Stories are a key component of human lives and have been for a very long time—some may say, for as long as there have been humans. The anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011) argues that we live in a “storied world” in which “any thing – caught at a particular place and moment – enfolds within its constitution the history of relations that have brought it there”, so that we understand the nature of things “only by attending to their relations, or in other words, by telling their stories” (p. 160). Stories enable us to make sense of the world and share personal knowledge with others in compelling and immediate ways. Stories can act as “windows into the public and private meaning making that people do as they make connections in their lives that make personal sense to them” (Mileham, 2015, p. 4). Passed down through generations, stories become an ongoing cultural patrimony, tools of wayfinding, or moral compass. Stories are powerful tools to frame experience and disseminate ideas: they may reinforce stereotypes or inspire alternative views of reality; they may disseminate alternative ways of doing things or encourage fixed positions and reified notions of identity. From a translational standpoint, the same story can move in countless directions and have very different effects, depending on how it is translated and into what languages, and modes.
Individual repertoires of storied knowledge may include autobiographical narratives as well as stories that have been passed down and that are part of local (or diasporic) folklore, local or national cultural identities, and political memory. Given the scale of multilingualism in contemporary cities (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015; Simon, 2019), repertoires of stories in disparate languages may coexist side by side, not necessarily intelligible to all. Translating such stories across languages and cultures enables them to reach new audiences and, potentially, build new connections.
The study presented here focuses on multilingual storytelling practices as tools for both individual development and community building, as part of a wider collaborative project on urban intercultural encounters on the island of Ireland, namely in Galway and Belfast. Funded under the Higher Education Authority’s North-South research programme, the “Multilingual Island: Sites of Translation and Encounter” (MISTE) project (2022–2025) compared intercultural communication approaches in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Divided into three strands, MISTE consisted of an ethnographic study of linguistically diverse sports, religious, and cultural settings (respectively) in Galway and Belfast, with the goal of understanding the role of translation, including non-professional translation and machine translation (MT), in such settings. It builds a relationship with local stakeholders (sports clubs, churches/mosques, libraries, non-governmental organizations, etc.) to participate in the conversation about social inclusion and multilingualism in their sites.
Storytelling workshops were part of MISTE’s third strand exploring the creative potential of translation in cultural sites, through the inclusion of creative practice-based research. Workshops in Galway and Belfast aimed to create safe spaces where multilingual individuals living locally could creatively use translation between their preferred languages and English, to tell stories. Researchers, who were also workshop facilitators, insisted on the creative potential of translation through exercises that encouraged participants to translate in a playful and creative way. The researchers also aimed at creating spaces where the participants would be able to share elements from their culture and simultaneously improve their confidence in public speaking and/or the English language. In each setting the researchers recruited diverse groups of multilingual individuals including refugees and international protection applicants, labour migrants, international students, second generation migrants, and other multilingual individuals who had a personal commitment to the social inclusion of migrants. While most of our participants would fall under the umbrella term of ‘migrants’, and we were influenced by creative practices aimed at migrant integration, we acknowledge that our work drew interest from a range of multilingual individuals whose experience can hardly be reduced to a single term.
Between October and December 2023, the Galway team conducted multilingual storytelling workshops with diverse groups in Galway, Ireland. This team was composed of IA, AC, and LS. During the workshops, they told folktales from Ireland and elsewhere, creating a space where participants could share stories from their own cultures. Between March and May 2024, the Belfast team (PB and ES) conducted storytelling workshops focusing on personal narratives of language learning, translating oneself into a new linguistic and cultural environment, and transnational connections.
In this article, as members of both teams, we reflect on these workshops in relation to our goals of establishing a multilingual space of solidarity through the arts (Evans, 2019) where participants and facilitators could help each other develop techniques to share different cultural practices and languages, with a view to developing new tools for community building. The workshops created spaces that were translational in many ways. The participants translated back and forth between English and other languages, adapted storytelling conventions, transposed narratives across media (e.g., from printed book to oral storytelling to written storyline on a whiteboard), and reframed parts of their own cultural identities to different audiences. Focusing on different genres of stories, the Galway and Belfast workshops provide complementary findings and avenues for exploration of how storytelling techniques can constitute a translation of the self. As part of the goals of MISTE, these techniques will be made available to stakeholders and can be deployed as a methodology for community building and personal development.
Creativity and social inclusion through the arts: A multilingual and translation theory perspective
In the last decade, research on multilingualism has found that not only are individuals able to combine different elements of their linguistic repertoire, but that they are able to do so creatively. Moments of contact “between people of diverse backgrounds and traditions provide new opportunities for innovation and creativity” (García & Wei, 2014, p. 124). Concepts such as translanguaging emphasize “the creative blending of the linguistic options available to speakers in an utterance” (Baynham & Lee, 2019, p. 20). Combining words and phrases from different languages will often bring out the novel and the unexpected. Creative possibilities are multiplied when we incorporate different modes of communication (visual, bodily, etc.) into the mix: “new forms of creativity […] are possible when individuals can play with the norms of multiple languages, multiple modalities, and both local and trans-national visual elements” (Vold Lexander et al., 2020, p. 280).
