The conversation delves into ideological issues involved in the widespread use of machine translation and the real-life impact for those who may rely on machine translations in various situations. Esther’s research and the wide variety of contributions to the book highlight the need to open a discussion about instilling an ‘ethics of care’ perspective into the use of technology to make AI generated translations more inclusive and relevant for the communities using them.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (coming soon)

In this episode, Brynn and Dr. Cho discuss Dr. Cho’s new book, Multilingual Practices and Monolingual Mindsets: Critical Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Health Care Interpreting. With a novel approach, which sees interpreting as social activities infused with power, Dr. Cho’s research and this book have captured the dynamics of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic power relations in diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital, Life in a New Language, Linguistic Inclusion in Public Health Communications, and Interpreting service provision is good value for money.

If you liked this episode, be sure to say hello to Brynn and Language on the Move on Bluesky! Support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

(Image credit: Australian Government, Study Australia)

In her 2007 ethnographic study of eight US law schools, Elizabeth Mertz traces the process through which law students learn to “think like a lawyer” in order to become one. She shows how this process is essentially about language: learning to think like a lawyer means adopting new ways of reading, writing and talking.

Crucially, Mertz demonstrates that underlying these processes is a set of linguistic ideologies – assumptions we make about language and how it should manifest in particular social contexts. For example, she identifies a practice in legal analysis and reasoning, as taught in these classrooms: the social characteristics and personal perspectives of people who appear in legal cases and problem questions are rendered irrelevant and made invisible, in favour of the legally relevant facts. Issues of morality and emotion are likewise pushed aside as unimportant.

As students undergo this transformative process of learning to think and speak like a lawyer, Mertz questions the effects this may have on how law students see the world, their ability to see social diversity and inequality and to identify and challenge issues of injustice in their future work.

But what about how students think about themselves? What if they personally face marginalization? And what of their diverse language repertoires? If thinking like a lawyer depends on speaking like one, what is this speech expected to sound like? And what impact does sounding differently have on one’s sense of professional identity and self-worth?

These were just some of the questions raised in my recent digital ethnographic research with students enrolled in a Graduate Diploma in Migration Law and Practice (GDMLP). This one-year university program is required for people who do not have an Australian legal qualification to become Registered Migration Agents (RMAs) and offer professional assistance to people applying for a visa in Australia. Unlike law degrees, which remain difficult to access for many, it has been estimated that at least half of the GDMLP cohort has English as a second language (L2), and perhaps even more are first generation migrants.

I attended online workshops during which students practiced their client interviewing skills through role-plays, observing this practical work and debriefing with them. I also conducted research interviews with students at various points during their study and after graduating, over a period of three years. To have immediate impact, I also offered my interdisciplinary expertise to enhance learning, presenting on various aspects of communication, and helping the teaching team to develop and refine learning materials (see Smith-Khan & Giles 2025).

In a new article, I share some of the ways students talk and think about their study, their future professional goals, their existing strengths, and the skills they wish to improve and how. The discussions brought up beliefs about language, closely tied to ideas about proficiency, professionalism and identity.

Bilingualism: optional benefit, real risk

While every participant who speaks multiple languages planned to use them in their future job, with at least some of their clients, there was a clear hierarchy in how different languages were valued, with English appearing at the apex as non-negotiable, and other languages more as optional extras (see also Piller & Gerber 2021).

Paolo*  The English level, I think it’s very very important too.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    I’m Italian, as I said before, I work with a lot of Italians, and they don’t speak English. And will have, a hundred percent sure that I will have a lot of consultations within Italian community. I will go to Italy to do seminars, and that will be in Italian.

Laura   Yeah.

Paolo    So in that way, if you think in that, in that way, you don’t need English, okay?

Laura   Yes.

Paolo    I mean, ‘I don’t need to have a very high English level, because my-, ‘I’m Chinese, I just talk in Mandarin, my consultation in Mandarin, my clients are in Mandarin.’ Okay. And it makes sense. But then you have to do applications in English, you have to study the uh legislation in English. So if the legislation, if you don’t understand properly the legislation, if you mixed up a word, all your translation in Chinese, or in Italian, or in any other language, won’t be, won’t be correct.

