Transliterating in Time and Space

Trans-languaging emerges in multilingual educational settings when students communicate across their native and codified languages effortlessly. The pandemic has revealed how that although the mother tongue can complement the codified language context in a classroom, indigenous minority languages remain marginalised in the online world. Trans-languaging is now rendered into text online and speech automatically via deep learning. Google translate allows users to quickly translate an unlimited number of characters into another language if those languages have a large online database. However, not all languages enjoy this status.‘Transliterating’ captures the practices that emerge in digital space as solutions for reading and writing in multilingual and multi-script societies. Transliterating has no limit apart from digital resources (data). Indeed, these practices are codified in formal teaching of literacy in Japanese classrooms and observed in educational contexts in India. In Africa, transliterating is a less formal but effective grassroots approach to teaching literacy in multilingual settings without access to any digital resources. The result is transliterating nurtures local language expertise by valorizing local practices and local knowledge. It therefore maximizes bilingual ability. For instance, a teacher can develop a lesson plan using an alphabet and translate the text instantly into another language used as the medium of instruction and delivered in any geographic location in the world. This allows students to use each their native language for assessment and thus adds fairness to the online learning environment. Transliterating also enables students excluded by non-native language-literacy such as adopted and fostered children, in-married women, refugees, and economic migrants and also generates cultural and linguistic ‘meta-linguistic awareness’ based on innovative teaching.