One important consequence of this strand of recent sociolinguistic research is the realization that creativity is not the exclusive purview of a few exceptionally talented individuals:
In a break from ideas of the lone, creative genius, contemporary studies see creativity as a more widespread phenomenon, socio-historically located, and co-produced – i.e. a collaborative rather than individual achievement. (Swann & Deumert, 2018, p. 4)
Sociolinguistically speaking, in the space of interaction we observe people “doing-things-with-words” and “doing-things-to-words” (Swann & Deumert, 2018, p. 5), in ways that configure, and sometimes transgress, the power relations between speakers of different languages, dialects, styles, etc. Migrants moving from one context to another can use their multilingual repertoires to build connections in their local areas, including by playing with-words and to-words. However, most policies for the linguistic “integration” of migrants (Flubacher & Yeung, 2016) tend towards building work-related proficiency to help people construct “desirable professional selves that can be commodified on specific labour markets” (Del Percio, 2018, p. 242). While the local language is undoubtedly necessary for migrants’ livelihoods, this strategy risks calling attention only to the qualities that migrants lack. Conversely, initiatives that rely on art and creativity to improve and develop migrants’ linguistic skills appeal to migrants as already inherently valuable, creative individuals. Creative practices by migrants assert their right to cultural citizenship in their new location as well as the culture of their departure. In this way, creativity may challenge a common but limited view of cultural citizenship and address power relations. In the last decades, researchers have focused on multilingual art practices as ways of building connections in migration contexts. Various types of art practices involving migrants have been proposed as ways of building a “more complicated and ‘messy’ understanding of community and society that is rooted in notions of interdependence” (Evans, 2019, pp. 49–50), and where “the movement and sensual nature of real-life encounters heralds a new understanding of intercultural subjectivities or vibrant identities” (Ros i Solé et al., 2020, p. 400). Here we understand ‘community’ not as a concrete or static entity but as a social and discursive construct that is continuously made and remade or ‘built’ in relation with others (Cohen, 1985; Anderson, 2006; Back, 2009).
Art forms vary from theatre (Marinetti, 2018; Tsang et al., 2022; Wells, 2018), to dance (Ciribuco, 2022), to digital storytelling practices (Macleroy & Shamsad, 2020), each with its own expressive advantages and challenges. Different languages are involved in these practices, both at the level of collaboration between practitioners and the outputs themselves; but they also encompass a variety of modes of communication, from body language, to painting, to music. Translation is not generally foregrounded in creative practices involving migrants and refugees, but this does not mean it is absent. Commenting on a British project aiming to showcase refugee stories using walks through historical sites, adapted plays, and the retelling of these stories with the help of famous authors, Brownlie (2022) commented on the power of these transcreations to link “the world of the asylum seeker to these past social worlds, famous past events and people, and canonical literary texts” to provide aesthetic satisfaction as well as “bonding across divergence” (p. 134). The matter in these cases, Brownlie (2022) notes, is how to ensure that the translations maintain the cultural specificity and intention of the refugees who shared their stories instead of subsuming them into Western forms (p. 135).
Oral storytelling is a fertile tool for harnessing migrants’ multilingual creativity. Storytelling does not require tools or equipment, and its practice is widely shared across cultures. This makes it a low-threshold activity that can be used to involve a great variety of individuals from different backgrounds in the same space. Story circles have been used with multilingual migrant children as “dialogic, power-sharing activities that center students’ experiences and surface and support their linguistic and cultural repertoires” (E. E. Flynn, 2021, p. 656).
De Fina et al. ran a project in Sicily in 2016, where episodes from the Odyssey were told in Italian and then in the languages of a group of young African migrants. The choice of text was not casual: by picking an epic tale of wanderings across the Mediterranean, the researchers appealed to individuals who had also performed a perilous Mediterranean crossing in their own search for safety. This story, the study found, had a positive effect on the young participants who were confronted with “a new framing for understanding their own mobility”; it also appealed to their Italian teachers who could find renewed empathy for their migrant students through “an alternative reading of an epic world represented in a text that many of them had learned in school” (De Fina et al., 2020, p. 78).
The translation challenges faced by the intercultural mediators working in six languages do not feature in De Fina et al.’s study, but translation is indeed part and parcel of similar projects. What happens to the story of Nausicaa rescuing Odysseus on the shore, as it moves from Ancient Greek to Italian, and from Italian to Bambara? How is it reframed for young asylum seekers who had been themselves rescued on Mediterranean shores? Such questions may help understand how narratives are and can be communicated, reframed, and re-appropriated by activists and migrants.
The role of translation in this type of practice, however, is often understudied. We operate, in this sense, within the framework of emerging intersections between the study of multilingualism in context and the study of translation as a tool of community building (Baynham & Lee, 2019; P. Flynn, 2023; Simon, 2019). Our interest is not purely linguistic: we acknowledge the importance and creative potential of translation across different media and genres (Brownlie, 2022) but we also embrace the concept of “translationality” as developed by translation scholars in the cultural, social (Buden & Nowotny, 2009; van Doorslaer & McMartin, 2022), and semiotic (Marais, 2019) turns of the last decades. Exploring “translationality” as a concept allows us to account for the experiences and phenomena emerging amidst actual, remembered, and imagined encounters between peoples, cultures, places, objects, and institutions, and the transformative force of such encounters (Blumczynski, 2023). Translation studies have also become preoccupied in this sense with power relations and power asymmetries between different actors and their languages. The theme has been explored through a variety of lenses including gender, race, economy, and geopolitics (see Carbonell i Cortés & Monzó-Nebot, 2021). The translation of oral storytelling from marginalized or oppressed voices can become in this sense a form of resistance and activism (Mourad 2020).
In order to conceptualize translation as a form of activism and community building, scholars have turned their attention to improvised, non-professional, unregulated translation (P. Flynn, 2023; P. Flynn & van Doorslaer, 2016; Inghilleri, 2017). Different languages are involved in these interactions—but so is mediation between graphic signs and oral speech, between ideas and objects, between gestures and socio-cultural frames of reference, across different degrees and types of literacy.
Translation, viewed as a (bio)semiotic rather than merely or predominantly linguistic operation, concerns the “relationships between (inter) signs and between signs and things and between signs and ideas, etc.” (Marais, 2019, p. 138). This definition encompasses a complex variety of socio-cultural phenomena that involve the mediation and transformation of meaning. The focus is on the ways in which individuals understand, misunderstand, reformulate, and incorporate disparate forms of meaning (in different languages but also different modes of communication) as part of their interactions with other humans and non-humans alike (Tyulenev, 2018). This is relevant to describe an oral storytelling event where impromptu translations happened and where the totality of meaning was determined by words in multiple languages as well as gestures, positioning, drawing on a flipchart, etc.
