Travelling Languages ― Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World

Based on the commonly held assumption that we now live in a world that is ‘on the move’, with growing opportunities for both real and virtual travel and the blurring of boundaries between previously defined places, societies and cultures, the theme of this book is firmly grounded in the interdisciplinary field of ‘Mobilities’. ‘Mobilities’ deals with the movement of people, objects, capital, information, ideas and cultures on varying scales, and across a variety of borders, from the local to the national to the global. It includes all forms of travel from forced migration for economic or political reasons, to leisure travel and tourism, to virtual travel via the myriad of electronic channels now available to much of the world’s population. Underpinning the choice of theme is a desire to consider the important role of languages and intercultural communication in travel and border crossings; an area which has tended to remain in the background of Mobilities research.

The chapters included in this volume represent unique interdisciplinary understandings of the dual concepts of mobile language and border crossings, from crossings in ‘virtual life’ and ‘real life’, to crossings in literature and translation, and finally to crossings in the ‘semioscape’ of tourist guides and tourism signs.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.

John P. O’Regan is Senior Lecturer in Languages in Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. His research interests lie in intercultural communication, cultural studies, critical discourse analysis, globalization and the new capitalism, and the development of English in diverse world contexts.

Jane Wilkinson is Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, UK. She was Chair of the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) between 2008 and 2010. Her research focuses on borders and border crossings in contemporary German-speaking culture, and she is the author of Performing the Local and the Global: The Theatre Festivals of Lake Constance (2007) and several articles on cross-border cultural events at the German-Polish border.

Mike Robinson holds the Chair of Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham, UK, and is the Director of the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage.