Through the stories of 12 people living in Australia, Translating Lives examines the multicultural experience with a particular focus on what it means to speak more than one language. What emerges from these stories is the idea of language as a cultural formation; within language one finds a key to understating another culture. In a more personal sense, Translating Lives looks at how our very identities are to a degree shaped by the language at our disposal. This is what I found most enjoyable in this book: the charming and deeply personal histories of the individual’s experience with language. For example, Anna Wierzbicka tells of her experience as a six-year old girl during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944-obviously a traumatic event, and one that could only be retold in her native Polish language. There is also a wonderful account from the Indo-Fijian Brij Val of the various names in Hindi given to particular family members-names that reflect the relatively rigid and complex social roles performed by individual family members. This book may have benefited from a less scholarly approach to the topic: the majority of contributors are university academics, which somewhat limits its appeal. Nevertheless, there are some real gems in here for the reader drawn to the subjects of language and multiculturalism.

Nick Dluzniak is a Melbourne-based editor

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Tags: mary besemeres & anna wierzbicka