Crossing the borders of social class: Social mobility as translational experience

ABSTRACT

This article suggests that we might conceive of the experience of upward social mobility as a form of translational experience and view the socially mobile individual as both translatum and translator. Acknowledging that the experience of social mobility varies enormously in its specificity, the article’s temporal focus is on upward social mobility in Britain since the expansion of higher education in the early 1990s. It draws on the author’s own experience of social mobility and on the memoirs Hungry by Grace Dent (2021), Respectable by Lynsey Hanley (2017), and People Like Us (2020) by Hashi Mohamed, and relates the socially mobile self to the phenomenon of textual translation. It also theorises the ‘return’ – post-translation communication with the ‘source culture’ or social class of origin – and the process of back-and-forth translation in which socially mobile individuals are constantly engaged.

KEYWORDS:

• social mobility
• untranslatability
• back translation
• social class
• working-class
• Walter Benjamin

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. If I conceive of myself on this occasion as the ethnographer of my own circumstances, this moment of reflection can be seen as an example of what Masi de Casanova and Mose call ‘linguistic reflexivity’, namely, ‘recognition of linguistic boundaries and language-based identities in fieldwork’ (2017:2).

2. I use the terms working class and middle class here in full awareness that social classes are neither homogenous nor inert. From the outset I also wish to state that my own experience of a working-class upbringing was both gender-inflected, and coloured to a significant degree by religious conservatism and anti-intellectualism. Savage argues that the contemporary UK class landscape has been ‘fundamentally remade’ and is ‘more fuzzy and complex in its middle layers’ (2015:4). This evolution can certainly be traced in my parents’ lives where some intragenerational social mobility is observable. My parents, who grew up in white working-class families in Manchester in the post-war period, were the first generation in their respective families to purchase their own home. Having both grown up on council estates, they first rented privately and then took out a mortgage on the first of two houses that they would own. Both of my parents left secondary modern schools at the age of 15 and went straight into the workforce. In my mother’s lifetime, her occupation – nursing – became a degree subject; her own status and the status of the profession shifted accordingly. Both of these factors were significant in my parents’ upward economic and social mobility. See Savage (2015) for a breakdown of the ‘middle layers’ of the UK’s contemporary social class structure.

3. On language and code-switching see, for example, Chapter 7 of Mohamed’s memoir.

4. This dividedness can be seen in other contexts that involve the crossing of a substantial cultural and/or linguistic border. In 1981 German exophonic writers Franco Biondi and Rafik Schami authored a manifesto entitled ‘Literatur der Betroffenheit: Bemerkungen zur Gastarbeiterliteratur’ [the German word Betroffenheit is notoriously difficult to translate but can mean ‘dismay’, ‘consternation’, ‘being affected by something’ or ‘being on the receiving end of something’; roughly translated therefore, the title reads ‘Literature of Betroffenheit: Some Notes on Guest Worker Literature’]. In this manifesto they discuss the negative effects of migration upon the mental health of guest workers in Germany and frame the then emergent guest worker literature – much of which was written in German and therefore involved a linguistic border crossing – both as a response to the vulnerable situation of the individual writer and as an act of political solidarity with fellow migrants.

5. Though Ryan states, in her discussion of Robert Elias’ The Civilising Process (1994): ‘this book reveals that while the precise criteria differentiating one class from another change historically and according to locality, class distinction per se does not’ (2017:83).

6. One uncle had done a non-residential Open University degree in maths.

7. On this occasion I will not, however, be considering the socially mobile self in relation to the well-researched phenomenon of self-translation.

8. Cf. Dent’s anecdote about being taught how to deal with the wine list in expensive restaurants (2021:182–6).

9. Savage notes that ‘Britain’s social mobility challenge is far from over once the graduation ceremonies are concluded’ (2015:108).

10. I have observed in myself, for instance, an investment in outward appearance in certain areas that I know to be a feature of my English working-class upbringing. I would be embarrassed to serve a guest food on a chipped plate, and feel uncomfortable using a less than fresh tea towel, particularly if visitors are present, and am still genuinely baffled when such practices feature in certain kinds of middle-class environment. This is an anecdotal generalisation of course, but also an example of the kinds of thing about which Bourdieu (2010) had so much to say.

11. Gideon Toury’s work on translational norms showed that translators tend to unconsciously ‘adapt’ to prevailing translational values, whatever those are in a given cultural space (1995). Lawrence Venuti’s oeuvre (1995, 1998) famously explores the dominance of a domesticating approach to translation in Anglo-American publishing of the late 20^th and early 21^st century.

12. Hanley is also aware of the special status of journalism and references David Brooks’ (2000) concept of the ‘bourgeois bohemian’, under the banner of which he includes both journalists and academics (Hanley 2017:181).

13. When Grace Dent writes that ‘my childhood, in fact, almost all British childhoods in the 1970s and 80s – contains a lot of mince’ (2021:6), she is putting her finger on another shared national experience, the almost universal mediocrity of post-war British cuisine before the food revolution of the 1990s. Hanley, too, talks about mince (2017:29).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chantal Wright

Chantal Wright is Co-Director of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. She is also a literary translator working from French and German into English. Her research interests encompass the theory and practice of literary translation, stylistics, philosophies of translation, and migrant, exophonic and intercultural writing. She is the author-translator of Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation (2013), the editor-translator of Antoine Berman's The Age of Translation (2018) and the author of Literary Translation (2016).