Within this framework, our multilingual storytelling circles can be characterized as complex translational events. Additionally, as their objectives included the communication of personal identities and culturally connotated narratives to a diverse audience, they connected to translation as a foundational part of what it means to be a migrant: migration has been likened by artists and theorists alike as a translation of the self (Besemeres & Wierzbicka, 2007; Cronin, 2006). Migrants may be used to reframing cultural meaning from their backgrounds by using different languages, gestures, tones of voice, accents, etc., with different target audiences that they encounter in their daily lives. The central experience is not limited to migrants but is also shared by bilinguals and even learners of a second language, all of whom speak about translating themselves and their lives or being translated (Blumczynski, 2016, pp. 337–340). A migrant storytelling event is a translation in more ways than one, across languages and cultures: at once mundane, inherently creative, and potentially disruptive.
Methodology
The Galway and Belfast teams shared the main tenets of the methodology and workshop design. However, they differed in their choice of focus (folktales vs. personal narratives) and in the method of data collection (audio recordings vs. observation and note-taking). These differences followed from responsiveness to different contexts and themes, but they also enabled the two teams to observe different translational phenomena at play, creating a rich composite picture.
The workshops were designed as practice-based research (Bradley et al., 2018; Evans, 2019), co-created with local stakeholders. We consulted with local libraries, as well as local schools and migrant interest groups, to promote the project and collect early feedback to make sure that our activities would respond to the interest and needs of local migrants. We collaborated with Britain-based Irish performer Clare Murphy, and Galway storyteller Carol Barrett. In September 2023, the Galway team attended one of Murphy’s storytelling courses to develop their own storytelling techniques and place themselves in a situation similar to the one in which they planned to place participants. In February 2024, Murphy conducted an online training session specifically designed for the project, attended by both Belfast and Galway teams. Each team then designed a series of workshops that combined storytelling techniques employed by Murphy and others, with their own backgrounds as language lecturers and/or social science researchers. Considerations were made to adapt the aims of the workshops to the local populations in Galway and Belfast. We sought appropriate spaces for the workshops, holding some in neutral grounds (museums, libraries) and others on university campuses, especially after trust had been established with the group.
In both locales, researchers took on an active role in the workshops, not only conducting them but also working to establish a safe space by chatting with participants, and sharing refreshments. The Galway and Belfast teams had different backgrounds and expertise, not only in the disciplinary sense (literary translation, intercultural communication, language teaching, sociology) but also in linguistic terms (Ukrainian, Spanish, Italian, Polish).
Each researcher found themselves in Galway/Belfast as a result of a different trajectory: some were born in (Northern) Ireland, even if they all had experience of living in other countries; others had moved to Ireland for study or research; others had to leave their country as a consequence of conflict. This meant that researchers shared with participants the experience of mobility and multilingualism. At the same time, most researchers found themselves in a more privileged position (being Irish/UK nationals or EU nationals) than many participants. Some researchers had previously encountered some of the participants in the context of teaching or volunteering with local migrants’ associations.
During the project, the researchers/facilitators discussed their positionality, reflecting on how each individual’s background could help in the context of the workshops but also create potential disparities, where the researchers/facilitators may be acknowledged a higher status due to their position within the University. As Hirsu (2020) noted, “unlearning” the role of researcher is important to take part in the flow of interactions as they happen in the field (p. 157). By discussing their ideas in the planning stage, and comparing notes after each workshop, researchers discussed how to create as equitable an exchange as possible, while acknowledging that some disparities may not be fully mitigated.
Galway workshops
The Galway workshops concentrated on folktales following on from consultation with local libraries, as well as the fact that Galway and the West of Ireland have a rich storytelling tradition. The city is home to storytelling groups working both with traditional folklore and contemporary material. These sometimes include multilingual storytellers (working through English and Irish), as well as practitioners with diverse linguistic or cultural backgrounds. This presence enabled the team to reach out to local storytelling practitioners for guidance and partnership, who generally responded positively.
On an ethical level, concentrating on folktales rather than on the life stories of migrants protects participant privacy. Individual life stories can be difficult to tell since they may contain traumatic content. Life stories may also be risky to reveal when someone is involved in an international protection application, their life stories already heavily scrutinized by the authorities (Jacobs & Maryns, 2021). Folktales on the other hand are not necessarily connected to lived experiences, but they may still be quite important for representing one’s identity. The Galway researchers worked on the hypothesis that folktales could be a powerful instrument to gain insights into the cultural heritage of others, while allowing storytellers the possibility to maintain their privacy and distance themselves from the stories that they tell.
Table 1 relates the structure and goals of the five workshops in Galway, each lasting about two hours.
— Table 1. Overview of Workshop Activities in Galway.
| Workshop | Activities |
| 1 | Introducing the project; drafting ground rules and commitments; working on story structure: beginnings and endings in different languages |
| 2 | Listening to and retelling/translating a story; describing settings within cultural contexts |
| 3 | Exploring basic story structures (the ‘bones’ of a story); describing characters |
| 4 | Participants introduce their stories to the group; learning to communicate cultural differences |
| 5 | Workshop with local storyteller Carol Barrett—refining storytelling techniques |
The project received ethical approval from the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Galway (approval no. 2022.06.008). The workshops were advertised through local partners and took place in Galway City Museum, with some extra meetings in the University campus for storytellers who decided to take part in the final event (see below). The target was adult individuals living in Galway who self-identified as migrants and considered a language other than English to be their first language. Fifteen individuals (four men and eleven women) took part in the project, attending at least one workshop. Recruitment took place via local associations, libraries, English classes for migrants. While the University was not especially a target, some participants happened to be international postgraduate students and researchers.
Participants provided written consent to being audio-recorded. Researchers did not collect information about nationality or migration status, but only about linguistic background, since linguistic and cultural diversity was the only variable that was considered relevant for the project goals. Languages represented in the workshops included Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Farsi, Irish, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Ukrainian. This is the list of languages that participants ‘represented’ and discussed during the workshop, but it is not an exhaustive list of languages spoken by the participants—for example, some participants spoke both Ukrainian and Russian. The workshops were audio-recorded and then transcribed, with the participant names replaced by an identifier (“G” for Galway, plus a number).
