Abstract
ABSTRACTPrevious scholarship has assumed a monolingual norm. This norm has been noted across disciplines and societies, where it demands assimilation and language shift. However, socially responsible language scholars have increasingly rejected this norm in favour of renewed interest in language contact, and associated complexity. Many social institutions in which interpreters and translators work in modernist nation states view languages as separate, separable units which come into contact in highly regularised ways and can therefore be highly regulated. I argue instead that a renewed focus on ethics in the study and practice of translation and interpreting involves recognising forms of communication which are increasingly common and diversified due to superdiversity.This paper describes an investigation into multilingual language practices in four changing UK cities, using Linguistic Ethnography. The study’s own approach to ethical practice is first evaluated. I then ask how increased study of multilingualism can contribute to interpreters’ and translators’ work and how this work fits with contemporary patterns of language use, drawing on distinctions between the ethical and moral. I suggest that, whilst translating and interpreting can offer an ethicised approach to language contact, a truly moral approach may require rich understands of contemporary superdiverse societies.
Highlights
It is frequently noted that a good deal of past scholarship and large swathes of social life have worked from the assumption that there exists a monolingual norm (Brutt-Griffler and Varghese 2004, 93)
This paper describes a large research study which is investigating multilingual language practices in four UK cities using the detailed gaze offered by Linguistic Ethnography
In exploring the notions of translanguaging and superdiversity as they relate to social change in England and Wales, this paper has considered the challenges these notions pose to the monolingual norm
Summary
Each team’s activities involved making observations and taking fieldnotes in order to record the researchers’ understandings of events and to record as broad a context as possible for the other forms of data; taking photographs within the site and of the surrounding linguistic landscape in order to enrich the more traditional forms of language data and develop a situated understanding of each site over time; making audio-recordings and where possible video-recordings of both front-stage and back-stage talk in order to build a coherent picture of the key participants’ language practices; collecting social media data in order to understand each research site beyond its immediate physical location. The process of making sense of the data was ideally a dialogue between the university-based researchers and the key participants These integral aspects of the research design meant that even where multiple languages were not immediately evident in the data, there was an orientation to translanguaging in the form of awareness of individual participants’ repertoires of resources (after Blommaert and Bakus 2011). Turns from the chicken vendor were not audible on the recording but were all short: Excerpt 1: the telephone call
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