Is It Necessary to Know Foreign Languages?

This section does not concern those students writing a the­sis on a foreign language or on foreign literature. One would hope that these students know the language on which they write their thesis. Better still, one would hope that a stu­dent studying a French author writes his thesis in French, as many universities around the world rightfully require.

Also, the observations below are no substitute for learning the language by spending time in the country in question. However, this is an expensive solution, and here I would like to advise students who do not have this option.

Let us pose the problem of an Italian student who writes his thesis in philosophy, sociology, law, political science, his­tory, or natural sciences. Even if the thesis involves Italian history, Dante, or the Renaissance, the student will inevita­bly have to read a book in a foreign language, since illustri­ous scholars of Dante and the Renaissance have written in English, German, and other languages foreign to our Italian student. In these cases, the student generally uses the thesis as an excuse to start reading in a new language. If the stu­dent is motivated by the topic and up to the challenge, he will begin to gain understanding. Often this is how the student first learns a foreign language. Although he will not learn to speak the new language, he will learn to read it, which is better than nothing. If there is only one book in German on a specific topic, and if the student does not know German, he can ask someone to read him the most important chapters.

He will have the decency not to rely on that particular book too much, but at least he will be able to legitimately include it in his bibliography.

But these are all secondary issues. The main tenet is this: we should not choose a topic that involves foreign language skills that we do not currently possess, or that we are not willing to acquire. For now, let us examine some essential requirements:

1. We cannot write a thesis on a foreign author if we do not read his texts in the original language. This seems self-ev­ident if the author is a poet, but many students do not see this as a prerequisite for a thesis on Kant, Freud, or Marx. However, it is required for three reasons. First, not all of the author’s works may be available in translation, and sometimes neglecting even a minor work can lead to a misrepresentation of the author’s intellectual background, or his work in general. Second, most of the secondary sources on a given author are usually in the author’s orig­inal language. Even if the author is available in transla­tion, his critics may not be. Finally, the translation does not always do justice to an author’s thought, and writing a thesis involves the act of restoring the author’s original thought from the distortions of translations, and from vulgarizations of various kinds. Writing a thesis requires going beyond the easy formulas of school textbooks, such as “Foscolo is a classicist while Leopardi is a romantic,” or “Plato is an idealist and Aristotle is a realist,” or “Pascal favors the heart and Descartes favors reason.”
2. We cannot write a thesis on a topic on which the most important secondary sources are in a language we do not know. For example, since some of the past decade’s most groundbreaking reassessments of Nietzsche’s German texts have been written in French, a student whose only foreign language was German could not write a thesis on Nietzsche. The same applies to Freud; it would be diffi­cult to reinterpret the Viennese master without consid­ering the American Freudian “revisionists” or the French structuralists.
3. We cannot write a thesis on an author or a topic by read­ing only the sources written in familiar languages. How can we know beforehand that the most influential secondary source on our author or topic is written in a language in which we are fluent? Surely questions like this can lead to paralysis, so here we should use common sense: rules of academic rigor allow a Western student to acknowledge a secondary source written in Japanese, and to admit that he has not read it. This “license to ignore” usually extends to non-Western languages and Slavic languages, so that a student can complete a rigorous study on Marx and still admit his ignorance of Russian sources. But in these cases, the rigorous scholar will demonstrate that he has explored these sources through reviews or abstracts. For example, Soviet, Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, and Israeli academic journals usually provide abstracts of their arti­cles in English or French. Therefore, if the student works on a French author, he may manage with no knowledge of Russian, but he must read at least English. In any case, before the student chooses a topic, he must have the good sense to consult the existing bibliography in order to avoid considerable linguistic difficulties. In some cases, this is easy to determine: it is unthinkable to write a the­sis in Greek philology without knowing German, the lan­guage in which there is a flood of important studies on the subject.

Additionally, the thesis will inevitably introduce the stu­dent to a smattering of general terminology in all Western languages. For example, even if the student does not read Russian, he must at least be able to recognize the Cyrillic alphabet enough to determine whether a quoted book speaks of art or science. It takes an evening to gain this familiarity, and after comparing a few titles the student will know that iskusstvo means “art” and nauka means “science.” Do not let this terrorize you. You should consider your thesis a unique chance to learn skills that will serve you for a lifetime.

Let us form a final, conciliatory hypothesis. Suppose an Italian student is interested in the problem of visual per­ception pertaining to the topic of art. This student does not know any foreign languages, nor does he have the time to learn them. (Or the student may have some kind of psychological block; there are people who learn Swedish in a week, and others who can barely speak French after ten years of prac­tice.) In addition to these limitations, let us suppose that the student must write a six-month thesis for economic rea­sons. Although the student must graduate quickly and find employment, he is sincerely interested in his topic, and he eventually plans to study it more deeply when time permits. (We must think of this kind of student as well.)

In this case, the student may narrow his topic to “The Problems of Visual Perception in Relation to Figurative Arts in Particular Contemporary Authors.” First, he must paint a picture of the psychological question, and on this topic there is a series of works translated into Italian, from Richard L. Gregory’s Eye and Brain to major texts on the psychology of perception and transactional psychology. Then the student can bring the theme into focus in three authors: he can use Rudolf Arnheim for the Gestalt approach, Ernst Gombrich for the semiological-informational approach, and Erwin Panof- sky for his essays on perspective from an iconological point of view. After all, from three different points of view, these three authors discuss the role of nature and culture in the perception of images. There are some works, for example the books of Gillo Dorfles, that will help the student contextual­ize and link these authors. Once the student has traced these three perspectives, he can also attempt to apply their criteria to a specific painting, perhaps by revising an already classic interpretation (for example drawing from Roberto Longhi’s analysis of Piero della Francesca’s paintings) and integrating it with the more “contemporary” data that he has gathered from these authors. The final product will be nothing original, and it will fall between the survey and the monograph, but the student will be able to develop it on the basis of Italian trans­lations. The student will avoid reproach for not having read all Panofsky, including work available only in German or English, because the thesis is not on Panofsky. Panofsky is relevant only to a specific aspect of the topic, and is useful as a reference only for some questions presented by the thesis. As I said in section 2.1, this type of thesis is not the best choice, because it risks becoming incomplete and generic. To be clear, this is an example of a six-month thesis for a student who wishes to gather preliminary data on a problem about which he truly cares. It is a makeshift solution, yet it can produce a decent thesis.

In any case, if our Italian student does not know any for­eign languages, and if he cannot seize this precious oppor­tunity that the thesis provides to acquire them, the most reasonable solution is for the student to choose a specifically Italian topic, so that he can eliminate the need for foreign sources completely, or at least rely on the few sources that have been translated into Italian. Therefore, if the student wishes to write a thesis on “The Models of the Historical Novel in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Prose,” he should have some basic knowledge of Walter Scott and his role as the origina­tor of the modern historical novel, in addition to the nine­teenth-century Italian polemic on the same subject. He could also find some reference works in Italian, and he could find at least the major works of Walter Scott in translation, espe­cially if he searched the library for the nineteenth-century Italian translations. A topic such as “Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi’s Influence on the Italian Culture of the Risorgi- mento” would pose even fewer problems. Obviously, the stu­dent should never begin his work based on such optimistic assumptions, and he should always consult available bibli­ographies to determine which foreign authors have written on his topic.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.