Languages – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Call for proposals: Language Policy and Practice in Multilingual Families, Special Issue of Languages. Deadline: 31 March 2023.

Special Issue Editors: Anastassia Zabrodskaja (Estonia) and Natalia Ringblom (Sweden)

This Special Issue welcomes manuscripts of various types, such as articles, reviews, and conceptual papers of a disciplinary or interdisciplinary nature, that seek to contribute to the analysis of language policy and practice in multilingual families from a multidisciplinary perspective. The multilingual (resp. bilingual) family is a worldwide fact, as more and more families now use more than one language. This provokes situations in which the family is faced with the problem of maintaining a heritage language (mother tongue, home, immigrant or minority language), its transmission to the next generation, or a language attrition and shift towards a dominant (societal or majority) language. Language transmits culture and history; thus, the loss of one’s heritage language can lead to the loss of inherited knowledge. As such, a conscious decision must be made by parents to pass on language, especially as children enter adolescence and become more independent, including in their language choices. Various factors influence the transmission of heritage language and culture, including: motivation (integrative and intrinsic motivation); its symbolic role; linguistic ideologies and language identity; socioeconomic status; social networks; religion; tendency towards social segregation or inclusion; language solidarity; the speaker’s environment and the value of multilingualism in specific domains (family, school, community and individual); and the use of heritage language in public space and its usefulness and cultural value.

Call for papers: Special Issue of Languages: Translating Otherness: Challenges, Theories, and Practices. Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2023; deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2023.

Guest editors: Dr. Paola Giorgis (Italy), Prof. Dr. Ivanka Mavrodieva (Bulgaria), Dr. Bilyana Todorova (Bulgaria), Dr. Andrea C. Valente (Canada).

“We are pleased to invite you to contribute to a Special Issue of Languages, in partnership with the European Society for Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Dialogue, following its 6th ESTIDIA Conference at Alicante University (June 2022, Spain). As ESTIDIA members and In Other Words (IOW) Dictionary researchers, we welcome contributions that explore issues, concerns, and dilemmas in the translation of the Other from various scholarly perspectives. Translation studies are is informed mostly by linguistics, literature, and psychoanalysis. Similarly, studies on Otherness tend to be interdisciplinary, being enriched mostly by discussions from critical discourse analysis, rhetoric, anthropology, and philosophy. Thus, this Special Issue aims to collect original and innovative studies that articulate theories and practices from interdisciplinary approaches in order to understand how Otherness travels and is translated into other languages and contexts.

The Special Issue aims to showcase micro and macro analysis of translated material, from word/morphological to semantic-pragmatic levels in interlinguistic, intersemiotic, and or intercultural translations of Otherness. We will collect articles that present and discuss challenges, theories, and/or empirical research in translating Otherness”