Translation technology, translanguaging and transknowledging in student academic writing

This article draws attention to the centrality of translation in multilingual pedagogies that include translanguaging and transknowledging with higher education (HE) students in English Medium Instruction (EMI) institutions. At a perplexing time when AI technologies advance, this article provides a background to earlier (southern) research on multilingualisms in education, including the use of human language translation technologies to increase epistemic access to academic texts predominantly written in English. We specifically draw a distinction between more northern perspectives of translanguaging and more southern perspectives that emphasise the central and explicit role of translation in ‘vertical’ translanguaging and ‘transknowledging’. We follow this with a close discussion of a micro-study, the purpose of which is to offer insight into how Chinese-speaking multilingual students engage with academic texts in English through their own human capacity for translation and in interaction with machine translation (MT) and post-editing (PE) of MT to enhance their academic writing ( Chang, 2024 ). In so doing we connect this study to earlier research, pedagogical interventions and theorisation of vertical translanguaging and transknowledging ( Heugh, Li & Song, 2017 ; Heugh et al., 2022 ).