Okay? So it’s very, very important that they understand, the people that they want to become a migration agent, that they understand everything. [Paolo, interview 1/2, 2020]

On one level, this makes perfect sense: the work does indeed require close engagement with legal and institutional texts that are only available in English, and application forms required to be submitted to the Immigration Department only are allowed in English. However, this type of discourse also assumes bilingualism is a potential risk to English language proficiency: rather than acknowledging the crucial skills bilingual and multilingual people bring to this work, the fact that they speak more than one language is regarded as a threat to their English. This resembles political and institutional discourses in which the ‘monolingual mindset’ is evident, including in the language proficiency rules around becoming an RMA, and in other areas like skilled migration and university admission, where proficiency is assumed for some, but not for others (Smith-Khan 2021a; Piller & Bodis, 2023). Such discourses are also evident in public political debates about migration and registered migration agents (Smith-Khan 2021b).

‘Australian’ native speakers and language choice

Perceptions about identity are also closely connected with these types of ideologies. As L2 English speakers discuss their experiences and efforts to develop speaking skills in class and connect these evaluations with their future language practices and career plans.

Gemma: If you have poor communication you give them the impression you’re not professional. You probably have lots of knowledge in your mind but you just can’t express yourself properly, or too slow, or I don’t know. You’ve got to give them, the client the impression that oh no, you are professional. I can trust you. You can do the job for me. So I try to, the reason why I said um, um, the native English speaker is better, probably that’s just one side about um, they easily use language um, uh, like more vocabulary than us. We can’t use like beautiful words or whatever it is to express myself uh, precisely. So uh, that will give client the impression like, you not professional like I can’t trust you…. So, yes. So that’s why I said if I speak to Chinese, probably I’ll be more confident. They, they will, will feel less, um, less suspicious. I don’t know. Um, less, how will I say? Um, more trust on you than English-speaking people. [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020]

Evaluations like these compare L2 English speakers’ skills vis-à-vis what they consider the ideal student and future RMA, an L1 English speaker, with implications for professional identity and future work plans. They also link general professional competence with language proficiency and oral fluency, something that again also comes up in the broader discourse (see Smith-Khan 2021b).

However, these ideologies extend even further, to national identity and moral worth.

Gemma: Yes, with my, one of my classmates… Uh, at the beginning it wasn’t very good. Oh, he’s local. He’s Australian. And he’s very, I feel he pick up very quickly and easily and then he has to put up with me because I have to think. And, you know, thinking probably slower than, than him and then speak slowly. Uh, yes so I find the difference and I try to, I just want to try to improve that by talking more [Gemma, interview 1/1, 2020].

In this encounter, Gemma evaluates herself in relation to an “Australian”, “local” L1-speaking classmate. Here, speaking and thinking are closely connected, and she comes out positioned as a burden in the interaction – something her classmate must “put up with” because of her slower thinking and speaking.

While such discourse is not surprising in this particular social and political context, it sits uneasily against the facts we have about Gemma’s personal and professional background, along with the direct linguistic data collected in the project. She came to Australia as a skilled migrant and was granted a permanent visa because of her professional qualifications. She has been an Australian citizen for over a decade, working as a civil servant in a professional role, in a regional Australian city, in a highly monolingual English office environment. Her English language proficiency is indisputably high. Yet her evaluation demonstrates the power of native-speaker and monolingual mindset ideologies about languages: her capability, her professionalism, and even her nationality become inferior and vulnerable to the point that she imagines herself as at best a burden, and at worst incapable of being trusted, for an L1 English speaking audience in this context (see Piller et al 2024).

Hard work, pushback and pragmatism

However, all is not lost for this group of aspiring migration practitioners. Both L1 and L2 English speakers heavily stressed the need to practice speaking and to study hard to continue to improve their professional skills. While this emphasises individual responsibility and creates an additional burden for L2 speakers, it still allows for a degree of agency and a sense of opportunity: developing professional skills and identity are not regarded as impossible.

