Find out more about these and other fascinating aspects of English in Korea in this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast. Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho about her 2017 book entitled English Language Ideologies in Korea.

English Language Ideologies in Korea critically examines the phenomenon of “English fever” in South Korea from both micro- and macro-perspectives. Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions: why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the ‘dreams’ and ‘realities’ associated with English in Korea?

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Transcript (added 09/09/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Jinhyun Cho.

Jinhyun is a Senior Lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are primarily in the field of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistics of translation and interpreting. Jinhyun’s research focuses on intersections between gender, language ideologies, neoliberalism, and intercultural communication across diverse social contexts, including Korea and Australia.

Jinhyun is the author of the 2021 book Intercultural Communication in Interpreting, Power and Choices, and she has authored numerous other publications for international journals. Today, we will be discussing her 2017 book English Language Ideologies in Korea. This book critically examines the phenomenon of English fever in South Korea from both micro and macro perspectives.

Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions. Why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the dreams and realities associated with English in Korea? Jinhyun, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Cho: Oh, thank you for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to studying how people think about and view the English language within Korea?

Dr Cho: Sure. I was born in Korea and grew up there, and I spent almost 30 years of my life in Korea before moving to Australia. And I worked as an interpreter between English and Korean in Korea.

And I have to tell you this, and that I didn’t speak English at all until I finished university.

Brynn: I cannot believe that. When I read that in your book, that was an incredible revelation to me.

Dr Cho: It might sound interesting to you and to the listeners, but back then, and I know that was many years ago, the Korean education on English, it focused on grammar and reading. And there was no speaking element at all.

So, I never had a chance to learn how to speak English until I finished university. And I got my first job at a small company after university, which I didn’t enjoy at all. And I started wondering what else I could do.

And I knew that there was such a job as a translator and interpreter, because one of my friends at university, her brother was an English-Korean interpreter. And that looked so cool, instantly switching between English and Korean, and he was working for an established broadcasting company in Korea. So, I thought that, oh, that sounds so cool, and I want to be one of those people.

So, I enrolled in a coaching school designed to train people who wanted to be a translator and interpreter. And that, to provide more details on this, because it doesn’t exist outside Korea, I know that there’s some in Japan. So coaching schools, these schools train people to sit for exams to enter a graduate school that specializes in translation and interpreting.

So that’s how it works, because it’s so competitive to get into a graduate school, graduate schools for translation and interpreting. So, I enrolled in one of those coaching schools and studied English for 14, up to 16 hours a day, and for two years. And that’s how I successfully got into this best graduate school in Korea.

And so, I took it for granted, right? Because everybody in Korea wanted to be good at English and they wanted to learn English. So, I thought that I never questioned why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then revelation came to me when I moved to Australia. And here, English is so natural, right? And everybody is expected to speak English.

And if you don’t speak English, then there’s something wrong with you. Whereas in Korea, if you speak English well, then you’ll be instantly admired. So, I thought that the gap was so interesting and started wondering why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then that led to this research question, as you said, right? So why do people in Korea pursue English so feverishly? You know, so much so that there is this social phenomenon of English fever.

And that’s how I got into this research.

Brynn: And just you saying that you studied English for like 14 to 16 hours a day, I cannot imagine doing that in another language. That had to be exhausting. It does feel like almost feverish study.

Is it exhausting to do that?

Dr Cho: Feverish study, I think it’s a perfect description of how I studied. Oh, it was exhausting. A session at the coaching school, it started at 7 a.m. So, I got up at 5 a.m. You know, because it was very far from, you know, where I lived.

So, I took about more than an hour. So, I got there and then took the three-hour session. And after that, me and then other students in the class, we created a study group.

So, we studied there until like 5 p.m. And after that, I came home and did some exercise and had dinner and studied more English until I went to bed.

Brynn: Collapsed. Collapsed.

Dr Cho: Collapsed. That’s right. And I think I was so consumed with that.

And sometimes I went to bed with CNN on, and I’m hoping that I could, you know, soak in more English in sleep. So that’s how I studied then come to think of it, yes.

Brynn: Well, and that’s what’s so interesting about the book is that you introduce us to this idea of this English fever, but also just this huge drive to study English.

But what’s so interesting is that then you take us back in time and you show in one of the first chapters of the book, it talks about the history of the English language in Korea. And what I find so interesting about that is that there’s this very real beginning point of when English literally made landfall in Korea. And this was in 1882.

Take us through that history a little bit, just in brief, from the arrival of English through to the Korea that we know today from a global perspective.

Dr Cho: Yes, I mean, this was so fascinating. So, this is a discovery that I made during my PhD, at the beginning of my PhD. So, I didn’t plan to examine this from a historical perspective.

But while, you know, just like any other research, you make a discovery by accident. So, while I was collecting data, I found out that the beginning of translation and interpreting in Korea, it coincided with the arrival of English in Korea. And to provide you more background on this, so you said back in 1882, Korea, so Korea’s predecessor, the Joseon dynasty, the last dynasty of Korea, it was under precarious geopolitical situations.

So, it was surrounded by strong and ambitious neighbours, which included Japan, Russia and China, which had acted as Korea’s elder brother traditionally. So, China was like a protector of Korea. And Japan in particular was the most ambitious because Japan was the first country in Asia that introduced modern technologies and civilizations from the West, primarily from the UK.

So, you know, the geographical situation of Korea is a peninsula. And Japan wanted to occupy Korea so that it could advance into the mainland China and into the bigger continent. So, in order to curb Japanese ambition, China joined forces with the US.

