Translingual Practices in Global Business. A Longitudinal Study of a Professional Communicative Repertoire

Abstract

This chapter draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of a Finnish engineer's communicative repertoire that develops in the process of professional migration. The participant first works as a factory intern in Germany, then as a project engineer and project manager in Finland, and latterly as an operations manager in China. Here, repertoire is viewed through dynamic and flexible translingual practices, in which people follow, appropriate and invent norms, combine and shuttle between languages, ways of speaking, semiotic resources and modalities in the transnational work space in order to meet, interact, make meaning and build relationships and, ultimately, do their jobs. The data selected for this chapter provide an overview of the professional's translingual practices in speaking (face-to-face and computer-mediated) and writing at work. The analysis combines temporal and spatial dimensions and demonstrates how the professional communicative repertoire manifests itself through translingual practices, some of which remain in the repertoire over time while others change.

Transnational work, translingual practices, and interactional sociolinguistics

“…Sociolinguists have attempted to explain the changes emerging in what many call ‘the new work order’ (Gee et al., 1996) from different perspectives. They have variably attributed the changes to technology and globalization (as in Ladegaard & Jenks, 2015; Räisänen, 2018), mobility (Angouri, 2013; Duchêne et al., 2013), or economic conditions in late capitalism (as in Canagarajah, 2017; Heller & Duchêne, 2012; Roberts, 2010). I explain the changes in work, technology, and mobility in terms of neoliberal market pressures.…”

“…Detaching a speaker's repertoires from that of the community is well motivated in the context of mobility. One's life trajectory might play a big role in what communicative activities have been relevant and what resources were acquired for accomplishing them (see Räisänen, 2018 for the mobile professional trajectory and resulting unique translingual repertoire of her focal participant).…”

“…Recent sociolinguistic studies label workplace communication ‘transnational’ (see Duchêne et al, 2013; Hazel, 2015; Kingsley, 2013; Räisänen, 2018; Sherman & Strubell, 2013; Wodak et al., 2012; Yanaprasart, 2016), or related terms such as ‘cosmopolitan’ (Mondada, 2012) and ‘superdiverse’ (Blackledge & Creese, 2017). These work settings are ‘transnational’ in that they involve people, resources, and interactions that transcend nation‐state borders and space/time boundaries.…”

Translanguaging and multimodality in workplace texts and writing

“…The concept of repertoire opens up for viewing a person's linguistic and semiotic resources as 'a whole' (Busch, 2012, p. 521), regardless of the status of the different languages involved. It also moves away from a view of languages as bounded entities, similar to the concept of translanguaging (see also Räisänen, 2018), discussed below. The concept of linguistic repertoire has typically included multimodal resources, such as gesture, expression and social semiotics, often referred to as an individual's communicative repertoire (Rymes, 2014).…”

“…paper, computers) in meaning making, have been theorised and analysed (Björkvall & Karlsson, 2011;Scollon & Scollon, 2003). The concept of affordance (Gibson, 1979, Räisänen, 2018) can be used to describe the possibilities that a certain material artefact or linguistic means offers the users; verbal language affords telling stories, images afford showing things (Kress, 2015). When analysing text products, a relevant concept is text element, defined as relatively delimited parts of a text, such as a title or an image (Björkvall, 2019, Van Leeuwen, 2004.…”