Stakes, Evolution, and Limits of the Platform

The "Platform for a Responsible and United World" has been translated into about 20 languages. Translators often met major obstacles: it turned out to be impossible to translate some of the words, some of which did not even exist at all in this or that language, such as “responsibility,” “cross-cultural,” “destiny,” or “citizenship.” The Alliance, which aims to federate men and women from many different countries and thought it had a platform that was a good reflection of their aspirations, thus discovered that the Platform text raised many problems related to cultural interpretation and that many Allies were not able to own the text ...

Summarized excerpt from An intercultural and multilingual contribution to the framing of a Charter of the Alliance by Edith Sizoo

“In September 1998 a meeting was held in Naxos on the theme ‘What words do not say.’ It summarized the work on translation of the Platform and went on to produce a methodical assessment of the problems encountered: to prepare the workshop, participants were to fill out two questionnaires and follow, during the meeting, the discussions of the different groups set up. The meeting was an opportunity to bring out broader issues regarding how the Alliance worked, how cross-cultural discussions could be held (in particular as considered through beliefs and through the distinction of the relations between spiritualities and representations), and to review the translation difficulties presented by the Platform.

It also revealed a particular disposition of some of the Allies to perceive, in the Platform, a text that was far removed from their concerns and made it possible to identify expectations that placed greater emphasis on the spiritual dimension of an alliance. The meeting led to a very interesting document, showing the multiplicity of all these trends and the discussions that took place in Naxos, called: “Ce que les mots ne disent pas. L’art de l’écoute interculturelle” (What words do not say: the art of cross-cultural heeding). The idea then sprung that the Platform was a ‘pre-text’ for the discussion and for this meeting of different people and movements, and that it signed the impossibility to render, in all the targeted languages, all the concepts and notions set forth in the text.”

Quoted from Capitalisation des différentes chartes et la problématique interculturelle 1992-2002 by David Beytelmann, available in French only, translated here for purposes of publication

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