Translanguaging Bible Translation

Emphasis on so-called heart language and mother tongue Scripture has marked Bible translation (BT) organizations from their earliest days. Without minimizing the importance of language development and the BT enterprise, recent attempts have been made at the organizational level to sunset such rhetoric while re-imagining variations of it. Despite these efforts, BT practitioners find themselves lacking a theoretical lens for understanding and describing BT in multilingual contexts which is informed by advances in multilingual communication. Practitioners, such as translation consultants, are thus in need of an up-to-date framework within which to conceptualize and pursue their work.

In this paper, we draw on the work of multilingual education researchers Suresh Canagarajah, Ofelia García, and Ricardo Otheguy to introduce translanguaging as one helpful theoretical lens for thinking about the process of local language BT and its agents. Translanguaging may be defined as “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (Otheguy et al. [2015], p. 283). We argue that translanguaging has the potential to provide a significant turn in the history of the theory and practice of BT for the way it invites practitioners to reconsider long held and often unquestioned linguistic ideologies. Finally, insights from translanguaging are brought to bear on the role of translation consultant, specifically with regard to quality control.