Three Attitudes Towards My Bilingual Writing

Assignment completed for WRS 101

Translation and postcoloniality in Ireland: the particular and peculiar relationship between Irish Gaelic and English

Translations in Ireland (between Irish Gaelic and English) take place in two very different scenarios. In the southern Republic, the Irish language is officially the first national language, but it is now spoken by a bare fraction of the population, and is steadily declining as a living language. Translations between Irish and English are supported by the Republic ’s government in various schemes, but are often viewed with suspicion by many of the Irish Gaelic speakers as yet another colonialist move. In the North (Northern Ireland), the long history of repression has made the language a rallying point for nationalists. It is in this political minefield and threatened linguistic zone that both writer and translator must operate. Creative hybridity is revealed not as free of political enmeshments, but rather the reverse: the creative vitality of this particular bilingual writing zone (of both author and translator) results precisely from its highly pressurized milieu. This article argues that translations are served by the reflexive postcolonial understanding of the role of the translator and translation, as well as the original text, within the larger socio-political context.

Bilingual writing coactivation: lexical and sublexical processing in a word dictation task

Bilinguals’ two languages seem to be coactivated in parallel during reading, speaking, and listening. However, this coactivation in writing has been scarcely studied. This study aimed to assess orthographic coactivation during spelling-to-dictation. We took advantage of the presence of polyvalent graphemes in Spanish (one phonological representation with two orthographic specifications, e.g., / b /for both the graphemes v and b) to manipulate orthographic congruency. Spanish–English bilinguals were presented with cross-linguistic congruent (movement–movimiento) and incongruent words (government–gobierno) for a dictation task. The time and accuracy to initiate writing and to type the rest-of-word (lexical and sublexical processing) were recorded in both the native language (L1) and the second language (L2). Results revealed no differences between conditions in monolinguals. Bilinguals showed a congruency and language interaction with better performance for congruent stimuli, which was evident from the beginning of typing in L2. Language coactivation and lexical–sublexical interaction during bilinguals’ writing are discussed.

The Interplay of Language Awareness and Bilingual Writing Abilities in Heritage Language Speakers

This paper investigates how language awareness influences the writing abilities of bilingual heritage language speakers. The study includes 175 bilingual 9th and 10th graders with Italian, Greek, or Turkish as their L1 and German as an early L2. The analysis is based on a corpus of narrative and argumentative texts in L1 and L2 and a language awareness test to explore semantic, pragmatic, and textual knowledge that was administered in both languages. We found that the students’ writing abilities in both languages were highly interdependent and there was a significant correlation between achieving high scores in the heritage language test and achieving equally high (or even higher) scores in the L2 test. The results further point to a significant correlation between metalinguistic awareness and writing abilities. However, there was a higher correlation between metalinguistic awareness and text level scores in the heritage language, which shows that writing abilities in this language are more dependent on metalinguistic awareness than in the language of schooling. Moreover, differences were found between the respective language groups and different school types. Based on these results, it is argued that the fostering of language awareness ought to be implemented more intensively in the language classroom.

More's History of King Richard III: Bilingual Writing and Renovation of Historiography

Why did Thomas More write two versions of his History of King Richard III, one in English and the other in Latin? Critics tend to answer this question by arguing that the two versions were not destined for the same audience: the Latin for a continental elite, the vernacular for a larger British readership. Although perfectly convincing, this explanation may not be the only one: this paper tries to underline the existence of another motivation, one of a literary nature. The History of King Richard III indeed combines two historiographical models: the ancient and classical monograph as illustrated by Sallust, and the medieval tradition of the chronicle. The oscillation between English and Latin may reflect More's wish to renovate the genre of the medieval chronicle, accomplished by an hybridization with classical Latin models—as if More attempted to grasp the best of both traditions in order to initiate a new means of writing history.

Interlingual Literature, Tropicalization, and Bilanguaging

US Latina/o literature is shaped by the hierarchical relationship between Spanish and English in the United States. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, writers working in various genres have explored this linguistic relationship by representing the interaction between English and Spanish in their literary works. Within a broader context of bilingual literary creation, many Latina/o writers have innovated with Spanish and English in ways that trouble the boundaries between these languages and, by extension, their relationship. In response to these literary experimentations, scholars have developed a range of perspectives to analyze writing that cannot be fully described by the term bilingual. Juan Bruce-Novoa proposes the term interlingual to analyze texts that do not treat Spanish and English as separate, independent codes but rather place the languages in a state of relation that makes a purely monolingual reading impossible. Frances Aparicio approaches this writing through the framework of tropicalization, a term that signals both dominant US cultural stereotypes about Latina/os as well as subaltern responses to those stereotypes. While Bruce-Novoa generally focuses on texts that include a high volume of both Spanish and English, Aparicio highlights the work of Latina/o writers, like Sandra Cisneros, Gary Soto, and Helena María Viramontes, who work primarily or exclusively in English. Aparicio traces the presence of Spanish in seemingly monolingual works through strategies like the use of literal translation and the phonetic representation of accent in English dialogue. She analyzes these strategies as sources of linguistic tension and literary creativity that transform the experiences of both monolingual and bilingual readers. Walter Mignolo offers a third perspective on bilingual writing, approaching it through the framework of decolonial theory. Like Bruce-Novoa, Mignolo highlights the creative use of the space between distinct languages. He argues that writers, like Gloria Anzaldúa, who operate in this liminal space participate in an active process of social transformation by denouncing and re-imagining hierarchical, colonial relationships between languages and cultures. While Bruce-Novoa, Aparicio, and Mignolo offer distinct perspectives on Latina/o writing between languages, they share a recognition of creative work that moves beyond the mere coexistence of Spanish and English to create meaning in the messy interaction between languages. In doing so, these creative and critical writers challenge their audiences to new modes of reading literature as well as of imagining linguistic, cultural, and political relationships between English and Spanish.

La traduction n’est pas qu’une traduction. Quelques propos sur la traduction d’une écriture fragmentaire bilingue: Cuvântul nisiparniţă (Le Mot sablier) de Dumitru Tsepeneag

Translation is not mere translation. A few remarks on the translation of a fragmentary bilingual text: Cuvântul nisiparniță (Le Mot sablier/The Hourglass Word) by Dumitru Tsepeneag The present paper will focus on the translation of a fragmentary bilingual writing. Interested both in his own monolingualism and in the monolingualism of the other (see Derrida 1996, and here mainly the monolingualism of the French reader who should constitute a kind of pseudo-source-audience3), Dumitru Tsepeneag turns his own bilingualism into a topic in his book Cuvîntul nisiparniță (published first in translation as Le Mot sablier in 1984). “This (im)possible appropriation becomes the generating reason of the creation and in the creation, then in the self-translation”; a “writing experience” where the writer cultivates his bilingualism and his biculturalism, and sheds light on the process of translation from a perspective that is at least double: that of the translated42 and self-translated writer, but also that of the translator-writer” (Lungu-Badea 2008, 20). What translation strategy would be appropriate for a book that begins in Romanian and ends in French? We could claim that its destiny is to show how one language replaces another and, consequently, renders translation useless for bilingual users. If this is but an argument for the counter-translation, the French translation, published by the P.O.L. publishing house, does not challenge it. It could respect neither “the psychological intention of the author” (Ladmiral 2006, 140), nor the “semantic intention of the text” (Ladmiral and Lipiansky 1995, 53).