The GLY Conference: Is It Unfair to Use English?

The organizing committee's recent work and discussions have led us to a perplexing dilemma. How do you facilitate a dialogue when participants will be facing a language barrier? (More directly: Is it imperialistic or simply practical to use English as the lingua franca?)

The conference, as I mentioned before, will consist of four panels, each followed by a working group session (a small breakout discussion group about the previous panel, each group with three to five participants from each country.) While we will have real-time translation for everyone during the panels, it is very difficult to do this for the breakout groups. This means that we mostly have to depend on people being able to speak English. Last year English-speaking Jordanians helped translate for their fellow participants in group sessions who did not understand English. This doesn't seem right to me.

And last year, there was a clear problem with Jordanian participation, which we attribute in part to the fact that all spontaneous discussion was held in English. (I can't blame them - you try to hold your own in an Arabic group discussion!)

There are several arguments about how to address this problem, though I don't find any one particularly satisfactory.

Mohammad, one of my fellow organizers, suggested that we prioritize English-speaking Jordanian participants in the application process. Immediately people protested against this (and I have to agree), saying that this will limit the already very stratified group of Jordanian applicants that we receive. While it is true that many, many Jordanians speak English ("We do all our college coursework in English!" Mohammad added) there are still many that do not speak English, and the level of English here is often correlated with affluence. And the young and wealthy Jordanians here are often more open to Western influence. It certainly wouldn't be a representative sample of Jordanians - even less so than already is the case, since there is usually a certain type of student who is open to this type of conference. Additionally, even though many Jordanians would be able to speak English, they still will be at a linguistic disadvantage to Americans with English as their mother-tongue. And this seems unbalanced to me, to say the least.

Along with the English college coursework argument (which I would say is about 75% the case), Mohammad also noted that many of the terms we will be discussing (democracy, civil society, minority politics, etc) don't have good Arabic equivalents and people end up using the English word anyway. I wasn't convinced by this however. How can Jordanians be discussing the nature of democracy in their own country if they don't have a word for it in their own language? (They in fact do; it is a cognate, though. I think the use of English words instead is a symptom of the larger, complex relationship with the English-speaking world and specifically America. I blog about this separately in the next entry.)

With regard to the language of the conference, I swung the pendulum back far into the other direction and suggested that we do the whole conference in Arabic. After all, even though some people joke and call Jordan an English-speaking country, it is still truly an Arabophone country. So shouldn't we be using the language of the country we're in? This is not Finnish we're talking about here. Arabic is one of the top five most commonly spoken languages in the world. It's one of the official UN languages. And if this conference were located in Washington, D.C., we wouldn't be doing it in Arabic.

I also brought this up because while doing the conference in English would leave a small minority of non-English speakers to fall through the cracks, almost all of the American participants would need translation, and so the problem would be more widely addressed. We would know right away if there was a glitch in the communication.

Unfortunately, my suggestion, while possibly acceptable in principle, is not very realistic due to the cost of so much translation.

We will probably choose neither of these two extremes and instead do something in between. Still, I think that we should try to make the American or Western footprint on this conference as light as possible, so as to keep the cultural imperialism to a minimum. Part of the goal of this conference is to foster the existence of similar future discussions in Jordanian civil society. And the more "Jordanian" the conference is, and the more we all respect the particular characteristics of such national efforts, the better. And using English doesn't seem to be like a positive move in that direction.

So, is using English increasing American cultural power in the Middle East? Or is it simply the most practical way for people to communicate in an American-Jordanian dialogue? I'll let you know what we finally decide.

Note: For more information about my conference, click here and view the second half of an earlier post.