Foreign language teaching in distance education is administratively and pedagogically challenging; research on the perspectives of novice practitioners’ online teaching is also relatively scarce. This study explores how a novice Japanese teacher navigated and negotiated her professional development in a two-way virtual practitionership during her first online teaching. Data were collected from ongoing dialogue journals between the novice and her mentor followed by a semi-structured interview. Qualitative results indicate that pedagogically-sound and personalized digital tools can not only reduce the psychological distance between the teachers and students, but facilitate online teaching and learning via a performance-driven, standard-based curriculum. Informed by Action Research, the study reveals how both practitioners de/reconstructed their teacher identities and achieved professional empowerment through robust supervision and reciprocal teacher evaluation in a virtual environment. It further demonstrates the extent to which this evidence-driven and research-oriented approach can better address the genuine concerns of a foreign language program in distance education. Specifically, this context-responsive study indicates the improvement of online course delivery, teacher training and program sustainability in its own right.

This chapter analyzes the development of the Japanese writing system and the use of multiple types of scripts in translated texts in Japanese based on translanguaging. The sociolinguistic concept of translanguaging refers to the strategic use of linguistic repertoires across language boundaries by bilingual language users. In the case of translations of texts into Japanese, various scripts provide numerous communicative and expressive functions which allow users to adapt new concepts, creatively represent ideas, and critically convey their viewpoints. These abilities are often afforded by unconventional use of furigana, or small-sized kana that indicate the proper pronunciation of kanji characters. This study argues that translanguaging occurs not only in oral communications, but also through scripts, and is essential for languages to evolve by incorporating the surrounding sociocultural contexts.

The paper examines the products of interlingual and intralingual translanguaging and qualitatively analyzes three origin-based lexical varieties in Japanese,wago(native Japanese words),kango(Sino-Japanese words), andgairaigo(foreign loanwords other thankango) in terms of how they have been complementing, competing against, or being in conflict with each other, how they engage word-formation processes as deep as morpheme-levels, and how they are perceived and manipulated by language users, including translators. This study shows that translanguaging has been practiced recursively and multi-directionally over a long period of time, yielding the phenomenon ‘translanguaging sequel’. The qualitative study of a Japanese translation of a Korean poem reveals a translator’s ideology-driven translanguaging practice that crosses not only interlingual but also intralingual boundaries, causing an international socio-political dispute. This study supports the view that translanguaging has been shaping and reshaping the norms of languages and language use. It also suggests the benefits of analyzing the products and traces of translanguaging in translated texts as well as the process of translanguaging during translation activities that can be promoted and implemented in language classrooms.

This paper examines six English translations of the Japanese novelBotchanwith a focus on a complex pun that pairs a multi-morphemic sentence-ending in the Matsuyama dialect with the name of a traditional Japanese food. One English translation renders it as a heterolingual SL-TL pun, which is made comprehensible for TT readers without using footnotes and without distorting the culture of the ST. The SL item in this pun is seamlessly integrated into the TT’s linguistic environment at the morpho-syntactic level and is provided with layers of scaffolding at varied linguistic levels which are naturally presented as if they are a part of textual message. This heterolingual pun is analyzed as a manifestation of translanguaging. The paper proposes a research methodology whereby translanguaging perspectives are applied to translation studies in order to explain varied heterolingual translation phenomena, including foreignization.

Language learners’ motivations cannot be fully understood without studying a learner as a whole person with agency in social and cultural contexts (Ushioda 2009). Building on the concept of subjectivity, which is shaped through communicative interactions (Kramsch 2009), and the concept of translanguaging that extends to an individual’s subjectivity (Li 2023), we propose viewing language learners’ motivation as a constituent of their subjectivity, which ecologically emerges, develops, or changes through communicative interactions, enabled by translanguaging practices. To illustrate our view, we quantitatively tracked the changes in motivation levels among 26 students of Japanese at a university in the United States during the 2022–2023 academic year and triangulated the results with the findings of semi-structured reflective interviews, students’ journal entries, discussion board contributions, and observations made by their instructor and program advisor. Our study revealed the uniqueness of each language learner’s dynamic and complex trajectory of their motivations, which sensitively respond to their human interactions and their sociocultural environments filled with competing ideologies. The results of this study illuminate the importance of staying alert to learners’ evolving motivations and taking effective pedagogical strategies that embrace them.