And then that led to this first international treaty in Korea, Korea-U.S. Treaty. And back then, there was nobody who could speak English in Korea.

And naturally, that led to the establishment of the English-Korean Translation, sorry, English-Korean Translation and Interpreting School, which is Dongmunhag. So now, what is interesting here is that the beginning of English fever in Korea, it happened at both top government and grass roots levels. And then top government level, that means that the king of the dynasty, King Gojong, had absolute trust in the US.

Why? It’s because of this Good Offices Treaty that was established between the US and Korea. And let me read you the clause of the treaty.

“The Good Offices on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable agreement, thus showing their friendly feelings between the two countries.” So, this is a mere legal requirement. It meant nothing to then U.S. President Roosevelt.

However, King Gojong of Korea, he interpreted this as unflinching commitment from the US to protect Korea. So, the king relied on the US literally like a child does for his father.

So that was the beginning of English Fever. And also, the beginning of the US as the most powerful and generous country in the world. So that was the perception of the US at that government level.

But at the grassroots level, Translation and Interpreting. So even before this first English Korean Translation and Interpreting School was established, translators and interpreters, there was such a job in Korea because Korea had a lot of trade and business relationships with China. So, translators and interpreters, although they belong to the middle class, they were very wealthy because by using their bilingual skills, they made a lot of money out of trade.

So, becoming a translator and interpreter in Korea, there was an opportunity to climb up the cost system. The cost system in Korea back then, it was so rigid. So, there was no way that you could transcend the class barriers.

So, for people who were at the lowest class, becoming a translator and interpreter, that was the only opportunity to transcend the class barriers. And now what’s really interesting about this government established translation and interpreting school is that students were accepted regardless of class backgrounds. As long as you are linguistically talented, everybody was accepted, right?

So that opened the door for people, commoners in Korea, to become, to belong to a higher class. And then there was more American missionaries in Korea.

There were a lot of American missionaries who arrived in Korea in the 19th century, and they established the schools to teach English. This is what I found so fascinating that the English simultaneously became the language of the US and the language of power, and also the tool for class mobility for commoners. And that’s how English gathered forces and became the language of mobility and the power in Korea.

So, from a global perspective, I think in contemporary Korea, of course, you would say that there’s no such thing as a caste system, but there’s no society that is classless. Right?

Brynn: Exactly.

Dr Cho: Yeah, we all pretend that there’s no class, but there is.

Brynn: Of course there is.

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s right. So, in Korea, the reason why people pursue English so much is the amount of capital that’s attached to English. So English, this is the key findings from my research, that the English constitutes all four capitals and identified by Bourdieu.

So, it’s an economic capital and a cultural capital, social capital and also symbolic capital.

Brynn: Which is amazing. And I think for people who maybe aren’t familiar with English in Korea, or even just the concept of how very powerful English is in the world right now, to think that just having a language gives you that much capital, that much power, that much social mobility. I think especially to monolingual English speakers, it’s kind of like, what? What do you mean? It’s just my language. It’s just English.

But it really is. And in your book, you also go through the wartime era, like with the American occupation in Korea, and how that then influenced English as well. Can you tell me about that a little bit?

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s when there was a watershed in the popularity of English, and more importantly, the images of the US in Korea. So, as you know, Korea was colonized by Japan, and Japan pulled out of Korea when the Second World War ended, the US-led bombing of Hiroshima. And then when Japan left, the US came in.

And so that was to help Korea to manage the transition, right, from the colonized country to become an independent country. And to Koreans, the fact that the colonization was ended by the US, right? And then that made them believe that the US was the most generous benefactor.

And so, US basically freed up Korea. And then people had this fantastic image about the US, and coincidentally, the meaning of the US in Korean. In Korean, the US is called Mi-guk, which is based on the Chinese name of the US, Maegaw, and that means beautiful country.

Brynn: What!? Oh, my goodness. Amazing. I’m going to refer to it as beautiful country from now on. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yes, you are from the beautiful country. (laughs)

Brynn: The beautiful country, yeah. Oh, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. So then, and then the US was established as the most beautiful and wonderful country in the world. And as the language of the US, you know, English represented the power.

And then I wrote in the book that the very first president of the US, you know, Seungman Lee, he was baptized by the US because he was anti-communist. And then, and then he himself studied English at an American missionary school in Korea and went to the US to study. And he was the first Korean who finished a PhD.

And then spent most of his life, you know, in the US. So, Seungman Lee identified himself as American with the US. So, in his book, Autobiography, you know, it reveals his identification of himself and with the US, the freedom, the spirit of freedom and democracy.

So, you know, that kind of ideology view, idealised view of a country, and if that image of the country and then associated images of the language have been accumulated throughout history, then it’s only natural for people to believe that that is true, right? So, the whole point here is that English fever in Korea is not a contemporary phenomenon. It has always existed throughout history, but not many people know about this historical background about English in the US.

Brynn: That is so interesting how just idealizing a certain country or a certain culture can have that knock-on effect to the language of that country or culture. And on that, you discuss in your book, these two groups of English speakers in Korea. And in Korean, they actually have their own terms in the Korean language.

So, we’ve got haewepa, and those are people who learned English while living or visiting abroad in English-dominant countries. And guknaepa, people who learn English as a foreign language within Korea. And the fact that these specific terms even exist might be surprising to people, because it was to me when I first read it, who aren’t familiar with English ideologies in Korea.

So, tell us about what these terms say about the socially constructed nature of linguistic insecurity and neo-liberal ideologies in Korea.

Dr Cho: Yes, again, I didn’t think that this is specific to Korea, right? And because it was natural that people refer to each other that all you are haewepa, because you learned English abroad. And then we are guknaepa, because we have never had a chance to go abroad to learn English.

