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Introduction
The study of written language use in the public sphere has become a prominent area of sociolinguistic research in recent years, conceptualized as studies of linguistic landscapes (Shohamy & Gorter 2009; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael, & Barni 2010; Gorter, Marten, & van Mensel 2012; Blommaert 2013), semiotic landscapes (Jaworski & Thurlow 2010), or of language display (Coupland 2012). Such research has yielded new insights into language ideologies (Jaworski & Thurlow 2010; Coupland 2012; Hornsby & Vigers 2012) and into relationships of power and inequality between speakers of different languages, as the relative distribution of multiple languages in a given locality is seen not only as a reflection of demographic, social, and cultural patterns, but also as shaping language use by demarking spaces as 'belonging' to certain languages, that is, spaces where their use is sanctioned (Landry & Bourhis 1997). Linguistic landscape (LL) studies often employ a quantitative methodology, such as counting all instances of signs in which a particular language is used (e.g. Backhaus 2007), and thus scholars tend to treat languages as their unit of analysis, or, in semiotic terms, as signs that index particular social meanings. In doing so, LL studies often assume that texts can unambiguously be attributed to specific languages. As Kroon, Dong, & Blommaert (2015:3) note, however, signs may 'look English' without truly being 'in English'. Furthermore, given the wide availability of machine translation tools like Google Translate, multilingual texts can be produced by authors who do not speak or understand (some of) the languages in them. Such uses of machine translation may result in ungrammatical or unidiomatic texts, to the point that their attribution to particular languages becomes questionable. Scholars in LL studies, however, do not always pay attention to such processes (but see e.g. Lou 2010).1
The use of translation is in fact widespread in the linguistic landscapes that have been studied, especially in contexts where governments and other institutions engage with newcomers who lack proficiency in the language of the state. As Blommaert (2013:15) points out, recent trends of migration have given rise to 'superdiverse' spaces of multilingualism that are unstable and dynamic, where 'groups that are present today can be gone tomorrow'. This is particularly true in the context of migrations of refugees, where the...