At the same time, students also demonstrated a critical awareness of the broader social and political contexts, and what these mean for how people are (sometimes unfairly) evaluated. For example, one student pointed to the broader political context of migration and perceptions of migrants to make sense of how RMAs are perceived: if the government is “very anti-immigration”, it follows that RMAs would be seen as “unnecessary” or a “pain to deal with”, and it would be made difficult for them to enter the profession.

Another student pushed back against the apparent need for people to speak standard Australian English. Nitin explained how whether someone comes across as rude can be a matter of the listener’s perception. He was thus able to turn the spotlight onto the interlocutor, who may misjudge L2 speakers who “don’t have those little, nice touches” in their speech, rather than the “deficient” speaker, and at the same time claim an advantage over L1 interlocutors, as more compassionate and knowledgeable in interactions involving speakers of diverse language varieties or proficiency. However, Nitin still ends on a pragmatic note, related to his own lived reality:

Nitin: People, when I talked to the native speakers here, sometimes they’d think I’m talking rude. My colleagues said that on a few occasions, and I started thinking, what was rude in that? … So I adapted it over a period of about nine years. Now I know what to speak and what not to speak. [Nitin, interview 1/2, 2020]

Therefore, while it is clear that students may come to internalize linguistic ideologies that frame their language practices and repertoires as inferior or in need of ongoing improvement, there is still space to reclaim and challenge these ideologies. However, even while doing so, they must still navigate the very real and enduring practical effects such ideologies have within their social and professional contexts.

Note

*Participant names are pseudonyms.

References

Mertz, E. (2007). The language of law school: Learning to “think like a lawyer”. Oxford University Press.

Piller, I. & Bodis, A. (2024). Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission. Language in Society, 53(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000689

Piller, I. & Gerber, L. (2021). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, (24)5, 622-635. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227

Piller, I. et al. (2024). Life in a New Language. Oxford University Press.

Smith-Khan, L. (2025, AOP). Language, culture and professional communication in migration law education, Language, Culture and Curriculum, https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2025.2481051

Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘Common language’ and proficiency tests: a critical examination of registration requirements for Australian registered migration agents. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 97–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1900031

Smith-Khan, L. (2021b). Deficiencies and loopholes: Clashing discourses, problems and solutions in Australian migration advice regulation. Discourse & Society, 32(5), 598-621. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265211013113

Smith-Khan, L., & Giles, C. (2025, AOP). Improving client communication skills in migration law and practice education. Alternative Law Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X251314205

Sunjoo Kim (middle) graduating from her Master of Research

Whenever I write an email to a professor, there is one question lingering in my mind: Should I say “Dr + Last Name” or just “First Name”?

It might look like a simple question, but it exemplifies a deeper cultural dilemma to me.

When I was in university back in Korea, a professor from the U.S. asked us to call him by his first name, not the last name or job title. I understood what I had to do, but was it easy for me? Not really. It took me a while to get used to it. This is because the culture of address terms is quite different in Korea.

In English, first names can be used regardless of age and hierarchical dynamics in relationships without causing offense. This, however, hardly happens in Korean unless they are close friends of the same age. To be specific, addressing someone older and superior by their first name is impossible, unless I want to pick a fight. Likewise, age and social hierarchy are the core elements that have been deeply rooted in Korean society, playing a salient role in the choice of address terms.

Instead of first names, Koreans tend to choose alternatives including kinship terms and professional titles. Kinship terms, such as unni (older sister, 언니) and oppa (older brother, 오빠) are extensively used to non-family members. Professional titles are used as a generic way to address someone politely. For example, I can call someone sacangnim (CEO, 사장님). It does not necessarily mean that he or she is the head of the company. Rather, it is one of the most neutral and polite titles I can use. All choices depend on the nature of the interpersonal relationship.

The complexity of the societal and cultural characteristics reflected in the use of address terms poses a significant challenge in translation. The challenge gets exacerbated in subtitle translation, combined with spatial and temporal limitations. Multiple layers of relational dynamics and cultural nuances can easily get lost and simplified in translation. In relation to this, for my Master of Research, I explored subtitle translation of Korean address terms.

