Welcome to our first issue of the Language Exepress!

I grappled for quite a long time with my ‘A’ level choices’. French was an easy decision – it had always been my favourite subject and France had always been one of my favourite places to be. Latin had maintained its place on my list for years and English was the most obvious choice for the third subject, as my favourite activity has always been reading. But then my languages teachers pointed out that if I wanted to read languages at university, a second MFL might be a more sensible option. This was a bit of a setback, since German was a subject that I endured rather than loved. I resisted for some time until everything changed when a very wise teacher pointed out to me that even if I didn’t study English for ‘A’ level, I’d still have access to all the books written in English, whereas if I gave up German I’d never have access, except through translation, to the world of German literature (and possibly not even then, as so much remains untranslated).

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And it’s that access to new worlds that we want you to experience when you study for a degree in languages. The French author, Michel Butor, writes beautifully of arranging his (extensive) library according to nationality, so that he could wander from Mexico to Portugal, from China to France simply by moving from shelf to shelf. Such travelling to different cultures via literature, art and films is fundamental to the work that you undertake while you are with us. It’s one of the benefits bestowed by a languages degree that makes you supremely employable – is there any other course that ensures intercultural awareness and communication to such an extent? But reducing the value of a degree to such metrics risks overlooking the other gifts that we hope you will gain from stepping into unfamiliar territories and then returning to your own world to realise that it’s shifted and been transformed by the experience.

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And the pleasures and gifts of this are so much greater if you do this through another language. (It’s not just pedantry that makes us looks upon translations of the set texts with a jaundiced eye – it’s that we know you are cheating yourselves of much of the reading experience.) We want you to relish the shiver of the unfamiliar by having to think about how to translate words that have no direct equivalent – that’s how you enter into a mind-set belonging to a culture that is not your own. We want you to discover for yourself that the more you begin to understand about another country, the more difficult the act of translation can be. It’s a paradox that is both endlessly frustrating and endlessly rewarding.  How can you convey to an English ear the powerful gastronomic resonances and links to a specific region, to generational bonds, contained in the word terroir?  And unless you have some understanding of the horrors of the Occupation, how can you appreciate the ways in which a word such as la rafle (the round-up) immediately chills and darkens a text? Struggling with such challenges will expand your powers of expression in English also, as you are forced to manipulate the language or extend your vocabulary in order to accommodate and convey the foreignness of what you are confronting. It isn’t easy. It demands patient and persistent effort, but there are few activities that remind us so forcibly that making that imaginative leap to step into the world of others will always leave us richer.