Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015

The translingual practices of young Mongolians and Bangladeshis suggest that contrary to those popular discourses which position youth as passive recipients of global culture, these young adults are better understood as actively and powerfully engaged with popular culture productions. Drawing on the examples of casual offline conversations and online Facebook interactions of university students in Mongolia and Bangladesh, this paper shows how processes of relocalization give new meanings to the translingual practices of these students as they draw on different modalities from popular culture (film, music and so on) and different linguistic and nonlinguistic resources. This transtextual and transmodal analysis enables us to show how these young adults relocalize linguistic and cultural resources in both their on- and offline interactions.

This article explores aspects of modal marker use in English and Greek and suggests that parallel data may significantly contribute to raising learners’ intercultural sensitivity in the FL classroom, as an instance of TOLC (Translation in Other Language Contexts). Parallel data seem to assume a dynamic potential (privileging learner autonomy and developing self-study skills), which other traditional approaches to the use of the modal system lack, leaving important aspects of cross-cultural variation out of the perspective of the learner. The study focuses on two aspects of intercultural variation in the use of the modal systems of English and Greek, namely shifting degrees of possibility-certainty and the shift across epistemic-deontic, as manifested through a 2013–2014 sample of parallel data from newspapers. It offers a set of sample exercises highlighting the potential of translation to contribute valuable insights to L2/additional language learning (ALL) and syllabus design, assuming an ecological ethic in acknowledging the primacy of context, including L1, especially if L1 is a less widely spoken language.

This paper investigates two of the most widely analysed universals in translation research, namely simplification and explicitation. We examine the oral production of bilingual children with different language pairs as available in the CHILDES project (MacWhinney 2000) (i.e. the FerFuLice, Ticio, Deuchar, Vila, Genesee and Pérez-Bazán corpora) as well as in other compilation forms (i.e. Ronjat 1913; Leopold 1939–1949; Swain 1972; Lanza 1988, 1997, 2001; Cossato 2008). We address two main issues: whether instances of simplification and explicitation appear in the production of non-instructed interpreters and, if so, how their occurrence relates to the type of data (i.e. spontaneous or experimental) and the language pair involved. The results show that children acquiring two first languages often translate and use simplification and explicitation at varying degrees irrespective of the language pair. We conclude that the analysis of acquisition data can contribute to shed light on the nature of these translation universals.

This paper considers some methodological implications related to translation in cross-language qualitative research. The paper takes a twofold stance: on the one hand, it argues that, provided the process is carried out with integrity and transparency, translation in cross-language research can be insightful, and can function as a phase of the analysis in itself. On the other hand, ‘interlanguage translation’, that is, the translation of non-native speakers’ utterances in the target language, should be avoided, or at least acknowledged as a limitation of the study. The article draws on a cross-language qualitative research study, conducted partly in Australia and partly in Italy, in the inter-disciplinary field of second language acquisition (SLA) drama education research. The article argues that a multi-approach to equivalence (dynamic, conceptual and dynamic equivalence) may be needed to translate different kinds of texts within the same study, offering a variety of examples to support these claims.

Over the last two decades, with the increasing bilingual population across the globe, it has become clear that we need to develop new approaches to language and education. Translanguaging is a term that was originally coined in Wales to describe a kind of bilingual education in which students receive information in one language, for example English, and produce an output of their learning in their second language, for example Welsh. Since then, scholars across the globe have developed this concept and it is now argued it is the best way to educate bilingual children in the 21st century. The present article offers an overview of translanguaging from its origins in Wales to recent developments in the UK and the US. It first presents the traditional approaches to bilingualism in education, which viewed the first and second language as separate entities. Next, it explores how bilingual education can be transformed through the use of translanguaging and outlines current research in the UK. Finally, it proposes some avenues for future studies.