More Than Meets the Eye: Indexical Analysis on Korean Address Terms in Subtitle Translation

Abstract: Cultural references are one of the most significant challenges in subtitle translation. One example is Korean address terms due to their complexity and multiple dimensions reflecting societal and cultural values in Korea. In this vein, this thesis investigates the translation of address terms in English subtitles of one Korean drama, within the theoretical framework of indexicality as conceptualised by Michael Silverstein (1976). Adopting power, solidarity and intimacy (Lee & Cho, 2013) as an analytical prism, the thesis examines the complex interplay of each dimension to construct the non-referential indexicality of the address terms. The drama, Misaeng (Incomplete Life), which portrays corporate settings where Korean societal cultural values are well-reflected, was chosen for the data set. Thirty cases of address terms within a variety of interpersonal relationships from the drama were chosen to explore the formulation of indexical meaning and how it is transferred into the English subtitles. By adopting qualitative analysis focusing on both linguistic and multimodal elements, results from the study underscore the dynamic fluctuations of indexicality depending on the contextual dimension of the interaction, which makes the translation challenging in reflecting this whole range of indexical meanings. This leads to the inevitable indexical meaning gaps between the original and the subtitles. However, non-linguistic elements contribute to understanding of the indexical meaning, which mitigates the limitations of linguistic translation. The findings indicate that, although the translation of Korean address terms has been domesticated to be aligned with the target culture, this practice of domestication may change in a direction to keep the cultural references as much as possible. This study suggests the need for a subtitle translation direction that can preserve indexicality for global audiences to have a better cross-cultural experience, with relevance to the global attention to Korean cultural products.

You can download and read the full thesis from here.

Translation helps bridge language barriers. With the global rise of Korean culture, now is the time to move towards a translation practice preserving the original cultural depth as much as possible. This will open global audiences’ eyes to the unseen layers and help them genuinely enjoy the culture, as there is so much more than meets the eye.

References

Lee, K., & Cho, Y. (2013). Beyond ‘power and solidarity’: Indexing intimacy in Korean and Japanese terms of address. Korean Linguistics, 15(1), 73-100. https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.15.1.04lee

Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. Meaning in anthropology. https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/Courses/ParisPapers/Silverstein1976.pdf

A lack of legal literacy can affect migrants – and indeed anyone – across all aspects of social life. This can include everything from signing a contract with an electricity provider, through earning a living, to having a safe and dignified marriage.

Legal professionals suggest that recent migrants may be special targets of a range of scams and exploitation because they are more likely to lack legal literacy, may lack information about available assistance, or may not be capable of accessing those services even when they do know about them.

However, this is not due simply to a lack of inclination to learn about the law. Rather, the development of legal literacy is dependent on the accessibility of information and education. For those with limited or no English, this naturally requires the provision of resources in other languages and accessible formats, in locations where their target audiences can find them.

While the various government and non-government bodies tasked with providing information about the law have already taken a range of measures to make their resources more accessible to non-English speakers and readers, barriers persist. These barriers can even influence the form of exploitation people face. For example, a lawyer I interviewed in my most recent project shared the story of a man who had migrated to Australia in the late 1990s and became trapped in a highly exploitative work arrangement:

you see the signs from the very beginning. Like, he didn’t have an accountant, he’ll use [his employer’s] accountant. And that accountant played around with his papers. They put him in a house on top of the shop. They denied him English lessons. So, till this day, I speak to him in Arabic, even though my Arabic’s not perfect.

In this scenario, it was only when the man’s workplace injuries became so severe that he insisted on seeing a doctor that he was eventually able to learn about his rights and access legal assistance. Among other measures, his exploiters intentionally limited his English language acquisition opportunities as a form of abusive control, to prevent him learning of his rights and seeking help.

This only reinforces the importance of providing resources in a range of languages, and clearly demonstrates the inappropriateness of claims that individual migrants are responsible for learning English as a prerequisite to accessing full inclusion in society and protection of the law.

Unfortunately, his case is far from being an exception. News reports uncover myriad examples, from international students underpaid with justifications that their limited English meant they weren’t good enough for minimum wage, to asylum seekers threatened with deportation if they didn’t comply with forced labour arrangements.