Carol Barrett was invited to one of the workshops to share some traditional Irish folktales and provide support to participants who were working on their delivery. As culminating event, IA organized a storytelling event in December 2023 in the Galway Westside Library, coupled with a session of making traditional Ukrainian arts and crafts, with members of local diaspora associations. During this small, informal event, participants had the opportunity to tell the story that they had been working on during the workshops, if they wished. This was not recorded, to put participants at ease.
Belfast workshops
The Belfast team decided to work on stories of language learning, migration, and interlingual and cross-cultural encounter, particularly on narratives detailing the participants’ engagement with the English language and element of the local culture in Northern Ireland. Due to the time of year, the cycle of four workshops was advertised as “Springtime Stories”. The team mitigated risks connected with potential loss of participant privacy by not recording the workshops but compiling notes instead. They also invited the participants to distance themselves from the stories and from the exposure that may result from sharing them, by encouraging them to adopt relayed attribution and frame the stories as “things that happened to a friend”. This gave the participants the freedom to share only as much as they wished to without disclosing what parts of the story reflected their own experience, thus removing attention from themselves.
Table 2 relates the main themes of the four workshops that took place in Belfast, each lasting about 1.5 hours.
Table 2. Overview of Workshop Activities in Belfast
| Workshop | Activities |
| 1 | Introducing the project and drafting ground rules and group commitments; stories of encounters in Belfast (focusing on sensory impressions; new words, expressions, etc.; initial social experiences) |
| 2 | Warm-up exercise (prompt-based storytelling); sharing experiences of living a life in/between/across more than one language (feeling embarrassed; small talk; verbal and bodily gestures; raising an issue) |
| 3 | Warm-up exercise (prompt-based storytelling); feelings/evocations of speaking one’s first language (memories and present-day experiences); comparing the expressive capacities of one’s first and second/third languages. |
| 4 | Exploring food-related words and discourses through senses, memories, experiences (staple foods, unfamiliar foods, comfort foods, ceremonies); group feedback on the workshops |
The project secured the approval of the Ethics Committee at the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast. Expecting that many of the participants may be international students from the university (which turned out to be the case), we decided to hold the workshops outside the campus, in a neutral, non-academic environment. The workshops took place in the Linen Hall Library in central Belfast—a popular venue for cultural events (including those involving migrant groups) and language classes—and were advertised through word of mouth and personalized email invitations. Sixteen individuals (two men and fourteen women) took part in the workshops in total, with an average of six to seven participants per workshop.
At the beginning of the first session, the participants collectively drafted a set of ground rules or commitments. These included: “we will avoid criticism and judgement”, “it’s fine to make mistakes”, “we are willing to take risks”. These were written on a flipchart placed in the room and displayed for the duration of each workshop. As in Galway, researchers in Belfast did not collect information about nationality or migration status but only took note of languages spoken or referred to. These included Arabic, Danish, Gujarati, Hindi, Korean, Kurdish, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Spanish, and Turkish. Two researchers took handwritten notes (approximately 6,000 words), where participants’ names are replaced by an identifier (“B” for Belfast, plus a number). Participants were invited to write any comments, insights, examples, and ideas they wished to share with the project team on notepads provided.
Findings and discussion
The data analysis follows Li Wei’s (2011) concept of “moment analysis”, that is, the empirical analysis of a multilingual space with a focus on “spontaneous, impromptu, and momentary actions and performances of the individual” (p. 1224). This type of analysis enables the individuation of specific significant “moments” that will be recognized as important, “characterised by its distinctiveness and impact on subsequent events or developments” (Wei, 2011, p. 1224). The following sections analyse relevant themes that emerged during these encounters.
Galway: Polyphony and parallels
In Galway, during the inaugural workshop on 24 October 2023, the participants were asked to share beginnings and endings of folktales in their preferred languages. Storytelling traditions around the world often have unique and recognizable beginnings and endings, passed down through generations. English examples are “Once upon a time” or “and they lived happily ever after”. These formulas immediately frame a text as a story (often, as a fairytale) to an English speaker. The Galway team asked participants to share the equivalent of such formulas in their languages, to find out how ‘translatable’ they were, and to stimulate creative translation processes.
The participants, regardless of age, origin, or language, all responded enthusiastically. They provided beginnings and endings in six languages (Arabic, Farsi, Irish, Polish, Spanish, and Ukrainian), to which AC added Italian. Each time a relevant expression came up, it was discussed with the group and added to a flipchart by researchers and/or participants, especially if written in a script that not everybody was familiar with. This participation intended to confirm that each participant was an expert in their own language and culture, and that those languages were important in this context.
The following interaction exemplifies the type of engagement taking place in the room at the time:
G8: Fadó fadó a bhí ann
IA: Fadó fadó a bhí ann
G6: Kakoi yazyk? [What language? (Ukrainian)]
IA: Irish
G6: Irish?
IA: Yes. And in English once again?
G8: Long, long ago it was.
G6: Aha. Davnym-davno [A long time ago (Russian)]
In this passage, G8 states the traditional beginning of fairytales in the Irish language. A Ukrainian participant asks IA in Russian what language that was, and IA answers the question in English. The Irish participant provides what he deems a literal English translation of “fadó fadó a bhí ann”, and the Ukrainian participant translates it further into Russian, using the corresponding Russian formula. In the space of approximately 6 seconds, the same sentence gets translated twice interlingually and further commented upon metalinguistically (“what language?”). G6’s motion of recognition (“aha”) before providing their Russian translation testifies how easily participants could connect formulas like “fadó fadó a bhí ann” to similar sentences with similar functions in other languages. This exemplifies how multilingual conversations can lead to “joy and discovery” (Ros i Solé et al., 2020, p. 400). Especially in this first encounter between the participants, they all showed interest in each other’s cultural background and, very often, in the sound itself of languages that they did not speak or know. The room often erupted in a joyous cacophony of sound. This type of exercise proved instrumental in bridging gaps between participants from the university and from other groups, who may have different levels of familiarity with the workshop format. People were seen helping each other and asking each other questions about their backgrounds or languages.
