Bilingual Writers Research Articles

Inside the Bilingual Writer

Through a series of interviews, Erik Gleibermann explores how eight prominent bilingual US writers approach their dual-language craft as they navigate identity between a childhood lived in one tongue and adulthood lived in another.

Typology of title transformations in self-translations of Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories

Abstract This article is dedicated to the issue of the adequacy of self-translations of Vladimir Nabokov’s small forms of fiction. Different types of transformations of short-story titles in the creative work of the bilingual writer were chosen as the object of the research. The article is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach, uniting aspects of linguistic, literary and cultural studies in the investigation of the self-translation phenomenon, an approach that provides for scientifically-grounded conclusions. The authors of the paper build a typology of structural and semantic changes reflecting the features of Nabokov’s interpretations of his own texts. Contrastive comparative, structural, intertextual and cognitive methods were employed as the main research methods. This complex approach to text analysis used in the paper permits an expansion of the idea of the semantics and poetics of separate texts as well as a collection of stories as a whole. The authors pay special attention to investigation of the following types of correlation between the original title and its equivalent: semantic specification, semantic narrowing, semantic broadening and modulation. The authors note that Nabokov in many cases does not follow his own principles of “literality”. The specializing character of correlation between the original text and the translation is predetermined by the author’s aspiration to convey the exact sense and to emphasize separate connotative shades of meaning, while devices of modulation and semantic broadening perform the function of an author’s comment.

El proceso de mediación explícita en la escritura del bilingüe endógeno. Análisis de "La otra gente", autotraducción del gallego al castellano de Álvaro Cunqueiro

La autotraducción del escritor bilingüe endógeno acostumbra a poner de relieve de modo privilegiado los mecanismos que rigen en la construcción del discurso sobre el otro. Así, la presencia del heterolingüismo, que hace audible la mediación, puede considerarse una característica habitual en muchas de las autotraducciones intraestatales en las que la que la nota o la glosa aparecen incorporadas en el cuerpo mismo del texto lo que modifica el estatus de la ficción.Esta tolerancia hacia la alteridad lingüística acostumbra a presentar también fuertes límites. Dentro de un marco de relaciones de poder asimétricas, como lo son las relaciones entre las literaturas gallega, catalana y vasca con la de expresión castellana, solo se asumen como tolerables aquellos textos que ocultan el conflicto sociolingüístico propio de las situaciones de contacto.

Disrupting the status quo: exploring culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies for young diverse learners

This article highlights four qualitative studies that examine young diverse populations (i.e. middle-class African-American learners, Latinx immigrant children, emergent bilingual writers, and teachers of low-socioeconomic African-American learners) using culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies as our theoretical lens. The research questions are (1) What are the features of classrooms that support culturally sustaining learning for young children? (2) What social, cultural, and linguistic resources do learners draw upon when engaging in culturally sustaining spaces? Findings in this paper indicate that (a) children need critical safe spaces to foster CSP (b) children draw knowledge from varied resources and (c) teachers’ must be able to navigate policies to implement practices that utilize students’ cultural referents.

An Investigation into Self-Translation

The paper analyzes the nature, basic aspects, and specific features of self-translation in the context of translation theory and practice, as well as basic causes making writers translate their works. The analysis of the works on the topic shows that the issue is understudied and demands further investigation. Our analysis shows that self-translation (translation of the author) is considered to be the translation of an original work into another language by the author himself. On the one hand, it is a rather rare phenomenon. On the other hand, self-translation represents “ideal” translation since the author is in a better position than any ordinary translator because he knows his creation as nobody else and has the authority to allow himself shifts in the translation which might not have been ‘allowed’ by another translator. The results of self-translation can be regarded as certain “gold standards” for others to make use of. There are different reasons that cause bilingual writers to translate their works, both linguistic (interest to languages, wish to create and use new expressive means, dissatisfaction with existing translations, etc.) and extra-linguistic (emigration, challenge to check one’s gift in new conditions, paying tribute to motherland, etc.). It is obvious that some reasons are objective, but others can be considered subjective, the latter being more powerful and stimulating.

