Cultural translation: the art of cosmopolitan learning as an international student

The concept ‘cosmopolitanism’ has a long history (cf. Delanty, 2012) and is found in many languages. The more recent debates about its meaning centre on understanding its relationship to globalisation. The argument is located around the idea that the increasing movement of people, ideas, media, technology and finance (Appadurai, 1996) is reshaping global dynamics. It is not that globalisation is new, rather it is the pace of globalisation leading to time/space compression (Maguire, 2010) and increasing ‘super-divesity’ (Vertovec, 2007). Debates examine the genealogy of the term and its attachment to elite forms of movement, such as processes of colonisation and those who can afford travel. However, more recently this view has been challenged, suggesting that cosmopolitanism takes different forms and is therefore vernacular (Werbner, 2006) and cosmopolitan practices are situated (Sobe, 2009). This chapter extends this usage to an examination of being an international student. It does this through understanding how identity is located in relation to the local and global and to the actually existing different practical stances taken by students (Sobe, 2009). The reasons that they are vernacular or different, is because of the processes of cultural translation that are undertaken, which are different depending on original cultural understandings and practices. They are also different because of place, time and other social relations, such as gender and English language capacities. The process of cultural translation is also a process of cosmopolitan learning.