat and notable writers such as Colette. They study and offer viewers a human access point to understand how the war affected everyday life for people at the time as well as how it has led to changes in the foreign policy of policing states like the United States and the emergence of international organizations like the United Nations. In engaging these texts, the translating students engage the history of war on a more visceral level and make this empathic work accessible to an English-speaking audience.
Translation, though, is not only a matter of word equivalence, but a matter of cultural transmission. Translation is the act of carrying across, transporting, and transferring meaning from one context to another. Thus, a translator knows commonplace, standard translation, for instance, when a French maison becomes an English house, but also engages in deeper cultural, historical, and social study to best transport meaning, and not just words. He or she must consider how to transfer from one language to another words which do not have a direct equivalence of meaning, and how to transfer idiomatic language, colloquialisms, and cultural references so as not to impede the understanding of target language readers and to make them understand the intentions of the original author.
“Translation from the Trenches”, then, is not only a database housing the experiences of French writers enmeshed in the war but a demonstration of translation from French to English, from early 1900 soldiers to 21st century readers, from French sensibilities to English ones, from the page to multimedia, from the trenches of the war to the often-distant outlook of the modern audience. It is an archive which seeks to understand, to empathize, and to share.