On the Brink: Identity and Language in the Poetry of Arab-American Women

On the BrinkIdentity and Language in the Poetry of Arab-American Women Lubna Safi Almost a decade ago, Al Raida (lit. The Pioneer), a journal based out of the Lebanese American University, published an issue on "Arab Women Writing in English." Among its concerns, the journal hoped to highlight the problem of translating experience into language asking: "How does one translate their experience of Arabness into another language whose signifying capacities will always tend towards distortion?" Whether the language is a European one or British and American English, the particular power dynamics between languages are concerns posed within a post-colonial frame of imperial and non-imperial languages. This struggle to translate experience is illustrated in a quote by Abdelfattah Kilito, a writer of French and Arabic, who cites an ancient source that describes a relationship with the Arabic language in this way: "I defeated her then she defeated me, then I defeated her and she defeated me again" (21). In the struggle between the subject and language this question arises—whether or not language, given its state as an inheritance from previous generations, can bring into articulation an identity when in fact it has an identity of its own. If this encounter with Arabic highlights a tense relationship between the subject and his native language; a struggle that ends with language's victory and the defeat of the speaker, then any relationship with language used as a means to articulate an identity must be one of complete surrender to that language. The question of language's capability to express or articulate poses too broad a scope to attempt in this paper. However, the choice of a writer's language as a mode of identification through writing becomes a significant one when considering bilingual writers. In his semi-autobiographical text, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin Jacques Derrida proclaims, "I have only one language; it is not mine" (2), a refrain he echoes throughout the rest of this work. At the heart of this contradictory statement stands the question of possessing language. As the foreigner, i.e. colonial subject, who speaks only the master's (or the host's) language, Derrida's dilemma of possessing language becomes a question of bestowing belonging through language, of being allowed access to a group, like a cardholder whose card [End Page 309] proclaims membership in a certain society. For Derrida, language only grants one an identity as a speaker of that language because of language's homogeneity with regards to itself: it is always open to assimilating the other.1 In justifying the refrain posed at the beginning of his book, Derrida qualifies it thus: … a necessity that, however, is there and that works: translation, a translation other than the one spoken about by convention, common sense, and certain doctrinaires of translation. For this double postulation, —We only ever speak one language … (yes, but) —We never speak only one language … is not only the very law of what is called translation. It would also be the law itself as translation. (10) Taking Derrida's text as a starting point for thinking about questions of identity vis-à-vis language, this paper examines the works of three Arab-American women writers within the context of an ambivalent relationship to language embodied through a particular practice of translation. As a foundation for approaching questions of identity, Derrida's text poses the question of translatability, both as a means and mode of understanding the integral problem of identity through and in language. This question of possessing a language—within its connection to an ethnic identity and the ability to translate both the language and an identity associated with that language—is the central metaphor in the poems below by Naomi Shehab Nye, Dima Hilal, and Suheir Hamad. Previous scholarship on Arab-American writers has focused on the negotiation of 'Arabness' within a community-based context, concentrating for example on ethnicity, religion, or within the parameters of reclaiming self-representation in writing. According to Carol Fadda-Conrey, writing, for Arab-American writers, especially post 9/11, "becomes an important tool to establish and practice self-representation, and to dismantle blanket and inaccurate portrayals inherent...

Писательский метаязыковой комментарий и его роль в понимании текста (на примере произведений русской литературы XIX в.)

The article concerns all types of metalinguistic commentary given by the authors of Russian literature of the XIX century. The metalinguistic commentary makes the text understanding easier. The aim of this article is to analyze the metalinguistic methods of entry the foreign language inclusion, ideologemes, which are important for understanding the authors position and view of the world. The research shows all types of metalinguistic commentary which were defined based on different factors, namely according with the language used for translating the lexical unit; the sphere of usage; the authors semantization as well as defining the lexical unit type and his attitude to it. The article demonstrates the perspective of research, which means the comparison of the texts of different style, regarding the metalinguistic commentary in usage of sociolects, the analyses of the type of foreign language in the bilingual writers.

Модификации заглавий в автопереводе (на материале сборника В. Набокова «Возвращение Чорба»)

article is devoted to study of the self-translation of stories' titles by Vladimir Nabokov from the point of view of structural and semantic changes, stipulated by use of semantic reduction, semantic specification, compensation and modulation. authors study the literary text on the grounds of compare-and-contrast, structural, intertextual and cognitive methods of research. main subject of research are the stories from the collection The return of Chorb. bilingual writer often deviates in from a proclaimed principle of literal translation what is stipulated by Nabokov’s desire to specify or to emphasize the semantics of the title. article also explains the reasons why certain stories have not been translated by the author into English.

Audience and Young Bilingual Writers

This study explored how an audience-focused writing curriculum mediated the literacy development of bilingual Latina/o first-grade students. Drawing on translingual theories of literacy and scholarship describing the role of audience and audience awareness in skilled writing, this study qualitatively documented and analyzed students’ writing and talk about writing for a variety of audiences. Analysis suggests that children both addressed, or responded to, their intended readers and invoked particular kinds of audiences. Children’s audience awareness influenced their use of language (Spanish, English or both), as well as rhetorical strategies and design choices. This study expands theories of audience to include linguistically diverse settings, and contributes to scholarship on asset-based pedagogies for literacy teaching and learning.

