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Multilingualism and Translation: Seeking Innovative and Integrative Approaches to Language Research
Elena Basile, University of Toronto, Canada
Maria Constanza Guzmán, York University, Canada
In the last decades, multilingualism and translation have drawn increasing critical attention from researchers across a range of fields in the humanities and the social sciences. Multilingualism especially has become a frequently used keyword to describe literary and social practices that have historically challenged the monolingual constraints upon which the 19th century European tradition of modern "national" literatures has been built (Emily Apter, Paul Bandia, Brian Lennon, Françoise Lionnet, Sherry Simon among others). Modernist, post-modernist and post-colonial writing insistently deploys multilingual and translation tactics to highlight underworlds, dissonances, erasures and tensions that traverse and fracture the subject and haunt the dream of cultural unity of the monolingual nation-state and its imperialist logic. On the other hand, translation scholars attentive to the social have been drawing attention to problems of linguistic diversity, linguistic genocide and the global erosion of the ethnosphere (Mona Baker, Deborah Cameron, Michael Cronin, Rita Khotari, Yaseen Noorani, Alison Phipps among others). These scholars offer politically nuanced analyses of the problems attendant to the intertwining of multilingualism and translation in a globalized world. Despite a general agreement around the importance of paying critical attention to multilingualism and translation in the areas of literature, culture and society, the application of terminology and concepts related to both terms remains uncertain and shifting, ranging from narrowly linguistic categorizations (and multiplication of subcategories) to loosely conceptualized usage of both terms. It is important to examine the richness and variety of innovative approaches to multilingual texts and translative practices, as they may offer valuable and productive tools to engage with an array of literary, cultural, social and political phenomena.
This panel aims to bring together scholars interested in asking questions pertaining to the methods, terminology and areas of research in multilingualism and translation. Its aim is to start exploring potential avenues of interdisciplinary conversation among diverse critical approaches to the problems and processes of language transfer, mixture and interchange in different literary and social contexts. The topics for discussion include: 1) Challenges of defining translation in the context of multilingualism. 2) Intercultural pedagogies: translation in the multilingual classroom. 3) Multilingualism, translation and constructions of citizenship; 4) Historical perspectives on language and nation; 5) Linguistic borders and post-colonial translation zones; 6) Geopolitics of multilingualism and translation; 7) Linguistic diversity, linguistic human rights; 8) Textual criticism and poetics of translation and multilingualism; 9) Reception and circulation of multilingual texts; 10) Translating multilingual texts. We are particularly interested in developing a common vocabulary and a set of integrative strategies to approach the stratified and interlaced problems related to multilingualism and translation, so as to open up new paths of research in these areas.
For informal enquiries: [ebasileATyorkuDOTca]
Elena Basile (Ph.D.) is a translator and sessional lecturer in the Sexual Diversity Studies Program at the University of Toronto, and in the English Department at York University. She writes on translation and multilingual Canadian poetries (essays in New Voices in Translation Studies, Open Letter, Canada and Beyond) and has translated into Italian Nicole Brossard's novel Le désert mauve (2011). She is a founding member of the Multiligualism Research Group at York University, and collaborates regularly with artists and academics in Europe and Canada, exploring ecologies of linguistic diversity in contexts of cultural displacement and hybridization. Her present research focuses on the translative politics of feminist queer migrant poetics. Her most recent collaborative multimedia project, Transitions in Progress: Making Space for Place, is part of a EU-Canada International Project titled Performigrations: People are the Territory (2014-2016).
María ConstanzaGuzmán is Associate Professor in the School of Translation and the Hispanic Studies Department at York University. She teaches in the MA in translation and in the graduate program in the Humanities, and coordinates the Spanish-English Translation Certificate and the Research Group in Translation and Transcultural Contact. Her publications include the articles "Toward a Conceptualization of the Translator's Legacy", "Who do We Teach for? Thinking Translation for Social Awareness in Toronto" (co-authored with Rosalind Gill), and "Translating Latin America: Reading Translators' Archives." She is the author of the book Gregory Rabassa's Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy, co-editor of Translation and Literary Studies: Homage to Marilyn Gaddis Rose, and the editor-in-chief of the journal Tusaaji: A Translation Review.
