The Linguist

22 The Linguist Vol/65 No/2 ciol.org.uk/thelinguist FEATURES GROWING UNDERSTANDING There have been efforts to reclaim the symbolism around autism and today an infinity symbol is often used (left); and (right) an autistic girl wears a sunflower lanyard for hidden disabilities How have translation choices in Asperger's work affected our understanding of autism, asks Elizabeth De Zoysa "We're not psychopaths, you know," my friend and disabled activist Lydia Wilkins told me over coffee. "Autistic people do have empathy." Those lines resonated with me. I wanted to find out the origins of the deficit model of autism and why the general populace thinks autistic people lack empathy. I decided to go back to the beginning, to Hans Asperger, the Viennese paediatrician who was the first to document the observable behaviours we now know as autism, 1 and see if there were any links. In her book Asperger's Children, Edith Sheffer argues that Hans Asperger's diagnosis was shaped by Nazi psychology. 2 This was of interest to me; as an autistic ally and German translator, I had the chance to identify the role translation issues, as well as linguistic and editorial choices, played in this. From Sheffer's work, four areas of linguistic interest emerge: the translation of the terms Psychopathie, Heilpädagogik and Gemüt, and the omission of Asperger's original introduction in the standard English translation of his 1944 paper. A brief chronology The field of Heilpädagogik took on a new direction in the early 20th century under the leadership of Erwin Lazar at the University of Vienna Children's Clinic. According to Sheffer, Lazar's vision of Heilpädagogik is difficult to translate, with various possibilities: 'therapeutic pedagogy', 'remedial education', 'special education' or 'orthopedagogy'. 3 She suggests that for the Austrian variant the term 'curative education' perhaps fits best. Asperger joined the clinic's Heilpädagogik ward in 1931 and took charge the following year. He first published his seminal work Die 'Autistischen Psychopathen' im Kindesalter 4 in 1944 as his Habilitationsschift (post-doctoral lecturing qualification) and reprinted it in 1952 as Heilpädagogik, 5 with slight revisions and without the introduction. Asperger's work came to the attention of an Anglophone readership in 1981, when British psychiatrist Lorna Wing published a paper 6 on autism which drew heavily on Asperger's research, using a translation by her husband. Later, Wing called upon Ute Frith, a German- born psychologist, to translate the work, which appeared in Frith's 1991 book on the subject. 7 A sanitising exercise? Asperger's original term 'Autistische Psychopathie' presents an immediate translation challenge. In the 1944 paper, it appears capitalised and in quotation marks, signalling that it functions as a defined diagnostic concept rather than a loose descriptive label. Wing decided not to use the term 'autistic psychopathy' in her paper as it had "led to misunderstanding because of the popular tendency to equate psychopathy with sociopathic behaviour". Instead she chose 'Asperger's syndrome', which she considered neutral. 8 Both terms were already in usage in English, so she did not coin a new concept so much as choose between existing labels. However, Sheffer contends that choosing a neutral term was a 'sanitising' exercise: "Asperger had not used a neutral term. Psychopathy in German psychiatry had long connoted social deviance and recalcitrance." 9 In her 1991 translation, Frith uses 'autism' in the main text with a footnote explaining that Revising the 'A' word © SHUTTERSTOCK / MARCO VOLTOLINI © SHUTTERSTOCK / VETRE

• Cover