Nativizing or Foreignizing Content? A Question of Rapprochement

As I consider different approaches to translating philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature address, I’m led to ponder the nature of the anglophone usage of the word rapprochement. 

Here is the French for context. The speech was read by a French diplomat in letter form because the professor could not make it to Scandinavia for the ceremony in 1928.

On avait pu croire que les applications de la vapeur et de l’électricité, en diminuant les distances, amèneraient d’elles-mêmes un rapprochement moral entre les peuples : nous savons aujourd'hui qu'il n’en est rien, et que les antagonismes, loin de disparaître, risqueront de s’aggraver s’il ne s’accomplit pas aussi un progrès spirituel, un effort plus grand vers la fraternité.

My translation of the first sentence of this excerpt: There was a time when someone might have anticipated steam and electricity shrinking distances and thereby leading the people of the world into closer moral harmony with each other.

And here is the official Nobel Prize translation: “One might have expected that the use of steam and electricity, by diminishing distances, would by itself bring about a moral rapprochement between peoples.”

So why does the official Nobel translation say: “Bring about a moral rapprochement between peoples”? The consistency in tone is impressive and even beautiful, but I find the placement of a French word in an English sentence a problematic instance of franglais at this current moment in history.

 When you accept that no obviously English word can replace it,  you are perhaps explaining the nature of rapprochement itself according to one reading—that there is some mystical divide between peoples such that the French, for instance, can be quoted but not quite approximated.

That is precisely what rapprochement means in this context. Rapprochement is an elite word, a nonce word for many people that may pass by like a blip when reading the English translation below. In humanistic academic contexts in the anglophone world analogous to the one Bergson operated in, this word may make perfect sense. And yet… I did have to look up the word because the use of a loan term did seem to imply the term could be veiled in a bit of mystery for English speakers—the expression is italicized as though there is no safe or logical way around it.) I have reason to believe that it was not until I tried to think my way in circumlocution around the word that I even got close to mastering Bergson’s thought here. Which means there is a problem posed by this translation.

There are many reasons to keep rapprochement—and not just academic ones. Diplomacy and political science and of course English itself more generally involve borrowings from other languages. The word rapprochement itself sounds lofty. Truth be told, I think it’s a cool word. There just happen to be some audiences who cannot necessarily be expected to learn a word like this on the fly. What college student would know this word in the US? Not all of them. What high schooler could hear this word whose spelling rules and pronunciation do not line up with a set pattern of existing English terms and know how to look it up?

These are incidentally extremities on a basic axis that a translator like me has to balance or switch between from project to project. Either content gets nativized and made to sound more like the English “commonly spoken” by a reference group or the audience is expected to negotiate more foreignness.

I as it turns out realized recently it is already a unique part of my approach to see the radical openness of certain translation projects to different approaches. Sometimes it is a matter of taking it a word at a time, but a wider angle view is needed.