The complex and interconnected barriers recent migrants, especially those with temporary visas, often face means holistic responses are needed for them to access their rights. However ultimately, seeking justice still hinges on them first having knowledge about what those rights are and the processes and resources available to have them enforced. This is not possible unless relevant information is available in a language and format accessible to them.

The landing page

While service providers and regulatory bodies appear aware of this issue and have taken steps to address it, less is known about how accessible the resources and mechanisms are in practice (Victoria Law Foundation 2016). Further, beyond these formal offerings, less still is known about how migrants with limited English actually learn about Australian law and how it applies in their lives.

The Legal Aid bodies in each Australian state are tasked with providing a range of legal services. This includes providing free legal assistance and advice to some individuals, based on need. However another of their statutory functions is what is commonly called Community Legal Education and Information (CLEI) (e.g. Legal Aid Commission Act 1979 (NSW), section 10(2)(j),(k),(m)). This means that they are required to develop and disseminate informational resources and training to help increase the community’s legal literacy.

This is considered a crucial component to ensuring the whole community, and particularly recent migrants and those with limited or no English, can access justice, but we do not yet have a comprehensive picture of what is currently on offer, nor how well it works for these particular groups. Therefore, the peak body of the Australian legal profession has called for research to address the gaps in evidence to ensure migrants’ linguistic and other forms of diversity are understood and incorporated into efforts to improve community legal literacy (Law Council of Australia 2018).

The internet is a popular starting point for individuals looking for all types of information and existing studies on multilingual communications on the websites for government schools and multiple government service providers suggest that much work remains done to ensure that multilingual government communications are both complete and accessible for their target audiences. Therefore, in May, to start exploring the legal literacy resources available for non-English speakers, I undertook a pilot audit of Legal Aid NSW’s website.

The website

Information about Apprehended Violence Orders in Spanish

Legal Aid NSW offers a range of CLEI, with varying accessibility for non-English speakers and readers. As someone with English literacy, the landing page immediately presents me with a promising ‘My problem is about’ section. This part of the website helpfully guides readers step-by-step, in accessible plain language and appealing format, across a wide range of legal issues, e.g. ‘My job’, ‘Disasters’, ‘My rights as’ and ‘Visas and immigration’. Another section provides lay definitions of legal terms. These reflect an evident broader commitment to enhancing the accessibility of the site as a whole. However, these two sections are only available in English. Similarly, face-to-face and online legal education courses are advertised, but all current offerings appear to be in English only.

Another section provides a large collection of resources, like posters and pamphlets, organized across various topics, providing information about legal issues and available services. Some are provided in languages other than English (LOTEs). However, again, non-English speakers have significantly less access. Of the total 233 resources identified, only 40 are available in more than one language. Even then, most only include a few common LOTEs, e.g. Arabic (37), Chinese (36), Vietnamese (29), Dari/Farsi (16). Further, LOTEs are included inconsistently, e.g. Women’s Domestic Violence Court Advocacy information is offered in 13 languages, including several not used in any other resource. In contrast, all resources in the Disasters, Covid-19, Prisoners, and Young People topics are in English only. All resources are written texts (some with images), meaning only those with literacy can access them, a barrier for some refugees, for example, even in their first language (see e.g. Ba Akhlagh & Mehana 2024). Finally, when LOTE versions exist, it appears they cannot be located without English language literacy: the search function seems to operate only with English key words, and the resources are sorted and labelled in English.

One section of the website is more broadly navigable in many LOTEs. The ‘Ways to get help’ section provides information on how to access legal assistance and is available in 31 languages.  However again, there are inconsistencies between languages, e.g. the Spanish version largely replicates the original, with a full overview and four subsections covering contacts, legal advice, help at court, and applying for legal aid. In contrast, others, like Italian and Pashto, have no overview and only two subsections. Others have only an overview and no subsections. Some links lead readers back to English-only content, and website navigation menus remain in English even when on LOTE pages.

Where to from here?