SESSION PLAN
The first and last sessions of the panel will have a 10 minute introduction and a 10 minute conclusion respectively. Apart from these, each speaker will have 20 minutes to speak.
Discussion time will be at the end of each session (after all the presenters have spoken)
PART 1: Multilingual Texts in Translation: Practices and Theories
PAPER 1:
Title: "Multilingualism from above and below: The Politics of Canadian Multilingual Theatre"
Speaker: Eva Karpinski. York University
PAPER 2:
Title: "The Multilingual Text: The Politics and Poetics of Multilingualism"
Speaker: Chiara Montini. CNRS/ENS, Paris
PAPER 3:
Title: "A tradução de Finnegans Wake em português: multilinguismo de uma língua de chegada"
Speaker: Marie-Hélène Paret Passos. PPGL da PUCRS.
PART 2: Multilingual Mappings and the Politics of Translation Zones
PAPER 4:
Title: "Linguistic Ecologies: Multilingual Poetics, Translatio(n) and the Question of Citizenship. Examples from Canada"
Speaker: Elena Basile. University of Toronto
PAPER 5:
Title: "Spaces of Translation in the Americas: Languaging from the Borders"
Speaker: María Constanza Guzmán, York University.
PAPER 6:
Title: "Community Translation and Civil Rights in Contemporary Mexico"
Speaker: Danielle Zaslavsky. Colegio de México.
PART 3: Pedagogies of Multilingualism
PAPER 7:
Title: "breaking SWEat: the place of translation in critical approaches to teaching linguistically diverse students"
Speaker: Dunja Baus and Paola Bohorquez. York University.
PAPER 8:
Title: "Translation Thresholds in the Pedagogies of Intercomprehension and Multilingualism"
Speaker: Clorinda Donato and Cedric Oliva, California State University, Long Beach.
PAPER 9:
Title: "Multilingualism and translation in literature and visual arts in pedagogical strategies and civic education projects"
Speaker: Antonietta Sanna, University of Pisa
-Panel Conclusion
PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES
PART 1: Multilingual Texts in Translation: Practices and Theories
PAPER 1:
Title: "Multilingualism from above and below: The Politics of Canadian Multilingual Theatre"
Speaker: Eva Karpinski. York University
Abstract: Despite the fact that most societies are multilingual, monolingualism is perceived as the norm, much the same as national languages are viewed as unitary rather than heteroglot. Mandated Canadian bilingualism confirms rather than disproves the monolingual nature of the modern liberal nation-state with its policy of multiculturalism without multilingualism. However, multilingualism itself is structured in relations of domination, and not all multilingualisms are created equal. In multilingual contexts, languages are deployed not just horizontally, that is, in synchronic contiguity, or next to each other, but also vertically, one above another, reflecting stratified hierarchies of extra-linguisitic agency and symbolic power. We must consider these stratifications when we try to account for unequal vectors of cultural exchange and uneven flows of translation and non-translation that operate in multilingualism. Looking at the scene of Canadian multilingual theatre, where very little of local production by linguisitically minoritized communities ever gets translated into one of the dominant two languages, I want to reflect on different valences of multilingualism and translation in the geopolitical and cultural space fractured by colonial legacies and uneven paths of migration and globalization. Following Alison Phipps, I distinguish between multilingualism "from above," linked to economic privilege, free mobility, and commodity exchange, and multilingualism "from below," associated with "minor" languages, non- marketability, and invisibility. Given the richness of multilingual theatre in Canada, on mainstream, fringe, and community stages, I will focus on some selected productions that explore the challenges and contradictions of living in the post-Babel world. On the one hand, we have Robert Lepage's experimental, multilingual, and multi-media approach to theatre, or such Dora-winning performances as RETURN (The Sarajevo project) an UBUNTU (The Cape Town Project) by Ahuri Theatre, which since 2005 has programmatically been placing "people, cultures, languages, and ideas in a creative space." On the other hand, we witness the emergence of community-based, grassroots cultural productions that explore differences across and within multilingual groups, such as the Toronto annual Hindustani Drama festival, organized by the Indian diasporic playwright Danish Jawaid. All these phenomena must be distinguished from the uses of Indigenous languages in Aboriginal theatrical performances. Rather than softening the hard edges of difference in a global spread of equivalences, multilingualism "form below" embraces radical heterogeneity and incommensurability, radically confronting the meaning of ethnicized, hyphenated multiculturalism. However, at the same time, these minoritized forms of multilingualism throw into high relief the selective cultural politics of translation that privileges Canada's official bilingualism, even if the balance between French and English is tilted toward the latter.