Joseph Conrad as a bilingual writer? On A Personal Record (1912)

The article is an attempt at comprehensive research on the diffi cult issue of the Joseph Conrad’s bilingualism. However, formulating the thesis is preluded by a detailed description of the analysed phenomenon – in the view of the interdisciplinary studies: linguistic or, to be precise: contactological. Intentionally the image of Conrad has been constructed here specifi cally, although not idiomatically: the patterns to consider his works will be provided by the most signifi cant Polish elaborations of the literary bilingualism’s experience, Edward Balcerzan and Ewa Kraskowska. Basing on the portrait of Joseph Conrad as the comparatist and the commentator of his own translations (notes on the Polish translation of Il Conde and the interview with Marian Dąbrowski in 1914), the creator of letters-language hybrids (English, Polish and French) or the founder of the style constructed of language norm’s, system’s and usage’s infringements (the subject of analysis is in article Conrad’s prose Some Reminiscences [A Personal Record]), we are able to drive only to the very one – as it seems – generalization: the ambiguity of Joseph Conrad had been caused by the writer’s suspension between systems of creative and defi cient bilingualism and passive bilingualism (Balcerzan’s terms). Accretion of that ambiguity could we observe specially explicitly about 1914. It provokes more careful (than it occurred previously) statement concerning Conrad’s knowledge of language systems, Conrad’s experience and surviving them, and also Conrad’s usage of them. It encourages us to use ‘middle-terms’ such as interlingualism, rather than monolingualism, bilingualism, trilingualism and so on.

From „neither this nor that” to „a stereoscopic and stereophonic attitude to the world”: writers’ attitude to bilingualism

The article examines the problem of bilingualism from a diachronic perspective in the context of the contribution of current cultural theories (gender, postcolonial) to the perception of multilingualism in contemporary culture. A distinct issue in this research is compulsory bilingualism caused by the Holocaust and involuntary resettlement processes resulting from political harassment. The article also emphasizes the import of cultural anthropology, cognitive sciences and the sociology of translation into the redefi nition of the very notion of bilingualism and the infl uence of this phenomenon on such remote from literature spheres as therapy. Refl ection on bilingualism is largely dependent on the intellectual capacity of the bilingual authors conducting self-analysis. The cases of Eva Hoffman and Anna Wierzbicka provide more than adequate evidence which signifi cantly complements the testimony of philosophers, such as trilingual George Steiner, and bilingual writers, such as Conrad, Nabokov or Brodsky. Finally, it should be added that globalization favors bilingualism among authors but often also provides the rationale for choosing a less popular language as a means of expression.

Wales: (Still) a Problem of Translation? Language Choice in Wales at the End of the Anglo-Welsh Era

In 1996 the poet R. S. Thomas claimed that ‘my country, Cymru, to be understood presents a problem of translation, and if it is to maintain a separate and valuable identity, it must continue to do so.’ Thomas, a native speaker of English, and a self-taught user of Welsh, seemed to be questioning the value of English to reflect the reality of Wales, and with it his own status as an ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poet. This inner conflict mirrored the language situation in Wales, and the lack of language choice facing writers, since native Welsh speakers carried the psychological onus of remaining faithful to the ‘old language’, and non-Welsh speakers had no choice but to use English. But the last two decades have seen considerable social, political, and linguistic change in Wales. An extensive bilingual education policy, the emergence of a Welsh language television channel, and the establishment of the Welsh assembly, seem to have halted the decline in the number of Welsh speakers, and bridged the gap between the two linguistic communities. Today writers in Welsh and in English share the same national platform (Llenyddiaeth Cymru - Literature Wales) and an increasing number of bilingual writers choose to use both languages, often translating their own work. In this paper I shall look back over a century of Anglo Welsh writing, and suggest that entrenched language attitudes in Wales, and the attendant ‘impossibility of translation’, have given way to a vibrant bilingual literary scene as Welsh writers look beyond the hills and valleys of an Anglo-Welsh tradition to the world at large.