But it was only after I came here, again, when I was discussing my research and when I told this to people and people were surprised, like you, what? Oh, is there such a term?

Brynn: There’s actual words.

Dr Cho: Yeah. It’s an actual word that is popular, you know, in Korea. So, I thought, oh, that’s so interesting.

And then I started wondering, maybe the fact that such a term exists, you know, that reveals that it works as distinction, you know, between those people who learned English abroad and then people who learned English within Korea. So, it’s not, it’s much more than the fact that, you know, certain people had a chance to learn abroad and the certain people didn’t. It really is about class distinction, that because in Korea and also in many countries, in many non-English speaking countries, having an opportunity to go to an advanced country, and a lot of advanced countries are English speaking, right?

And then go to those advanced countries to study, that itself works as a class marker, right? That your family has enough resources to support you. And also, back then in Korea, going abroad, it was not allowed, right?

Except that you are from certain classes such as diplomats, or from those top class, from the top class. So, I started wondering maybe being a heawepa itself, and overseas learners of English itself, it works as a marker of class. And then that naturally, the other group who never had a chance to learn English abroad, they feel inferior, right?

And then they are not confident about the English, which I observed at the graduate school. Because at the graduate school, and I was one of those guknaepa students, because I learned English at home, right? And whereas there were a lot of students who learned English as a child because of their father’s job, you know, as a diplomat or posting, the father was posted to an English-speaking country, you know, from this company.

And then I observed that this underlying feeling of inferiority among guknaepa students, domestic learners of English and including myself.

Brynn: Yeah. Did you feel that you had to work harder as a guknaepa than the other people?

Dr Cho: Yes. Yes. We often, you know, say some things like, oh, yeah, such and such, you know, a person, their pronunciation is excellent.

Okay. She sounds like British, or he sounds like American, or he sounds like a New Yorker, right? And because they learned English, you know, in those places, yeah, in the US, whereas we, there was no term that could define us.

And the thing about language learning is that, okay, you can learn grammar. I can’t generalize, but in general, right? And people who learn the foreign language as a child, then they tend to acquire better pronunciation.

And then those students who learned English at home, and in general, our pronunciation wasn’t as good as that of, you know, overseas learners of English. I think in itself was a significant source of insecurity for us, you know, who wanted to become top interpreters in Korea. And people do get impressed by good pronunciation.

Brynn: Oh, of course. Yes, absolutely.

Dr Cho: Yes. So that was a significant factor. And then that led us to study harder and harder.

Brynn: For 14 to 16 hours a day.

Dr Cho: And then of course, I didn’t know that it was part of neoliberal ideology. So, I worked under those dominant ideologies without knowing that I was influenced by the historical factors of Korea, as well as the contemporary ideology of neoliberalism.

Brynn: Exactly. And I can absolutely see how that would happen, where, like you said, just the fact that these names exist for these two people does signify sort of this larger story that’s going on, where we’re putting more power and emphasis into the people who do get that chance to go abroad, and who do get to go study, you know, because they do maybe have more money, they have more power already. So, they’re kind of already starting with that leg up, and that’s going to make the guknaepa people feel like they have to go even harder, and even higher.

And not only do we have these two groups of people kind of vying for power, there’s also an incredible part in your book that talks specifically about sort of these gender roles in translating and interpreting. So, there’s a part that talks specifically about Korean women who go into translating and interpreting work, and the factors that are related to gender that influence this. Can you tell us more about how these women view English and English related work, and how their language journeys construct gender norms and expectations?

Dr Cho: Sure. In Korea, back then – I mean, things have changed so much.

Brynn: Sure.

Dr Cho: So, these days, a lot of young Koreans, they don’t want to marry. And if they marry, they don’t want to have a child. And I’m not sure if you know this, but Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world.

Brynn: Does it?

Dr Cho: Yes, it’s less than 0.7%. That means only one out of three women has a child. That’s rock bottom.

Brynn: Wow, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. However, there is still this social expectation that you have to marry, and then you have to have a child. And that completes your female biography.

If you are a single woman and a childless, then, well, you might be successful in terms of career, but the people, especially from older generations, they will say something about it.

Brynn: Sure. They’ll say, but you haven’t really lived up to the cultural expectations of what womanhood is.

Dr Cho: That’s right, exactly. So, when I conducted this research, that was in 2012. Right?

So, it was 12 years ago. And a lot of my participants, so there was a single participant, they were living under the marital pressure. You have to get married.

Brynn: You need to find a man. Go find a husband. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yeah, go find a husband. And at the same time, these women, they wanted to have their own career. And some of them, they worked for companies like I did, and they realized there was a glass ceiling.

And there was only so much that women could do in a corporate setting, which is still true in contemporary Korea, because Korea has one of the lowest levels of female executives among the OECD countries. And so, the glass ceiling is so strong there. So as a woman, there’s a limit to how far you can go.

So, I think to these women, becoming a translator and interpreter, there was an opportunity for them to build their own career, free from corporate structures and gender biases and gender norms, and especially jobs relating to Korea. They have this international image, becoming a translator and interpreter. Oh, there are open-up opportunities to work for international companies, or like the UNESCO or the UN, or you can work for an international company based overseas, or you can do some job relating to language.

So, I think they saw learning English as an avenue to lead their own independent female biography. And that’s how they expressed their beliefs in English, you know, as a language that could change their life and free from the gender norms.