Existing reviews and scholarship emphasise intersectional considerations when examining and addressing barriers to justice. For example, providing multilingual resources in written form only will not reach people who lack literacy or have low or no vision. Telephone information services and audio resources may be inaccessible for migrants who are deaf or hard of hearing (Smith-Khan 2022). Living in a regional area decreases access to language supports more readily available in urban centres, increasing the importance of LOTE resources. Similarly, not all LOTES are equal: speakers of ‘emerging’ community languages (e.g. recently arrived refugee communities) often have less language support, and issues with correctly identifying and categorising minority dialects and languages can lead to unsuitable translation and interpreting (Victorian Law Foundation 2016, pp 8-9; Tillman 2023).

Spanish word search

These considerations must inform the design and prioritization of resources in particular languages. For instance, while it seems logical to offer resources in commonly spoken LOTEs, speakers of these languages often have a higher level of English proficiency than speakers of emerging languages, who may often also face additional vulnerabilities (Grey & Severin 2021, 2022).

This brief pilot has obviously only uncovered what is publicly available via a website: qualitative research is needed to understand how service providers like Legal Aid NSW develop their resources and how legal, policy, and practical considerations influence their choices. At the same time, research could also provide insight into migrants’ decision-making. By better understanding how recent arrivals and people with limited English find out about the law, research could provide valuable evidence to policymakers and service providers to continue to make community legal literacy efforts more universally accessible.

References

Ba Akhlagh, S & Mehana, M. ‘Challenges and opportunities in designing culturally appropriate resources to support refugee families’ (2024) 8(1) Linking Research to the Practice of Education 2.
Grey, A & Severin A, ‘An audit of NSW legislation and policy on the government’s public communications in languages other than English’ (2021) 30(1) Griffith Law Review 122.
——— ‘Building towards best practice for governments’ public communication in LOTEs’ (2022)31(1) Griffith Law Review 25
Smith-Khan, L. ‘Inclusive processes for refugees with disabilities’ in Rioux et al(eds), Handbook of Disability (Springer Nature, 2022)
Tillman, M ‘Ezidi refugees in Armidale say gap in language […]service impacts health care (2023) ABC https://tinyurl.com/2vz3x8s9
Victoria Law Foundation, Legal information in languages other than English (2016) https://tinyurl.com/3nr5vndb

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Laura Smith-Khan and Alex Grey

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Dr Jinhyun Cho

Dr Jinhyun Cho has investigated interplays between monolingualism and multilingual practices in courtrooms, with a focus on interpreters. Focusing on linguistic, institutional and cultural hierarchies in Australian legal spaces, Dr Jinhyun Cho’s work has revealed how power differentials influence the choices that legal interpreters make in the course of interpreting and drawn attention to the need for legal professionals to enhance their awareness of interpreting through the formalisation of multilingualism within university-level studies of law. She is based at Macquarie University in Australia.

Her 2024 collaborative work on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (the ECCC) represents her broad interdisciplinary approach which brings together interpreting, sociolinguistics and law.

Recent publications

Killean, R., Grey, R., Cho, J., & Stern, L. (2024). Translating atrocity at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. New Mandala.
Cho, J. (2021). Intercultural communication in interpreting: Power and choices. Routledge.
Cho, J. (2021). ‘That’s not how we speak’: interpreting monolingual ideologies in courtrooms. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 50-70.

Research project team (L-R): Dr Julie Lim, Professor Ludmila Stern, Professor Sandra Hale, Associate Professor Melanie Schwartz and Professor Stephen Doherty, April 2024

Professor Sandra Hale

In addition to her role in the project led by Ludmila Stern described below, Sandra Hale and another team at the University of New South Wales in Australia (Prof Jane Goodman-Delahunty, Dr Natalie Martschuk and Dr Susan Brandon) have been working since 2020 on a project funded by the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation entitled ‘Remote simultaneous interpreting in investigative interviews: The effect of language and interpreter training on deception detection, interpreting accuracy and witness credibility’. Keep an eye out for publications coming out of this project soon.

