Through reading this chapter, you will gain insights into Vygotsky’s cultural-historical conception of play and the range of contemporary models of play that have been informed by cultural-historical theory.

What is play? How does play develop? What is the relationship between play, learning and development? This book looks at these central questions from the perspectives of children, families, educators and what is known from research. You are encouraged to read and reflect on the content as you progress through the book. Although each chapter brings in different dimensions, the approach taken is interactive, with most chapters (but not all) inviting you to consider specific research into play practices, and to generate your own ideas/data to discuss or critique. We begin the journey in this first chapter by looking at your ideas and the writings of others on the topic ‘What is play?’

Chapter 4 presents textual features, text types and genres in the detail necessary for elucidating translation practice. Starting with texture as the essential distinction between a sequence of sentences and a text, it examines textual features, that is, those elements that serve to distinguish between texts and non-texts and that give texts their identity. Among the textual features discussed are cohesion and coherence, markers of cohesion and coherence, information structure and information flow (from old to new), and topic and thematic development (along with topic maintenance and the tracing of participants in discourse). Textual functions (text types) and genres are also discussed. The implications for translation of textual features, textual functions and genres are presented throughout the chapter with numerous examples. Armed with these basic concepts, readers are offered tips on textual and parallel text analysis and on how assistive texts (background texts, parallel texts) and online corpus tools can be used for translation tasks.

As advocates for play, teachers need to have a clear definition of play, a model of play used to guide their practice and a theory of play that underpins their philosophy of teaching and learning. This chapter brings together insights gained about play from all the chapters in this book and invites you to take a position on your own philosophy of play. We then ask you to become an advocate for children’s play.

Chapter 6 aims to help readers understand how variation and change affect language, so that translation practices and decisions are not based on personal biases and lay views about language but, rather, on a principled understanding of how language interacts with society. Another goal is to create awareness of the impact of social and use-related (contextual) factors on language so that translated texts respond to the requirements of the translation instructions. Other sociolinguistic notions reviewed in this chapter, along with their implications for translation are register, dialectal variation, socioeconomic variation, the nature of language change and variation, prestigious varieties vs. stigmatized varieties, and translating in multilingual societies. The discussion of register includes field of activity, medium and level of formality, as well as the implications for translation of not considering these within the context of the translation brief and translation norms. The connection between register selection and linguistic and translation competence is explained. Illustrative examples are used throughout the chapter.

In this chapter, we seek to examine how play supports children’s overall development. We specifically take the child’s perspective in planning for play development.This chapter has been designed to provide a strong theoretical sense of the concepts of play, learning and development in early education; the capacity to analyse and support play development; a look at planning for play and learning outcomes, drawing on the The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (V2.0) or Te Whāriki.

Chapter 5 shifts the focus from the text to the reader (both the translator and the target-text reader) and the reading process. The misguided belief that reading is decoding and that there is an objective meaning hidden in the text has in turn facilitated the view that translation consists of recoding the decoded meaning into another language, namely, reproducing the objective meaning present in the source text. By providing a more accurate understanding of reading, this chapter presents a more accurate view of translation. It summarizes what reading as an interactive process means for the craft of the translator, including such concepts as background knowledge and its relation to specialized texts, new and old information, word meaning as activation of a potential meaning within a particular text, word meaning and dictionaries, and the translator as a reader. Additional topics discussed are reading and language directionality in translation; reading for translation purposes; and reading in translation process research.