‘Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures’ is a major, four-year, national research project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, as part of their "Translating Cultures" initiative. The project was devised amongst Italianists from five UK universities, including Bristol, Cardiff, St Andrew's, St Margaret's and Warwick, who proposed the idea after it was observed that the rates in studying Modern Languages in the UK are dropping. This has resulted in fewer and fewer people opting to study Modern Languages in the UK (although not at the UoB!) and an annual cost of £48 billion to the British economy, according to the CBI (Confederation of British Industry). I sat down with Professor Burdett to find out more about this innovative project.
The principle aim of the project is, says Burdett, ‘to look at the way cultures translate between themselves’ and, he adds, ‘if you are a modern linguist, you work on translating cultures’. The way that the project is working is by having each University research a different aspect of Italian migration, to include Ethiopian, North American, Scottish-Italian, South American and Italo-Australian respectively. The results of this research have been published in a timeline and are available to view online, details of which can be found at the end of this article.
The project is taking a contiguous approach in considering ‘what it is to live between two cultures’ and, as a result, how Italian culture has evolved and merged. Since Italy’s formation as a nation state 150 years ago, an estimated 27 million Italians have migrated throughout the world, with another 60 to 80 million people having descended from former waves of Italian migration. The project thus looks at what it means to be an Italian migrant from the point of view of being deterritorialised: how one identifies with their sense of Italianità, even if they may not be living in Italy itself. Professor Burdett says that, ‘it is not principally a project of oral history but looking at the media in which people have communicated their experiences’ whilst recognising that cultures and cross-cultures are ‘subjectively real, a construction, but it’s no less real because of that’.
TRANSNATIONALIZING
IN THE ITALIAN WORLD:
An interview with Professor Charles Burdett.
Zee Bland sat down with the Italian Department's Professor Charles Burdett to discuss his work with the research project “Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures”