Translation and Translanguaging [1 ed.] 9781138067028, 9781138067042, 9781315158877

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Introduction: A dialogue
Chapter 2 Why translanguaging?
Introduction
Three vignettes
Struggling with the warp and woof of language
From language to languaging
Disinventing language(s)
And so translanguaging
Translanguaging repertoires
Language from below
Translanguaging: Beyond multilingual interaction
From intersemiotic translation to multimodality
Beyond interlingual/intralingual/intersemiotic translanguaging
Translanguaging as a tool for thinking with
Multilingualism from below: Tales from the Sydney fruit and vegetable market
Translanguaging and the mind: Linguistic multicompetence
Issues and puzzles
Chapter 3 Translation and translanguaging: Tensions and synergies
Introduction
Conceptual schemas
Two examples from Japanese
On the “moment”
Tensions
Synergies
Examples from World Englishes
Conclusion
Notes
Part I
Chapter 4 Interlingual translanguaging: The case of community interpreting
Introduction
Translanguaging in a community interpreting event
The interpreting event
Drafting a letter in Standard Czech
Informal interpreting in an immigration advice consultation
Discussion
Google Translate as mediator
Discussion
Conclusion
Chapter 5 Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging: Cultural brokering as repertoire
Introduction
Intralingual translanguaging: Klára rewriting Mr Tancoš’s letter
Register work as translanguaging: Explaining complex legal terms and processes
Interdiscursive translanguaging: Answering an Equal Opportunities question on sexual orientation
Interdiscursive translanguaging: Working up a business plan
Discussion
Conclusion
Chapter 6 Intersemiotic translanguaging: The visual, the verbal, and the body
Introduction
Visual-verbal modes interacting: Some illustrations
Spatial repertoires and assemblages
Intersemiotic and embodied translanguaging in sport: capoeira and basketball
Capoeira: The body at play
The pattern of capoeira moves in the roda
Basketball: A space of play
Discussion and conclusion
Part II
Chapter 7 Translanguaging in cyberpoetics
When translanguaging disturbs
John Cayley’s cybertranslational poetics
Conclusion: A virtual theatre of translanguaging
Notes
Chapter 8 Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art
Translanguaging and the imagetext
Ludic translation: Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles
Tracing the alphabet through the character: Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy
Adulterating the Bible: Post Testament
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 9 Concluding dialogue: What have we learnt?
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Translation and Translanguaging

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. Mike Baynham is Emeritus Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. Tong King Lee is Associate Professor of Translation at the University of Hong Kong.

New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies Series Editor: Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation.

The New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies series aims to address changing needs in the fields of translation studies and interpreting studies. The series features works by leading scholars in both disciplines, on emerging and up to date topics. Key features of the titles in this series are accessibility, relevance and innovation. These lively and highly readable texts provide an exploration into various areas of translation and interpreting studies for undergraduate and postgraduate students of translation studies, interpreting studies and cultural studies. Translation and Migration Moira Inghilleri Fictional Translators Rethinking Translation through Literature Rosemary Arrojo Translation and World Literature Edited by Susan Bassnett Translation Sites A Field Guide Sherry Simon Translation and Translanguaging Mike Baynham and Tong King Lee For more information on any of these and other titles, or to order, please go to https://www.routledge.com/New-Perspectives-in-Translation-and-Interpret ing-Studies/book-series/NPTS Additional resources for Translation and Interpreting Studies are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://cw.routledge.com/ textbooks/translationstudies

Translation and Translanguaging

Mike Baynham and Tong King Lee

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Mike Baynham and Tong King Lee The right of Mike Baynham and Tong King Lee to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-06702-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-06704-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-15887-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Visit the www.routledge.com/9781138067042 Visit the eResources: https://www.routledge.com/9781138067042

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: A dialogue

vi viii 1

2 Why translanguaging?

13

3 Translation and translanguaging: Tensions and synergies

33

PART I

4 Interlingual translanguaging: The case of community interpreting 57 5 Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging: Cultural brokering as repertoire

77

6 Intersemiotic translanguaging: The visual, the verbal, and the body

97

PART II

7 Translanguaging in cyberpoetics

123

8 Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art

151

9 Concluding dialogue: What have we learnt?

182

Bibliography Index

191 198

Figures

3.1 A Chinese New Year envelope made in Hong Kong 48 3.2 A Singlish ecclesiastical artefact 50 6.1 A visual-verbal sign on a plane in Barcelona 99 6.2a Undocumented migrant rescues child from balcony in Paris, May 2018 101 6.2b A cartoon: “Good Migrant/Bad Migrant” 101 6.3a Customer opens his arms wide 104 6.3b Bradley points to his stomach 105 6.4a The game begins in front of the leader, ao pé do berimbau, literally “at the foot of the berimbau” 112 6.4b A roda 112 6.5a Coach explains defensive system to players 117 6.5b Coach positions Team A on the court 118 6.5c Coach throws the ball to players practising defence 118 6.5d Coach advises team on the game 118 7.1a translation by John Cayley (1.1) 129 7.1b  translation by John Cayley (1.2) 130 7.1c translation by John Cayley (1.3) 131 translation by John Cayley (1.4) 132 7.1d  7.2a translation by John Cayley (2.1) 133 7.2b  translation by John Cayley (2.2) 135 7.2c translation by John Cayley (2.3) 136 7.2d  translation by John Cayley (2.4) 137 7.3a John Cayley’s microcollage translation (2015 version) 141 7.3b John Cayley’s microcollage translation (2016 version) 147 8.1 Image of artefact from Forest of Stone Steles 155 8.2 A pseudocharacter written using Gu Wenda’s method 160 8.3  Forest of Stone Steles on exhibition, the University of North Texas, 2003 162

Figures 

vii

8.4 “Art for the People”, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1999 163 8.5 “Spring” written in square word calligraphy 165 8.6 Zhuangzi’s “Discussion on Making All Things Equal” in square word calligraphy 169 8.7  Square Word Calligraphy: Instruction manual (top) and tracing book (bottom) 171 8.8  Post Testament 174

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support and encouragement of Angela Creese, Adrian Blackledge, Li Wei, and Zhu Hua of the research project Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities (TLANG). In particular, we would like to recognize the contribution of the Leeds TLANG team, comprising James Simpson, Jolana Hanušová, John Callaghan, Jess Bradley, and Emilee Moore in the research presented in Chapters Four to Six. They will find here versions of many ideas developed together in research meetings and on drives down to Birmingham to attend TLANG meetings. Any errors that have crept in remain our own. We are further thankful for the insights gained from working with our key participants: Klára, Monika, Lucy, and Tiago. Special thanks extends to Eriko Sato for her comments on the Japanese examples used in Chapter Three; to Olivier Nkunzimana for the Lingala transcriptions and Michael Meeuwis for his insightful comments on Lingala grammar that we’ve drawn on; and to John Cayley for his invaluable input on his digital works discussed in Chapter Seven. We are also grateful to Elisabetta Adami for enlightening conversations on multimodality and translanguaging. The data drawn on in Chapters Four to Six derive from TLANG, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Research undertaken for this book is further supported by two grants from the University of Hong Kong, namely the HKU Overseas Fellowship Award and the School of Chinese Small Research Grant. Every effort has been made to obtain copyright permission for the material used in this book. Please contact the publisher with any enquiries or information relating to such material.

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

2 Introduction 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.

Introduction 

3

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 selftranslator much more broadly and suggest that the translator, in whatever context, epitomizes the multilingual language user.

4 Introduction 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 (ThinkAloud-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

Introduction 

5

full of semiotic potentialities. In Chapter Three, I represent this using the symbol Љ, 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

6 Introduction 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. Translation necessarily has a dimension of intentionality, a conscious project to accomplish. Studies of code-switching undertaken by Gumperz and Hymes (1972) showed that speakers are not necessarily aware they are code-switching, which can occur beneath the level of conscious attention. If this is true of code-switching, then it would be true of translanguaging. TK:   Could we then say that a translanguaging perspective highlights the processual and emergent aspects of translation? That we could in fact understand translanguaging as a theoretical lens with which to interrogate translation as applied practice? MB: Absolutely. My argument is that translanguaging and the associated notion of repertoire helps understand the fine-grained activity of translation in the way we have been discussing. It occurs to me also that everyday translanguaging is always embedded in emergent activity, in genres and events in spaces and places: market stalls and shops, advice centres, gyms. These activities, genres, and events, which constitute the spaces and places where they occur, are dynamic, emergent, and directional in rather the kind of way you attribute to translation. A group of young men get together for a basketball practice; the practice phase leads into a strategy discussion, then a game. And the whole sequence is a lead-up to a match. There is plenty of directionality here in the activity. The approach we are taking to translanguaging is a situated one. We see it as situated in and constitutive of activity of different sorts. This can be running a market stall or visiting that market stall as a customer; coaching a basketball game or being a player in that game; giving or seeking migration advice. Translanguaging occurs in the interactional small change that constitutes the activity. Seen from that point of view, translation is an activity, with its own directionalities and outcomes (the translation); translanguaging is a way of understanding how you get there. So the proposition we are developing here is that the lens of translanguaging and the notion of repertoire can help in developing a dynamic account of translation as activity and practice. TK: So far so good on translation and translanguaging, which is what this book is about. I somehow think we are also obliged to address the relationship between code-switching and translanguaging, which remains a bone of contention. Many linguists are not convinced that translanguaging adds anything new to code-switching or multilingualism, seeing it as just another fancy term describing what we already know. What’s our position on this? Just now, you mentioned

Introduction 

7

that code-switching and translanguaging are two perspectives on the same phenomenon. Can you elaborate on that? This is important. If we have not yet settled the relationship between code-switching and translanguaging, we are in no position to discuss the relationship between translation and translanguaging. MB:  Can we have your view first? TK: Li Wei and I have addressed this issue in our recent work (Lee and Li 2019). In short: notwithstanding that code-switching and translanguaging can be empirically related, the two are conceptually distinct. “A classic code-switching approach would assume switching back and forward to a single language default”, says Li Wei (2018: 14). I agree with this, although I hasten to add that this is not to say code-switching is less or more theoretically legitimate than translanguaging. Different multilingual situations have different dynamics, hence calling for different perspectives and terms. Translanguaging does not hinge on “a single language default”, or the switching between this default and the “other” language. To me, translanguaging is about the contingent and creative thrown-togetherness of languages, language varieties, registers, and semiotic modalities; it is not really about moving back and forth between languages. Code-switching may take place subconsciously, as you mentioned, but I’m not sure I can say the same confidently about translanguaging. Can we be subconsciously creative with language? My sense is that when people engage with languages creatively, they are to some degree conscious of themselves as language-makers. They need not analyse their own language behaviour (who does that besides us?), but they know at some level they are producing something marked. Markedness, to me, is an essential attribute of translanguaging. Empirically, code-switching and translanguaging may not completely overlap. Translanguaging can involve myriad processes including code-switching, transliteration, translation, orthographic transitions, phonetic slippage, even interfacing language and the body, as the chapters in our book will make clear. Translanguaging pedagogy, for example, involves the use of both code-switching and translation in the bilingual or multilingual classroom. Codeswitching, as the term suggests, is premised on language codes, and as such must be narrower in scope than translanguaging. As we suggest in Chapter Two, theoretical constructs like codeMB:  switching and translanguaging can be seen in terms of affordances. A particular theoretical construct enables certain perceptions and insights while disabling others. I agree with you that code-switching as a construct seems to lock us theoretically into language. As I think we show in this book, translanguaging opens up promising ways of thinking about the co-existence not just of different language elements, but also of different modalities, registers, and discourses,

8 Introduction not to mention the language-body interface, which would be hard to encompass in code-switching. Code-switching implies switching between two similars (i.e. named languages). To that extent, translanguaging encourages us to think about relations of difference held together in the repertoire. So in that sense, translanguaging is a construct with more traction, theoretically and empirically. TK: We should underscore the point that the trans- prefix in translanguaging also means going beyond language as such. If code-switching means going between languages, translanguaging means going between and beyond them. And it is in the “beyond” dimension where translanguaging affiliates with multimodal studies. In addition, codeswitching may be governed by structural constraints, such that we can speak of the structural properties of code-switching (e.g. Callahan [2004]). Translanguaging, to me, is antithetical to structure and structuration. If different processes can dovetail into translanguaging, such as code-switching, translation, transliteration, and orthographic morphing, how can it be constrained by an a priori structure? The only constraint we can speak of in translanguaging is perhaps the creative potential that arises from all the circumstances of a communicative situation. Li Wei and I call this the translanguaging potential (Lee and Li 2019). MB: I am beginning to wonder whether we are operating with two rather different conceptualizations of translanguaging. You seem to emphasize more the creativity of translanguaging, whereas I think I have a rather broader and more inclusive definition of the co-occurrence of elements from different languages, registers, modalities, discourses, etc. in the repertoire. I think there is a banal, humdrum, everyday sort of translanguaging. This may be illuminated from time to time with dazzling moments of creativity, but at other times not so. I think if we set the definition of translanguaging too narrowly, we exclude too much. Definitions of any sort, of course, invite such problems: do we set the definition of bi/multilingual broadly or more narrowly? This has been a pervasive issue in studies of multilingualism. I think we are coming up with just such an issue in our consideration of translanguaging. TK: We might well be operating with two different conceptualizations of translanguaging, that is, the everyday and the aesthetic. In so doing, in crossing the mundane–poetic boundary, are we not exemplifying the potential of translanguaging on a metatextual level? And does that not inform the bipartite design of this book? Yes, indeed we are exemplifying the potential of translanguagMB:  ing. And don’t get me wrong, I believe strongly in the intersection between the aesthetic and the everyday in everyday talk and action: in the poetry of everyday life. Some moment of creativity can bubble up, as if from nowhere, while buying meat at a market stall, for

Introduction 

9

example. Human beings are endlessly capable of playfulness and creativity, but I wouldn’t want to restrict the scope of translanguaging only to such moments. TK: To your “poetry of everyday life”, may I add the everydayness of poetry. MB:  You ask in Chapter Seven, “Why disturb translation? What has translation done wrong?” If you take into account what I suggested above concerning the affordances of particular theoretical perspectives, what you are in effect asking is not what translation has done wrong, but rather in what way translanguaging can productively disturb translation. What can it enable us to see that other theories of translation can’t? I wonder if one of the myths with which translation typically operates is the notion of settled centres and translation at the borders. This can be related to arguments developed in Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) Border as Method. If we imagine a space which is Language A and a continuous space which is Language B, then translation operates at the boundary, the border between the territory of Language A and that of Language B. This leaves the centre of Territory A and Territory B somehow untouched, served by the transborder commerce between A and B, but otherwise inviolate. This is the myth of the language/nation-state homology, so beloved of ideological purists. If you restrict the commerce between languages to the fringes, the border, then the monolingual heartland remains inviolate. TK:   And what’s our take on this? MB: Arguably the way we treat translanguaging, fleshing out and extending Jakobson’s programmatic framework, unsettles this in quite a productive way. It tells us that difference isn’t simply a characteristic of the borderlands, but that difference is threaded through the entire social fabric and incorporated into the repertoire. Mary Louise Pratt (1991) memorably critiqued the centrality of the speech community in linguistics, and along with speech community goes the idea of communication based on shared meanings and understandings. The idea of “contact zones” that Pratt introduces suggests that communication typically occurs based on difference – that difference, rather than shared meanings and understandings, is the norm. I think translanguaging provides a way of understanding how communication based on difference, whether linguistic, multimodal, or embodied, is enabled in the repertoire. It thus makes translation, understood as the managing of difference, the central process of human communication, taking us beyond an oversimplified notion of the speech community whose speakers all communicate using the “same” language. Difference works itself through the most apparently homogeneous setting. This enables us to say that all human communication is radically constituted in difference, and translanguaging shows how this unfolds in the repertoire.

10 Introduction TK:   Translation studies scholars would claim that they have long been interested in the idea of difference, way before the term translanguaging was coined. For a long while, Pratt’s “contact zone” was one of several theoretical lynchpins for translation scholars working in the cultural studies vein. So now I need to put on my devil advocate’s mask for a bit and ask: what does translanguaging have to say that has not already been pre-empted by contemporary translation studies – with all its inflections from postcolonial studies, poststructuralism, gender studies, sociology, and multimodal studies? Or is that even the right question to ask? After all, translation studies has been cannibalizing concepts from all imaginable fields for three decades, consolidating these into what is perceived today as an “independent” field. Should translation studies even have the right to expect something from translanguaging? Translation studies (before it became a field of study) was preoccupied with structural linguistics before the 1980s, after which it then abandoned linguistics with disdain to carve out its own path through cultural studies and every other conceivable line of inquiry. Now, the primary connection between translation studies and linguistics is CDA (critical discourse analysis). So when I’m asking what translanguaging can do for translation studies, what I’m really asking is what place does applied linguistics or sociolinguistics have in the above trajectory, if it needs to have a place at all? MB: As I note in Chapter Two, translanguaging is the new kid on the block, theoretically, so you have every right to feel haughty about my cheeky and possibly oversimplified generalizations concerning translation. As we will argue in this book, translation and translanguaging are entities of a quite different order, yet with the potential to be mutually informing. Translation is an academic field and a field of practice, institutionally embedded and with a longish (relative to translanguaging) history. It has all the attributes of a thriving field: undergraduate and Master programmes, doctoral research, conferences, and journals, not to mention the complex and differentiated, if rather magpie-like, research literature you refer to. Translanguaging is simply an element in the stuff of language use. A rather important element, we argue, but necessarily just an element. It is particularly associated with sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography, so you are right to raise that here. So the question for me is this: what can insights into translanguaging – multilingual language use, multimodality, embodiment – contribute to the ongoing conversation on the nature of translation? Or, as you mentioned earlier: how do we use translanguaging as a theoretical lens to interrogate translation as applied practice? TK: Certainly translation is an institution at one level, and also a form of material practice. I think we are developing a scalar view here, where

Introduction 

11

translation is a sliding category that can be pegged at different levels of abstraction. But following on from what you just said, are we therefore talking about a way of looking at translation phenomena through the prism of translanguaging? MB: Indeed. Translanguaging as a theoretical lens requires a microanalytic approach to complement it, and I think that opens up the possibility of studying translation as a form of multilingual practice using approaches such as moment analysis and spatial repertoires. I think a translanguaging approach to translation would provide thick description, in the Geertzian sense, of translation practices, reworked by Appiah (2012) into thick translation. You mention CDA and other linguistic approaches. These are still stuck on theorizing the properties of texts-in-contexts and their intertextual relations to other texts. This is in itself a great project. However, the sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnographic approach that spawned translanguaging decisively shifts the focus away from text/context or language/language relations towards language users and their repertoire. This is a turn that translation studies could take. TK:  Methodologically, I think the TLANG project has much to offer translation studies in the way of linguistic ethnographic research. While thick translation has been in currency in translation studies for a long time, it is not often that the translation scholar doubles up as the linguistic ethnographer. Sherry Simon’s Cities in Translation (2011) and Mona Baker’s Translation and Conflict (2006) are two landmark works in this trajectory. I see ourselves as pushing in the same direction in Part I of the book. In terms of data, we talked about the everyday and the aesthetic. This book covers both terrains. Translation studies has no doubt been expanding the range of data it takes into its purview, but published texts are still very much at the core. We have quite a bit of nontextual data, and I think there is some value in introducing this kind of data into translation research. Ethnographic data are reported in Part I of this book, complemented by the literary-aesthetic data in Part II. Ethnographic work is very much your domain. I, on the other hand, am more interested in text-based art, asking in particular: how does translation and/or translanguaging feature in art as both a material technique and a structuring concept? This is an underresearched topic, and Part II of this book represents a thrust at this. MB: I would add that we planned this book to be dialogic: an encounter between translanguaging and translation, mediated between myself, with a background in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, and you, from the perspective of translation studies. This has created interesting issues of voice, specifically whether we are speaking in unison or separately at different moments and how we signal these voices. In our introduction, the dialogical nature of the thinking that has gone

12 Introduction into the book is made explicit. At other times, we speak as “we” out of a common position or understanding. Yet when using examples from our personal experience or research, it sometimes makes sense to use “I”. To clarify this, when we are introducing data or an experience attributed to one of us, we will introduce “I” in the first mention as “I (MB)” or “I (TK)”, and thereafter just “I”. TK:  Finally, the structure of this book: Chapter Two introduces translanguaging and its key constructs, such as repertoire and moment analysis, while Chapter Three responds dialogically, setting out the perspective from translation studies. There follows a number of data-analysis chapters which develop a combined understanding of translanguaging and translation, firstly from a study of everyday multilingualism in superdiverse urban contexts (Chapters Four, Five, and Six), and then looking at digital poetry and visual art (Chapters Seven and Eight). Throughout the book, the ongoing theme is to develop an understanding of translanguaging in all its forms – verbal, visual, embodied – and test its relevance for our understanding of translation. MB:  Okay. So here we go.

2

Why translanguaging?

Introduction In this chapter, we will introduce the idea of translanguaging. Any theoretical construct can be understood as a tool for thinking with, having its own affordances: enabling some thoughts and disabling others. We will review translanguaging in relation to the more established notion of code-switching as tools for thinking with, outlining our position on the relationship between these constructs. We will show how translanguaging must be linked to the notion of repertoire. Translanguaging always involves a selection from available resources in a speaker/writer’s repertoire, and, indeed, this is how we can define translanguaging. In its original formulation, translanguaging assumed a multilingual repertoire, but we will show how the concept has since developed, arguing that there needs to be more analytic specificity in the ways that translanguaging is often used. To do this, we turn to a framework even older than code-switching: Jakobson’s (1959/2012) well-known translation typology, introduced here and discussed in more detail below. We show how translanguaging can of course be, in Jakobson’s terms, interlingual, thus involving the multilingual repertoire. It can also be intralingual, involving relations between registers such as everyday and technical speech or writing. When, for example, a lawyer interacting with a client glosses a technical legal term in everyday language, this is for us an instance of intralingual translanguaging. And what happens when different modes, for example visual and verbal, come into play? We describe this as intersemiotic translanguaging, understood as the selection and blending of modal resources. Extending from Jakobson’s original framework, we further identify two other types of translanguaging: interdiscursive translanguaging, where translanguaging involves interplay and mediation between discourses; and, on the boundary of language and the body, embodied translanguaging, where what is in play are the communicative affordances of the body interacting with language. Translanguaging thus, playfully or seriously, involves the mixing and blending of communicative resources and the crossing and transgressing of boundaries. We will conclude this chapter by asking what

14  Why translanguaging? is transgressive about translanguaging as boundary crossing, developing the idea that translanguaging is language from below.

Three vignettes Vignette 1 An Italian friend recently posts on Facebook in Italian that her adult son has returned temporarily to the family home. When asked why, she explains: Perchè il suo apartamento è airbandbiato [Because his apartment is airbnb-ed] Vignette 2 A family is visiting from Paris, the mother English, the father French. Their toddler runs into the garden to watch a plane passing, then runs back into the house, shouting: Maman, maman, l’avion il est gone [Mummy, mummy the plane has gone] Vignette 3 Many years ago in London, I (MB) brought my girlfriend, soon to be my wife, to meet my Moroccan friends. Their grandmother congratulated us and wished us: Jouj d-l-babiyāt [two babies] (Her wishes were on the conservative side; eventually there were three.) The Italian friend created a new Italian verb out of the English “Airbnb”: airbnbiare, here transformed into the past participle airbnbiato. In doing so, she was demonstrating her fluency in two languages in her repertoire: Italian and English. The new verb was a creative and playful synthesis of resources from the two languages. She is also pushing the phonology of Italian to its limits and perhaps beyond: where in Italian can you find a consonant cluster “bnb”? Making sense of this sequence throws one back to the English “b&b”. The Franco-British toddler slotted an English past participle into a perfectly formed French sentence. We infer from this that both French and English form part of his emerging linguistic repertoire. Similarly, in the third example, the Moroccan grandmother, though she speaks very little English, effortlessly incorporates the English lexical item into the morphological and indeed the phonological structure of Moroccan Arabic. It is a well-known feature of dialects of Arabic that lexical items from other languages can be incorporated into the morphology of Arabic: film [= film] (singular) aflām (plural), tumubil [= car] (singular) tumubilāt (plural).

Why translanguaging? 

15

All of these are instances of translanguaging. Why translanguaging, when there are many other terms already in existence to characterize bi/multilingual language use, such as code-switching, lexical borrowing, triggering? What does translanguaging bring to our understanding of multilingual interaction? To answer these questions, we need to (a) review approaches to language analysis which treat language as dynamic and emergent rather than as a reified code, and (b) consider recent arguments that critique the commonly held assumptions that link language with nation.

Struggling with the warp and woof of language Since Whorf (1950, 2012), we have known that theory struggles with and against the affordances of particular languages. It has proved particularly difficult in English, for example, to conceive of language as something dynamic rather than something reified. Yet we can track sustained attempts to conceive of language as dynamic, against the grain, as it were, of the English language, with its tendency to reify and nominalize dynamic processes. Ironically, it is only through exposure to the dynamics of other languages (in other words, by entering a multilingual space) that the constraints and affordances of particular languages can become obvious, a kind of theoretical translanguaging. For Sapir and Whorf, these were the indigenous languages of North America. Explaining the semantics of Hopi, we find Whorf struggling with the nominalizing tendency of English to express the dynamic tendency he is encountering: “The Hopi microcosm seems to have analysed reality in terms of events (or better ‘eventing’)” (Whorf 1950: 84). In order to express the dynamic tendency in language, Whorf is forced to be creative, to innovate, skewing the nominal “event”. This tendency to stretch and skew language, to innovate creatively in order to capture the dynamic which is against the grain (à rebours) of English, can be found in other fields. The anthropologist Brian Street memorably argued that culture is a verb (Street 1993); Judith Butler’s performative perspective on gender focuses on the dynamic of doing gender (Butler 1999, 2011). All of these construe language dynamically as process. What all of these approaches have in common is a struggle both against the reifying tendency of English and against the ideological and social forces that want these things to be solidified in exclusionary ways.

From language to languaging In the effort to rethink language not as a thing but as a dynamic activity, it is thus necessary to be creative, to innovate linguistically – in this case, to shift from noun to verb. Juffermans (2015) provides an overview of this shift, citing Becker (1991: 34), who argues that “there is no such thing as Language, only continual languaging, an activity of human beings in the world”. Juffermans also quotes Mignolo’s (1996: 181) assertion that “languages are

16  Why translanguaging? conceived and languaging is practiced”. García and Li (2014) identify the contribution of Maturana and Varela: It is by languaging that the act of knowing, in the behavioral coordination which is language, brings forth a world. We work out our lives in a mutual linguistic coupling, not because language permits us to reveal ourselves but because we are constituted in language in a continuous becoming that we bring forth with others. (Maturana and Varela 1998: 234–235, cited in García and Li 2014: 8; emphasis added) The concept of language as a continual becoming, brought forth with others, resonates with Bakhtin’s notion of ideological becoming. It seems, therefore, that we can think of languaging as dynamic practice, connecting with the turn towards practice in the social sciences and linking with Bakhtinian notions such as heteroglossia. This focus on languaging as practice is explored by Juffermans who, in relation to language, multilingualism, and borders in Africa, argues that “languages and ethnicities are not naturalistic givens, but dynamic cultural constructs that were not fixed and compartmentalized as units prior to scholarly description, but in great part in the process of and as a result of such descriptions” (Juffermans 2015: 4). This is salient, and indeed painfully true, in the case of Africa, whose borders and linguistic differentiations were often the product of arbitrary colonial decisions. An alternative perspective, as Juffermans puts it, points to “the dynamic, fluid and hybrid nature of literacy and multilingualism as social practices” (ibid.), contributing to a postcolonial perspective that can dismantle taken-for-granted homologies between language(s) and nation states.

Disinventing language(s) The search for more dynamic ways of thinking about language, as we have seen, evokes a critique of the performative link between monolingual language ideologies and the emergence of nation states. In a striking phrase, Makoni and Pennycook (2006) have talked about disinventing languages. This theme is taken up in the framing introduction for The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society (García et al. 2017) and in individual contributions, with May, for example, asking: How did this subsequent preoccupation with linguistic homogeneity at the (nation-)state level, the privileging – and, often, rigorous enforcement – of a “national” language, and the related pathologizing of other language varieties (and their speakers) come about? (May 2017: 38) The pathologizing of other languages that May identifies of course also extends to language practices such as translanguaging. We have already seen

Why translanguaging? 

17

such questions being posed by Juffermans in relation to the West African contexts of his research. A South American case is brought up in a recent paper by Ballena and Unamuno (2017) examining the historical impacts on an indigenous community in Argentina of Argentinian monolingual language policy and ideology. Juffermans (2015) points to the implication of linguistic research and language policy in the emergence of these national standards and their part in what might be called a coproduction of nationhood. Chomsky (1986: 15, 2000: 31), not noted for his active involvement in sociolinguistics, when asked in an interview to explain the difference between a language and a dialect, quoted the memorable and to-the-point aphorism attributed to Max Weinreich: “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. The conclusion to be drawn is that monolingualism is both a language ideology and a set of practices aimed at control and involving the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion.

And so translanguaging Translanguaging started as a dynamic, user-oriented approach to multilingualism, adopting the perspective we described in relation to languaging above, but this time specifically referring to languaging when more than one language is in play. So translanguaging has a boundary-crossing dimension. For an account of the origins of the term see García and Li (2014). Here is how García and Li define it: [T]ranslanguaging is an approach to the use of language, bilingualism and the education of bilinguals that considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous language systems as has been traditionally the case, but as one linguistic repertoire with features that have been societally constructed as belonging to two separate languages. (García and Li 2014: 2) García and Li argue for translanguaging, rather than languaging as proposed by Juffermans as well as Makoni and Pennycook, to highlight languaging that routinely crosses language borders: We argue that the term translanguaging offers a way of capturing the expanded complex practices of speakers who could not avoid having had languages inscribed in their body, and yet live between different societal and semiotic contexts as they interact with a complex array of speakers. (García and Li 2014: 18) “Living between” is a key phrase here, pointing to the fact that in a world marked and shaped by mobility and flows, it is no longer adequate sociolinguistically to think of language as the property of speech communities or communities of speakers. Rather, the metaphor of “contact zone”,

18  Why translanguaging? introduced by Mary Louise Pratt (1991), better expresses the dynamic of contemporary communication spaces. It seems that translanguaging carries with it a sense of living between and talking across boundaries and borders, maybe even talking down the actual and psychological boundaries and borders set up by monolingual linguistic ideologies and their exclusionary language practices.

Translanguaging repertoires A key word in García and Li’s definition above is repertoire. Spotti and Blommaert (2017) remind us that repertoire is one of the foundational constructs of sociolinguistics, defined by Gumperz as “the totality of linguistic resources … available to members of particular communities” (1972: 20–21). In the light of the discussion above, we see this as framed in the modernist notion of speech communities rather than contact zones. While the concept of speech community has come to be problematized, repertoire has had a robust development, surviving the fracturing and dislocation of settled and stable notions of place. Spotti and Blommaert characterize people as performing repertoires of identities through linguistic-semiotic resources acquired over the course of their life trajectories through membership or participation in various sociocultural spaces in which their identities are measured against normative centers of practice. (Spotti and Blommaert 2017: 171) Important here are ideas of emergence and trajectory. Communication does not happen in the timeless now of the speech community, in the simplifying assumption of Saussure’s synchronic space; it happens in time, in history, both personal and social. There is a kind of intersection of the interactional now and the historical trajectory of what is brought along – Silverstein’s “presupposed” – with what is brought about in the interaction – Silverstein’s “entailed” (Silverstein 2003: 193–194). They are interactionally sedimented (Baynham 2014). Repertoires are provisional and change over a lifetime. Spotti and Blommaert go on to cite Creese and Blackledge (2010), Jørgensen et al. (2011), and Canagarajah (2013) in support of this position. The “various sociocultural spaces” here index a decentring of the normative assumptions of the homogeneous speech community and a move towards notions of polycentricity and potentially competing centres of normativity with their attraction/repulsion effects (Baynham and Hanušová 2018). Another key term in the quote from Spotti and Blommaert (2017) above, signalling the expansion of the notion of translanguaging which we propose, is that of “linguistic-semiotic resources” (emphasis added). The resources available and drawn on in the repertoire are not just linguistic but also involve other semiotic orders. This is apparent in the work of Rymes (2014)

Why translanguaging? 

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on repertoire in a book tellingly entitled Communicating Beyond Language. Rymes starts her discussion of repertoire with a focus on multilingualism: As one Moroccan ninth-grader in a Philadelphia area high school explained to me, “At home we speak English, French, Spanish, Arabic, a little of it all.” Usually this multilingualism is not restricted to “home”: another student from the same school speaks a little Urdu/Hindi, Pashto and English all evening in his after-school job at a family store. Another speaks French and English at a hair-braiding shop where she works. (Rymes 2014: 1–2) So far so multilingual, but Rymes goes on to point out that as multilingual students begin to navigate school, they need a communicative repertoire that goes beyond their languages: “how they dress, what their hair looks like, the nicknames they go by, how they greet, say goodbye, express thanks, respond to teacher questions, format an essay, or invite a friend home with them, will all influence their pathway through school and life” (Rymes 2014: 2). As humans, we are communication devices. We can’t turn off. As soon as we step into a room or open our mouths, we are communicating something. Even to say nothing is to communicate – to communicate uncommunicativeness. Our body speaks. What we communicate can be deliberate, conscious, but it can equally well be unconscious. Additionally, those around us may not take what we say or communicate as we intend it. (My smart bright yellow shirt bought on impulse in sunshiny Palermo might be your clashing colour or mutton dressed as lamb on an elderly guy.) What Rymes is pointing out is that communication, intentional or unintentional, goes well beyond language. This will be a useful insight when we come to consider broader definitions of translanguaging which go beyond the multilingual matrix. We will return to repertoire as a way of defining translanguaging in a way that can encompass not just the linguistic but also the semiotic modes through which we humans routinely communicate.

Language from below If Spotti and Blommaert (2017) characterize polycentricity as competing centres of normativity to which speakers are required to orient in their communication practices, where does this position translanguaging? We have already identified monolingual language ideologies, characteristically linked to nation states, as a dominant centre. In the work of Ballena and Unamuno (2017), for example, Spanish is dominant on a national scale with regard to the indigenous languages of Argentina. On another scale, Ballena and Unamuno are publishing their (2017) paper, originally written in Spanish, in English rather than Spanish, thus orienting to the normativities of another centre, the global space of academic publishing. Nor can dominant language ideologies be solely monolingual. In recent work, Wheeler (2017) has examined a trilingual state

20  Why translanguaging? ideology in Kazakhstan involving Kazakh, Russian, and English. This explicit language ideology ascribes specific roles to the languages in question; it is a kind of boundaried trilingualism: “an ideology of perfectly balanced separate multilingualism in each language as a bounded code” (Wheeler 2017: 174). In contrast, in the urban elite contexts of her study, there is at the same time a pervasive translanguaging between Kazakh and Russian which is under the radar as regards the official language policy. This Kazakh and Russian translanguaging can be described, using Pennycook and Otsuji’s (2015: 9) phrase, as “multilingualism from below”. This is because translanguaging as a practice is inherently boundary- or border-crossing, and hence it is likely to draw down sanction from those who like their borders policed, their languages pure. Consider as an example the tension over many years on the use of other languages in English classrooms. In many education systems around the world, there are explicit directives that teachers should only use English in the English-language classroom. Equally there is an ongoing body of research which demonstrates that this regulatory framework is systematically flouted in actual classrooms, where translanguaging is the norm. Research reported in Saxena and Martin-Jones (2013: 291) provides an overview of how “teachers and learners manage the gap between reified institutional mono-lingualism and the lived multilingual realities of everyday classroom practice”. Thus, a language ideology regulates, or attempts to regulate, multilingual language practices. The attempt to regulate does not mean that it is necessarily successful. García and Li (2014) point to this creative, resistant character of translanguaging, understood as language from below, which is liable to be subjected to regulation and censure from dominant monolingual language ideologies (consider how an unseen hand disappeared the White House Spanish pages in the hours after Trump’s inauguration). They bring out this dimension of resistance to the asymmetries of power when they speak of “languaging actions that enact a political process of social and subjectivity transformation which resist the asymmetries of power” inherent in institutionalized language usage (ibid.: 43). Two other aspects of translanguaging, linked to the resistant character of language from below, are creativity and criticality, where creativity describes “the language user’s ability to play with various linguistic features as well as the various spatial and temporal resonances of these features” (García and Li 2014: 32), and criticality “the ability to use available evidence … to inform considered views of cultural, social, political and linguistic phenomena, to question and problematize received wisdom, and to express views adequately through reasoned responses to situations” (ibid.: 67). A further contribution to thinking on translanguaging is the idea of a translanguaging space: a space created by and for translanguaging practices, a space where multilingual individuals integrate social spaces (and thus “language codes”) that have been formerly practised separately by “bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment, their

Why translanguaging? 

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attitude, belief and ideology, their cognitive and physical capacity into one coordinated and meaningful performance” (Li 2011: 1223).

Translanguaging: Beyond multilingual interaction Translanguaging, as we have seen, started as a way of capturing multilingual interaction in a more dynamic way, emphasizing the creative blending of the linguistic options available to speakers in an utterance. We have already seen suggestions that there might be more to translanguaging than activity involving different languages in phrases like multilingual-multimodal and linguistic-semiotic. We have also seen how Rymes’s notion of communicative repertoire goes beyond the linguistic to include other semiotics of meaning making, for example dress. In Translation and Translanguaging (TLANG), the recently completed large-scale study of translanguaging, we found empirical data that greatly extended our understanding of translanguaging as a construct beyond the linguistic, specifically repertoires involving more than one language. As well as discovering, in the speech of the people whose daily lives we followed, translanguaging repertoires that creatively combined and different languages, we discovered creative uses of register, for example, when a skilled professional effortlessly blends technical terms, for example in giving legal advice, with everyday language glosses and explanations of these terms. Such interactions seemed to be understandable also as translanguaging. In addition, in the market stall in Birmingham, investigated by Blackledge and Creese (2017, 2018), the activity of buying meat products, as captured by observational notes and video, frequently involved combinations of speech and gesture – sometimes gesture alone. In a case study in Leeds, focused on sport, we saw similar combinations of the visual and gestural on the basketball court. What we seemed to have identified here was visual-verbal translanguaging, a type of languaging that worked across modal boundaries. As suggested in the introduction to this chapter, we were helped in our thinking here by going back to Jakobson’s classic paper “On linguistic aspects of translation” (Jakobson 1959/2012). In this programmatic paper, Jakobson places translation at the heart of meaning-making, an insight that has still not been fully developed and exploited as it might. This is because he is not talking simply about translation on the borders between languages, as it is conventionally understood, but also of translation as a core semiotic process, perhaps the core semiotic process. This argument thus places translation at the core of meaning making, not at its periphery. Jakobson introduces three categories of translation: a Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. b Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language.

22  Why translanguaging? c Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. (Jakobson 1959/2012: 127) To be honest, Jakobson, having introduced these distinctions, dedicates the rest of the paper more or less to the study of what he terms “translation proper”, yet in its framing, the suggestion is strongly present that translation occupies a more central place in meaning-making practices than is commonly imagined. Thus, interlingual translation corresponds with that form of translanguaging which draws on different languages available in the repertoire. Let us call this provisionally interlingual translanguaging. Intralingual translation corresponds with that form of translanguaging that draws on different registers and varieties, dialects for example, within what is commonly construed as the “same” language. Let us call this, again provisionally, intralingual translanguaging. Intersemiotic translation corresponds with that form of translanguaging that draws on different semiotics. Let us call that provisionally intersemiotic translanguaging. Why provisional? Because a great deal has happened in linguistic and (social) semiotics in the more than 50 years since Jakobson wrote this paper, and we take advantages of these insights in framing the current study. Nevertheless, it was striking, as we began to consider the data generated in the TLANG project, how the types of translanguaging were encountering mapped on to the three categories of Jakobson’s paper. We found translanguaging that brought together different languages, but also registers and dialects of the “same” language, often mixes and blends of all three, and we have a great deal of evidence of visual-verbal translanguaging, Jakobson’s intersemiotic. Relatively undeveloped however is the statement that places translation as a central process in the semiotic process of meaning making: “the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign” (Jakobson 1959/2012: 127). The critical reader might at this point be wondering that, having disinvented language, we are constantly talking about translanguaging in terms of languages, registers, and dialects. Later on in the chapter, we will discuss the positioning of translanguaging in relation to other ways of thinking about language. At this point let us just say, in line with Jakobson’s claim, that the meaning of translanguaging can only be made clear through its translation into further alternative signs, including constructs such as language, register, and dialect.

From intersemiotic translation to multimodality A clear example of the way theory has developed since Jakobson’s programmatic paper is in how our understanding of the interaction of the visualverbal has developed into the study of multimodality. The emergence of this field over the last three decades or so is overviewed in Adami (2017). A key

Why translanguaging? 

23

influence in this development was work on the grammar of visual design by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 2006), coming out of social semiotics. Adami quotes Hodge and Kress (1988), who argue that the analytic limitation to verbal language is a major inconvenience. Meaning making resides so strongly and pervasively in other systems of meaning, in a multiplicity of visual, aura, behavioural, and other codes, that a concentration on words alone is not enough (1988: vii, cited in Adami 2017: 458). As well as the social semiotic tradition, interactions of the visual-verbal have become central themes in ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. Another field where interaction of the visual and the verbal is salient is in linguistic landscaping (see, for example, Blommaert 2013). Again, this study can be undertaken from a range of theoretical perspectives, including the social semiotic and linguistic ethnographic. It is enough for our purposes here to say that, since Jakobson proposed the intersemiotic as a translation mode, there has been a major flourishing in work that both crosses the visual-verbal boundary and brings the visual-verbal together. We see in these processes two dynamic tendencies: one boundary crossing and emphasizing difference, the other the integration of difference into the communicative repertoire. This partly makes explicit our response to the (rhetorical) query raised earlier in our discussion of translanguaging in terms of discrete languages, that is, in terms of boundaries and difference. Translanguaging as a practice routinely crosses boundaries, bringing together elements that certain language ideologies would wish to be kept apart. It is for this reason that translanguaging as a practice has the potential to be othered and stigmatized by purist monolingual language ideologies or those that promote boundaried and separate forms of bilingualism. While Jakobson’s framework brings together and enables us to make sense of the different kinds of translanguaging that were immediately apparent in our TLANG data, giving us confidence to think about translanguaging in this extended way, we acknowledge that since its formulation in the late 1950s, an immense amount has happened in the study of language and semiotics that gives us the tools to engage with these different types of translanguaging. One of these tools, derived from sociocultural theory, is the notion of the material affordances of different modes. The notion of affordance, in locally occasioned encounters, enables us to make sense of multilingual, multimodal interactions. A simple example of the notion of affordance is the child’s trick of asking someone to describe a spiral staircase. Typically, the person asked will respond not with words but by tracing a spiral in the air with their finger. Something about describing a spiral staircase encourages the respondent to lean towards the visual. In the TLANG data, we found a great deal of visual-verbal translanguaging in the buying and selling transactions of butcher’s stall and also on the basketball court. In both these contexts as we shall discuss in future chapters, features of context tip communication in the direction of visual-gestural or visual-verbal.

24  Why translanguaging?

Beyond interlingual/intralingual/intersemiotic translanguaging In addition to the categories identified by Jakobson, our research has led us to identify further types of translanguaging: what we have termed (Baynham et al. 2015, 2017a) interdiscursive translanguaging and translanguaging at the language-body interface. Interdiscursive translanguaging, drawing on the notion of Fairclough’s (1992) notion of interdiscursivity, is concerned with instances of translanguaging where it is not just a question of register, but also that some effort to draw together or mediate different discourses is in play. The data which gave rise to this construct will be discussed in detail in Chapter Five. It concerns a case in which a Roma client attending a benefits advice session is asked to complete a routine set of equality questions, including one concerning his sexuality. In the misunderstandings that follow, it becomes clear that the client in question is not operating within an equity discourse which makes sense of the question. We will argue that it is not enough to think of this as a question of register; what is at play is a discourse which some participants are inside and others not. It is this episode that gives rise to the idea of interdiscursive translanguaging. In this intervention, we also develop the idea that translanguaging can be a heuristic for exploring communication at the language-body interface. We develop our thinking using examples from the sports phase of the TLANG project, specifically with a focus on basketball and capoeira, where we argue that to supplement spoken language and gesture, we have to consider what Judith Butler terms “the language of the body” (Butler 2011, n.p.). As we have suggested above, all these incidents of translanguaging are locally occasioned; they make sense and are made sense of in the context of what is currently ongoing in a particular context. A range of communication modes are available in the repertoire, each with different affordances; participants in a translanguaging event select from the resources available in their repertoire, tailoring their affordances to the moment. This comes close to what Li Wei (2011) has called moment analysis, involving close attention to the interactional moment. However, building on arguments from earlier in the chapter, we want to make clear that moments trail histories, both in terms of personal life trajectories and group history; and also that scale phenomena, including polycentricity, can be implicated in shaping and informing the translanguaging moment. For example, the translanguaging practice can be, implicitly or explicitly, speaking back against some purist language ideology that wants to keep languages and other modes of communication separate. In the field of sexuality studies, it can further be understood as a speaking back to normative regimes concerning the regulation of bodies. In the light of the above, our expanded definition of translanguaging is as follows: Translanguaging is the creative selection and combination of communication modes (verbal, visual, gestural, and embodied) available in a

Why translanguaging? 

25

speaker’s repertoire. Translanguaging practices are locally occasioned, thus influenced and shaped by context but also by the affordances of the particular communication modes or combinations thereof in context. Translanguaging practices are typically language from below and are liable to be seen as infringing purist monolingual or regulated bilingual language ideologies and hence can be understood as speaking back, explicitly or implicitly, to these ideologies.

Translanguaging as a tool for thinking with So far in this chapter, we have introduced and defined translanguaging. Now we return to the question in the title of this chapter, “Why translanguaging?” We will ask what the affordances of translanguaging are as a tool for thinking with and how it enables us to think thoughts that other theories do not, but we also ask what its limits are as a construct, actual and current. Semiotic tools like theories enable some ways of thinking but disable others. We therefore conclude the chapter with a consideration of what we see as some of the outstanding issues for translanguaging as a theoretical construct. To start with, we will briefly contrast the “theory as a tool for thinking with” metaphor along with the other predominant metaphor for theory: as a way of seeing. Theory as a way of seeing is best expressed in Charles Goodwin’s paper “Professional vision” (Goodwin 1994). In that paper, Goodwin explores how professional knowledge will enable us to see the same phenomenon in different ways: a geologist, an archaeologist, and a farmer viewing a plot of land will each be seeing it in different ways informed by the specialist knowledge and purposes that inform their gaze. So it is with theory. Theory as a semiotic tool appeals to neo-Vygotskyan and sociocultural origins but in fact also lines up quite closely with Whorf’s perspective on the affordances of different languages. The affordances of theory enable us to see things that otherwise would pass us by. What about translanguaging as a theoretical construct? We will contrast it with its most obvious counterpart: code-switching. Code-switching aligns to languages and examines the strategies that multilingual speakers use to switch between these languages in interaction. As such, it highlights the differentiation between languages and the speaker’s moving between them. Theoretically, it therefore highlights language as code or system. In contrast, translanguaging foregrounds repertoire: in other words, those language varieties and other modalities that a speaker has available in their repertoire. It emphasizes the bringing together of difference in translanguaging practices. With code-switching, there is an emphasis on the differentiation between codes or language systems; it is thus a language-oriented theory, while translanguaging is language-user oriented. Does this make one theory correct and the other wrong? Or if not right/wrong, does it make these approaches at least incommensurable?

26  Why translanguaging? We think not and would prefer to propose a theoretical complementarity to approaches such as translanguaging and code-switching. A translanguaging gaze will afford certain insights into multilingual interaction, a codeswitching gaze others. This is not to say that there may not be empirical questions to be resolved of a cognitive, neurological linguistic, or sociolinguistic nature. We will explore some of the cognitive arguments later on in the chapter. It may be that translanguaging is emically more adequate as an account of how multilingual, multimodal, and embodied speakers deploy their communication repertoire. However, even if translanguaging turns out to be emically more adequate as an account, this does not mean that more etic (i.e. analyst oriented) ways of knowing about language are not relevant. Theoretically, indeed, a combination of emic and etic perspectives is probably a good bet. We will illustrate this below with a reanalysis of an episode from Pennycook and Otsuji (2015). Finally, however, we can say that code-switching and translanguaging differ with regard to scope. The scope of code-switching is core grammar, syntax, and lexis. As such, it fails the challenge put to linguistics by social semiotics, as expressed by Kress and Hodge. Rymes’s take on repertoire, combined with translanguaging understood as multilingual, multimodal, embodied practice, is arguably capturing more of human communication potential and practice.

Multilingualism from below: Tales from the Sydney fruit and vegetable market Pennycook and Otsuji’s (2015) Metrolingualism draws on engaging data of multilingual interaction in the Sydney Produce Market. The phrase multilingualism from below has a number of resonances; earlier in this chapter, we explore the assumption that if there is a “below”, there must be an “above” in the shape of monolingual or regulated bilingual language ideologies, and then multilingualism from below is about how people get along with their multiple linguistic resources in their daily lives and also how they perceive and talk about this language use. (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015: 13) This suggests that multilingualism from below is also a users’ perspective on multilingual interaction, an emic perspective. In the following extract (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015: 7–8), stallholders Muhibb and Talib are working out prices and quantities of merchandise for a customer of Maltese background: (M:   Muhibb, T: Talib, CM: Maltese customer) Arabic:  italics; English: plain (translation in brackets) M:    How many boxes does he want?

Why translanguaging? 

27

T:   Tamana? (eight?) Siteh? (six?) Arba? (four?) Oh four. M:    Yeah no worries! T:   Tell him arba wa ashreen (24) I told him. He wants to try and get it for cheaper. Arba wa ashreen (24)   [opening a box of zucchini] T:   Hadol misfareen. Misfareen hadol. (These are yellowing. They’ve gone yellow.) CM:    Isfar (Yellow) … we understand isfar in Lebanese … isfaree, isfaree (yellow, yellow) Yellow. T:    Get that one and we’ll get you another one. [to the customer] Pennycook and Otsuji describe the interaction as follows: Here … Talib’s use of Arabic to acknowledge that the zucchini they are trying to sell have turned yellow (line 5) is picked up by the customer. He knows the meaning of isfar. This seems to concur with Joseph’s view that they know a bit of each other’s languages, though in the case of Maltese, this is not wholly surprising (isfar is also the Maltese for yellow). More generally, however, this shows how people draw on their own resources in achieving tasks at hand and how items such as yellow zucchini (the food rather than the linguistic form) play a mediating role in the metrolingual action. Metrolingual practices concern the whole package of linguistic resources, personal trajectories and repertoires, objects and space. (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015: 8) The analysis here goes beyond the emic user construction in that all participants in the market seem to talk about Lebanese rather than Arabic. Pennycook and Otsuji are picking up on the etic fact that Lebanese is a variety of Arabic. The missing part of the picture, however, is that Maltese is also arguably a variety of Arabic, albeit historically separated from the Arabic mainstream for some 800 years. While Maltese has evolved and incorporated a large amount of Latin-based lexis, grammatically it is recognizably a variety of Arabic, and some of its basic lexical terms, such as numbers and primary colours, are identifiably Arabic. It is thus not surprising that the Maltese customer understood isfar and was probably following the English/Lebanese pricing discussion as well. Probably none of the participants were thinking “we are basically talking different varieties of Arabic”, so Pennycook and Otsuji effectively capture the user perspective. However, a Vietnamese customer would not be able to tune in and out of the stallholders’ translanguaging in the way a Maltese customer might. This is not to say, however, that over time Vietnamese customers and Lebanese stallholders might not construct a shared translanguaging space. This is exactly what Blackledge and Creese (2017, 2018) found in the Birmingham market stall they studied. Many years ago, at the time of the Vietnam war in

28  Why translanguaging? the 1970s, when refugees were arriving in London and Vietnamese children were coming into multilingual primary schools with many Moroccan children, I remember a primary school teacher telling me that she had overheard the Vietnamese children telling others to shut up (skut) in Arabic. Hence, both insider and outsider perspectives can and indeed should intersect to understand a translanguaging space. Sometimes the intersections can be a revelation. I (MB) remember in my university in Australia an aboriginal colleague telling us in a meeting how in her family, there had been certain particular words which she had always thought of as family words until, as an adult, she studied aboriginal languages and learnt that these “family words” were in fact words from a forgotten aboriginal language. On another occasion, I was attending a talk given by a colleague on the lexis of Scots English. I found with some surprise that almost all the words she mentioned had been used by my mother, a Glaswegian, in the family as I was growing up (dreich for a dull rainy day for example). I am clearly not a speaker of Scots English, but nor did I think of myself as in any way having a stake in it as a recognizable language variety. It turns out that I do. At such points the emic and the etic intersect.

Translanguaging and the mind: Linguistic multicompetence As we have suggested here, the multilingual/multimodal/embodied translanguaging repertoire vastly complicates the relatively simple picture created by code-switching between two lexicogrammatical systems. How do speakers hold such knowledge in the mind and how do they deploy it in translanguaging utterances and interactions, assembling as it were the linguistic, semiotic, and embodied dimensions of such an utterance? To address these questions requires a crossover from the social space of translanguaging to the cognitive (see, for example, Cook and Li [2017] on linguistic multicompetence). This approach can be seen as a critique not only of monolingualist assumptions of the sort discussed earlier, but also of a kind of segregated bilingualism, where the languages involved are kept discrete and separate. In this vein, Ofelia García and Li Wei distinguish between three broad ways of understanding the multilingual mind. In the first, the two languages are held separately. In the second, as espoused by Cummins (1979), the two systems are interdependent, with differences but a common core of similarities. In the third, there is dynamic bilingualism, the approach espoused by García and Li, where all language varieties are held in common: “The Dynamic Bilingual Model that is related to our theories of translanguaging … posits that there is but one linguistic system with features that are integrated throughout” (García and Li 2014: 14–15). It is clear how this would work if the focus was exclusively on language and (trans)languaging as a linguistic phenomenon, but how does the integrated character of the Dynamic Bilingual Model play out when the elements in the game are linguistic, semiotic, and embodied?

Why translanguaging? 

29

The argument could go something like this: the integrated cognitive space in the Dynamic Bilingual Model could correspond to the sociolinguistic repertoire, that space where language varieties and semiotic modalities are held. The body is something of a wild card. If the body speaks, in the sense that Butler (2011) has brought into discussion, how do we place embodied communication in the repertoire? In fact, if we imagine the cognitive space of the Dynamic Bilingual Model as corresponding to this linguistic/semiotic/ embodied repertoire, how do we understand the materialities that constitute each element of the repertoire? We have seen from the beginning of the chapter, in revisiting the pioneering work of Whorf, that every language has its affordances, enabling some ways of thinking and disabling others. Indeed, a large part of Jakobson’s paper is directed to illustrating the different affordances of languages and their relevance for interlingual translation purposes. It is perhaps even more obvious that different modes (spoken/written/visual/gestural/embodied) have different affordances. From this point of view, it makes sense to treat the body as a semiotic object in that it speaks, which would thus align the body with other semiotic modalities, having its own communicative affordances. Whichever way we have a scenario in the translingual repertoire/integrated cognitive space consisting of both similarity and difference, of different materialities and corresponding affordances. I (MB) will give you an example of this from my own repertoire. As a teenager between school and university, I worked for a period in a market garden in Switzerland. I was set to work doing an activity called repiquer les salades. This involved transplanting little salad seedlings, once they were sufficiently grown, into outdoor beds. The French phrase, which I will forever associate with a repetitive, embodied procedure of gently separating off the seedling without damaging the root system, making a hole into flowerpots prefilled with compost, patting the earth around the seedling, and rounding off the whole with watering the newly replanted seedling, trips off my tongue with no hesitation when I recall that period. I have to struggle to assemble a description of the activity in English. If we want to incorporate these differences and affordances into the way we imagine the multilingual repertoire/cognitive space, does this mean going back to the interdependence model? On the other hand, why can’t a single repertoire/cognitive space encompass similarity and difference? This would yield a modified bilingual competence model encompassing both sameness and difference. The linguistic multicompetence framework, as expounded in Cook and Li (2017) and elsewhere, is a promising basis for delineating the cognitive space of the translanguaging repertoire, though in its framing it attracts the critique of Hodge and Kress (1988: vii) that it is a primarily linguistic approach. Brown’s contribution on gesture and multicompetence (Brown 2017) shows how the multicompetence approach can be

30  Why translanguaging? adapted to cross modes. Cook (2017) proposes three premises for a multicompetence approach: Premise 1: Multi-competence concerns the total system for all languages (L1, L2, Ln) in a single mind or community and their interrelationships. (Cook 2017: 7) Premise 2: Multi-competence does not depend on the monolingual native-speaker. (Cook 2017: 11) Premise 3: Multi-competence affects the whole mind, i.e. all language and cognitive systems, rather than language alone. (Cook 2017: 15) Premise 1 concerns the idea of the integration of the translanguaging repertoire/cognitive space. Premise 2 evokes the existence of monolingual ideologies that have been discussed earlier in the chapter. Premise 3, in insisting that language alone is not the focus, seems to open the way to think of multicompetence in terms of different modalities. To sum up, multicompetence seems to line up quite closely with the notion of translanguaging repertoire developed in this chapter and shows the potential for extending the analysis to the coexistence of different modalities as well as languages. However, it needs to address the question of differences in affordance between languages and modalities, with the consequence that the cognitive task of assembling a translanguaging utterance has to involve the handling of both similarity and difference.

Issues and puzzles In this chapter, we have developed a repertoire-based account of translanguaging which is explicitly multilingual/multimodal and embodied. We see it as locally occasioned language from below that is liable in certain circumstances to attract censure informed by dominant monolingual or regulated bilingual (keep-languages-separate) ideologies. We have identified some of the challenges put to cognitive theories of multilingualism in this approach and have also suggested that linguistic multicompetence is the most obvious current approach to deal with the communicative richness which the translanguaging construct evokes. However, we also suggest that linguistic multicompetence has to deal with the issue of the difference of affordance between languages and modes in the repertoire or cognitive space. We will conclude the chapter with some issues and puzzles which we see coming out of current translanguaging theory, including our own. We would first point out that, although the scope of translanguaging seems broader than code-switching, in practice, empirical studies of

Why translanguaging? 

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translanguaging have tended to focus on the core lexicogrammatical aspect of language. Rymes’s (2014: 2) evocation of the multilingual repertoire includes a lot more than lexis and grammar: “how they greet, say goodbye, express thanks, respond to teacher questions, format an essay, or invite a friend home with them” foregrounds the performative, pragmatic aspect of languaging. This has not been much in evidence so far in research in translanguaging. This is perhaps because this performative aspect is more nebulous, more difficult to pin down, raising issues of influence. For example, while learning Arabic with my Moroccan friends, I (MB) discovered that the typical greeting sequence in Moroccan Arabic is A: Lā bā's; B: Lā bā's (Lā bā's = “no misery”). This rather appealed to me, and I have a tendency when asked how I am in English to consciously echo Lā bā's and say “Not too bad”, which I take to be the nearest equivalent. In Tokyo, I came to appreciate the way in which change is given in shops, not slapped down on the counter, but presented to the customer with both hands and a small bow. When handing something to someone I often (but not always) try and echo the Japanese gesture. This is what we mean by influence: the language practices of one language, understood in its broadest sense as including its performativities, impinging on the language practices of another. I was consciously influenced by what he encountered in learning Moroccan Arabic and in Japan. Influence can be conscious or unconscious. It is often called transfer or crosslinguistic influence. But these formulations fall into the trap of reifying language, particularly when cast within dominant second language acquisition (SLA) approaches which suggest a predictable linear progression from Language A to Language B, with Language A putting up a spirited resistance to the acquisition process, with various kinds of transfer phenomena as a kind of Language A guerrilla struggle against the forms of Language B. How can we recast the issue of influence within the frame established for translanguaging? How indeed, more broadly, can we think of language development in terms of translanguaging? We can think perhaps of it in terms of the distinction set up by Fairclough (1992) between manifest and constitutive intertextuality. Manifest intertextuality refers to those intertextual elements that are visibly present in a text. Reported speech is an obvious example of these. Constitutive intertextuality refers to those elements (genres, registers, discourses) that may shape and influence the text but not visibly so. Fairclough later came to recast constitutive intertextuality as interdiscursivity, which is how we referred to this idea earlier in this chapter. To identify the features of constitutive intertextuality/interdiscursivity, we need to read into the text analytically. Arguably, translanguaging, as we have been discussing it in this chapter and as it is discussed in the literature more generally, involves manifest, that is, visible and identifiable, features of language. Thus, we can talk about manifest translanguaging. But the point is that alongside this analytically rather obvious evidence of translanguaging practices, there are domains of

32  Why translanguaging? influence which are less obvious to determine, but no less interesting and maybe crucial to human sociality in multilingual spaces. It may be that we cannot incorporate this into an ever-broadening theory of translanguaging but rather need to start thinking of translanguaging as the visible aspect of larger, more complex multilingual spaces. In this chapter, we have established translanguaging as multilingual-multimodal-embodied practice, locally occasioned and liable to be regulated by monolingual and bounded bilingual language ideologies. We have seen it as playful and creative and, at times, as a speaking back, consciously or unconsciously, to these ideologies. We conclude by pointing to the emphasis in translanguaging on the manifest/visible elements of language, looking beyond to the larger and less formulated field of influence. In our next chapter, we turn to translation, with a view to analyzing from its distinctive perspective the tensions and synergies it creates with translanguaging.

3

Translation and translanguaging Tensions and synergies

Introduction The relationship between translation and translanguaging can be problematic, depending on how each of these terms is construed. From one perspective, it is clear that translanguaging and translation are simply constructs of a different order. Translanguaging concerns fleeting moments of language use. As such, it corresponds to the utterance, the conversational move or turn. Translation, as well as being a theoretical construct, is also an institution, or perhaps a set of institutions with the discourses, regulatory mechanisms, ideologies, and practices that go along with being an institution. It is easy enough to think of the institutional dimensions of translation: the MA programmes in translation studies, departments and institutes of translation, government translation agencies. Can one imagine an MA in translanguaging, a department or institute of translanguaging, or a translanguaging agency? Translanguaging is part of the stuff and texture of interaction; it always makes sense as part of some larger activity: a conversation, a lesson, a service encounter. The interesting question for this chapter is how to use the insight of translanguaging, understood as multilingual use in the repertoire, as a way of rethinking translation as practice. It is also noted that most of the work on translanguaging to date has concerned spoken language. In this chapter, we start to think about translanguaging as a feature of written texts of different sorts, showing how we can use it to think dynamically of translating, disaggregating the translation activity into its moment-by-moment unfolding and showing how, at each of these moments, the multilingual repertoire of the translator is at play. We argue that to take the translanguaging turn in translation studies is to move away from translation conceived as a relationship between texts and conceive of it as a creative deployment of resources within the multilingual repertoire.

Conceptual schemas Understood dynamically, translation and translanguaging can describe distinct language practices and, as we will show in this chapter, they can create

34  Translation and translanguaging overlapping zones where the one feeds into the other. In particular, we argue that translanguaging can be a way of understanding the moment-tomoment deployment of the multilingual repertoire in the activity of translating. This chapter starts by adopting a scalar perspective in elucidating the tensions and synergies between the two, using examples to illustrate how they dovetail into dynamic language practices. Let us start with the premise that translation and translanguaging are structured by different conceptual schemas. Prototypically, as conventionally understood, translation begins with a more or less definable Source and terminates in a more or less definable Target; it denotes both the process of going from source to target and the product that ensues from this process. At the risk of stating the obvious for translation studies scholars, let us posit that the schema A → B is a fundamental heuristic with which we imagine, indeed metaphorize, conventionally understood text-to-text translation, notwithstanding how this has been problematized by perspectives from poststructuralism and cultural studies. Jakobson’s tripartite taxonomy of translation, mentioned in the last chapter, complicates this linear schema by adding two further vectors: the intralingual and the intersemiotic. This extends the schema vertically to cover sublinguistic variations such as registers, but also diagonally to encompass transpositions between verbal and nonverbal modalities. It amplifies the spatial locus of translation, without necessarily disturbing the cognitive logic underlying the A → B schema. More specifically, underlying the A → B schema is a combination of the Container metaphor (Languages are Containers) and the Bridge metaphor (To Translate is to Cross Over From One Language to Another).1 Hence, a prototypical act of translation must emanate from a certain source point – this can be a point within the same language, a point located in a different mode/media, or even a fabricated point, as in the case of pseudotranslation – and purposefully transmit some-thing (word, sense, meme, structure) across a space-time continuum to a certain target point. This view coheres with the etymology of the English word “translation”, originating in the Latin translatus, the past participle of transferre – “to carry across”.2 The traversal of space, and by implication of time,3 is therefore a characterizing feature of translation. Translation, in its prototype, presupposes a prior text in the source language and culture, and the absence of the same in the target language and culture. It is this absence that triggers the act of translation at the outset, generating a subsequent text based on the prior text – to varying degrees and by way of different treatments. A disjuncture in space-time, a directional there-to-here, then-to-now movement, is immanent in a prototypical translation scenario, as when a Japanese memoir first published in Tokyo (“there”) in 2011 (“then”) subsequently appears in 2019 (“now”) in New York (“here”) in English translation. This movement constitutes what we may call a translation space. This is still, we need to remember, a text-based theory of translation. Translanguaging, as

Translation and translanguaging  35 we showed in Chapter Two, specifically diverges from linguistic accounts that privilege language-to-language, variety-to-variety, and thus text-to-text relations. Can the insights of translanguaging help us to reimagine translating as an activity? Unlike translation, which can describe both process and product, translanguaging is always process and never product. Translanguaging is not a thing in itself; it is not conceived “as an object or a linguistic structural phenomenon to describe and analyse but a practice and a process – a practice that involves dynamic and functionally integrated use of different languages and language varieties, but more importantly a process of knowledge construction that goes beyond language(s)” (Li 2018: 15; emphasis added). Translation – and named language for that matter – can be nominalized into discrete entities, enabling us to speak of this or that translation, multiple contemporaneous translations, or successive retranslations of a work. Translanguaging, however, resists such nominalization, perennially signalling a transitional, work-in-progress condition (use, process), never coagulating into a stable formation. Hence, for the most part, translanguaging appears in the -ing form: *“a translanguage” or *“two translanguages” are impermissible, although the infinitive “to translanguage” possibly makes sense, with the adjectival “translanguaged” appearing occasionally as a modifier. From the perspective of translation, the interesting issue is to think of translation as “a practice that involves dynamic and functionally integrated use of different languages and language varieties”. This would mean giving translation a translanguaging turn; to think, as it were, not of translation as a nominalized thing but of translating to further foreground the dynamic activity. Since translanguaging does not entail tangible things which one can put a finger on, the idea of spatial movement from a start-point (a thing) to an end-point (another thing), and together with that the notion of directionality, is largely irrelevant. The conception of space in translanguaging is instead captured by the notion of translanguaging space (Li 2011), explained in the previous chapter. To recapitulate briefly, a translanguaging space is a transformative nexus zone where language users integrate “social spaces (and thus ‘linguistic codes’) that have been formerly separated through different practices in different places” (Li 2018: 23). In this zone, language users mediate different languages, language varieties, registers, discourses, and modalities with a relatively weak consciousness of the border, and it is this that marks another difference between a translanguaging space and a translation space. In translanguaging, language users, instead of being understood as shuttling across different systems (linguistic, cognitive, and semiotic), structures, and modalities, synergize and transform these, “bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience, and environment; their attitude, belief, and ideology; their cognitive and physical capacity, into one coordinated and meaningful performance” (Li 2018: 23; Li 2011: 1223).

36  Translation and translanguaging Texts do not travel from one delineated site to another (there-to-here) in translanguaging as they do in translation; rather, texts emerge from within the intermingling of languages, language varieties, and other semiotic modalities. In a prototypical translation situation, represented schematically as A→B, each of A and B constitutes a separate, relatively (though never fully) homogenous repertoire comprising elements more or less well defined within the institution of each named language, thereby necessitating movement from one repertoire to another. In translanguaging, however, it is not so much the intervening route from one point to another that matters; the deictic directionality implied in the → symbol is immaterial. In translanguaging, we imagine one heterogeneous repertoire, a kind of vibrant assemblage (Pennycook 2018: 46) comprising spatially distributed elements drawn from diverse sources. It is the selection of these elements from within a single repertoire, their copresence, spontaneous interplay, and possibly mutual constitution in a specific purpose-driven context, that are foregrounded in translanguaging. In contrast to translation, therefore, our conceptual schema for translanguaging is encapsulated by the visual heuristic Љ where the morphing of A and B represents a space of transition and flux.

Two examples from Japanese As an illustration, let us look at how English words may be treated in Japanese. To render the semantic sense of an English or French word in Japanese kanji (a logographic Sino-Japanese script) is, quite simply, to translate; to transliterate an English or French word using the Japanese kana script and then insinuate it into the morphological frame of Japanese by way of, say, affixation or conjugation, is tantamount to translanguaging. In this regard, the two are distinct procedures, noting though that in early translation theories (e.g. Vinay and Darbelnet 1958/1995), transliteration is treated as a procedure of translation. For example, the French/English word sabotage has at least two possible equivalents in Japanese kanji: hakai-katsudou 破壊活動 (“destruction activity”) and bougai-kousaku 妨害工作 (“hindering-damaging work”). Placing sabotage alongside either of these Sino-Japanese expressions gives us a relationship of translation in the prototypical sense. However, Japanese also has the verb saboru サボる (“to slack off”, “be lazy”, “to skip”), which is made up of the stem sabo, the clipped transliteration of sabotage (sabotage → sabo); and the Japanese verbal suffix -ru. The word thus formed is absorbed into the Japanese linguistic system and is subject to further inflections following its rules of grammar. Thus, we can have saborimasu (polite nonpast affirmative, “[I will] skip [class, work …]), sabotta (plain past affirmative, “skipped [class, work …]”), saboruna (negative imperative, “don’t skip [class, work, etc.]”), saboreba (conditional, “if [I] skip [class, work ...]”), and so forth.

Translation and translanguaging  37 Semantically, saboru does not have the same meaning as sabotage: saboru connotes laziness in a person, and although this vaguely captures a partial sense of sabotage (which in French at least can connote the slowing down of work as a deliberate tactic against opponents), saboru clearly derogates from the parent word in its usage, transforming itself into a novel entity while retaining a transliterated element. The relationship between the French/English sabotage and Japanese saboru is one of derivation-deviation, an uncanny relationship best described as translanguaging. Similarly, to express in Japanese the meaning of “doubling”, as in having two of the same, there is the translation option of using, inter alia, the kanji compound choufuku/juufuku 重複 (“overlap”). The alternative is the translanguaging option, which involves taking the clipped transliteration of the English word “double”, dabu ダブ, and stringing it to the verbal affix –ruる, creating the intransitive verb daburu ダブる. Like saboru, daburu is a hybrid form that assimilates a foreign item into the morphological shape of Japanese, giving rise to various possible conjugations such as daburimasu (polite nonpast affirmative; “[It] overlaps”), daburanai (plain nonpast negative; “[It] does not overlap”), dabutta (plain past affirmative; “[It] overlapped”), daburitakunakatta (plain past negative; “[It] did not overlap”), and so forth. And although daburu does not present the kind of semantic morphing witnessed in saboru, it offers a different point of interest – and confusion. Alongside ダブる, there is another Japanese word, ダブル, that also means “double”. Both words have the same sound, daburu, albeit with different pitch contours; they are visually very similar, with an important difference in the elements representing the final sound: る vs. ル. It turns out that ダブる, like saboru, is written in a mixed katakana (ダブ)-hiragana (る) form, whereas ダブル is entirely in katakana. Hiragana is the script associated mainly with Japanese words, while katakana is used to represent foreign loanwords imported into the culture. The orthographic difference triggers a layer of intralingual translanguaging: the katakana-hiragana form ダブる operates as if it were indigenously Japanese, with the る ending enabling grammatical production like many other Japanese verbs, as seen above. The katakana form ダブル, however, cannot be subject to further inflections and has restricted uses, mainly as an adjective, for instance, daburu-kurikku ダブルクリック (“double click”) and daburu-beddo ダブルベッド (“double bed”). In Japanese, the simultaneous use of multiple scripts in written discourse complicates translanguaging processes semiotically (Sato 2018). In the case of daburu, the use of katakana only highlights the alien provenance of the word on the level of the script, affording it the visual aura of a foreign word and relegating it functionally to a relatively inert part of speech. The grammatically productive katakana-hiragana form, on the other hand, smuggles the foreign word “double” into Japanese, where the hiragana suffix camouflages the foreign word under the linguistic skin of a native orthography and facilitates its insertion into Japanese grammar. We thus see how an English word, completely capable of a Japanese kanji translation, simultaneously

38  Translation and translanguaging develops a katakana transliteration and a semiotic doppelgänger – a perfect coincidence for the word “double” – in a mixed katakana-hiragana transliterated form susceptible to grammatical inflections. These and many other similar examples are not cases of borrowing, code-switching/mixing, or translation. Instead, we see how a non-Japanese word-concept is creatively hijacked and cannibalized by Japanese through a productive process of translanguaging that combines transliteration, truncation, affixation, and conjugation. The crucial point, however, is that the words saboru and daburu in all their conjugated forms are now already a staple in the repertoire of contemporary Japanese speakers. They are no longer activated as creative and spontaneous resources but are used in everyday conversations as if they were originally Japanese. This means to say that translanguaging is no longer active within the act of uttering these words; or that saboru, daburu, and numerous other words created out of a similar operation are now remnants of a translanguaging process.

On the “moment” Which brings us to the next, ancillary point: time functions differently in a translanguaging space than in a translation space. The notion of temporal succession (source-first, target-later), essential to the definition of translation, does not fit well with translanguaging. The temporal nature of translanguaging is embodied in its morphology, indicating simultaneous and continuous engagement with two or more entities. Whereas a translation space is marked by a then-to-now structure, in a translanguaging space, ingredients from different semiotic sources (codes, systems, structures, modalities) converge, transact, even mesh into each other without regard to their temporal priority. Everything happens in the now. For example, García and Li (2014) discuss a translanguaging episode in a classroom setting, where a Math teacher uses both Spanish and English to her Latino students. In the course of her teaching, the teacher “[speaks] Spanish, although she has students read in English, repeat the written English on the blackboard, translate into Spanish and use their metalinguistic skills to identify new words. She finally repeats the term she is teaching in English and Spanish” (96). In this episode, translation, as well as code-switching, is fused into a translanguaging pedagogical frame, where the sense of a there-to-here or then-to-now considerably weakens in the reiterative, back-and-forth evocation of two languages within the temporal duration of the math lesson. This takes us to the idea of the moment in translanguaging. What is a “moment”? In naturally occurring conversations, it refers to “a point in or a period of time which has outstanding significance. It is characterized by its distinctiveness and impact on subsequent events or developments. People present at such moments would recognize their importance and may adjust their behaviour according to their interpretation of them” (Li 2011: 1224).

Translation and translanguaging  39 The idea has been developed into a methodology known as moment analysis, designed to zoom in on “the spur-of-the-moment actions, what prompted such actions and the consequences of such moments including the reactions by other people” (ibid.). By concentrating on the moment, we take our attention away from the start- and end-points of discourse, focusing instead on the semiotic actions in the midst of their unfolding – although, because a moment does not exist in a temporal vacuum, the start- and end-points remain as points of reference. The -ing grammatical aspect that inheres in the word-concept translanguaging suggests that it is mutually exclusive with the normative and normativizing force of language – better still, Language with a capital L, pointing to structuration and institution. Stable formations do not accrue from translanguaging; from this, it follows that when such a formation does eventually arise, translanguaging ceases to occur. The examples saboru and daburu are cases in point. Further consider a quasi-word borne out of creative crossfertilization between two languages, with wide currency among young netizens. In the event that such a word makes its way into the Oxford English Dictionary through its high usage frequency, it becomes “enshrined” in the potential vocabulary of an English-language speaker and thereby enters the institutionalized realm of Language. At this point, the creative and critical processes that initially transpired in the new coinage submerge and eventually disappear. More accurately, those processes would form a historical layer subsisting beneath the word, which can now be invoked by speakers unmarked, as if it were originally part of the English-language repertoire. On this view, one might say, in personified terms, that translation and translanguaging have different “aspirations”: whereas translation starts off as a process and works its way towards culmination in some semiotic resolution, translanguaging aspires to be no-where in particular, not unlike an itinerant traveller dwelling in the present moment, always on the move but without a fixed schedule or destination. Leaving aside challenges posed by poststructuralism here, the resultant form of translation is relatively “neat” in the sense that it brings into corporeal existence, by way of a management of signs, a manifestation of text in one language.4 Translanguaging, by its volatile nature, cannot lead to neat manifestations. We can speak of the effects and outcomes of translanguaging practice, but at all times we need to be wary of these constructs fossilizing into the neatness of Language, because once fossilization happens, translanguaging vaporizes. Therefore, although translation and translanguaging are both languagecontact phenomena, translation has an innate drive towards a terminus, a will-to-materiality, without which it cannot be considered finished. Translanguaging, by contrast, cannot theoretically be “finished”, as its dynamic potentiality necessitates an incessant unravelling unto-itself. It represents a contingent flux wherein ingredients from different languages, language varieties, registers, discourses, or modalities interface and interact to

40  Translation and translanguaging produce creative and/or critical outcomes that are not (yet) absorbed into normative Language. Unlike translation, translanguaging does not settle in, so to speak. On the contrary, it generates spontaneous and volatile semiotic constellations borne out of spaces between and beyond languages. To invoke a different metaphor here: translation negotiates a linguistic transaction between two sides, with a view to ultimately closing the deal, as it were, with possible “gains” and “losses” on one or the other side; translanguaging, however, suspends itself dynamically in the middle of the transaction, refusing to settle anything at all. Putting translation and translanguaging alongside each other gives rise to duality of time: a horizontal dimension with a forward momentum towards an end, as exemplified by translation; and a vertical dimension that delves into successive moments of interculturality, as exemplified by translanguaging. This vertical dimension could be used to characterize the process of bricolage by which a translator at a particular moment arrives at a translation equivalent for a particular item. Conceptually, these are complementary axes, where a translanguaging perspective magnifies the processual dynamic of translation as the latter moves us along laterally. Translation, regardless of its manifest form, is an activity driven by an aspiration to reach a terminus point (A→B) and to culminate in some material outcome; yet it is also the accruement of a series of intercultural moments in time. Within each moment dwells a translanguaging space where languages (as well as language varieties, registers, discourses, and modalities) converge in temporal suspension and negotiate within a whirlpool of semiotic tension – a repertoire. The “whirlpool of semiotic tension” is then passed on from moment to moment, evolving in gradations as it moves towards fixation in some material outcome that we call a translated text. Yet a translanguaging space emerges from different kinds of mediating procedures, including translation, transliteration, codeswitching/mixing, orthographic morphing, and so forth. Translation can therefore be seen as embedded within a translanguaging space, at the same time as it is composed of successive translanguaging moments. This scalar view, best demonstrated in interpreting and think-aloud-protocols in translation, enables us to think of translation and translanguaging as being mutually embedded, such that we can speak of translation-in-translanguaging and translanguaging-in-translation.

Tensions Given their different conceptual architectures, translation and translanguaging potentially generate tension when juxtaposed. If translanguaging describes, on one level, the simultaneous engagement of several languages (as well as language varieties and other modalities) within a bounded timespace, this interactive regime may preclude the need for translation. As a practice, translanguaging strategically destabilizes language borders – these

Translation and translanguaging  41 borders are not meant to be taken too seriously from a translanguaging perspective. Translation, on the other hand, regards language borders with absolute seriousness, as the entire business of translating hinges on their resolution. Which means to say: whereas the irreconcilability of languages represents the central problem of translation, translanguaging subsists on such irreconcilability, turning it into a site of creative and critical potentialities. It follows from this that a translanguaging turn in translation studies would also turn irreconcilability into a site for creative and critical potentialities, where translanguaging would capture the flux and bricolage of translating. On this point, let us return to Pennycook and Otsuji’s Metrolingualism, discussed in the last chapter, specifically on the semiotics of restaurant kitchens in multilingual cities. The authors state their central problem as follows: The central question here is what language resources are necessary to get the cooking done. Let us first of all imagine that indeed everyone spoke their “native language”. There is of course no particular problem with this … But by and large, everyone speaking their first and only their first language would present us with a rather Babel-like and possibly dysfunctional kitchen. This does not, on the other hand, suggest that everyone need speak English (or French, or Spanish or Japanese, or whatever language operates more broadly in each context). Most of these workers have complex work and language trajectories, having picked up bits of other languages (and usually very functional bits) as they work their way through different kitchens. (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015: 68–69; emphasis added) This example illustrates the point that translanguaging always takes place in the context of some larger activity: to cook something, to learn something, to translate something. The suggestion that the language that “operates more broadly in each context” is not by default the linguistic denominator underpinning communication in multilingual settings implies that there is no imperative to translate, that is to say, speakers of different languages are not necessarily motivated to move towards a linguistic nexus. The proliferation of tongues, underscored by the Babel reference above, is endemic to sophisticated interactive regimes, engendering its own ecology. Yet in order to get things done in the multilingual kitchen, what is needed is surely not just a proliferation but also a conference of tongues.5 The question is: what is the role of translation in this metrolingual regime, where metrolingualism may be defined as translanguaging in metropolitan settings? The seemingly chaotic but nonetheless effective transactions in Pennycook and Otsuji’s (2015) multilingual kitchens apparently indicate that translatability is not the key to the resolution of all communication issues in every context: “It is quite possible for different languages to work around each other in kitchens and restaurants, and we should be careful not to assume that the varied backgrounds of kitchen staff need to be compensated for by

42  Translation and translanguaging monoglossic language policies” (ibid.; emphasis added). The idea of having one lingua franca to bundle up several other languages is an instantiation of monoglossia. It epitomizes “a very particular language ideology that linguistic diversity can only be overcome through a shared language” (ibid.: 69), in other words, the ideology that translation is the cornerstone to intercultural communication. It is here that translanguaging represents a pushback on translation. Untranslatability can become almost a virtue in translanguaging, where different tongues aspire neither to be translated out of nor translated into. Instead, they juxtapose, interpenetrate, crossfertilize, transmogrify. If we recognize translanguaging as a condition of procreative and generative interaction between languages and cultures, it precludes translation in so far as translation leads one language into and through the other, hence disabling the concurrent orchestration of disparate tongues that is translanguaging. In respect of untranslatability, Lee (2018: 54) suggests that we let the recalcitrant [i.e. untranslatable] elements be, and keep in check this obsession to translation into, so as to understand in, one’s own terms. There should be no compulsion to render them fully or economically into English or any other language. Perfect translatability need not be the default or only desirable outcome in communication across languages and cultures. This claim does not preclude the possibility of crosslingual and crosscultural communication for most practical purposes; in fact, it affords significance to such an enterprise. To “let the recalcitrant elements be” is to leave heterogeneity as it is, to not always desire to translate on the pretext of communication. On this view, untranslatability is not a nemesis to communication across languages and cultures. Rather, it extends the imaginary of such communication beyond the structure of transference, mapping, and correspondence between Point A and Point B towards “a much wider range of linguistic, artefactual, historical and spatial resources brought together in particular assemblages in particular moments of time and space” (Pennycook 2018: 54). Hence, while communication can be said to be a common goal of translation and translanguaging, the means by which this is achieved are different in each case. Translation, in its conventional formulation, works on a communication model that privileges equilibrium by way of remedying perceived ruptures and filling perceived gaps between languages. By folding one text into another, it exerts a centripetal force which manages polyphonic voices, mitigates differences, and enforces semiotic order. Translanguaging, however, thrives on the sustenance and propagation of semiotic perturbation and communicative turbulence; it eschews stability, celebrates centrifugal “lines of flight” from the centre, and facilitates lateral, “rhizomatic” connections between distributed nodes.6 To appropriate Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, translation territorializes and reterritorializes, whereas

Translation and translanguaging  43 translanguaging deterritorializes by perennially creating pathways of escape from the centre. We can thus imagine the translanguaging turn in translation studies as bringing in this deterritorializing tendency which we discern in translanguaging.

Synergies Having noted their differences and potential incommensurability, let us now explore the proposition that translanguaging and translation can be affiliate and corroborative concepts. The interface between the two emerges when translation is understood as a scalar notion marked by degrees of abstraction. On a more concrete or material scale, translation evokes a correspondence-based transference that maps elements from one language (or language variety or modality) onto another. It “involves rendering fully articulated stretches of textual material from one language into another, and encompasses various modalities such as written translation, subtitling and oral interpreting” (Baker 2016: 7). On this microtextual scale, translation is the representation of the one text to the other, typically entailing a transfer or transmission of elements in the process (Tymoczko 2014: 115–120) – what we may call substantive translation. On a wholly different scale, abstracted away from all its technicalities, translation includes but exceeds an ontological, point-to-point, momentto-moment mapping, encompassing transcultural and intersemiotic flows – what has been called nonsubstantive translation (Trivedi 2005, citing Bhabha). Articulating the relationship between translation and protest movements in the Egyptian revolution, Baker sets out what is to date the most inclusive rubric of translation in the field, encapsulating nonsubstantive translation: In its broad sense, translation involves the mediation of diffuse symbols, experiences, narratives and linguistic signs of varying lengths across modalities (words into image, lived experience into words), levels and varieties of language (Standard Written Arabic and spoken Egyptian, for example), and cultural spaces, the latter without necessarily crossing a language boundary. As such, it also encompasses the use of languages other than Arabic in the case of the Egyptian revolution (or Turkish, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. in other cases) in writings and discussions about the revolution (any revolution), the use of (forms of) Arabic (or Spanish, or English) in addressing regional audiences, as well as the journey of visual and musical artefacts across social and national boundaries. (Baker 2016: 7) The three examples mentioned in this passage – the use of non-Arabic languages in discourses about the Egyptian revolution, the use of regional

44  Translation and translanguaging varieties of language, and the movement of artefacts across borders – do not ordinarily count as translation. On this “nonsubstantive” plane, where we are speaking not of the transfer of meaning from one discrete spatial-temporal point to another but “the mediation of diffuse symbols, experiences, narratives and linguistic signs across modalities … levels and varieties of language … and cultural spaces”, translation steers towards a metrolingual situation in the manner of an asymptote. On this basis, we may argue for a translanguaging turn that disturbs or troubles the routinized territorializing/ reterritorializing assumptions of translation studies. Consider, further, the idea of translation as transculturation. Based on Fernando Ortiz’s tripartite conceptualization of transculturation as acculturation, deculturation, and neoculturation, Tymoczko (2014: 126) states that we can see the give and take of transculturation at work in translations where the source text is acquired by a receptor culture, yet its understanding is modified or deculturated by reception into the new cultural context; in turn the received text plays a role in modifying the receptor culture through a process of deculturation and neoculturation. This idea of absorbing a text originating in one culture into a different culture, with the possibility of transmutating that text, lies at the heart of cultural translation as it relates to the meeting of migrant peoples and diverse tongues. Cultural translation, as used by Homi Bhabha (1994), is a “borderline condition” (9, 11) that exposes “the hybridity of any genealogical or systematic filiation” (83); it is both process and product: “an insurgent act” created by “a sense of the new” (10), dovetailing into “hybrid sites of meaning” (234). Here again, translation is not about negotiating between two texts; the (hybrid) text or textual site is itself translational. On this view, Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses, which triggered the fatwā, is itself a translation (notwithstanding that it has actual translations into several other languages) in that it translated the sacred into the profane by way of, for example, naming prostitutes after the wives of the prophet (Bhabha 1994). The language behaviour of migrants living under constant negotiation between the mother tongue and the language of the host country embodies a Third Space that is cultural translation. In this Third Space, many kinds of language transactions can take place, including code-switching, substantive translation, even nontranslation. These are what make a Third Space translational, in the sense that it can include substantive translation but also exceeds it to encompass other modalities of crossing – intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic. On the scale of mediation (Baker), transculturation (Tymoczko), or cultural translation (Bhabha), the distinction between translation and translanguaging becomes less relevant, though the two constructs are not to be totally conflated either. On a scalar view of translation, then, translation

Translation and translanguaging  45 encompasses substantive and nonsubstantive translation, with intermediate gradations. And whereas substantive translation may (but need not) preclude translanguaging,7 nonsubstantive translation is largely coextensive with, and at times undifferentiable from, translanguaging. A scalar understanding can also be applied to translanguaging, which can occur at the levels of morphology, lexis, or discourse. Across all levels, translanguaging can, but need not, entail (substantive) translation. In a foreignlanguage classroom that uses translanguaging as a pedagogical instrument, translation may dovetail into an overall discourse of teaching and learning. Yet translanguaging can take place at lower-level scales, into which translation and/or transliteration can be incorporated as a procedure. Our earlier Japanese examples of saboru and daburu attest to this. However, as we have explained, these items have been normativized in Japanese and can no longer be considered “living” examples of translanguaging.

Examples from World Englishes There are numerous “living” instances of translanguaging at the levels of morphology and lexis, such as creative and contingent formations of English as used by second or foreign-language speakers. These formations are in currency but have yet to settle into Language. They are fundamentally translational, as they often derive from such procedures of “direct translation” (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958/1995: 31–35) as borrowing (via transliteration, for example), calque, and literalism. Yet they also go beyond neat lateral transfer from one language into another, constituting a dynamic space where two languages mesh into each other, the one playfully appropriating the other’s morphological or syntactical structure to create linguistic palimpsests. A specific case in point is New Chinglish and its internet variety, Shitizen Chinglish (Li 2016). The term Chinglish refers to a variety of English heavily inflected by the structure of the Chinese language; it represents a specific instantiation of World Englishes, and it has often been understood as a passive result of the influence of Chinese in the learning of English as a foreign language in China. From a translanguaging perspective, however, New Chinglish can be seen as a mode of linguistic practice that proactively draws on resources from both English and Chinese to generate new and often subversive coinages or structures that enrich the repertoire of its users. Unlike Chinglish, New Chinglish is motivated by a self-conscious desire to create linguistic entertainment and/or to satirize certain social conditions. Among the examples provided by Li Wei (2016) are emerging compounds that combine English suffixes with lexical forms transliterated from Chinese. We expound on two examples here to highlight the role played by translation within the broader frame of translanguaging. First, the word niubility, often spelled as newbility, is a Chinglish noun describing formidability, incredibility or awesomeness. It derived from the Mandarin Chinese

46  Translation and translanguaging vulgar term “niubi/newby” which literally translates to cattle’s cunt or cow’s pussy. It is believed that the word Niubi, was made an adjective in the late 19th century by an imperial accident. The term niubility is often used to show astonishment or praise but can also be used for sarcastic effects. Other derivatives of niubi/newby include newber, newbable and newbilization. You can see the niubility oozing out of Usain Bolt as he eased through the finish line. (Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=niubility; accessed 1 November 2018) Here we start with the transliterated form of the Chinese colloquial adjective niubi 牛逼 (meaning “powerful” in low vernacular); this form is then nominalized by being attached to the English ending -bility to create a new derivative compound. The process involves a translational procedure by way of transliteration, which, through affixation, creates a lexical monstrosity that translates the sense, but also retains the sound, of an expression originating in Chinese – the guest language. The resultant form is uncanny, creating an illusion of Englishness out of a bastardized coupling of Chinese sense-sound with English morphology. What is even more interesting is that there can be variant spellings of the same form (niubi/niubility, newby/newbility). This morphing of the orthography from niu(bi) to new(by) further insinuates the quasi-word into the lexis of English; while niubility still betrays a visual tint of foreignness to the English reader, newbility looks like a very possible neologism. The quasiword is furthermore generative, spinning off a plethora of cognate forms according to English morphological principles (newber, newbably, newbilization), suggesting the integration of the form into the grammatical system of English – the host language. The same operation is found in the quasi-word geilivable, which is a Chinese word in English alphabet, with its original form in pinyin “geili” [給力]. It used to be a regional dialect meaning something is cool or supportive. “Gei” means “to give” or “to be given.” “Li” means “ability”[,] “power” or “force.” So together they mean “to give force (to)”[,] “be capable of”. For example, when you are downloading at a speed of 1 TB/s, it is very “geilivable.” (Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=geilivable; accessed 1 November 2018) As with newbility, geilivable (“functioning at a high level”) exudes uncanniness as it invokes visually and aurally proximate forms such as achievable,

Translation and translanguaging  47 believable, retrievable, microwavable, among many others. With both niubility and geilivable, the original Chinese form enjoins and sometimes partially overlaps with the English suffix endings (niubi+ility; geili+vable), producing a palimpsest, where there is a layering and twisting together of the guest and host forms. This is a phenomenon that cannot be explained by the constructs of codeswitching and code-mixing. The trajectory of words in the like of niubi and geili traces a complex translingual phenomenon: lexical forms from Chinese internet vernacular make their way into the repertoire of Chinese speakers of English, hijack the morphological rules of English, and register themselves in an online dictionary of English slang expressions, whose definitions underscore the immanent biculturality of the lexicon. This is translanguaging at work, resulting in translational forms, both in the sense that translation constitutes part of their making and in the sense that as an emerging, intercultural lexicon, they serve to express Chinese-specific sensibilities using a new breed of English. Importantly, these are forms-influx: they may continue to gain currency, metamorphose, or fall into disuse within the linguistic ecology in which they circulate. It is not insignificant that we have quoted the definitions of the two words from UrbanDictionary.com, for this lexicographical frame speaks directly to the themes of translation and language-from-below. UrbanDictionary. com is an online resource on slang expressions in English. The dictionary definitions above, by way of explaining the Chinese roots of the two terms as well as citing examples of how they might be used in a specific register of English, foregrounds their translational nature. Once again, translation here refers both to the discrete process that culminates in the terms, but also the broader intercultural economy of the linguistic transactions involved. In attempting to interpret an utterance such as “You can see the niubility oozing out of Usain Bolt as he eased through the finish line ” or “When you are downloading at a speed of 1 TB/s, it is very ‘geilivable’”, one ineluctably engages in translation in trying to pin down the semantics of the translingual words – perhaps with recourse to UrbanDictionary.com – and in that process furthers the articulation of those words in the English lexicon. Beyond morphology, translanguaging can produce quirky EnglishChinese expressions by way of calques (Li 2018: 13): “I will give you some colour to see see”, a New Chinglish expression, is a morpheme-to-morpheme translation of wo yao gei ni dian yanse qiaoqiao 我要给你点颜色瞧瞧 (“I will teach you a lesson”) in Chinese. A literal translation of this expression would ordinarily not work in English, but in a ludic context where the interlocutors are aware of the substrate elements at work, translation can become the process by which an idiomatic Chinese expression turns into a resource for translanguaging. An even more intriguing example is the New Chinglish “How old are you?” which does not assume its ordinary meaning in English; it is calqued from zenme lao shi ni 怎么老是你 (“Why always you?” or “Why you

48  Translation and translanguaging again?”), where the word lao 老, itself meaning “old” but is used here as an adverb meaning “always”, is literally rendered into English and superimposed on the English word “old”. The result is a bifurcated expression that is apparently English but belies a Chinese substratum. Translation becomes a tongue-in-cheek operation in translanguaging, which, in the two examples here, manifests as creative exploitations of the tension between two languages to create critically humorous formations. Translanguaging can be commoditized in multilingual settings. Figure 3.1 shows a lai see from Hong Kong. It is a red envelope widely circulated during the Chinese New Year season. One would place a modest amount of money into this envelope and give it to others (usually those younger than yourself) as a ritualized gesture. Auspicious words, typically four-character Chinese expressions invoking prosperity and bliss, are often inscribed on such envelopes. The envelope in Figure 3.1 is sui generis in its use of an “English” expression that is incomprehensible to an English reader. It is not even readily understandable to a Chinese person who is not acquainted with Cantonese, the dominant dialect in Hong Kong; and in fact, it is not really a

Figure 3.1 A Chinese New Year envelope made in Hong Kong

Translation and translanguaging  49 set expression in Cantonese. Thus, several layers of transfers and transgressions are lurking beneath this seemingly simple inscription. The phrase “boy chok girl shot” is a calque from the colloquial Cantonese expression 男擢女索, approximately meaning “boy-handsomegirl-sexy”. As mentioned, this is not an idiom in Cantonese, although it is made to resemble one with its four-syllabic configuration. It is a contingent formation put together for this commercial product. The word chok means “to act handsome”, used, for instance, to describe the vanity of men who like to pose for selfies. The word shot has nothing to do with the English word “shot”; here it is an approximate transliteration of the Cantonese word sok (pronounced “sock”), a derogatory term meaning “sexy”. By transliterating sok as “shot”, the word opens up an ambivalent English-Chinese discursive space, lending itself to misreading by creating the illusion of Englishness. As a concocted Cantonese expression, this four-character phrase does not mean very much; but when turned into an inscription on a red envelope, it takes on an auspicious interpretation as a blessing to the receiver: “May boys be handsome and girls be pretty”. The materiality of the medium embodying the expression is therefore crucial. The transliterations chok and shot, coupled with literal translation (“boy” and “girl” are literal translations from corresponding Chinese words), add a translingual dimension to the piece. Notice, further, the “superscript” gloss (“cute” and “hot”) on top of these words on the envelope, which serves as a kind of interlinear translation. What we have here is an apparently English expression with a Cantonese substrate fleshed out as a four-character idiom (though it is not readily available in the Cantonese repertoire as an idiom) on a specifically “Chinese” artefact. This example is one in a series of lai see red envelopes designed along a similar concept. The expressions on these envelopes all epitomize translanguaging in their ludic engagement with calque and transliteration: a PIG CAGE GET WET A near-calque of the Cantonese expression “Water goes into pig cage” 豬籠入水, where water symbolizes money in Chinese culture and a pig cage stands for a wealth container. b FAT LIKE A PIG HEAD A near-calque of the Cantonese expression “(To be) wealthier than a pig head” 發過豬頭, where “pig head” symbolizes wholesomeness, hence wealth. Here “fat” is meant to approximate the Cantonese faat (“to become wealthy”): the English word transliterates and overlays the Cantonese word to form a palimpsest. c BIG LUCK BIG GAIN A near-calque of the Cantonese/Mandarin expression 大吉大利, meaning prosperity and abundance.

50  Translation and translanguaging d 100 SHOT 100 GOAL A near-calque of the Cantonese/Mandarin expression 百發百中, meaning “every attempt is successful”; but here the envelope adds the phrase “husband and wife”, turning it into something of a sexual innuendo – a blessing for fertility to married couples: “every sexual attempt is successful in producing babies”. e YEAR YEAR HAVE FISH A calque of the Cantonese/Mandarin expression “There are leftovers every year” 年年有餘 (魚), where the image of leftover food symbolizes abundance; the Chinese word for “fish” has the same sound (yu) as that for “leftover”. f IN & OUT SAFE A near-calque of the Cantonese/Mandarin expression 出入平安, a blessing for another’s personal safety in the daily commute. g STEP STEP GO RISE A near-calque of the Cantonese/Mandarin expression 步步高陞, meaning “rise with every step”, used particularly in respect of career progress. Here, “go” is meant to phonetically approximate 高 gou/gao (“high”) in Cantonese/Mandarin, so once again a transliterative element is mixed into the calque translation. There is a temporal limit to such translanguaging. There can be no translanguaging potential in idioms or other expressions which have gained such currency, which have been so entrenched in a certain language that they are retrievable by users without being reminded of their creative freshness. However, it is completely possible for lexicalized items, stale expressions, or dead metaphors to be resuscitated through their emplacement in novel cotexts or semiotic environments for rhetorical purposes. Figure 3.2 shows a badge whose text-body consists of the Singlish expression tio sabo and a quote from Isaiah 54:17. The Singlish expression is

Figure 3.2 A Singlish ecclesiastical artefact

Translation and translanguaging  51 heterogeneous, where tio is a word from Hokkien, a southeastern Chinese dialect, functioning as a passive marker, and sabo is a truncation from “sabotage”. The expression means “to be sabotaged”, and although it is linguistically mixed, there is no translanguaging potential in it, for it has long become a stable part of the Singlish repertoire (although we may speculate that at the point of its inception, and perhaps for a period of time thereafter, the expression would have been considered “fresh” by native speakers of Singlish). Translanguaging arises not from the Singlish expression itself but from its emplacement in the artefact alongside the Isaiah quote. The full Isaiah text is as follows: Isaiah 54:17 (NKJV) No weapon formed against you shall prosper, And every tongue which rises against you in judgment You shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, And their righteousness is from Me,” Says the Lord. From this we can see a vague translational relation between the expression tio sabo and the Isaiah quote, taken from a passage that says one can be protected from “weapons” and “tongues” against him or her. The relation between the Singlish expression and the Biblical quote is also dialogic; notice that the tio sabo has a question mark appended to it, suggesting that the line from the Bible provides the answer to the problem of being sabotaged, and that Christian faith is the solution. The text as a whole is meant to be humorous, partly due to the marked emplacement of an ecclesiastical message on a trivial household item, but also because of an unexpected translational equivalence, forged by juxtaposing a Biblical line alongside a Singlish expression. That translational equivalence is also a translanguaging space. In this text-based artefact, several borders are transgressed – between language varieties (English/Singlish with embedded Chinese dialect), between registers (scriptural quote/vernacular expression), and between discourses (sacred/secular). Although each of the textual components is old, their copresence within one material frame produces an ironic translational-dialogic relationship that is fresh and novel to the prospective consumer. This is an example of the commodification of translanguaging, which in this case embeds the translational – a simulacrum of translation. The example in Figure 3.2 was developed as part of a product series called “I am a Singaporean Christian” by the company WowWow5. These text-based items (pouches, coasters, badges) create a whimsical intertextual space where a Singlish expression stands in relation to an evangelizing statement or a simplified Biblical quote, partially displacing the latter’s religious connotation and appropriating them to mundane contexts. The relation between the Singlish and the English is dialogic and translational, and the

52  Translation and translanguaging emergent discursive space that blossoms between them is a translanguaging space. The artefacts in which the texts appear are also multimodal, with illustrations corresponding to and corroborating the texts. In the following examples, the slash (/) indicates the divide between the two registers and discourses; the capitalization scheme follows the original. a MAI TU LIAO/I CHOOSE JESUS The Hokkien expression mai tu liao means “do not delay”; it leads on to the second clause to the effect of “Delay no more. Choose Jesus now”, crossing language varieties, registers, and discourses in the process. There is a figure of a helicopter, indicating expediency. b CHIO BU/You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you. (Song of Solomon 4:7) Chio bu is a vulgar Hokkien expression meaning “pretty girl”, resonating with the theme of the quote from Song of Solomon while transcending registers. The artefact is sprinkled with heart shapes and a lady hat. c POWDERFUL SIA!!/I can do ALL things through Him who strengthens me Powderful is a ludic corruption of “powerful”, and sia is a sentencefinal particle in Singlish; the phrase powderful sia is a vernacular commentary on the evangelical statement that follows. The figure of a muscular arm accompanies the text, illustrating the idea of power and strength. d MAI KAN CHEONG/Be Anxious for Nothing (Philippians 4:6) The Hokkien expression mai kan cheong means “do not be anxious”, thus uncannily translating the Philippians quote into Singlish. Below the text we see the figure of a cup of hot beverage, which speaks to the “let go and let God” theme. e RELAK/REST IN HIM. The Lord is My Shepherd. I shall not want. (Psalm 23:1) The Singlish word relak mimics the way “relax” is sometimes pronounced by Singaporeans. The following English clause can be seen as explicating the Singlish word within a Biblical logic. Accompanying the text are images of a ship and an airplane, possibly pointing to leisurely travel. f HUAT AH!/GOD WILL SUPPLY All your needs according to His Riches (Philippians 4:19) Huat ah! is an exclamation meaning “Get rich!” in Hokkien, and this is a vernacular response to the quote from the Philippians. Figures resembling coins accompany the text.

Translation and translanguaging  53 g Kena Arrow?/ NO FEAR! A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will NOT come near you (Psalm 91:7) In Singlish, kena is a passive marker and arrow means to target or assign someone to take on a difficult or unpleasant task, so kena arrow means to be targeted or assigned to take on such tasks. The Psalm quote is here appropriated and trivialized to the context of office politics, the message being that God will protect you from harm – including that of being targeted. The text is circumscribed by a ring of arrows. h JIAK BUEY LIAO/Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand. (Matthew 14:13–21) Jiak buey liao means “too much to eat”, indicating an abundance of food. This provides a vernacular commentary on the Matthew quote, illustrated in the artefact by five loaves of bread and two fish. i STEADY POM PIPI/HE will NEVER forsake US. (Deuteronomy 31:8) The Singlish expression means to be calm and composed in the face of turbulence; the English expression provides the reason why one should feel that way, setting up a dialogic relation between the two. There are several figures of umbrellas on the artefact, possibly evoking the idea of shelter and protection offered by God.

Conclusion The relationship between translation and translanguaging is regulated by the notion of scale. On one scale, the two may be considered separate language contact phenomena, where translanguaging, by virtue of its simultaneous invocation of different language and semiotic resources in a repertoire, precludes translating in the substantive sense. On another scale, where translation is conceptualized as a broad spectrum of activities that includes but also goes beyond substantive translation, there is an overlapping region between nonsubstantive translation (cultural mediation, diffusion of symbols, transculturation) and translanguaging. In particular, we have demonstrated through examples how translation can partake in translanguaging practices as one of several processes that go into creative language making. Ultimately, translanguaging represents a fluid semiotic space where different processes, such as calquing, code-switching, literal translation, transliteration, onomatopoeia – even silence – come into play in creating emergent meanings while negotiating and nuancing boundaries. We can indeed go further to suggest that translanguaging can be a way of understanding the routine moment-to-moment flux and bricolage of translating as an activity, where translators draw on their multilingual repertoire and artefacts in the environment, such as the internet, dictionaries, and databases, in coming up with a translation “equivalent”.

54  Translation and translanguaging

Notes 1 Here we draw on Cognitive Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 2003). 2 Translation as a concept is of course not exclusively “Western”. It is an international concept captured in different languages through different terms and metaphors; see Tymoczko (2014: 68–75). 3 Time is Space is a pervasive cognitive metaphor in conventional expressions in many modern languages. 4 Here we recognize that no language or text is ever entirely monolithic and hence maximally stable. In the course of its development, a language always already incorporates into its fabric strains of influence from other languages or language varieties; in actual usage, language is heteroglossic in the Bakhtinian sense, constantly weaving together different varieties, registers, and genre conventions. Nevertheless, a language is not merely a structured organism but also a social institution, and the institutionalization of language necessarily involves hegemony and power – or the territorialization of language into Language. 5 I borrow this phrase from Hermans (2014). 6 The terms lines of flight and rhizomes are from Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 2013). 7 See, for example, Sato (2018) on the use of furigana (a superscript used to indicate the reading of Sino-Japanese characters in Japanese writing) to enact translanguaging in English-Japanese translation. While furigana is conventionally used to indicate the “indigenous” reading of Sino-Japanese characters, it has occasionally been put to creative use by translators to transliterate foreign words. This generates dynamic tension between aurality (the sounds as indicated by the furigana) and visuality (the architectural structure of the characters).

PART I

4

Interlingual translanguaging The case of community interpreting

Introduction This chapter introduces translanguaging understood as interlingual ­selection across languages. As discussed in Chapter Two, this was the original focus of translanguaging and is still the way that it is predominantly understood. The main source of data here is from a study of community interpreting in advice sessions for Roma migrants in the UK working in hourly paid, precarious employment and seeking to claim benefits or advice on housing or their children’s education. Like many low-paid workers, on zero-hours contracts or similar, the Roma are subject to extreme economic and social precarity, never knowing month by month how much they will earn, or if they will dip below the poverty line and become eligible for various benefits. This data was collected as part of the Translation and Translanguaging (TLANG) project. In this part of the project in Leeds, we focused on Klára, a self-employed Czech-English community interpreter working with advocates advising Czech and Slovak-speaking Roma on issues related to their successful settlement in the UK, in particular employment, housing, and education and related benefits. Klára draws on English and Czech to facilitate communication between Roma clients and English advocates. We will also however examine an interpreted and mediated interaction from a legal advice session, in which a relative of the client interprets/mediates between Lingala and English, while the lawyer speaks only English. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of a session where Lucy, the monolingual lawyer, and Mahamadou, an Italian-speaking client, use Google Translate to facilitate the interaction. The analysis illustrates the dynamic, process character of translanguaging and how it can illuminate processes of interpreting and translation. It also shows the importance of factoring language ideologies into translation and interpreting processes. In Chapters Two and Three, we have examined frameworks for working across languages, noting that the view from translanguaging is rather different to that from translation studies. Translanguaging in the repertoire is language from below, subversive of borders and the language

58  Part I ideologies that insist on them. The moment is important in translanguaging, whereas translation, at least as it is currently theorized, exists in temporal sequencing and spatial displacement. While it can be thought of as process, in translation there is also a product in mind. However, translanguaging is liable to be “noticed” by monolingual or boundaried bilingual language ideologies, for example in classrooms where “English only” is the norm: noticed and sanctioned. Thus, translanguaging spaces are not always free spaces and have the potential to be sanctioned and regulated by the kind of dominant language ideologies we have noticed in relation to translation. We will develop this idea in this chapter with data from the TLANG project looking at community interpreting in the context of advice giving and advocacy. This is data wherein we can clearly discern the intersection between translanguaging in the multilingual repertoire and the discourses and language ideologies which constrain and shape translation and interpreting in interaction. Community interpreting is, after all, part of the spectrum of translation as activity. The focus of our first case study will be on Klára’s work and the way she translanguages, drawing on Czech as well as her knowledge of Slovak and English. In the second data extract, drawn from the law phase of the TLANG project, we worked with Lucy, an immigration lawyer providing immigration advice as part of a free drop-in consultation service. The interaction examined shows how she achieves a consultation with a Congolese, Lingala-speaking client, Musembwa, who appears at least initially to speak little English, using informal English/ Lingala interpreting provided by his wife, Valentina.

Translanguaging in a community interpreting event Watching and recording Klára at work, we observed “community interpreting events”: multilingual literacy events (Baynham 1993) where she interpreted and mediated between advocates and Roma clients. Our starting point for the analysis is work done on mediation and cultural brokering in multilingual contexts. Baynham and Masing (2001) analyse multilingual literacy events in Vanuatu, achieved in the lingua franca Bislama and the local vernacular Aulua, distinguishing a particular role of mediator in which a more knowledgeable other mediates literacy activity to achieve a literacy purpose. This is very much in evidence in the interpreting events we observed. Interpreters such as Klára and the advocates she worked with are mediating between the claimant and the benefit awarding institution. This involves: a multimodal activity, face-to-face communication in a variety of languages (interlingual translanguaging); b elicitation of information orally or via reading relevant documentation for the purposes of completing a claim (intersemiotic translanguaging);

Interlingual translanguaging 

59

c intralingual translanguaging in the rendering of complex terms of the benefit trail into language that clients could understand; d phone calls to benefit helplines to clarify the state and stage of a case. Such events involve what Kell (2009) calls transcontextual flows: they are not located in just one time-space. Forms are completed and submitted online, and phone calls are made to benefit helplines. Information travels and is communicated and gathered through activity displaced in time-space. In our observations of Klára's work as an interpreter alongside an advocate we saw all the characteristics of the literacy event as it had been identified and described in literacy studies (see Baynham and Prinsloo 2009). In our case, the literacy event is multilingual, of course, characterized by constant translanguaging between English, Czech, Slovak, and, between the Roma themselves at times, in the Roma language. Our focus, however, is on the languages the Roma use not to interact with each other but with the institutions they encounter in managing their daily lives. A foundational collection of papers on multilingual literacies is MartinJones and Jones (2001); also relevant is the work of Keating (2009) on literacy practices of Portuguese women in London. More recently, the work of Warriner and others has focused on transnational literacy practices (e.g. Warriner 2007). Kell (2009) introduces a transcontextual dimension to the literacy event which is very much in evidence in our data, as when a benefit claim which is being completed online provokes a call to the benefits helpline to clarify some issue. In the face-to-face environment, the client produces relevant documentation in paper form which is the subject of oral negotiation, leading to completion of the online form by the advocate and including frequently clarificatory phone calls to the benefits helpline. This, as Kell argues, disrupts settled ideas of the literacy event as occurring in a fixed time and place, leading for a need to conceptualize transcontextual flows of information.

The interpreting event We observed repeated interpreting events, all with a very similar structure. The rooms used were borrowed, not specifically designated or designed for interpreting/advocacy, typically with bare institutional tables and chairs appropriated temporarily for the purpose at hand. Again typically, interpreter and advocate were seated on one side of the table with the client, often with a friend, relation, or child, seated at the other. The client would typically arrive with a clutch of papers, often crumpled and dog eared, either in a plastic bag, a wallet or folder, or a shopping bag. These are the sedimented accumulation of relevant documents, a bureaucratically documented life story, containing information that may be pertinent to the claim. A proportion of time is spent fishing around in the document cache to find the relevant information. The early part of the interpreting event is typically

60  Part I spent establishing what claim the client wants to or can make, whether it is a new claim or there is a claim in process. If the latter, the task is to establish what stage the claim is at. If there is a claim to be made, it will typically be made online with the advocate completing the form on a laptop, asking questions which are translated by the Klára the interpreter in the familiar three-participant structure of mediated interaction. There are a number of major sources of difficulty, both for the clients and for the interpreter and advocate. The first is to construct what steps are actually required in the procedure to claim a particular benefit, while establishing whether the client is eligible and what stage he/she is at. Eligibility for benefits and procedures for claiming them are generally very complex and arguably adversarial, are liable to change, and can provoke confusion on the part of the interpreter and advocate as well as the client. The relationship between Klára and her advocate coworkers is interesting. It often seems as if Klára is better informed than the advocates themselves and is able to step in with detailed information about some procedure which the advocate lacks. As such, we note at times a blurring of role between advocate and interpreter. Typically, interpreter and advocate work together to resolve such issues, and it is not always clear what the division of labour is. The basic exchange structure of interpreter mediated interaction is as follows: A, who does not share a language with B, communicates with B by means of C, who shares both B and C’s languages. In this extract, M, the advocate asks the client, N, a question, which is interpreted into Czech by K (Klára). K then completes the interaction by responding to M’s initial question. M: do you intend to claim reduction of your council tax?  K: zažádala ste si o snížení council tax?  [have you requested a reduction of your council tax?] N: ne [no] K: ne, nežádala ste si, když ste si žádala o housing? [no, you haven’t requested, when you applied for housing?] K: she says no, no ... However, as suggested above, due in part to her familiarity with the topics and her expertise, Klára does not just limit herself strictly to the role of interpreter but will also often engage in a series of questions to elicit the necessary information, which she then summarizes for the advocate. Sometimes, she cuts corners, relying on shared knowledge as when she says “housing” rather than “housing benefit”. Working out what the problem is and what is required to solve it is by no means a negligible task, as can be seen in the following interaction from the beginning of a session. Klára draws on her repertoire of Czech and English, first to draw out from L the problem that has brought her to the consultation, then to summarize the

Interlingual translanguaging 

61

information she has gleaned for the advocate. In addition to her Czech/ English linguistic repertoire, Klára has extensive and constantly updated knowledge of the benefit system. We will see in the extracts below how she acts with more independence than would be characteristic for an interpreter, taking responsibility for a sequence of turns in which the problem is identified: the client’s jobseeker’s allowance has been stopped. (Jobseeking is a present-day euphemism for being out of and looking for work.) K:  tak s čím chcete pomoci?

K:  so, what do you need to help with? L:  well ... I ... I worked. I wanted L: Nó ... mně sa ... ja som robila. Chcela to go to the benefit office, som isť na sociálku, vlastně na podporu, actually to the jobseekers’ ale že prišol papier, P forty-five, nikdo allowance, but I received a mi to neveděl vypisať, ani ja to neviem, paper, the P forty-five, and no a do [...] jsem to vypisala a ani som to no-one knew how to fill it in neodeslala a zastavili mi to, že mám for me, and I don’t know that either, well and [...] I filled it in, I haven’t even sent it out and they stopped it because K:  jobseekers K:  jobseekers L: ano L:  yes K:  you have, you have applied for K: vy jste so vo to, jste se přihlásila a pak vám to zastavili it, and then they stopped it L: ano L:  yes K:  and do you have the letters here? K:  a máte ty dopisy tady? L: ano L:  yes K: right, this lady used to work, she worked and then her job stopped, so she wanted to sign on, she started to sign at the jobcentre, claiming jobseekers’ allowance, then she received P45 and I don’t know whether she said she had to fill in some forms, she did not know how to fill it in properly, and then [...] jobseekers has been stopped. So she would like the help. With the jobseekers. And I asked her about the letter, if she had any paperwork on her

Once the problem has been identified and explained to M in English, Klára and M work together with L, the client, to establish why the jobseeker’s allowance has been cut, more specifically why she did not attend the Job Centre to sign her declaration. It emerges that L has been informed that she does not satisfy the residency requirement for receiving the benefit, which is why she does not go: M:  so her jobseekers’ has stopped K:  takže se Vám to, Vám to zastavili L:  ano K:  kdy Vám to zastavili M:   from twenty seventh of August L:  ale mi neposílali žádné peniaze, nič

K:  so it has, they’ve stopped it L:  yes K:  when did they stop it L:  but they weren’t sending me any money, nothing

62  Part I M:  because she didn’t go to sign K:  she just said she didn’t receive any money M: she didn’t go to sign her declaration. She didn’t go to the jobcentre, maybe she was supposed to go there K:  vy jste měla jít [...] K:  you were meant to go [...] L:  ja som mala jit na podpis lenže me L:  I was meant to go to sign but povedali že já som resident test nieprešla they told me that I hadn’t passed the resident test. K:  takže ste tam nešla K:  so you did not go there L:  no L:  yea K:  she didn’t go because she was told she didn’t pass residency test

Klára draws on her Czech and English repertoire to manage this interaction. The reader will note that certain terms, highlighted in bold, are already known and used by L, the client. These are drawn from the lexis associated with work in the UK and the benefits system (P45, jobseekers, resident test), indexing the knowledge that L has already gained about the UK employment and benefits system. In the next case, analysed in detail in Baynham and Hanušová (2018), Klára draws on varieties of Czech in her repertoire, working to translate a letter from nonstandard Slovak-influenced Czech into Standard Czech.

Drafting a letter in Standard Czech At one of Klára’s sessions, the client, Mr Tancoš, brought in a handwritten letter for the Czech authorities, which he needed to be translated into English in order to be verified by a British solicitor and sent to the Czech Republic. This was a rather atypical case in our TLANG data, since the vast majority of cases considered were connected with the UK benefits system, children’s education, etc. However, this case raised interesting issues which are discussed here. Mr Tancoš was a man in his early 40s, of Roma ethnicity. He was working for a Polish construction company. Mr Tancoš was finding himself in a difficult position – he needed to send a power of attorney letter to his cousin in the Czech Republic in order that she could collect documentation for him related to renewing his driving licence, something he needed in his job. At the same time, he was putting himself at risk of not being offered more work by his employer for taking time off to attend the session: “If you don’t come, he’s got other ten people”, Mr Tancoš said to us. This reveals the precarity of his work situation, a precarity we found to be pervasive in the lives of people we encountered in our fieldwork, working in low-pay jobs and caught in the benefits trap. Mr Tancoš and Klára communicate in Czech during the session; however, Mr Tancoš’s Czech is very distinctive. One of its characteristics is the incorporation of Slovak language structures (vocabulary, case endings) as well as the creation of new words, blending elements of Czech and Slovak. This practice of drawing on resources from different discrete languages can

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be described as interlingual translanguaging, and in the case of Mr Tancoš, it is happening across at least four different languages – Czech, Slovak, Polish, and English. This, however, does not on the whole impede a smooth communication between Mr Tancoš on the one side and, on the other side, Klára and Jolana (the Czech-speaking researcher), who are native Czech speakers familiar with the Slovak language. On one occasion, however, Mr Tancoš, who works for a Polish company, uses a Polish word belonging to his repertoire but not recognized by Jolana (J). Mr Tancoš (T) resolves the situation by rephrasing the meaning into Czech: J: hm, hm, hm, hm ... no a kde J:  hm hm hm hm ... and where do you work? pracujete? T:  dělám remonty T:   I do remonts [a Polish word meaning ‘refurbishments’] J:  co děláte? J:  you do what? T:   Opravuju baráky T:   I reconstruct houses

In the context of an informal conversation between Mr Tancoš and Klára, the varieties of their spoken language coexist side by side, in a nonhierarchical manner. However, this situation changes the moment they turn their attention to Mr Tancoš’s handwritten draft of what is to be the power of attorney letter, composed by himself in nonstandard, Slovak-influenced Czech. This contextual change involves a move across modes (from spoken to written) as well as across registers (from informal to formal). Klára is struggling with some of the formulations in the handwritten draft, stemming from Mr Tancoš’s lack of familiarity with Czech legal register. Some of the words appear misspelled; on some occasions, Mr Tancoš creates a word which sounds similar to the legal term he has in mind, but with a completely different meaning. That is the case with “power of attorney” – plná moc in Czech. Mr Tancoš merged the two words into one, which Klára reads out as půlnoc (meaning “midnight” in Czech): K:  co to je tady napsaný, půlnoc?

K:  what is it written here, půlnoc [midnight]? T:  pulnomoc, no, sem to nadepsal asi, T:  pulnomoc, yea, I’ve titled it, perhaps, ja už tu gramatiku my grammar

Mr Tancoš is aware of his limited capability to produce a grammatically correct text and agrees to Klára’s suggestion to rewrite the letter. In this situation, as we shall see, Klára’s Standard Czech becomes the dominant variety, treated interactionally as hierarchically superior to Mr Tancoš’s language, which contains a characteristic bricolage of elements drawn from different languages and including nonstandard neologisms. Klára, however, uses her excellent interpersonal skills to avoid the situation being interpreted in this light. She carefully formulates her reasons for rewriting the letter and uses

64  Part I the inclusive first-person plural (“we want”) to mask the power dynamic and diminish the gap between their language competencies to avoid a possible negative reaction from Mr Tancoš. Her effort is rewarded by Mr Tancoš’s acknowledgement of the situation in which his version of the letter is positioned in relation to Klára’s “correct” Czech: K: já teda ... když už to teda chcete K:  I well ... since you want it in Czech česky T:  já vám věřim T:  I trust you K: ((laughs)) jo? Já (.) mého (.) řidičs- (.) K: ((laughs)) yea? I (.) my (.) drivi-(.) tečky, když už to chceme správně accents, since we want it correct ...

Klára and Mr Tancoš also have different perspectives on what kind of language is acceptable for the Czech authorities, which reflect two different language ideologies: whereas Mr Tancoš believes that using Czech alongside Slovak in his letter, thus effectively translanguaging, “won’t be a problem”, Klára’s view on the exigencies of Czech bureaucratic institutions is different: “in Czech they are very strict when it comes to stuff like that, it needs to be very precise”. Although Klára gives Mr Tancoš voice to express his opinion in the process of rewriting the letter, and on occasions he argues for his version quite forcefully, it is her formulation that eventually wins. K: No protože tak ( ) vy máte i slovensky. Mám to napsat celý česky? T:  ( ) napište ( ) K: protože tam máte česky i slovensky

K:  well because so ( ) you have it in Slovak as well. Should I write it all in Czech? T:  ( ) write ( ) K:  because you have it in Czech and also Slovak

T:  ( ) K: ((to Rahim, the project manager who is present)) you know why, because it’s written Czech and in, not Czech, Czech and Slovak, there are mixed words T:  já si myslim že to nebude problém T:  I think it won’t be a problem K:  ((to Rahim)) and I said do you want it Czech or Slovak, he said Czech but like T:  já si myslim že to T:  I think it K:  ((to Jolana)) ‘preukazu’ is Slovak, isn’t it? J:  hm I think it won’t be a problem T: já si myslim že to nebude problém oni si T:  tam přečtou they will read it

Once the letter is ready, the next step is producing a version in English to be taken to the British solicitor. This process is led by the project manager, Rahim, who is familiar with British legal language and procedures. Klára reads out the letter she has just produced with Mr Tancoš, translating it into English; Rahim is typing up the new letter, which he is simultaneously rephrasing to match the British bureaucratic requirements. The letter therefore undergoes changes on several levels: apart from moving

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across languages (from Czech to English), there is a change of register, from Standard Czech to legal English. In this stage of the process, Klára finds herself in an analogous position to Mr Tancoš when she was rewriting his letter. The centre of the interaction shifts from the letter produced by Klára to the new letter that is now being composed by Rahim, designed to meet the requirements of British, not Czech or Slovak, institutions. Once Rahim has composed the new letter, he then asks Klára to translate his letter back into Czech. At first, she is reluctant to do so, not as much because she would be questioning Rahim’s knowledge of the correct procedure, but because she fails to see the difference between the registers of the two letters and thinks that back-translating the letter into Czech is a redundant step. We can again interpret this hesitation as a resistance against what would mean in effect moving her original letter to a peripheral position in relation to Rahim’s letter, which has become the dominant, central text. After she has a closer look at Rahim’s letter, however, she realizes the difference between the registers and she is then happy to proceed. Once this new version of the Czech letter is ready, Mr Tancoš is free to go to the solicitor, whose office is on the same street. He is taking with him the letter in legal English produced by Rahim as well as the third version of the Czech letter. The latter has undergone a transformation from a draft by Mr Tancoš in a nonstandard Slovak-influenced Czech language to a version composed by Klára in formal Czech to the final version, which is a translation of Rahim’s letter, produced to meet British legal standards. The exhausted Klára jokes about the whole process, which took almost an hour and a half instead of a previously expected 20-minute session, saying to Mr Tancoš: “If they don’t accept this then I don’t know what they will!” She gives him back his original letter – which he takes back, laughing – and then scrunches up her own previous versions of the letter (now redundant) and throws them away, indexing their eventual worthlessness. We see here how Mr Tancoš’s translanguaging ideology, which can be glossed as “What does it matter that I am using both Czech and Slovak, they will understand”, is trumped by Klára’s Standard Czech language ideology in the letter she drafts for him in Czech. However, in the interaction with Rahim, the Standard Czech version is trumped in its turn by the legal requirement to produce an initial version in English, which must then be back-translated into Czech. There is a hierarchical ordering of language ideologies and interactional regimes at work here, illustrating how translanguaging, as language from below, can easily be othered by standard language ideologies.

Informal interpreting in an immigration advice consultation Klára, as a trained community interpreter, is employed to interpret for predominantly Roma clients in advocacy sessions concerned largely with benefits, housing, and schooling. Having done this work for several years now, she

66  Part I is extremely knowledgeable about the continual changes in benefits legislation – sometimes, as we have said, more so than the advocate she is interpreting for. This means that she sometimes goes beyond the highly regulated norms of interpreting which, according to the norms for the profession, expect the interpreter’s self-effacement and verbatim (or near-verbatim) reproduction of the words of the parties involved in the interpreter-mediated communication. Yet Klára is clearly influenced by professional norms and overall adopts a professional and ethical approach to her work. In the case of Lucy, a trained lawyer, who provides immigration advice at a drop-in session in a community organization, she too is clearly governed by the norms of the legal profession in terms of providing advice and is scrupulously aware of the limits of what she can say and do in her advice giving. However, she does not have regular access to interpreters and draws on her own highly developed communication skills to explain legal terms and concepts to her clients. We shall discuss some of these in Chapter Five. Sometimes, however, informal interpretation or mediation takes place in Lucy’s advice sessions, as when a client brings along a friend or relative who is more fluent in English, and that person is drawn on to interpret. Here Musimbwa (M) has come with his wife Valentina (V) to seek help from Lucy with his appeal against deportation. Also present are Jolana, the researcher, and Jackie, another lawyer who is observing Lucy. Although Musimbwa interacts directly with Lucy occasionally, he appears to speak little English, and the majority of the interaction is mediated by Valentina, who summarizes what Lucy has been saying and translates specific questions where required. The session starts with Lucy trying to elicit what Musimbwa’s problem is, what previous legal advice he has had to date, and how she can best advise him. Speaking for Musimbwa, Valentina explains the problem, namely that his asylum application has been rejected. Lucy asks if she can see the documentation, at which point Valentina turns to Musimbwa and asks him to hand over the papers he has to Lucy (L): [Items in Lingala utterances drawn from French are highlighted in bold, from English underlined] V: I’m think the Home Office told no because she ( ) (you see) ( ) received the letter for erm the court ( ) the Home Office. L:  oh ok have you got the ( ) any papers with you V: yea L:  I can have a look at have you got any letters V: Pesa bapapiers nyoso ozwaki epai V:  Give the papers all you’ve got from ya solicitor wana that solicitor. M:  Oyo eza pona tribunal M:  This one is for tribunal. V:  that one is from the tribunal L:  aha let’s have a look V: yea

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In her Lingala turn, Valentina uses lexis from French and English, all items which are broadly drawn from the register of bureaucracy and legal processes (papers, solicitor, tribunal). Valentina then translates Musimbwa’s response more or less verbatim into English for Lucy. While scanning the documents, Lucy continues to elicit background information on Musimbwa’s case, but again directly interacting with Valentina, without involving Musimbwa. When Lucy is satisfied that she has the documentation she needs, she asks permission (“am I all right to have a look through these”) to satisfy herself that the claim has been lodged. One of her effective communication strategies in English, which will be discussed in the next chapter, is providing an aloud commentary on what she is doing. While this is happening, Valentina summarizes the gist of what Lucy is doing in Lingala for Musimbwa. She notably draws on lexis in both English and French (typically the lexis of bureaucracy) as well as introducing another distinctive strategy: that of taking an English verb stem, “check”, and giving it a French morphology by the addition of the nonfinite suffix –er: “checker”. These English and French lexical items are systematically integrated into Lingala morphological structure, yielding forms such as the following: Nouns bapapiers = the papers (French “papiers”) baquestions = the questions (French “questions”; N.B. the pronunciation indicates it is French, not English) Verbs akochecker (she will check) is a combination of Lingala bound morphemes a + ko+ check the English verb + er the nonfinite French verb suffix babooker (they book) is a combination of Lingala bound morpheme ba + book the English verb+ er the nonfinite French verb suffix. (But cf. the more typical case: bakoétudier [they will study] is a combination of Lingala bound morphemes ba + ko + étudier the French verb.) These examples show a complex layering of English, French, and Lingala in the speech of Valentina and Musimbwa as she mediates for her husband, explaining to him what is going on. The embedding of French lexis into Lingala is a commonplace feature; however, here there is an additional layer: English, given French morphology and embedded into the morphological structure of Lingala, is more unusual and provides a rich example of everyday creativity and bricolage in the multilingual repertoire (Michael Meeuwis, personal communication).

68  Part I L: brilliant am I all right to have a look through these and just see what’s been said let’s have a look so ah so so yea so they’ve they’ve lodged everything they’ve put all the paperwork in and then you’ve got this date back to go to court ok let me just (let) I’m just gonna have a quick look here and I’ll ask you some more questions and then I’ll see if we can help you as I think we can I just want to have a look first V:  ok ok ((Paper rustling – L leafing through the paperwork)) V: Akochecker avant asala appel wana. V:  She will check before she does Akotuna yo baquestions mosusu that appeal. She will ask you other atala ndenge nini akosala. questions to see how and what she will do. L: yes so it’s definitely asylum I think we should we should get a new Lingala interpreter next week anyway

Having scanned the documentation, Lucy satisfies herself that it is indeed an asylum case and moves on to consider getting a new Lingala interpreter to assist with taking it forward. She has also satisfied herself that her organization can take on the case (“I’ll see if we can help you I think we can”). Again we see a similar format where Lucy explains what she is going to do and Valentina explains the gist in summary form to Musimbwa, with lexical items connected with the legal process in French. L: so (.) what I think we will be able to help you with this one now I work for a charity called Asylum Hope project? … and what we do is we represent people who don’t have a lawyer so we we do their court case and we go to court for them ok now this is exactly the kind of case that we can take V:  oh thank you L: so what I’m going to do is I’m gonna take some details (I’m gonna) copy everything and then we will be in touch a a a man called Jack will be in touch to make an appointment ok so let me let me write everything down and then I think we can help you ( ) V:  ( ) V:  She says they (Lucy & Co) are people V: Alobi baza bato ya law firm of law firm Asylum Hope I told you Asylum Hope nayebisaki yo non? before, didn’t I? Actually/Now this Sikoyo oyo nde bacase balingaka. is the type of cases they like. As the Comme avocat apesaki yo eloko solicitor didn’t give you anything she te, ye akokoma nyoso. Après [Lucy] will write everything. After, her chef na ye akosolola na yo, puis boss will speak to you. Then she will akopesa yo rendez-vous give you an appointment.

There are a number of ways in which Valentina’s role here does not correspond to the professional role of the interpreter, although she is very effective in drawing on her multilingual repertoire to further the interaction. Firstly, there are extended exchanges where Valentina is speaking for Musimbwa in English, without reference to him. She is drawing on

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her status as Musimbwa’s partner in a way that would never be the case for any kind of professional interpreter. Secondly, when she summarizes what Lucy has explained, she is generally giving the gist, and it is sometimes not clear whether she has understood entirely what Lucy is saying or whether she is simply trying to put it briefly. For example, Lucy says she will “take some details and copy everything”, which Valentina renders as “ye akokoma nyoso [she will write everything]” – clearly something of an oversimplification. There is more evidence, on the one hand, that Valentina is not simply performing the role of an interpreter and, on the other, that Musimbwa is understanding more of the interaction than might be apparent in the following exchange, where Lucy is seeking help in getting recommendations for a Lingala interpreter. It is clear from Musimbwa’s intervention to Valentina, which is totally on topic, that he is following the conversation. Valentina challenges Musimbwa as to whether the person he knows is in fact an interpreter. This pattern falls more obviously into the domain of family interaction rather than an interpreting event. Yet there is mediated understanding being achieved; however, it is somewhat unregulated in relation to the verbatim norms and ideologies which govern interpreting of all sorts. L:   excellent now do you know anybody that could interpret (erm) who could come and do that or would you need us to find somebody cause Lingala is very hard to find ( ) V:  yes I know some people L:  ok V:  but I’m not sure if it’s free L:  ok V:  the problem M: Nga naza na moto alobaka anglais M:  I have someone who speaks English bien well. L:  well V:  Aza interprète? V:  Is he an interpreter? V:  Yeah parce que wana eza interprète. V:  Yeah because this is about interpreters. Kaka pe pona nga, bon nayebi te Just for me, you see I don’t know if soki bango eza free ou bien pas. with them it’s for free or not M:  Te aza interprète te. M:  No he’s not an interpreter. L:  ((speaks in low voice in the background)) ( ) any permission ( ) with me M: Nga naza na moto akoki kosalela M:  I have a person who can do that for nga yango me. L:  ((speaks in low voice in the background)) ( ) one out ( ) M: Moto wana aza na experience. ( ) M:  That person has experience. ( ) Tell Yebisa bango babooker ye. them to book him up. V:  Yango nazoloba V:  That’s what I’m saying

The verbatim norm for interpreting comes out rather clearly in this exchange, where Lucy is drafting a letter of permission for Musimbwa to sign which allows Asylum Hope to access papers from his previous lawyer. Lucy asks

70  Part I Valentina to tell Musimbwa “exactly what it says”, which suggests that she is operating with the verbatim assumption for interpreting: L: so what I’m just doing here is I’m writing out a permission so what I what it’s going to say is that erm (Musimbwa) gives me (erm) gives Asylum Hope project permission to get all the old papers from the old lawyer because I we will need those to help start the case to prepare the case V: ok L: ok so ( ) I’ll just write it out and then if you wouldn’t mind just to tell (Musimbwa) exactly what it says cause obviously you should never sign anything you don’t understand so I’ll I’ll write it and then if he’s happy he can sign ok? V:  ok. She’s saying she’s writing V: ok. Alobi eza papier azokoma, papers (because they are two*) pona baza mibale, bango mobimba both of them will study your case. bakoétudier case na yo. Sikoyo soki So if you are not happy you tell yo osepeli te oyebisi bango ou bien them or don’t sign. But they have osigner te. Mais baza na dossier na your file so that they can study it yo bango bakoétudier yango bango both of them. If you’re not happy mibale. Soki osepeli te oyebisi bango you tell them and you don’t sign. osigner te. *Lucy and Jack M:  Te, yebisa ye asala yango. M:  No, tell her to do that. V:  he’s he’s ok L:  ok V:  yea L:  wonderful, perfect

Musimbwa immediately agrees to the document before he has had it read to him, which suggests that the point made by Lucy that “you should never sign anything you don’t understand” has been missed. Lucy composes the letter, while speaking aloud as she writes, in line with her strategy for making the process she is engaged in available to her interlocutors. This strategy is called “epistemic flattening” (Baynham et al. 2017b: 42): ((L:  talking to herself in low voice as she’s writing)) L: ((in low voice)) file to them ((to the clients)) so this says I (Musimbwa K….) give Asylum Hope project permission to act on my behalf which means permission to be my lawyer in connection with my asylum claim I authorise the release of my full case file to them so we can get the case papers ok? V: Oyoki? oyoki? Eza papier V:  Have you understood? Have you understood? akomi po olingi bapesa It’s a paper she wrote to say that you want service oyo. them to give you the service. M:  Donc eza papier nakosigner M:  So it’s a paper that I’ll sign so that they do po basala case na nga. my case.

We will discuss in Chapter Five the strategies that Lucy uses for making complex legal wording and concepts available to her clients (some of which are in evidence here) and how these can be understood as a form of intralingual translanguaging. For the moment, let us note the fact that, despite

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Lucy’s request to Valentina to tell Musimbwa exactly what the text says, Valentina boils it down to “a paper she wrote to say that you want them to give you the service”, to which Musimbwa replies, describing it as a paper signed by him for them to do his case. Regardless of the detail, this is the core performativity of the document as far as they are concerned, and on this basis, Musimbwa signs and the transaction is completed.

Discussion Earlier in this chapter, we have suggested that Klára, due to her very deep and up-to-date knowledge of benefit regulations, sometimes moves beyond the role of interpreter into that of advocate/advice giver. She does this in a very professional manner and with great care, in such a way as to contribute positively to the interaction. Yet it somehow transgresses norms and expectations of the interpreter, who is characteristically understood as contributing verbatim translations of the words of others and not inserting any of their own content. This in itself raises issues concerned with language ideologies and norms of the sort discussed with reference to translation in Chapter Three. It seems that other relevant kinds of knowledge and ethical considerations can cut across Klára’s interpreting role when she feels she knows something that is pertinent to the issue under discussion and will lead to a better outcome for the client. Such interventions would be more controversial if provided by an interpreter in a doctor– patient interaction, for example, but in the case of Klára and her work, the boundaries seem less sharply defined. Sometimes she can be reasonably confident that she has the most up-to-date information than anyone in the room, including the advocate. In the case of the interaction between Lucy, Musimbwa, and Valentina (largely mediated by Valentina), this again is rather less conforming to interpreting norms, due in large part to the fact that Valentina and Musimbwa are partners and Valentina is not a professional interpreter. Extended sequences involve Lucy questioning Valentina, who answers on her husband’s behalf. Therefore, this triadic bilingual interaction does not entirely conform with the norms of interpreting, nor perhaps does it need to. Lucy seems to be operating in the normative space of interpreting practice when she asks Valentina to tell Musimbwa “exactly” what is being said. Indeed, the fact that a certain amount of time is spent by all parties on getting a “proper” Lingala interpreter suggests both that Valentina is not one, and that Lucy is concerned with getting trained interpreting in place. Nevertheless, the interaction proceeds and concludes effectively. Musimbwa’s problem has been shared and heard, and a strategy is in place to get him legal representation. Thus far, we have been examining the mediating potential of human beings in multilingual interaction. But increasingly, technology is providing options for mediation where different languages are in play but are not shared. In the next section, we will see what happens in Lucy’s advice-giving practice when Google Translate becomes an actor.

72  Part I

Google Translate as mediator As explained above, Lucy speaks only English. In order to communicate with her clientele, she has to rely on (a) her excellent communication skills in English, which we will return to in Chapter Five; (b) the English skills of her clients; (c) prebooked interpreting services; (d) informal interpreting by an accompanying family member or friend; or, as is the case here, (e) the widely available machine translation app Google Translate. On occasion, when there are no other people or communication resources to mediate, Lucy reaches for Google Translate. Here we will examine a case in which she does so. How can we understand the interactional role of Google Translate here and indeed more generally? We could draw on tool theory from neoVygotskyan sociocultural theory and see Google Translate as a semiotic tool (e.g. Ivarrson et al. 2009: 201–202); or, perhaps more dynamically, on the notion of the nonhuman actant in Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2005). For ANT, objects are as active as humans in networks of activity, so we can see Google Translate from this perspective as occupying the space in the room and the interaction that were occupied in our previous examples by human mediators Klára and Valentina. Hence, we will treat Google Translate as an actant in the analysis. This interface between human and machine is an increasingly common aspect of everyday communication across languages, not just in informal everyday contexts, but also in the work of professional translators, who routinely make use of databases and electronic resources in their work. We will explore this further in Chapter Seven in the context of cyberliterature. In this interaction, Mahamadou is drawing on his Italian and English repertoire to try and communicate to Lucy that he needs a resident’s card. [Sequences in Italian are in bold, sequences provided by Google Translate [GT] in italics and bold, emphasis in italics.] He seems to be using a translanguaging strategy, rather understood as “any language is good provided it helps me get my meaning across”, for example: (l’ ho fat) pa- passaport [I have done a passport]. In contrast, Lucy has no such option, so what does she do? One strategy is that of simplification: she used simplified grammar and identifiable language chunks: (a) “you want (.) a card?” (question formed with rising intonation); (b) “ok perfect ok I will write” (transitive verb without an object). Interestingly she returns to (a) when she adopts the Google Translate strategy, only here the wording has shifted to a more formal register: “Would you like…”. The formality is not picked up by Google Translate, which translates this with informal vuoi and also with scheda di registrazione, which is an approximation but conforms more to the sense of registration card as used when registering at a hotel. L:   you want (.) a card? M:  l’ ho fatpa- passaport [I have done a passport] L:   ok let me just (2.0)

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M:  si ((beep)) fai la carta si [do the card yes] L:   would you like a registration card for the UK GT:  Vuoi una scheda di registrazione per il Regno Unito ((beep)) [would you like to have a UK registration form] M:  si, my (like) erm residente L:   ( ) resident M:  (uh-uh) L:   ok perfect ok I will write M:  si si hm hm L:  ok M:  (perfect-) long working per.personato (perm) L:   you jobseeker M:   job- jobseeker si L:   ah perfect M:  jobseeker L:   no problem lovely M:   job- jobseeker Alarm bells start ringing for Lucy when it appears that Mahamadou has been in the UK and jobseeking since 2013, a fact that would certainly prejudice his application for documentation. She again resorts to Google Translate to get this message across. L:  ok so I will try and explain for you ok. You can ( ) (2.0) ((beep)) you can make an application for a residence card in the UK but you have been jobseeking here for a very long time and that can cause problems GT:  é possibile presentare una domanda di carta di soggiorno nel Regno Unito ma se restate ricerca di (.) lavoro qui per un tempo molto lungo e che possono causare problemi [it is possible to make an application for a residence card in the UK but if you keep jobseeking here for a very long time and that they can cause problems] ((beep)) Here Google Translate increases the formality, taking the relatively direct “You can make …” and impersonalizing it: é possibile. The clause that starts “but you have been jobseeking ...” is rather disjointed with a number of grammatical errors; for example, the third person plural possono has no obvious antecedent plural subject. As a nonhuman actant, Google Translate shows up as a rather clumsy one, with difficulty in handling the pragmatics of address and the syntax of moderately complex clauses. The next sequence arises when Mahamadou explains that, during the period in question, he has been going back and forth repeatedly between Italy and the UK and is able to produce air tickets to prove it. M: no my my go back erm Italia L: Ita- oh you go back? M: yes you go back Italia I come back erm

74  Part I L: aha:: ok a::h M: I come here back ok I come here back erm ventisette ((papers rustling)) (2.0) one second [twenty-seven] L: that’s ok M: one second one second L: ah more tickets let’s see M: questo [this] L: ok M: I come back (Italia) L: so you come back ah in so you went M: si (fifteen day) L: and then you come back in M: si L: and M: come back in (you) go back Italia L: and so and then when did you come back to UK M: ( ) fifteen fifteen day L: fifteen day M: si L: ok now the problem is M: I come back erm (3.0) L: November (.) fifteen ok (so) let me just have a look M: si si (3.0) L: so tha- that’s from Manchester to Milan so that’s M: si si L: yea and then you M: si L: come back M: si (3.0) L: Bologna to Bristol and that was in April M: I come (in) back erm ventisette (eccolo) [twenty seven here it is] L: ah let’s have a look M: (yes ) I come back in L: let (we) let us just work this out so this is so this is Pisa to Leeds Bradford M: si si L: twenty-seventh of May twenty sixteen M: si L: ah so you ha- so a::h ok so you jobseeking from May M: si si jobseeking si L: easy M: ok yeah L: thank you very much M: you’re welcome L: that makes it very easy

Interlingual translanguaging 

75

We see again in this exchange something that was highly characteristic of all our data around rights and benefits, not only in terms of employment and housing education, but also immigration. Clients would bring with them plastic bags or folders full of their documentation and would periodically fossick through them to find the relevant documentation. Here, it is the airline tickets which prove his coming and going between Italy and the UK. Mahamadou moves easily between English and Italian, punctuating his talk with si … si … si, and using Italian deictics when he hands or points to documents (questo, eccolo). Lucy, on the other hand, does not resort to Google Translate, perhaps because there is nothing especially complex to explain, and also because Mahamadou is in charge of the interaction here. She does, however, draw on the simplified English range within her repertoire, for example, the verbless sentence “ok so you jobseeking from May”.

Discussion Although a somewhat clumsy actant, which has difficulty handling pragmatics and the syntax of moderately complex sentences, Google Translate serves a purpose here in communicating the gist of a complex or important point. It conveys the point to Mahamadou sufficiently clearly, so he can energetically refute the idea that he has been jobseeking since 2013. Using Google Translate, Mahamadou translanguages, drawing on the Italian and English he has in his repertoire. Lucy, on the other hand, draws on another characteristic of hers, the ability to simplify her speech along lines that have long been described in the literature on pidginization and learner language.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have considered translanguaging in the way that it has most typically been characterized, as the drawing on different languages in the speaker’s repertoire, akin to Jakobson’s “interlingual” category. Examining translanguaging not in everyday informal interaction, but in institutional settings and in the context of interpreter-mediated advice giving, has had an interesting effect: it has enabled us to bring together the focus on translanguaging as language from below, as explained in Chapter Two, with the more institutionally and normatively framed focus on translation as noted in Chapter Three. We have seen here a number of different responses to the challenges of multilingual communication in institutional settings, or, to be more precise, settings where institutions, normativities, and discourses impinge. All the settings we researched in were, after all, community based. In the case of Klára, the institution in question (another kind of actant in the ANT sense), which loomed large in her interpreting practice, is the Department of Work and Pensions and the constitution of the benefits system. In the case of Lucy, it is the Home Office and immigration law. Klára’s practice as an interpreter conforms most closely to the norms and expectations of the

76  Part I interpreting profession, although she often goes well beyond interpreting, using initiative and agency that would not be welcome in more regulated settings (e.g. law courts, doctor’s surgeries). Lucy’s practice is highly regulated by the norms and expectations of the legal profession. But we also notice that she is alert to the professional aspect of interpreting, as when she asks Valentina to explain “exactly” what she has said, and also in her concern to get a proper Lingala interpreter. That concern is shared by Valentina in her interaction with Musimbwa (where she is also concerned to establish whether his suggested Lingala interpreter is actually an interpreter). Other strategies include the use of a family member, Valentina, to mediate the interaction with her knowledge of English and Lingala, though it seems at times as if Musimbwa understands more than is made obvious. And finally, the use of online resources in which the Google Translate app serves, albeit rather clumsily at times, as an actant in mediating the interaction. Translanguaging between and across different named languages is the unmarked case, and almost all that is written about translanguaging assumes the strategic deployment of different languages in the repertoire. In the next chapter, we will be looking at other kinds of translanguaging, not drawing on different languages, but rather on different varieties and registers of the same language. We have already seen some examples of this in the repertoires of Klára and Lucy, albeit it has not been the focus of the analysis. This will be the topic of Chapter Five.

5

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging Cultural brokering as repertoire

Introduction In this chapter, we consider two other forms of translanguaging: intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging, which occur not across language boundaries but within them. They therefore problematize the notion of the linguistic speech community based on shared meanings, emphasizing the diversities and differences within language spaces which must be negotiated on a daily basis. Let us consider Mary Louise Pratt’s well-known critique of the speech community and her proposal of contact zones (Pratt 1991). The shift in perspective that Pratt proposes is foundational to the notion of cultural brokering as communication across borders. Cultural brokering is what happens when knowledge is shared and negotiated in contact zones, where all participants are notionally speaking “the same language”, yet the differences within that sameness create boundaries to cross and obstacles to surmount. It typically involves issues of register and discourse. A number of illustrative cases are presented in this chapter. We will look at the following: a how Klára (K), introduced in Chapter Four, and Jolana (J), the Czechspeaking researcher, work across registers with a client, Mr Tancoš (T), to draft his letter in appropriate Standard Czech; we will also look at an instance of Equal Opportunities monitoring in the course of this, which highlights interdiscursive translanguaging; b how the lawyer, Lucy (L), who speaks only English, strategically moves between legal and everyday English as she tries to ensure that her clients understand the processes they are going through; c how Monika (M), a young Czech Roma woman, trying to draw on her heritage and cultural capital to set up a small business and draw on funding from social enterprise sources, is socialized into both the register and discourse of funding applications: of thinking/being like a business person. We examine intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging around register and nonshared discourse in the process of cooking up, drafting, and writing Monika’s funding application.

78  Part I We conclude this chapter by considering how the phenomena of intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging place translation and translanguaging processes at the centre of communication in the contact zone.

Intralingual translanguaging: Klára rewriting Mr Tancoš’s letter In Chapter Four, we examined how Klára rewrote Mr Tancoš’s letter, emphasizing the shifts across Standard Czech, nonstandard Slovak-inflected Czech, and English as they jointly worked on the rewriting. However, there is also a clear register dimension in the rewriting as Klára nudges Mr Tancoš towards not just Standard Czech but also a more formal register which she thinks is more appropriate to the letter she is writing. In the following extract, there surfaces a dispute, low key but persistent. It turns on how Mr Tancoš’s cousin Antonia (to whom power of attorney is to be given) should be referred to. Klára prefers paní (= Mrs) signalling a politer and more formal letter writing style, while Mr Tancoš again prefers his original simpler version: T: to tam nemusí být ta sestrnice já si myslim J:  né chcete ji vyškrtnout? K:  ale aby věděli jak to (.) né? T: stačí dávám plnou moc K:  nebo paní? Mé T: dávám pulnomoc Antonii Tancošové a hotovo K: jo? T:  nó já si myslim K:  paní paní jo? Paní Antonii T:  nemusí být ani paní prostě K: ale tak (.) je to lepší (.) paní (.) paní paní

T: that doesn’t have to be there that cousin I think J:  no do you want to cross her out? K:  but for them to know how it (.) no? T:  just I give the power of attorney K:  or Mrs? my T: I give the power of attorney to Antonia Tancošová and that’s it K: yea? T:  yea I think K:  Mrs Mrs yea? To Mrs Antonia T:  you don’t need even Mrs K:  but (.) it’s better (.) Mrs Mrs Mrs

What Klára is asserting is the register of letter writing in Standard Written Czech, formality being here signalled by a term of address, while Mr Tancoš is preferring the simpler, unadorned form. Klára’s version wins out, which is why we can say that there is an interactional regime in operation. This is articulated by Klára at a number of points, positioning the formal register of Standard Written Czech against Mr Tancoš’s informal, nonstandard variety that incorporates (as we have seen in Chapter Four) elements of Slovak-Czech translanguaging. Klára here is voicing the standard position, robustly shifting the letter towards her sense of how an appropriate letter should be written, articulating implicitly a language ideology about register, formality, and correctness in this type of correspondence. Mr Tancoš, on the other hand, voices a resistant counterposition on a number of occasions,

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  79 expressing a contrasting language ideology that can be formulated as: “What does it matter? They’ll understand anyway”, or “Don’t worry about form, what is important is getting the meaning across”. We see therefore in Klára’s repertoire not only the ability to work across Standard Czech and English, but also to understand, more or less, Mr Tancoš’s Slovak-influenced, nonstandard Czech, though it is not a variety she would ever use herself. It is interesting that when it comes to rendering the letter (so painstakingly translated into Standard Czech) into English at the behest of the manager of the project Rahim (R), this is not a simple case of translation from Czech to English, as Klára supposes. Rather, her Czech version forms the raw material for a completely new letter that conforms to the legal genre of power of attorney. Once finished, it becomes a legal document to be retranslated. When he has finished, Rahim reads back the English version: R: ok so what I’ve written here erm oh ( ) I say this is sworn statement of Milan Tancoš yea K: uhm-uhm R: I Milan Tancoš of 25 Ashley Road Leeds LS8 1DE UK date of birth twentieth October nineteen sixty-eight personal ID number 7250205568 make oath and say as follows I confirm that I Milan Tancoš give power of attorney to Mrs Anto- Ant- what is it Antonia K:  erm yea yea R: yea K:  Antonia, yea R: yea date of birth twentieth August nineteen seventy-three address as he’s mentioned Czech erm and Czech Republic to collect my driving license documentation K: tak vlastně von tam napsal přesně to co K: so in fact he wrote there sme napsali tady že ale že přísaháte jo že exactly what we wrote here, přísaháte že tadyty že that, but that you swear, yea, that you swear that these, that T:  jo jo jo T:  yea yea yea K:  takle to je, ale to to je jediný co tam dodal K: it’s like this, but that that’s the only thing he’s added there T: jo T: yea K:  a pak tam napsal přesně stejný informace K: and then he wrote there exactly the same information T: jo T: yea K:  co teďka K:  he has just T: jo T: yea K:  read. Yea? K:  čet. Jo?

After this, Rahim asks Klára to translate the letter back into Czech, which puzzles her, since as far as she is concerned, Rahim’s English letter is simply a translation of her original. Rahim insists, and a further stage follows in which she back-translates the English letter into Czech. One could say that she is thinking like a translator here, not as a lawyer. In legal terms, the

80  Part I power of attorney document must be translated from English into Czech. Klára has come up against the law as a discourse and institution; it is far from the simple case, as she imagines, of translating back and forth between languages. Raheem goes on to explain exactly what he requires and why, and there is ongoing evidence of conversational difficulty as Klára struggles to understand why she has to translate back into Czech something that (to her mind) already exists in Czech. R: ok now what he needs to do erm no could you do the same thing on a on a piece of letter for him because this is a different format now this is like a proper sworn statement it’s like a legal document kind of K: just to write exactly the same thing in English R: yeah K: all right that’s fine R: in in Czech K: in Czech? R: yea K: in there? R: no no in on the paper there K: oh R: then he K: ( ) R: then the solicitor can sign that one and then I’ll tell you what to write underneath it K: oh in Czech ( ) R: yeah K: but it’s oh sorry I don’t understand why because ((starts laughing)) R: no no because this K: yeah R: is written K: yeah R: in Czech K: yea yea R: but the format is different K: yes R: ok this is like a legal thing this is K: yeah R: what he’s written here K: yeah R: so if we change it this one to that one it will look more erm K: all right so to write this in Czech R: first of all sworn statement of K: this statement this statement R: yea yea K: in Czech

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  81 R: yeah K: in here R: yes K: ah R: is that ok K: yea on this different paper R: I’ll I’ll get you another paper K: ok ((laughs)) J: hm K: I wasn’t sure what he wanted We saw in Chapter Three how acts of translation evoked issues of institutional power, ownership, and language ideology, while in Chapter Two, we argued that translanguaging is language from below, resistant to dominant language ideologies and susceptible to their regulation. Mr Tancoš perfectly expresses the translanguaging ideology, the perspective from below, while Klára firmly sets about to regulate his version and push it towards Standard Czech, thus expressing a dominant language ideology. This interaction thus encapsulates perspectives “from above” and “from below”. From this we see how translanguaging can manifest over bumpy terrains of power/knowledge/inequality/access, where it is liable to implicit or explicit censure and regulation (Baynham and Hanušová 2018). It is perhaps ironic that Klára, who expresses a dominant language ideology in the drafting of the letter in Czech in the earlier part of the action, is then positioned by Raheem on the wrong side of the discourse/institution of the law in the latter part. The shifting relationships of (a) Standard Czech to nonstandard Slovak-influenced Czech and (b) legal English to Standard Czech can be understood as hierarchically-ordered interactional regimes with accompanying indexical orders (Baynham and Hanušová 2018). In the first part of the interaction, Standard Czech is in a dominant relationship with the nonstandard variety; in the interaction with Rahim, it is legal English that is in a dominant relationship to Standard Czech. Recognizing the bumpiness and inequality of linguistic terrains is important because it makes clear how translanguaging as a practice both has its own ideologies, as clearly expressed by Mr Tancoš, and is liable to be regulated by dominant ideologies that emphasize particular language choices in terms of correctness or appropriacy. The shaping influence, even if often inexplicit, of discourse/institution on interaction is an important theme which we shall develop in this chapter when we talk about interdiscursive translanguaging, occasions when, for a range of motives, participants mediate not just language but also discourses interactionally. Such instances are often referred to as cultural mediation or brokering; here we think of the knowledge of specialist discourses as part of a given speaker’s repertoire, typically deployed across unequal terrains of power and knowledge in contact zones. In Klára’s case, there is a complex

82  Part I range of language varieties and registers in her repertoire, though we saw some discursive limits which are manifested in her difficulty with accepting the idea that in legal terms, the English version of the power of attorney letter had to be the original. We argue that this is a discourse issue, not a simple translation issue; the work around meaning making that ensues is what we mean by interdiscursive translanguaging. In the next section we will see how Lucy, monolingual but by no means monovarietal, fluently draws on her repertoire to communicate with clients from different language backgrounds.

Register work as translanguaging: Explaining complex legal terms and processes Unlike Klára, Lucy, the lawyer whose work on giving immigration advice we followed in Chapter Four, operates only in English. However, she seems to be able to communicate complex matters effectively to her clients. Her strategies include piecing together clients’ life stories and matching and mapping them onto the relevant categories in asylum and immigration legislation, and simply repeating key points a number of times to make sure the client knows what will be happening and what they have to do. Lucy is also effective in a particular kind of translanguaging, which, after Jakobson (1959/2012) we have called intralingual, using her repertoire to draw fluently on the specialized technical lexis of the law as well as ordinary, everyday language to gloss and explain a particular term or concept to a client. We can think of this as register work. In the following extract, Lucy is explaining to a client Cara (C), whose son has been deported, the consequences of her son’s deportation order for his chances of re-entering the country. [Legal language in bold] 1 L: now you have a big problem here because when somebody is subject to a deportation order 2 C: hm 3 L: which your poor son that’s what happened to him 4 C: hm 5 L: it lasts for ten years even after you’ve been removed from the UK 6 C: the UK 7 L: yea. Now you can apply to revoke that 8 C: revoke it yea 9 L: but if you don’t if you simply (make) an erm s- student application for him or a visit it would automatically be refused 10 C: refused 11 L: every time for ten years 12 C: ( ) years yea 13 L: even after the ten years they still might decide that because he was once excluded

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  83 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

C: yea L: that he’s not desirable to let back in C: ( ) back in L: so (.) he(.) your (.) what you would be looking to do for him or what you the only thing that you could do at this stage is to try and reapply to re- revoke that deportation order (now) that’s gonna be difficult ’cause he’s been out of country C: yea L: wh- the grounds for revoking a deportation order are that something in the situation is now significantly different to warrant the Home Office opening that that up C: ( ) L: so if nothing (is) changed if he’s if he’s still in the same situation and you are it’s not gonna be successful

Highlighted in bold, we have the legal terms that Lucy uses as she explains the consequences of the deportation order to Cara. Cara seems to have a strategy of repeating the last word or phrase of Lucy’s utterances as if in confirmation that she is following the explanation, though it is not entirely clear if she is in fact doing so. As she explains, Lucy glosses and comments on the more technically loaded stretches in conversational English. For example, in turn 19, Lucy explains the current situation of Cara’s son using legal terms, such as the complex nominal group “the grounds for revoking a deportation order”, yet embeds these in rather more mundane and generalized language: “something in the situation is now significantly different”. In turn 21, she shifts into more conversational English to gloss this for Cara, personalizing it with reference to the actors in Cara’s lifeworld with “he” and “you”. She offers two versions of the same proposition, the first more impersonal than the second: “if nothing (is) changed” and “if he’s still in the same situation”. The strategy here seems to shift from the impersonal, generalized legal statement to the personal and particular of Cara’s son’s case. If we think of this in terms of Lucy’s repertoire, we can see that just as Klára does with the languages in her repertoire, Lucy is seamlessly knitting together utterances that draw on the legal language she knows as part of her formation as a lawyer with more accessible everyday formulations. There is an invisible yet highly present knowledge imbalance in her interactions with clients that Lucy has become skilled in addressing, not through knowing their languages but in her own way, through her own repertoire. This is what we mean by intralingual translanguaging. As well as explaining the legal situation, we can also see how Lucy aligns herself in sympathy with Cara and her son using affect-laden lexis: “your poor son” (turn 3). Lucy consistently uses strategies to align with and express empathy with her clients, part of what has been called epistemic flattening (Baynham et al. 2017b: 42). For example, when Cara

84  Part I describes the circumstances of her son’s removal from the UK, Lucy comments empathetically: “goodness me … o::h poor guy … my god”. She is consistently doing interpersonal work to communicate empathy with the client’s situation. Yet as Lucy fluently interprets legal terms and concepts to her multilingual clients, there is something more than register in play: law as a discourse and institution. It is not obvious whether the interactions we have looked at are bringing Cara into the discourse and institution of law; it seems more that Lucy is making Cara aware of the real-life consequences of the law for her lifeworld, while remaining focused on the processes to be gone through and what the client must do at each stage. Yet it seems that some of Lucy’s clients do indeed, in time, simply by going through processes over and over again, pick up some key terms of law as a register, if not perhaps of law as a discourse. In the next section, we will examine the interdiscursive issues that came up for Mr Tancoš when, in the course of the session described in Chapter Four, he was asked to complete an Equal Opportunities questionnaire as part of his registration.

Interdiscursive translanguaging: Answering an Equal Opportunities question on sexual orientation As discussed above, in addition to the interlingual and intralingual translanguaging discussed so far, which correspond to shifts across language and register, respectively, we also identify a kind of translanguaging that goes beyond the Jakobson framework. Drawing on Fairclough’s (1992) use of the term, we describe this kind of translanguaging as interdiscursive. Interdiscursive translanguaging occurs when there is an unfamiliar discourse that needs to be negotiated. Here, it is the discourse of Equal Opportunity Monitoring. We will see how interdiscursive translanguaging is triggered when Klára mediates the question “Are you heterosexual?” to Mr Tancoš in order to complete the monitoring section of the Migrant Counsel registration form. Since Mr Tancoš is new to the Migrant Counsel, in the course of the session with Klára, the manager Rahim comes in to complete the registration form required for new clients. Part of this is the Equal Opportunity Monitoring section, which includes a question on sexual orientation as one of the protected categories: Rahim, the manager, enters. He asks for the client’s surname, first name, (Klára spells it out), address – Axxx View, tel number (T gives it to Klára in Czech), if he has any disability. R:  Is it easy to ask this question? K: which one? Hesitates. Jste K: which one? Hesitates. Are you heterosexuál? heterosexual? T:  co to je? T:  what is it? K:  he said, what is it.

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  85 T:  Ja jsem na ženský. T:  I like women. K:  he said he likes women (all laugh) R:  Date of birth? K:  dvacátého desátý šedesát osm? K:  Twentieth of the tenth sixty- eight? T: jo T: yea K:  twentieth of October sixty-eight K:  why is it there if people feel uncomfortable asking it? R:  I feel uncomfortable asking this question, but it’s required. Nineteen? K: sixty-eight. R:  sometimes people have funny reaction. K: (to Mr Tancoš) voni to tam prostě K: (to Mr Tancoš) they just have those ty otázky, někdo se ptaj, někdy questions there, somebody asks, neptaj, je to pro ňáký statistiky, asi. sometimes they don’t, it’s for some statistics, perhaps.

The sexual orientation question, it seems, provokes some uncertainty on the part of Rahim, who asks in English: “Is it easy to ask this question?” Klára asks which question it is that Rahim is referring to, then hesitates a moment and asks in Czech: Jste heterosexuál? There seems a degree of discomfort among all parties in asking this question, which starts with Rahim’s comment. This is also indexed perhaps by a degree of turn-taking breakdown. Klára asks, “Which one?” but almost immediately answers her own question and translates it into Czech. Later Mr Tancoš asks co to je? (“what is it?”), but again answers without waiting for a response to his question. Everybody involved in the interaction seems to know what is being asked; what nobody seems to be clear about is why. Klára and Rahim continue to discuss this: K: why is it there if people feel uncomfortable asking it? R: I feel uncomfortable asking this question, but it’s kind of required. Rahim’s critical question (“Why?”) and the vague passive construction (“it’s kind of required”, not really specifying or making clear who is requiring it) illustrate the speakers’ uncertainty and self-distancing from the question. The atmosphere of veiled and not-so-veiled criticism of the sexual orientation question persists, with Rahim saying: R: sometimes people have funny reaction. Klára turns to Mr Tancoš to explain in Czech, attributing the question to some unspecified third persons (in bold): K: voni to tam prostě ty otázky, někdo se ptaj, někdy neptaj, je to pro ňáký statistiky, asi [they just have those questions there, somebody asks, sometimes they don’t, it’s for some statistics, perhaps].

86  Part I Another similar issue comes up with the Equality Monitoring in relation to the question on religion. But here there seems to be no need to mediate a discourse: to be asked about your religious affiliation seems to be a commonplace: R:  religion Christian, yea? K: máte ňáký náboženství, nebo ne? K:  do you have any religion, or not? T:  tak, normální. T:  well, normal. K: laughs tak, normální je? He said K: laughs well, normal is? He said “normal”. “normal”. T:  Žádný ... katolík. T:  none ... Catholic. K:  Katolík. Tak žádný nebo katolík? K:  Catholic. So, none or Catholic? T:  Katolík, nó ... T:  Catholic, yea ... K:  (still laughing) he said normal, which one is normal?

These identity questions seem to have the capacity for provoking discomfort, particularly the sexual orientation one, though also in a different way in the religion question. Religiously, Mr Tancoš is “normal”, which appears to mean somewhere between nothing and Catholic, the unmarked religion in the Czech Republic. It seems that sexually he is “normal” as well. What is interesting in this interaction is that nobody seems prepared to own the sexual orientation question. It is something in both English and Czech that “they” are asking for, and thus has nothing to do with “us”. This provokes a misunderstanding which can be understood as a problem of framing. Mr Tancoš does not seem to be inside the discourse of Equal Opportunities Monitoring; the others present are, even if they are uncomfortable with the relatively recent but now commonplace sexual orientation question. If you are inside the Equal Opportunities Monitoring discourse as it has developed over time, the question on sexual orientation is relatively easy to make sense of, even if someone feels reluctant to ask or answer it. To Mr Tancoš, who is outside the discourse, the question is totally random and incomprehensible as is evidenced by his reaction. This triggers the mediating work that is outlined above. Interdiscursive translanguaging can be understood here as mediating or interpreting a discourse, in this case Equal Opportunities Monitoring, to someone who is outside it. As we saw in the interaction between Lucy and Cara, it is not obvious that Cara is being brought into the discourse of law. Here, the other protagonists make no attempt to bring Mr Tancoš in either, distancing themselves from it interactionally by attributing the question vaguely to something “they” do to “us”. In both these cases, the discourse is a kind of elephant in the room, alluded to but not made explicit. Participants such as Mr Tancoš and Lucy’s clients are subjected to or regulated by the discourse without actively appropriating it. The difference is that Lucy tries to bridge the gap by explaining why a certain course of action is desirable or not, possible or not, drawing from her repertoire in

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  87 terms of her legal expertise and also her finetuned capacity to explain legal terms and concepts in more everyday language. In the next case, however, we will look at an instance where another TLANG key participant Monika is schooled into not only the genre and register but also the discourse of a funding application. Thus, this case differs from the previous two in that there is a conscious attempt to scaffold not just genre and register but also discourse on the part of those who help Monika with her form. Monika is being brought into the discourse as an agent.

Interdiscursive translanguaging: Working up a business plan We find another example of interdiscursivity at work when Monika, a key participant in the heritage phase of the Leeds TLANG project, plans to realize her dream of a place to house and conduct a range of Roma-related cultural and advice giving activities, and is encouraged to apply for small scale start-up funding (for a more detailed discussion, see Baynham [2019]). There are clearly register dimensions in learning the language of small business and social enterprise as well as the genre of the funding application, but more than that, there is a discourse of small business by which she has to be interpellated. She works with two people, Parmi (P) and Sharon (S), whose job it is to assist potential applicants conceptualize and develop an idea for funding; later on, she also works with the project researcher, Jolana, who helps her complete the form. It is in the conversations with Parmi, Sharon, and Jolana that we can see intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging at work, though it is also in evidence in the Business Plan pro-forma used by Parmi’s organization. Turning your dream into a project We have identified that a key feature of Monika’s dream is a space in which to develop Roma cultural heritage activities. Space in the Harehills area of Leeds, where we conducted the Translation and Translanguaging (TLANG) research, is in short supply and comes at a cost. Space requires funding, and in this section, we examine how Monika pursues the possibility of social enterprise funding, working first with two organizations which support social enterprise applications in the local community. In order to apply for funding, Monika has to (a) reconceptualize her idea into a fundable project within the constraints of available funding sources, such as Social Enterprise; and (b) complete a Business Plan to gain seedcorn funding for it. This process is initiated for Monika when she engages with two particular individuals, Parmi (Bright Ideas Fund of Leeds City Council) and Sharon (Integrity Endeavour), who help shape what Monika does and, specifically, how she subsequently completes the Business Plan form. We also documented the process by which Monika completed the Business Plan form, helped by Jolana. How can we understand this process? Clearly, Monika is engaging with a new and unfamiliar genre, namely that of the business plan. There are also

88  Part I features of register, or the language of business, such as “gap in the market”, “cash flow projection”, “products and services”, “pricing structure”, etc. But there is something more to this: we see how Monika, both in interaction with Parmi and Sharon and then later with Jolana, but also in interaction with the Business Plan form itself, is being obliged to reconfigure herself as a business person. She is taking on the discourse, so in that sense, filling in the Business Plan pro-forma is something transformational. This transformational writing of yourself into a role has obvious identity consequences. These have been discussed in the context of academic writing, where researchers such as Ivanič (1998) and Lillis (2001) have investigated the kind of identity work that arises when novice writers apprentice themselves into new forms of writing (as Ivanič puts it), involving the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. In a similar way, through the act of filling in the business plan, Monika is constructing herself as a different kind of person – a business person, a planner. Thus, we have discourses, genres, and registers in play, and we have established that negotiating these new forms has identity implications. Let us now examine in a little more detail the interactional process that Monika goes through with Parmi and others to recontextualize her initial idea of a place of her own into something potentially fundable. The Bright Ideas Fund itself is conceptualized as an initial point of access for people who would probably have little or no business experience. It provides a kind of bridge into the discourse of the business world. The concept of bridge implies something to be crossed, a border. As Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) point out, borders are not just between nation states or language communities; they crisscross the social world, manifesting wherever inequalities in power, knowledge, access, and resources are to be found. This bridge or access-point character can be seen in the text of the business plan itself. In its interactive and conversational tone, the Business Plan is quite literally bridging the space between everyday language and the specialized language of business – in which Monika must become fluent if she is to get funding and realize her dream of a place of her own. There are a number of phases in Monika’s working on the Business Plan.

My Pricing Structure This is a tough one. You must consider your pricing carefully if you want to get into the market. You will need to know your costs before you can arrive at the correct sales price. Your prices need to be keen but don’t fall into the trap of being too cheap. Do your homework and borrow a few prices from the competition and adjust to give you the edge. This will show whether or not you can deliver at a price that is suitable for all concerned. (DON’T SELL FOR MEDALS)

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  89 In this extract from the text of the Business Plan pro-forma, we notice a bright and cheerful conversationalized tone, yet another example of “epistemic flattening”. The novice business-plan writer is addressed directly throughout (“you”), and there are everyday idiomatic expressions (“don’t fall into the trap”, “give you the edge”). The supporting text can be seen as a conversationalized expansion and gloss of the term “Pricing Structure”, drawn from the more specialized lexis of business. We see that the person who designed this pro-forma is drawing on a repertoire that goes from specialized to everyday, another example of intralingual translanguaging. The final sentence “DON’T SELL FOR MEDALS!” reads like a motivational slogan, its idiomaticity perhaps as opaque to some readers as the technical lexis. Initial meeting with Parmi In an initial meeting, Monika comes up with quite a variety of ideas for her project: some office where I can support clients with my advocacy do some parties people will come to me and I can help them call job seekers I will do like drop-ins my job’s gonna be get them some ESOL classes zumba classes carnival advising them take them somewhere support them to go GP to be their hand In response, Parmi encourages Monika to focus, articulating the discourse of the Business Plan in plain and accessible language: Start with one small idea Look at one thing at a time You’re not getting paid You need the money You can’t start your own business unless you've got some money and are gonna make some profit or you’re gonna put it back into the [business] Monitoring. Looking at how many people you’re visiting? Gathering that evidence and being able to say that actually we’ve saved this organisation this much money because otherwise interpreting would have cost this much Part of Parmi’s cultural brokering involves mediating the discourse implied in the business plan to Monika. She does this through explicitly creating a bridge between the specialist language involved (“business plan”, “pricing strategy”) and Monika’s experiential starting point. To do this, Parmi is drawing on her repertoire of specialist business language and everyday language to create a bridge for Monika. There is thus both a register and a discourse dimension to this work: Monika is not only learning to talk the talk, but she is also reinventing herself in the process.