Non-native English Varieties: Thainess in English Narratives

<p>This study aims at examining Thainess as a writing strategy used in non-literary texts written by non-professional bilingual writers. These writers are advanced language learners who are pursuing their Master’s degree in English. Seven English narratives of their language learning experiences were analyzed based on Kachruvian’s framework of bilingual’s creativity and contact literatures. The findings showed that four out of six contextualization processes - transfer, translation, code-mixing, and reduplication - were utilized when conveying the writers’ experiences in acquiring their first and second languages. Unlike the findings in previous studies of Thainess in literary genre, lexical borrowing and shift process were not found in narratives. Although Thai English as a new variety in World Englishes has been debated for years and remains in an obscure status, it cannot be denied that the research findings in this study show the uniqueness of Thai English writing strategies.</p>

English as a Literature in Translation by Fiona J. Doloughan

DOLOUGHAN, FIONA J. English as Literature in Translation. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 179 pp. $100.00 hardcover; $89.99 e-book. Fiona J. Doloughan's new study is an examination of contemporary novels in English through the prism of translation. Taking her departure in the translational turn in Humanities, Steven G. Kellman's influential concept of literary translingualism, and English's role as lingua franca for non-native speakers worldwide, Doloughan sets out discover how writers who have found English as opposed having been born into it (e.g., Eva Hoffman, Ariel Dorfman, Xiaolu Guo) and bilingual writers or writers for whom non-standard variety of English is the starting point (Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, James Kelman) are changing the expression of literature in English. Doloughan's interest lies with what she coins as narratives of translation, that is, that thematize, narrativize and/or are structured around, questions of language, cultural identity and what it means translate oneself or one's culture (79). The main focus of the study is not primarily the way the examined writers are changing the English literary language of today's globalized world; rather, it is the thematic aspects that dominate--that is, how experiences of switching languages and/or moving through are expressed in the chosen works. It is an optimistic narrative Doloughan is writing. She wants to suggest that the prototypical notion of language as loss, and translation of self and other as predominantly painful and traumatic experience, have given way greater sense of what is be gained, both at the individual and societal levels, through access different languages and cultures (1). She regards this development as correlating with more positive understanding of bi- and multilingualism in linguistic research as well as in society. While literary multilingualism undoubtedly is vehicle for renewing literary expression, question already extensively explored in literary scholarship (e.g., Doris Sommer's Bilingual Aesthetics 2004 and Hana Wirth-Nesher's Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature 2006, just mention couple of works), the narrative of from loss gain is problematic. Firstly, the chronology of the chosen works contradicts it. The most radical argument for linguistic and cultural hybridity as gain, not loss in the study, Anzaldiia's classic Borderlands/La Frontera 1987, is actually the oldest of the works, preceding Hoffman's story of language learning as the loss of another language in Lost in Translation (1989) by two years. It also precedes, by over decade, Ariel Dorfman's memoirs with their eroticization of language ties in terms of bigamy--itself an excellent illustration of the monolingualist conception of the mother tongue as a family romance described by Yasemin Yildiz in Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012). Secondly, the transformation of literature in English by writers with background in other languages is not new phenomenon. Multilingual modernists like Beckett. Conrad, and Nabokov that Doloughan briefly mentions (162) were not exceptions monolingualism; instead, translingualism, exile, and textual multilingualism are constitutional traits of European literary modernism (cf. Languages of Exile, eds. Englund & Olsson, 2013). …

International Scientific Conference "Lithuanian and Polish Bilingual Writers. The Issue of Bilingualism in Lithuanian and Polish Culture"

International Scientific Conference "Lithuanian and Polish Bilingual Writers. The Issue of Bilingualism in Lithuanian and Polish Culture"

Contrasting Rhetorical Patterns: Discovering Effects of First and Second Language Writing Conventions

Problem Statement : In this qualitative small-scale study, I aimed at investigating why students have difficulties in adjusting themselves to English writing conventions. I also examined the possible bilateral effects of Turkish and English writing conventions to determine whether engaging learners in contrastive rhetoric exercises can elucidate the phenomenon of transfer in rhetorical patterns. Purpose of Study : The aim of this study was to discover whether bilingual writers with the same first-language background (i.e., Turkish) demonstrate similar composing patterns or whether these patterns diverge when writing in first or foreign language (i.e., English). Its broader aim was to describe whether transfer pertains to rhetorical patterns. Method : To investigate the existence and transfer of rhetorical patterns, we examined four opinion essays—two in English, two in Turkish—written by each of six freshman students registered for an English composition course at an English-medium university in Istanbul, Turkey. Additional data came from students’ reflective tasks and semi-structured interviews conducted with them. Findings : The analysis of the essays demonstrated that the students placed thesis statements in the initial, middle, or final positions in their Turkish essays, indicating that some students used a deductive style of writing, a common US English writing convention, in their Turkish essays. This finding suggests that the students practiced aspects of English composition learned at the university level. Notably, students also used discourse markers more than typical Turkish essayists would, indicating that students were able to transfer knowledge not only from their first to the foreign language. Other results reveal that it was somewhat challenging for students to write in their first language given their adjustment to English writing conventions. Conclusion and Recommendations : This study’s findings suggest that students initiated the construction of an academic discourse community identity and membership, implying that writing instructors can raise learners’ awareness of academic environment and involve them with different academic conventions by engaging them in contrastive rhetoric studies. Contrastive rhetoric could also prompt students to think more critically, which would further assist them in writing process. Lastly, the findings suggest that engaging students in exercises of contrastive rhetoric can assist and empower them in their writing practices. Keywords : Writing instruction, contrastive rhetoric, transfer, academic discourse community