Bionote: Eva C. Karpinski is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at York University. She has published articles on autobiography, translation, feminist theory, autoethnography, trauma, micro-cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and multiculturalism. She is editor of Pens of Many Colours: A Canadian Reader, an anthology of multicultural writing. Her book on Canadian and American immigrant women's narratives, called Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation, was published in 2012. She also co-edited Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard (2013). In 2013, she was Visiting Professor in the Summer School on Multilingualism at the University of Mannheim, Germany.
PAPER 2:
Title: "The Multilingual Text: The Politics and Poetics of Multilingualism"
Speaker: Chiara Montini. CNRS/ENS, Paris
Abstract: Translating a Bilingual Text: from Theory to practice As a scholar who works on translation theory and multilingualism, and as a translator who translates literary texts, I often face some aporetical issues: theory doesn't always apply to the practice of translation. In particular, I tackle the question of how to translate a multilingual text. Generally speaking, the translation of a multilingual text challenges the conditions of readability and transparency of translation itself and requires a plural relationship to language. No monolingual schemes are allowed. Rainier Grutman mentions four different ways of translating a multilingual text: non- translation, suppression, substitution, and transfer. Although recent theories of translation encourage a translation that doesn't suffocate and/or alter the source text's multilingualism, the translated text doesn't always comply with this theoretical point of view. Why is it so difficult to translate "multilingually"? In this presentation, I will speak about my experience of theorizing and translating a "bilingual text", that is a text that has already been translated once by the author and whose last version is his/her own translation. Such a text might be looked at as having, so to say, two "originals." Even if this text may seem perfectly monolingual (notwithstanding the impossibility of this statement), the text exists in two (mono)languages and is thus multilingual. In this case, what is the translator in a third language supposed to do? Does she have to translate the first or the second version? Does she have to mix up the two texts as if they were a unique text? Finally, how can the translation "translate" the bilingualism of the text(s)? I have tried to provide theoretical answers to these questions in my published works, where I propose different methods to approach a bilingual text. One of these essays, based on my experience as a translator into Italian of Beckett's novel Mercier et/and Camier, shows the constraints I had to face (the publisher's demands, the potential reader, my own biases, etc.). I began to translate Mercier et/and Camier by adopting an "unconventional" and "uncomfortable" methodology (drawing on my own theoretical works) because it had the advantage to let the reader figure out how Beckett's bilingual text works. But I gradually switched to a much more comfortable and conventional translation, closer to the author's first version (intended as "the original"), more "readable" and "acceptable" for the publisher who refused my "unusual" theoretical propositions. Finally, in my upcoming translation, except for some shy hints in the text, only my introduction informs the reader that the source text is bilingual. I have thus erased multilingualism even if my goal was exactly the opposite. I will show the path that has brought me from a challenging theoretical position to a much more tamed and target-oriented translation in order to explain the reasons for this choice. I will ask: How can we overcome our prejudices about translation when the decisional role of the translator is far from being recognized? Where does the translator's freedom begin and where does it end?