90  Part I Working on the Business Plan with Sharon In a series of follow-up meetings with Monika, Sharon works with her to develop her business plan idea, while at the same time inculcating what we might call a businesslike, planning approach, or a business planning discourse. Questions Sharon uses a questioning technique to test Monika’s responses and to force her to think more deeply about an issue. Through the use of questioning, Sharon pushes Monika to thinking in a more focused way about how her enterprise will be funded. P: The question is who’s gonna pay for it M: Lottery S: but this is the point I’ve made, when that money is finished, where is the next batch of money gonna come from? You see what I mean Directives As well as questions, Sharon uses directives, saying “I want you to” and “you’re gonna” to command Monika to behave in particular ways and to do particular things. She appears to be taking control of Monika’s discourse and of how Monika will develop her plans. Here are two examples: those are the things I want to, on your business plan template that I’m gonna send you, I want you to be very clear on is that one pound donation gonna be enough to do your rent, your rates, your electricity, your staffing. Because this is what burns us out in the UK but what you’re gonna say to the GP is, what you’re gonna say to the GP is, if you buy from me I will cut down the amount of time this person comes. Because each time they go it’s costing the GP. Probing To further test the logic of Monika’s responses, Sharon probes them by bringing up further points for Monika to think about. M: mostly I would get voluntary, I will apply for voluntary staff from jobseekers or something S: again, let me, let me, I’m gonna be, I’m being honest with you so you know, you know, what happens with volunteers is, they will do and do and do but volunteers have to live as well. M: yea, sure S: they have to eat, they have to drink. So after a while volunteers they go. You see what I mean. So you’re constantly having to find volunteers. So [...]

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  91 Working on the business plan Later in the process, during a visit to Monika’s home, Monika and Jolana start to talk about the office space and the business plan. Here we can see the extent to which she has internalized not just the linguistic aspect of the business planning process – the genre and the register – but also the mindset, that is to say, the discourse. M: funding že tam je, a ona ho chce spustit mě, těch 6000. (...) J:  a to je Parmi anebo Sharon? M: Sharon. Na vykopnutí, víš? Či jak to mám povedať.

M: there is a funding, and she wants to release it for me, those 6000. (...) J:  and that’s Parmi or Sharon? M: Sharon. For kick start, you know? Or how should I say it.

Here we can see how Monika is beginning to assimilate some of the lexis of the Business Plan and start-up of small businesses more generally, using the English “funding” and vykopnutí (a translation of English “kick start”). M: Ale ona povedala že hlavně nechť M: But she said I should describe most vypišem svoj napad, víš, toto a importantly my idea, you know, this hlavně nápad do toho. A zvyšok and primarily the idea in it. And the ona už může dát ňák do kopy. rest she can somehow put together. J:  Hmm. Hmm, ale víš co je dobrý, J:  Hmm. Hmm, but you know, it’s good přijít tam prostě s něčim, a něco to go there with something, and then jakoby upravit než to prostě adapt it than just M: právě, lenže já som aj skúšela M: that’s right, but I was trying to fill this toto ňák vyplňovat, já nevim... in somehow, I don’t know ... I don’t nevim jak to dát do kopy, jak sa know how to put it together, how to vyjadriť abysom neopakovala to express myself so that I’m not repeating isté furt. the same thing all the time.

It seems Monika has taken on the concept of “one idea”, forcefully proposed to her by both Parmi and Sharon. We can see Monika, in interaction with Parmi, Jolana, and others, being interpellated into the Business Plan discourse, and more specifically into the discourse and practices of Third Sector Business. Stuart Hall has written dynamically of this construction of identity position in relation to dominant discourses in terms of identification and suturing: Identities are thus points of temporary attachments to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us ... They are the result of a successful articulation or “chaining” of the subject into the flow of the discourse, what Stephen Heath, in his path-breaking essay on “Suture” called “an intersection” (1981: 106). “A theory of ideology must begin

92  Part I not from the subject but as an account of suturing effects, the effecting of the join of the subject in structures of meaning”. (Hall 2000: 19) Monika is starting to take on the business identity position, all the while protesting that she does not feel able to express herself well. As it turns out, the writing of the Business Plan is interactionally scaffolded with Monika and scribed by Jolana. Here, Jolana and Monika are working on the Personal Aims and Objectives section of the Business Plan. We see a term in the heading familiar to anyone writing a proposal: “Aims and Objectives”, glossed with the conversationalized address to the novice writer: My Personal Aims & Objectives You should give a little background on you and what you wish to achieve by starting your own business, i.e. to prove your capabilities, provide security for your family, or something you have wanted to do for a long time but just not had a chance. People like to see that you have enthusiasm and commitment. Their working method is oral discussion with Monika presenting her ideas, which Jolana reformulates and then scribes. Czech in bold, translated text in italics JH:    Ok erm my personal aims and objectives erm (.) jo tak tady v těch v tom vysvětlení pod tim < yeah so here in this explanation underneath> like to prove your capabilities provide security for your family or something you have wanted to do for a long time but just not had the chance so it’s like what you want to get out of it MS:   tak erm hm how to say it hm I want to people stand s- be same as me change their future JH:   I want MS:     I don’t know how to say it An indication of how far Monika is progressing in discursively constructing the employer mindset occurs when she starts thinking about the pros and cons of various types of employment contract: M: T našla jednu z Rumunska, M: T found one from Romania, who ktorá by chtěla pre mňa would like to work for me as pracovat ako živnostnička. self-employed. So I would not be Takže bysom já nedávala za ňú paying her pension and these things, pension a takéto, víš you know

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  93 Later, Jolana challenges her on the idea that she could use voluntary interpreters, as did Sharon earlier. Monika expands her idea by proposing employing interpreters on zero-hour contracts and paying travel expenses. Ironically, this is exactly the precarious employment category from which she herself is trying to escape. J: M: J: M: J: M:

J: M:

Jo takže advocacy, k tomu budeš potřebovat interpretov voluntary môžme zohnat jó? akože né voluntary Hele, ty sama to nechceš dělat jako né voluntary, ale akože já [...] požádám funding o to že bysom jim dala zero hours contract čiže bysom preplatila ako keby cestovné, na fundingu [...] to je ako to robí Damian

J: M: J: M: J: M:

J: M:

yea so advocacy, for that you will need voluntary interpreters we can get yes? like not voluntary look, you yourself don’t want to do it like not voluntary, but like I will apply for funding and give them zero hours contract so that I would pay them like travel costs, from the funding [...] that’s how Damian does it

Monika is beginning to think like an employer, evaluating different types of employment conditions. She has been interpellated by the discourse of small business. The process of seeking social enterprise funding for a small business implies taking on board a new register and a new discourse with its identity positions. Learning to do this in conversation with Parmi, Jolana, and others involves intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging. This is also clearly visible in the conversationalized tone of the Business Plan proforma, which explicitly mediates between everyday and specialized business lexis, while indexing the discursive shift that is required to think of oneself as a small business owner.

Discussion In previous sections of this chapter, we have seen how translanguaging is not just a characteristic of the multilingual repertoire but is also characteristic of those who might consider themselves monolingual – monolingual but not monovarietal. We have looked at a number of cases where speakers interactively construct meaning by drawing on register resources, where there is a specialized register and a commonplace, everyday one available to them. This we call, following Jakobson, intralingual translanguaging. We have also identified cases where questions of register cannot fully explain what is going on interactionally. When Mr Tancoš is asked (in Czech) “Are you heterosexual?” and replies “I like women”, it is not a problem with understanding the question itself, but rather with why he is being asked it. To answer the “why” question, it is necessary to be privy to the discourse of

94  Part I Equal Opportunities Monitoring, with its political, legal, and institutional dimensions which would need to be unpacked. We have seen instances of both intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging across the cases. When Klára works with Mr Tancoš to rewrite his letter into Standard Czech, she is working across registers as well as across languages. Later, when she is positioned by Rahim, she in turn is coming up against the institutional discourse of law. When Mr Tancoš fails to understand why he is being asked about his sexuality, it is nothing about language and all about the discourse/institution, which over time has produced in the UK (and elsewhere) the Equal Opportunities Monitoring process. When Lucy gives migration advice to her clients, the elephant in the room is the migration system, the appeals process, and, more broadly, the British legal system. All of this informs her work with her clients, but she does not make explicit the discourse as such; rather, she explains the process, seamlessly drawing on her repertoire to gloss and explain technical terms in ways that might be accessible to those without legal knowledge. In both cases, interdiscursivity is there but is not explicitly addressed. Lucy’s aims seem to be largely procedural, so that her clients can understand the process, what part they must play in it, what documentation they must provide, and when. Yet in the work of Parmi, Sharon, and Jolana, it seems that interdiscursivity is more explicitly present. They want Monika not just to be able to fill out the business plan, but also to learn to think and behave like a business person. This is why it makes sense to talk of discourse and interpellation. We would thus argue that where there are discourses in play, there is potential for interdiscursive translanguaging. A correlate of this is that we need to start thinking of discourses in terms of repertoire. A term that is often used for this type of interdiscursive work is cultural mediation or brokering. Thinking of cultural mediation or brokering in terms of repertoire is a powerful way of thinking about the kind of interaction we have analyzed in this chapter. This involves looking at the availability of discourses in a speaker’s repertoire and therefore the potential for interdiscursivity, understood as bringing together different discourses; this is analogous to the way the translanguaging utterance brings together elements from different languages, language varieties, or registers. It also connects with our arguments in Chapter Three for taking a translanguaging, and thus a repertoire, perspective on translating as process. Chapters Four and the current chapter have largely focused on community interpreting and advice giving, contexts which bring issues of translanguaging and translation together. Indeed, in the episode with Mr Tancoš, we encountered an act of translation when Klára reworks his letter into Standard Czech. We would suggest that while this is primarily intralingual, concerning a shift into the register of the formal letter, there are also interlingual issues, since Mr Tancoš’s nonstandard variety of Czech draws on Slovak. In Chapters Two and Three we showed how translanguaging as a language practice could be understood as language from below, liable to censure

Intralingual and interdiscursive translanguaging  95 and regulation by dominant language ideologies, whether monolingual or (separate) bilingual. On this view, Mr Tancoš is at times an explicit advocate for the translanguaging ideology. Translation as an activity, in contrast, appeared more hedged with language ideologies, institutional imperatives, notions of ownership, and the primacy of the source text. We would, however, argue that rarely has translation been investigated as dynamic language practice in the ways that have enabled the dynamic understanding of translanguaging to emerge. It follows that, if we made a focus on translating as activity and on the social and language practices of translators, translation might seem more like translanguaging than has up to now been apparent. In an important sense with regard to translation, we are advocating not so much a translanguaging approach to translation, but a repertoire approach. Community interpreting is an interesting case in this regard, as it demonstrates both the dynamic contingence and emergence of translanguaging as language practice, on the one hand, and its regulation by language ideologies, discourses, and institutions, on the other. When Klára, in Chapter Four, draws on her multilingual repertoire to work with M and L to understand the problem that L is presenting, they are on a terrain that is highly regulated and constrained by the benefits system. When she works with Mr Tancoš to draft a power of attorney letter for him to send back to the Czech Republic, the interaction is constrained by both the Czech and British legal systems and the Czech procedures for renewing a driving licence by proxy. Lucy in her advice is mediating immigration law to her multilingual clients, not on the whole by drawing on their languages (though in Chapter Four we saw an instance of informal interpreting, when a relative mediates), but rather by exploiting her own repertoire in English, which enables her to shift between the legal register and more everyday forms. If we understand translanguaging as constructing utterances drawing on resources available in the repertoire, then this too is translanguaging. What is evident also in the community interpreting data are differences in language ideology among participants. This is clearly illustrated in the interactions between Klára and Mr Tancoš concerning the rewriting of his original text. From the point of view of standard language ideology, this can be seen as an errorful melange of Czech and Slovak and poorly understood Czech legal terminology. Mr Tancoš’s view is that none of this matters provided that he gets his meaning across, in effect articulating the translanguaging ideology. By contrast, Klára is quite clearly articulating the standard language ideology in her assertion that in order to communicate effectively with a powerful other, it is best to conform to the norms of the standard written language. What is interesting about the extended interaction concerning the power of attorney letter is that when Klára gives the Standard Czech version to Rahim, she assumes that it is simply a question of translating this letter into English. Rahim insists that the letter must be first drafted in English, using the required legal formulation for powers of attorney. This must then

96  Part I be back-translated into Czech. We would argue that this is not simply a linguistic question, here of register, but of discourse and the law-as-institution. Working across discourses requires interdiscursivity. We therefore further argue that having access to discourses has to be taken as part of one’s repertoire. In the Equal Opportunities interaction between Mr Tancoš, Klára, and others, it is clear that he does not understand the question on sexual orientation, and that this is because he is not inside the discourse of Equal Opportunities – or at least that part of the discourse that engages with sexuality. He finds it less strange to be asked about his religious affiliation, it seems, even though that too is quite an awkward interaction. Similarly, Monika’s interactions with Parmi, Sharon, and others can be seen to be a prolonged apprenticeship into or interpellation by the discourse of small business and social enterprise. By the end of the process, this discourse is starting to become part of her repertoire.

Conclusion In Chapter Four, we have examined the role of the multilingual repertoire in community interpreting events, showing how Klára draws on Standard Czech and English as well as her knowledge of Slovak and Slovak-influenced Czech. This involves the most obvious form of translanguaging that corresponds to Jakobson’s interlingual variety. In this chapter, we have shown how speakers draw interactionally on varieties such as register, resulting in intralingual translanguaging, as when Klára works to redraft Mr Tancoš’s letter into Standard Czech, or when Lucy renders the legal terminology of immigration legislation accessible to her clients. Beyond this, we have identified discourses and institutional practices which are in play in the settings we examined, leading to an emphasis on interdiscursivity and interdiscursive translanguaging. What is involved here goes beyond interpreting in a narrow sense, encompassing cultural brokering as speakers work together to make meaning across borders in complex, differentiated settings which correspond to Pratt’s contact zones. In all the examples discussed in this and the previous chapter, however, language remains the central means of communication involved. In Chapter Six, we will look at phenomena beyond language proper: translanguaging across semiotic boundaries, corresponding to Jakobson’s intersemiotic, with a focus on visual-verbal interaction in the communication repertoire. This is a field where the theoretical landscape has changed beyond recognition since Jakobson’s programmatic paper. We will also develop the idea of translanguaging and the language-body interface.

6

Intersemiotic translanguaging The visual, the verbal, and the body

Introduction As discussed in Chapter Two, it is a cliché and a children’s game to ask someone to describe a spiral and then watch as they describe a spiral in the air with their finger. There is literally no better way to do it in language. Moving from language to consider the materiality and affordances of the visual, of gesture, and the body in order to communicate, takes translanguaging into the intersemiotic, multimodal domain. Let us recall the definition of translanguaging provided in Chapter Two: translanguaging always involves a selection from available resources in a repertoire. Here the repertoire extends to include the visual, the gestural, and what can be communicated with the body or, to be more precise, by the body. To provide a simple example: I can say to you “STOP”, I can raise my open hand, palm towards you in a gesture to signify stop, or I can wordlessly block you with my body. All of these communicate STOP but raise the interesting philosophical question of whether or to what extent the bodily action can itself be construed as semiotic. According to Butler “the body speaks … through a performativity of the body … that crosses language without ever quite reducing to language” (Butler 2011, n.p.). Each materiality has its affordances. We will explore these ideas in competitive team sport, with data from basketball games, where embodied practices such as blocking, marking, and passing are characteristic activities. We will also look at the materiality and affordances of the body in the practice of capoeira. To make sense of the intersemiotic repertoire that this implies, we draw on the notion of performativity as both serious and nonserious action. This focus on play and playfulness provides a transition to the aesthetic focus of the second part of this volume. When we started conceptualizing this book, we framed it by looking back to Jakobson’s (1959/2012) taxonomy of interlingual/intralingual/intersemiotic translation. In this chapter, we turn to the intersemiotic, and it must be said that this category has been developed out of all recognition since Jakobson introduced the term. The first and most obvious influence has been the work on multimodality, arising notably out of the social semiotic work of Kress and van Leeuwen (i.e. Kress and van Leeuwen 2006), which

98  Part I brought the visual into focus and into relationship with language in what has come to be known as multimodality (see Adami 2017 for an overview). This can be understood in part as a challenge to the dominance of language as a communicational means. Two decades later, it is widely accepted that a theoretical focus on language alone, without consideration of the other semiotic modes and orders with which it is imbricated, is inadequate. It is now a relatively accepted and normalized intellectual position that visual and verbal modes co-occur, shaped by “everyday acts of sign-making” (Adami 2017: 460). These everyday acts have a certain resemblance to the ways we have talked so far about translanguaging. The study of multimodality has itself been shaped by social semiotics, with its emphasis on the materiality and motivated character of the sign, and by functional linguistics. However, important work on incorporating the visual has also gone on in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and linguistic ethnography (e.g. Scollon and Scollon [2009] and contributions in Deppermann [2013], notably Goodwin [2013]). It seems there is a convergence among research approaches which value understanding in the social world towards moving beyond a single-minded focus on language. How can we understand translanguaging in relation to the interplay of semiotic modes? In Chapter Two, we pointed out the centrality of repertoire and that translanguaging always involves selection from a repertoire. Social semiotics and multimodality also brings us both the notion of the materiality of the sign and the idea of difference in affordances: in the example given here of describing a spiral, it seems that words won’t do, and it is easier and more effective to rely on a spiralling gesture with a forefinger. Here the affordances of the visual are more effective in communicating the spiral than words. But in this book, we are particularly interested in the creative bringing together of meanings in everyday settings, so in this chapter, we start by examining utterances and texts which bring together visual and verbal in intersemiotic translanguaging. It might be argued at this point that by using the term translanguaging, we are continuing to privilege language over other semiotic modes. Yet we also recall, as discussed in Chapters Two and Three, that the trans- in translanguaging has the meaning of going beyond language as such, and this is the meaning we emphasize here. Another advantage of the term translanguaging is that it can be used dynamically, that is, as something people do. As we saw in Chapter Two, this is an important aspect in the shift in perspective that translanguaging brings about. The affordances of the word “semiotic” or “trans-semiotic” do not seem to permit its use dynamically in the same way. It is also useful to remember at this point that the study of multimodality was initially the study of written texts (although work on classrooms by Kress et al. [2001] and the emphasis in Norris’s [2004, 2009] work have significantly extended this original emphasis). In contrast, the study of translanguaging has up till now primarily focused on spoken language. In this chapter and in the ones that follow, we blur and unsettle this distinction.

Intersemiotic translanguaging 

99

Visual-verbal modes interacting: Some illustrations We can illustrate how we understand the interaction of visual and verbal modes with some examples. For colour versions of the images discussed in this section please consult the e-reference “Visual-verbal modes interacting” on the Routledge website. The first example is a “found” visual-verbal text, encountered when boarding a plane in Barcelona (Figure 6.1). The text is intended presumably for staff whose job it is to connect la pasarela for passengers to disembark after a flight has landed. Here, our English deserts us, as we do not have immediate access to the English term for pasarela, which we must either Google or look up in a paper dictionary. For the purpose of this chapter, we do both, and discover that either “footbridge” or “gangway” are suggested translations, although a US website (traveltips.usa.today.com) uses “jetway”, and yet another potential translation is “airbridge”.

Figure 6.1 A visual-verbal sign on a plane in Barcelona.

100  Part I Literally translated, the Spanish text reads: “Always remember to give an OK sign after connecting the bridge”. Dar el ok provides an interlingual trace, since the word OK originates in English though it has clearly travelled since. What is interesting about this text is to ask: is it in effect an image with accompanying text or a text illustrated by an image? In translanguaging terms, establishing a hierarchy is less important than their connectedness. As we might recall from Chapter Five, this was Mr Tancoš’s perspective. We can assume that this image/text is assembled probably by at least two people, if not more; there will be someone to write the text (a copywriter) and someone to do the cartoon (an artist). Probably there will be at least another person or persons commissioning the whole. If we start to look at what we might call the natural history of this image/text, we might be able to reconstructively imagine the process by which it is assembled. Latour and Woolgar (1986) did this in their work on the sociology of science. So what is the image doing here? First, it is adding something semantically to the verbal message. The first image in the sequence of two shows a hand knocking on the fuselage door, presumably to attract attention; the second shows graphically the required OK sign, thus bringing in a gestural semiotic. The phase of knocking on the fuselage door to attract attention is not included in the verbal message. Presumably, the pragmatic aspect of the text would ensure that if you give an OK sign, you have identified someone to receive the sign, more specifically, someone who ought to receive it. Here, a male worker in a high visibility vest knocks from the outside, and a female flight attendant responds from the inside. There are clearly other aspects of this image/text that would interest a student of the materiality of the sign. Why is dar el ok in bold? How do we understand repertoire here when the image/text may been assembled by at least two people, possibly more? Leaving aside how it is assembled, we can perhaps assume that it is read as a whole, as a gestalt, hopefully by the people for whom it is intended. But probably the staff who are tasked to perform the action would have performed it countless times. The action would be inscribed in the body to become part of their bodily habitus; they would not really be “reading” this image/text at all. The next example is of a cartoon which came from an incident in Paris in May 2018, when an undocumented Malian migrant saved a child by scaling an apartment building to the balcony where the child was hanging. The episode was caught on mobile phones and was widely reported, leading to a number of high-profile consequences for the rescuer (Figure 6.2a). The irony of the undocumented migrant hero was captured in the cartoon in Figure 6.2b with the title GOOD MIGRANT/BAD MIGRANT. Apart from the title (which is perhaps redundant as the visual image makes the point so starkly), the point of the cartoon is made entirely visually, a combination of images and icons. The image of the man scaling, with its conspicuous parallelism, itself a visual equivalent of the argument, can be intertextually linked to the original photo above as well as the video footage which circulated widely. The TICK/CROSS icons are coloured respectively

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Figure 6.2a Undocumented migrant rescues child from balcony in Paris, May 2018.

Figure 6.2b A cartoon: “Good Migrant/Bad Migrant” by Tjeerd Royaards, courtesy of Cartoon Movement. Colour image also available as an eResource: https://www.routledge.com/9781138067042.

green and red and thus visually supported by the GO/STOP connotations of the green and red colour. The image as a whole, using the resources of juxtaposition, parallelism, and contrast, creates a highly condensed argument about the (dis)valuing of migrants. Are these examples of translanguaging? So far, our examples of translanguaging have been from spoken language. Certainly, these image/texts are created out of the bringing together of visual, iconic, and verbal material that relate to a certain theme. The first example articulates a safety procedure, while the second makes an argument about the fluctuating perception of refugees: in the morning, the Malian protagonist would have been a fugitive; in the afternoon, a hero.

102  Part I

Spatial repertoires and assemblages This discussion leads into some recent theoretical developments that take us beyond the initial focus of multimodality – on the characteristics of visualverbal texts – towards further emphasis both on the situatedness of visualverbal texts and on their history and processes of becoming. To explore what this means for the study of intersemiotic translanguaging, we will consider the idea of spatial repertoires (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015) and assemblages (as discussed in Canagarajah 2018) as ways of providing a more complete and complex account of both the ecology and the natural history of the translanguaging moment. We will also consider the implications of all this for a theorizing of the body and embodied action as part of the spatial repertoire, a connection that can lead in a number of directions, for example, to Scollon and Scollon’s (2004) nexus analysis. Spatial repertoires refer to the “throwntogetherness” (Massey 2005: 140) of linguistic and other semiotic resources in particular places. Social interaction is not merely the collision of individual trajectories but the spatial organization of semiotic resources and the semiotic organization of space (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015). Another way of thinking about throwntogetherness is through relationality: spatial repertoires are constituted by resources that though being thrown together in a space become related. Ways of thinking about the relationality of actors in space are provided by Actor Network Theory (ANT) or the notion of assemblage (French agencement), the bringing together of actors as elements in a network or assemblage which can consist of both human and nonhuman actors. Muller (2015) quotes Deleuze on assemblages: It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy”. It is never filiations which are important but alliances, alloys: these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 69, cited in Muller 2015: 28) Threading through the thought of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 2013) is the contrast between the hierarchical tree structure, exemplified by the tree diagram of formal linguistics, with the rhizomatic, comparable to the root structure of a grass lawn, multiple and endlessly interconnected but all on the same level (think of how the vertical and the horizontal function in the work of Bernstein [1999]). However, Deleuze and Guattari are at pains to point out that they are not conceptualizing this as an either/or binary, even though language traps them into expressing it that way. There is a strange similarity between the rhizomatic and the translanguaging language

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ideology articulated so clearly by Mr Tancoš, while Klára herself, as we have seen, advocates a more top-down language ideology. Let us illustrate this by looking back at the process that Monika went through in working on her Business Plan with Parmi, Sharon, and Jolana. She was thrown together with them in the process but also with a significant nonhuman actor, the Business Plan pro-forma itself, which, as we saw in Chapter Five, significantly shaped the interactions we examined. So why is this relevant to our study of intersemiotic translanguaging? Because it provides a tool for thinking about the language element of any interaction relationally, along with other semiotic orders, materials, and embodied practices. This in turn provides a way of thinking of the translanguaging moment as an assemblage of elements, some of which are linguistic and others beyond language, but all of which are material. This also provides a way of making sense of the multiple authorships of the image/texts we discussed above. It seems puzzling that a particular image/text could be brought together by a number of actors. However, a moment’s reflection will suggest that many communication activities are coproduced and jointly constructed or, as Deleuze would put it, cofunctioning. If we imagine the spatial repertoire of a graphic design office, then we can see how a number of actors can come together in a more or less transitory way to make something happen, the outcome being the sign we are currently examining. Constructs such as spatial repertoire and assemblage show how far we have come theoretically from a simple understanding of context as the situation or setting of language use, what Baynham (2003) calls “backdrop” accounts of context. Seen from the perspective of spatial repertoire or assemblage, or indeed from other related theories such as ANT (Latour 2005) or nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004), “context” is a dynamic construct composed of different semiotic orders, including the shaping influence of space and place itself and the material and embodied contribution of actors, both human and artefactual. What is the contribution of the body and embodiment to the spatial repertoire? In considering the aircraft boarding image/text, we suggested that in situ, the experienced worker would not necessarily be relying on the warning notice as a kind of semiotic mediator to shape and channel the activity in the recommended direction. As Scollon (2001: 6–7) points out, actions repeated over and over again become embodied as part of a bodily habitus. One of the most obvious ways that the body impinges on the communicational moment is through gesture, a heavily semiotized and often conventionalized nonverbal modality, which can be used either to supplement verbal communication or as an alternative to it. The use of gesture was very salient in the data collected for the TLANG project at a Chinese butcher’s stall in the Birmingham City Market and is analyzed in detail in Blackledge and Creese (2017: 256):

104  Part I It was immediately evident to the research team that a significant feature of the semiotic repertoires of both market traders and their customers was the body. Customers would regularly point to the produce they wished to purchase. They used physical gestures to order their meat and offal – a man touched his own tongue when he wanted ox tongue; a man pointed to his own head when he wanted to buy pig’s head; a woman tapped her thigh to indicate leg of lamb. Traders and customers held up fingers to indicate numbers, quantities, or prices; they raised their thumbs to indicate assent; elaborate mimes represented chickens or pigs. Gesture, mime, and physical performance were part of the spatial repertoire of the market hall, and a feature of the orders of discourse. One of the examples Blackledge and Creese analyze is an interaction between a customer and one of the butchers concerning the possibility of purchasing a pig’s small intestine. Here is how they describe the interaction: A customer approaches the stall and Bradley (BJ), the butcher’s assistant, realises that the customer wants to buy pig’s small intestine. Bradley explains to the customer that although the butchers once sold this item, they are no longer able to do so. Bradley and the customer negotiate mainly by means of iconic gestures which represent the large and small intestine, by deictic gesture, and through speech. The customer asks the butcher a question by saying “is it this erm?”, as he does so representing the small intestine with a gesture made by opening his arms wide, bringing his hands together, and opening his arms wide again [Figure 6.3a]. (Blackledge and Creese 2017: 257)

Figure 6.3a Customer opens his arms wide.

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Figure 6.3b Bradley points to his stomach.

The interaction carries on as follows: In response, Bradley points to his own stomach [Figure 6.3b] to represent the intestine, and then points to the pig’s large intestine, which is displayed on the counter. With reference to the large intestine, Bradley makes a gesture to represent “small” with his finger and thumb, and repeats the gesture of pointing to his own stomach to represent the intestine. He shakes his right hand quickly from side to side to indicate a negative response. He then makes a gesture with his hands clasped to represent “the small one”. As he does so he says, “no no no you want the in- the small intestine don’t you no no, you want that one but the small one”. Next Bradley mimics the customer’s original gesture with arms apart to represent the small intestine, and points to the large intestine, saying “not that one”. Finally he makes a shrug with his hands and then with his arms as he says “no more”. (Blackledge and Creese 2017: 257–259) In interactions such as these, through the detailed analysis of Blackledge and Creese, we see the bringing together interactionally of talk and gesture, which both combines with and acts as an alternative to talk. Video recording of the interaction shows how the exchange is choreographed as part of the spatial repertoire. Participants rely not only on a sedimented repertoire of gestures, but also on their own creativity.

106  Part I

Intersemiotic and embodied translanguaging in sport: capoeira and basketball In this chapter, we draw on data from another phase of the TLANG project at Leeds, the sports phase. In this phase, we worked with Tiago from Mozambique, a capoeirista and basketball player. Gesture was a significant feature in both the capoeira and basketball sessions that we observed, but there seemed to be something beyond gesture in the way that bodies were implicated in those sessions. To explore this, we draw on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity of the body, mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. Butler’s recent writing on the performativity of the body occurs in the context of a consideration of mass political protest on the streets, such as occurred in Egypt and elsewhere during the “Arab Spring”: Although the bodies on the street are vocalizing their opposition to the legitimacy of the state, they are also, by virtue of occupying that space, repeating that occupation of space, and persisting in that occupation of space, posing the challenge in corporeal terms, which means that when the body “speaks” politically, it is not only in vocal or written language. The persistence of the body calls that legitimacy into question, and does so precisely through a performativity of the body that crosses language without ever quite reducing to language. In other words, it is not that bodily action and gesture have to be translated into language, but that both action and gesture signify and speak, as action and claim, and that the one is not finally extricable from the other. (Butler 2011, n.p.) According to Butler, then, the massed bodies oppositionally occupying public space speak through a performativity of the body, simply by persisting and resisting. A key insight for our purposes is that “both action and gesture signify and speak … and that the one is not finally extricable from the other”. This inextricability of component elements is one of the characteristics we have identified for translanguaging, so we argue that the performativity of the body, when combined with language, can be thought of as a kind of translanguaging. We found this idea of the performativity of the body, of the body speaking, helpful in making sense of the action/reaction sequences which make up both capoeira and basketball practice. But it is necessary for our purposes to distinguish between the spaces produced and inhabited by different actional genres. A demonstration, while it may have ludic aspects, is a serious action in the world, while capoeira and basketball are spaces of play, that is, nonserious action. The distinction between serious and nonserious action is one originally made by J. L. Austin (1962), but Austin’s approach was significantly critiqued by Derrida (1972) for privileging the analysis of serious rather than nonserious action. Here we follow Derrida’s line and look at the performativity of nonserious action.

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What happens if we incorporate the speaking body into the communicative repertoire? As we have highlighted throughout this book, the notion of repertoire implies selection from communicative options available to the subject. Originally conceived in sociolinguistics as linguistic repertoire, we have seen, through the work of Rymes (2014) and Kusters et al. (2017), how repertoire must be extended to include not just languages, modalities (spoken/written), and registers but also a range of semiotic possibilities (visual, gestural, etc.). That is because virtually anything in our world can be enlisted to signify. The example we gave at the beginning of this chapter was of different ways of communicating STOP – verbally, visually, gesturally, but also corporeally: by blocking an oncoming person with one’s body. Butler’s (2011) analysis of bodies in protest is a more philosophically sophisticated and situated development of this idea: that the body insisting on its presence in public space is performative, not through language or gesture but by simply persisting there in resistance to some power. (The recent Palestinian demonstrations against the inauguration of the US Embassy in Jerusalem and its bloody consequences are an example of protesting performatively with the body and its consequences.) Consider the notion of spatial repertoire in the space evoked here, a public space occupied by resistant bodies, bodies who are speaking back performatively against some power, saying NO or STOP. Within the spatial repertoire, space is dynamic, transformative, and transformed by action, a coproductive relationship. In times of peace, a public square can be somewhere you stroll through, a place to meet friends. In the time of a demonstration, it is transformed by the bodies that occupy it and the forces that resist or try to control the occupation. Thus, a short walk to a drinking fountain could become a walk into a no-go zone between demonstrators and riot police. Space transforms, and is in turn transformed by, action. Butler develops her ideas about the performativity of the body in relation to a public, politicized space. How can we relate this to the spaces that capoeira and basketball both occupy and produce as activity? What roles do the bodies of the players enact? Most notably, both capoeira and basketball are play; they are ludic, nonserious action. When a basketball player blocks another with their body (cf. the example of embodied action with which we started this chapter), or indeed when two capoeiristas circle round each other making challenging lunges, it is carried out within a play frame. In order to think through what kind of spatial repertoire capoeira and basketball bring into being, we need to remember that, whatever the material space within which they take place (in a gym, in a park, on a street corner), the activities of capoeira and basketball create a space of play. Barring accident, life and limb are not threatened by engaging in capoeira or basketball, whereas the demonstrators occupying a public space are potentially putting themselves at risk in an existential speaking back to power. However, the relationship of capoeira and basketball to violence and danger are different. Capoeira is both dance and martial art; in certain contexts in Brazil, as we

108  Part I will discuss below, it can shade into street fighting (capoeira do rua) (“street capoeira”). But here in the contexts we studied, it is diasporic capoeira, emphasizing exercise, fitness, mental and physical training, and conviviality rather than the raw fight element. In the next sections, we will consider first capoeira and then basketball, asking, in line with Butler (2011), how, in gesture and beyond, the body works in these spaces of play as a communicative resource. Interestingly, Tiago, whom we followed through his capoeira and basketball practice, found strong support in his family in Mozambique for basketball, while capoeira was disapproved of. Tiago thwarted his grandfather’s dream when he found capoeira, which clearly did not have the same potential in his grandfather’s eyes as basketball, seen as a strategy to find success and a path through life through scholarships to play at American universities. T: When I say I do capoeira, oh, he feel so upset with me. Cause he didn’t understand what I was feel you know. And he say oh no, you need do basketball, you could go to US you know, you you xxx gonna be basketball. Tiago’s family was not supporting his new passion, so he had to find excuses in order to be able to train – such as saying he was going to basketball and then practising capoeira on his own in a dark corner of the basketball court, hiding his practice of capoeira in a similar way to the slaves in Brazil in colonial times: T:  And erm and when I start capoeira I I was doing school in secondary school, but outside like in the basketball place outside and no light but it was xxx capoeira, ginga, was was, yea, I remember this time MB:  after school T:    yea was like erm half 6 until half 7, so what I did, I s-, I was say to them I go to do basketball but not was go to basketball, to go to capoeira. That’s why when I found capoeira I stopped little bit basket, you know. Playing with its dance/martial arts ambiguity, Tiago tries to convince his family that capoeira is a traditional dance, similar to what African slaves did in Brazil in front of their masters: MB:  and what about capoeira, what did they [the family] think of capoeira T:   when I start capoeira was difficult MB:  xxx like it T:   I was, I was run to go and I not was tell them when xxx MB:    so they didn’t like capoeira T:   no, no MB:    why why was that

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T:  cause some people think capoeira is very like violent thing because people doesn’t understand, you know, people in, some people in Mozambique doesn’t understand, what is capoeira, where it come from, you know. But if I say to them oh, I do kind of traditional dancing from there, xxx ok As we can see then, capoeira in the contexts where it originated was rather disreputable, indexing its long history of association with black Brazilian resistance.

Capoeira: The body at play Capoeira is referred to as a game (jogo in Portuguese); therefore it is played, not fought. The participants are arranged in a circle, or roda in Portuguese. The word roda can also denominate the social gathering in which capoeira is played. The circle may vary in size, depending on the number of participants or other factors, and it is formed by people sitting or standing at its edge, marking the space for the game taking place inside. Capoeira is played to music, produced by the orchestra, or bateria in Portuguese, the chief instrument in the bateria being the stringed berimbau. The orchestra is also situated at the perimeter of the circle, and the musicians sit on chairs or a bench. (Three video extracts are provided on the Routledge website for this book to illustrate our discussion below). Space is differently configured at each stage of the capoeira session. Those we observed typically took place in borrowed space, with enough room to accommodate the expansive movements of capoeira, in community centres around Leeds. Typically, an evening meeting would fall into a number of phases. Group members would arrive in loose clothing and would chat till Leandro, the contra-mestre, arrived and started setting up: the berimbau and other percussion instruments, a small CD player or similar for playing capoeira songs and music. Then the group would gather round the contra-mestre, who would distribute instruments to be played by the students while he sang a song typically with distinctive Afro-Brazilian terms: Aruandé é faca de matar, Quando eu vou pra Angola. In the next phase, the contra-mestre might question students about some aspect of the song or other capoeira practice, or tell a story to explain some aspect of the history of capoeira in Brazil. In this phase of the session, the spatial repertoire is balanced differently than it will be later, with a predominance here of the verbal, as Leandro sings and explains, and the students sing along and ask or answer questions. This musical-cultural phase typically leads into an individual/pair practice phase. Leandro puts recorded capoeira music onto the CD player. The practical part sometimes starts with a warm-up, with a series of gingas (the basic dance move of capoeira practice) performed individually, the students following Leandro and facing the same direction. The students also spend a lot of time practising in pairs. In the practical part of Leandro’s classes,

110  Part I we notice a shift from a predominantly vocal communication used in the theoretical part to a greater use of communication through physical movement. Spoken communication is also used, mostly for instruction, when it is typically accompanied by a demonstration of the physical movement in question. The music sets the rhythm and pace of interaction; all capoeira movements in the practice and play phases are harmonized with it. Having demonstrated the movement, Leandro would typically go round and spend time with each student, observing how they were doing it and correcting them if necessary, again both verbally and physically (in Video Extract One, he instructs Sophie through demonstration as well as verbally). The exercise is broken down into parts to make it easier to follow, and the verbal instructions follow the exercise. Leandro’s first verbal instruction (troca – change) is followed by a pause, in which he stays for a moment in a position he wants his students to imitate. The next verbal instructions (rola – roll, troca – change) are immediately followed by the movement. They are deictic and can be correctly interpreted only when accompanied by the action. Leandro uses words to describe a key action while at the same time modelling the action with his body. The students imitate him as best they can, according to their level of experience. If we work with this dynamic concept of the coproduction of meaning in space that is implied by constructs such as spatial repertoire and assemblage, we see Leandro’s instructional words co-producing meaning with the actions that his body is modelling. When he says “roll”, he rolls. This coproduction looks very much like the coproduction of a translanguaged utterance selected from the repertoire. But here the elements fluently brought together are language and something from Leandro’s repertoire of capoeira movements, something inscribed in his body. As with the spiral example, we can consider this in terms of modal affordances; materially, it makes a lot more sense to demonstrate a roll than to describe it. Spoken language can be substituted by the embodied demonstration of a movement completely. On one occasion, Leandro gathers his students at one side of the room and starts performing a movement in silence, moving towards the other side of the room, with his students following him (see Video Extract Two). Leandro does not need to explain verbally what he requires from his students – they know it because the activity is a habitual one, one that is sedimented, as it were, in their bodily habitus. Video data show the activity has a mirroring structure: rather than responding to Leandro’s move with a move of their own as in the roda (which is conversational in structure, one move inviting another responsive move), here the students mirror it as best as they can. Verbal communication is used mostly for instruction during the practical part, but information on the history of capoeira might get thrown in the middle of the exercises to illustrate certain moves. The information on the historical context gives the students an idea about what the movement should look like, apart from serving as an example of the malandragem (skillful cunning) of the old mestres. Leandro explains that the movements should be fluid, almost as if you are drunk. The old mestres would

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sometimes pretend that they were drunk, that they were harmless. Leandro staggers around the room illustratively, then all of a sudden performs a few highly precise attacks. Here, again, we find the verbal–body interplay: the story is told in words, just as the body tells it. Practising in pairs often follows the practice of individual movements, and it can be seen as a step between the exercises performed individually and the actual game in the roda. Unlike in a real game in the roda, however, practising in pairs is an opportunity to learn and practise the moves, leaving space for discussion between the two students. The exercises in pairs are usually synchronized and practised at a close distance; therefore, coordination and communication are essential for the successful performance of the sequence. The students use both spoken language and body movement to communicate to each other. Spoken communication is likely to be significant, especially when beginners are involved. In our video data, there is an instance when a lot of speaking is taking place between Sophie and Jolana, who had just started doing capoeira, whereas Tiago and another advanced student are training mostly in silence. These patterns of communication may be different at capoeira workshops, as each mestre may prefer a different way of running the class. Another mestre, Axé, in his welcoming speech at the beginning of his workshop, outlined the behaviour he was expecting from the students: During the class, please don’t speak. This is my way of running a class. You practise, but don’t speak. Also, do not leave the class for a sip of water or anything until the class is over. Verbal communication between the students was thus restricted by the mestre, possibly to encourage them to focus on other forms of communication (e.g. embodied) and to pay attention to the recorded music playing in the background. In the other workshop we observed, however, a lot of verbal communication was taking place during the practical part, which is similar to what was happening in Leandro’s class. Following the practice phase, the players may move into the roda, the play proper (Figure 6.4a). The roda, meaning a circle, can refer to a social occasion at which capoeira is played, either at the end of a class/workshop or organized independently; or to the actual people who form the circle. This is a good example of the relational constitution of space implicit in the spatial repertoire construct: the people shape the roda space. Depending on their position, each participant has a distinct role in the roda (Figure 6.4b), as can be discerned from our fieldnotes: “A bateria” (the orchestra) typically consists of 3 berimbaus, an atabaque drum, a pandeiro (tambourine), an agogo (cowbells) and a recoreco (serrated wooden instrument played with a stick). The composition of the orchestra depends on the number of people, however, the gunga (a berimbau with the lowest note) is indispensable. The person playing

Figure 6.4a The game begins in front of the leader, ao pé do berimbau, literally “at the foot of the berimbau”.