This exercise is a reversal of ideologies that see ‘the migrant’ mainly as a defective speaker of the local language to be integrated; whose ability to speak the local dominant language is tested but whose expertise in any other language is rarely, if ever, validated (Flubacher & Yeung, 2016). It also echoes other experiments of conversational groups involving migrants and locals (Helm & Dabre, 2018; Hirsu, 2020) where, by using different languages, participants were positioned alternately as learners of one language or experts in another, based on their repertoires. Hirsu (2020) observed in a Scottish-based group a “chain of one phrase calling for another, one language resource chaining and flowing from the other”, the participants “entangling oneself into the world of the other through exposure to new wor(l)ds” (p. 158). Hirsu warns the reader that similar exercises are to be considered more than “a translation exercise.” Through our practice, we call attention to the validity of the translational aspects themselves. The process of finding equivalents across languages and pointing out subtle but crucial differences between them; and the process of debating more or less literal translations of the same expression or phrase: these are part and parcel of the process of creating a multilingual space. This simple exercise reveals the potential of translation as a collective and creative practice, and a gateway for non-professionals to be exposed to the pleasure of playing with languages. Participants moved across what Marais (2019) called the “semiotic stream” (p. 138) of evolving relationships between signs and different aspects of the sign. According to this Peircean understanding of translation, different interpretants of the same sign constitute a translation. In the first excerpt, we see how the translation of an Irish formula leads not only to its English translation, but into a translation of the English into a suitable Russian expression.
During successive encounters, as participants started sharing whole stories from their home cultures, the chain of translation started including not only the relaying of certain oral narratives into English, but their explanations and contextualization, as well as the other participants’ and facilitators’ reframing of them into other contexts. This is an excerpt from 17 November 2023, when an Indonesian-speaking participant told a story about a mythological figure known as Sangkuriang:
G15: You know why his mom is really, really mad to him? Because that dog is his father. Yes, his dad is kind of from supernatural human transform into animals. That that thing is really still happening right now in Indonesia. People who still like in, you know, yeah.
LS: People believe-
G15: -Yeah!
LS: We have, we have in in Ireland, we have a tradition as well called shape shift. Shape shifters, we have stories as well about […] very often a seal in the sea comes ashore and very often a woman, a female and she […] her seal skin comes off.
In this exchange, G15 felt the need to contextualize a story involving humans who could shapeshift into animals, by adding that in Indonesia people still believe in these legends. LS took this as a chance to mention shapeshifting figures in Irish folklore. This appeared, at times, in other workshops: for example, on 3 November 2023 a Farsi-speaking participant, tasked to retell a story provided by Clare Murphy (“A farmer and his sons”) remarked that he had heard a similar story in Afghanistan.
In this case, the power of storytelling in translation lies in the possibility of recontextualizing stories in ways that make it possible for the participants to highlight these similarities and build conversations where the different narratives are put in contact and compared. The process creates not only a version of the story that is in English, but one that connects it with other comparable stories. Nor does it end with LS’s intervention: while LS comments, in the recording IA can be heard in the background, translating these concepts into Ukrainian for the benefit of other participants who were less confident of their English. The myth of Sangkuriang and Irish stories about shapeshifters find new and unexpected homes in Ukrainian, potentially echoing other comparable stories of Ukrainian folklore in their minds.
The literary translation of oral folktales from distant or oppressed traditions can use the orality of the source text to challenge the “confining norms and boundaries of society, both source [...] and target” (Mourad 2020, p. 176). A collaborative oral translation of folktales can build on the extemporaneous aspects of orality to underline consonances and similarities. This process builds a temporary space that challenges the hierarchy between languages: powerful lingua francas like English and Arabic are placed on the same level of more locally relevant languages like Irish or Bahasa Indonesia.
Galway: Transformations of stories
At the end of the first workshop in Galway, AC told an Italian folktale called “Giovannino Senzapaura” (translatable as “Fearless Johnny”). The story comes from Italo Calvino’s classic 1956 collection Fiabe Italiane, itself a remediation of folktales from various Italian regions, originally told in countless dialects, written in Italian by Calvino. A retelling of the story in English, in Galway, in November 2023, was another node in a chain of translations, in a sense.
“Giovannino” is about a young traveller who, not finding accommodation in a town, accepts to spend the night in a haunted building; there, he meets a living corpse, but he shows no fear in the presence of this threatening apparition, and eventually is rewarded with three pots of gold and ownership of the building itself—until the moment he mysteriously dies of fright. AC intentionally kept some words in Italian, to encourage the creation of a multilingual space. He accompanied most Italian words with gestures that would help the audience fill the gap (e.g. mimicking the act of toasting and saying salute!). This was meant to encourage participants to use a variety of semiotic resources to tell their stories, showing how body language and gestures could be used to complement speech, especially when multiple languages are at play.
Subsequently, participants re-told “Giovannino” in different ways. Following one of Clare Murphy’s techniques, the researchers first asked the participants to retell the story of Giovannino in shorter and shorter timespans (3 minutes, then 1:30 minutes). This is a storytelling technique used to get performers to individuate the “bones” of a story and eliminate unnecessary narrative elements. In this context, it was also intended as a tool to improve participants’ confidence in English, as they worked in peer groups together with others who had different linguistic repertoires and different English proficiency. Participants were encouraged not to worry about their English proficiency but to get as much of the story across as they could. A friendly atmosphere ensued where participants groaned playfully in disappointment or cheered when the stopwatch rang—depending on whether they had ‘won’ the game of telling the story in an increasingly shorter time.
A follow-up exercise, specifically designed by the Galway team, focused on retelling the story across different cultural frameworks. First, the researchers asked the participants to individuate what they considered specifically Italian about the story. Answers varied, but generally participants referred to the dinner of bread, salami and red wine that Giovannino brings into the haunted building, or to the Catholic priest coming at the end of the story to celebrate Giovannino’s funeral—only to find him alive. Subsequently, researchers asked the participants how they would retell the story if it was set in the context where they grew up.