Brynn: And that echoes what we saw before with in, you know, the late 1800s and the early 1900s when Korean, I’m assuming more men at that point, were using English as their sort of ticket out and their ticket up that social ladder. And it’s amazing that you then see that happening over 100 years later, but with women this time.

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, oh, that’s a very good point, Brynn. So back then, and of course I, you know, don’t have time to explain everything, right? That is just to relating to that.

So, one of the distinctive points of the history of English in Korea is this phenomenon called New Women’s Movement. And that’s during the Japanese colonization. So, the New Women’s Movement that was inspired by burgeoning feminism in Japan first, and then that influenced Korea.

So those Korean women who were educated overseas in Japan, you know, primarily because Korea was a Japanese colony, and then they learned advanced concept of feminism and women’s rights. So when they went back to Korea, they lead this movement, New Women, literally. So new women, they distinguish themselves from old women, you know, which was, you know, typically a good wife and a wise mother.

Again, there is this Korean expression, “hyunmoo yangcheo”. Literally, again, that means good wife and wise mother. So, there was the female, there was a gender expectation.

And they rejected the old gender norm to establish themselves as a model, like a new model for Korean women. And they, they consumed English and also Western civilization, right, to import Western ideologies and also to become Westernized. So, when the movement first started, it received a lot of support, including people, the Korean male intellectuals, because of the Korean male intellectuals, educating the populace, you know, under the colonisation.

It was one way to achieve independence. However, as the New Women’s Movement gathered forces, the new intellectuals, they started, they turned their back against them, because they didn’t want women to be too strong.

Brynn: You can get powerful, but only to a certain point, and then we’re going to stop you, right?

Dr Cho: Yes, exactly. That’s what happened. And I mean, also those new women, the leaders, and there was, you know, Korea was an extremely conservative country, and it still is, you know, to some extent, but they, you know, believed in free love and free sex, right?

And that didn’t go down well.

Brynn: That wouldn’t have gone down well with the powerful men. No, no, no. And obviously, we cannot talk about gender roles, especially of women, without talking about beauty standards.

And something that many women all over the world can relate to is the idea of unrealistic beauty standards that society sets on us. And your book discusses how these female interpreters and translators actually have to perform what you call aesthetic labour because they’re under pressure to not only be amazing in English, but also to look beautiful in order to compete with others in the translating and interpreting market. Tell us about that.

Dr Cho: Yes. It was a very interesting discovery. At the end of my research, I observed this phenomenon in Korea, which was called good-looking interpreter.

It was a social phenomenon and frequently featured in Korea that they had this capture of a good-looking female interpreter in action. And they said, Oh, such a such person, she’s one of those good-looking interpreters. And I was thinking, this is very interesting.

Why suddenly good-looking interpreters? And if you are familiar with Korea, you would know that there’s social pressure on good looks. And it’s not just for women, for men too.

Korea, it has obsession with beauty. And at first, I thought that maybe it’s part of that. And then as I had conversations, with the participants, I realised that the interpreting market in Korea, it was becoming saturated.

And because the number of schools specialising in translation and interpreting, it increased and that there were more graduates who specialised in English translation and interpreting. And then more and more people had opportunities to go abroad. After the Korean government lifted the ban on going abroad, and more and more people went abroad to learn English and study it.

And so, there were more English speakers in Korea. So, one way to distinguish language professionals from those people who could speak English, but not to the extent that they could translate and interpret. For female interpreters, I found out that it was beauty.

And the more beautiful you are, then the better chances you might get, especially if you are a freelance interpreter. Why? Because a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for males.

So, the market itself, it gives an illusion that it’s a female dominant profession, because a lot of language workers are females. However, who do they work for? The males.

Brynn: The men.

Dr Cho: Yeah, the men. They are the top executives of companies, and they have important positions in industries. Therefore, it’s the men who hire female interpreters.

And very interestingly, a look was an important factor. And one of those ads that I collected as part of the data, it specifically said that a woman of a certain height, it said that it has to be over a certain height of 163cm or 165cm. And what’s the height to do with the language work?

So that itself, it demonstrates the male expectations of language work and language workers. And hence the term aesthetic labour is not just about language, but it’s also about how you look.

Brynn: Which is just mind-boggling to me to think that somebody could, like you had to, study for 14 to 16 hours a day for years to do all of this really difficult mental and intellectual work. And then to get to a point where someone then says to you, but you also have to conform to beauty standards, that just feels galling, you know? But you don’t see that happening with men at the same rate in Korea, or do you? What do you think?

Well, there was only one male participant. So, and then that person, he had a different motivation to learn English. So, I haven’t had an opportunity, you know, to observe if the same rule applies to men.

But, you know, if you just look at the gender dynamics of the industry, then it speaks itself, right? And it’s a male-dominated, it’s a female, yes, it is a female-dominated profession. However, the industry itself is controlled by men.

Brynn: That’s what’s so interesting.

Dr Cho: Yes.

Brynn: And something that you talk about is, yes, it’s female-dominated, but that also means that because they are freelance workers, they don’t always have consistent work. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, sure. In Korea, the interpreting industry is very different, you know, from, we are in Australia, right, in Australia, and in English-speaking countries, because in English-speaking countries, community interpreting is the mainstream interpreting. So, community interpreting, it refers to the type of interpreting that helps migrants who are not fluent in the societal language, right?

So non-English-speaking migrants who have trouble accessing health care, education, or government assistance, then they need language support. So, translators and interpreters in Australia and in other migrant-receiving countries, they are community interpreters, because they serve communities. Whereas in Korea, Korea is becoming multicultural, because there are a lot more migrants, especially from Southeast Asia.

