Andrew Carnegie: industrialist and philanthropist
The Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was the leader of the American steel industry from 1873 to 1901, donated large sums of his fortune to educational, cultural, and scientific institutions. He was born in 1835 in Scotland, the son of William Carnegie, a weaver, and Margaret Morrison Carnegie.
With the invention of weaving machines, William Carnegie's job disappeared, and eventually the family was forced into poverty. In 1848 the family left Scotland and settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the USA. William found a job in a cotton factory, but he soon quit to return to his home handloom, making linens and trying to sell them door-to-door. Andrew Carnegie also worked in the cotton factory, but after his father died in 1855, his strong desire to help take care of the family pushed him to educate himself. He became an avid reader, a theatergoer, and a lover of music.
Andrew Carnegie became a messenger boy in a telegraph office and later became a telegraph operator. Thomas A. Scott, superintendent of the western division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, made the eighteen-year-old his secretary. Carnegie was soon earning enough to buy a house for his mother. During the Civil War in the United States (1861–65), he helped organize the military telegraph system, but soon returned to Pittsburgh to take Scott's old job with the railroad.
Between 1865 and 1870 Carnegie made money through investments in several small iron mills and factories. He also traveled throughout England, selling the bonds of small United States railroads and bridge companies. Carnegie began to see that steel was eventually going to replace iron for the manufacture of rails, structural shapes, pipe, and wire. In 1873 he organized a steel rail company and continued building by cutting prices, driving out competitors, shaking off weak partners, and putting earnings back into the company. He never went public (sold shares of his company in order to raise money). Instead he obtained capital from profit, and when necessary from banks, and he kept on growing, making heavy steel alone.
In the 1880s Carnegie's purchases included a majority stake in the H C Frick Company in Pennsylvania that had vast coal interests, and also the Homestead mills business. Frick became his partner and eventually chairman of the Carnegie Company. Carnegie had moved to New York City in 1867 to be close to the marketing centers for steel products, while Frick stayed in Pennsylvania as the general manager. They made a good team. Behind the scenes, Carnegie planned new projects and the improvement of existing plants; Frick was the working director who watched over the mass-production programs that helped keep price down.
Carnegie spent his leisure time traveling. He also wrote several books, including Triumphant Democracy (1886), which pointed out what he thought were the advantages of life in the United States over the unequal societies of Britain and other European countries. To Carnegie, access to education was the key to America's political stability and industrial accomplishments. In 1889 he published an article, 'Wealth', stating his belief that the rich had a duty to use their money to improve the welfare of the community. Carnegie remained a bachelor until his mother died in 1886. A year later he married Louise Whitfield and they had one child together. The couple began to spend six months each year in Scotland, though Carnegie kept an eye on business developments and problems.
Carnegie's absence from the United States was a factor in the Homestead mills strike of 1892. After acquiring Homestead, Carnegie had invested in new plants and equipment, increased production, and automated many of the mill's operations, cutting down the number of workers that were needed. Carnegie believed that workers had a right to join unions and to bargain with management through their unions. He also recognized the right to strike, as long as the action was conducted peacefully. He viewed strikes as trials of strength, with peaceful discussion resolving the conflict. In contract talks during 1892, Frick wanted to lower the minimum wage because of the need for fewer workers. The union representing his workers would not accept this and organized a strike.
Following a violent confrontation that resulted in the death of eight workers, soldiers were sent in to restore order and Carnegie was criticized for his lack of action. In the 1890s Carnegie also began to meet with tougher competition from newer, bigger companies who were interested in controlled prices and sharing the market. Companies that he had sold to for years threatened to cut down their purchases unless he agreed to cooperate. These threats made him decide to fight back. He refused to enter into any agreements with other companies. Moreover, he decided to invade their territories by making similar products and by expanding his sales activities into the west of the country. Eventually, though, he decided to sell his company to the newly formed U.S. Steel Corporation in 1901 for almost $500 million. Carnegie's personal share was $225 million.
