ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the role of languages in travel narratives. Exposure to foreign languages is a recurrent feature of travel but until recently questions of languages and translation have been relatively neglected in the critical literature on travel writing. The chapter begins with Roman Jakobson’s tripartite division of translation into the intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic and explores the application of this paradigm to different forms of engagement with language difference in travel. The chapter then examines the tension between exotic and endotic forms of travelling and how these might inflect or be inflected by the forms of foreign language usage encountered in the travel account. The chapter concludes with a close examination of two travel accounts, one authored in a major and the other authored in a minority language: Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople – From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977) and Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, Ó Mháigh go Fásach [From Plain to Desert] (1977).
