In order to explore translinguistic precarity in greater depth, we need to do three things: First, move towards a sufficiently complex understanding of what precarity means (and does not mean). Is it a general condition of our times, a longstanding effect of capitalist exploitation or an emergent property of unequal social relations? Second, we need to think through ways of relating precarity to language. It is not enough to predefine precarious lives in terms of marginalisation, poverty, struggle or discrimination and then to assume that the language used by or towards such speakers is necessarily precarious or produces precarity. We need instead to understand the co-articulation of translingual practices and lived experiences of precarity, asking how one informs the other. So third, it is important to understand the dynamic interactions among material relations, language ideologies and linguistic resources, where precarity may be an emergent feature as much as a pre-condition, of a local assemblage. Drawing on data from our longitudinal metrolingual project we make a case for understanding translanguaging and precarity in relational terms, entangled with family and friendship support structures, contingencies of the local economy, gender norms, cultural and religious practices, and local language policies and possibilities.

Drawing on various distributive frameworks – distributed cognition, distributed agency, distributed language – this paper makes a case for understanding identity along similar lines. While poststructuralist approaches to identity usefully undermined monological cognitive approaches to identity (where identity is a characteristic of the individual) – emphasizing instead the discursive construction of subjectivity as multiple, conflictual and flexible – many failed by and large to escape the constrictions of methodological individualism, or to account adequately for non-discursive factors, the place of agency or the material world. Distributive frameworks, by contrast, seek to break down the barriers between inside and outside, between humans and their surrounds, between language and context. From this point of view, language, cognition and agency are not solely properties of individuals bur rather operate through larger networks, assemblages or entanglements. In this paper we draw on recent data from our ten-year metrolingualism project to explore ways in which identity may be understood as a relational quality of an assemblage of people, places, things and linguistic resources.

Chapter 6 addresses the complex, multifaceted relationship between translation and society in general, before discussing translation in the context of multilingual societies. It examines translation in connection with translanguaging in the contexts of superdiversity and metrolingualism, drawing on findings of the AHRC-funded project ‘Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities’, arguing that translation should be seen as part of assemblages that constitute the discursive and semiotic character of multilingual societies.