Language and translation policies in the Intellectual Cooperation Organization (1922-1946). Promoting the internationalization of the intellectual field

The Intellectual Cooperation Organization (ICO) was an organizational network created under the auspices of the League of Nations (LON) to promote international exchange in the scientific, literary, and artistic domains. Active between 1922 and 1946, the ICO featured a structure where both governments and intellectuals were represented.
Given its international scope, the ICO, like the LON and its technical bodies, explored and tested possible solutions to the challenges posed by international communication, including the use of lingua francas and the practice of translation and interpreting. As such, they constituted some of the scenarios where the “battle of languages” deployed in the interwar period, which marked the end of French linguistic hegemony and the emergence of English as an international lingua franca.
In the present dissertation, I reconstruct the languages and translation policies enacted by the ICO in the framework of its efforts to contribute to the internationalization of the intellectual field. With said policy spanning different domains of activity, I focus on institutional translation and literary translation. Institutional translation, I argue, was used by the bodies composing the ICO to manage their internal and external communication strategies and, thus, build their respective institutional identities. In the literary domain, the ICO operated with a clear understanding of the structural role of translation for the internationalization of the literary field, and for this reason, it aimed at improving its conditions of practice and its social recognition. In both domains, the ICO contributed to the early institutionalization of translation.
From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation is grounded in a Translation Studies perspective interested in the social history of translation and its relations with globalization processes. More precisely, I build on field theory applied from a relational perspective and a global studies approach. In methodological terms, I conduct historical archival research with qualitative and quantitative methods. This includes source criticism and close reading of archive material, as well as analyses conducted with tools from data science and digital humanities, for instance, the reconstruction of historical networks.