Multilingual Creativity Lab

On 30 November 2015, I had the opportunity to participate to the Multilingual Creativity Lab, a brand new and much necessary initiative organised at the Free Word Centre in London, where I presented City in Translation as a workshop (I will write about the session in more detail in a separate post). 

The day was produced by Free Word in partnership with teacher and education researcher Sam Holmes, literary translator and curator of translation programmes Sarah Ardizzone and Director of the Stephen Spender Trust Robina Pelham Burn (meet the team behind the Lab). 

The Multilingual Creativity Lab was supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a key supporter of translation and multilingual creativity programmes across the UK. The translator in residence programme at Free Word Centre, which I had the immense pleasure of being part of in 2013, is among the many initiatives they're engaged with.

Multilingualism isn't always clear-cut and mixing it with creativity can even scare some people -I am obviously not one of those, but it is important in this case to define what is meant by "multilingual creativity", which I believe the project has managed to do well:

Multilingual Creativity is about engaging positively with the reality of plurilingualism and is an umbrella term for the current range of projects and research across schools, arts/cultural organisations and universities, which grapple with celebrating, drawing a dividend from and further developing such linguistic skills. 

This is also what I am trying to do with City in Translation, so I feel very lucky and honoured to have been invited to take part in such a project.   

The different sessions of the day have been filmed and are now available on Free Word's YouTube channel. Below is the talk on Translation Nation, presented by Sarah Ardizzone and Sam Holmes. 

There are three different ways you can engage with the Multilingual Creativity Lab:

• by reading the report presenting findings from a review of current practice, identifying five key principles associated with successful projects in Multilingual Creativity; 
• by regularly browsing the website to find a wide range of resources on multilingual creativity, such as projects, opportunities, training and more.  
• by participating to a series of events organised by the various partners of the projects, where you can engage with professionals working on issues and opportunities around multilingual creativity - including this multilingual speed-dating event on 25 May 2016 (sounds very promising).

In my next post, I will explain how I introduced City in Translation during the event and share some tools on how you can work with the concept of City in Translation within projects related to multilingual creativity.