ENGLISH AS A LANGUAGE ALWAYS IN TRANSLATION

Abstract

The global enterprise of English language teaching (ELT) ought to present the possibility of bringing millions of people into the global traffic of meaning. Yet it does not do so because global ELT is paradoxically viewed as a monolingual enterprise. Both the pedagogy that underpins much of this spread and the ways in which the global spread of English has been described and resisted emphasize English as a language that operates only in its own presence. Overlooked are the ways in which English always needs to be seen in the context of other languages, as a language always in translation. Yet if we wish to take global diversity seriously, we would do well to focus on semiodiversity (the diversity of meanings) as much as glossodiversity (the diversity of languages), and to do so by taking up a project of translingual activism as part of ELT. If students are to enter the global traffic of meaning, translation needs to become central to what we do.

Keywords:

• English
• globalization
• translation
• traffic of meaning
• semiodiversity
• ELT
• pedagogy

Notes

A reference to Kachru's 3-circle model, where the expanding circle refers to all those countries where English is learned and used as a ‘foreign’ (rather than a ‘second’ or ‘native’) language.

This is a form of discursive disruption in relation to the overly stable acronyms of the ELT world. I have similarly proposed (Pennycook, 2001) that Languages other than English (LOTE) might be replaced by LOBE, languages othered by English, or that the ‘F’ in TEFL might be better considered as ‘feral’ rather than foreign (Pennycook, 2004): Teaching English as a Feral Language.