New Books in Language and Translation

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast Ingrid Piller speaks with Professor Sandra Issel-Dombert. Sandra is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at Universität Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Her research focus is on everyday multilingualism, in the workplace, in healthcare, and in the family.
We talk about Sandra’s new book Multilingualism, Migration, and Domestic Work: On the Sociolinguistic Situation of Filipina Domestic Migrant Workers in Madrid. The book was published by de Gruyter in 2025 and is available open access through UPL Open.
The book explores the intersection of multilingualism and transnational migration in the global sector of domestic work in Spain, the second largest labor market in the EU. Over the course of three years, a corpus of field notes, narrative interviews, focus groups, language portraits and language maps was built with 25 Filipina domestic workers (FDWs) in Madrid, partly collected through participatory approaches. The analysis focuses on three main aspects: first, spatial repertoires; second, the multilingual everyday life and lived experiences of languages; and third, the agency of FDWs. The aim of this study is to better understand the dynamics that emerge from inequalities of multilingualism in the feminized sector of transnational domestic work.
The book expands our understanding of multilingualism and transnational migration in the feminized sector of paid domestic work. It is a pioneering contribution to the growing field of language and migration, offering new insights into the sociolinguistic aspects of migration from Spain’s only former colony in Asia to Spain. Theoretically, the study adds a postcolonial and critical approach to language and migration, using a variety of methodological techniques.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agi Bodis speaks with Dr Carly Steele (Curtin University, Perth) about researching education with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and how to enable culturally and linguistically responsive teaching. They discuss the importance of positionality when working in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context, and why it matters in collaborative work with communities.
Through her professional experience in the On-Country Teacher Education program in Western Australia, Carly reflects on the way educational scholarship is rooted in community engagement. The conversation provides insights into the needs of teacher education to better prepare graduate teachers and an example for an innovative pedagogical approach co-created with community and one that reflects the local language, culture and Country.
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible (Bodleian, 2026) by Dr. Harry Spillane is a history of the English Bible as a book. A book that in order to be read had first to be sold.
The Bible is the most published text in history and the story of its publication in the English language is extraordinary. Published on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Tyndale’s groundbreaking printed translation of the New Testament, this book traces the evolution of the English Bible from 1525 to the much celebrated King James version of 1611. By this date, readers could already choose from over a dozen English versions, each of them printed in vastly different ways. Behind each edition are stories of rivalries, mistakes, bankruptcies and bestsellers. Far from being fixed, stable publications, Bibles were consistently undergoing change and development in the early modern period.
Creativity and enterprise were at the heart of the English Bible market, something that the usual focus on Bible translators has often overshadowed. Illustrated with early editions, this book considers how printers created new markets for Bibles, how they advertised them, and how they commissioned innovative forms of illustration and decoration to attract buyers. How, it asks, did the English Bible become a bestseller?
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Tom Birkett, University College, Cork, joins Jana Byars to discuss his new book, Runes: A Concise History (Oxford UP, 2025) An accessible and illuminating introduction to the history of the runic script, a writing system in use in the medieval North from the Roman Iron Age until the Reformation and beyond. Runes were the only writing system known to Germanic tribes, including those who migrated to England, and they provide a first-hand account of huge social change in the medieval North, including the Viking expansion in Europe and the adoption of Christianity. Often endowed with magical or prophetic properties--the keys to Middle Earth--runes were in fact a workaday script. As this book demonstrates, however, when the myths are stripped away the stories they tell us are no less fascinating.

Join the fun! The iViking app discussed on the podcast is available for Apple or PC.

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Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions: The Roots of Modern Korean (U Toronto Press, 2026) traces the emergence of vernacular Korean as a distinct subject of study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centering on school textbooks as key sites of change, Daniel Pieper reveals how language education became instrumental in forging modern Korean literacy and identity. The book situates this process within broader global patterns of vernacularization and nation-building across East Asia, Europe, and South Asia. Introducing the concept of “transformative bilingualism,” it argues that Korea’s language modernization – while catalyzed by colonial influence – ultimately reshaped both Korean and Japanese literacies.
Daniel Pieper is a Korea Foundation Lecturer in Korean Studies at Monash University. He specializes in modern Korean language and literary history. His current research focuses on the emergence of vernacular Korean as a discrete subject in the modern school, the textual differentiation process of cosmopolitan Hanmun and vernacular Korean, and the role of language ideology in directing language standardization in pre-colonial and colonial-era Korea.
Buy Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions here
Dr. Pieper’s University Profile: here
Dr. Pieper on Academia.edu Profile: here
More by the author: "Foreign Objects or One Wing of the Same Bird? The Place of Hancha in Modern Korean Identity" in The Politics of Script and Language here
"Language Policy and Vernacular Education in Korea up to 1945" in Handbook of Language Policies in East Asia here
About the host: Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at leslie.hickman@emory.edu

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