Blog

Our research proceeds from the premise that there’s more to languages than their practical benefits for communicative transactions.

This is not just about ‘added’ value. Languages are our key medium for self-expression, and as such they’re at the heart of individual and collective cultural identity. That gives them immense creative potential which is fundamental to our lives as human beings. While being inextricably connected with practical use, that creative potential is also an invaluable resource in its own right.

Our research programme was designed to develop a new paradigm for Modern Languages that is predicated on the intrinsic connection between multilingualism and creativity. This connection is embedded in our linguistic heritage, our linguistic development, and our communicative lives. It can give learners confidence in their innate ability as linguists, and it makes language learning lastingly rewarding. It also holds the key to establishing a common identity for the subject of Modern Languages across educational sectors.

In this section, we feature articles, videos and podcasts that give insights, snapshots and personal perspectives on the many ways in which languages and creativity interact and cross-fertilise each other.

Babel: Adventures in Translation

Babel: Adventures in Translation is running at Bodleian Libraries until 2 June 2019. The exhibition explores translation and the important, often invisible, role it plays in our everyday lives. It celebrates all sides of translation, from the practical and creative to the divine.

Key themes of the exhibition include:

Multilingual Shakespeare: Merely Players

Earlier this year, professional theatre-makers and students from Birmingham came together to produce an immersive, multilingual collage of Shakespearean plays – MERELY PLAYERS – at the Eagle & Ball pub on Creative Multilingualism partner Birmingham City University’s campus.

68 ways to say ‘plain’: translating Jane Eyre

It has been a busy time for Prismatic Translation's Prismatic Jane Eyre project. I spent March mainly in Pisa, working on fifteen Italian translations with a group of graduate students and early career researchers co-ordinated by our collaborator in the project there, Professor Alessandro Grilli.

Lunch at the Creative Power of Metaphor conference

The Creative Power of Metaphor: conference highlights

29 March 2019 was destined to sear itself on the collective memory as Brexit Day, being the official date when the UK was due to leave the EU. Instead, 29–30 March will be remembered – at least by the Creative Multilingualism team – as the springtime weekend when 120 conference delegates converged on Oxford from five continents to engage in some blue sky thinking and luxuriate in a veritable sea of metaphors.

Research update: Linguistic creativity in the language classroom

Over the last 18 months our classroom-based research project has been exploring the impact of using poems and authentic texts (on such themes as love, death, migration) and different teaching approaches (‘creative’ versus ‘functional’) on 14 year-old language learners’ language development and attitudes towards languages.

Research update: Prismatic Jane Eyre and Scriptworlds

The Prismatic Translation strand is made up of three twined threads. ‘Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-reading a global novel across languages’ looks at how that book has been transformed through translation into many languages across the globe.

Impressions from fieldwork: ‘I have never done these things with English!’

As part of our ongoing psycholinguistic research on figurative language processing, our Metaphor strand took three experiments on the road in November 2018 to test learners of English in Osijek, Croatia.

The first experiment (a priming study) looked at how non-native speakers process conventional English metaphorical expressions (such as open an account or expose the truth) and whether it differs from the way English native speakers process them.

Performing Languages: on multilingualism and language hierarchies

As a Warwickshire-based translator and creative writer in French and English, I’ve long been aware of the four-year research programme Creative Multilingualism. Due to professional commitments, I had however never been able to attend previous events.

Yoruba Sonnets performance Wolfson College

Yoruba Sonnets: creative multilingualism in action

Friday night’s (15/2/19) Yoruba Sonnets event at Wolfson College was part of a project initiated over 20 years ago by Birmingham-based Lekan Babalola, to explore the oral poetry associated with the ancient Nigerian philosophy and divination system Ifa, and to introduce it to other cultural contexts. This may sound like the outline for a dry-as-dust worthy academic lecture…

Yoruba Sonnets: audience feedback

On 15 February, Grammy award-winning Lekan Babalola brought his Sacred Funk Quartet and spoken word poet Dr Olu Taiwo to perform the Yoruba Sonnets at Wolfson College, Oxford. The performance pairs ancient verses from the Ifa divination with contemporary Western funk music.

Multilingualism and Language Learning: survey

The increasing voluntary and forced mobility of people resulting from globalisation and political instabilities in various regions is having a dramatic impact on the linguistic make up of many nation-states. New forms of linguistic diversity and multilingualism are emerging, involving different linguistic practices.