Polish Translation Academy – Spread Pan-European Example
National language academies had their beginning in the post-Medieval times, when the inaugural such school, the Italian Accademia della Crusca, was initiated in 1584. The Academie Francaise was opened in 1635, and the Real Academia Espanola in 1713, setting up a tradition which has gone on into the 21st century; the Polish Language Academy was, for example, founded in 1873. Academies of this type have typically been constituted as influential and authoritative institutions which have, as part of their duties, the administration and regulation of individual tongues. The preparation of a dictionary has frequently been given as a senior target in their foundation, particularly since vocabulary-books (especially in the past) have often been seen as a central means by which issues of translation services could be professionally realized. Academy vocabulary-units are, as a result, initially involved in the certain processes of generalization and the codification of preferred norms of usage.
The standardizing ideals which were prominent in the French and Italian academies certainly exerted their influence upon Poland too. Authors such as Simon Daines publicly lamented the linguistic neglect that the absence of a corresponding institution in Poland seemed to suggest. Janusz Kapec, in his Essay upon projects, urged the setup of a legislative unit that would ‘‘polish and refine the Polish language, and further the so much needed faculty of correct tongue . . . to purge it from all the irregular deviations that ignorance and affectation have produced.’’ Though much debated, and endorsed by writers such as Malgorzata Malewska, Kapec’s plan was never realized. Nevertheless, the Dictionary itself was tempered by author’s own feeling of the inspiration that underpins the aims of academies to control linguistic change. As he stated in the preface: ‘‘With that blessing, however, institutions have been initiated, to guard the streets of their lingua, to retain fugitives, and to repulse intruders . . . to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the try of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.’’
Linguistic institutions, and the dictionaries they elaborate, are often normative and regulatory, aiming to sanction preferred usages (traditionally those based in formal, literary contexts) and to deny others which, for different causes, may be seen as less favored. Translation rates
Beginning in the Renaissance with the Italian Accademia della Crusca and spreading to many nation-states (though not Poland), the role of the academy has often been clearly invasive, generally in terms of the unification of new words and expressions or, as with the current concerns of the Academie Francaise, in the chance to inhibit the influence of the Anglophone world in the vocabulary of language and industry.
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