"Orellana tracks immigrant children in Los Angeles, Chicago, and a Chicago suburb to explore the work children do translating for others. From the author's introspection, one once more appreciates that immigrant children are not the burden they are often portrayed."
~Education Review
"I highly recommend Translating Childhoods for an array of courses in language and literacy. Despite the book's strong research base, it reads more like a novel."
~Elaine Rubinstein-Avila, Anthropology and Education Quarterly
"Orellana paints a powerful portrait of the complicated lives of America's immigrant youth."
~Language Arts
"Translating Childhoods is a deeply insightful analysis of the daily 'work' of immigrant children and its implications for their development—a superb contribution to the field!"
~Carola Sußrez-Orozco, author of Children of Immigration and Learning a New Land
"Translating Childhoods, an important and pathbreaking contribution to the new sociology of childhood, provides lucid analysis and vivid ethnographic portraits of children as powerful social actors engaged in the invisible work of language brokering at home, in schools and in public spaces across an array of institutional domains where their skills matter."
~Marjorie Harness Goodwin, UCLA
"Translating Childhoods should be required reading for educators and future teachers. It provides a refreshing and important view of children as active contributors to communities and society."
~Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, University of California, Santa Cruz
"This is one of the most important works on learning and development among immigrant children in the last decade. Orellana integrates a cognitive and developmental focus with deeply personal portraits that expand fundamentally our understanding of what counts as generative knowledge for academic learning."
~Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University, author of Culture, Literacy and Learning