O'Regan, J

Robinson, M

Wilkinson, J

English

UCL Discovery

1  O’Regan, J. P., Wilkinson, J. & Robinson, M. (2011). ‘Introduction’, Travelling languages: Culture, communication and translation in a mobile world. Language and Intercultural Communication, 11(4), 299-303.  This issue of Language and Intercultural Communication features a selection of the papers presented at the 10th annual conference of the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) in association with the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University in December 2010.  The theme of this 10th anniversary conference, chosen to highlight and explore research synergies in the fields of intercultural communication and tourism, was Travelling Languages: Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World.  Based on the commonly held assumption that we now live in a world that is ‘on the move’, characterised by growing opportunities for both real and virtual travel and the blurring of boundaries between previously defined places, societies and cultures, the theme is firmly grounded in the interdisciplinary field of ‘Mobilities’.  ‘Mobilities’, a term coined and developed by Sociologist John Urry at the turn of the 21st century (see, for example, Urry 1999; 2007), deals with the movement of people, objects, capital, information, ideas and cultures on varying scales, and across a variety of borders, from the local to the national to the global.  It includes all forms of travel from forced migration for economic or political reasons, to leisure travel and tourism, to virtual travel via the myriad of electronic channels now available to much of the world’s population.  Underpinning the choice of theme was a desire to consider the important role of languages and intercultural communication in travel; an area which has, perhaps surprisingly, tended to remain in the background of Mobilities research.  When we travel abroad or enter into virtual relationships and transactions with organisations or individuals in other parts of the world, we often encounter new languages and have to develop new means of communication and interaction, whether by learning new languages ourselves or by seeking the assistance of intermediaries.  In both cases, some form of translation between languages and cultures is involved and a degree of intercultural competence, a concept much analysed and debated in the pages of this journal, is required.  Scholars with an interest in intercultural communication, language education, and linguistic and cultural translation thus have potentially much to contribute to the Mobilities debate, as is clearly demonstrated in the seven contributions to this Special Issue.   The papers which are included in this Special Issue represent eclectic understandings of the dual concepts of mobile language and border crossings, from crossings in ‘virtual life’ and ‘real life’, to crossings in literature and translation, and finally to crossings in the ‘semioscape’ of tourist guides and tourism signs.  In the way in which the papers have been arranged in this issue they more or less correspond to one of these dimensions.  Thus, the first pair of papers, by Broughton and Dooly respectively, are concerned with border crossings in cyberspace, and with the paper by Penman and Omar form part of a trio which are devoted to borders both virtual and real.  In his paper, Lee Broughton explores the culturally productive activities of a transnational virtual community of 2  Spaghetti Western fans, who come together on an Internet message board called the Spaghetti Western Web Board. The paper presents a detailed examination of the participatory activities of this select group of film fans. As such it aims to demonstrate that this transnational body of Spaghetti Western fans, who cross virtual borders in order to communicate with each other on-line, are a ‘virtual community’.  By using theories connected to virtual communities, new technologies, fan cultures and tourism, Broughton seeks to show how the culturally productive activities of this transnational virtual community of Spaghetti Western fans resulted in some of their number crossing real borders and meeting each other face to face on the suitably dust-blown plains of Almeria in Spain.  The object of their individual sojourns being the iconic sets and locations of their shared passion – the Spaghetti Western film genre.  In his paper Broughton shows how this internationally disparate group of individuals has evolved into a state of ‘virtual togetherness’ which inspires them to travel across real borders to meet one another in person.  Broughton documents how the virtual space which has motivated the fans to become physically ‘visible’ to one another also has its melancholy obverse, in that the real spaces where they meet, of iconic film set locations and shoots, are suffering their own decline, and steadily becoming invisible to the people who value them most.  Melinda Dooly’s paper complements Broughton’s by also being focused on intercultural communication in virtual space.  Where the focus of Broughton’s paper is more generally sociocultural, Dooly’s is pedagogic, and concerns a year-long network-based exchange between two groups of student teachers; one group in Catalunya (Spain) and the other group in Illinois (USA). The student teachers were involved in various collaborative activities during their online exchanges, and Dooly’s paper looks principally at the student teachers’ collaborative designing of teaching sequences and podcasts. She shows how the participants’ online interaction was facilitated through diverse communicative modes including forums, Skype, Moodle, Voicethread and, interestingly, the online 3D virtual environment of Second Life (SL), where the participants adopt avatars (virtual representations of themselves) in order to interact with one another while undertaking a series of activities.  