Approaching the end of the semester, students in Research Project 3G each gave a presentation using English to describe their individual research project. A major focus of this class is for students to learn about how “border-crossing” and transnational phenomena also have a “local” dimension – they are occurring all around us here in Japan, and they are not always mediated by the “international language” of English. Accordingly, our class is mainly conducted in Japanese. However, it goes without saying that English plays a special role in transcultural encounters around the world. The purpose of this English presentation was for students to think about how easily their research “translates” into English. Titles are usually fairly easy to translate, but describing what makes the research worthwhile often requires thinking from (and speaking to) another person’s perspective – a much more difficult exercise. Hopefully, this exercise has helped them to consider “border-crossing” from multiple perspectives, something we will be working more on next term.
