As a professor of English, who also happens to be entrusted with the direction of this new MLA project, I hope that every foreign language teacher in this room realizes what a difficult problem of translation the preceding speeches pose. It is my job to translate them into 'action. If I do not do so, with your help, we shall merely have spent a morning congratulating or consoling ourselves. After what you have heard, I probably don't need to tell you that my acts of translation will inevitably lose much of the peculiar eloquence and overtone of the originals, but I do want to assure you that I shall try my best to preserve the spirit of what has been said today. Don't expect me, in other words, to be always literal; and don't expect me to do anything that will stir you as you have been stirred this morning. From now on, it is a workaday matter of files and figures, committees and conferences, interviews and press releases, and endless letters. We live, for better or for worse, in such a complex world. Our critics or detractors have long understood this, and have taken advantage of our otherworldliness. Let them take notice: we may betray our inexperience for a time, but the MLA is this morning outside the classroom and the study, speaking up for something it deeply believes in.