Bionote: Chiara Montini is a scholar and a translator. She wrote several articles and edited a book on Samuel Beckett. She also wrote a monograph on his bilingualism and the translation of his bilingual work: "La bataille du soliloque' Genèse de la poétique bilingue de Samuel Beckett (1929-1947). She is presently working on self-translation, multilingualism and translation through the works of some significant writers.
PAPER 3:
Title: "A tradução de Finnegans Wake em português: multilinguismo de uma língua de chegada"
Speaker: Marie-Hélène Paret Passos. PPGL da PUCRS.
Abstract: Antoine Berman argued that linguistic position marks the translator in his relationship to languages and his maternal language. Donaldo Schüler, writer and translator of Joyce's novel, Finnegans Wake, in Portuguese, appreciates languages and masters many: Greek, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and English. It is this multilingual substrate that supports his translation process and is also from it that the translator sets his discourse, imbued with multilingualism. In this paper I will analyze aspects of the 11 notebooks of Schüler's translation work, in order to show how the process of (re) creation of Joyce's (multi) text language into Schüler's (multi) text language takes place.
In one of the notebook's comments, Schüler writes: "The narrator addresses the Babel writers. As there was a confusion of languages, there was also confusion of texts. Diversification never stops. Writing keeps moving." This position opens a path to the emergence of a third language or a third degree of language that appears in the source text as much as in the translated text.
In the Joycean text, an exasperated process of linguistic overlay transforms the English of the source language, and provides the translator with a text that is given to read in a unique language, that implies a prototypical task of reading and translation, which imposes the necessary invention of new words that will ultimately enrich the target language, Portuguese. Yet, is still possible to say that the target language is, indeed, Portuguese? How is it equally possible to say that the source language was English? We will concentrate on the analysis of this so called target language to try to emphasize its multilingual features that make it "language-more-than-one". And, if Joyce wrote in a multiplied language, creating some sixty languages and neologisms, Schüler, the translator who transcreates the text, must follow in Joyce's multilingual footsteps. This process leaves, in his comments, traces of multilingual and multi-shaped passages. Finally, we will try to characterize the translating language as a sort of third language, which, in turn, also nourishes the translation process because it shapes the target text. It sustains the translated discourse, it hosts and creates it out of the norm and linguistic system of the target language. As previous readings are mobilized at each new reading, at every new translation the languages known by the translator are mobilized in a kind of fusion, creative, innovative, and most of all, unique.
Bionote: Doctorate and post-doctorate in Letters. Professor of PPGL PUCRS. Research on Genetic Criticism and Literary Translation.
[1] By Hidden Curriculum we understand the system of values, attitudes, and principles which reinforces the unequal distribution of cultural capital and which is implicitly conveyed through injunctions which are hard to resist and identify because they are "silent and insidious, insisting and insinuating" (Bourdieu 51).
[2] Matsuda, Paul. "The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition." College English 68.6 (2006): 637-651.
