Can Multilingualism Be a Radical Force in Contemporary Canadian Theatre? Exploring The Option of Non-Translation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recognizing the richness of multilingual theatre in Canada, this article argues that the choice of nontranslation as the absolute staging of multilingual hospitality carries the promise of a more radical cohabitation and offers both critical and reparative encounters with bodies that resist mainstream recuperation. Beyond multicultural accommodation of diversity, non-translation as a politicized choice is examined through examples chosen from contemporary Asian Canadian and Afro-Caribbean Canadian drama, as well as Indigenous performance. Specifically, the article analyzes the deployment of multilingualism “from below” (Alison Phipps’s term) in front of mainstream Anglophone audiences in such plays as debbie young and naila belvett’s yagayah.two.womyn.black.griots, Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue, and Monique Mojica’s Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way. The decolonial practice of non-translation embraced by these playwrights contributes to the trend of “diversifying diversity” and promotes more balanced linguistic ecologies. Rather than softening the hard edges of difference in a global spread of equivalences, multilingualism “from below,” associated with minoritized languages and invisibility, embraces radical heterogeneity and incommensurability, radically confronting the meaning of ethnicized, hyphenated multiculturalism. However, at the same time, these forms of multilingualism throw into high relief the selective cultural politics of translation that privileges Canada’s official bilingualism
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".