English Text Construction - Online First

Other than considerations as a historical source, little has been written on Lucy Atkinson’s travelogue Recollections of Tartar steppes and their inhabitants (1863) as a work of writing. This article sets out to redress that imbalance by analysing the role of the epistolary form and the linguistic implications of travel in the construction of the memoir. We aim to demonstrate that by means of language and form, the author explores the (trans)portability of the English language as a ‘home away from home’. First, the article considers the affordances granted by Atkinson’s use of the epistolary to construct her persona and narrative. Next, it explores the cultural translation in the travelogue by zooming in on shifting stances regarding the ‘self’ and the ‘Other’ in the text, e.g. by means of various language uses, and by connecting it to the problematisation of complex notions of ‘home’ and ‘Englishness’ during her travels.

As the world’s “hyper-central” language, English operates within asymmetrical structures of power while enabling processes of hybridization, adaptation, and contestation. Rather than a bounded, homogeneous system, English is a (trans)portable resource that circulates across linguistic, cultural, literary and medial contexts. Assembling insights from sociolinguistics, literary and cultural studies as well as translation research, this opening contribution to the special issue “(Trans)portability: English in the World” explores tensions between monolingual ideologies and multilingual practices, global dominance and local negotiation, English as both a vehicle of hegemony and a malleable resource shaped by its users. Across literary, translational, educational and broader cultural contexts, English emerges as a structuring force and as site of resistance. While the special issue offers a variety of case studies exploring English in motion across modern contexts, this introduction engages with English as a set of dynamic processes that invite identification, create structures of exclusion and provoke resistance.

This article positions audio description (AD) as a critical site for assessing the cross-linguistic transportability of Netflix’s Inclusion Strategy — a commitment to embedding an inclusion lens in hiring, commissioning, and storytelling. It examines how this inclusionary imaginary is re-articulated when AD is tasked with verbalizing a diverse storyworld, particularly when produced in languages other than that of the original audiovisual text. Using Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story as a test case, the study offers a comparative micro-analysis of four AD tracks (British English, Metropolitan French, Peninsular Spanish, and Latin American Spanish) for the dialogue-free opening of the first episode, where the series’ racial desegregation (“the Great Experiment”) is established. The analysis shows that diversity is unevenly verbalized across languages in the selected excerpts. This suggests that Netflix assumes its U.S.-centric inclusionary imaginary circulates transnationally and cross-linguistically as universally intelligible, and thus requires no explicit articulation in its guidelines, despite the cultural and linguistic specificity of the issues it encodes. As a result, the task of rendering these ideological commitments is effectively displaced onto largely un(der)credited localization workflows, where, in the absence of clear guidance, they are variably interpreted, reformulated, or muted.

This article revisits Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) through its engagement with multilingualism and cultural translation. As a novel of migration, it explores the protagonist Sammar’s journey between Sudan and Scotland, navigating the field of cultural and linguistic identity amid the hegemony of English. Her relationship with Rae, a Scottish professor, highlights the tensions of cultural negotiation shaped by language and faith. I argue that Aboulela’s poetics disrupts monolingualism through multilingual strategies of foreignization, creatively employing English to signal linguistic plurality. Reading The Translator as a “born-translated” novel, I examine how it problematizes cultural negotiation and reflects new social formations that transcend ethnic and geographic boundaries. Aboulela’s work maps new affective paths through language, offering a model for reimagining identity beyond the constraints of (hegemonic) monolingualism.