PART 2: Multilingual Mappings and the Politics of Translation Zones
PAPER 4:
Title: "Linguistic Ecologies: Multilingual Poetics, Translatio(n) and the Question of Citizenship. Examples from Canada"
Speaker: Elena Basile. University of Toronto
Abstract: This presentation explores the work of three Canadian poets who grapple with the existential and political implications of bearing witness to violent geographies of linguistic border zones, where the fuzzy boundaries between multilingual practices and heavily ideologized vectors of translation constitute intractable realities of everyday life. Specifically, I look at Gail Scott's The Obituary (2010), Erin Moure' The Unmentioable (2012), and Rachel Zolf's Neighbour Procedure (2010) as texts that perform alternative re-inscriptions of boundaries of corporeality, indigeneity and (exilic) citizenship, through a purposefully jagged staging of stratified linguistic diversity. This staging, I argue, eschews essentialist inscriptions of corporeality, citizenship and belonging, and enables readers to start thinking through new ecologies of being, unmoored from the historical violence of dominant territorial anchorings of cultural identity. I am particularly interested in showing how Scott, Mourè and Zolf probe how bodies and lands are welded into hierarchies of legitimate and abject existence via a poetics that makes visible border zones of underworld "translatio" (Apter) – that is, border zones of linguistic seeping, clashing and re-routing whose affective charge powerfully surfaces the open wounds of genocidal histories haunting life in geopolitical regions as diverse as North-America/Turtle Island (Scott, The Obituary), Palestine/Israel (Zolf, Neighbour Procedure) and the Ukraine/Poland border (Mourè, The Unmentioable). While seeming written in English, all three of the texts I examine very quickly undercut monolingual dominance by means of a range of techniques (sudden insertions of foreign characters, words or word-strings in a sentence; use of hybrid word formations; apparent juxtapositions of translation), which mobilize the reader's uneven multilingual competence while simultaneously frustrating her hermeneutic desire for full textual comprehension and mastery. All three poets oblige us to sift through the solderings and rifts between the constitutive opacity of multilingual inscriptions and translation's promise of transparency and infinite circulation of meaning. Each text's jagged multilingualism enacts the drama of the violence and of the failures of translation – especially when the latter is employed in the service of epistemological mastery and political appropriation, typical of settler-colonial contexts and historically contested border zones. At the end of my paper, I will argue that a potential space of poetic healing is made visible through these poetries' insistence on the opaque ontic weight of language difference, one that demands a particular kind of ethical approach to language on the part of readers, which can be understood as a mode of bearing witness.
Bionote: Elena Basile (Ph.D.) is a translator and sessional lecturer in the Sexual Diversity Studies Program at the University of Toronto, and in the English Department at York University. She writes on translation and multilingual Canadian poetries (essays in New Voices in Translation Studies, Open Letter, Canada and Beyond) and has translated into Italian Nicole Brossard's novel Le désert mauve (2011). She is a founding member of the Multiligualism Research Group at York University, and collaborates regularly with artists and academics in Europe and Canada, exploring ecologies of linguistic diversity in contexts of cultural displacement and hybridization.
PAPER 5:
Title: "Spaces of Translation in the Americas: Languaging from the Borders"
Speaker: María Constanza Guzmán, York University.
Abstract: Linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity are often overdetermined by fixed national cartographies. In the Americas, spaces of language heterogeneity are often obscured in national discourses informed by the geopolitical borders that condition national languages, frame nations and communities, and delimit them culturally and linguistically. National cartographies inform identity discourses which often privilege homogeneity, fail to incorporate contact zones, and result in a national consciousness that is often at odds with the identitarian possibilities emerging from lived linguistic and cultural multiplicity on the ground. The spaces of language heterogeneity are, inherently, spaces of translation as a praxis of intercultural negotiations. In this paper I investigate cultural and editorial projects in the Americas in which multilingualism is transacted. I look at spaces of linguistic multiplicity—including various border spaces, as well as the Caribbean—as sites of multilingual existence where notions of nation, identity and language are both intertwined and contested. Specifically, I take the case of cultural projects that originate in these "spaces of translation" in the Americas, which claim their relation to these multilingual spaces, and participate in one way or another in negotiating linguistic heterogeneity. I focus on the ways in which practices of translation, and non- translation, relate to the transacting of cultural heterogeneity. Looking at specific cases—e.g., editorial projects such as cultural journals—I identify a range of narrative practices that relate to the negotiation of linguistic difference, focusing on translation and also relating it to various forms of narrative hybridity and languaging. In so doing, I explore the possibilities of placing translation within a larger frame of multilingualism; in turn, I posit translation as a conceptual possibility to understand multilingualism. In addition, and taking the opportunity of having done a situated comparative examination of translation and multilingual narrative practices, I also seek to illuminate the way in which regional images and notions of space specific to the Americas emerge from such practices. As a whole, I see the editorial projects as devices through which regional imaginaries—e.g., the idea of "Latin America"— are constructed and produced via narrative and linguistic plurality. This is done with the goal of outlining cartographies emerging from translation praxis, and seeing whether these perpetuate colonial mappings or engage space productively, exploring counterhegemonic and decolonial possibilities.
