The comparative analysis of texts alone cannot really grasp what is happening here. A considerable jump has been made from a radio broadcast made by General De Gaulle in 1940 (the “Appel du 18 juin") to a biography published by
Major E.L. Spears in 1966. Real fear should have been involved in 1940. De Gaulle was speaking from London, lancing his call to resistance, distributing his text synchronically. He was not wholly sure that France would not become the
Vichy regime (the Third Republic had been dissolved the previous day), that she would not in fact be alone. Surely that uncertain vision of the future could not fully be distributed away from that particular locale? We know who won the
war; De Gaulle did not. Thus confronted by an inevitable loss of discursive force, the biographer Spears probably should not have bothered to cite the speech at all. Yet he did; he has distributed this text well beyond its productive
locale, in a different medium, with an entirely different directionality. He cited and localized De Gaulle's words. Why should he have made De Gaulle speak English in 1966? Why was it important to have it known that De Gaulle himself
produced this utterance? In fact, why should a biographer remind readers that non-isolation had been important to the France of 1940 before it was presumably of some importance in the Britain of 1966?
In this way, the analysis of distribution leads to the fundamental question to be asked of all localizations: Why? Marketing statistics do not always provide the answers.
What was happening in the receiving locale in this case? The United Kingdom, long the center of Empire and Commonwealth, was becoming a satellite of what they called the Common Market. Questions of identity and national pride were increasingly vexing. Could that general climate give a military biographer reason enough to do more than translate phrase-for-phrase? Just as military France had needed Britain, so economic Britain needed France. Indeed, this Britain of 1966 did not need a vision of France that included discursive violence, historical paranoia, or excessive Gaullist pride. Closer to material movement than was his translation critic, the biographer perhaps knew that words said in time of war should not be repeated (nor too literally translated) in time of peace.
Unfortunately for the United Kingdom, De Gaulle was also something of an expert in resistance to distribution. He had used this same principle to block Britain's European entry in 1963 and was to do so again in 1967. Localizers are not alone in their responses to things that move.
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