ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship of translation and interpreting to multilingualism, surveying studies in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that engage with translation in spoken and written contexts and range from studies of professional and non-professional interpreting in institutional discourse, or sociolinguistic approaches to translation in film and literary works, to studies of linguistic landscape or language change. While translation may be invoked as a remedy to linguistic inequality, it is typically deeply embedded in power asymmetries between languages and their speakers, especially in institutional contexts, such as the judicial system, medical or educational settings. As an inherently meta-semiotic practice, translation also plays a role in language differentiation and the creation of language boundaries, and consequently needs to be examined in relation to language ideologies. This chapter argues that translation practices are best studied in a wider context of language contact and multilingualism, and in relation to phenomena such as code-switching, translanguaging, second language acquisition, mock languages, and language shift. This includes exploring the role of interpreters as mediators, advocates or institutional gatekeepers, but also the use of machine translation that is becoming more and more ubiquitous in this age of globalization.
