Translanguaging, Literary Multilingualism and Exophony in Translation

Abstract

This article focuses on the new term of ‘translanguaging’, first developed in applied linguistics and then critically discussed in critical multilingualism studies. The term foregrounds language use as opposed to language competence. In this way, translanguaging is understood as shaking up the commonly received ideas about standardised language. With such a term, new avenues of thought and research open up to better understand multilingual practices. The new proposed way of regarding multilingual practices as more ‘energeia’, processual, and varied – instead of a fixed entity or tool – takes centre-stage in this article. I analyse the term ‘translanguaging’ by way of two practices, literary translation on the one hand and exophony on the other hand. In choosing these two practices, I ask how can translanguaging help bring down old-established epistemic walls such as clear-cut ideas about Jakobson’s intra- and interlingual translation. These terminologies will thus be analysed by way of multi- and translingual texts to discuss the extent to which translanguaging practices can challenge current ideas about literary translation and multilingualism. In my discussion, I focus on two Brazilian authors; firstly, on Wilson Bueno’s Mar Paraguayo alongside its translation Paraguayan Sea by Erín Moure, and secondly, on Geovani Martins’s O Sol Na Cabeça alongside its translation The Sun on my Head by Julia Sanches. I show how a translanguaging approach does justice to the way in which these authors and narrators speak in their own languages as well as in and between other languages than their own (exophony). I draw on examples showing how the translators have gone about these particularities, at once reflecting on the process of creative writing and literary translation as an open-ended practice.