Abstract:In all Nordic countries, the L2 proficiency needed at work has become a key area in the language education provided for adult immigrants. This paper is part of a series of articles that gives an overview of language policies and research activities in the Nordic countries related to L2 in working life, together with a presentation of novel empirical analyses. Here, the focus is on the Finnish perspective. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, it provides an overall picture of the policies and research fin… Show more
In multi-lingual workplace interaction involving L2-speakers with different levels of proficiency, L1-speakers can be seen to use self-translation of their own prior contributions as a repair-practice to restore intersubjectivity. This paper shows that self-translations are produced in three environments: (a) in response to repair-initiation by recipients, (b) in response to inadequate or missing responses, (c) after disaffiliative responses in order to elicit a more favorable uptake. Self-translations therefore are not only used to deal with linguistic understanding problems, but can also use linguistic diversity as a resource for dealing with lack of affiliation and alignment. Self-translations are produced by a switch to the addressee’s L1 or to a lingua franca. They are only partial, being restricted to a translation of the core semantic content of the turn to be translated, thus relying heavily on a shared understanding of the pragmatic context and being designed so as to support interactional progression. Data come from video-taped meetings in Finland involving Finnish and Russian L1-speakers and various kinds of professional trainings in Germany involving instructors with German as L1 and refugees with various linguistic backgrounds.
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