However, traditionally, Korea is ethnically, it has this belief that Korea is an ethnically homogeneous country. Therefore, the type of interpreting there is not community interpreting. There is community interpreting, but it’s not the mainstream interpreting.

So, the mainstream interpreting is simultaneous interpreting. If you are not familiar with interpreting, you might have seen the image of interpreters working in booths, right? And then speaking into the microphone, interpreting the speech of this prominent political figure, President Obama, giving a speech at the United Nations, or interpreters working for companies.

And because there are a lot of big companies in Korea, like Samsung and Hyundai, and those companies, they have trade relations with businesses overseas. So to deal with the business transactions in English, because English is a global language, then they need a translator and interpreter. So therefore, a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for businesses or for governments, and either they work for companies on a fixed-term contract or they freelance.

So, when they freelance, again, their clients, they are coming from those industries, government officials or they are top-ranking businessmen. So when you work for these people who have power, then what are the criteria that they are looking at when they hire an interpreter? So again, it’s a gendered question.

Brynn: Yeah, absolutely. And that means that even though this profession of interpreting is so glamorized and, you know, these, especially the women, study for so long, they might have to perform this aesthetic labour, but they might get hired and not have this work all the time. It’s just sort of when these companies need it.

And that means that their own financial income is not going to be consistent, which is just so fascinating to think how glamorized the profession is, but then the reality is, but we’re not always going to have a consistent good income.

Dr Cho: I think that’s the illusion about freelancing jobs. People think that they can be free to build their own career, but when you’re in the industry, you are not controlled. You don’t understand, right?

And then you are literally working for these people at the top. So, therefore, being a freelancer comes with a significant amount of insecurity, feelings of insecurity, financial, and also its feelings, because you don’t know when your next job will be. You might be unemployed for how long or how many months, and that’s why they keep pushing themselves to accept more jobs and to enhance individual competitiveness.

Brynn: Yes, that’s exactly it. It’s that always enhance that competitiveness, look better than anyone else just to try to get those jobs.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes.

Brynn: And this book was published in 2017, and you said that a lot of your work came from 2012. It’s now 2024. Where do you see the future of English language translating and interpreting going in Korea?

Is the profession still ultra-competitive and wrapped up in language ideologies, or do you see it changing in any way?

Dr Cho: I think the profession itself is still very competitive. And then it’s regarded as one of those highly professional jobs. However, because of AI, it’s a very big question.

You know, it’s sometimes said in media that it’s one of the first jobs that might be replaced by AI. Yes, but I don’t see it coming yet because, you know, myself, I have done a lot of experiment with the AI translation and I’m not interpreting. But yes, AI works well for certain type of translation such as legal documents, because the legal documents, there is a template, right?

Brynn: It’s like a formula.

Dr Cho: Yeah, that’s right. So, if you have, if AI has a lot of databases to work out the structure, then it does quite a good job. However, for other types of jobs, and as you know, in language, the hidden meanings of language in humans do a far better job at capturing those meanings. Capturing the nuance of human communication and emotion.

And then, so the AI is still, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of AI. But it’ll be interesting to see how things will change, because the profession itself, especially translation, there has been this prediction that a lot of translators will become post-editors. That means that the AI will do draft translation, and the human translators will review the draft translation done by AI.

And that is already happening in Korea. For example, Netflix, I understand that it does a lot of translation. It’s done by AI, machine translation.

But for interpreting, I think people still feel uncomfortable, right? It’s not natural, speaking to a machine, maybe young generation might not. But people, they prefer to have face to face conversation.

So, for interpreting, I think there is a long way to go.

Brynn: And that is interesting that maybe for, and we should specify for maybe people who don’t know, translating means the written language, literally translating from one language to another, whereas interpreting is for spoken or signed languages. And like you said, that’s often in person. It can be simultaneous or it can be consecutive.

And what about for you? What’s next for you and your work and teaching at Macquarie and research? What do you have coming up?

Dr Cho: Oh, well, in line with this conversation, so I’m working on my third monograph, and it’s about healthcare interpreting in Australia.

Brynn: Which I’m extremely excited about.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes, I can see that. So, I’m approaching healthcare interpreting in Australia again, from a historical and a contemporary perspective, and from a critical social linguistic perspective. Because the contrast in terms of English between Australia and Korea, and that always made me wonder, that why is English so natural in Australia?

I’m asking the question, and people might find that, you know, what a pointless question, because Australia is an English-speaking country. But we know that it’s a multilingual country, and over 300 languages are spoken in Australia. But the English has become so dominant, and then again, so how the historical dominance of English, how has it shaped people’s perspectives on other languages, represented by translation and interpreting, and also their perspectives on other language speakers, represented by interpreters, and how English monolingualism, so how does that impact interpreting?

So, from a historical perspective, again, again, in any societies, and it’s not just Korea and Australia, but in any societies, the very first foreign encounter, it generates interpreting, right? Therefore, interpreting is a birthplace of foreign intercultural communication. So that’s how I see it.

Brynn: That’s going to be fascinating. I cannot wait to read that, because as you know, that’s a lot very similar to research that I am conducting. So, we’re going to have to have another chat sometime soon after that’s done and do another episode.

Well, thank you so much, Jinhyun, for coming on and for talking to me today.

Dr Cho: No worries, I really enjoyed it. I hope that the listeners will enjoy it too.

Brynn: I think they absolutely will. And thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time.

