Translation and Translanguaging

Mike Baynham, Tong King Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351657877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation and Translanguaging brings into dialogue translanguaging as a theoretical lens and translation as an applied practice. This book is the first to ask: what can translanguaging tell us about translation and what can translation tell us about translanguaging?

Translanguaging originated as a term to characterize bilingual and multilingual repertoires. This book extends the linguistic focus to consider translanguaging and translation in tandem – across languages, language varieties, registers, and discourses, and in a diverse range of contexts: everyday multilingual settings involving community interpreting and cultural brokering, embodied interaction in sports, text-based commodities, and multimodal experimental poetics. Characterizing translanguaging as the deployment of a spectrum of semiotic resources, the book illustrates how perspectives from translation can enrich our understanding of translanguaging, and how translanguaging, with its notions of repertoire and the "moment", can contribute to a practice-based account of translation.

Illustrated with examples from a range of languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Czech, Lingala, and varieties of English, this timely book will be essential reading for researchers and graduate students in sociolinguistics, translation studies, multimodal studies, applied linguistics, and related areas.

1 Introduction

A dialogue

Nous écrivons ce livre comme un rhizome. Nous l'avons composé de plateaux. Nous lui avons donné une forme circulaire, mais c'était pour rire. Chaque matin nous levions, et chacun de nous se demandait quels plateaux il allait prendre, écrivant cinq lignes ici, dix lignes ailleurs. Nous avons eu des expériences hallucinatoires, nous avons vu des lignes, comme des colonnes de petites fourmis, quitter un plateau pour en gagner un autre. Nous avons fait des cercles de convergence. Chaque plateau peut être lu à n'importe quelle place, et mis en rapport avec n'importe quel autre. Pour le multiple, il faut une méthode qui le fasse effectivement; nulle astuce typographique, nulle habileté lexicale, mélange ou création de mots, nulle audace syntaxique ne peuvent la remplacer.

(Deleuze et Guattari 1987: 33)

We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten lines there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leaving one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made circles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple one must have a method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can substitute for it.

(Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 23)

(MB stands for Mike Baynham; TK for Tong King Lee)

MB: This description of how Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) went about composing their strange book doesn’t entirely correspond with how we have gone about writing our strange book, partly because I think we are still more trapped within the normativities of the academic voice than D&G were, but nevertheless I found it resonant, a good place to begin.

TK: At some point in writing the book, I did think it was becoming chaotic. Now in the light of D&G, I prefer to see it as rhizomatic. And the image of rhizomes, where lines “leav[e] one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants”, leaving trails of “circles of convergence”, is of course central to our conception of translanguaging. How did this all begin?

MB: Starting a project called Translation and Translanguaging provided a wonderful opportunity to engage with my practical and theoretical interest in multilingualism and my long-standing interest, also both practical and theoretical, in translation. As the plot of our AHRC-funded Translation and Translanguaging (TLANG) project (2014–2018; https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/generic/tlang/index.aspx) thickened, I started to look out for approaches to translation that were resonant with our concerns, and I came across your Translating the Multilingual City: Crosslingual Practices and Language Ideology (Lee 2013).

TK: Interesting. When that book came about, I hadn’t even heard of translanguaging. Yet it became the first interface between us and our interests.

MB: Why did it engage me so? I quote from the review I wrote on the TLANG blog (https://tlangblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/translating-the-multilingual-city-book-review/): “Lee argues compellingly for a consideration of the power dynamics and linguistic ideologies in the linguistic economy in order to understand the micro detail of translation processes”. Lee asks how “translation choices index power relations between languages”, particularly with a focus on issues of directionality in translation. So my interest in the book was not simply that its theoretical concerns resonated with those of what one might call as shorthand “the sociolinguistics of globalization”, but also because of certain reservations I was having about how the concept of translanguaging was developing.

TK: What were those reservations?

MB: I felt that the emphasis on translanguaging as language from below and its counternormative discourse needed to be countered with a parallel acknowledgement that normativities articulated as language ideologies would work to other and regulate such subaltern language from below. In short: translanguaging doesn’t always occur in a dominance-free communication zone; rather, these directionalities you write of, expressing relationships of power and purist language ideologies, create indexicality hierarchies that position the elements of the translanguaging utterance, and indeed translanguaging more generally, on an unequal terrain of indexical orders. This is an argument I started to develop in Baynham and Hanušová (2018) and hope to develop further in this book we are writing together.

So when an invitation came from Routledge to write a book on translation and translanguaging, you seemed the ideal accomplice for this assault on different kinds of normativity – which, if successful, should prove challenging to accepted ways of thinking both about translanguaging and about translation.

TK: It does seem that translanguaging has hitherto interested itself in the creative constitution and flexible manipulation of signifying resources, particularly in classroom contexts. So I agree that language ideology as a line of critical inquiry, already well developed in translation studies, can help us understand translanguaging practices in light of the complex power relations in which any communicative event is embedded.

Translanguaging itself emerged in reaction to another kind of normativity – the ideology of monolingualism and what Ofelia García and Li Wei (2014) have called separate bilingualism. It is relatively easy to construe monolingualism as an ideological construct. But separate bilingualism, the cognitive model underlying conventional translation and code-switching, presents a challenge for translanguaging.

MB: Language ideology is a very well-developed strand of thinking in sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography as well. It is worth remembering that separate bilingualism ideologies would also exclude “illegitimate” language mixing as much as monolingual language ideologies – perhaps more, as there is more to defend. By the way, I think I have identified a translanguaging ideology in some of the data discussed in Chapter Four.