In retirement, Carnegie began to set up trust funds 'for the improvement of mankind'. He built some three thousand public libraries all over the English-speaking world and funded galleries, museums and concert halls in the US. He also built a group of technical schools, a research institute, and a foundation providing pensions for university professors. When Carnegie died in 1919, the continuation of his broad interests was put under the general charge of the Carnegie Corporation, with a donation of $125 million.
Translating: a key to international understanding?
A The term 'translation' is used for all cases where the meaning of expressions in one language (the 'source' language) is turned into the meaning in another (the target language), whether the medium is spoken, written, or signed. In specific professional contexts, however, a distinction is drawn between work with the spoken or signed language (interpreting), and work with the written language (translating), although certain tasks blur this distinction.
B It is sometimes said that there is no task more complex than translation — a claim that can be readily believed when all the variables involved are taken into account. Translators not only need to know their source language well; they must also have a thorough understanding in the field of knowledge covered by the source text, and of any social, cultural, or emotional connotations that need to be specified in the target language if the intended effect is to be conveyed. The same special awareness needs to be present for the target language, so that points of special phrasing, contemporary fashions in expression, local expectations, and so on, can all be taken into account. On the whole, translators work into their mother tongue (or language of habitual use), to ensure a result that sounds as natural as possible though some translators have argued that, for certain types of text (e.g., scientific material) where translation accuracy is more crucial than naturalness, it makes more sense for the translators to be more fluent in the source language.
C The aim of translation is to provide semantic equivalence between source and target language. This is what makes translation different from other linguistic activities, such as adapting, précis writing, and abstracting. However, there are many problems hidden within this apparently simple statement, all to do with what standards of 'equivalence' should be expected and accepted.
D Exact equivalence is of course impossible: no translator could provide a translation that was a perfect parallel to the source text, in such respects as rhythm, puns and cultural allusions. Such a parallel is not even possible when paraphrasing within a single language: there is always some loss of information.
E On the other hand, there are many kinds of inexact equivalence, any of which can be successful at a certain level of practical functioning. It therefore follows that there is no such thing as a best translation. The success of translation depends on the purpose for which it was made, which in turn reflects the needs of the people for whom it was made. A rough-and-ready translation of a letter can suffice to inform a firm of the nature of an enquiry. A translation of a scientific article requires careful attention to meaning but little attention to stylistic features. The provision of a dubbed film script will warrant scrupulous care over the synchronisation of lip movements, often at the expense of content. Literary work requires a sensitive consideration of form as well as content, and may prompt several translations, each of which emphasises a different aspect of the original. It is easy to see what might be 'best' for one set of circumstances may be entirely unsuitable for another.
F Several different kinds of translation have been proposed to allow for this range of possibilities. A pragmatic translation emphasises accuracy and knowledge of the subject, required for instruction manuals and much scientific research. In an aesthetic translation, important for literary material, the focus is on preserving the emotional as well as the cognitive content of the work, and on maintaining some level of stylistic equivalence. Ethnographic or sociolinguistic translations aim to pay full attention to the cultural backgrounds of the authors and the recipients, and take into account differences between source and target language, and the ways of life in which they are embedded. And there are various kinds of linguistic translation, where the aim is to convey the structural flavour of the original text, often in quite a literal manner, emphasising such features as archaisms, dialecticisms, and levels of formality. Most translations, of course, are mixtures of these theoretical types, reflecting the complex reality of language in use.
G At another level, in a word-for-word translation each word in the source language is translated by a word in the target language. The result often makes no sense, especially when idiomatic constructions are used. In a literal translation the linguistic structure of the source text is followed, but is normalised according to the rules of the target language. In a free translation the linguistic structure of the source language is ignored, and an equivalent is found based on the meaning it conveys.
