New Books in Language
Interviews with Scholars of Language about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Episodes
The question of whether to acknowledge a text as a translation and thereby bring attention to the translator’s role has been a central topic in discussions on translation throughout history. While the concept of translator visibility has gained significant prominence in translation studies, it has been criticized for its vagueness, adaptability, and focus on literary contexts. Peter J. Freeth and Rafael Treviño’s Beyond the Transla...
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May 1, 2024 • 21 mins
Yixi (Isabella) Qiu speaks with Professor Yongyan Zheng about The Shanghai Alliance of Multilingual Researchers.
The interview explores the Alliance’s origins, research themes, and future directions. The episode not only highlights the significant contributions of this dynamic research group but also provides a glimpse into the personal and professional journeys that have shaped this academic endeavor.
For additional resources, sho...
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The defining feature of this textbook is the treatment of classical and New Testament Greek as one language using primary sources. All the example sentences the students will translate are real Greek sentences, half of which are taken from classical literature and philosophy and half of which are directly from the New Testament. The advantage of this approach is that it highlights the linguistic, literary, and historical connection...
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April 27, 2024 • 50 mins
Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Michael Chesnut, Professor in the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea.
Brynn and Michael chat about an area of study in linguistics known as "the linguistic landscape," and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘M...
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Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Dr. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City: The Fight to Preserve...
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April 12, 2024 • 95 mins
A candid conversation with renowned Sanskritist and online teacher Antonia Ruppel on her love of the language, teaching philosophy, views on academia, and online programs, here and here.
Antonia Ruppel is a researcher on the project Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax. She did her PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently the Townsend Senior Lecturer in the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit Languages at Cornell University....
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Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Elizabeth Peterson about language ideologies and what we think when we hear different varieties of English. The conversation centers around Dr Peterson’s 2020 book Making Sense of 'Bad English': An Introduction to Language Attitudes and Ideologies (Routledge, 2019). The book discusses how the notions of “good” versus “bad” English came about, and some of the consequences of these views of language.
The bo...
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Ingrid Piller speaks with James McElvenny about his new book A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II (Edinburgh UP, 2024).
This book offers a concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversi...
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While the topic of relationships in professional sports teams is gaining greater attention from researchers and practitioners, the role that coach and athlete language plays in shaping these relationships remains largely unexplored. How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Kieran File addresses this gap by examining how every ...
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The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device?
In The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Thomas Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doi...
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Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature (Routledge, 2023) offers unique insights into the role of the translator in today’s globalized world, exploring Latin American literature featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists in which prevailing understandings of the act of translation are challenged and upended. It looks to the fictional turn as a fruitful source of critical inquiry ...
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March 18, 2024 • 42 mins
Ingrid Piller speaks with Jim Hlavac about interpreting to bridge language barriers.
About 5% of the Australian population do not speak English or do not speak it well. In this conversation, Dr Jim Hlavac, an experienced interpreter and interpreting trainer, explains how professional interpreters, language mediators, and language brokers help to support fair and equitable access to healthcare and other forms of social participation...
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February 29, 2024 • 91 mins
The ideal of ‘conversation’ recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics, and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a ‘conversational’ style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023) clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interdisciplinary literary studies. It ar...
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February 22, 2024 • 30 mins
Hanna Torsh speaks with Alexandra Grey about good governance in linguistically diverse cities.
Linguistic diversity is often seen through a deficit lens. Another way of saying this is that it's perceived as a problem, particularly by institutions and governments. However, it doesn’t have to be that way and shouldn’t be that way in a participatory democracy.
This conversation addresses 3 questions:
Why does governance in a multilin...
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February 21, 2024 • 48 mins
Ingrid Piller speaks with Piers Kelly about a fascinating form of visual communication, Australian message sticks.
What does a message stick look like? What is its purpose, and how has the use of message sticks changed over time from the precolonial period via the late 19th/early 20th century and into the present? Why do we know so little about message sticks, and how has colonialism shaped our knowledge about message sticks? How d...
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February 20, 2024 • 60 mins
Swearing can be a powerful communicative act, for good or ill. The same word can incite violence or increase intimacy. How is swearing so multivalent in its power? Is it just all those harsh “c” and “k” sounds? Does swearing take its power from taboo meaning? Why is swearing sometimes so funny? In For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun (Oxford University Press, 2023), Rebecca Roache, host of the podcast The Academ...
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February 19, 2024 • 72 mins
Ingrid Piller speaks with Aneta Pavlenko about multilingualism through the ages.
We start from the question whether the world today is more multilingual than it was ever before. Spoiler alert: we quickly conclude that no, it is not.
One of the reasons why the world may seem more multilingual today than in the past lies in the European nationalist project, which culminated in the “population exchanges” of the 20th century – the grea...
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February 18, 2024 • 54 mins
Ingrid Piller speaks with Adam Jaworski about his research in language and mobility.
Adam is best known for his work on “linguascaping” – how languages, or bits of languages, are used to stylize a place. A welcome sign may index a tourist destination, artistic arrangements of word blocks like “love”, “peace”, or “joy” may index consumption and leisure spaces, multilingual signage may index a cosmopolitan space, and the absence of l...
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February 16, 2024 • 23 mins
Loy Lising speaks with Ofelia García about translanguaging.
The conversation addresses 4 big questions:
What is translanguaging?
How is translanguaging different from codeswitching?
What are the pedagogical implications of translanguaging?
How can we engage those who are uncomfortable with translanguaging because to them it distracts from the objective of ensuring that language learners learn languages as proficiently as they ...
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February 16, 2024 • 58 mins
Listen to Episode No.7 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is This is what language means.
It is text, and it is speech — but is not the two wholly as one. It is speech, and then it is text, or it is t...
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