ABSTRACT
Although portrayed as Anglo-Irish culture that invaded an Indigenous culture and then added immigrant cultures, Australia is a space of multilingual superdiverse cities where translation plays a hidden but constitutive role in developing historical awareness, providing social services and moving towards an inclusive society. The need to provide social services to immigrant communities drove early advances in remote interpreting and professional certification, without the language-rights policies that have prevailed elsewhere. The policy discourse on multiculturalism has been dominated by language learning and, in the case of Indigenous communities, language recuperation, often with scant awareness of the roles played by translation in setting in place the materials and motivation for learning. Loosely reflecting current multilingualism, recent historical work on the presence of Malay, Indonesian, Chinese, German, Valencian, French and other languages in the early trade contacts, settlements and missions is nevertheless revealing an extremely diverse past. Yet there remain unknowns. In particular, there are indications that translation between pre-invasion Indigenous languages may have been for reasons other than information transfer, and that it was probably secondary to code-switching by polyglots. This may provide clues for the ecological virtues of non-translation in a contemporary world where technology allows everything to be translated.
