Translanguaging to Understand Language

Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language

This article seeks to develop Translanguaging as a theory of language and discuss the theoretical motivations behind and the added values of the concept. I contextualize Translanguaging in the linguistic realities of the 21st century, especially the fluid and dynamic practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages, language varieties, and language and other semiotic systems. I h...

Learning how to understand language

What Does it Mean to Understand Language?

In its earliest drafts, this paper was a structured argument, presenting a comprehensive view of cognitive science, criticizing prevailing approaches to the study of language and thought and advocating a new way of looking at things. Although I strongly believed in the approach it outlined, somehow it didn’t have the convincingness on paper that it had in my own reflection. After some discourag...

A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging

Translanguaging is a new term in bilingual education; it supports a heteroglossic language ideology, which views bilingualism as valuable in its own right. Some translanguaging scholars have questioned the existence of discrete languages, further concluding that multilingualism does not exist. I argue that the political use of language names can and should be distinguished from the social and s...

Learning to Understand Natural Language with Less Human Effort

Learning to understand the meaning of natural language is an important problem within language processing that has the potential to revolutionize human interactions with computer systems. Informally, the problem specification is to map natural language text to a formal semantic representation connected to the real world. This problem has applications such as information extraction and understan...