By Alan James Runcieman
The article entitled ‘Proposal for a ‘Translanguaging Space’ in Interpreting Studies: Meeting the Needs of a Superdiverse and Translanguaging World’ has recently been published in the John Benjamins Journal, Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts.
Globalization and migration have impacted the social fabric of urban centres globally, creating a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual mix of peoples who cohabit on a daily basis; a phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘superdiversity’. In turn this superdiversity has created multiple ‘contact zones’ in which languages and cultures interconnect, leading to new forms of linguistic expression which no longer respect the boundaries of languages, but rather mix and meld them in critical and creative ways. The nationalistic ideology of ‘one nation, one language and one culture’ is ceding to what we now call ‘translanguaging’, a perspective on language and cultures not as a series of individual entities (i.e. English, French, etc.) but all part of a fluid and hybrid interchange of multiple semiotic resources in situated contexts.
A translanguaging lens has begun to emerge in many disciplines (i.e. Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and Literacy Studies, to name but a few) but it is still relatively in its infancy in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Indeed, interpreting in particular has been slow to react, maintaining a rigid monolingual approach to languages, i.e. LA-LB etc. in its pedagogy, where interpreters are positioned as bridging individual, discrete and bounded languages and cultures. But what happens when these bridges begin to breakdown, when the focus is rather on the multi-lingual/cultural currents that flow beneath them? The majority of interpreters’ clients are no longer mono-lingual/cultural and their consequent identities are far more complex.
This article then describes the history of translanguaging as an observed social phenomenon, an epistemological and ontological concept, and a pedagogical necessity. It also explores how Translation and Interpreting Studies has evolved under a monolinguistic bias which needs to be challenged by a recognition of superdiversity in late-modernity, and it proposes concrete changes to pedagogies and curricula to help prepare students for their future professional lives.
Runcieman, A. (2021). Proposal for a ‘Translanguaging Space’ in Interpreting Studies: Meeting the Needs of a Superdiverse and Translanguaging World. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 7(2). John Benjamins: Amsterdam. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.00070.run