Bionote: María Constanza Guzmán is Associate Professor in the School of Translation and the Hispanic Studies Department at York University. She teaches in the graduate programs in Translation Studies and Humanities, and coordinates the Research Group in Translation and Transcultural Contact. Her publications include articles and the book Gregory Rabassa's Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy. She also co-translated, with Joshua
M. Price, the novel La sombra de Heidegger, and co-edited (with D. Folaron and M. Feltrin- Morris) the volume Translation and Literary Studies: Homage to Marilyn Gaddis Rose. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Tusaaji: A Translation Review.
PAPER 6:
Title: "Community Translation and Civil Rights in Contemporary Mexico"
Speaker: Danielle Zaslavsky. Colegio de México.
Abstract: In post-revolutionary Mexico, national identity was defined on the basis of hibridity (mestizaje). While the indigenous history was granted an important part in the official historical narrative of the Mexican past, cultural and linguistic diversity, which are characteristics of rural areas, kept being associated to poverty and underdevelopment, and were thus considered as obstacles for modernity. Things seem to have changed today. In spite of having imposed Spanish as the national language in the public sphere, Mexican official discourse has provided a list of over 60 indigenous languages. Admitting linguistic diversity requires the implementation of translation policies, in particular, in community settings. Some public institutions have undertaken initiatives for training translators and interpreters of indigenous languages, who more often than not, belong to an indigenous community. There is a lot to be done, and this is only the beginning of a long process. In this context, translation is presented as a State task. Public institutions are responsible for guaranteeing that every indigenous citizen's rights are protected, whether s/he is being accused or is the plaintiff in a judicial process. However, restricting translation between a dominant language, i.e. Spanish, and a dominated language, i.e. indigenous languages, to legal setting provides a highly reductionist representation, both of translation practices and of indigenous languages.
Translating and interpreting in conflictual settings, that is, those involving legal and political action, has been studied and analyzed by a number of translation studies' scholars (Mona Baker, Jan Bloomaert, Ian Mason, Robert F. Barsky, among others). These studies have foregrounded the social, cultural, and linguistic power differentials, and the assymetrical interactions that take place between the agents involved in these translation/interpreting processes. On the basis of some case studies, this paper will focus on analyzing the discourses articulated through translation in legal settings in contemporary Mexico. The study will be instrumental in showing how translation is used to build a social representation, both of the languages involved and of the translator's task.
Bionote: Studies in Political Discourse, Media Discourse, and Translation and Political Discourse. Last Publications: -2013: "Cuando traducción e interpretación se contradicen", en Nayelli Castro Ramirez (coord.), Traducción, identidad y nacionalismo en Latinoamérica, Bonilla Artigas/ Conaculta/Fonca, México -2013: Nayelli Castro, Danielle Zaslavsky, "México", Francisco Lafarga y Luis Pejenaute (dir.) Diccionario histórico de la traducción en Hispanoamérica, iberoamericana/ Vervuert Madrid -2013: "Las traducciones de la declaración de independencia de Estados Unidos de América en Hispanoamérica", en Alfredo Avila, Jordana Dym, Erica Pani (coord), Las declaraciones de independencia, El Colegio de México/Universidad Autónoma de México, México.
PART 3: Pedagogies of Multilingualism
PAPER 7
Title: De-positioning Standard Written English: A Literacy Experiment in Linguistic Crossings.
Speaker: Dunja Baus and Paola Bohorquez.
