The chapter covers special bilinguals; that is, those who have both a regular and a unique relationship with their languages. Among them, one finds bilingual writers of literature who express their art in their first language, their second or third language, or even in both their languages. There are also those who make a living from their extensive knowledge and careful use of their languages such as interpreters, translators, second-language teachers, and so on. Others, such as airline pilots and traffic controllers, or foreign correspondents, do not have to reflect on the linguistic aspect of their languages as much but depend on them, as well as on specific skills, to do their jobs. And others still owe a lot to their language proficiency and bicultural abilities to assure their safety, such as sleeper agents. All share many similarities with regular bilinguals, but they are also characterized by a number of interesting differences. The author concentrates on the latter.

Chapter 19 explores how different technological resources may help or hinder language learning efforts. Technology is discussed in its capacity to support learners, to create new real-life communicative tasks, and to assist teachers as an additional resource. The chapter includes several ways in which technology can be used to maximize learner motivation and engagement in classes of varying ages and proficiency levels.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

The chapter analyzes the remarks on the use of languages in hagiographical narratives, including episodes that describe the mundane and miraculous linguistic skills of holy men as well as demons and demoniacs speaking in foreign tongues. References to knowing or speaking foreign languages in the hagiographical tradition were closely connected to expressions of holiness in late antique Christianity, both in social practice and in the realm of rhetoric. The use of language is a performative act that is closely related to issues of social differentiation, power, and control in any society, and even more so in multilingual communities. The appearance of Christian hagiographical narratives that depict miraculous linguistic events and abilities of holy men and demons reveals that symbolic power and authority started to manifest themselves through remarks on one’s multilingual competence or the use of specific languages.

This chapter charts what we know about intermediaries across settings and times in history, to provide a comparative perspective on their being within fields of development that broadly relate to interventions of law, regulation, rule of law, justice, and institutions. It focuses on the concept of the intermediary as an analytical means of identifying the social nodes in transnational networks of relative positions and power. It highlights the role that intermediaries play and the challenges they face, at the interfaces of different knowledge and value systems that appear as the development industry intervenes across the globe. It uses an inductive approach, which was key for locating individuals who played an intermediary role in Myanmar’s rule of law assistance field across several institutional positions: local lawyers; local NGOs; locally employed staff of international organisations; government employees; and international consultants. Despite their different roles and assignments, they all had in common having to perform the delicate task of relating larger, globally oriented ideas to the Myanmar locale, in a key middle position between foreign, national and local actors.

This chapter concerns the translation of the rule of law by and through intermediaries. The intermediaries change and distort the messages from their global employers and funders in order to make them palatable to local and national actors – and also to build their own local career trajectories. The chapter highlights the main translation challenges that rule of law practitioners experience and presents intermediaries’ insider perspectives on how they translate rule of law. By analysing the strategies that intermediaries use, the chapter concludes that intermediaries become influential in their role as translators. While Myanmar’s political history and reality have produced a semi-authoritarian form of rule of law, associations with formal aspects of the concept were initially enhanced by foreign promoters who brought in their versions of a concept they deemed modelled on international standards that were universal and non-negotiable.