Participants mostly intervened on the setting (relocating the haunted building to a variety of landscapes) and on the food brought by Giovannino into the building. A Farsi-speaking participant decided to replace the red wine with tea and the sausage with kabuli pulao, a lamb-based dish. An Arabic-speaking participant changed Giovannino’s name to Ahmad, eliminated the fireplace (“we usually don’t have fireplaces”) and replaced wine and sausage with tea and bread.
Two Spanish-speaking participants from different Central American countries reimagined the story in a central American setting:
G4: Which is like the culture is very… similar so we were laughing because. First we said, of course, no castles, no palace. And so nothing like that. So maybe like a farm we call them fincas, I don't know.
LS: Yeah. Yeah. Like a… ranch. A ranch.
G4: Yeah. A ranch. And also no fireplace [laughs] and most likely through the door or window. And the food, of course, I was saying tamales or. Or atole to drink.
LS: Right.
G5: Pupusas, sì [inaudible] pupusas.
The task of translating the story into a Central American setting involves a local setting of a finca (“farm”) which means that the monster would not drop through the fireplace (as in Calvino’s/AC’s version) but through a door or window. In the same conversation, however, the participants came up with translational solutions that impacted the story even further. When asked if they kept the Catholic elements, they said:
G4: Yeah, the coffin and the priest.
LS: The Catholic priest so.
G4: Yes, the Catholic priest, yes, but we said instead of gold, money.
LS: Just money. Yeah, money. Maybe you… maybe you did a little more modern as well.
G4: [laughs] Yes, we said. Because he had money and he didn't die from seeing himself. He died because the gangers [sic] came and extortioned him, because they knew he had money.
LS: [all laugh] Ah, you brought it up to date
In Calvino’s version, Giovannino becomes the owner of the building, but dies mysteriously after some years, suddenly afraid of seeing his own shadow. Calvino does not provide a rational explanation and neither did AC. The participants appear to have filled this gap through a further move in the translational chain, as they imagined Giovannino being killed by gangs. Endemic gang violence is an important socio-political phenomenon in many Central American countries in the 21st century, which has indeed led many to seek asylum elsewhere. We do not know if the participants left their countries because of this particular threat, but it is evident that the phenomenon left an impression on them, strong enough that they used it as a characterizing element in their own translation of the story.
An oral, impromptu translation of an oral story such as this one relates to the creative potential of translation. As there was no written authoritative source text (Calvino’s 1956 text was not discussed with participants) there was technically no limit to the transformations that participants could perform. In certain instances, the translation involved relatively simple adaptations of certain elements to conform to habits or taboos in the supposed target culture. In other instances, as seen with the two Spanish-speaking women, participants moulded the folktale into a setting, and a whole new narrative, that was completely unexpected from the perspective of the source text.
Belfast: Translating first sensory impressions of the city
The personal nature of the Belfast stories—though in the discursive guise of “here’s what happened to a friend”—had a powerful community building effect, allowing the participants to feel reassured and validated in their experiences of interlingual and cross-cultural encounter (some of which were puzzling, embarrassing, or amusing).
For example, during the opening workshop devoted to the first sensory impressions of the city, and Northern Ireland more broadly, participants were asked to recall and relate their early reactions. Unsurprisingly, climate and weather conditions were frequently highlighted as prominent themes of these initial encounters, shared between most participants. This type of experience is often described in terms of ‘culture shock’. It is explored by intercultural communication research in terms of embodied processes of “becoming” where individuals gradually learn to find their place in an unfamiliar, “unhomely” setting (Harvey, 2017; Ros i Solé, 2019). Participants variably discussed feelings of overall (dis)comfort, a sense of “blending in” or “standing out” (including [in]adequate clothing), the quality of housing conditions (thermal comfort, availability/affordability of heating, fresh air, etc.). The stories shared by the participants left no doubt that feeling safe, healthy, and comfortable—key elements of what is often described as wellbeing or simply “feeling at home”—have very basic physical and economic aspects.
What is the translational dimension of such moments, where migrants meet the unhomely? Reflecting on the historical U.S. entry points of Angel Island and Ellis Island, Inghilleri (2017) noted the importance of translation in the “liminal moments of transition and transformation, when individuals are precariously positioned between their departure from one place and their arrival at another” (p. 57). Translation becomes then a tool of exclusion or inclusion as it allows migrants to make sense of the unhomely, voice their concerns, and carve a space for themselves in an unfamiliar setting (or being denied opportunity to do so).
In recalling their early impressions of Belfast, some participants shared experiences that were translational in this sense: figuring out the unhomely and creating, or recreating, meaningful relations between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Two themes emerge: first, these stories are often connected to anxieties about cultural differences; and second, they often relate to translation in the semiotic sense of being able to understand signs that are not necessarily verbal. A participant for example gave a particularly poignant account: “Two weeks [after arriving in Belfast] I heard bombs going off, and ran out into the street in my pyjamas, thinking ‘The war has followed me here’, but it was just fireworks for Halloween. I’m used to them now” (B1). This story relates to what Marais (2019) would call “interpretant translation” (p. 140), as it refers to translation’s capacity to create different interpretants (in the semiotic sense) of the same signs. In this case, the participant had interpreted the sound of explosions as a sign of war, based on their experience of the meaning of such signs; growing accustomed to the environment of Belfast, they were able to create different interpretants of the sign, one that enabled them to live with greater ease in the city.
