What We Lose When We Translate Everything

The Federal Translation Centre announced this month that it will open three new annexes in the next fiscal year—one in each region's capital, plus a fourth in Meridian itself. The move is practical and overdue. As virtual citizenship has grown, the demand for real-time translation at Federal Assembly sessions, in the courts, and at the Electoral Commission has strained the Centre's staff. More annexes mean faster service, more languages supported, fewer delays in the machinery of the state. By any measure of institutional efficiency, the expansion is sound.

And yet we find ourselves asking a question that the Centre's directors may not have posed to themselves: what happens to a federation when every word spoken in one regional language is instantly rendered into three others, and into Esperanto, without friction or delay? The Meridian Convention chose Esperanto as the federal language precisely because it belonged to no region and no founding ethnicity. The choice was a wager that neutrality could be purchased through a language that no one brought to the table as a native inheritance. But neutrality is not the same as transparency. When translation is seamless, something is lost.

We do not argue for the restoration of difficulty. The Federal Assembly's Wednesday Question Time would be unwatchable if the Prime Minister had to pause for interpretation after every sentence. The courts would grind to a halt if legal argument required sequential translation. The Electoral Commission could not administer a federal election if verification of a ballot required human intermediaries at every step. The Centre's work is essential to the Republic's functioning. But we observe that the very efficiency of translation can obscure the fact that something is being translated—that the words spoken in Spanish in San Vicente or in Scandinavian dialects in Bratislava-Nova are not the same as the words that arrive in Meridian in Esperanto, no matter how skilled the translator.

The founding principle of the Republic is unity in diversity. The Centre's expansion serves that principle by making the machinery of state accessible to all four regions in their own languages. But we might ask ourselves, as the Centre grows, whether we are also gradually erasing the diversity that the translation is meant to preserve. A federation that can translate everything instantly may discover, too late, that it has translated away the very differences that made the federation necessary.