Dooly’s paper is a timely revisitation and augmentation of a discussion which was instigated in a previous issue of this journal by Diehl and Prins (2008), who examined intercultural literacy and cultural identity in SL.  In her paper Dooly answers the call of Diehl and Prins for research into the educational potential of SL for intercultural learning and the development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC).  Dooly argues that ICC is a key element for success and/or a possible stumbling block in virtual interaction, and so, following Bhabba (1994) she interrogates what ICC in this type of ‘third space’ may mean.  The evolution of virtual communication by means of SL and other online fora such as Facebook, which can also involve the anthropomorphic ‘degendering’ and reincarnation of online interactants, implies the development, according to Dooly, of a ‘new communication semiotics’ which has consequences for the teaching and learning of ICC.  In these circumstances Dooly enquires whether language learning and intercultural education should now incorporate within them a ‘critical intercultural semiotic awareness’ which is more suited to the 3  new media age.  The third paper in the theme of virtual and/or real border crossings, concerns neither humans specifically, nor avatars, nor virtual worlds, but inanimate objects.  In their paper, Christine Penman and Maktoba Omar examine the role of material goods in the transnational experience, and people’s relationship to these goods when they are in transit between cultures.  Of specific interest to Penman and Omar are the kinds of commodities that international students bring from home when living in the UK. Their aim is to provide an emic perspective on cultural flows, in this case of goods as transnational objects.  Combining Piercean semiotics with, among others, Bourdieusian and Deleuzean cultural theory, Penman and Omar develop a theme and theoretical construct within which transnational objects appear, and are interrogated, as spatial extensions of the self which connect translocated users, in this case international students studying in the UK, to private conceptions of home.  In this circumstance, the authors argue, the goods become part of the students’ personal biographies and irreducibly linked to feelings of nostalgia and attachment, and so to the search for ‘authenticity’ by means of the consumption of objects.  The personal investment of individuals in objects as extensions of an imagined self is uncannily redolent of Marx’s critique of the commodity and of how values of exchange and use come to adhere to it (Marx, 1961 [1887]), and just goes to show that whatever iterations the commodity has gone through, it is still the perceptions of individuals which give it value rather than anything inherent in it. Employing the theoretical frame which they have constructed as an optic, Penman and Omar present, in the second half of their paper, a quantitative analysis of transnational objects such as food, literature, music, toiletries, clothes and fashion, and of the relationship of translocated individuals to them.  Under the second theme in this issue, of crossings in literature and in translation, we have two papers, one by Meenakshi Sharma, and a second by Alison Phipps.  In her analysis of literary representations of English-educated Indians in England Meenakshi Sharma examines the experience of language learning and travel, and the myths and illusions which accompany this process.  She suggests that under British rule and during the first decades of independence in India, English was taught primarily using literature, and that, as a result, educated Indians travelling to England had clear expectations of the country gleaned from their reading. Moreover, this literary immersion fostered in many Indians a strong sense of identification with an ‘imagined’ England.  Sharma shows how many Indians travelling to England in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were surprised to find a country very different to that presented in the literature.  She focuses specifically on the depiction of this very specific form of ‘culture shock’ in fiction and autobiographies before concluding with a discussion of the way in which younger generations of Indians identify with England today.  Their exposure to constant multimedia images from the English-speaking world coupled with the growth of English as a global lingua franca creates an even greater sense of confidence and familiarity with the language, people and culture than that inspired by literature in earlier decades.  This confidence can, however, still be shattered and expectations disappointed when young Indians travel physically rather than 4  virtually to England.  Physical, bodily experiences are the focus of Alison Phipps’ contribution on ‘Travelling languages: land, languaging and translation’.  Phipps proposes a new understanding of language and translation as grounded in the land and our relationship with it and thereby signals a departure from the preferred pairing of language and culture, which sees languages as culturally constructed and mediated and somehow apart from the physical world we live in.  She suggests that we inhabit languages in a very similar way to landscapes, i.e. when we learn and use languages we embody them and experience them physically, a process she calls languaging.  