Another area in which keen awareness was broadly reported during the Belfast storytelling workshops concerned differences in non-verbal communication and social conventions. For example, one person shared a story in which raising of the eyebrows was interpreted—in line with a local Northern Irish protocol—as unpleasant surprise, rather than as nonverbal confirmation (as it is often used in Malawi, and how it was intended in this situation). Several participants mentioned forms of greeting to which they had to become accustomed: “it’s not normal for me to hug my friends in China, but I’ve learnt to do it from international students here” (B2). Others narrated stories of how they came to adopt different behaviours depending on context: “I found myself hugging others at church but not at university” (B3). One participant told a story from a conference to illustrate the tricky conventions around handshakes that are usually exchanged between men: “but what do you do in a mixed group? It’s a minefield!” (B4). This comment triggered a flurry of similar accounts of unexpected social awkwardness caused by attempts to offer either too few or too many kisses on the cheek (usually one is given in Ireland/UK; two in the Middle East, and three in Poland). Others highlighted culturally dependent norms around eye contact, which may communicate friendliness or aggression depending on who interprets these signs. Some stories illustrated differences in the negotiation of personal distance in public spaces, which tends to be considerably greater in Ireland, compared to China and several Arab countries, but also compared to London, especially in public transport.
Tyulenev (2018) speaks of kinetic translation, defined as a “combination of intersemiotic translation (turning ideas/emotions into gestures) and intercultural translation (translating one’s cultural notions into the repertoire of the gestures and body movements of another culture)” (p. 40). Navigating the meaning of gestures and body language across cultures can be quite stressful and delicate, especially if the translational exchange puts one person—in this case, the migrant participant—in a position where they have less agency and more risks than their interlocutors. This concept is particularly important here as it relates not only to the interpretation of this or that isolated gesture, but is a component of translation as a way for individuals “to get out of their bubbles and, step by step, or rather action by action, communication unit by communication unit, learn each other’s intentions” (Tyulenev, 2018, p. 81). The fact that this type of translation is an important element of the public sphere is relevant also because it can often lead to mistranslation and consequent misunderstandings, as the participants’ stories attest. In this case, the process of storytelling is particularly important because it enabled the participants to give form and meaning to these episodes of mistranslation. More importantly, the story form allows for these episodes to be shared with others and, by sharing, attaining a form of mutual recognition. Considering the risks of isolation that are inherent with being a newcomer in a certain context, storytelling can be an important tool for mutual recognition and support.
Belfast: Translating voices and identities
Several times, personal stories dealt with the difficulties of everyday interlingual translation, mostly the challenges involved in rendering the rich cultural connotations of this or that word, from other languages into English. Quickly, they expanded beyond this traditional remit to explore ways in which the participants framed and narrated their attitude with respect to languages and cultural norms.
A number of participants shared stories illustrating how practices of translanguaging and ‘transculturing’ made them feel, for example:
“…this is how I realized that my voice is different in English, it’s lower in my throat. Also, I speak more honestly in Mandarin, it’s more difficult to lie.” (B2)
“I feel like I’m living with two versions of myself here in NI. Jokes, noises and volume are all different in Arabic for example, I am louder in Arabic and unsure of how to joke in English.” (B1)
“I am funnier in my first language [Arabic]. It’s not the same in English.” (B5)
Such self-awareness may manifest itself rather powerfully, and often has an element of disappointment or inadequacy: “I sometimes wish people in Northern Ireland knew me ‘in Arabic’; I feel I have more to give” (B1). That aspect can be particularly salient in storytelling, when a punch line frequently depends on linguistic nuances or idiomaticity that is difficult to achieve in a second or foreign language. It is also for this reason that it was important to structure the storytelling workshops as a non-hierarchical space where participants were encouraged to contribute also by making mistakes and sharing their insecurities.
A sense of having “a dual personality” or switching between various discursive conventions depending on the language used, testifies to the complexity of our associations between linguistic, paralinguistic, and cultural elements. It also shows how strongly these forms of expression are linked with a perception of oneself, including self-worth, dignity, and a sense of potential exposure. One participant described being invited to their landlord’s house for a family dinner, and not understanding their children but laughing anyway, until they asked her “And what do you think?”, at which point she had to admit, with embarrassment, that she hadn’t understood. Of course, similar situations may occur in one’s first language for various reasons—not having heard because of loud noises, and so on. Still, experiencing it in a foreign language often creates a sense of infantilization (as in this case, since our participant had not understood something said by children) or inadequacy that extends beyond a single incident. Moments of incomprehension always happen in a socially structured space, and it is typical that a negative evaluation of someone’s linguistic performance by speakers of standard varieties can “influence […] her own self-perception as a ‘deficient’ speaker” (Busch, 2017, p. 346). It is precisely this type of self-perception that can make it more difficult for migrant individuals to speak up in their target language.
There were also stories of empowerment, where participants spoke about discovering strength and confidence when interacting in a foreign language, or translating oneself into some contexts which may have been difficult back at home. Several participants shared stories demonstrating that it is generally easier to express disagreement in English (than in Arabic, Mandarin, or Polish) due to a greater “plurality of perspectives” (B1) but also more “understated, polite and roundabout ways of disagreeing” (B4). One person describes how they feel that “the language itself [i.e., English] tames you” (B1) by offering less confrontational discursive positions. Interestingly, in several cases this newly discovered expressive freedom in English had unexpected effects on the communication patterns in the participants’ first language to the extent that, when visiting their home country, their interactions were at times perceived by others as foreign or unfamiliar. One participant said: “in Mandarin, I started to express disappointment in a less polite way, so when I went back to China after two and a half years, I told my mum, ‘Your cooking is terrible!’, to which my mum replied, ‘What happened to you in Belfast?!’” (B2). Hearing this story, another person responded: “I am the opposite, when I’m speaking to my mum and kids in Jordan, I am more easy-going than before; I tend to say, ‘That’s fine by me’, a lot” (B1).
