Going beyond the comfort zone: multilingualism, translation and mediation to foster plurilingual competence

From watching a subtitled TV series to learning the lyrics of a popular song in a foreign language, media act as a mirror reflecting global multilingual realities. And yet, it is not always clear how teachers can exploit these multilingual experiences of learners in the foreign language classroom. Introducing a multilingual approach into the teaching of translation can show students how a given translation problem can be resolved in multiple ways in different languages. This contributes to promoting awareness of language diversity and fosters plurilingual competence, as students embark on the task of identifying similarities and differences among languages and recognising the link between languages and cultures. In this article, I present a unit of learning comprised of self-reflective and Multilingual Audiovisual Translation (MAVT) activities that can be used to integrate multilingualism into the foreign language curriculum as well as for teacher training purposes. Such a programme offers teachers several ways to develop both multilingual and plurilingual awareness while encouraging both teachers and students to go beyond their comfort zone as they tackle multilingual translations of texts

Cross-linguistic lexical influence between English and Spanish

This article focuses on the cross-linguistic lexical influence between English and Spanish. We begin by redefining the concept of cross-linguistic lexical influence as the impact that two or more languages have on each other’s vocabulary. We then present a brief chronological survey of Hispanicisms in English and Anglicisms in Spanish, taking the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the Diccionario de la lengua española (DRAE) as the main sources, and examine some of the factors that affect the patterns of word interchange between these two languages. We argue that the historical and social milieu, mass media, information technology, prevailing attitudes to foreignisms, and the stance taken by dictionaries and official linguistic policy condition which words are borrowed, affect the phonological, orthographic and semantic forms of these borrowings, and impact the degree of their integration in the receiving language. The present study is the first to offer a cross-linguistic (bilateral) perspective on lexical borrowing, a novel approach that is of particular interest given the contrasting philosophical differences governing language policy and lexicographic traditions in English and Spanish. It demonstrates the importance of adopting a comparative approach in the study of lexical influence between languages