Transliterating in Time and Space
Presented by Professor Brendan Weekes PhD, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne and University of Cambridge and University of Hong
Abstract
Trans-languaging emerges in multilingual educational settings when students communicate across their native and codified languages effortlessly. The pandemic has revealed how that although the mother tongue can complement the codified language context in a classroom, indigenous minority languages remain marginalised in the online world. Trans-languaging is now rendered into text online and speech automatically via deep learning. Google translate allows users to quickly translate an unlimited number of characters into another language if those languages have a large online database. However, not all languages enjoy this status.‘Transliterating’ captures the practices that emerge in digital space as solutions for reading and writing in multilingual and multi-script societies. Transliterating has no limit apart from digital resources (data). Indeed, these practices are codified in formal teaching of literacy in Japanese classrooms and observed in educational contexts in India. In Africa, transliterating is a less formal but effective grassroots approach to teaching literacy in multilingual settings without access to any digital resources. The result is transliterating nurtures local language expertise by valorizing local practices and local knowledge. It therefore maximizes bilingual ability. For instance, a teacher can develop a lesson plan using an alphabet and translate the text instantly into another language used as the medium of instruction and delivered in any geographic location in the world. This allows students to use each their native language for assessment and thus adds fairness to the online learning environment. Transliterating also enables students excluded by non-native language-literacy such as adopted and fostered children, in-married women, refugees, and economic migrants and also generates cultural and linguistic ‘meta-linguistic awareness’ based on innovative teaching.
References:
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XwJbVEMAAAAJ&hl=en
- https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/index.php/letronica/article/view/37538
Speaker's bio
Professor Brendan Stuart Weekes was a (Foundation) Chair of Communication Sciences and a Director of Laboratories in Communication, Development and Information Sciences in the Faculty of Education, University Hong Kong (HKU), and a Distinguished Fellow in Humanities and Social Sciences (Research Grants Council of Hong Kong). He is now Emeritus Professor at HKU and an Honorary Professor in Psychology at the University of Melbourne and Visitor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. His current work focuses on a critique of cognitive and neuro-linguistic conceptualisations of multilingual and multimodal language use with a focus on how digital literacy fits within the field of Translanguaging. He was co-author of the Ugra Memorandum on Information and Communication in the Digital Age for UNESCO (2021) and is consultant for the Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-32).