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.