ABSTRACT

In a poetry or fiction workshop, undergraduates almost always enter thinking they are entirely in charge of the language they use, its sources, and the effects it will have upon their reader. The multilingual workshop also demands that students revise and rethink their own language and thus what is expressed through it. The effort to get students to take a step back from the language they wield and to recognize the wide array of possibilities open to them is what the author sees as the core experience of the undergraduate multilingual translation workshop and the essential lesson it has to offer. In fact, students will often say that after working with translation revising their own writing is much easier, and they come to see their own poems and stories as further versions that are continually evolving. The multilingual translation workshop allows undergraduates to understand how lessons in the transformation of language apply to the writer.