Translanguaging has become an inescapable notion in the anglophone literature on multilingual education. To what extent has it been adopted into francophone educational discourse? Should it be? How? This paper explores these questions by investigating uses, translations, and equivalences from onomasiological and semiological angles in a bilingual academic corpus.
Translanguaging has become an inescapable notion in the anglophone literature on multilingual education. Questions thus arise as to whether and how it should be adopted into francophone educational discourse, which has developed parallel vocabularies and orientations (Moore & Gajo, 2009). These questions echo those that arose in the 1990s/2000s when francophone scholars came to grips with the notion of literacy (Barré-De Miniac, 2003). Overcoming initial resistance, littératie has now made its way into Francophone scholarship and Le Robert. This paper first reviews the development of translanguaging as a notion in English by drawing on existing syntheses (García & Lin, 2017; Lewis, Jones, & Baker, 2012) and critiques (Jaspers, 2018; MacSwan, 2017). Insights from these retrospectives are compared with definitions and uses found for the term with the Antconc software in a corpus of journal articles and the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Education (3rd ed., May, 2017). Nominal, adjectival, and verbal uses, as well as four main meanings are identified: a) a pedagogical strategy; b) a language practice; c) an approach to bilingual education; d) an emergent field of study. Second, the paper reports on the compilation of a corpus of French publications and bilingual documents (e.g., by the Council of Europe) that refer to translanguaging in citations and/or in the main text. This corpus provides insight into how translanguaging has been received, used, and translated in French, and what related notions it has generated (e.g., translangageance). Third, from an onomasiological angle, the paper investigates how the various English meanings of translanguaging can be mapped onto existing equivalent notions in French. Finally, the paper proposes French equivalents for the main English meanings and uses of translanguaging, making a case for the added value that this concept offers Francophone scholarship, similar to the case once made for littératie.