Building on the concept of languaging, Phipps argues that translation can also be examined as a ‘sensory activity’ born of our relationship with the world around us which is formed through sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.  She uses Brian Friel’s play Translations and Margaret Elphinstone’s novel A Sparrow’s Flight to analyse the senses and emotions involved in translating and attempting to speak a new language.  In both examples the characters find themselves able to communicate their feelings through reference to the land around them and therefore do not share the disorientation of travel presented in Sharma’s paper.  Under the third theme in this Special Issue, of crossings in the ‘semioscape’, we have a first paper by Maria João Cordeiro concerning the language representations employed in Portuguese phrase books and tourist guides, and a second by Oliver Radtke and Xin Yuan on ‘Chinglish’ in bilingual tourism signs in China.  More familiar to many reading this journal will be the term ‘linguistic landscape’ (cf. Shohamy & Gorter, 2009), for referring to the study of public signage in urban settings, and into which Radke and Yuan’s paper more easily sits.  Also, relevant here are the five ‘scapes’ of Appadurai (1996), ethno-, techno-, finance-, media- and ideo-, to refer to different types of global flow.  To this we may add the ‘semioscape’, to refer to the global flow of signs in the world, and which, in the context of this issue, includes the various ‘semio-texts’ which travellers, sojourners and ‘border-crossers’ in general come into contact, whether in the virtual plane or the real. Into this category the phrase books and tourist guides of Cordeiro’s paper readily fit, as do most of the other ‘texts’ which are documented in the various papers in this issue – as either objects, film sets, online networking sites or as plain written texts.  Now is not the time to engage in an extended discussion of the text, or of the semioscape, but it ought to be evident that when we say ‘text’, we do not confine it to the written mode.  In her paper, Cordeiro, also following Appadurai (ibid), employs the term ‘languagescape’ and addresses what she sees as the lack of research into the linguistic aspects of globalisation.  She argues that the success of the ever expanding global travel and tourism industry is largely dependent on removing ‘friction’ from the interaction between hosts and guests by creating an ‘illusion’ of a monolingual world through translation, normally into English, of all tourist information, or through the publication of easy-to-use language guides and phrase books for tourists.  Using Portuguese guides as a case study, she maintains that these publications at once reassure and motivate the learner 5  by claiming that it will be easy to learn enough of the language ‘to get by’, but that a little effort will open doors to the ‘real’ people and culture of the destination.  She goes on to demonstrate the way in which such guides ‘break’ the language, and by extension the culture and people, of a destination into easily consumed categories which mask the ‘chaos’ and complexity of an increasingly fractured multilingual world.  The final paper in this Special Issue ‘translocates’ the reader to the phenomenon of ‘Chinglish’, or Chinese-English translations which are to found on public bilingual signage in the People’s Republic of China. After a short review of the existing literature, Radtke and Yuan attempt to establish a typology of Chinglish by means of a corpus-based statistical analysis. The study finds that the majority of so-called ‘errors’ in Chinglish are due to over-literal translations which are concomitant with a proliferation of grammatical mistakes. In the view of the authors, the disfluency and in some cases nonsensical nature of the Chinglish sign is in large part due to the reliance on machine translation by the local government bodies responsible for public signage.  A significant theme in Radtke and Yuan’s paper is the decorative use of English in the commercial realm, where the  existence of non-Chinese lettering is used to establish, in their view, an appearance of cosmopolitanism by means of English as a given and perpetually iterative ‘international brand’.  Radtke and Yuan’s paper is a salutary reminder of the interminable commodification and reification of English to the point that the presumed language of global communication is so commodified and so reified that its value is reduced to that of a sign which, outside its brandedness, has been emptied of signification.  This Special Issue concludes with two book reviews: Fred Dervin reviews Introducing Intercultural Communication, by Shuang Liu, Zala Volčič and Cindy Gallois (Sage, 2010), and Paolo Nino Valdez reviews The Language and Intercultural Communication Reader, edited by Zhu Hua (Routledge, 2011).  John O’Regan Jane Wilkinson  Mike Robinson  References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  Bhabha, H. K. (1994). Location of culture. London and New York: Routledge. Diehl, W & Prins, E. (2008). Unintended outcomes in second life: intercultural literacy and cultural identity in a virtual world.  Language and Intercultural Communication. 8(2): 101-118. Marx, K. (1961 [1887]) Capital, Vol. 1, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House. 6  Shohamy, E. & Gorter, D. (Eds.) (2009). Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London: Routledge. Urry, J. (1999) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities. London: Polity.  

Travelling languages: culture, communication and translation in a mobile world

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Travelling languages: culture, communication and translation in a mobile world

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