Preschool in Karlsruhe, Germany (Source: DW)

Ever since my research for my 2002 book Bilingual Couples Talk I’ve regularly been told by people – or been asked to confirm their belief – that a cross-cultural relationship is beneficial once the couple have children. The children are expected to not only be bilingual but also to enjoy cognitive advantages from growing up with more than one culture and to be more open minded and better communicators. I’ve always struggled how to respond because, of course, nothing is ever this simple. A 2011 study of the cognitive and linguistic abilities of various groups of preschoolers in Germany confirms the assumption – children of intermarried couples outperform all other groups on a cognitive ability test – and, simultaneously, explain why it is a fallacy that confounds ethnicity and class.

The study by Birgit Becker examines the cognitive and linguistic abilities of three- and four-year-olds with different types of parents:

• Children whose parents and grandparents were all born in Germany (the ‘native’ group)
• Children whose parents were both born in Turkey (the ‘second generation’)
• Children whose parents were both born in Germany but each parent had at least one parent born in Turkey (the ‘third generation’)
• Children with one first-generation and one second-generation Turkish parent (the ‘2A generation’)
• Children with one ‘native’ parent and one first- or second generation Turkish parent (the ‘intermarried’ group)

The cognitive abilities of a total of 1,008 children were tested with the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. The German version of the test was used but it was administered by bilingual researchers and the children could choose to do the test in German, in Turkish or they could mix the two languages as they pleased. So, language proficiency is unlikely to confound test results here, as it so often does in cognitive testing of bilingual and minority children.

Adapted from Becker (2011, p. 448)

The diagram shows that the children from the intermarried group outperformed all the other groups, including the natives. It also shows that, with the exception of the intermarried group, all the other ‘Turkish’ groups performed significantly lower than the ‘native’ group. Children in the ‘2A group’ – with one first-generation and one second-generation Turkish parent – performed particularly poorly. In fact, ‘2A’ parents might be considered ‘intermarried,’ too; but, obviously, their intermarried status is not beneficial for the child.

Once the full diagram is revealed, part of the conundrum is solved.

Source: Becker (2011, p. 448)

Once parents’ socio-economic status (as measured by their level of education and their occupational status) and educational resources (as measured by the number of books in the home; the frequency of bedtime stories; or the number of visits to the zoo) are controlled, the ethnic differences disappear and the influence of all the above ethnic groups/generations is reduced to non-significance.

All group differences regarding children’s cognitive skills can be fully explained by families’ socioeconomic status and educational resources. (Becker 2011, p. 447)

What seems like an ethnic effect (‘children of intermarried couples are smarter’ or ‘German children are smarter than Turkish children’) is, in fact, an effect of socioeconomic status and educational resources; in other words, a well-known class effect. However, class maps onto ethnicity, in this case, as elsewhere. The vast majority of Turkish families in the sample, which can be assumed to be representative of Turks in Germany (or, at least, southwest Germany, where the study was conducted), are poorly educated, work in low-status occupations, and have few educational resources at their disposal.

As far as the two ‘mixed’ groups – ‘2A’ and ‘intermarried’ – are concerned a process of negative and positive selection can be assumed to apply respectively.

Having a first-generation mother and a second-generation father constitutes some sort of ‘double jeopardy’ for the child: the mother is much less likely to speak German than even first-generation women married to first-generation men; and the father is even less likely to have completed secondary education than other Turkish second-generation men. As the researcher explains, second-generation men who ‘import’ brides from the country of origin are likely to be negatively selected on various dimensions and their ‘imported’ brides will lack knowledge and resources that are useful to raising a child in the destination country.

By contrast, a process of positive selection works in favor of a child with a native and a migrant parent. Not only will the native parent ‘automatically’ have country-specific knowledge and resources but the migrant parent is likely to be positively selected with regard to level of education, proficiency in German, and general ‘openness’ and ‘integration.’ This is particularly true in the case German-Turkish intermarriages, which are comparatively rare and only account for five percent of all marriages of first- and second-generation Turks in Germany.

In sum, if intermarriage is an expression of parental cosmopolitanism, it is beneficial for children. Not because there is any intrinsic value in intermarriage but because that is how educational reproduction works: well-educated parents with stable jobs, parents who read to their children and who engage in a wide range of family activities confer an advantage on their children. It is just that the advantages – as well as the injuries – of class are increasingly mapped onto ethnicity, race or ‘culture.’

Becker, B. (2011). Cognitive and Language Skills of Turkish Children in Germany: A Comparison of the Second and Third Generation and Mixed Generational Groups International Migration Review, 45 (2), 426-459 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2011.00853.x

“Naughty boys” in the media: image from the Channel 4 gangs and drugs drama “Top Boy”

Teacher expectations can constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy: teachers behave differently towards children depending on their expectations of them. The ways in which teachers treat students affect students’ self-concept, motivation, achievement and aspirations. Over time, the performance of high-expectation students will increase and the performance of low-expectation students will decline, until student performance and behavior closely conforms to what was expected of them in the first place (for an overview of teacher expectations and labelling, see Rist 2015).

Teacher expectations don’t just come out of the blue but are related to social stereotypes: they are gendered, classed and raced. As we say last week, working-class Hispanic boys in the USA get a poor deal in formal education. The same is true of working-class ethnic-minority boys in many other contexts around the world.

A 2008 study of the mismatch between student aspirations and teacher expectations poignantly illustrates this point and shows how formal education can serve to limit, rather than expand, opportunities for teenage migrants. The researcher, Melanie Cooke, followed three teenage migrants in London schools over a period of six months.

At the time, the three boys were16 and 17 years old. We meet Felek, an unaccompanied refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan, whose family had pooled their resources to smuggle him out of Iraq and across Europe almost two years earlier. We meet Carlos, an asylum seeker from Angola, who had arrived in London with his family about a year earlier. And we meet Santos, a Portuguese national, whose parents are from Angola and Cabo Verde, and who had come to London to live with his grandmother.

