Polezzi, Guest Speaker on Translation, Brings Awareness of Multilingualism to Montclair State University Campus

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“We live in a multi-lingual world since every day we interact with people, signscapes and soundspaces that prompt our engagement across languages and cultures. As knowers of two or more languages in some cases, we shuttle back and forth among them in an operation called translanguaging. Our relationship with languages, and the cultures they represent, is much more dynamic and creative than we are aware of, ” Polezzi convincingly stated.

“There is a translator hidden in all of us,” she concluded, to both demystify the image of the translator in a glass booth and to encourage students to undertake the fascinating career of translating.

In reminding us that translation is not just the transfer of an oral or written text from one language to the other, but a multi-faceted operation that has to do with borrowing and lending in complex ways, she shared examples of this fluid passage coming from literature, dance, music, and the arts in English, Italian and French. Polezzi’s unique take on translation and multilingualism consequently complicates the notion of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” in a world of heightened mobility, easy communication, sophisticated technology and cultural mixing like ours.

Her counter-intuitive approach to these concepts – “what if your mother tongue is your father’s?” she asks with the intent to challenge the “biological” formulation of language acquisition – grew in incisiveness when a Montclair State University alumna, Dragana Bozinova, who came from Macedonia to the U.S. at the age of 14 and now works in Spanish Translation, explained how in some instances employers assign jobs to “native speakers” in the conviction that they can provide a more accurate translation of technical texts, but then realize that whom they need is somebody like Dragana who has studied Translation, even though without the “requisite” of being a “native speaker” of Spanish!

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For more information:
Webpage for event “National, Transnational, Translational: Re-Thinking Italian in a Multilingual Landscape”
Full footage of Oct. 15 lecture
The Salzburg Statement for a Multilingual World
Transnationalizing Modern Languages
Montclair State U Italian Translation Project
Montclair State U French Translation Programs (Post-BA Certificate and MA Concentration)

Photo by Christopher Boncimino