Figure 6.4b A roda. The orchestra is sitting on the bench, with Leandro playing the gunga and leading the roda. The two players are Mestre João and Sophie. The rest of the people sit in the circle around (Tiago with his back to the camera).

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the gunga is the leader of the orchestra, therefore it needs to be an experienced capoeirista, as he is the person who chooses the rhythm and the song to be sung. This further determines the style of the game, as certain songs are linked to a certain ways of playing capoeira. He is the lead singer as well, singing the main line of the songs. The position of the other instruments in relation to the gunga is set – for example, the other berimbaus are situated on the left in relation to the gunga. The other members of the band sing the chorus of the songs. “In a roda” (the circle), the people sitting in a circle demarcate the limits of the space in which capoeira is played. It is not an audience– player relation but something more dynamic; the energy of the roda supports the energy of the current players. A smaller roda can result in a more dynamic game. They are usually sitting on the floor and do not have instruments, but they can clap hands to the rhythm and they also sing the chorus. Together with the “bateria”, they maintain the energy of the roda. The two people sitting closest to the bateria from each side of the roda are usually the two who play in the next round. “Os jogadores” (the two players) play within the boundaries of the roda and should not kick or touch anyone sitting in the roda. Not anyone can take any position in the roda. Only a very experienced capoeirista, usually the mestre, can play the gunga and lead the roda. During a workshop with Mestre Axé, the latter insisted that only the people who know how to play the instruments play them (as opposed to learning how to play them during the class). People with very little experience in capoeira do not usually play in the roda. Changing one’s position within the roda is possible and frequently happens – for example, if a player is tired, he will take the instrument from someone from the orchestra to allow them to play.

The pattern of capoeira moves in the roda A game in the roda often has the pattern of alternating attacks and escapes. If one person attacks, it is likely that the other person will attack in the next turn. While the structure of bodily relations in the practice phase is imitative and involves mirroring, here the roda is conversational and dialogic. As in a conversation, it gives both participants of the game to express themselves through their bodies in a coordinated way. Sometimes, a few gingas are inserted. The pattern is typically as follows: Person 1: attack Person 2: escape (both: ginga) Person 2: attack Person 1: escape (both: ginga)

114  Part I The turn-taking pattern is apparent from the game between Tiago (T) and a visiting mestre, Mestre João (MJ) (Video Extract Three provides a short segment of this): 00:01 00:05 00:08 00:09 00:10 00:13 00:15 00:17 00:19 00:22 00:24 00:26 00:29 00:30 00:33 00:37 00:40 00:43 00:46

T does a tesoura, MJ escapes T attacks MJ does rabo de arraia, T escapes with an au MJ attacks T does the meia de lua de frente kick, MJ avoids it, T attacks, ginga they both go to ginga MJ feigns a meia de lua de frente kick MJ attacks T moves away from the kick and counterattacks T attacks with rabo de arraia MJ avoids the kick by rolling away from it, attacks MJ attacks with a kick T avoids the kick, MJ moves away from him by turning around him T kicks, MJ feigns a rasteira T attacks MJ feigns a kick, moves away from him MJ attacks, MJ moves away from T, does a bananeria T – rabo de arraia T attacks MJ – rasteira T moves away with an au MJ feigns a kick; a headstand MJ attacks T performs a kick while standing on his head T attacks T performs a kick while standing on his head. MJ T attacks in front of him; ginga T does rabo de arraia T attacks MJ falls in negativa, marks rasteira, feigns a kick MJ attacks T escapes (negativa), feigns a cabecada T attacks

Gesture plays a part in the communicative ecology of the capoeira session as a whole and of the roda in particular. The mestre tends to punctuate the different phases of an activity by a single-hand clap, indicating time for an activity to finish, to transform, or to become more intense. When practising the movements in the class outside the roda, both Leandro and Mestre João like to mark the transition between the ginga and the action with a clap of their hands. In the roda, the jogadores (i.e. the two players), as they enter the circle, give each other a stylized embrace before embarking on the play. One player, thinking she has touched the mestre accidentally in the course of her turn in the roda, touches his hand in an apologetic gesture. As suggested earlier, an essential part of the ongoing organization of the capoeira space is the music, which sets the rhythm and pace of every interaction, and which can be intensified or slowed down at times by the mestre. Synchronized to the music is the three-part step of the ginga, the basic dance move of capoeira. In the roda, the ginga represents a moment of relative peace, when the capoeiristas are circling each other, evaluating the weak points of their opponent, and preparing an attack. This alternates with action – attacking or escaping the attack.

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Thus, in the capoeira session as a whole and in the roda in particular, the organizing role of language coexists in the spatial repertoire with embodied communication. Here, the body speaks performatively but is also disciplined by the regulating modality of music, performed live in the roda and on CD in the practice phase. These regulated improvisations of capoeira correspond rather closely to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (Bourdieu 1990): through repetition inscribed on the body, the body develops over time a repertoire which can be drawn upon creatively in the roda. Moves and sequences of moves from the embodied repertoire co-occur with language, playing a largely instructional role (e.g. when Leandro says “roll”, he rolls in demonstration for the novice capoeiristas who mirror him). In the first phase of the capoeira session, language and music are the dominant modes, with songs and music, stories, explanations, and motivational talk. Once we move into the practice phase, the space is reconfigured; the embodied demonstration and mirroring of moves co-occur with instructional talk from the mestre and the ever-present undertow of the ginga, within the ambit of whose rhythm every move is encompassed. In the roda phase, language takes a back seat, as music and embodied movement come to the forefront. Yet as we have seen, there is a rich lexicon of terms to describe these embodied moves in the roda, such as meia de lua de frente (“half moon from the front”), rabo de arreia (“stingray tail”). These are metaterms which close the circle with capoeira as a historically sedimented linguistic, cultural, musical, and embodied practice, hence returning it to language.

Basketball: A space of play The structure of the basketball sessions we observed, held in the gym of an inner-city sports centre in Leeds, involved a similar combination as observed in the capoeira sessions of motivational pep talk, warm-up, practice, and the actual basketball game. A typical routine is as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Players arrive and informally warm up Beginning of the training: short pep talk by coach Drills: running or shooting Stretching led by a player Drills: running or shooting Warming into the central part of the session: final running or shooting drills Coaching of a strategy Practising the strategy Feedback on the practising of the strategy (Making of teams and instructions for a game of basketball) (Game of basketball, with pauses for coaching) (End of game) (Feedback from coach on the game) End of session

116  Part I There are of course significant differences between capoeira and basketball, despite both being ludic, nonserious action. Basketball is a team sport, which means that players have to have shared and commonly agreed strategies in place, leading to a phase which is quite different to capoeira, namely the coaching and practising of a strategy (items 7 and 8 above). Unlike the motivational talk in basketball, which is largely hereand-now focused, the motivational talk at the beginning of a capoeira session can take participants – through song, music, and story – deep into Afro-Brazilian history, language, and culture, a resistant perspective on the black Brazilian diaspora. What capoeira and basketball have in common, however, is the interaction of spoken language with gesture and embodied communication in both practice and actual play. Because of the particular demands of basketball in terms of embodied action in space, and because of the constraints it imposes on verbal modes of communication due to the acoustics of the environments in which it is played, the game displaces speech from its normally central position. It pushes us to explore more holistically the complex of embodied practices, co-operative and competitive, which, in concert, build the temporally unfolding activity constituting a particular game. This is not to say that speech is unimportant in a game of basketball. As the coach, Patrick, explained to players at the end of one training session, speech can play a crucial part in the organization of activity in basketball: Communication’s key. When we started talking to each other, right, and telling each other where it – where we want players, that’s when we started to improve the game. The spacing got better. The passing got better. Running the floor got a lot better. But in a game, there are limitations to the appropriateness of speech, as Patrick later explained: I think when people speak, particularly on defence it’s a lot easier as a team to have that success. On offence, there’s lots of different ways of communicating. Yeah, you can talk, but in a lot of sense then if you do say what you’re going to do, then it tells the defence what you’re doing. So you use eye contact. You can use your hands. Thus, speech is productive in defence, where co-operation and co-ordination are key; but it is potentially counterproductive in offence, where surprise is key. Moreover, as we began to see, the more expert players become – and the more environmentally aware – the less reliance there is on speech, though experts can often be heard coaching novice teammates during the

Intersemiotic translanguaging 

117

course of a game. It is in coaching, then, that speech, and issues of speaking and understanding, come to the fore: I think cultural and ethnic differences can make it difficult because I think there’s a level of understanding that if everyone speaks English, then the level of understanding that you can convey as a coach, that people will automatically get. But I think that when there’s language barriers, I think that, yeah, there is … you see that by when you’ve explained something to them, they go and do what they were doing before. The use of speech, however, is seen more in the coaching of larger-scale actions (plays) as opposed to lower-scale actions (moves, microactions), which are often more successfully taught through modelling, with speech being subordinated to embodied action. Given that basketball coaching is done in a rather contrastive way to capoeira, we will analyze in detail an extract from a sequence where the coach is setting up a strategy. Gathering the players together in what is neither the changing area nor the basketball court but a liminal space on the edge of both, the coach explains the defensive system that he wants his players to use in an upcoming league game (Figure 6.5a). To help them visualize this, he uses a magnetic board holding blue and white discs, thus creating a space for visual-verbal translanguaging. ... Okay, the defence that I want us to work on next week is the onethree-one. But we’re gonna play effectively three-quarter court onethree-one to put pressure on the ball. This is wherever the ball is these two guys [moves two disks] are gonna come and trap the ball and make him throw that pass over the top. This guy steps up [moves another disk]. We’re looking to squeeze wherever we can. So we’re looking to

Figure 6.5a Coach explains defensive system to players.

118  Part I either make him pass that ball across and then we can steal or trap him in the – trap him at half court so he's got nowhere to go. It’s even better to trap him at this side of half court so he can’t step back. Alright? ... Following this multimodal demonstration of what we may call a schema (Baynham et al. 2017a), the coach moves into embodiment, getting five of his players to take up positions on the court in the particular defensive

Figure 6.5b Coach positions Team A on the court.

Figure 6.5c Coach throws the ball to players practising defence.

Figure 6.5d Coach advises team on the game.

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formation (one-three-one) called for by the strategy, thus providing an embodied experience of its spatial requirements. Other players look on (Figure 6.5b). Dispensing with his magnetic board, the coach then takes up a ball, modelling with his body the actions of an attacking player (Figure 6.5c), thus giving his players a chance to perform defensive actions which they have already incorporated to a greater or lesser degree. The schema introduced in the verbal-visual coaching phase is thus seen to enable players to organize existing skills into more effective action during a period of nonpossession of the ball. Finally, after a number of other practice sequences, the coach brings the exercise to an end. He provides some final advice on incorporating the schema into the higher-level schema of defensive play and that of the game as a whole, relating this to a “real”, high-stakes game to be played at the weekend (Figure 6.5d). Thus, we see the complete trajectory of the transmission of a template for mid-level action; however, it will be some time before the flow of constituent actions and the decision-making which gives rise to them become part of the players’ bodily habitus – automatic, unconscious, and cognitively effortless – as the practices become “hard-wired”. This sequence provokes a further comment on the distinction introduced earlier between serious and nonserious action. It seems clear that there is a nonserious/serious relationship between the low-stakes activity of the practice and the upcoming high-stakes game. We saw the same dynamic in the practice phase of the capoeira session. It seems that the serious/non-serious distinction has to be treated as relational rather than absolute. Within the framing of the basketball space of play, the highstakes game is deadly serious.

Discussion and conclusion This chapter has drawn on rich developments in multimodality studies, which have shifted our emphasis away from language per se towards other modalities, primarily, though not exclusively, the visual. It is now commonplace to think of the visual and the verbal as coproduced in images, texts, and interactions. This has in turn productively destabilized the relations between language and context, which have been a persistent focus of sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. Instead of seeing context as a mute backdrop to talk, we begin to see it dynamically as coproducing situated meanings. These dynamic meanings-in-context are captured by concepts such as spatial repertoire and assemblage. Our definition of translanguaging is that it involves selections from the repertoire; hence, if it is possible to extend repertoire in the way that Rymes (2014), Pennycook and Otsuji (2015), and Kusters et al. (2017) have done, then it is possible as we do here to understand translanguaging as involving selection from visual-verbal, gestural, and embodied modes of communication.

120  Part I The data from Tiago’s capoeira and basketball sessions provide ample evidence of the interaction of verbal, visual, gestural, and embodied elements in the spatial repertoire. We note that the preponderance of one mode in relation to another differs according to phase: the basketball motivation and coaching phase as well as the capoeira singing, story-telling, and music sessions are language heavy, while the play phases are language light. To understand the place of the body and of embodiment in the spatial repertoire, we have drawn on Butler’s concept of the performativity of the body: that beyond gesture, in action and in its simple persistence, in being there, the body speaks. In Chapters Four and Five, we have examined contexts where translanguaging was provoked primarily by encounters with bureaucracies and institutions, mediated through the advice givers, advocates, and interpreters visited by clients who needed their help to negotiate a way through the precarity of their situation. In this chapter, our focus was on Tiago and on playfulness of different sorts. This is not to say that Tiago, earning his living through low-paid work on a zero-hours contract, was not as liable to the precarity of his situation as any of those featured in earlier chapters. However, in this chapter we do not see Tiago at work but rather Tiago at play, specifically in spaces of play and the repertoires deployed therein. In the next chapters, we will move into zones of visual-verbal playfulness in experimental art production, contexts which further foreground the creativity of translanguaging that we have seen in everyday language use.

PART II

7

Translanguaging in cyberpoetics

When translanguaging disturbs Why disturb translation? What has translation done wrong? To the extent that translation takes the sensibilities of one language into interaction with those of another, it can itself be seen as a disturbance to Language, specifically to monolingual regimes. Yet when our discourse on translation settles into a from-here-to-there transference, translation tends to consolidate the boundaries between named – some call “natural” – languages as if the latter were in and of themselves neat spaces. It is such consolidation that needs disturbing. Deconstruction has long pointed us in this direction (Davis 2001). Repudiating the organicity of the source, a deconstructionist view conceives translation as yet another step in the proliferation of signs that in the first place are always already wrought with multiple strands, each of which is in turn inflected through by various sources, ad infinitum. Studies on the translation of heterolingual literature, notably by Grutman (2006), have also highlighted the unique difficulties in negotiating source texts with more than one language, especially when the target language is one of those languages in the mix. Along with these efforts, this chapter asks how translanguaging helps us disturb translation. The dynamic and processual nature of translanguaging imbues it with the potential to destabilize the perceived neatness of translation as a traversal of signs from one discrete time-space into another. What if we were to let an act of translation be intercepted by translanguaging, and, further, be extrapolated from textual-discursive communication towards embodied-multimodal performance, such that the initial event of translation no longer “makes sense” as translation, as conventionally understood? In other words, when translanguaging punctures translation, how should we understand the resultant outcome, given that it is still nominally described as a “translation” (e.g. by the producer of the linguistic artefact at issue), notwithstanding all the disturbances?

124  Part II

John Cayley’s cybertranslational poetics With these questions in mind, we will be reading two works by John Cayley, a professor and practitioner of digital literary art and also a sinologist and translator of Chinese poetry. Cayley’s poetry experiments are cybertextually engineered (Funkhouser 2005) for networked and digital media. Digital poetry represents a form of extreme text which, with its unusual capacities and configurations, enables us to push the envelope on well-established notions of translation, not least by jolting us out of our comfort zones as readers. The data per se is also interesting. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to literature, much less digital literature, as a viable source for translanguaging research. In the sociolinguistics tradition, ethnographic, naturally occurring communications are privileged; literature is marginal in this respect. The basis for selecting the works for reading is twofold. First, they both overtly feature translation. The first piece is titled, (deceptively) simply, translation; the second is a work-in-progress with no given title, yet it advances the new term “microcollage translation” as part of its presentation. The second reason for their selection is that, as (nominal) translations, they are extremely problematic: although the literal act of translating underlies both works, each goes on to undermine, from within, its ontological status as a translation. There is, therefore, a strong tension between the work as it stands and the work as it is named. In each case, the nominal identity of the work as a translation is disrupted, subverted even, by “computationally rendered versions of linguistic processes” (Cayley 2018, n.p.). In Cayley’s poetics, “process” is a technical term with a specific definition: By “process” I mean, in the case of the writer, chiefly: a compositional engagement with technics that reconfigures or reforms the linguistic artifact in such a way as to enable readings that are significantly or affectively distinct. When it comes to the translator, there is, firstly, an encounter with language and with process through the kind of charged and directed reading that the translator undertakes, and then an obligation, somehow, to incorporate any process that may have been encountered in the actual production of their translation. (Cayley 2018, n.p.; emphasis added) The idea of process, both in its ordinary meaning and in Cayley’s terms set out above, is pertinent – as we have seen in previous chapters – to our understanding of translanguaging as language users’ dynamic appropriation of meaning-making resources from their repertoire for rhetorical purposes in communication. Translanguaging often engages with the phonological, morphological, or syntactic affordances of a language (or language variety or register), and these correspond to Cayley’s technics – “the operative aggregation of material culture and technology” (Cayley 2018, n.p.).

Translanguaging in cyberpoetics  125 To align with Cayley’s terms above, translanguaging requires the language producer to reconfigure and reform a guest language in such a way as to render it “significantly or affectively distinct” in the host language. It also necessitates an encounter on the part of the receiver with this piece of transformed language, one that is often “charged and directed”. Humour is one of the obvious indices of this. An encounter is charged and directed by virtue of its breaking of rules and exposure of underlying processes – the reconfigurations, reformations, transformations, and deformations that language is subject to and that render a reading “distinct”: When less internalized technics transform or deform linguistic artifacts so as to allow distinct readings, processes are exposed. When readings break rules or conventions, the exposure is startling. When translation is the linguistic practice that concerns us, technics-as-process applied, however aesthetically, in one language, will usually – and certainly if not “translated” – lead to rule-breaking in another, typically at the level of grammar. (Cayley 2018, n.p.) Reading through and off Cayley, we would go as far as to say that the raison d’être of translanguaging is to embody rules being broken; if no rules in language are broken, there is no translanguaging. Having imbibed the process – the manifestation of rules broken – the reader/user may then proceed to deploy the same process, that is, the phonological, morphological, or syntactic manipulations in their own speech production, to generate similarly charged and directed readings for other receivers. In this case we may venture to say, in line with Cayley (2018), that the process is being further translated, hence the translation of process as opposed to the process of translation. The exuberant displays of process in Cayley’s cybertextually engineered “translations” provide a rich site of language performance, compelling a rethinking, a disturbed thinking, of the arising creativities and complexities that occur as translanguaging – understood as playfully combining and recombining elements in the linguistic and semiotic repertoire – intervenes in and interferes with unmarked translation. Such interventions or interferences may generate more nuanced statements on the rubric of the translational as a critical practice (Cayley 2015a, 2018) by bringing in a translanguaging perspective. As we begin our reading, it would perhaps be apt to use, as our point of departure and of reference, Cayley’s own understanding of translation as a general concept: all translation [is] subject to the types of procedural and conceptual interventions that are demanded by [the] properties and methods of digitally mediated literary works, for which any “translation” requires iterative reconfigurations of concepts and processes in order to adapt

126  Part II their deployment within any commensurate culture of linguistic practices that is distinct from the one in which they were previously made. (Cayley 2015a; original emphasis) Using our theoretical lens, we construe translanguaging as constitutive of those “iterative reconfigurations of concepts and processes” entailed in Cayley’s view of translation as both material practice and structuring concept. This notion of “iterative configurations” resonates with the idea of disaggregating an act of translation into a series of moves or moments, corresponding to Li Wei’s translanguaging moment, introduced in earlier chapters. These ideas will unfold in the course of our reading below. Translation Conceived in 2004, with several versions thereafter, translation is a singular piece of digital language art that exemplifies “iterative, procedural ‘movement’ from one language to another” (Cayley 2004a). From the latter description alone, it is clear that we are not dealing with translation in any usual sense; note, in particular, that the term “movement”, used frequently and intuitively in respect of translation, is marked with inverted commas, suggesting that what is moved here is something apart from interpretable meaning (Cayley 2015a). The title is thus tongue-in-cheek, yet it is also provocative in stirring the dust of our settled thinking about translation. By invoking translation against a semiotic set-up that blatantly breaches expectations about translation (as we shall see), the piece performatively explores the limits of our conception, generating a translanguaging space that absorbs and exceeds translating. This creates either disillusionment with translation as such (when the reader “gets it”) or total confusion as to what is transpiring – and one suspects this is the more usual reaction. At any rate, the goal is achieved: translation is disturbed. Before we can begin to appreciate this point, we need to first grapple with the technics of this highly sophisticated piece. translation is based on two sets of underlying texts in three languages: Walter Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” and snippets from Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, in their original languages (respectively German and French) and in two other versions (English and French for Benjamin; German and English for Proust). The choice of Benjamin’s essay is strategic; as Raley (2016) points out, Benjamin writes on translation as the “removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations” and as “pass[ing] through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity” (cited in Raley 2016: 124). This dynamic notion of the continuum of transformations resonates with the idea of a string of translanguaging/translational moments. When incorporated into Cayley’s work, Benjamin’s writing adds a metatextual

Translanguaging in cyberpoetics  127 twist, whereby the text that speaks of transformation in translation is itself being transformed (Raley 2016: 124–125), “subjected to the intermediating agency of the machine … designed to reveal relationships between machine code and [its] human language” (Hayles 2006: 14). That is basically all there is to “translation” in this work called translation. The rest of it is algorithmic, or process. The process at issue is called transliteral morphing, first developed by Cayley for an antecedent work titled overboard and redeployed in translation. This procedure sets alphabetic letters into a dynamic of transition, mediated by a code that pairs each “natural” letter with an alternate letter based on “phenomenological similarities”, determined by such dimensions as phonology and typography.1 For example, b/p, c/k, and c/s are paired as they comprise phonetically proximate letters, while y/v, q/p, and r/n are matched on graphical grounds, as it is convenient for the one letter to visually fuse into the other within each pair (Cayley, personal communication).2 Following this code, any given line can be translated into its alternate version, resulting in disfigured, unreadable strings. For example, the phrase “to the brim of the water” is translated as lu lra pnjw ut lra velan following letter-by-letter correspondences set out in the code (Cayley 2004b). This system of correspondences is a subjective one, “a composition of [Cayley’s] own that compromises over questions of the various types of perceived similarities in order to arrive at a single alternate for each letter” (ibid.), and in effect works as a structure of translation at the subatomic level of the text. With transliteral morphing, Cayley subjects his texts to a series of moving “textual states”: sinking (letters drown into the void of the screen, creating holes within strings of letters and impeding readers’ perception of words); floating (letters are gradually displaced by their alternates and appear on the screen as visible strings); and surfacing (from a void, letters “slowly accumulate [on the screen] to constitute the textual field” [Cayley 2004b]). In this way, Cayley’s texts (and, with that, his readers) undergo a timebased visual metamorphosis, where their constituent letters continuously dis- and replace one another, leading to intervals of fragmentation and reassemblage. The ensuing outcome is a text artefact in perpetual flux, partially (un)readable and visually chaotic. Now let us come back to translation and illustrate the above procedures at work, based on our engagement with the technics of the piece. Our engaged reading serves to play out the disturbance that translanguaging brings to translation in an embodied way. Here, the perceptual reading interface3 on which the movement between languages takes place is further complicated by a language–body interface. This latter interface brings translanguaging beyond the artefact to the somatics and kinetics of the reader-user. Because the underlying algorithm produces a unique series of textual states each time it is run, any one reading experience is singular, contingent, and transient; it is not replicable as such, and is thus strongly ludic. To test this, we ran the program twice on a computer. Our method is to

128  Part II zoom into one specific fragment from Benjamin’s text, already cited above – “Translation is removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations” – and to trace and record its dynamic on the perceptual reading interface. Isolating one fragment makes it possible for us to appreciate the textual metamorphosis in detail, without the distraction of transformations occurring in tandem in other parts of the text. Further, as previously noted, this particular Benjamin fragment takes on metatextual significance within the material context of the artefact. As the sentence passes through “a continuum of transformations” in different languages, a self-reflexive loop is enacted on the work itself. In our first reading, Benjamin’s sentence morphs through four stages. We begin with Figure 7.1a, where the fragment at one point could almost be fully discerned in the original German in the third stanza. The German sentence then starts morphing into English. In Figure 7.1b, we witness different textual states in operation: the empty spaces within word strings are where letters have been “sunk”; the well-formed words (“translation”, “another”, “continuum”) manifest by “surfacing”; and the corrupted word strings are in the middle of “floating” (ransformarions “transformations”), composed in a hybrid of natural and alternate letters.4 The letters in the same stanza then begin to drown into the dark abyss of the screen, before surfacing gradually, but this time the text is in German again. Figure 7.1c is a screenshot of the stanza arrested in the middle of its transition from English into German, where the empty spaces in the middle of word strings again indicate letters being sunk before alternate letters can emerge to replace them. And finally, as seen in Figure 7.1d, the German passage shifts into a relatively well-formed French version. At this point, Benjamin’s fragment comes full circle, having traversed from the original German into French via English. The transfer of semantic meaning is the lesser point here; it is the visual transposition of the same text across three languages and through three textual states that is the interesting bit. It forces us to reconcile the deeply sensuous, corporeal movement of letters with the abstract, metaphorical movement of messages that is typically associated with translation. In our second run of the program, the interface evolves in a very different way. At one point, we observe the same fragment from Benjamin surfacing in German, but before the morphing completes, it starts floating into French (Figure 7.2a). Notice the string métamorphoseorco in the last line of the third stanza. This is supposed to be metamorphoses, the French equivalent for the German verwandlungen; the garbled spelling results from an unfinished floating. In this ephemeral (hence privileged) instance within the text’s unfolding, the two languages mesh into an uncanny word – incorrect yet quite recognizable. The string métamorphoseorco is thus the fleeting product of a transitional process that will come to pass instantly as the morphing algorithm proceeds.

Figure 7.1a translation by John Cayley (1.1)

Figure 7.1b translation by John Cayley (1.2)

Figure 7.1c translation by John Cayley (1.3)

Figure 7.1d translation by John Cayley (1.4)

Figure 7.2a translation by John Cayley (2.1)

134  Part II Then, something even stranger happens. Out of this incomplete French translation, a monstrous version starts to appear (Figure 7.2b). Looking at this forensically, it could be an English sentence in the midst of its becoming. For example, the first line of the third stanza probably reads: “you would not satisfy …”, and the last word in Line 4 of the stanza must be “beautiful”, with the “t” and “f” floated into their respective alternate letters and the “i” sunk in. We also spot the words “by” and “to” in Line 2 as well as “water” as part of a nonword treowater in Line 3. The problem is that this stanza seems to have come from nowhere, as the Benjamin fragment does not contain these words. The best conjecture is that Proust’s text (the other base text) has somehow sneaked in through the algorithm. And indeed, Googling “you would not satisfy” with “Proust” reveals the true identity of this fragment, excerpted from In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann’s (as translated by Lydia Davis): “you would not satisfy it by taking me to the bank of a river where the water-lilies were just as beautiful, more beautiful than in the Vivonne …” Subsequently, the German version of the original Benjamin sentence starts to shape up again (Figure 7.2c). Curiously, this is followed by what looks like a (still formative) German translation of the English sentence translated from Proust. We cannot be entirely sure, but in Figure 7.2d, we see genügen in Line 1 of the third stanza translating “satisfy”, and schöne in Line 4 translating “beautiful”, which may indicate that the morphing is shifting towards the direction of Proust in English. On this second reading, Benjamin’s text appears only in German and French; its English version does not appear even after 20 minutes of running the program. By the unfathomable workings of the algorithm, it seems to have slipped into the English version of the Proust fragment, although that version is not in its complete form either. Incidentally, as we struggle to understand where all of this is heading, we notice that the last stanza in Figure 7.2d has morphed into a wellformed English text: “What I want to see again/is the way that I knew/ that landscape whose individuality/clasps me with an uncanny power/and which I can no longer recover”. This is a pastiche of fragments of a paragraph from Proust in its English translation, and it aptly encapsulates our experience in engaging with translation: the digitally mediated language landscape of the artefact exudes a strong “individuality” that binds us with its “uncanny power” of bizarre movements. Such individuality and power derive from the work’s radical thematization of translation beyond its typical frame. This is where translanguaging enters as a stimulus to translation. The work starts with interlingual translations as base texts (together with their originals) and then spins off in unexpected trajectories under the dictates of the algorithm-driven procedure of transliteral morphing. Indeed translation is not about translation at all; it really is about the transitional flux among three languages on the reading interface, the

Figure 7.2b translation by John Cayley (2.2)

Figure 7.2c translation by John Cayley (2.3)

Figure 7.2d translation by John Cayley (2.4)

138  Part II subatomic transposition of alphabetic letters, and the transformation of hybrid strings, all of which serve to undercut the fundamentals of translation with all its conceptual baggage of equivalence and fidelity. They are manifestations of translanguaging, in the sense of a creative (unconscious in this case), bottom-up (with the letter rather than the word as the unit of shift), and wayward (the artefact defies linear, logical reading) orchestration of semiotic resources to fulfil a communicative need – in this case, precisely to uncommunicate the text, to totally disturb the reader’s sensibilities. By calling itself “translation” and then undermining the usual sense of translation through various forms of translanguaging, the work disorients translation into a marked and alien notion, releasing its irregular rhythms within and opening its space towards a wider rubric of semiotic interplay. Thus understood, translation is performatively construed as “translationas-movement between so-termed human languages (German to French), as well as between media and compositional environments” (Raley 2016: 125). This literalization of translation reveals to us the raw texture of language, returning us to the etymological sense of the English word “translation”, in the Latin translatus, of physical movement from one place to another. Yet its technological mediatization also drives us temporally forward, in a manner of speaking, into contemporary accounts of the modalities of communication. Ultimately, translation is meant to be watched as a discordant sequence of images that comprise a translanguaging space, rather than read as a coherent piece of discourse. Our embodied and experiential interaction with the work further invokes the corporeality of movement. In order to appreciate how the piece operates in any meaningful way, one needs to eye-track the morphing of letters carefully, as we have done above, always keeping in view the fact that two base texts in three languages are involved. Much reading labour is required here, such as to qualify this use of the senses as an embodiment. Potentially, the reader’s hands can be roped in as well: the algorithm allows readers to interfere with the perceptual reading interface through a number of combinations on the keyboard. By pressing down and holding any of these combinations, one can partially influence (not dictate) the trajectory of the text and hence the outlook of the translanguaging space on the screen. Pressing and holding down Ctrl-D, Ctrl-F, and Ctrl-E nudges the interface towards a gradual manifestation in German, French, and English respectively; pressing Shift-Q causes the screen to fade out, and pressing Shift-S sets the texts off into a state of flux again. This possibility of intervention via one’s hands contributes to the general ambience of a text-in-flux and creates another interface beyond the semiotics of the text, bridging it with the modalities of the body. The algorithm, programmed like a repertoire out of which the combinatory transformations are generated, nevertheless interacts with the repertoire of the reader/user. This creates in effect a Cyborgian machine-human

Translanguaging in cyberpoetics  139 interface which generates multilingual meanings, drawing on both randomness and intentionality. What Cayley is doing here in fact is extending the interfaces we have already identified in translanguaging (language-language, verbal-visual, semiotic-embodied) to include the Cyborgian interface which is iteratively demonstrated in the succession of transformational moments through which the text morphs. As we will argue in our concluding chapter, this human-machine interface, with its successive string of transformational moments, is as good a metaphor as any for a repertoire account of translation. Such an account becomes possible when we start to read translation through the lens of translanguaging. Microcollage translation We now move on to Cayley’s more recent work, where translation is disturbed by translanguaging in a quite different way. This is an untitled piece for which the author coins the term “microcollage translation” (for convenience, we will hereafter refer to the work with the latter term). Figure 7.3a shows the interface of the artefact, produced in 2015. Unlike the previous work, this interface does not move; however, it nonetheless conceals crossings and transactions beneath the surface manifestation of the writing. Prima facie we already see bilingualism at work, where Chinese characters written in highly stylized calligraphy on the margins flank a body of English text. There is a bold visuality to the presentation with the contrast of colours and fonts. If we look carefully at the English text, we find twenty items in bold print that form a meandering path through it: “sun”, “twilight”, “cerulean”, “mountain”, “far”, “Heavens”, “cold”, “white”, “house”, “poor”, “wattle”, “gate”, “hear”, “dog”, “bark”, “wind”, “snow”, “night”, “homeward”, “person”. This visual arrangement evokes mesostics, best exemplified by John Cage’s “writings through”. Cayley describes the working of mesostics as follows:5 A text is “prepared” as an orthographic instrument by searching through it for the letters – most frequently – of a proper name, that of a hero of the avant garde, or occasionally some special word. The letter need not be acrostic – at the beginning of a piece of language, usually a line – but it may be: by chance. It need only be “mesostic,” allowing its discovery, by chance operation, anywhere – at any arbitrary point in a word that is then positioned more or less in a middle, on a central vertical axis for lines thereby raggedly ranged both left and right and rendered poetic through the process itself or by the writer’s subsequent adjustments. (Cayley 2018, n.p.; emphasis added) “Microcollage translation” is conceived on the basis of this creative operation, with a translational twist to it: each of the bolded items in Figure 7.3a

140  Part II translates and corresponds to a word-character in the classical Chinese poem written on the margins of the artefact, as follows: 日暮蒼山遠 sun/twilight/cerulean/mountain/far 天寒白屋貧 Heavens/cold/white/house/poor 柴門聞犬吠 wattle/gate/hear/dog/bark 風雪夜歸人 wind/snow/night/homeward/person This settles the “translation” part within “microcollage translation”. The base text of Cayley’s work is the pentasyllabic Chinese poem Fengxue su furong shan zhuren by the eighth-century Chinese poet Liu Changqing 劉 長卿. The verses on the margins in Figure 7.3a are not supposed to be read vertically through on each side; rather, each line is distributed on both sides, with two characters on the left joining three characters on the right to form a line in accordance with the prosodic pattern of this poetic genre. This creates the visual effect of a line of Chinese poetry bracketing a body of English text containing the lexical equivalents of those characters. In the first stanza, for example, the characters ri mu 日暮 on the left are to be read with cang shan yuan 蒼山遠 on the right, and literally they read as follows: sun; twilight; cerulean; mountain; far. Translated idiomatically, this would be something like “The sun setting against distant blue hills”. The same works for the remaining stanzas. To provide a general sense of the poem’s meaning, here is our own English translation of the poem: The sun setting against distant blue hills A shack stands bare in the cold From the wattle fence a dog barks A man returns home in the windy dark snow The English prose text in Figure 7.3a seems to show a vague affiliation to the Chinese poem in terms of a broad-brush narrative contour – a person returning home at dusk. This is by virtue of the bolded words, which form its backbone. Yet clearly it is more than the poem, not least because the mode of writing has changed. Adapting Cayley’s own words with reference to Cage’s work, the English prose is a “prepared” text that serves as an “orthographic instrument”, using which the reader “searches” for “some special word” (Cayley 2018, n.p.) – in this case, the words translated straight out of the Chinese poem. The bolded items do not quite line up into a vertical axis as in Cage’s work, though the concept of an intersectional reading operates in a similar way. The bolded items cut through the lateral English text, producing two reading axes: whereas reading the bolded words “downward” (which is how classical Chinese poetry is traditionally read) gives us a word-for-word rendition of the Chinese poem, reading the entire English text (left-right, top-down) generates a different discourse.

Figure 7.3a John Cayley’s microcollage translation (2015 version)

142  Part II There is something uncanny about this latter discourse. It reads fluently, but the way it hangs together makes it feel unlike an organic entity. One obvious hint lies in the heavy punctuation, where ellipses and dashes intermittently break the flow of the text. The register is also heteroglossic, with the textual voice oscillating between the casual and the hyperformal. More importantly, the semantic coherence of the text is highly suspect; a series of images dart around haphazardly, hardly accruing into a narrative. In sum: there is something “not quite right” about this English text. Cayley says nothing about the genesis or constitution of the piece and offers no instruction as to how to read it – unlike for most of the other works on his website. But its uncanny texture calls out to its reader, as if asking to be unpacked. When we initially encountered Cayley’s text, and without any theoretical preoccupations, we decided to pull it apart to see what was going on in there. Google was the obvious place to start, so we started typing random fragments of the text into the Google (Books) search box. This churned up links which led us to discover that Cayley’s text is in fact a pastiche of fragments, all of which are traceable to Internet sources – mostly very old texts now made available as ebooks in the public domain. This Googling process is not a straightforward one; there is a measure of trial and error, as one cannot know a priori the exact point where a found fragment begins or ends. Adding inverted commas would help delimit search results, though it may equally lead to a nil outcome. This is where microcollage – and translanguaging – comes into the picture. Whereas the classical Chinese poem sets the skeletal frame of the piece with its characters distributed throughout, the flesh of the text is composed at a microtextual level through the juxtaposition of disparate fragments. The originality of “microcollage translation” lies in its immanent intertextuality: each line of the piece is not Cayley’s own, but is drawn from various sources across different periods of time and genres. The technique here is that of loose links. These are “quasi-algorithmic microcollages” concerned with particular phrases or sequences of words but the play here revolves around the concept of the “longest common phrase” … [which] is, for any attributed text, a sequence of its words that can be found elsewhere in a multi-author corpus and not attributable to the original author, proving, minimally, that it is still an attested, discoverable part of the commons of language. (Cayley 2015b: 138) In our present example, for each of the twenty lexical items translated from the Chinese poem, a sequence of words containing the item in question is extracted from “a multi-author corpus” – Google Books, in this case. The point of doing this (if we must prove a “point” at all) is to demonstrate that the piece of language concerned “is still an attested, discoverable part of the

Translanguaging in cyberpoetics  143 commons of language”, as Cayley tells us. And since the English items are translated from Chinese, what we are looking at is a language commons that crosses the boundaries of named languages. Back to the main text of “microcollage translation”: the found sequences are then juxtaposed to produce some semblance of coherent discourse. Meaning – if the term still means anything here – is negotiated through triangulation between the semantic affordances of the found text; the author’s intervention, at the level of discourse, in defragmenting the text, as it were; and the reader’s propensity to assume that the microcollage as a whole is comprehensible. A Dadaist strain is apparent here, yet the procedure is also quasi-algorithmic because it is followed through systematically like a code, although the author exercises discretion as to which specific fragments to select and how they are collaged (Cayley 2015b: 139). As with the previous work, we now showcase our experience in reading the artefact. This is important because the reader’s forensic engagement with the complex fabric of the text signifies over and above its substantive content. What follows can be read as an account of the experience of a hypothetical reader as s/he unravels the intertextual connections underlying the resultant text. Our theoretical point is two-fold. First, Cayley’s creative practice exemplifies the core themes in translanguaging, specifically his ludic appropriation of resources from a shared repertoire (freely downloadable ebooks) to create new, contingent literary outcomes that are shot through by multiple sources and sensibilities. Second, on the part of the reader, the embodied process of working through the text – as opposed to reading it in the interpretive-hermeneutic sense – constitutes a subjective experience of translanguaging based on the semiotic potentialities embedded in the artefact. The somatic process of searching for disparate strands and appreciating how they are built into the microcollage is itself a performance of a virtualized language-body interface. A search on Google Books will show that the first fragment in the microcollage “The setting of the sun, a modified illumination, produced by …” is taken, out of its context as well as cotext, from the first volume of Hedderwick’s Miscellany of Instructive and Entertaining Literature (1862), edited by a certain James Hedderwick. Comparing this text with the microcollage, we see that Cayley has added the sentence-initial capitalization, the boldface to the word “sun”, and the ellipsis at the end of the phrase. The ellipsis is meant to enjoin this first phrase to another fragment on the same page of Miscellany: “a single and striking instance of the value of refracted light or twilight, let us take the winter of the extreme north”. In the microcollage, we observe that “twilight” is bolded, a dash is added thereafter to smooth the syntax, and the phrase “winter of the extreme north” is italicized. The manipulation of punctuation and typography insinuates the unrooted fragment into its new context; it also infuses an element of authorial subjectivity into the so-called translation. Of interest to us is italicization, which pertains to how Cayley “hears” the voice of the language.

