Managing Latin: support and intratextual translation as mediation strategies in the history of English

Our study maps the practices of managing Latin in English texts from over a thousand years. Mediation is a communicative activity which involves explaining the content of a conversation or text to another person. In contexts of multilingual writing, this is typically self-mediation, which a writer may perform by complementing code-switches with intratextual translations in the text. The data for the study are drawn from corpora of English historical texts, dictionaries and manuscripts, and mediation is analyzed in terms of support, intratextual translation and flagging. The findings show that while cognitive support helps a reader understand all of the content of the text, intratextual translation may also have relational functions, where the reader is expected to understand both languages used, as when code-switching and translation are a vehicle for humor. Intratextual translation can also be used to add credibility to the writer's argument or to link it to a broader discussion on the topic. Mediation is also facilitated by flagging code-switching and intratextual translation metalinguistically or visually. Support is needed for Latin as a language which has always been part of relatively few English-speakers' repertoire, but these strategies are expected to apply to other language pairs as well.