All three boys have high aspirations: first, they want to learn English and find a place in London where they fit in; something that seems impossibly difficulty to achieve. They are disappointed with the slow progress of their English language development, and they are struggling with the fact that, in the one to two years they have been in London, they have not been able to make a single local friend. Felek has met other Kurds and also spends time with other young asylum seekers from Albania and Somalia. The friendship networks of Carlos and Santos are exclusively with other Portuguese speakers.

While they are keen to make friends and find a place where they “fit,” they are frequently harassed by local youths, and conflict and fights are a regular part of their experience.

All three boys have high expectations of their future, and all three see themselves as studious and academic. Felek dreams of becoming an engineer or a doctor to give back to his family and homeland. However, none of the three has received any guidance regarding educational pathways and, other than “studying hard” have only the vaguest ideas how their dreams might be achieved.

In sum, Felek, Carlos and Santos see themselves as fundamentally “good boys,” who have been through a lot already, who see migration to the UK as an opportunity, and who want to make the most of this opportunity to further their careers and to make a contribution to society.

Unfortunately, that is not how educational policy makers and their teachers see them.

As regards educational policy, as teenage arrivals they simply fall between the cracks of the educational system. While new arrivals up until the age of 16 are sent to mainstream schools in the UK, arrivals above this age are treated as adults and are offered English language classes designed for adults, from all kinds of backgrounds, who lack basic vocational skills (for an overview of educational provisions for refugee youths in Australia, see Moore, Nicholas & Deblaquiere 2008). The classes are designed to teach numeracy, literacy and English that will allow graduates to transfer into a vocational course and to become “job-ready.” Other than English language training, no pathway that would continue their secondary education is available to them because no one ever seems to have envisaged that teenage migrants might have educational aspirations.

As regards their teachers, they know next to nothing about their students’ life outside the classroom and so draw on stereotypes about Middle Eastern and black male adolescents in their interactions with their students: they see them as ignorant young men who lack discipline and who have no past and no future. As one teacher puts it: “they come to this country … they get off the plane and they have no idea … about anything” (quoted in Cooke 2008, p. 32).

The teachers, both of who are middle-class women, one British Asian and the other white British, in particular react to what they see as the boys’ sexism. Carlos and Santos, for instance, have both been banned from interacting with younger girls in the mainstream school to which their English-language program is attached. Supposedly, this was because the boys were causing trouble. However, Carlos’ and Santos’ explanation of the event that led to the ban is quite different: in their account, another young boy, who is also a recent arrival from Angola, one day went to school wearing girls’ pants. According to Carlos, this is what happened next:

So those girls noticed he had women’s trousers. So they started teasing him. He doesn’t speak English very well … so the only thing he did was answer back, and because we were in the middle, they blamed us all. And they said if you do anything more, they will throw us out of school. (Quoted in Cooke 2008, p. 29)

This innocuous story contrasts with the teacher’s view of Carlos as a “gangster rapper” and “the naughtiest of the naughty.”

One way to control the boys and to keep the dreaded “gangster” that the teachers believe to be lurking inside the boys at bay is through sticking strictly to the curriculum and through controlling classroom interactions in minute detail. As a result, valuable opportunities for the boys to find their voice in English are lost. Felek’s class, for instance, at one point reads a text about the refugee journey of an Afghan boy. It is a story that not only Felek but most students in the class can relate to well, and some had, in fact, watched a TV show about asylum only the night before. Therefore, they are keen to talk about the text and discuss it. However, the teacher stifles these attempts at discussion and sticks to her lesson plan, which treats the text only as basis for comprehension exercises, new vocabulary practice, reading aloud, and as a gap fill exercise.

The researcher concludes that school is not a good place for Felek, Carlos and Santos:

[T]he learners described in this article are, educationally speaking, getting the worst of all worlds, despite the intentions of their teachers. A large part of the blame for this must be laid at the door of policy makers who fail to address ESOL teenagers as whole people with transnational, diasporic complexities and aspirations and who regard teachers as technicians. Blame might also be laid at the door of teacher education, which fails to envisage the potential of education as an arena for social transformation or to encourage teachers to develop as “transformative intellectuals.” (Cooke 2008, p. 37)

As Western societies are struggling to comprehend why so many young men from immigrant backgrounds are turning “bad,” Cooke’s research offers us a glimpse of how such large social processes play out in everyday interactions: how students become not what they hope to become but what others expect them to become.

References

Cooke, M. (2008). “What We Might Become”: The Lives, Aspirations, and Education of Young Migrants in the London Area Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 7 (1), 22-40 DOI: 10.1080/15348450701804698

Moore, H., Nicholas, H., & Deblaquiere, J. (2008). ‘Opening the Door’ Provision for Refugee Youth with Minimal/No Schooling in the Adult Migrant English Program Project 2.1: ‘Modes of Delivery for SPP Youth’. Canberra: Australian Government, Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Rist, R. C. (2015). On understanding the process of schooling: the contributions of labeling theory. In J. H. Ballantine & J. Z. Spade (Eds.), Schools and Society: A Sociological Approach to Education (pp. 47-56). London: Sage.

