Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2019

Deaf people’s lives are predicated to some extent on working with sign language interpreters. The self is translated on a regular basis and is a long-term state of being. Identity becomes known and performed through the translated self in many interactions, especially at work. (Hearing) others’ experience of deaf people, largely formed indirectly through the use of sign language interpreters, is rarely understood as intercultural or from a sociocultural linguistic perspective. This study positions itself at the cross-roads of translation studies, sociolinguistics and deaf studies, to specifically discuss findings from a scoping study that sought, for the first time, to explore whether the experience of being ‘known’ through translation is a pertinent issue for deaf signers. Through interviews with three deaf signers, we examine how they draw upon their linguistic repertoires and adopt bimodal translanguaging strategies in their work to assert or maintain their professional identity, including bypassing their representation through interpreters. This group we refer to as ‘Deaf Contextual Speakers’ (DCS). The DCS revealed the tensions they experienced as deaf signers in reinforcing, contravening or perpetuating language ideologies, with respect to assumptions that hearing people make about them as deaf people, their language use in differing contexts; the status of sign language; as well as the perceptions of other deaf signers about their translanguaging choices. This preliminary discussion of DCS’ engagement with translation, translanguaging and professional identity(ies) will contribute to theoretical discussions of translanguaging through the examination of how this group of deaf people draw upon their multilingual and multimodal repertoires, contingent and situational influences on these choices, and extend our understanding of the relationship between language use, power, identity, translation and representation.

Identities are often reshaped, in translanguaging contexts, to fit narratives circulating in target environments. Analysis of parallel tourism data shifts is a rich resource for tracing how space identities may travel cross-culturally. The study tackles representations of Asianness as manifested through English and Greek parallel texts, in tourism advertising, to reveal locally internalized ‘speaker positionings’ which significantly affect the ‘package of identity features’ attributed to a destination. The analysis first takes into consideration the visibility of Asian spaces in the Greek press and points to features which may allow a unified account of media and travel discourses, drawing on tourism theoretical accounts. Discursively conveyed representations of Asian spaces are assumed to immensely affect perception of Asian destinations and sensibilities in audiences.

The study reported in this article investigated the design and implementation of a flexible bilingual mathematics assessment that allows for translanguaging whenever needed, to help the mathematics knowledge of emergent bilingual students emerge. The assessment included 10 mathematics items, six selected-response and four constructed-response items, which were enhanced with dual language supports such as seeing and listening to the items, writing or saying a response, and showing synonyms for certain words, all in English, Spanish, or any combination of both languages. These supports allow test takers to draw on their entire linguistic repertoire and their full range of linguistic practices to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in mathematics. Ten emergent bilingual students participated in cognitive interviews designed to collect data on usability and perception of the usefulness of the dual language supports. It was found that students were able to use the available supports strategically whenever needed, used their entire linguistic repertoire to complete the items, and had a positive perception of the supports.

Non-linguists are usually able to discriminate accurately between different language patterns (Niedzielski and Preston 2003; Preston 2010) although long-standing scholarly tradition has often, if not always, contradicted their views of language (Boas 1917; Bloomfield, in Hall 1950). Moreover, in diasporic settings, speakers’ constant need of renegotiating the problem of ethnicity is often resolved in their willingness to shed their regional, linguistic and ethnic identities to the detriment of their more general pan-Indian one (Jayaram 2004). In an Indian diasporic community situated in Heidelberg, Germany, perceived subtle differences in L2 phonological characteristics may index local and situated ethnic identities. In order to ascertain whether dialectal variation has salience for the community, this paper presents findings on how translanguaging might be a valuable linguistic resource in the expression of speakers’ ethnic identities. A qualitative analysis of questionnaires, interviews and informal conversations has delineated a new ‘diaspora consciousness’ (Vertovec 1997) in light of the transient aspect of the community in question.

An underexplored aspect of the use of translation in the L2 classroom is its potential to foster in-class communication. This article explores the efficacy of translation tasks as compared to monolingual writing tasks in engendering language-related discussions in class. The study is longitudinal and includes two experiments carried out in an EFL college setting. Data were collected over two semesters and a comparatively stronger presence of language-related episodes (LREs) was found among those who worked on translation tasks. This higher level of engagement in L2 class discussions suggests that translation tasks are advantageous in engendering student-initiated LREs, drawing learners’ attention to lexis and grammar, and fostering communication in the classroom.