In this article, we explore the phenomenon of deictic center shifts in literary translation, concentrating on the Spanish translation (La historia siguiente, 1992) of the Dutch novel Het volgende verhaal (1991 [The Following Story, 1993]). The empirical description focuses on lexical spatiotemporal markers and verbal tenses. We compare the source text and the target text in order to identify the translational shifts: we consider these shifts as textual traces of the translator’s interpretive process of resetting the spatiotemporal coordinates of the discourse. We will argue that the deictic shifts between source and target text are related to occasional hesitations of the translator, who tends to emphasize the most salient deictic center. On a methodological level, we hope to show that a close reading of a translated text, taking into account its thematic and structural peculiarities, can contribute both to Translation and Literary Studies.

In this article, the authors analyze citizens’ reactions to Brexit on social media after the referendum results by performing a content analysis of 5877 posts collected from the social media platform Flickr, written in English, German, French, Spanish or Italian. Their research aims to answer the three following questions: What multimodal practices are adopted by citizens when they react to societal events like Brexit? To what extent do these practices illustrate types of citizenship that are specific to social networks? Can we observe different reactions to Brexit according to the languages used by the citizens? The authors focus on the types of visual content the citizens used to react to Brexit, as well as on what types of social relations this content can particularly create between their authors and the other members of the Flick community. Their article also highlights to what extent these posts shared on Flickr show content that is in favour of, or against, Brexit.

This opening essay of the special issue on ‘Narration and Translation’ discusses the overlaps between the fields of narratology and translation studies. The fact that translation scholars have merely skimmed the surface of narratological issues relevant for the study of translation can be understood within the context of early developments in translation studies. The first explicit use of narratological models in this discipline has grown out of unease with the extant focus on the macrostructural level of translations. In recent decades, translation scholars have begun to include narrative approaches in their research. Some conceptualize the translator’s discursive presence by referring to a model of narrative communication, or borrow concepts from narratology in order to analyse observed shifts in literary translations. Outside the domain of literary translation studies, scholars have looked into the way translation can refashion narratives in the real world. Conversely, narrative theories have rarely dealt with translational issues, even though they often rely on translations of literary texts. The issue as a whole wants to enhance the dialogue between narratology and translation studies. Each essay explores aspects of the relation between narration and translation.

This paper addresses the challenges service providers are facing amidst growing ethnolinguistic diversity in a neoliberal climate. We focus on the public service provider Kind & Gezin (K&G), the agency that monitors the wellbeing of young children on behalf of the Flemish authorities in Belgium. We demonstrate that the organisation has taken various multilingual measures that go against the government’s preference for monolingual service provision. This is particularly the case for ‘bottom-up’ bilingual practices, where bilingual family support workers and medical staff developed bilingual routines in service provision, much in line with the ‘client-centered communication’ which K&G professes. Whereas these practices were initially endorsed by K&G’s management, a further diversification of K&G’s clientele, along with budgetary restrictions, prompted management to restrict these practices and explore alternative ways of providing multilingual services that do not require the recruitment of extra staff. Drawing on ethnographic data we explore the rationale underlying the organisation’s decision to restrict its multilingual policy and the way this decision is influenced by neoliberal principles which foreground effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility and entrepreneurialism. We conclude that the policy shift leads to ideological reconceptualisations of ‘language’ and ‘language difference’ that sit uncomfortably with the reality of language-discordant service encounters, as well as to redefinitions of the professional identity of bilingual family support workers.

This chapter reports on the design and implementation of a multilingual, mobile app to facilitate the communication in language discordant face-to-face service encounters (SEs). It describes the results of a two-group between-subjects experiment, in which respondents (N = 20) were randomly assigned to either a SE with app (N = 11), or a SE without app (N = 9). The research builds on the hypothesis that technological mediation facilitates the transfer of information. To verify this hypothesis, it relies on qualitative and quantitative research data: (i) SERVQUAL satisfaction questionnaires and (ii) interaction analysis of video-recorded SEs. The findings address concerns of lengthened visit time, reduced eye contact and additional training needs. The chapter closes with brief guidelines for unlocking the potential of mHealth in language discordant SEs.