Children of migrant cotton field workers from Oklahoma (Source: Library of Congress)

I’ve just come across a fascinating article about the schooling of migrant children during the Great Depression era in the US West Coast states. The authors, Paul Theobald and Rubén Donato, tell a fascinating tale of the manipulation of schooling as an efficient way to perpetuate class relationships. By comparing two groups of rural migrants the article also offers an illuminating analysis of the intersections of class and ethnicity. The two groups are external migrants from Mexico and internal migrants from the dust bowl of the Great Plains states. The latter group came to be collectively known by the disparaging term ‘Okies,’ and is epitomized by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

In California, schooling for Mexicans had developed in the 19^th century in a way that systematically segregated Mexican children although Mexicans were not included in the legal provisions for segregation that applied to Asians, Blacks and Native Americans. In 1920, for instance, eighty percent of all Mexican children attended separate ‘Mexican schools’ or ‘Mexican classrooms.’ The justification for segregation was that Mexican students were ‘problem students’: they were stereotyped as slow learners with a language problem and un-American habits and values. Their racial status was also frequently debated and there were a number of efforts to have Mexicans classified as ‘Indian,’ which would have legalized their segregation.

Efforts to legalize the segregation of Mexicans were never successful and so their segregation was achieved through other means such as the construction of ‘Mexican’ schools, the gerrymandering of school attendance zones, and internal segregation through tracking. Segregation coupled with the irregular attendance of families who were seasonal agricultural workers resulted in very early dropout, and most Mexican children left school without having learnt how to read and write.

‘Fruit tramp’ family from Texas, 1935 (Source: Library of Congress)

In the early 1930s around 250,000 Mexicans, including US citizens, were deported to Mexico. This created a labor void, which desperate dust bowl migrants were eager to fill. Like Mexicans, Okies were despised because of their poverty and the burden they were seen to place on the taxpayer. In contrast to Mexicans, there was no readily-available ideology that would justify their segregation: they were white and English-speaking.

Okies disrupted the logic of agricultural work and segregation in California because here were white Americans doing ‘non-white’ work. This meant that the ‘inferior’ ethnicity of agricultural workers could no longer be used to justify their low wages and abominable working conditions. Theoretically, there were two options to deal with this dilemma:

Either the conditions and circumstances of agricultural labor would have to improve to meet white standards, or the Okies would have to be shown to be as inferior as Mexican migrants. Regrettably, there was (and is) no place like school for defining inferiority. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 34)

Although race and language were not available as rationales for segregation, the low quality of schooling in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas was. A 1939 survey found that ten percent of Okie migrant children were as far as four years behind their non-mobile Californian peers. Another twenty percent were three years behind and forty percent were two years behind. As a result school authorities felt compelled to institute ‘special’ classes for Okie children.

The result was the same as it was for Mexican children: poor attendance, early drop-out and dismal outcomes. A contemporary account explains the inferiority complex schooling instilled in Okie children:

Year by year, as they grow older, the embarrassment of their ignorance increases; held back sometimes four and five grades, when they enter new schools tall youths of 13 are out of place in classes with small-fry of 7. Bashful at their own backwardness and ashamed of their clothes or “foreign” accent, they stand out as easy targets for the venomed barbs of their richer and settled schoolmates. “He’s from the country camp, that’s what they said of my child on the school ground. Don’t you see how it hurts?” one transient mother explained. (Quoted in Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 35)

Okie child camping in Imperial Valley, California (Source: Library of Congress)

That the low quality of schooling in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas was nothing but a pretext for segregation is most apparent from the experience of children from the states of the northern Plains. Dust bowl migrants from the Dakotas entered predominantly Oregon and Washington. These two states had no history of segregation because agriculture was not yet industrialized and therefore there were few Mexican (or Asian) agricultural workers. Furthermore, the schooling system in the Dakotas was superior to that of Oregon and Washington. Even so, segregated schooling for Okie children developed in the Pacific Northwest, too.

The authors conclude that schooling during the period was designed to perpetuate the subordination of agricultural labor. When language and ethnicity fell away as ways to legitimize the processing of Mexican children into cheap labor, other legitimation strategies such as ‘educational backwardness’ were found.

It is also worth noting that the animosity towards Mexicans and Okies during the Great Depression was justified with their poverty, with the fact that they were a drain on the public purse. However, the segregated schooling instituted for these two groups was a more expensive educational option than integration would have been. Segregation involved the provision of separate buildings and the hiring of extra teachers.

If the maintenance of a docile, inexpensive labor system required social distance between the children of property owners and the children of harvest laborers, then a slightly inflated budget at the local school was, seemingly, a small price to pay. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 36)

It is also instructive to consider what happened after the Great Depression and the Second World War: Okies were integrated into the mainstream and took up jobs in production and industry. In fact, today even the term ‘Okie’ itself has disappeared as a social category. By contrast, Mexicans were forced back into agriculture and segregated schooling for Mexicans continued into the 1960s.

California pea pickers returning to camp after a day’s work in the field, near Santa Clara, California (Source: Library of Congress)

The class position of Okies took precedence over ethnicity during a time of economic crisis. However, when the crisis was over, Okies were not barred from class mobility in the same way that Mexicans were. This means that class in the United States is most restrictive when it is defined by ethnicity. But in whichever way class is circumscribed, schooling plays a crucial role in legitimizing class inequality because the basic principles of school finance, educational objectives and student evaluation are defined by those in power.

The authors conclude by asking what the enduring lessons of migrant schooling during the Great Depression might be:

Rural schools can either play the traditional role of agent in the solution of the legitimation crisis of the state, or they can begin to work to expose the unethical nature of America’s treatment of the countryside. (Theobald & Donato 1990, p. 43)

Theobald, P., & Donato, R. (1990). Children of the harvest: The schooling of dust bowl and Mexican migrants during the depression era Peabody Journal of Education, 67 (4), 29-45 DOI: 10.1080/01619569009538699