One of the most significant observations on this topic came from a person who talked about her friend’s experience with counselling. They observed that “conversations about mental health—for example, about the imposter syndrome—are somehow easier in English” (as a foreign language). In fact, “a therapist in the Middle East will usually borrow from English” (B5). Another person told a story to illustrate that “it is easier to express my feelings in English; I am more reserved in my first language” (i.e., Chinese). These comments echo the reflections of author Eva Hoffman who described her own experience thus:
For me, therapy is partially translation therapy, the talking cure, a second-language cure. My going to a shrink is, among other things, a rite of initiation: […] a way of explaining myself to myself. But gradually, it becomes a project of translating backward […] It’s only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other […]. (Hoffman, 1989, pp. 271; 273)
Changes in ways of speaking and acting were not limited to our participants but also occurred around them through sustained multilingual and cross-cultural interaction (a sample of which we saw at the workshops). One person commented on how, over the course of several months, “my landlords changed their habits [in terms of hosting and entertaining], started staying longer at the table, and will now eat za’atar in their salad” (B1). Linguistic, cultural, and culinary exchanges only deserve this designation if they flow in different directions. As noted by Ros i Solé (2019), we “do not necessarily passively experience other cultures, but we make new cultural homes and identities through our actions, lives and daily practices” (p. 38). This is a process of “ideological becoming” where individuals work towards an imagined future as speakers of another language while seeing themselves in relation with others (Harvey, 2017, p. 77).
Concluding thoughts
In both Galway and Belfast, researchers worked to create a multilingual, inclusive space where participants could use their linguistic skills and cultural expertise to share elements of their own cultural and personal identities. Responding to differences in the two cities and in the teams’ expertise, the researchers used translation and multilingualism in two different ways.
In Galway, the workshops made use of local traditions to appeal to the participants’ expertise and knowledge and perform collective translations of that knowledge. The Galway group benefitted from a space where they could explore the sounds and structures of the different languages through intra- and interlingual translation exercises, comparing them and marvelling at the differences and similarities. They could work on existing narratives to make them their own, reframing them through their own cultural identities—and in doing so, share their identities in a playful way. In Belfast, the narratives were built by the participants themselves, and that enabled them to generate stories that were metacultural and metalinguistic reflections. In this sense, rather than creating impromptu and creative translations, the Belfast participants presented their own narratives of (mis)translation, by structuring their lived experience of navigating cultural differences into oral narratives that placed emphasis on (mis)understanding, transformations of identity, and negotiations with others.
A series of translated encounters offered opportunities for our participants to express themselves but also create spaces where they could be mutually recognized as speakers. The workshops enabled participants to share samples of their linguistic and cultural heritage—thereby giving it value and recognition—as well as appreciate similarities and differences between the different languages and cultures. Our results testify to the potential inherent in a multilingual group when its members are given the possibility to present themselves as multilingual speakers. Multilingual individuals could compare linguistic repertoires while confronting the English language together from a variety of perspectives, often helping each other. The shared experience of misunderstanding of initially unfamiliar elements of the [Northern] Irish context—such as climate, language, or behavioural conventions—was repeatedly found to be psychologically validating (“It’s not just me who felt/reacted/behaved this way”) and socially binding, creating a sense of belonging, described by one participant as “being foreigners together”.
These findings offer valuable insights, not only for researchers and participants, but also for a wide(r) range of stakeholders, including community practitioners, educators, and policymakers. By developing and sharing multilingual storytelling techniques, our research contributes tools that stakeholders can adapt and implement to support community building and personal development initiatives across diverse contexts.
We are convinced that multilingual storytelling workshops—such as those we offered in Galway and Belfast—have the potential to mobilize the creative potential of translation, in ways that create a sense of sharing and of marvel at the performance of difference. In contexts that have an established storytelling tradition, these workshops can be used to draw migrant residents into local artistic practices. In an academic context, storytelling can represent a tool for inclusion of international students that relies on creative practice rather than academic language.
These gains do not come without challenges. For example, the Belfast team was often concerned with the ethical dimension of collecting potentially traumatic experiences and handling very delicate knowledge about the participants (such as the case of the participant who implicitly self-identified as a refugee by sharing their story about the explosions). The Galway team, on the other hand, had to contend with difficulties inherent with collecting ‘folktales’ in the 21st century, when forms of traditional storytelling have been supplanted or mixed with other forms of media (for example, G15 told their traditional Indonesian myth, which they had watched in an Indonesian TV series). This also meant that many participants often remained silent when asked to provide a traditional story from their own culture, as they may not have been exposed—especially the younger ones—to traditional folklore. The team overcome this problem by providing a small repository of existing folktales that the participants could adapt and transform; this, as we have seen, offered many participants an occasion for sharing elements of their own cultures in a more oblique way. While the workshops managed, by design, to draw participants from a wide range of backgrounds, that also meant some participants felt visibly more at ease sharing their stories than others, which impacted participation and attendance. This limitation could be addressed in future iterations by designing longer courses, taking more time to build a group through icebreakers and group activities, and most importantly including representatives from migrant associations and local stakeholders into the workshop design.
In the feedback collected after the series of workshops in Belfast, several participants stressed a similarly self-exploratory and healing role of personal storytelling (something the researchers did not specifically aim for but were very pleased to observe). One person commented:
Taking part in Springtime Stories helped me reflect more on myself and made me feel clearer about my identity and how I see myself. I want to go back to China more now! I am more self-aware about my feelings. I am reminded of how happy I am when I get my hair curled or eat sauerkraut in China. (B2)
Another participant praised the selection of topics but felt that there was much more still to explore, especially around questions of identity. The importance of community building and developing a sense of belonging was also highlighted, especially in relation to research students who “need a space to talk about things that aren’t their thesis (…) It is important to have a place where you can be a person, not a student”.
The workshops established a translational space and a translational ethos, not limited to a linguistic component of translation—although that figured heavily in the ways in which Belfast and Galway participants debated “how to say X in language Y”. It referred most importantly to the work of building a common understanding, of working through misunderstandings, and of accepting to be impacted and affected by the compresence of languages and cultural references. The workshops in this sense underlined an important component of translation, the fact that translation is work, and that many acts of translation include an effort to carry meaning and ideas from one cultural space to another, and a willingness to compromise along the journey. The participants got to reflect, in this sense, on how translation is not the prerogative of a profession but part of the work of figuring out a shared multilingual world.
