Translanguaging within Enactments of Quotidian Interpreter‐Mediated Interactions

Abstract

This article provides a critical review of the interdisciplinary literature on child language brokering (CLB), employing a Bakhtinian translinguistic perspective. The extant literature isolates the child language broker as a particular kind of vulnerable speaking subject, without regard to the ways in which ideologies of language shape cross-generational linguistic exchanges in zones of cultural contact. Broader attention to bilingual communicative repertoires is also absent. We plot a new course for this area of study by considering the relationships between language brokering and other aspects of bilingual communicative practice such as codeswitching and bivalency. The data examined include transcript excerpts from video recordings of rehearsals and enactments of improvised skits that feature CLBs' experiences of brokering events. The enactments doubled as metalinguistic and metapragmatic performances that simultaneously drew upon situated competencies and displayed dominant language ideologies. Enactments also afforded play frames of interaction that conferred authority to peers (authority that is absent in actual situated instances of cross-generational exchanges). Our analyses acknowledge child language brokers' simultaneous identities and consider the relationships among differing forms of translanguaging by tracking instances when youths enacted particular language-ideological assumptions either to shore up or to dissolve boundaries.[child language brokers, bivalency, codeswitching, role-playing, translanguaging] Introduction I n this article, we examine the "translanguaging" (García 2009) practices that emerged when bilingual children of immigrants came together to envision, rehearse, and reenact scenarios modeled on their work as language brokers for their families. These practices include youths' representations of language brokering (Tse 1996a) in various contexts and in moments of spontaneous brokering that arose as the youths prepared their scenes, as well as other forms of codeswitching and language play that the youths engaged in together. Studies of language brokering within the interdisciplinary scholarship on child language brokers (CLBs) most often focus on spontaneous activities that occur in many migrant households and communities "in which the child who has learned the language of the new country bs_bs_banner Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 24, Issue 3, pp. 315-338, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12057. 315 mediates between a parent and different language speakers or writers [. . .] effectively facilitating communication between two linguistically and culturally different parties" (Bauer 2012:205). We consider how practices that heretofore have been separately theorized and explored as instances of language brokering and conversational codeswitching can be productively understood by means of a translinguistic, semiotic framework. In particular, we are interested in understanding the re...

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