(Becoming) Lost and Found in Translation

Salman Rushdie (1991) asserts, ‘It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.’ (p16) Lost and Found in Translation is a project run by students and staff from UAL, that has taken LCC’s Design School Manifesto as its starting point. This group (LaFiTers) are exploring ideas of; social inclusion (Cameron 1992), social justice, (Smyth 2011), culture shock, belonging (Burke & McManus 2009) and transitions (Sabri 2014), through ideas of what it means to have to translate something from one state to another. The students in the group have creatively and gainfully fused written, oral, visual languages, to create new kinds of thinking about the manifesto, with and for our multicultural students at LCC/UAL. This paper will focus on ideas of critical thinking, meta-cognition and diversity at UAL/LCC generally and how all student’s voices and thinking can be heard and acknowledged in the production of new thinking about inclusion and social justice. (Bhagat & O’Neill 2011, Freire 1990, Richards & Finnigan 2015). Inclusivity and critical thinking are central to this project as it gives a sense of belonging and ownership to the students (Freire 1990, hooks 1993). After the initial translations were completed, criticisms emerged and were voiced by the students in the group. There were a number of critiques of the manifesto, the students saw that it was about design, ‘...but as one of its principles is communication, some of the sentences were not clear and hard to understand.’ (LiFiTers). They saw is as not being democratic, as it was made by tutors. Their solution was for the content of their audio/visual recordings to come from asking questions about the manifestos, to criticise it, to ask people to translate them on the spot, ask them about their culture, stereotypes. (Cowden & Singh 2013) This paper interrogates the use of the English language as a part of an ongoing colonisation of the world by its seemingly increasing domination of world languages (Cameron 1992, Phillipson 1992, Rihane 2018). Alison Crump (2014) argues ‘...an emerging theoretical and analytical framework called LangCrit, or Critical Language and Race Theory. Crump ‘...urges language studies scholars, both within the field of English language teaching and beyond, to continue to look for ways in which race, racism, and radicalisation intersect with issues of language, belonging, and identity.’ (Crump 2014:1) Pedagogy according to Gilles Deleuze (1997) amongst others, is not something that is “done to one” or “is done by one to others,” but is something that one participates in, it should be a mode of co- construction, teaching and learning become fused, one is opened up to the future, and one is better able to question knowledge construction as such (Cole 2016). This project is collaborative, cooperative and contestable. Its aim is to create new concepts and new ways of thinking about inclusion and diversity. (Steventon, Cureton, and & Clouder 2016) The LiFiT project has opened up the idea that English itself is a colonising force. The project feeds into and helps the liberating and decolonising the curriculum project at UAL. (Panesar, Patel, & Jethnani, 2018). It interrogates ideas of cultural Imperialism and linguistic imperialism. Robert Phillipson professor of international language studies, defines English linguistic imperialism as, ‘the dominance of English... asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages." English is often referred to as a global "lingua franca", but Phillipson argues that when its dominance leads to a linguicide, it can be more aptly titled a "lingua frankensteinia’ (Phillipson 1992:36).

This paper was give at the International Conference for Design Cumulus 2021, Roma. It was in the Design Culture (of) Revolution strand which dealt with critical thinking, disruption and change.

The chairs for this strand were:
Hélène Day-Fraser, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Canada
Alastair Fuad-Luke, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Stefano Maffei, Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy
Betti Marenko, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, United Kingdom

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