Abstract: The increasingly visible and audible presence of multilingual students, English as a second language learners, and speakers of non-privileged varieties of English in Canadian university classrooms has shifted the terms of the debate regarding the effectiveness of traditional Standard Written English (SWE) pedagogies. Writing curricula across Canadian Universities increasingly incorporate readings and teaching materials that, either in content or form, challenge the standard language ideology, while vernacular and cross-cultural texts have become regular additions to the previously carefully guarded canon of "English Literature." While this diversification of the curriculum has been of critical importance for the inclusion and historical recognition of the place of other Englishes and linguistic traditions in the make-up of Canadian society, these problematizations have produced little to no change in current writing pedagogical strategies which continue to be grammar and correctness-oriented, and, for the most part, product-focused. We argue that these pedagogical innovations have had a very limited effect on the writing classroom's hidden curriculum[1], where the unquestioned authority of the native English speaker, the myth of the inherently superior nature of the Standard variety, and the notion that linguistic diversity needs to be contained rather than engaged[2] remain dominant and unquestioned. It is in this gap between the explicit and the hidden curriculum that deeply entrenched and oppressive language attitudes are maintained and reproduced. These experiences have prompted a pilot project that produced pedagogical methodologies that incorporate translation strategies and metalinguistic skills to the teaching of writing outside of the "deficit paradigm" inherited by TESL educators. In this presentation, we will showcase the students' use of translative competencies and ability to shuttle between languages through an examination of their writing pieces and metacritical essays on the pedagogical experience. Grounded on Derrida's translation theory, our project builds on current efforts to release linguistically diverse students from monolingual instructional models by approaching the Standard as both multiple and incomplete and therefore susceptible to deformations, transformations, and miswritings. This process of crossing between languages involves not only semantic and syntactical registers but also grammatical constraints, rhetorical modes, and genres.We are particularly interested in thinking with and through the following questions: What are the pedagogical effects of systematically examining and actively promoting the linguistic and inter-semiotic modes of transfer that multilingual students intuitively practice? How do such translative strategies impact students' approaches to English and writing? How does a broader understanding of translation that considers transfers between academic and vernacular languages and discourses and between diverse rhetorical patterns impact the teaching and learning of Standard Written English in mixed classrooms?
Bionote: Paola Bohórquez holds a Ph.D in Social and Political Thought from York University, where she teaches in the Writing Department. Her dissertation examines the psychic, textual and ethical dimensions of linguistic displacement. She has published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies, Synthesis, and in the collections On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture and American Multicultural Studies. Dunja Baus is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at York University. She teaches in the English and Writing Departments at York University and is currently working on her dissertation entitled "Life, Writing: Re-Citing Female Friendship—A Canadian Bioautography."
PAPER 8:
Title: "Translation Thresholds in the Pedagogies of Intercomprehension and Multilingualism"
Speaker: Clorinda Donato and Cedric Oliva,
Abstract: Since 2009, California State University, Long Beach has been engaged in the application of multilingual pedagogies in the teaching of French and Italian for Spanish speakers courses in a three-course series. Additionally, a course on the Intercomprehension of the Romance Languages has been added to the curriculum for students who know English and one Romance language. Drs. Donato and Oliva have each taught the French and Italian for Spanish Speakers courses as well as train new instructors in the multilingual pedagogies used. They have also team taught the Intercomprehension of the Romance Languages course in which 22 students were enrolled. This presentation will report on the results from their ongoing research in the pedagogies of Intercomprehension and Multilingualism and the role of translation. Reflecting the European influence of its continent of origin, Intercomprehension and the materials used to teach it have glossed over the role of translation in the acquisition of passive reading or listening comprehension skills in the materials they have created (Escudé 2012, Bonvino and Caddéo 2012), due to the philosophy of Intercomprehension, which focuses primarily on 1) the transparency of language and the purported ability of speakers of related languages to understand each other with little to no effort; 2) the "native" or "near native" quality of the Romance language that functions as the reference language in each individual case; 3) the exclusion of English from the mix of languages being taught and considered. Over the past year a writing team led by Donato and Oliva has been developing fresh materials for both courses. In these courses, translation is actively used as a strategy for acquiring meaning among the various languages. The translation that is enacted and elicited emerges from a place of translanguaging. Since our students are constantly moving between English and the Romance language(s) they speak, which is more often than not, Spanish as a heritage language, they bring the other Romance languages they are learning in both the French and Italian for Spanish speakers courses and the Intercomprehension course into the translanguaging they already practice. They are very comfortable with translanguaging translation and they use it to extract meaning as they move among languages. Our presentation will present data from the student work we have collected; we will also demonstrate the translanguaging, translation pedagogies that we have incorporated into our courseware for French and Italian for Spanish Speakers. Finally, the intercultural aspects of our methods will be considered. We will attempt to address questions related to linguistic and cultural specificity as a function of these pedagogical thresholds of translation, its loss and/or deferral to new, transcultural and translingual forms.