H Translators aim to produce a text that is as faithful to the original as circumstances require or permit, and yet that reads as if it were written originally in the target language. They aim to be 'invisible people' — transferring content without drawing attention to the considerable artistic and technical skills involved in the process. The complexity of the task is apparent, but its importance is often underestimated, and its practitioners' social status and legal rights undervalued. Some countries view translation as a menial, clerical task, and pay their translators accordingly, while others regard it as a major intellectual discipline in its own right. The question of status is currently much debated, particularly in Europe, where demand for translators is rocketing, especially in relation to the European Union.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A It is more than 100 years since the death of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson on the South Pacific Island of Samoa, and it seems that time has not been kind to Stevenson's memory. Immediately after his death, his family and friends set to work to fashion the legend of Robert Louis Stevenson or RLS, as he became known one of the few writers familiar from his initials alone. Subsequent works of biography then turned him into a writer of almost religious importance. One example was literary critic Balfour, who in 1901 portrayed Stevenson's family as ministering angels to the dying genius during his final illness. Similarly, the biographer Crouch absurdly overstated Stevenson's significance by placing him in the same company as those most revered names in English literature: Shakespeare and Keats. The reaction to this nonsense was a number of highly critical assessments of Stevenson's legacy in the 1920s.
B Normally, the critical pendulum can be relied on to swing back again, but there are several aspects of Stevenson's work that have, until recently, acted against a more balanced appraisal. First is the allegation that Stevenson was a mere master of linguistic fireworks, who lacked moral depth. Some critics accused him of being a literary charlatan, of juggling words very prettily to strike effects which overawed an ignorant public, and served to distract from the inadequacy of his ideas.
C Then there has long been a prejudice against the adventure story as the proper medium for deep moral seriousness, a prejudice which is still extremely influential today. It seems that we can accept that an adventure film can successfully express profound moral truths, but we reject the same idea for a book. The absurdity of this becomes apparent when we think of writers like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, but it is no use pretending that this bias against adventure stories is not part of our high culture. A further problem is that Stevenson has often not found favour in the land of his birth because his conservatism so often collides with the strong radical tradition in Scotland. His many escapist stories and preference for living abroad have led to accusations that he camouflaged Scotland's real problems. Lastly the high adventure of Stevenson's own lifestyle has sometimes obscured his output. His globe-trotting, and above all the final phase of his life in Samoa, tended to make his own life a greater story than any he could devise. This was precisely what his friends feared would happen towards the end of his short life: his art might be overwhelmed by the drama of life in Samoa.
D One consequence of this has been that Stevenson's influence on other writers has too often been neglected. The writer and poet Oscar Wilde was deeply influenced by Stevenson, even though he declared that Stevenson would have produced better work if he had lived in London rather than Samoa. Stevenson tends to stick in the throat even of those writers who would like to spit him out, such as Shaw, who claimed to have learned from him that the romantic hero is always mocked by reality. Likewise, the writer Galsworthy, who began as a determined critic, later changed his mind and said that the superiority of Stevenson over the novelist Hardy was that Stevenson was all life and Hardy all death. The influence on the novelist Chesterton would also repay detailed study, for it was through him that Stevenson has managed to cross the ages, emerging as an influence on the modernist movement and our own contemporary Latin American school of 'magical realism'.
E When making an assessment of his life and work one question must inevitably be asked: was Robert Louis Stevenson Scotland's greatest writer of English prose? For most commentators this honour falls to Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe among many other classic novels and it is true that in terms of craftsmanship, precision and the ability to minutely regulate language to create the desired effect, Scott takes the prize. However, this is not the same thing at all as inherent talent: by way of comparison one may take the example of the two great Russian composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev, of whom the former had learned more precise skills of execution but the latter's intrinsic genius was greater, and so it seems to be with Scott and Stevenson. Admittedly, Scott's detailed style does permit his stories to explore levels of tragedy that are beyond Stevenson's reach, but in this regard they have the musty smell of the museum, somehow artificial and removed from modern day reality. On the other hand, Stevenson's skill with plotting and narrative gives his books a timeless quality, so that they still live today. And Stevenson was also the shrewder judge of behaviour and psychology. For example, his compelling descriptions of a man with a split personality in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have proved so accessible and accurate that the expression 'Jekyll and Hyde' has entered common English usage. Even if we do not see a revival of critical interest in this great Scottish writer, it is to be hoped that readers go back to Robert Louis Stevenson's magnificent stories and reassess this neglected genius.