"You Don't Know What They Translate": Language Contact, Institutional Procedure, and Literacy Practice in Neighborhood Health Clinics in Urban Flanders

Abstract

This article examines how local, institutional communicative economies adjust to changes in multilingual client populations of immigrants and refugees in a health clinic in the Flemish city of Ghent. The focus of the article is on how language ideologies in a context of multilingual diversity bear on the development of institutional procedures and interactional routines through the planning and use of print materials. These ideologies include assumptions about language competencies, multilingual repertoires, and their efficiency, and are shown to shade over into forms of social categorization and indexicalities of noncomprehension. Solutions to perceived problems of noncomprehension take the form of literacy artifacts that have unintended consequences in their use.