Bionote: Clorinda Donato is the George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian Studies at California State University, Long Beach, Chevalier dans l'Ordres des Palmes Académiques and Professor of French and Italian. She is the Principal Investigator for the three-year NEH grant, "French and Italian for Spanish Speakers". Cedric Oliva is the Language Coordinator for the Department of Romance, German, Russian, Languages and Literatures. He teaches French and Italian for Spanish Speakers. He has also taught Intercomprehension, Second Language Acquisition, and Teaching Methodology at California State University, Long Beach.
PAPER 9:
Title: "Multilingualism and translation in literature and visual arts in pedagogical strategies and civic education projects"
Speaker: Antonietta Sanna, University of Pisa
Abstract: Multilingualism and translation are undeniably becoming the language of the world, a necessity that cannot be ignored, and the foundation of all relations in the global society. After literature, which for a long time has invented a language permeated with adaptations and has even turned translation into a narrative theme, contemporary art is integrating it into its discourse now.The works of various writers like Abdelfattah Kilito, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau show that multilingualism and translation are at the root of a ceaseless quest of the other. A lot of writers produce multilingual texts conceived like confrontation, conversation and interlocution. Therefore at present, in this field of research, after the concepts like hospitality or identity/alterity, is urgent to introduce the concept of dia-logos. Dia-logos: this interesting notion allows us to analyze the use of multilingualism and translation in literature and visual arts in pedagogical strategies and civic education in Italy and France. The French artist, Clara Halter, has recently produced a work of art through which she underlines that in today's world translation, understood as a step taken in the direction of the other, is the only way to step out conflicts and to build an exchange between individuals. Her work of art, entitled « Pathways to peace", is made up of a collection of sheets of paper on which the word "peace" is written in several hundred languages, each of them exalting the ornamental aspect of its alphabet. For Halter translating is travelling from one language to the next, and the artist taking the first step, making the first move of an invitation to settle in Other's house, to share the "common house" of our planet Earth. Marco Nereo Rotelli is an Italian artist that works in the same direction when he paints small canvases with forgotten languages: the Rapa Nui pictograms, the Bushman graffiti, and the symbols of Native American tribes. The artist reveals a world of figures and magic between the shadow zones of contemporariness where forgotten languages still survive. The golden doors (2010) are the central work in Marco Nereo Rotelli's research. On each door alphabets of the world and verses of contemporary poets are painted. Save the Poetry, created for the 53rd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in defense of minor languages, is a project to build a bridge for multilingual dialogue connecting cultures and peoples. We will consider too the role of "Site specific projects" in civic education realized in Italy and in France in collaboration with artists that works in multilingual perspective.
Bionote: Antonietta Sanna teaches French Literature in the University of Pisa. She has carried out her research in an eminently philological-literary field. She participates in the integral diplomatic edition of the Cahiers of Paul Valéry. She is a member of the Institut Des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, at the CNRS in Paris. She studies question of gender and relations between text and image. She has translated the important writings of Georges Semprun and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. She works with " Multilinguisme, traduction, création" group in French Institut for genetics studies. She has published articles about multilingualism and translation in literature.
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