Spatial Translations and Embodied Bilingualism: Defining the Migrant's Experience from an Architectural Perspective

As a bilingual writer and architect, my research is practice-based and multidisciplinary. In pulling together theories and practices about Space, Language and the Body, my aim is to develop a notion of Embodied Bilingualism. If the word ‘translate’ is to move something from one place to another, as architectural historian Robin Evans explains, then one needs to understand its pure and unconditional existence as a geometrical construct in the first place in order to fully appreciate the workings of linguistic translation. In this paper, language is considered as an embodied practice, which for the bilingual migrant leads to considerations about translatory motion not only of the body, but also of words. Using the contribution of Henri Poincare to the philosophy of geometry, we will see how the body’s very own capacity of movement contributes to the understanding of the movement of words.