One of the theoretical projects of translanguaging is to challenge the model of separate bilingualism. It’s easy to see how this latter model underlies the way we think about translation as crossing from one discrete language into another. Does translation studies have anything to say about this?

TK: In translation studies, separate bilingualism is problematized by the practice of self-translation, whereby the author of an original piece translates his or her own work. That process is different from a prototypical translation scenario, not just because the author-translator can take excessive liberties with the original text, but also because the self-translator draws on a holistic pool of resources in a simultaneous enactment of translation and creative writing, as opposed to “switching” consciously between named languages.

Could we then say that a self-translator epitomizes a multilingual user who does not so much move back-and-forth between one delineated language territory and another as s/he dwells in a converged space where diverse semiotic resources subsist and operate in tandem?

MB: I am intrigued by your discussion of self-translation and “the converged space where diverse semiotic resources subsist and operate in tandem”. That corresponds to my understanding of repertoire, particularly the way it has been recently developed – as semiotic or spatial repertoire. However, I would extend your focus on the self-translator much more broadly and suggest that the translator, in whatever context, epitomizes the multilingual language user.

TK: You have just raised the notion of repertoire, which is central to all discussions on translanguaging. When I spoke of the self-translator drawing on a “holistic pool of resources”, I was really talking about repertoire. I see it as a possible point of intervention on the part of translanguaging into translation.

MB: I like to work with repertoire as a construct. Others such as Alastair Pennycook (2018) and Suresh Canagarajah (2018) have recently suggested assemblage as a way of conceptualizing this bringing together of semiotic and material resources to make something happen somewhere. Your earlier use of the word dwell, of course, evokes spatiality in all this.

This convergence is simply highlighted by the self-translator, or indeed in situations where a translation is undertaken by more than one person, leading to a situation where a translation is talked through, externalized. This highlights and makes visible the translator’s multilingual repertoire. With the single translator, the conversation is going on in the head and in interaction with the various artefacts to hand: dictionaries, databases, Google Translate, etc.

What would happen if we adapted Li Wei’s (2011) moment analysis for the day-to-day activity of the translator? Any translation activity would then be made up of a string of “translation moments”, an assemblage at any snapshot in time of the various resources available to the translator.

TK: Your last formulation is interesting. It reminds me of the TAP (Think-Aloud-Protocol), a method that has been used to elicit what goes on in translators’ minds in the course of their work. TAP studies offer empirical evidence as to the nonlinear, iterative cognitive processes in translation.

However, when we speak of nonlinearity and iteration in translation, the premise is that translation is conventionally structured as a linear and unidirectional operation. For me, there is still value to this latter conceptual schema, not least because translation always emanates from some prior point of enunciation and aspires towards culmination in another point of enunciation. That being said, it is profitable to complicate this linear A→B schema with a concurrent focus on the vertical dimension, which transpires at multiple points or moments intervening the distance between A and B.

MB: And how might we complicate this?

TK: Enter translanguaging.

A translanguaging perspective punctuates our habitual, though not necessarily invalid, conception of translation by zooming into the turbulent space emerging out of the encounter between languages, language varieties, discourses, registers, and modalities. It spotlights the contingent creativity inherent in communication in multilingual and multimodal settings, delving deep into the in-between gap that is full of semiotic potentialities. In Chapter Three, I represent this using the symbol , a visual heuristic that morphs two extreme points (A and B) into the space of a composite letter. Notice how B is recast in lower case and morphed into the letter A, which loses its middle stroke in the process.

Hence, the vertical thrust of translanguaging, comprising any number of moments (a moment being suspended in linear time), complements the forward momentum of translation as it is conventionally conceived. On this view, when translators verbalize every step of their thinking, as they would in a TAP study, are they not experiencing the moment-by-moment flux between languages that is translanguaging?

MB: Your point about TAP is interesting because it is about how to get into the thought processes of the single translator. Another approach would be to record the process of translating using screen-capture technology and videos of the translator’s work settings. Those video excerpts could be used as prompts for the translator to talk through their practice. The other way, as I suggested above, is to look at translators working together as in that case their work is exteriorized through talk. In the TLANG project data, at one point an interpreter, Klára, works with the researcher Jolana to find a translation equivalent in Czech for the legal term sworn statement. This gives a concrete example of “the encounter between languages, language varieties, discourses, registers, and modalities” that you mention.

TK: Coming back to repertoire: this concept does not feature strongly in the translation studies literature. How do you think it might disrupt the assumed linearity and unidirectionality of translation, as encapsulated in the A→B schema?

MB: I completely take your point about the linearity and unidirectionality of translation, but if you look at it moment by moment, you see a to-ing and fro-ing as translators draw on their repertoire. There must also be moments of going backward and forward, as some element at a later stage of translating a text will force the translator back to revise something from an earlier stage.

TK: Point taken. Granted that a translanguaging perspective “messes up” the assumed linearity and unidirectionality of translation, can we still see the two as distinct practices?

MB: Yes. What is becoming clear to me is that there is a fundamental difference between translanguaging and translation. Translanguaging is a variable, contingent aspect of language in use. Translation is an institutionalized practice; as such, it is heavily regulated. Money is involved, and people make their living from it. Businesses thrive through translation. Translanguaging, by contrast, is language from below, to paraphrase Pennycook and Otsuji (2015). This is anticipating the arguments and orientations that will appear in Chapters Two and Three.

Of course, there are more informal contexts for translation, interpreting, and cultural brokering, and I have worked on these from time to time. Tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: A dialogue
• 2 Why translanguaging?
• 3 Translation and translanguaging: Tensions and synergies
• PART I
• PART II
• Bibliography
• Index