Chapter 6 addresses the complex, multifaceted relationship between translation and society in general, before discussing translation in the context of multilingual societies. It examines translation in connection with translanguaging in the contexts of superdiversity and metrolingualism, drawing on findings of the AHRC-funded project ‘Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities’, arguing that translation should be seen as part of assemblages that constitute the discursive and semiotic character of multilingual societies.

Using a historical institutionalist approach, I demonstrate how institutionalized norms stemming from the liberal tradition in America have informed its language regime by tracing the path dependency of language policy and the critical junctures when changing norms lead to policy shifts. In the early republic, liberal norms enshrined in the Constitution informed a minimalist language regime. At the turn of the 19th century, norms shifted to reflect rapid industrialization and mass immigration, informing attempts at restrictive language policies. At the critical juncture of the civil rights movement, the monolingual language regime was challenged by new norms of what constituted a liberal democratic society. Neoliberal norms of the Reagan presidency facilitated the success of the English-only movement in changing language policies at the state-level. Neoliberal cosmopolitanism of the new millennium re-introduced minimal multilingual policy initiatives. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s election represents a shift to nationalist, albeit possibly illiberal, norms.

The political theorizing of language is unavoidably reliant on at least certain basic assumptions concerning the nature of language and linguistic agency. In multilingual and multicultural societies such as Canada, the task of identifying, articulating, and ultimately evaluating such assumptions is more complex, given their more heterogeneous linguistic landscape, and the (sometimes conflicting) clusters of beliefs, attitudes, anxieties, hopes, and expectations attached by speakers to particular languages as well as to the broader repertoire. The chapter focuses its attention on the debate over multiculturalism/interculturalism in the Canadian context. It explores and defends the argument that this debate can be seen in fact as a debate between two distinct conceptions of language and linguistic agency, namely the designative (“Lockean”, i.e., language as detached from a partial and intersubjective human experience) and the constitutive (“Herderian”, i.e., language as inextricably linked to a contextualized social epistemology), respectively. The distinctive logic and reasoning of both models, the chapter argues, can only be defended by embracing a non-holistic “in-betweenness” experience (and conception) of language as an underlying constitutive commonality.