144  Part II Cayley (personal communication) explains his motivation for adding italics to his found texts as follows: Specifically, for me, italicization signals a “change of or in voice”. This could be a literal change of voice, or a change in the inflection of the inner narrator-poet’s/reader’s voice. Theoretically, there is also the overarching consideration that “voice” in my philosophy of language is its substance. I don’t mean that language “is all” or “reduces to” vocal/ oral. I mean that, after phenomenology and after Derrida, “voice” is still the best word for whatever the substance of language is, regardless of its perceptible support material. Italicization as an intervention thus introduces an oral-aural dimension into the discursive and visual performance of the artefact. Coupled with the use of bold typography, this enriches the sensuous quality of the microcollage text. The ebook resources are therefore not simply drawn out of their sources and then replanted into a new textual environment; they are being paralinguistically processed and recontextualized into a new discursive setting. Conceptually, this connects with the transformative potential of translation and translanguaging, where transferred or borrowed items from a guest language or media are subject to various treatments in the host language or media. The next found fragment reads: “… so often made a topic of splenetic reproach: round whose stern cerulean brows white-winged snow”; this comes from John Aikin’s Letters to a Young Lady on a Course of English Poetry (1807). This flows into a fragment from David Duner’s The Natural Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg: “covers the mountains and the ‘bluestarred ceiling’ with its glistening carbuncles and jewels, ‘In an order that we humans cannot grasp’”. The latter source is a 2013 biographical-philosophical text, very distant in terms of both time and genre from the first two sources; the quote within is from a certain Bishop Haquin Spegel. Note, in particular, that “covers” is “covering” in the original (“covering the mountains”); the aspectual change is made here to render the resulting formulation grammatical. The last line of the first stanza, “Our Reason can take us up that mountain only as far as the clouds that lie far below the summit”, is taken from Ralph Blumenau’s Philosophy and Living (2002). Note again that the italic for “Our Reason” and “only” is an added feature in the microcollage. Moving down the lines: the fragments “Heavens, what a sight!” and “so cold that my fingers were numb and utterly without sensation; no ray of sunlight every penetrated this spot – it was still last winter’s ice” are lifted from Hermann Buhl’s 1956 mountaineering adventure Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage (at two different points on the same page). We then find ourselves smoothed into Aldous Huxley’s 1936 popular novel Eyeless in Gaza: “He shuddered,

Translanguaging in cyberpoetics  145 closed his eyes; and immediately there she was, swooping towards him, white, like a sea-gull, and white again in the”; just before the sentence winds to a halt, the word “house” (translating the character wu 屋 in the Chinese poem) is sneaked in from elsewhere (this could be anywhere, since it appears in multiple places) in the same book. And then we are abruptly jolted from Huxley’s fictional world into Sturm’s Reflections on the Works of God and His Providence Throughout All Nature, an 1832 publication with obviously evangelical predilections: “of the Father. The rich complain that nature is become [sic] desolate and dreary; and the poor murmur because in this season their necessities are increased”. The next stanza begins with “But the wattle fence, with a path starting from the gate and leading towards”; we manage to trace this to Miodrag Jovanović’s 2001 book Mihailo Milovanović. The last phrase “and leading towards” overlaps with and meshes into the phrase “and leading towards the mountain heights”, taken from Gammer Bolton’s “The Wild Monkeys of India”, published in the Windsor Magazine in 1897. From here we are shipped on travel discourse; the next line “Anyone out there could probably hear it also” is from Dave Davenport’s D-Plus Forever, with the last line of the third stanza, “Even the dog will bark at the stone that has rolled too carelessly over one of his feet” plucked from a piece written for The Monthly Traveller in 1830 (the source reads: “and even the dog …”; the conjunction is deleted in the microcollage). Coming to the last stanza: “Together they made their way down the long aisle and pushed the north door open, the wind and snow trying to seal them in” is transplanted from a work of teenage fiction, namely Lauraine Snelling’s Believing the Dream (2002). The latter text then proceeds with a new sentence starting “With each step”; in the microcollage, this appears as “With each other”, with “other” (which appears several times in the same novel) displacing “step”. An added ellipsis takes us all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century: “On the night of the fearful storm, when the falchion of flame shook”, from Henry Herbert’s The Roman Traitor: Or, The Days of Cicero, Cato and Cataline (1853); this connects via another ellipsis to a clause found elsewhere in the same book: “with the words, they hurried homeward through the dark streets”. Into this is embedded the phrase “with candles in their hands, in remembrance” from a completely out-of-sync source: an online article entitled “Christians Observe Easter” on the news portal Times of India (13 April 2009). The ecclesiastical theme carries on to the last sentence: “and with each person taking the hand of his or her neighbour”. This last one could be a slight rewrite based on various potential sources, three possible candidates being: Volume 50 of Records of Columbia Historical Society of Washington D.C. (1980) (“each person taking the hand of the one next to him”); Jarrett Zigon’s 2011 Multiple Moralities and Religions in Post-Soviet Russia (“each person taking the hand of their neighbor”); and Margaret Withers and Tony Pinchin’s

146  Part II Celebration: Resources for All-age Eucharists (“each person to join hands with his or her neighbour”), published in 1996. Here the multiplicity and ambiguity with regards to the provenance of textual resources in the microcollage exemplify its unstable, centrifugal identity. Like translation, the title “microcollage translation” is something of a misnomer; a cursory glance at this “translation” tells us it is anything but. Cayley’s device is not really translating, but translanguaging in an aesthetic setting in the guise of translating. Apart from the initial word-for-word rendition of the Chinese poem that makes up the spine of the artefact, it takes a major leap of theoretical faith to accept this as a plausible specimen of translation. Yet this is the very point of the new nomenclature: to declare, as a speech act, that the writing at issue is translation, thereby producing tension between the declaration and common perception, and challenging readers to find the translational logic to it. By tracing for themselves the roots of the “loose links” in the composite text, readers embody the process of weaving together strands originating in different sources, experiencing a dispersed textuality – in effect an intralingual dynamic (conversely, a reader who eschews this embodied labour will inevitably fail to appreciate the point of the work). And with the Chinese poem still hanging in the background, the interlingual dimension is also palpable within the general ambience of the piece. This convergence of the intralingual and the interlingual, together with the embodied nature of readers’ participation in creating a language-body and a body-machine interface, gives rise to what we construe as a translanguaging experience in cyberpoetics. This experience comes into relief in light of the fact that Figure 7.3a is one of three manifestations of Cayley’s microcollage enterprise conceived between 2014 and 2016. Each of the three microcollages is triggered by the same twenty key words translated literally from the same Chinese poem, yet spins out unique outcomes by drawing on different Internet source materials. Figure 7.3b shows the final version, conceived in 2016. The idea of one source text giving rise to several target texts that differ from each other, sometimes quite radically, is a ubiquitous theme in translation studies. Compared with the 2015 version, which has a lyrical touch thanks to the several old literary sources it draws upon, the register of the 2016 version tends towards the legal-political, and its discourse on the whole seems to have diverged more significantly from the narrative of the Chinese poem. If we think of Google Books as a kind of shared discursive repertoire or language commons (Cayley 2015b), Cayley’s act of drawing out fragments from ebooks to write a composite text conceptually parallels a speaker’s act of drawing on resources from his or her repertoire to create semiotic assemblages. The microcollaging of loose links is therefore an act of translanguaging in writing. Placed within the nominal frame of translation, this practice disrupts the linear structure of translation by extrapolating away from the

Figure 7.3b John Cayley’s microcollage translation (2016 version)

148  Part II putative source text, converging heterogeneous resources from a shared repertoire to create an ostensibly corresponding text in a different language. Ultimately, what is enacted is a transformative textual space that belongs neither to the source nor to the target.

Conclusion: A virtual theatre of translanguaging The two works discussed above are highly transgressive in their dramatization of translation. Cayley is translanguaging within the structural process of translation. In both works, the figure of translation is foregrounded (as the title in the first work and as part of the method called “microcollage translation” in the second); this creates irony as for most readers, they are anything but translations. What we have here is essentially translanguaging under the skin of translation. To dramatize translation is also to defamiliarize it. In each case, the translation that is professed to be happening is hijacked and alienated. Both works begin with some form of interlingual translation, and then proceed to spectacularize it by way of (quasi) algorithmic procedures. We have seen how these procedures obliterate language boundaries through the morphing of letters and dovetail fragments from Internet repertoires into a complex virtual performance of language. To the extent that these processes bring about new material outcomes by way of synthesizing across borders, they represent translanguaging methods that undermine the assumed linearity of translation. One theme that comes up strongly in our discussion is that of ludicity, which combines contingency and creativity. The affordances of cyberpoetics facilitate a degree of free play in writing, which is one point where translanguaging can be seen to disturb translation: while translation is to some extent regulated by a source text that serves as a point of reference, translanguaging entails a dose of unpredictability. In translation, there is always a normative limit to the way an expression can be put in another named language; beyond that limit, the translation would ordinarily be seen as untenable. Translanguaging, however, respects no such borders; making meaning from below, it brings about semiotic alchemy over and beyond stable constellations of signs. Thus, while it is possible to speak of principles of translation, the idea of *principles of translanguaging is paradoxical, impossible even, as translanguaging involves a serendipitous meeting of semiotic elements based on all the circumstances of the communicative event and the sociohistorical trajectories of the language users; it cannot accrue into a series of replicable steps in language production. Once the latter happens, we are no longer in the realm of translanguaging because the ludic elements would have been lost. When translanguaging disrupts translation from within, such as is witnessed in our examples, it destabilizes the rubric of translation and unleashes the heteroglossic energies in it, transforming it into an unrecognizable yet eminently creative practice. As we attempt to come to terms

Translanguaging in cyberpoetics  149 with Cayley’s work, performatively placed under the umbrella of “translation”, we are in effect forced to confront and appreciate, perhaps also resolve, the tension between translanguaging as ludic creativity and translation as regulated discursive transfer. There is a dialectic to this tension: on the one hand, as we have argued in Chapter Five, translanguaging is not a game locked up in a semiotic world of its own; it may always be subject to the constraints of social power. On the other hand, translation may be ludic, where the transfer from source to target is continually interjected by reiterative and sporadic stimuli as part of the translator’s thinking process. The theatrical treatment of translation in our two examples plays out this latter point. The semiotically charged environment of cyberpoetics is especially pertinent to discussions on translanguaging. It helps us to identify the machine-human as a further interface, one not visible in our analysis thus far, although present in Chapter Four, when Lucy and Mahamadou enlist Google Translate as an actor. It is not hard to make the connection between the machine-human in Cayley’s experimental assemblages and the breadand-butter activities of the contemporary translator. In this environment, the discursive text is continually transcended, cohering with the view that translanguaging is not just about moving between languages but also beyond language as such. Multimodal studies has also gone some way to addressing this. In this chapter, we push the frontier further by foregrounding the language-body and machine-human interface. This is where the body, complete with all its sensory and kinetic capacities, is brought to bear on the text in a nontrivial manner – that is, beyond linear eye movements tracing the text or the flipping of book/web pages with one’s hands (Aarseth 1997: 2). In our examples, the complex cognitive engagement with morphing letters and the forensic Googling required to fish out fragments in the pool of resources all exemplify the embeddedness of the body in pulling strands of language into one dynamic, mutable entity. A translanguaging lens enables us to view such interaction as the reader’s body breaking the threshold of the textual artefact to enact a transformative reading experience in which translation among other types of semiotic crossing is involved.

Notes 1 The code, as used in overboard for the morphing of English letters, is as follows, where the first letter represents the “natural” letter and second the alternate letter: a/e; b/p; c/s; d/b; e/a; f/t; g/q; h/r; i/j; j/i; k/c; l/t; m/w; n/r; o/u; p/q; q/p; r/n; s/c; t/l; u/o; v/y; w/v; x/z; y/v; z/x (Cayley 2004b). The code used for translation may not be exactly the same. 2 There is a deeper and philosophically grounded basis for the establishment of correspondences between morphing letters, one informed by Derridean ideas, namely that “the elements of any system of inscription or (archi-)writing are fundamentally synaesthetic: they are able to refer to *any* [sic] perceptible and/ or potentially signifying differences, and any generative potentiality evoked by

150  Part II these elements refers to différance itself, particularly when particular differences in the system of inscription may be imperceptible in one dimension of ‘similarity’ and not in another” (Cayley, personal communication). 3 This is Cayley’s term, which basically refers to the text artefact as visually presented on the screen. 4 Cayley (2004b): “when floating, the text at each letter position can be in one of two states: the position may contain the natural letter or its (similar) alternate. This renders the text both illegible and legible”. 5 The poem under discussion here is John Cage’s “Songs for C.W.”, reproduced in Cayley (2018).

8

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art

Translanguaging and the imagetext Art is visual, but is it always exclusively visual? What if the central image in an artwork is textual, that is to say: the word is the image? What tensions and potentialities arise when the two conflate? The issue comes to the fore in text-based art, which offers an exemplary site for the investigation of intersemioticity through the lens of translanguaging. Now what if translation enters an artwork as a material operation or conceptual method? How do we think translation within a visual-textual frame that thematizes semiotic ambivalence? Just as art is not entirely visual, so texts are not solely textual. The rise of multimodality has led to an increased focus on the visual-within-the-verbal and the verbal-within-the-visual: images have gained considerable visibility (with all the irony of the term here) in terms of their capacity to signify, as opposed to functioning as a “mere” backdrop to discursive texts. There are three modes in which the visual and the verbal can operate in tandem, as represented by the following three lexical compounds (based on Mitchell [1994: 89n1]): (a) The image/text: where image and text signify on their own terms, the slash denoting rupture. (b) The image-text: where image and text signify with reference to each other, the hyphen denoting relation. (c) The imagetext: where image and text signify as a single semiotic unit, the collapsing of the two words denoting synthesis. This chapter is concerned with the last category – the imagetext, a figure proposed by W.J.T. Mitchell in Picture Theory as part of his global argument that the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no “purely” visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism. (Mitchell 1994: 5)

152  Part II In a similar vein as the construct of imagetext (as opposed to image-text or image/text), we conceive of the readerviewer as unhyphenated and unslashed (compare: “reader-viewer”, “reader/viewer”). This is in accord with our account of translanguaging presented above, whereby elements brought together in a translanguaging utterance are blended into a single semiotic unit. Imagetexts are conceived not merely for aesthetic purposes; they can be invoked as “motivated interventions in the semio-politics” of a particular medium (Mitchell 1994: 91). The media at issue in this chapter – stone steles with inscriptions, highly stylized calligraphy, and designed manuscripts with religious overtones – are loaded with cultural significance, traceable as they are to venerable traditions, East or West. We will see how the imagetext turns each of these frames into “a site of conflict, a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation” (ibid.: 91); and, in the terms developed in this book, how text-based art evolves into translanguaging spaces where the “politics of inscription” (ibid.: 109) is spectacularized; in other words, writing as spectacle (Jaworski 2018). Drawing on Guy Debord’s “consumerist representation”, Laura Mulvey’s “visual pleasure”, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s “grotesque ritual”, Adam Jaworski proposes the idea of spectacular writing – large-scale texts characterized by their visual extravagance, immersiveness, performativity, reiterative visual motifs, and diverse materiality (Jaworski 2018). Text-based installations are a mode of spectacular writing par excellence. They flaunt their multimodal bodies, converging the verbal and the visual within the translanguaging space of imagetexts, often blown into exaggerated proportions. Often they make non-sense: they represent a form of nonsense writing that seeks to both visually appal/appeal (by their sheer size) and cognitively confound (by the nonreferentiality of their signifiers). They push against the logic of the system by flirting with its rules like a dangerous lover, meticulously constructing a recognizable, often majestic façade only to vacate it from within at a single stroke – rather as John Cayley hollows and vacates the notion of translation (see Chapter Seven). This chapter discusses three exemplars of spectacular writing in the form of language art. In each of these pieces, the imagetext subsists at the border of languages and/or modalities, compelling the viewer to negotiate his or her way between and across, embodying the experience of translingualism and intersemioticity and, hence, of translanguaging spaces. Rather than one-off manifestations of creative genius, each of these works advances a reiterable methodology of inflecting established semiotic systems with a discursive twist – parodying the process of translation to produce cycles of gibberish out of classical poetry; manipulating the visuality of Chinese characters to metamorphose them into clandestine letters from the English alphabet; and interweaving the Bible with pulp fiction into a textual plaid that is at once readable and incomprehensible. Together, the three artefacts illustrate how translanguaging as a resource affords a creative and critical force at the visual-verbal interface that both spectacularizes our senses and challenges our sensibilities.

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  153

Ludic translation: Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry (1993– 2005) is a massive installation complex by the transnational Chinese artist Gu Wenda. In traditional China, stone steles were embodiments of high culture. They were used to document the stellar achievements of important people and were made with meticulous craftsmanship, featuring carvings inscribed in revered calligraphic styles. The celebrated Forest of Stone Steles Museum in Xi’an, China – which gave the title to Gu’s piece – presently houses a prized collection of stone steles from the imperial era. Gu’s Stone Steles was inspired by the historical stone steles but it is also a parody of them. It consists of fifty hand-carved stone tablets, each measuring 190cm × 110cm × 20cm and weighing 1.3 tonnes. Each of these tablets operates on a set of unusual translational procedures. Beginning with a poem from the classical Chinese canon, Gu Wenda first constructs a pair of Chinese-English parallel texts, drawing the English text from Witter Bynner’s anthology of translated Chinese poetry titled Jade Mountain. Next, the artist produces a Chinese transliteration of Bynner’s English translation, carefully selecting characters from among a number of homophones such that their literal meanings accrue into a vaguely sensible narrative. Each character is thus a sound-image representation, but in contrast to the Saussurrean signifier, it does not evoke a signified related by convention. Within the virtual space of the Chinese characters, sound and image diverge rather than converge, thus creating a nonsign. The nonsign, nevertheless, is given the pretence of signification. On each tablet, the Chinese transliteration is magnified to occupy most of its space, giving the impression of discursive prominence. It is unpunctuated, heightening the visuality of classical Chinese-ness. It moreover becomes the source text that generates the subsequent text, which semantically translates into English the Chinese word-characters that constitute the transliteration. The nonsigns initially derived on the basis of phonetic mimicry are now treated as if they were inherently meaningful entities susceptible to being translated. This last step creates slippage between sound and sense, producing a textual irony that leaves the viewer stranded in intersemiotic flux. It is the culmination of a chain of translational operations that takes us further away from the original Chinese poem with each step, resulting in quadruples of interlocking but tenuously related texts. This chain of translational operations picks up a thread that links Li Wei’s translanguaging moments with the proposal in Chapter Three to disaggregate an act of translation into a chain or series of translational moments, in which the translator draws on their multilingual repertoire as bricoleur to assemble the translation of an item. These in turn correspond with Benjamin’s series of transformations by which a translation is effectuated as well as Cayley’s series of moving texts that his digital piece translation morphs through. What all these constructs have in common is that they are dynamic, momentary, and transformational.

154  Part II Case example: Stone Stele 30 As an illustration, let us examine one stone stele (No. 30) from the installation in more detail. Figure 8.1 shows the façade of the stele. The layout of the texts follows the right-to-left orientation of traditional Chinese writing. Reading from the right, we have a famous Chinese poem, Fengqiao yebo 楓橋夜泊 by the eighth-century poet Zhang Ji 張繼, as follows (punctuation and transliteration added): 月落烏啼霜滿天, 江楓漁火對愁眠。 姑蘇城外寒山寺, 夜半鐘聲到客船。 (Yue luo wu ti shuang man tian, jiang feng yu huo dui chou mian. Gu su cheng wai han shan si, ye ban zhong sheng dao ke chuan) This is followed by Witter Bynner’s English translation, titled “A NightMooring Near Maple Bridge”: Tang Dynasty: Zhang Ji      A Night-Mooring Near Maple Bridge While I watch the moon go down, a crow caws through the frost; Under the shadows of maple-trees a fisherman moves with his torch; And I hear, from beyond Su-chou, from the temple on Cold Mountain, Ringing for me, here in my boat, the midnight bell. Entextualizing noise Bynner’s translation is not detail-oriented or elegant in the style of sinological translations, though it is fluent and largely captures the narrative and ambience of the source poem. The poem then morphs into a monstrous formation, visually represented as a large block of text occupying most of the space on the stele (see Figure 8.1). It is in effect an imagetext, its textuality being consubstantial with its visuality. Yet it is also a soundtext, being a transliteration of Bynner’s translation using Chinese characters to mimic the English sounds. The mimicry of course can only be approximate, creating a ludicrous aural-oral specimen; in other words: verbal noise. The entextualization of noise in characters, which by virtue of their tradition and materiality permeate a semiotic aura of meaningfulness, gives rise to an acute absurdity that critiques our sense of security in respect of the settledness of natural languages. The characters that make up the Chinese transliteration are selected based on their sound value, but with the constraint that the ensuing discourse be not hopelessly nonsensical. The semantic affordances of the selected characters thus make it possible for the reader to re-cognize the unrecognizable; however, a great deal of cognitive-perceptual effort and, above all, patience,

Figure 8.1 Image of artefact from Forest of Stone Steles. Courtesy of Gu Wenda Studio.

156  Part II is required to impute syntactical order to the phonetic strings. Any meaning that thus arises can only be shaky, teetering on the limits of intelligibility. The Chinese transliteration is reproduced below, with punctuation added to facilitate reading. To allow English readers to appreciate how Chinese characters are used to trace the phonetic contours of the English text, we further transliterate Gu’s Chinese transliteration using the Hanyu Pinyin convention: 外來活渠澤萌枸 ﹐ 溏內可落篙。斯如者府擾十徒 ﹐ 岸頭紫蠍多。搜伏每波取三肥。蠍滿莫胡食。微自喜時淘而去 ﹐ 安達皆福榮 ﹐ 陛雍抵蘇州。伏龍浙潭扑浪舸 ﹐ 爾得門安屯。雷音佛 迷海 ﹐ 陰霾波遮密 ﹐ 那礙得百樂。 (wai lai huo qu ze meng gou, tang nei ke luo gao. si ru zhe fu rao shi tu, an tou zi xie duo. sou fu mei bo qu san fei. xie man mo hu shi. wei zi xi shi tao er qu, an da jie fu rong, bi yong di su zhou. fu long zhe tan pu lang ke, er de men an tun. lei yin fo mi hai, yin mai bo zhe mi, na ai de bai le.) Comparing our English transliteration (of Gu’s Chinese transliteration) above with Bynner’s English translation – now a source text of sorts – we find a complex correspondence at work. Here, the unit of correspondence is not that of the English syllable to the Chinese character, as one might expect of a transliteration; rather it is based on an idiosyncratic prosody akin to the Japanese mora. For example, while “moon” is transliterated as the monosyllabic meng 萌, “through” becomes the bisyllabic si ru 斯如, and “midnight” the quadrisyllabic mi na ai de 密那礙得. The transliteration is informed by a recombinant poetics, where the English sounds are collapsed or dismembered in the Chinese at the artist’s discretion. For example, the verb phrase “caws through” becomes gao si ru 篙斯如, where the sound si merges the plural suffix -s from “caws” and the interdental sound th from “through” to create a bridge sound, mimicking a continuous reading of the two words. Similarly, “Under the shadows of” turns into the baffling an tou zi xie duo sou fu 岸頭紫蠍多搜伏.1 Here zi represents an alternative transliteration of “the” – cf. the use of ze 澤 to transliterate “the” in the first line, the difference being motivated by the characters that Gu wants to use to install some arbitrary meaning. The last four sounds, xie duo sou fu, transliterate “shadows of”, but reanalyses the latter sequence into “shadow-sof”, hence xie duo 蠍多 (“shadow”) sou fu 搜伏 (“sof”). This is meant to parody an accented reading of the phrase by a Chinese speaker, with the “s” coda of the first word slipping into and adjoining with the “o” onset in the second. Prosodic misalignment creates a further point of disjuncture as we slide from English to Chinese and sense to sound. For example, “While I watch the moon go down” transliterates as wai lai huo qu ze meng gou tang 外來活渠澤萌枸溏, but splinters off before the last character to parody the

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  157 form of a classic heptasyllabic verse. The clause “[a] fisherman moves with his torch” is phoneticized as fei xie man mo hu shi wei zi xi shi tao er qu 肥蠍滿莫胡食微自喜時淘而去, breaching the boundaries of three verses (see punctuated passage above). A string of sounds derived from one English clause is thus resegmented and resyntacticized as it insinuates itself into a Chinese poetic mould, adding to the arbitrariness of the English-intoChinese transition. Translating noise In the final and most bizarre step, the sound text derived from the previous stage doubles up as a source text that provides contingently meaningful signifiers to be translated literally into English. This appears on the left margin of the stone stele (Figure 8.1) and reads as follows: Fresh water from afar flows through the canal to nourish the wolfberry sprout. Punt-pole grows in viscous water. Ten troubled monks at Si Ru Zhe Mansion chase purple scorpions pushed up by the tide and pick up three fat ones from each wave. Don’t eat the abundant scorpions now – just catch enough and leave when you are happy. Luck will bring you safely to Suzhou and lead you to harmony. A boat fights the waves in Fu Long Zhe Lake to reach Men An village. But how can you care about happiness when Lei Yin Buddha is lost in the spooky cloud-covered waves. As if to recuperate sense from sound, in this English translation, the soundcharacters of the earlier Chinese passage are transduced into morphemes, calqued into English, and reorganized into intelligible units. The contrived nature of this process is attested by phonetic sequences that resist being semanticized and hence being translated. They form the untranslatable residue of the translation, and are conveniently subsumed as proper nouns – “Si Ru Zhe Mansion”, “Fu Long Zhe Lake”, “Men An village”, and “Lei Yin Buddha” where si ru zhe, fu long zhe, men an, and lei yin are recalcitrant sounds redressed as fabricated place names. Even a cursory comparison with Bynner’s English translation indicates that this last English version tells a very different story from the original Chinese poem. The emergent, barely coherent narrative speaks of ten monks catching fat purple scorpions on the beach and then embarking on a turbulent boat journey for some paradisal village. Its sheer comicality reminds us that it is borne out of a ludic semiotics involving a mix of chance and choice, again recalling the morphing in Cayley’s digital art, part a working-out of the algorithm, part intervention by the reader. The above English translation depends crucially on the specific constellation of characters in the prior Chinese transliteration; a selection of different homophone-characters would have led to a different semantic translation. The pool of characters that qualify as candidates for the transliteration are in turn constrained

158  Part II by Bynner’s English translation. Herein lies the creative dialectic between chance and choice: while the specific lexical items in Bynner’s translation determine the sound contours of the transliteration, hence limiting the Chinese characters that could be used for the purpose, Gu Wenda exercises subjective agency in shaping the ensuing translation by strategically juxtaposing characters that together give rise to some contingent meaning. In a reversal of the unmarked directionality of translation, which typically begins with a meaningful entity – and which may end up corrupted as in the case of machine or plainly bad translation – this last stage starts with noise and uncorrupts it into an ostensibly meaningful discourse (again echoing the intermediate stages in Cayley’s translation where sense morphs into nonsense, and then into sense again but in another language). Ostensibly, this is because the translation is grammatically meaningful on the level of syntax but ultimately miscommunicative on the level of discourse. And miscommunication is precisely the aesthetic point of Stone Steles: to gradually strip a classical Chinese poem of its literariness by sieving it through the folding doors of translation. The translingual chain, comprising the consecutive steps of semantic translation, transliteration, and backtranslation, creates a translanguaging space for the readerviewer as the interface of the installation. It is worth noting at this point that thus far, our account of translanguaging and translation has focused on the utterer and the utterance. Here, we begin to get a sense of what translanguaging might be for the readerviewer. This translanguaging space is replete with translational irony, turning the conventional idea of communicating across languages and cultures on its head. As Homi Bhabha observes apropos of art curatorship, “the act of translation between cultures is effected through the exacerbation of what is culturally incommensurable or strange, which then allows an understanding of the ‘other’ to emerge from an elision, an uncanny alienation, of one’s own cultural priority” (Bhabha 1993: 64). On this view, Gu Wenda’s experimentation with translation produces an uncanny alienation of Chinese poetry through eliding it with its multiple and perverse incarnations. What emerges, however, is not a discrete “other” but a trans sensibility that moves not just between but also beyond the simplistic Chinese-English binary to create ambivalent and serendipitously creative spaces. It is these ambivalent and serendipitously creative spaces that remind us of translanguaging spaces. The imagetext as anti-monument Gu Wenda’s translingual experiment suffuses a critical stance which art critic Wu Hung describes as antimonumentality (Wu 2005), the disinclination to immortalize and mythify, echoing the subversive speaking-frombelow of translanguaging. This is achieved through the misappropriation of cultural emblems. Chinese poetry from the classical canon, stone steles made with intricate craft and in spectacular dimensions, classical

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  159 calligraphy in the style of zhuan shu, (traditionally reserved for important official matters), and carved name seals (notice that Gu’s name seal is placed at the bottom of the transliterated text in Figure 8.1) are all Chinese cultural institutions weighted with symbolic significance (cf. the weightiness of translation in contrast with the lightness and transience of the translanguaging moment discussed in earlier chapters). By emplacing impeccably calligraphed yet wholly unintelligible writing at the centre of a stone stele, Gu creates an imagetext – more to be seen than read – that ironically invokes the stereotyped visuality of high culture and imbues it with nonsubstantive content. In so doing, he dismantles the idea of monumentality from within its semiotic cloak. Part of this visual illusion hinges on the perceived sanctity of the classical language, as enshrined in poetry, a privileged genre in premodern China. Subjecting this poetry to translation opens up a symbolic crack line. This is manifest in the heterolingual constitution of the stone stele texts resulting from the intrusion of English into what is supposed to be an unadulterated Chinese frame – the point of reference here being the historical stone steles in Xi’an (the “real thing”). Further, the translational chain sets into motion a perverse semiotics, triggering a ludic mishandling of the original poems. If translation as conventionally understood aims to communicate across languages as effectively as is practicable, the mode of translation performed in Stone Steles is a mockery of such understanding by way of delivering erroneous and inexplicable outcomes. Here translation, in all its twists and turns, is deployed as a conceptual method to dislodge assumptions about fidelity and equivalence, to defamiliarize language (and also translation) as discourse as well as dissipate its authority as an institution. To create yet another layer of perversion: the graphemes that make up the main texts on the stone steles are mostly pseudocharacters that are not readily legible to the Chinese viewer. These pseudocharacters, featured in several of Gu’s works, are minted by systematically corrupting the architectonics of Chinese logographs. This involves transforming components of Chinese characters into their pictographic forms and combining them in new ways to reshape the structure of the character. The resulting graphs are highly marked, with each pseudocharacter embedding within its contorted visuality a legible character that needs to be deciphered by the viewer. Figure 8.2 shows a sample pseudocharacter written using the method invented by Gu Wenda. This pseudocharacter derives from a manipulation of the character below:

ၢ

160  Part II

Figure 8.2 A pseudocharacter written using Gu Wenda’s method. Courtesy of Zhang Rui.

As we can see, this character comprises three components placed alongside one another. What Gu has done here is to extend the horizontal stroke of the component on the right (可) such that it stretches over the other two components (口 and 阝). This transforms the original lateral arrangement into a top-down configuration. The 阝component is a boiled-down form of the pictograph 耳 (meaning “ear”) and is used only as a radical (the semantic component) within characters but never on its own. Notice how, in the pseudocharacter, 阝uncannily uncoils into its “parent version” 耳, thus rendering the character un-cognizable, hence unutterable, at first sight. Each of these pseudocharacters is thus a discrete imagetext within a larger imagetext on the stone stele – eminently visual and yet not amenable to instant reading. Together these two graphic interventions create a kind of intrascriptural cipher that must be deciphered, indeed unread, into its source character in order to be re-cognizable. Given again that, like the stone stele themselves, the written script has a certain sacrosanct quality in Chinese culture and tradition, Gu’s procedure of deconstructing the Chinese character exudes an antimonumental stance in compromising the semiotic legibility of the language. Not only do his pseudocharacters yield no meaning (they are ultimately sounds), they further confound by setting up the visual parameters that invoke an expectation of signification and stripping it of its immediate aurality-orality. The imagetext is in the first instance muted, rendered unpronounceable against the spectacularity of its graphical presentation; it awaits resuscitation by the patient readerviewer who might, if s/he would expend the cognitive effort, decipher it (back) into life. Gu’s pseudocharacters enact an orthographic involution where characters turn inward and alienate themselves from within – in Bhabha’s (1993: 64)

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  161 words, they are “split” and “estranged unto themselves”. Whereas the Chinese-English textual juxtapositions on the stone steles are manifestly translingual, the pseudocharacters are transvisual, inviting viewers (if they will) to permutate disparate component parts back into the orthodox shape of a legitimate character. They compress for the readerviewer familiarity and alterity into a single translanguaging space and compel a hither-andthither shift between the contrived and the real, hence performing the dialectic between simulacra and authenticity. Yet not all the characters in the transliteration are subject to corruption; the structurally less complex characters are left unmolested as their already basic configuration leaves limited room for manipulation. The copresence of proper and aberrant characters within the same frame sustains an uncanny orthography where the familiar and the alienated converge within the cognitive-perceptual flux that a viewer experiences. By oscillating between known and unknown characters, the readerviewer labours through the labyrinth of the Chinese script, authentic and contrived, to retrieve the sonic values of the characters. Is this blending of sense and nonsense, this situating of the stele as imagetext on the border of the unsayable and unreadable, not another form of translanguaging practice? Intersections of body and text The notion of readerly labour brings us to our last point: the embodied interaction between readerviewer and text. In a typical exhibition space, the stone steles are laid horizontally on the ground (Figure 8.3) instead of erected vertically as they would be in premodern times. Despite all their visual majesty, the stone steles are made to look rather like tombstones, their texts recalling historical epitaphs (Wu 2005: 299), thereby evoking a very different discursive imaginary than the laudatory or commemorative texts typically associated with stone steles. The spatial layout of the installation changes the way a viewer interacts with the texts. Instead of standing in front of the 190cm-tall steles and looking forward and slightly upward at the texts (as one would if the steles were standing upright), the readerviewer would now need to bend or squat down in order to read (Cateforis 2005: 314). This alters the readerviewer’s embodied relationship with the text, hence the language-body interface, which in turn transforms the entire reading experience. On each stone stele, the Chinese and English texts are angled differently, creating two axes of reading intersecting at right angles. The Chinese texts (the original Chinese poem and the Chinese transliteration) are read topdown following the classical convention; the English texts (Bynner’s English translation and the English translation of the Chinese transliteration), although aligned top-down, are rotated 90 degrees clockwise to the gaze of the readerviewer directly facing the stone stele (see closeup of a stone stele in Figure 8.1). This means that readerviewers will have to tilt their gaze (and

162  Part II

Figure 8.3 Forest of Stone Steles on exhibition, the University of North Texas, 2003. Courtesty of Gu Wenda Studio.

possibly their head) alternately as they work through the two languages. Here reading becomes more than tracing the words; it is equally a tricky bodily manoeuvre. Combined with the general posture of the readerviewer, who must hover over and make their way around the lying stone stele, what we have here is an exemplary demonstration of how the body must be incorporated as part of the economy of performative texts. Text and body cross each other, as it were, through a kinetic relation that transcends and transforms the space between them.

Tracing the alphabet through the character: Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy This section explores the idea of transvisuality, which describes the “slippage” or sliding between orthographic forms; this can pertain to the writing systems of different languages, which, in terms of their materiality, are

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  163 fundamentally visual. Our premise is that that the orthographic patterns of a language – be it alphabetic, syllabary, or logographic – constitute its basic visual aura, and that this material-graphic visuality can be metonymically extended to represent the primary visuality that underpins a linguistic culture. What then happens when the primary visualities of different cultures mesh or slide into each other? Figure 8.4 shows a banner advertising Xu Bing’s exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 1999. At first glance, and especially from afar, the four graphs on the banner look like ordinary Chinese characters. On closer inspection, however, these “characters” turn out to be undecipherable as Chinese: they are apparently Chinese but ultimately not recognizable as such. The greater irony is that, upon scrutiny, they turn out to be recognizable as English; they read, in a highly defamiliarized visual: Art for the People. Cognitive effort is required initially on the part of the readerviewer to make out these phonetic letters, disguised as logographs. As with the inscriptions on Stone Steles, these are imagetexts. (Note, however, that without being told that these are in fact letters, one may not even begin to

Figure 8.4 “Art for the People”, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1999. Source: Xu Bing Studio

164  Part II decipher them, which turns these graphs into marks that do not register as signs in the readerviewer’s cognition.) And owing to its size, the banner as a whole is also a writing spectacle. Readerviewers are first bemused, and then, after tracing out each letter successfully through the calligraphic moves, are struck by a shock of recognition that they are reading a phonetic language under the cover of a logographic one. In this constructed translingual simulacra, each stroke is crafted as if it were part of a Chinese character when in fact it is an alphabetic letter. In Figure 8.4, the two diagonal strokes at the top of the first graph are made to look like the Chinese pictograph-radical ren 人 and would in the first instance be misrecognized as such by an unsuspecting Chinese viewer. It turns out, however, that further down there is a horizontal stroke joining the two diagonals, which immediately turns the alleged radical into a noncharacter and into the letter “A”. In the second graph, the structure on the left, which is the letter “F”, resembles the radical guang 广; notice how the first horizontal stroke is deliberately shortened so as to parody the dotted stroke on the top of the Chinese graph. The last character has an elongated “P” on the left, which is meant to mimic 阝, a pictograph with the shape of a human ear. Such are the deceptive manoeuvres that Xu Bing adopts in inventing his special brand of orthography, known as square word calligraphy or new English calligraphy. Xu Bing’s pseudocharacters are different from Gu Wenda’s, which operate intralingually by manoeuvring within the visual composition of Chinese characters. Xu’s imagetexts, by contrast, operate interlingually, where strokes of Chinese characters and English alphabets mutate and slide into one another through the mediation of calligraphy. Each imagetext formation is what Vinograd (2011: 98) calls a “liminal space”, an interstitial site that emerges out of the transfiguration of different script patterns. It is also language – or better still, interlanguage – as “thingified” (Jaworski 2014: 84) or fossilized in the material form of a transvisual script. The resulting imagetext is a monstrosity (and several of these translingual graphs do literally look rather monstrous; see Figures 8.6 and 8.7 below); it is English encompassed within the visual framework of Chinese orthography, at the same time as it demonstrates a distinctly Chinese visuality infused with English phonetics. Thus, each “Chinese” character can be read aloud, but what comes out of the reader’s mouth are English sounds. In this reading of English through Chinese, a phonemic-graphological schism arises between the perceptual (the architectonic structure of Chinese characters) and the cognitive (the aural-oral deciphering of the English letters) in processing each word-character. Within this schism lies the aesthetic tension of the work. We can therefore consider Square Word Calligraphy as a method to practically interrogate the space between English and Chinese. By reading and, even more so, by writing English through Chinese, we experientially transcend and transform this space. As another example, Figure 8.5 shows the word spring visually reimagined using this method and written by one

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  165

Figure 8.5 “Spring” written in square word calligraphy. Courtesy of Zhang Rui.

of our students. Let us work through this gestalt comprising several components: starting from the top-left, we have S (a laterally inverted version of 弓); to its right, a P (camouflaged in 阝or, alternatively,卩); in the centre of the graph is the letter R (resembling 尺); underneath that, there is an I (mimicking 工); a lower-case “n” (conflating with 冂); and finally a G (resemiotized as an inverted 戶). By working through the imagetext this way, we are also engaging ourselves with the cognitive-perceptual experience of translanguaging by way of embodying the visual slippage between English and Chinese. The visual tricks that characterize Square Word Calligraphy recall our earlier discussion of Gu Wenda’s pseudocharacters. It also evokes Xu Bing’s earlier and most famous installation piece, A Book from the Sky (1988). Indeed the former work must be properly understood through its intertextual connection to the latter work. In A Book from the Sky, Xu Bing devises pseudo-Chinese characters by combining calligraphic strokes in aberrant but conceivable configurations; the resulting graphs look just like orthodox Chinese characters, especially when seen from a distance, but they turn out to be undiscernible, illegible formations when observed closely. Viewers, in particular those who have at least some knowledge of the Chinese language, are thus tricked into believing that they are about to read some proper characters, only to realize with frustration that they cannot understand a single one of them.2 A Book from the Sky returns Chinese language and culture to the base materiality of its script while stoically blockading any meaning or message from coming through this script. It delivers a visual performance in noncommunication, where a seemingly familiar code fails to convey

166  Part II any expected meaning; by inscribing meaninglessness (in terms of lexical semantics) unto itself, the unrecognizable graphs undercut the institution of language and its attendant assumptions about the viability of linguistic communication and cultural continuity (Link 2006; Lee 2015: 100–106). This facilitates a politicized reading of the work, particularly in light of traumatic historical events (see e.g. Abe 1998), where the deconstructed characters are seen to embody the artist’s negative response to Chinese language and culture.3 Conceptually, A Book from the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy both operate with the motifs of misrecognition and unreadability, but with a difference. A Book from the Sky creates an involutionary loop, where unreadability leads the gaze of the readerviewer from a site of nonmeaning to the graphological-material origins of language. The misrecognition of Chinese characters results in nonrecognition, and hence the termination of any illusion of meaning. In Square Word Calligraphy, by contrast, the initial misrecognition leads to nonrecognition (in Chinese) and then to re-cognition (in English). Here translanguaging opens up a line of flight, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari again; instead of folding towards itself in a closed discursive loop which holds the moment, the visual sign flees from itself, that is to say, it deterritorializes itself, escaping its own boundary through visual transition into another language. The difference between nonrecognition and re-cognition has language ideological implications. Whereas A Book from the Sky assumes a pessimistic stance towards the integrity of linguistic meaning, Square Word Calligraphy intimates the possibility of communication by recourse to the alternative route of visual metamorphosis. This difference in language ideology becomes even clearer when we consider another related work by Xu Bing, titled A Dictionary of Selected Words from A Book from the Sky (1991). As evident from the title, this is an extension of A Book from the Sky. It is a translational text that shapes itself in lexicographical form. As in a dictionary, there are on the one hand selected pseudocharacters from the parent work; on the other hand, there are purported pinyin transliterations of these words, followed by a series of meaningless “definitions” in “English”. These definitions are couched in randomly jumbled letters that render the word strings nonsensical, as if they were a form of encryption. What we have here is a bogus dictionary of unreadable Chinese characters explained in unreadable English (or other alphabetic language). In this instance, translanguaging functions as an empty façade, sustaining the act of interlingual communication through pseudotranslation – here the visual frame of a dictionary is crucial – while perennially invoking non-sense/nonsense. Juxtaposed with A Book from the Sky, translanguaging in A Dictionary becomes an ironic tool to extend the aesthetic of uncommunicability in the former work (Lee 2015: 106–107). This move also subverts the ideologies that frame the dictionary genre as an authoritative cultural text. In Square Word Calligraphy, by contrast, translanguaging takes on a substantial role: it diverts and slides the Chinese script – which in A Book

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  167 from the Sky bends towards its own corruption – into a different linguistic trajectory, exposing it to orthographic inflection (graphological translation). Notably, these inflections are systematically executed. Xu Bing invents a visual glossary describing the patterns of correspondence between Chinese character components and alphabets by virtue of their perceived similarities of shape.4 For example, “w” translates into shan 山; “o” translates into kou 口; “n” (lower case) translates into jiong 冂; the capital “I” translates into gong 工; and the capital “L” translates into yi 乚. As in naturally occurring speech, translanguaging in literary art does not occur in a vacuum or out of pure intuition. The sociolinguistic motivation behind the conception of Square Word Calligraphy lies with the cultural environment in which Xu Bing finds himself. Xu Bing left China for an artistic career in the US in 1990, which was after he created A Book from the Sky. As a Chinese artist working in an English-speaking country, he had a deep sense of cultural dislocation. There he experienced an identity crisis: while Chinese was his mother tongue, his working language was now English, which he was not thoroughly comfortable nor familiar with. This in-betweenness became manifested in his hybrid orthography, which was a response to his own cultural condition at the time. According to Xu Bing, if he had continued to work in China, Square Word Calligraphy would never have come about (Xu 2014: 151). Translanguaging in literary art is therefore always a critique and performance of a broader linguistic-cultural context in which a particular piece of work is produced. In Square Word Calligraphy, this critique tends towards the positive. Here, translanguaging serves as a metaphor for cultural translation at the same time as it functions as a material channel through which the primary visuality of the Chinese language is resemiotized into a different visual order. This creates a new figurative space of communication that negotiates the representational systems of two languages, thereby hinting at the potential for coeval existence, mutual transformation, and re/biculturation. It is, then, possible to review this narrative as we move chronologically from A Book from the Sky to Square Word Calligraphy: the former represents the regression of a rich culture towards anarchy, and points to a disillusionment on the part of the artist in respect to the tenability of linguistic communication; the latter transgresses the institutionalized boundaries of what defines a language visually, suggesting that the solution lies in breaking out of cultural trappings and opening up to slippage and transformation. The two variables that underscore the difference between the two works are the artist’s physical trajectory from China to the US (and back) and the translingualism of the latter work. This brings in, quite literally, the influence of trajectories of the body in space, by which just being somewhere else reconfigures the work or makes new work possible. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that Square Word Calligraphy has evoked a very different interpretation among critics than A Book from the Sky, particularly along the lines of East-West fusion. The meaning potential of the work can also

168  Part II shift subtly according to the specific site where it is displayed. For example, its 1997 Hong Kong exhibition is said to have “achieved its full potential as a poignant message of hope for the future at its Hong Kong venue” (Erickson 1999, n.p.). Here, “hope for the future” can refer to transcultural encounters and interactions in Hong Kong, which, due to its colonial history, is often seen as the gateway between East and West. In Square Word Calligraphy, translanguaging is not merely encapsulated within the discrete imagetexts; it is also used as a technique in transvisualizing entire discourses. Using his new English calligraphy, Xu Bing has transcribed several existing works, including Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple Picking”, Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”, the work of Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei, Bob Dylan’s lyrics, nursery rhymes, quotations from Mao Zedong’s talk at the Yan’an forum on literature and art, the Chinese classical lyric Chunjiang huayue ye (Blossoms on a moonlit river in spring), and an excerpt from Zhuangzi’s philosophical treatise Qi wu lun “Discussion on Making All Things Equal”, among others. In each of these cases, translanguaging produces aesthetic tension by defamiliarizing the visual interface of familiar works or genres, simultaneously consolidating and estranging the viewer’s linguistic sensibilities. Frost’s English poem would thus look rather more like a Chinese poem, whereas in the case of Zhuangzi and Wang Wei, a Chinese classical text in English translation uncannily recoils unto itself through being cast in a Chinese-English script. Figure 8.6 shows an image of Zhuangzi’s text in square word calligraphy. The display largely conforms to the paratextual-material conventions of calligraphic scrolls. However, although the scripts are read from top to bottom, conforming to classical Chinese convention, they are also arranged from left to right in line with alphabetic writing (so that if we unknowingly start from the right, we will be reading the text upside down). In addition, faint punctuation marks – which are nonexistent in Chinese calligraphy – are visible in red. This meshing of writing conventions exacerbates the visual irony: we are in effect reading a square word calligraphic version of the English translation of a Chinese philosophical text, in a layout that meshes top-down and left-right reading orientations. This text is quintessentially translational, not primarily because it is factually a piece of translation proper, but because of the various layers of interlanguage tension set up within its very texture. An even more critical aspect of the display is that it entails painstaking reading labour. Deciphering a single imagetext written in new English calligraphy is relatively easy; interpreting an entire text written with those same imagetexts is quite another matter. One only needs to try reading the text in Figure 8.6 (smoothly, as one would read an ordinary English text) to experience the laboriousness of it. The text reads: Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps

Figure 8.6 Zhuangzi’s “Discussion on Making All Things Equal” in square word calligraphy. Source: Xu Bing Studio.