EMANCIPATING THE WRITING LIFE

About the Author Ramon C. Sunico is a bilingual writer, book designer, book project manager, editor and teacher. In Augsburg, Germany, he designed, printed, and bound his first book of poetry, The Secret of Graphite: Poems in Two Tongues (1989), the first book to do away with the artificial segregation of English from Filipino poems. As manager of Cacho Publishing House, he was the first to publish a line of picture books with parallel, bilingual texts, now common practice among publishers. Included in the line was Two Friends, One World/ Mata at Mangga, both winners of the first children’s story competition of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards. He was similarly the first to moderate a locally-based listserv (the precursor of e-groups) on Philippine arts and letters, rp-books. Similarly themed listservs were based in the US and Australia. He also belonged to the pioneering group that used early desktop computers to design Philippine literary titles during the flowering of local book publishing after the ouster of Marcos. THE BOOKNESS OF A BOOK

“Do you want an idea of what they’re doing?” Transgressive data generation and analysis within a bilingual writers workshop

We consider how research participants engage alongside researchers as choreographers of data generation and highlight the everyday practices of researchers and participants in motion within and across time and space. Data for this case analysis were generated during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and literacy teacher development. We utilized microethnographic discourse analysis to analyze a video excerpt from a classroom observation during writers workshop in a fourth-grade bilingual classroom. We sought to understand how the teacher’s and students’ discursive moves during the event tactically disrupted the researchers’ agenda in the moment and complicated attempts at data analysis. Our analyses illustrate how the teacher multiply situated herself in ways that trouble dichotomous framings of teachers’ work, such as traditional or nontraditional, as well as dominant conceptualizations of qualitative research, such as data “collection.” We end with implications for interpreting and representing research findings.

A tale of two tongues: self-translation in Sekiguchi Ryōko’s poetry

Literary self-translation is a practice that has gained increasing scholarly attention in the fields of postcolonial, transnational studies and translation studies, following the rise in the number of bilingual and plurilingual writers over the twentieth and twenty-first century. In the Japanese context, a growing body of research on works by authors who write in more than one language is now calling for an acknowledgment of how bilingual literature has been “shaking” the foundations of modern Japanese literature, as Komori (1998) suggests, by breaking the equation between nationality, ethnicity, national language and culture that had been developed during the nation-building process in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this paper, I analyze the work of Sekiguchi Ryōko, a contemporary poet based in France, who writes free-verse poetry in Japanese and self-translates it into French. In the first part, the paper examines a poem included in the collections Hakkōsei Diapositive (Japanese) and Calque (French) to illustrate how Sekiguchi conceives self-translation as a process that destabilizes the categories of original and translation. Addressing questions of authenticity and fidelity, Sekiguchi seeks to explore the creative potential of translation as a means to reconsider one’s affiliation to the mother tongue. In the second part, the paper focuses on Sekiguchi’s multilingual public readings, arguing that they offer alternative ways of thinking about translation, communication and linguistic identities, for they stress the need to foster an understanding of languages as historically positioned systems, but also encourage readers to step outside normative linguistic paradigms.

Self-Translation, Literary Creativity, and Trans-Lingual Aesthetics: A Québec Writer’s Perspective

Abstract Self-translation and bilingual writing are drawing increasing critical attention in literary and translation studies. Bilingual writing can cover a wide range of phenomena involving varying degrees of bilingualism. Scholarly focus has been on emigrant, expatriate or exiled writers and more recently, on bilingual writers writing in a post-colonial context, using the acquired language of the colonizer. The emphasis has been on the cultural and political power inequalities between languages. Self-translation has also been seen from the broader, ontological point of view as a form of double representation of the writing self. My own experience in the particular cultural geography of a bi-national, multicultural country such as Canada offers a different context for reflecting on self-translation and bilingual writing, or what I prefer to call “cross-writing,” based on the fundamental cross-cultural communicative aesthetics underlying my specific writing and self-translation process.