Faculty Spotlight: Stephanie Rodríguez on Multilingualism and Translation

Stephanie Rodríguez is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies and Director of Lives in Translation, the Translation and Interpreting program at Rutgers University-Newark. She is also a PhD candidate in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research focuses on translation technologies and human-computer interaction, bilingual language development, and language brokering.

In 2025, she received the Rutgers Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching and was a Chancellor’s Scholar-in-Residence Fellow. Rodríguez was recently honored as a Dr. Cheryl Wall Fellow for 2026-2027. She is also co-curator of A Feeling of Itself, a multilingual, multimedia exhibition on language, translation, and community at Rutgers-Newark.

“My research on language brokering and bilingual language development, along with my own personal experiences, inform how I mentor them and how I design my courses. I build applied, practical pedagogy that gives students tangible tools they can carry with them into their professional careers."

How does your research, scholarship or professional experience inspire your teaching? 

From a young age, I lived in a multilingual world. With family and friends, I moved between Spanish, English, and Galician, and I was encouraged to maintain those languages as a way of remaining connected. “It’s a superpower,” I was told. And now I share that exact quote with my students when referencing their bilingualism.

Today, my research, professional experience, and teaching grow directly from that foundation.

As a professional translator and interpreter, I witnessed firsthand how language access shapes people’s lives, especially in legal, medical, and public-service contexts. That professional practice led me to begin examining how bilingual speakers develop their language abilities, and how translation aptitude, when paired with structured and research-driven training, can build the skillset for competencies in translation.

In my classroom, theory never stands apart from practice. Instead, students engage with the same questions I investigate in my research: How does translation aptitude develop into professional translation competence? How does language access shape communities’ ability to navigate legal, medical, and public-service systems? What happens when artificial intelligence enters the translation workflow?

At Rutgers-Newark, many of my students are heritage speakers who have served as language brokers for their families and communities. My research on language brokering and bilingual language development, along with my own personal experiences, inform how I mentor them and how I design my courses. I build applied, practical pedagogy that gives students tangible tools they can carry with them into their professional careers.

At the core of my work, the focus is on the act of bilingual communication, both the why and the how. In translation, the goal is to ensure that everyone is understood. In translation studies, there has long been a “next” technology reshaping practice. Today, that new shift is the integration of large language models (LLMs) into translation workflows. While I recognize both the benefits and the limitations of these tools, my focus is on human-computer interaction. I design my courses to prepare students to work with industry-leading technologies while critically examining their implications. Students learn how to use these tools, and importantly, how they are designed, what assumptions they encode, and what are their capabilities and limitations. In my classroom, the translator remains at the center of the workflow as the expert decision-maker, and technology is positioned as a tool, used intentionally, not automatically.

What is one innovative or unique teaching practice you’d like to share? 

My pedagogical model centers on service-learning and critical civic engagement, while leveraging students’ bilingual skillsets to provide a solid foundation of theoretical approaches that can be applied in real settings.

Through the Minor in Translation and Interpreting Studies, I offer internships in the fall, spring, and summer semesters that pair students with community partners in specialized domains such as legal, medical, and public-service translation and interpreting. The placement is integrated with weekly cohort workshops, where interns bring real challenges from the field such as terminology inconsistencies, ethical questions, register and role management, and professional conduct, and we work through them collaboratively.

Simultaneously, students complete simulation-based training with partners across Rutgers and Newark, including Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, RU-N Nursing Midwifery program,  and RU-N Speech-Language Pathology program. These simulations allow students to practice high-stakes communication and ethical decision-making in controlled scenarios, while developing their language and translating skills. Students also have the opportunity to learn directly from practitioners by shadowing language professionals at NJ Courts-Essex Vicinage and University Hospital.

The final piece is ensuring that students are prepared to sit for a translation and interpreting certification exam before graduation, fully-funded through the program, giving them the opportunity to earn nationally recognized credentials and enter the job market competitively.

How does this work advance the university's mission as a publicly engaged anchor institution?

This work is rooted in the community, within Rutgers and within Newark, to expand its reach to others who have similar experiences living and working between languages. It is built on sustaining community partnerships with local institutions and organizations that benefit from collaboration that supports language access.

Whenever possible, I bring real-world practice into the classroom and create pathways for students to learn directly from the day-to-day work of language professionals. These experiences help students build professional competencies and a strong understanding of their own bilingualism.

In collaboration with colleagues in Lives in Translation and the Design Consortium, we also developed A Feeling of Itself, a multilingual, multimedia, multisite exhibition that aligns closely with the university’s publicly engaged mission. The project centers on the concept of “arraigo”, a sense of belonging grounded in one’s roots, specifically expressing the value of living in translation. The title comes from one of the recorded narratives: the brother of a Lives in Translation student describing what it feels like to live between languages and to express oneself in two or more languages at once.

To learn more about the next A Feeling of Itself exhibition, read more here.

Also from or about Stephanie:

1.  Jiménez-Crespo, M. A., & Rodríguez, S. A. (2025, June). Is it AI or PE that worry translation professionals: results from a Human-Centered AI survey. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 1 (pp. 407-419). https://aclanthology.org/2025.mtsummit-1.32/

2.  Thane, P. D., Austin, J., Rodríguez, S. A., & Goldin, M. (2025). The acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive by child heritage and L2 learners: evidence from a dual language program. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 18(1), 193-223. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2025-2007

3.  Rodriguez, S. A. (2025). Public Service Interpreter Training: Evaluating the Experiential Learning Approach of the Lives in Translation Internship. International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication, 9. https://doi.org/10.12681/ijltic.39101

4.  Ramirez-Polo, L., Rodriguez, S. A., Blumenfield, J., Horan, K., Robertazzi, M. M., & Short, J. (2025). Improving Health Equity Through Team Observed Structured Clinical Encounters with LEP Standardized Patients and Healthcare Interpreter Trainees. International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication, 9. https://doi.org/10.12681/ijltic.38841

5.  Horan, K. M., Blumenfeld, J., Short, J., Merrigan-Robertazzi, M., Ramirez-Polo, L., & Rodriguez, S. A. (2025). Building competency in caring for patients with limited English proficiency: Piloting an innovative interprofessional simulation. Nurse educator, 50(2), E118-E119.

6.  Casillas, J. V., Constantin-Dureci, G., Andreu Rascón, I., Shao, J., Rodríguez, S. A., Gadamsetty, A., ... & Esposito, R. (2025). Opening open science to all: demystifying reproducibility and transparency practices in linguistic research. Linguistics, 63(6), 1547-1575. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2023-0249

7.  Jiménez-Crespo, M. A., & Rodríguez, S. (2024). Spanish Translation and the Role of Machine Translation and AI Technologies for Public Communication in the United States. Estudios del Observatorio, 93, 73-87.

8.  Austin, J., Thane, P. D., Rodríguez, S. A., & Goldin, M. (2024). The comprehension of clitic gender in child heritage and second language Spanish: Evidence from a dual language program. Frontiers in Language Sciences, 3, 1334269. https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2024.1334269

Reader Bonus! Stephanie’s Favorite Books About Bilingualism and Translation:

Because internet : understanding the new rules of language by Gretchen McCulloch

Automating Translation by Andy Way, Joss Moorkens, and Séamus Lankford

The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa

De-mystifying Translation by Lynne Bowker