170  Part II of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there? What does the Way reply upon, that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, that we have right or wrong? How can the Way do away and not exist? How can words exist and not be acceptable? In order to decipher this underlying text, one would need to literally work out each graph as if it were a visual puzzle. The work involved is not merely cognitive-perceptual; there is also a sensuous-embodied element, as one would probably need to read out each phoneme (even silently), go through some trial and error, and accrue them into well-formed words. (This would be especially challenging if one tried to read the whole text while standing in front of the artefact [hung on a wall] at the exhibition venue itself.) The readerviewer may also need some tools to help them trace the letters through calligraphic shapes; this can be anything from a simple pencil and paper to a computing device. I (TK) first encountered the work in Xu Bing’s exhibition in Hong Kong in 2014. Unable to decipher the text on the spot, he took a photo of the artefact and enlarged each graph on the screen of his iPad later to work them out properly into the Zhuangzi text. This resonates with our point in Chapter Seven about the machine-human interface thrown up by Cayley’s work. The idea of reading labour, which we touched upon earlier in respect of Gu Wenda’s art, is important. It serves to underline the fact that Xu Bing’s translanguaging is not merely discursive but embodied: by tracing and tracking the imagetexts with a commitment of physical effort, one literally performs a translingual and transvisual act. Illustrative in this regard is an instruction manual, titled An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy, on how to write new English calligraphy, which Xu Bing has created using new English calligraphy itself (Figure 8.7, top). To obtain a coherent sense of the instructions, one would need to paradigmatically decrypt the English word camouflaged behind each hybrid script following a set of matching conventions, and then combine these syntagmatically into a discourse. In this impeded and strained reading procedure is embedded the process of learning the new script. This new script thus takes on a metadiscursive role, where it materializes a full-length discourse about itself. With this instruction manual comes a companion tracing book (Square Word Calligraphy Red Line Tracing Book) on which users can practice writing the translingual script (Figure 8.7, bottom). This brings us back to my earlier point about embodiment and performance: translanguaging manifests itself not only in the materiality of the artefact, but also within the interactive setup of a mock classroom. This “classroom” is an implement built into the space of an exhibition hall that induces the viewer to literally enter the installation. The physical setting turns the viewer into a learner-participant, who is seated in front of a desk, equipped with ink, brushes, and the manual and tracing book mentioned above. A video titled Elementary Square-Word Calligraphy Instruction is played on a screen at

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  171

Figure 8.7 Square Word Calligraphy: Instruction manual (top) and tracing book (bottom). Source: Xu Bing Studio.

the front of the room, after which the participant starts practising the new script using the given books. In other words, this installation is not only viewable but also eminently doable, in which case the viewer is not merely a viewer but also a practitioner of the new writing art.5 (Yet this intervention ironically reinstates the normativity that translanguaging resists, thus ironically and playfully turning translanguaging on

172  Part II itself. The work has in effect become a teachable institutional artefact; here there are quite obvious parallels with the everyday world, where translanguaging has the potential to be commodified into a teaching solution.) The hands-on approach evinced in Square Word Calligraphy demonstrates that translanguaging is not merely a static visual effect in art; it is as much a discursive performance enacted through the language-body interface between the imagetext and the readerviewer, who embodies the work’s transcultural sensibility. One’s initial response to the installation may vary according to one’s linguistic and cultural disposition, but after moving through the calligraphic exercise, this disposition would have been more or less negotiated. A predominantly English-speaking individual may at first be disconcerted by the way alphabetic orthography is being distorted beyond recognition and then, after some practice, be intrigued at the systematic convertibility between calligraphic strokes and alphabetic shapes. A predominantly Chinese-speaking individual, on the other hand, may initially be tricked into misrecognizing the pseudocharacters as characters proper, and then be pleasantly surprised that traditional calligraphy could be used to render an alphabetic language.6 At the end of the day, the two individuals with different language affiliations – no doubt idealized, hypothetical models – would have shifted towards a kind of middle cultural ground, where their initial, largely monolinguistic dispositions are moderated by a translingual sensibility and sensitivity. Importantly, all of this is experienced through the body of the readerviewers, who are also in an ethnographic sense persons-in-the-culture, wherever the exhibit is on display. This drives home the point that translingualism is not an abstract, intellectual entity but a cultural process that can and should be instantiated. Xu Bing’s translanguaging, then, underpins the ethical stance of his new English calligraphy. His imagetexts extend beyond discursive language to encompass an intercultural imaginary that renegotiates the visual boundary between English and Chinese. This imaginary is reified not only in the diglossic interface of the imagetext, which represents the site of encounter and mediation between two languages, but also between image and sound. In transcribing entire texts in the new script, Xu Bing also creates a space for the breeding of transculturation. This point gains further significance in light of the fact that today Xu Bing has a concurrent presence in both China and the US. While continuing to run his New York and Beijing studios, Xu Bing also served as the vice-president of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art in the period 2008–2014, which points to his embeddedness in the art institutions of both worlds. Transculturation, as Maria Tymoczko (2014) tells us, is the “performance of the borrowed cultural forms in the receptor environment” (121; emphasis in original). In the case of Square Word Calligraphy, this receptor environment is itself mobile, always shifting with the site of exhibition of the installation; this means that what is to be considered the “borrowed cultural form” also shifts. If the installation is displayed in China or some part

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  173 of Greater China, for example, a readerviewer might perceive himself or herself as writing Chinese calligraphy written with English, the latter being the foreign or borrowed element; if, conversely, the exhibition is held in a predominantly English-using region, the same script might be seen instead as an English word written with Chinese calligraphy, where the latter is borrowed as a stylistic font. There is no doubt a degree of simplification here, but this characterization of the work nonetheless underscores an immanent biculturality that is mutable and transformable, depending on the perspective of the readerviewer. Just as in naturally occurring interactions, multilinguals translanguage through actual exchanges with one another by tapping into a continuous repertoire, so in Square Word Calligraphy, translanguaging is a situated practice and embodied experience, where the readerviewer traces and negotiates, through their body, the orthographic slip from the Chinese character to the English alphabet as a visual continuum.

Adulterating the Bible: Post Testament All registers and discourses are institutionalized; as such, they are necessarily imbibed with values pertinent to the particular site in which they are produced, circulated, and consumed (e.g. whether a certain register is appropriate to a certain communicative setting; whether a certain type of discourse belongs to the realm of high culture). What happens when disparate discourses and/or registers are made to come together, and “weave” into each other, in a work that pretends to be coherent? The rest of the chapter explores this in relation to another piece of text-based art by Xu Bing. Earlier we posited a narrative that goes like this: as Xu Bing moved from China to the US in the early 1990s, a shift took place in his artistic endeavours together with a change in his language ideology. Whereas in A Book from the Sky, created when Xu Bing was still in China (and shortly before the Tiananmen Incident), the artist expresses a negative response to Chinese language and culture, Square Word Calligraphy, created after his migration to the US, reflects a positive vision of language and communication and suggests the possibility of East-West fusion. Now, this narrative needs qualification. It is problematized, first and foremost, by the simple fact that A Book from the Sky has been exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world till today, alongside Square Word Calligraphy and other works. Hence, a linear narrative that hypothesizes a neat evolution from one language ideology to another can be problematic, given that works with different, even contradictory, orientations are displayed in tandem. A more nuanced picture would be one that instead considers seemingly conflicting positions as coexistent and synchronous, thereby acknowledging the duplicity and layered-ness of an artist’s ideological disposition. This is, on a metalevel, homologous with the translanguaging utterance, which blends two apparently dissimilars into a single imagetext.

174  Part II Shortly before Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing produced an intriguing installation with the title Post Testament (1992). Post Testament comprises 300 bound volumes. Each volume is 570 pages thick, imbued with the aura of old European manuscripts through being made with a special kind of paper called zhengwen paper,7 complete with hand-sewn leather binding. Paratextual details, including the layout, font type, and the use of Roman numerals in chapter headings, give us again the impression of a fully dignified and grandiose text (see Figure 8.8).

Figure 8.8 Post Testament. Source: Xu Bing Studio.

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  175 Chapter I of Post Testament begins with this: The at book daybreak, of my the face generation still of turned Jesus to Christ, the wall, son and of before David, I the had son seen of above Abraham. Abraham the begat big Isaac; window and curtains Isaac what begat tone Jacob; the and first Jacob streaks begat of Judas light and assumed, his I brethren; could and already Judas tell begat what Phares the and weather Zara was of like. The Thamar; first and sounds Phares from begat the Esrom; street and had Esrom told begat me, Aram; according and to Aram whether begat they Aminadab; came and to Aminadab my begat ears Naasson; deadened and Naasson distorted begat by Salmon; the and moisture Salmon of begat the Booz atmosphere of or Rachab; quivering and like Booz arrows begat in Obed the of resonant, Ruth; empty and expanses Obed of begat a Jessie; spacious, and frosty, Jesse pure begat morning; David as the soon king; as and I David heard the king rumble begat of Solomon the of first her tramcar, that I had could been tell the whether wife it of was Urias; sodden and with Solomon rain begat or Roboam; setting and forth Roboam into begat the Abia blue. Surely this is perfect gibberish, an impossible text: every single word is recognizable to an English reader, but because of the strange collocations and apparent lack of syntax, the whole text is anomalous and inexplicable, no more than a haphazard cluster of biblical names. Here again we have an imagetext, eminently visible on the page but not quite readable. As it stands, the passage is incomprehensible, and the regal authority of the books’ appearance only serves to underscore the irony of their nonsensicality. The frustrated viewer of the installation may well stop here and declare it an impossible specimen of language, in which case the interpretation of the work comes to an end. Yet the text can become readable, though not without some commitment on the part of its reader. If we look closely at the passage above, it is composed of a repetitive structure, “and (proper noun) begat (proper noun)”, although this is interspersed among other words. If we sieve out this structure from the above passage, this is what we will have: The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren; And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram; And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon; And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse; And Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias; And Solomon begat Roboam; and Roboam begat Abia; … (Matthew 1, King James Bible)

176  Part II And when the remaining words are collapsed, the following passage emerges: At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big window-curtains what tone the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what the weather was like. The first sounds from the street had told me, according to whether they came to my ears deadened and distorted by the moisture of the atmosphere or quivering like arrows in the resonant, empty expanses of a spacious, frosty, pure morning; as soon as I heard the rumble of the first tramcar, I could tell whether it was sodden with rain or setting forth into the blue. (Proust 2006: 453) The unreadable text, as it were, is formed by splicing together two separate texts, more or less by every other word. The first extract above is from the King James Version of the New Testament, on the genealogy of Jesus; and the second is from Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, in English translation. If we start with the Matthew passage and interchange every word with a word from the Proust passage (i.e. one word from Matthew, one word from Proust, one word from Matthew, and so forth), and move along the two texts in tandem, what comes up is the gibberish excerpt cited above. Clearly these belong to very different text-types, viz. religious vs. literary. One also observes a confounding of registers, where archaic English (thou, behold, ye, unto) is mixed with a more modern, elegant English, as in the following excerpt from Chapter III: And of as intelligent they people departed she from was Jericho, merely a great lady multitude like followed any him. And, other behold, the two name blind Duchesse men de sitting Guermantes by signifying the nothing, way now side, that when there they are heard no that longer Jesus any passed duchies by, or cried principalities; out, but saying, I have had mercy adopted on a us, different O point Lord, of thou view Son in of my David. And manner the of multitude enjoying rebuked people them, and because places they this should lady hold in their furs peace: braving but the they bad cried weather the seemed more, to saying, me have to mercy carry on with us, her O all Lord, the thou castles Son of the David. And territories Jesus of stood which still, she and was called duchess, them, princess, and viscountess, said, as what the will figures ye carved that over I a shall portal do hold unto in you? This can be broken down into two passages from the same sources above, as follows: And as they departed from Jericho, a great multitude followed him. And, behold, two blind men sitting by the way side, when they heard that Jesus passed by, cried out, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  177 Son of David. And the multitude rebuked them, because they should hold their peace: but they cried the more, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou Son of David. And Jesus stood still, and called them, and said, What will ye that I shall do unto you? [I knew quite well that, to many people] of intelligence, she was merely a lady like any other, the name Duchesse de Guermantes signifying nothing, now that there are no longer any sovereign Duchies or Principalities, but I had adopted a different point of view in my method of enjoying people and places. All the castles of the territories of which she was Duchess, Princess, Viscountess, this lady in furs defying the weather teemed to me to be carrying them on her person, as a figure carved over the lintel of a church door8 holds in [his hand the cathedral that he has built or the city that he has defended]. (Proust 2006: 471) It is interesting to note that both of these sources are themselves translations, and that they are stitched together to create the image of an authentic English text. Those familiar with A Book from the Sky would not be too surprised by this optical trick, but whereas in the earlier work, Xu Bing plays with the visual corporeality of the Chinese character, this time he corrupts the English language at the level of discourse. The work may recall Lewis Carroll’s nonsense-poem “Jabberwocky”, which appears in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. But whereas “Jabberwocky” coins lexical strings by combining letters in new permutations while generally respecting English syntax, in Post Testament there is no syntax to speak of if one reads linearly, which means that no meaning accrues across the word sequences. At the same time, however, each word stands as a valid entry in the English language, which gives the text its uncanniness, where plain, familiar words build up into a meaningless text. Xu Bing uses an eclectic array of miscellaneous texts to adulterate the New Testament. If Proust’s novel can still be considered a “classic” work of world literature and an emblem of “high culture” (notwithstanding that these descriptors are an effect of literary institutionalization), Xu Bing also draws from contemporary pulp fiction as a mixing ingredient; the result is a constant shuttling between a revered, ecclesiastical language and a coarse vernacular of a violent and erotic nature. In Chapter XII, the religious text is shot through with a 1985 Wall Street Journal article on US income tax in the early twentieth century. In Figure 8.8, the last paragraph in the left column is formed by alternating, generally word-by-word, this passage from the newspaper article:9 For one thing, Congress didn't pass the implementing legislation until Oct. 3, 1913, which meant that the handful of officials and clerks

178  Part II authorized by the act had too much to do in too short a time. No tax forms were available until Jan. 8, even though the deadline for submission was March 1 … with this one from the Bible: [And it was at Jerusalem the] feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch. Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believed not ... (John 10, King James Bible) A very different kind of translanguaging is at work than in Square Word Calligraphy, consisting of the interweaving of strands from text-types of very different orders – religious, literary (serious and popular), journalistic. This creates a complex fabric of signs that forces the reader to repeatedly move in and out, up and down – the latter because of perceived values of “high” and “low” associated with biblical and secular registers respectively. Translanguaging, in this case intralingual, fragments the constituent texts at the same time as it threads them together into a different creature – an imagetext that resembles neither the one nor the other. Even though the work can be viewed as an installation artefact and therefore need not be studied closely, in order to fully appreciate the translanguaging act, a viewer must put in effort; this involves (as we have done here) teasing out the constituent texts that underlie a selected stretch of the texts, doing some research to identify their respective origins, and then twisting them back together in the way the artist did. Once again this is a language-body interface. It is a hands-on reenactment of the creative process that enables one to experience unreadability from the vantage point of readability, that is, how two perfectly comprehensible texts written in one language can turn into a textual monstrosity when they are sewn together. Since all discourses are institutionalized, we are really talking not at the level of words and registers but of discourse-worlds. On the one hand, there is the New Testament, which forms the matrix text in Xu Bing’s work; on the other hand, there are the various secular texts that intercept this matrix text, cutting in and out of it, thereby dismantling its organicity. If we accept that the Bible is a hegemonic discourse representing power and authority, then the secular discourses (not a unified entity in itself) represent heterogeneous forces that continually resist, disrupt, and destabilize this dominant discourse, rendering it incoherent and ultimately dysfunctional from below. Post Testament, then, is a textual imagining of ideological contestation in the real, sociolinguistic world. Here, translanguaging takes the specific form of transdiscursivity: the encounter, intersection, and intertwining of discourses to create a hybrid, transformative space replete with

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  179 textual ambiguity and mayhem. The outcome is a convoluted discourse that uncommunicates meaning. By refusing to provide a resolution to the clash of registers, by allowing the texts to stand inscrutable, Xu Bing advances a confrontational view towards the relationship between cultural forces struggling against each other for dominance. This theme is further developed in Cultural Negotiations (1992), which combines Post Testament with A Book from the Sky. This hybrid installation takes the form of a large conference table lined with chairs; on top of the table are sprawled hundreds of opened books belonging to two sets. The first set consists of 300 Chinese-style bound manuscripts inscribed with made-up characters; the second set consists of 300 Anglo-Saxon-style bound volumes full of jumbled texts, as in the examples we have just seen. Translanguaging is here taken outside the confines of text, discourse, and the book; instead, it structures the materiality of the entire installation, assuming as it does a spatial dimension in the plain juxtaposition of two translingual sets of incomprehensible texts on the conference table. In this emplacement of two languages alongside each other without any suggestions for translation, a chasm ensues. The grim message is, of course, that it is not possible to negotiate cultural gaps, even if the two cultures in question are in close proximity. Spatial translanguaging therefore produces discursive rupture, embedded within the close-range encounter of different languages.

Conclusion This chapter has focused as much on the readerviewer of the imagetext as its producer. As such, it further develops our understanding of translanguaging, which has typically been regarded from the perspective of the text producer. Taken together, the three pieces of experimental art discussed above reflect dilemmas and ambivalences in the artists’ on-going interrogation of the EastWest dynamic, dovetailing towards an emerging transnational-transcultural visuality. Central to the conceptualization and material constitution of these radical works of language art is translanguaging, which not only articulates a politics of (mis)recognition, (un)readability, and (in)communicability but also subverts the dominance of the stele, the authoritative literary or religious text, and indeed of writing and its transmission. By producing transliterations that sit on the verge of sense and nonsense, creating slippage and transition between the visual representations of languages, or crisscrossing textual threads that belong to contrasting genres and registers, translanguaging “creates a kind of third narrative that limns the border between avant-garde literature and visual art”.10 Translanguaging spaces constitute this third narrative, the existence of which as a pristine site of in-betweenness signals the presence of other relatively well-formed spaces. Therefore, like the “third spaces” of cultural translation in migratory midlands (Bhabha 1994), translanguaging limns or delineates borders and simultaneously challenges and transcends them, turning these into liminal zones.

180  Part II Apart from semiotic borders, the disciplinary border is one to be transcended. A translanguaging perspective on literary art, by conjoining applied linguistics with visuality, locates the study of language use beyond the usual comfort zone of linguists and translation studies scholars. This exemplifies the transdisciplinary aspect of the prefix “trans” (Li and Zhu 2013: 520; see also Lee and Li 2019). In this regard, this chapter has attempted to take translanguaging into the realm of literary art, with a focus on (a) the interlingual, translational perversion of Chinese poetics; (b) the intersemiotic transformation between orthographies; and (c) the intralingual, interdiscursive heterogenization of discourses and registers. There is, however, in this process the suggestion that we can read back from these subversive and contestatory artworks into the everyday. In important ways, artworks enable us to see/read differently, highlight, make visible that which is elided or erased. This unsettling of the settled relations between languages, registers, modalities, and discourses, bringing together the like and the unlike, the sensible and the nonsensical, is particularly pertinent today in view of “the continued flowering of indigenous and vernacular genres of verbal art in the context of a growing recognition of multiculturalism and language diversity” (Francis 2014, n.p.). With the proliferation of intercultural experimentations in creative writing, the interface between translingual poetics and applied linguistics has emerged. Francis (2014) suggests, apropos of language learning, that “bilingual poetry (and bilingual literacy in general) is considered today as a resource that favors the development of advanced proficiency in all realms of language use” (n.p.). This interface is only just beginning to be explored; the crossfertilization between psycholinguistics, bilingualism, and literacy studies on the one hand and aesthetic practices on the other remains a fruitful prospect to be furthered.

Notes 1 There is something rather similar to this in French/English. The French nonsense rhyme Un petit d’un petit s’etonne aux Halles, if read fluently, corresponds with the English nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall”. In effect, a nonsense string in French that has a certain phonetic equivalence with the nursery rhyme, as if repeated in English with a strong French accent. 2 For images of A Book from the Sky, see http://www.xubing.com/en/work/detail s/206?classID=10&type=class#206 (accessed 12 November 2018). 3 Most notably, early interpretations tended to read A Book from the Sky as a critique of the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. Such interpretations are retroactive, however, as the work was conceived 1–2 years before the incident. 4 For an image of this glossary, see http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/209? year=1996&type=year#209 (accessed 12 November 2018). 5 Square Word Calligraphy has also been introduced into schools (Xu 2014), where the classroom installation in question turns into a real-life entity. Other interactive versions of the work include Square Word Calligraphy: Computer Font Project (1998) incorporating Your Surname Please (1998), where participants key their surnames into a computer program which transfigures these surnames using square word calligraphy; see Tomii et al. (2011: 169–170).

Translanguaging as spectacle in text-based art  181 6 In this connection, Xu Bing once commented: “The Chinese people would be especially happy [with Square Word Calligraphy], because I transformed English into Chinese” (Xu 2014: 150). This was in response to a question from a US audience as to whether the Chinese would feel offended by his distortion of Chinese into English. Here the mutual bi-directionality of the linguistic conversion is itself telling of the transcultural sensibility underlying the work. 7 This kind of paper was used in China before the Cultural Revolution to print the English version of Mao Zedong’s teachings. 8 The phrase “lintel of a church door” seems to have been replaced by “portal” in Xu Bing’s text; earlier on, “people of intelligence” is replaced by “intelligent people”. The minor discrepancies are possibly due to the different translations of Proust’s novel that Xu might have consulted. 9 This was written by a certain Thomas V. DiBacco and cited in https://www. soundmindinvesting.com/articles/view/when-form-1040-was-brand-new (accessed 22 August 2015). 10 Artist’s statement on Post Testament, https://www.princeton.edu/~graphicarts/ 2011/04/old_new_and_post_testament.html (accessed 12 November 2018).

9

Concluding dialogue What have we learnt?

MB: In this concluding chapter, we reflect on what we have learnt about translation and translanguaging. The playwright Edward Albee wrote: “I write to find out what I’m thinking”. This is certainly a book in which our thinking developed as we wrote. Perhaps all books are, but the conventions of academic writing tend to mask the emergence of thought and present arguments as if they have always pre-existed.  TK: I think it’s completely apt that the book has unfolded in such a way, for throughout these pages we have been emphasizing the processual nature of language and communication. In a manner of speaking, is the way in which we write the book not a metadiscursive commentary on what we are discussing? MB: Interesting observation. So to begin: one of the first learning points (epiphanies) in the book came with the realization that in comparing translation and translanguaging, we were really trying to compare the proverbial apples and oranges. Translation is a field of practice with institutions, discourses, ideologies, and norms. Translanguaging is a feature of the multilingual repertoire; it is language from below and resistant to the normativities of dominant varieties of language. Li Wei has pointed to the importance of the moment in translanguaging analysis. Now how do we transform our understanding of translation so that we can achieve meaningful comparability? We have argued in Chapter 3 that translanguaging is to do with communication in the moment and does not have the directionality and purpose of translation which almost by definition has to go beyond the translation moment. To understand the directionality of translanguaging, I think we need to look beyond the moment and at the activity within which it arises and makes sense: a conversation between friends, a school lesson, a workplace interaction such as in a restaurant kitchen. If we look at translanguaging in classroom contexts for example, and there is of course an extensive literature on this, we find that here translanguaging clearly orients to something beyond the moment of utterance, in this case to learning something. And (formal) learning

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is of course a set of institutional practices just as translation is. So if translation is an activity in that sense, is translanguaging helpful to understand the moment by moment work the translator does to produce translation equivalents? We argue that it is. TK: If our assumption then is that translanguaging can be a useful way of thinking of the activity of the translator moment by moment as they draw on the languages and varieties in their repertoire to reach a translation equivalent, it follows that in order to bring translation and translanguaging together it is necessary to disaggregate the act of translating a given text into a sequence of translation moments (e.g. puzzling over how to translate a particular word or phrase, consulting an on-line dictionary or database): the translation moment, as part of the larger activity of translation, would thus be a construct of the same order as the translanguaging moment. So the translator draws on their multilingual repertoire moment-by-moment in constructing the translation. As we observed in Chapter Three, the key seems to lie in construing translation as a succession of “vertical” acts accruing into a “lateral” time-space process. MB: Yes. This would permit the development of a practice theory of translation. By proposing this practice account of translation we effectively disaggregate acts of translation into a series of moments in each of which translators draw on the language varieties in their repertoire to find a translation equivalent. Incrementally, each translation moment builds into the gestalt of the translation. So each momentin-translation as it were represents the creative bricolage of translators, drawing not only on their own multilingual repertoire, but also on relevant artefacts (print dictionaries, databases, online resources of all sorts), to achieve the translation-of-the-moment. Translation moments correspond to translanguaging moments without actually being reduced to them. TK: Could you explain your last statement? Why are translation moments irreducible to translanguaging moments? MB: Well, the tendency of translation is to keep languages apart, working across borders (thereby acknowledging their presence), while that of translanguaging is to bring them together, dissolving borders. I think this is another difference between translation and translanguaging that the book brings out, that is: the two constructs embody different but complementary approaches to the issue of communicating in multilingual environments. The translanguaging strategy is to make the best of whatever shared language and semiotic resources are available in situ for the making of meaning. This is what Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) found in restaurant kitchens: “Kitchens and restaurants can operate quite well multilingually, and it is these complex metrolingual practices that are of particular interest” (69). Even when repertoires are not initially shared, over time workers can

184  Concluding dialogue develop a shared situated repertoire. The default assumption from translation is that communication is only possible if mediated – by the translator obviously. It is the translator who holds the necessary range of language varieties in their repertoire. Hence, we can see the bricolage, the hither and thither of translation from the perspective of the translator’s repertoire, but translation in this sense remains a contrasting solution to the question of multilingual communication. TK: Indeed, in Chapter Three, we discussed how translation may actually be precluded by translanguaging in some situations. So our working assumption is that translation and translanguaging are different species of dynamic language practice. Yet this does not prevent us from seeing that the two can be mutually embedding, in other words: translation-in-translanguaging and translanguaging-in-translation. MB: Yes, I recall from Chapter Three that we imagine translation and translanguaging as moving scales that can incorporate each other. TK: To recapitulate briefly: remember our example of the Chinese New Year red packets? That demonstrates how translation, in the forms of calque and transliteration, can creep into translanguaging. Not to forget that Ofelia García and others have shown how translanguaging pedagogy in classroom contexts often invokes translation as one of many techniques in teaching. As for translanguaging-in-translation, we have John Cayley’s works, as discussed in Chapter Seven. The piece translation, in particular, is exemplary of how translanguaging dismantles prevailing ideas about translation to reveal the chaos of its moment-by-moment dynamic. Also, as discussed in Chapter Eight, Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles is really a display of translanguaging in its multilingual and multimodal flamboyance – in the name of translation. MB: In sum, we can propose an approach that treats translation as a practice and not just as a textual product, focusing on the repertoire of the translator and the moment-to-moment bricolage through which the translation is assembled. This is not really a translanguaging account of translation, though it does take translation on the same journey as dynamic concepts such as languaging and translanguaging take language. If anything, ours would be a practice approach, a repertoire approach, which would require a focus on the translator at work, “in the wild”. TK: On this last point, we seem to have been pre-empted by TAP (ThinkAloud-Protocol), which we briefly discussed in the Introduction. TAP, if you remember, has already suggested looking into translation process rather than product. Having said that, TAP is a protocol. Translanguaging is a theoretical perspective, and in this sense it can provide the conceptual framework for process-oriented procedures like TAP. MB: TAP is a methodology which aims to externalize what is going on in the head of an actor while engaged in an activity. I think if you

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took the kind of approach to researching translation that we advocate, TAP could be one of the methods used, but other possibilities, like getting actors to comment on video recordings of their practice, documenting what happens when more than one person works on a translation, or documenting a translator’s online activity, would contribute. TK: So what we have said above is really an attempt to use translanguaging to read translation. How does it work the other way, apart from what we have just said about translation-in-translanguaging? MB: As I said in the Introduction, one thing which I valued from encountering your work on translating the multilingual city, TK, was your emphasis on power relations and language ideologies. To be honest, I felt that this was a gap in research in translanguaging, which has tended to concentrate on the creativity and counternormativity of translanguaging, while not recognizing sufficiently that dominant monolingual language ideologies can marginalize languages from below. These issues were covered in Chapter Five. TK: So could we say that one intervention that translation studies can make in translanguaging is to tease out the asymmetries of power relations? MB: Absolutely. As we have said at various points throughout the book, translation, with its emphasis on norms and normativities, and with its relatively well-developed institutional framing, helps us nuance translanguaging not just as a free communication zone, but also one that is liable to be othered and marginalized by dominant language ideologies, including, of course, those concerned with translation. In our discussion of community interpreting and translanguaging in Chapters Four and Five, we can see these ideologies and normativities at work in the interactions between Klára, Jolana, and Mr Tancoš. TK: I think those interpreting episodes really bring translation and translanguaging into convergence. There we saw how interpreting involves a to-and-fro, back-and-forth negotiation across languages, and therein resides translanguaging. This departs from a linear imaginary of translation as moving from Language A to Language B. There are many intervening points between the two ends, and at each of these points, communication delves into the “vertical” realm, so to speak. Here languages, language varieties, registers, and entire discourses encounter, clash, mesh, or pull apart. As you can imagine, this process is far from “neat”. MB: Speaking of this, I am reminded of an interesting difference between translation and translanguaging, raised briefly in Chapter Two. Leaving aside for a moment the important and emergent field of interpreting, translation theory has often focused on the written language, while translanguaging has been almost exclusively focused on the spoken language – another example of apples and oranges. At a

186  Concluding dialogue number of points in the book, particularly in Chapters Seven and Eight, we extend translanguaging to consider the written mode. TK: More accurately, the multimodal. MB: Of course! The other issue on which my thinking developed during the writing of the book was the relationship between the empirical work on translanguaging in everyday contexts, presented in Chapters Four through Six, and the analysis of experimental poetry and art in Chapters Seven and Eight. TK: You mean the odd combination of the everyday and the aesthetic? MB: Yes. At first I wondered how we would bring the two analytic elements together, but it became clear to me in Chapters Seven and Eight how the artworks, like art in general, invite some kind of reading back into the everyday. TK:  Reading back into the everyday. I love this formulation. Elaborate, please. MB: Artworks change the way we see/read the world; in this sense, they read back onto daily living. Even so-called “representational” art does not posit a simple relationship between art and everyday worlds – by no means. The most apparently representational piece is a complex selection and reordering of the visual. Representational art can be unsettling and confronting, as for example the work of Egon Schiele demonstrates. Conceptual and experimental pieces like the work of John Cayley, Gu Wenda, and Xu Bing are more explicitly framed to unsettle and challenge thinking. So what I am calling reading back is the effect of reading (or looking) back at the everyday world with different eyes after engaging with an artwork. TK: This is theoretically exciting. But what does the act of reading back actually feel like? It sounds like another one of those epiphanies you’re experiencing in the process of writing the book. MB: We have already looked at the complex semiotic processes in those works. Here I will simply discuss a number of moments of engaging with them that prompted my reading back at the material in our earlier chapters. In Cayley’s piece translation, the transformations that are generated are in part machine-driven and in part human-driven, thus suggesting a Cyborgian machine-human relationship. This caused me to look back at and think differently about an episode in Chapter Four, where Lucy and Mahamadou use Google Translate as an actor to make meaning across Italian and English. The way Cayley’s algorithmic piece operates is an intensely condensed version of much more human processes. TK: That episode does indeed invoke the Cyborgian imagination. Just as Cayley’s algorithms mediate the interface between reader and text, Google Translate mediates between two persons speaking different languages but attempting to communicate for practical purposes. And significantly, we had not anticipated these connections when we set out on this project. They are emergent.

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MB: Exactly. In fact, I think Cayley’s piece also resonates with the everyday activity of a translator who is continually shuttling between the translingual knowledge contained in their repertoire and the knowledge available in nonhuman others, both print-based and online. Experiencing Cayley’s work has deepened my understanding of the materiality of the everyday. In a way it seems that one can think of Cayley’s translation device as, on the one hand, a materialization of the process of translation, as a string of transformational moments; and, on the other hand, as an artful manifestation of the multilingual repertoire itself, which is capable of such transformations. The relationship between such artworks and the everyday world is at times critical and at other times working through analogy and homology. This means that engaging with Cayley can generate new readings back into the everyday world with the potential to enrich and create depth. TK: Let me stop you here for a bit. You mentioned that the relationship between the aesthetic and the mundane is “at times critical and at other times working through analogy and homology”. Why is that? MB: Well, for example, the playful treatment of authoritative texts, as in Xu Bing’s threading through of biblical texts with profane texts in Post Testament, can be taken as a critical commentary on textual authority. In a similar vein, his Square Word Calligraphy is both critical and ludic in the way it dismantles the boundaries between writing systems. Analogy and homology, on the other hand, is where you get a flash of similarity or resemblance. For example, Cayley’s translation is something like a machinated version of a multilingual repertoire, mechanically yet somewhat spontaneously transforming among German, French, and English. So artworks can emit flashes of resemblance; they are devices that generate meaning by analogy and homology rather than directly. TK: Could it be this: it is not that the artwork is sometimes critical and sometimes analogical/homological, but rather that it is always operating in more than one mode simultaneously? MB: Good point. Perhaps criticality is embodied in the texture of art in a way that is not easy or even desirable to pull apart. TK: One salient point about the artworks examined in the book is a playful irreverence towards powerful texts or discursive structures, be they stone steles with inscriptions (material object imbued with symbolic significance), classical poetry (genre), writing systems (orthography), or the Bible (discourse). I see the ludic entering at various points in the book. MB: And here again, there is potential for reading back from these artworks to everyday multimodal language use. The theme of ludicity resonates with more recent work emphasizing creativity and playfulness in tranßcripting (Li and Zhu 2019) and translanguaging in World Englishes (Lee and Li 2019). There is indeed considerable

188  Concluding dialogue playfulness in our translanguaging data, a stand-out example for me being Valentina’s triple-layered folding of English core verbs into the French suffix and the Lingala-bound morphemes, discussed in Chapter Four. There is considerable linguistic exuberance here. TK: On this point, I see our work connecting with what scholars have called ludology (Haynes 2006) or the “ludification of culture” (Raessens 2006) in the context of Game Studies. MB: Cayley’s translation does resemble a literary game of sorts, both in terms of its interface and also in its use of algorithms. TK: Indeed. Even text-based art can be seen to possess ludic qualities. In Chapter Eight, we looked at how Gu Wenda and Xu Bing’s artworks invite readers to explore, in an almost playful manner, the semiotic flux between languages. MB: Not to forget multimodal communication in capoeira and basketball – quite obvious candidates for play! I would add that everyday communication can be ludic too, in the sense that all communication is performative. TK: What you have just said reminds me of recent work in the literature on management. Salovaara and Statler (2019), for example, look at the “gamification of existence” in organizational settings based on their reading of Hans-Georg Gadamer, defining gamification as “any organizational situation in which open-ended, non-instrumental ‘conversations’ occur between and among people and their environment” (151). MB: So how does Gadamer enter the picture here? TK: In his Truth and Method, Gadamer develops an ontology around the idea of play, describing it as a back-and-forth movement, an unpremeditated coming-and-going, manifested in such phenomena as the movement of waves, fire, or light. Notably Gadamer’s focus on the “being-ness” of artwork is somewhat analogous to the instantaneity or momentarity (Lee and Li 2019) of the translanguaging moment: “When we speak of play ... this means neither the orientation nor even the state of mind of the creator or of those enjoying the work of art, nor the freedom of a subjectivity engaged in play, but the mode of being of the work of art itself” (Gadamer 2004: 102). MB: Understanding multilingual communication in these terms, we might say that meaning is not exclusively controlled by either the speaker/ writer or the listener/reader but is rather an effect of their interaction in time-space. TK: Interestingly, Gadamer uses conversation as a metaphor to explain his point, specifically that “no one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation”, hence “allow[ing] something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exists” (Gadamer 2004: 385). Salovaara and Statler (2019) interpret this to mean that “[c]onceptualized in terms of conversation, play appears as something fundamentally processual, openended, and non-instrumental” (150).

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MB: The processual and open-ended nature of translanguaging is indeed a point we’re trying to make. TK: Which leads to the conclusion that translanguaging is play! So are we in effect reading Gadamer’s conversation metaphor back unto itself? MB: I think as well as reading back, we are materializing Gadamer’s idea of conversation as an instance of playfulness. While he writes as a philosopher, we draw on actual multilingual conversational data and artists at work. Clearly, the arguments you outline resonate with the playfulness and momentarity which we identify in translanguaging, both in conversation and in art practice. Gadamer’s back-and-forth is presumably conversation. I would like to relate it to the back-andforth of the translator’s practice as one of sustaining a conversation between languages, between language varieties, between registers, between discourses, and between modalities. TK: Which brings us back full circle to our point on the intersection of translanguaging and translation. A translator does not merely move from a start-point to an end-point; this movement is punctuated by consecutive moments within each of which a translator shuttles backand-forth, hither and thither between languages, language varieties, registers, discourses, and modalities, while still maintaining the forward thrust towards the destination – the target text. The ludic resides within all of those punctuating moments. MB: Indeed, what you’ve just said is a theme that can be developed in future work. So I think we’ve had a wonderful journey so far. Now let’s look forward to hearing what others have to say about our views as set out in this book.

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Index

Actor Network Theory 72, 102 affordances: of modes 15, 23, 24, 29, 98, 124, 154; of translanguaging 13, 25 Arabic 14, 26–27, 31 assemblages 4, 36, 42, 102–103 Baker, Mona 43 Bakhtin, Mikhail 16, 152; see also heteroglossia basketball 6, 106–108, 115–119 Bhaba, Homi 44, 158, 160–161, 179 Bible, the 51–53, 173–179 brokering 77, 81, 89, 96; see also cultural mediation; translanguaging: interdiscursive Butler, Judith 24, 97, 106, 107 Canagarajah, Suresh 4, 102 capoeira 106–115 Cayley, John 124–127, 139–148 Chinese 45–51, 139–142, 146, 153–162, 163–168, 177 Chinglish see new Chinglish code-switching 6–8, 25–26, 30–31 contact zones 9–10, 17–18, 77, 81, 96 creativity 7–8, 20–21, 41, 148–149, 152, 158, 185, 187 cultural mediation 81, 94; see also brokering; translanguaging: interdiscursive Czech 5, 57–65, 78–81, 84–86, 92–96 embodiment see translanguaging: embodied entextualization 154–157 epistemic flattening 70, 83–84, 89 French 14, 29, 36–37, 66–68, 128, 134, 138, 180n1

gesture 21, 29, 97–98, 103–105, 106, 114; see also translanguaging: embodied; multimodality Google Translate 72–75, 186; see also machine-human interface; translanguaging and technology Gu, Wenda 153–162 heteroglossia 16, 54n4, 142, 148; see also Bakhtin, Mihail imagetext 151–152, 158–161, 163–165, 170, 172–173, 175, 178 indexicality 2, 81 Jakobson, Roman 9, 13–14, 21–23, 97 Japanese 31, 36–38, 54n7, 156 Kazakh 19–20 language ideology 2–3, 64, 78–79, 95, 166, 185; monolingual language ideology 16–17, 42; separated bilingual language ideology 3, 19–20; and translanguaging 24–25, 58, 65, 81 legal advice 65–71, 82–84 Li, Wei 3, 4, 7, 8, 17–18, 24, 28, 45–48 Lingala 66–69, 75–76, 188 linguistic multicompetence 28–30 literacy 58–59 ludicity 49–50, 106–107, 143, 148–149, 157, 159, 187–188 machine-human interface 72, 127, 138–139, 146, 149,170, 186; see also Google Translate; translanguaging and technology microcollage 139–148

Index  migration 44, 100–101, 173; and legal advice 65–71, 82–84 moment 4–5, 34, 38–40, 58, 103, 153, 182–183; moment analysis 4, 24, 39 multilingualism see repertoire multimodality 22–23, 97–98, 151–152, 186 narrative 140, 146, 157, 167, 173 new Chinglish 45–48 nonsense writing 152, 158, 161, 166, 175–177 Pennycook, Alastair 20, 26–27, 41–42, 102, 183 performativity 31, 97, 106–107, 120, 138, 188 precarity 57, 62, 93 reader 124–125, 127, 138, 143–144, 146, 152, 161–162 recontextualization 88, 144 register 21–22, 65, 78, 82–84, 173, 178–179 religion 50–53, 86, 175–178 repertoire 3–4, 18–19; and cognitive space 28–30; and intralingual translanguaging 83, 89, 93–94, 96; as a key component of translanguaging 25, 40, 53, 72; multilingual 34, 60–61, 63, 67–68, 72, 182; semiotic 18–19, 104, 107; spatial 102–105, 107, 115, 119–120; and translation 5, 34, 36, 153, 183–184 rhizome 1, 42, 102 Russian 19–20 Rymes, Betsy 18–19, 26, 31, 107 self-translation 3–4 sexuality 24, 84–87, 93–94

199

Singlish 50–53 Slovak 57–58, 62–65, 78–79, 81 Spanish 19, 38, 100 Think-Aloud-Protocol (TAP) 4, 5, 40, 184–185 Third Space 44, 179 transculturation 44, 172; see also Tymoczko, Maria translanguaging: definition of 4–5, 8, 17–18, 24–25; embodied 13, 24, 106–107, 146, 170; interlingual 13, 22, 62–63, 75–76, 78–82; intralingual 13, 22, 58–59, 70, 82–84, 93; interdiscursive 13, 24, 82, 84–93; intersemiotic 13, 22, 97–98, 102–105, 117–119; as a practice 2, 5, 14, 19–21, 23, 38, 39, 40, 81, 95; in relation to translation 10–11, 33–36, 39–45, 53, 125–126, 134, 148–149, 182; and technology 72–75, 127–128, 138–139, 146, 149; translanguaging space 20, 27–28, 35, 38, 40, 58, 126, 138, 152, 158, 179, 185–186 translation: as an academic field 10, 33, 182; as an activity 6, 35, 40, 95, 183; definition of 34–35, 125–126; Jakobson’s typology of 21–22, 34; importance of the outcome of 35, 40, 58, 123; scalarity of 43–45; translation space 34, 35, 38; and transliteration 36, 46, 153, 156–157, 184; see also translanguaging in relation to translation Tymoczko, Maria 43, 44, 172; see also transculturation Xu, Bing 162–179