New Books in Language and Translation

While the topic of relationships in professional sports teams is gaining greater attention from researchers and practitioners, the role that coach and athlete language plays in shaping these relationships remains largely unexplored. How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Kieran File address...

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device?  In The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Thomas Mullaney sets out...

Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature (Routledge, 2023) offers unique insights into the role of the translator in today’s globalized world, exploring Latin American literature featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists in which prevailing understandings of the act of translation are challenged and upended. It looks to the fictional turn as a f...

Ingrid Piller speaks with Jim Hlavac about interpreting to bridge language barriers. About 5% of the Australian population do not speak English or do not speak it well. In this conversation, Dr Jim Hlavac, an experienced interpreter and interpreting trainer, explains how professional interpreters, language mediators, and language brokers help to support fair and equitable access to healthcare and...

The ideal of ‘conversation’ recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics, and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a ‘conversational’ style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023) clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interd...

Hanna Torsh speaks with Alexandra Grey about good governance in linguistically diverse cities. Linguistic diversity is often seen through a deficit lens. Another way of saying this is that it's perceived as a problem, particularly by institutions and governments. However, it doesn’t have to be that way and shouldn’t be that way in a participatory democracy. This conversation addresses 3 questions:...

Ingrid Piller speaks with Piers Kelly about a fascinating form of visual communication, Australian message sticks. What does a message stick look like? What is its purpose, and how has the use of message sticks changed over time from the precolonial period via the late 19th/early 20th century and into the present? Why do we know so little about message sticks, and how has colonialism shaped our kn...

Swearing can be a powerful communicative act, for good or ill. The same word can incite violence or increase intimacy. How is swearing so multivalent in its power? Is it just all those harsh “c” and “k” sounds? Does swearing take its power from taboo meaning? Why is swearing sometimes so funny? In For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun (Oxford University Press, 2023), Rebecca Roa...

Ingrid Piller speaks with Aneta Pavlenko about multilingualism through the ages. We start from the question whether the world today is more multilingual than it was ever before. Spoiler alert: we quickly conclude that no, it is not. One of the reasons why the world may seem more multilingual today than in the past lies in the European nationalist project, which culminated in the “population exchan...

Ingrid Piller speaks with Adam Jaworski about his research in language and mobility. Adam is best known for his work on “linguascaping” – how languages, or bits of languages, are used to stylize a place. A welcome sign may index a tourist destination, artistic arrangements of word blocks like “love”, “peace”, or “joy” may index consumption and leisure spaces, multilingual signage may index a cosmo...

Loy Lising speaks with Ofelia García about translanguaging. The conversation addresses 4 big questions: What is translanguaging? How is translanguaging different from codeswitching? What are the pedagogical implications of translanguaging? How can we engage those who are uncomfortable with translanguaging because to them it distracts from the objective of ensuring that language learners learn lang...

Listen to Episode No.7 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is This is what language means. It is text, and it is speech — but is not the two wholly as one. It is spee...

Ingrid Piller speaks with Aneta Pavlenko about her new book Multilingualism and History (Cambridge UP, 2023). We often hear that our world 'is more multilingual than ever before', but is it true? This book shatters that cliché. It is the first volume to shine light on the millennia-long history of multilingualism as a social, institutional and demographic phenomenon. Its fifteen chapters, written...

Matthew Rubery's book Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the influence neurodivergence has on the ways individuals read. This alternative history of reading is one of the few books which tells the stories of "atypical" readers and the impact had on their lives by neurological conditions affecting their ability to make sense of the printed word: from dysle...

Conceptualising China through Translation (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. James St Andre provides an innovative methodology for investigating how China has been conceptualised historically by tracing the development of four key cultural terms (filial piety, face, fengshui, and guanxi) between English and Chinese. It addresses how specific ideas about what constitutes the uniqueness of C...

How does human language arise in the mind? To what extent is it innate, or something that is learned? How do these factors interact? The questions surrounding how we acquire language are some of the most fundamental about what it means to be human and have long been at the heart of linguistic theory.  Harry van der Hulst's book A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (Cambrid...

Let's Talk: An Essential Guide to Skillful Communication (2022) is a transformative guide to elevate your everyday conversations. Authored by Mudita Nisker and Dan Clurman, this practical handbook equips you with essential skills to navigate challenging topics, boost self-expression confidence, and foster respectful influence. Drawing from psychology, sociology, learning theory, and spiritual trad...

How social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about it Social scientists do research on a variety of topics--gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization,...

Have you ever felt that the grammar of Asian languages does not fit with the framework that we use to describe them? In the late 19th century, Asian grammarians began adapting the European-based grammatical frameworks describing their languages, but this application was not straightforward. In Japan, the question of grammar eventually became entangled with larger debates about cultural identity, h...

My Life in Propaganda: A Memoir about Language and Totalitarian Regimes (Durvile, 2023) is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school; the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings; socialist realist art and film; and Radio Free Eur...

To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. Hyphen (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Pardis Mahdavi is part of the Object Lessons series and follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity-"Hyphen” is derived from an ancient Greek word meani...

What (and why) can and can't we say? What do empirical examples both at home and abroad tell us about how we should protect freedom of speech? How do we create an environment where speech is not only permitted but encouraged? Does freedom of speech bring people together or sow discord? Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU and Professor Emerita at New York Law School, brings her decades of...

Violent Exceptions: Children's Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2021) turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is pr...

Seasoned scholar Asko Parpola discusses his Indological career, from how it began in the 1960s to what he’s working on now. Key themes include his longstanding work on Sāmaveda Jaiminīya texts, the Indus valley script, and the ancient Indo-European Aryans. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indi...

The SAGE Handbook of Human-Machine Communication (Sage, 2023) has been designed to serve as the touchstone text for researchers and scholars engaging in new research in this fast-developing field. Chapters provide a comprehensive grounding of the history, methods, debates and theories that contribute to the study of human-machine communication. Further to this, the Handbook provides a point of dep...