Recent publications

Hale, S., Martschuk, N., Goodman-Delahunty, J. & Lim, J. (30 Apr 2024): Juror perceptions in bilingual interpreted trials, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice.
Hale, S., Lim, J., Martschuk, N., & Goodman-Delahunty, J. (2023). Note-taking in court interpreting: Interpreter perceptions and practices in a simulated trial. The International Journal for Translation & Interpreting Research, pp.1-21.
Hale, S., Goodman-Delahunty, J., Martschuk, N., & Lim, J. (2022). Does interpreter location make a difference? A study of remote vs face-to-face interpreting in simulated police interviews. Interpreting:  International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting, 24(2), pp.221-253.

Michael Jones

Michael Jones has been involved with the interpreting and translation profession for over 40 years and has worked as a NAATI accredited translator and interpreter between English and Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish (NAATI is Australia’s National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters). He likes to call himself a language nerd. He has always been fascinated with languages since growing up in Sydney near two of the old migrant camps of the 1960s. He studied Linguistics at Sydney University in the 1970s.

As a lawyer specialising in immigration and citizenship law, Michael Jones also works extensively with interpreters and translators in courts, tribunals and other professional settings, and is happy to share his experiences and observations with others studying the field.

Dr Rachel Killean and Dr Rosemary Grey

In 2023, University of Sydney Law School researchers Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey launched a new project ‘Translating Atrocity: Bridging language barriers in Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal.’ The project focuses on challenges of interpretation and translation arising in the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC) which works across the Khmer, English and French languages. Drawing on their original interviews with translators and interpreters who worked at the court, Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey are identifying Khmer terms that have been difficult to translate into English and French and vice-versa; examining how translation challenges have been addressed; and assessing how translators and interpreters have affected the tribunal’s capacity to assess evidence and communicate effectively with the public. The findings have potential value for the functioning of other international tribunals, including the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Members of the public arriving at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia to hear its main judgment (Image credit: Rosemary Grey, Phnom Penh, 2018

Rachel Killean and Rosemary Grey hope to continue collaborations with translation studies scholars, as well as interpreters/translators working in international criminal justice.

Recent publications

Killean, R., Grey, R. (2023). Interpretation and Translation in Atrocity Trials: Insights from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Cambridge International Law Journal, 12(2), 211-234.
Grey, R. (2022). Translating Gender Diversity in International Criminal Law: An Impossible but Necessary Goal. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 47(2), 163-186.
Killean, R., Grey, R., Cho, J. and Stern. L., ‘Translating atrocity at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal‘, New Mandala, 17 January 2024.
Grey, R. and Stern, L., ‘“Kadago’ in the Courtroom: Language Disputes in Atrocity Trials‘, Opinio Juris, 31 January 2024:

Dr Lucy Xin LIU

Dr Lucy Liu Xin’s research centres on the accuracy of Mandarin-English court interpreting and its implications for due process. She is particularly interested in exploring the interface between interpreting and pragmatics in legal settings. Her recent work explores the multimodal aspects of court interpreting, such as examining multimodal turn-taking strategies of court interpreters and utilizing acoustic tools for the analysis of courtroom discourse. She is based at Dalian University of Technology in China.

Recent publications

Liu, X., & Wang, C. (2023). How Does Interpreter’s Intonation Affect the Pragmatics of Courtroom Questions? A Case Study of Chinese-English Court Interpreting. In J. Zhao, D. Li, & V. L. C. Lei (Eds.), New Advances in Legal Translation and Interpreting (pp. 137-162). Singapore: Springer.
Liu, X. (2020). Pragmalinguistic challenges for trainee interpreters in achieving accuracy: An analysis of questions and their translation in five cross-examinations. Interpreting, 22(1), 87-116.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2020). Interpreting Studies. In S. Laviosa & M. González Davies (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education (pp. 226-244). Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2019). Ensuring interpreting quality in legal and courtroom settings: Australian Language Service Providers’ perspectives on their role. The Journal of Specialised Translation(32), 90-120.
Stern, L., & Liu, X. (2019). See you in court: How do Australian institutions train legal interpreters? The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 13(4), 361-389.

Dr Laura Smith-Khan

Laura Smith-Khan’s work explores how multilingualism is managed in and conceptualized by tribunals and courts in the context of assessing credibility in asylum applications in Australia. This was one focus of her doctoral research and has continued to be an area of interest in her more recent work.

She has also examined how migration lawyers and agents play a role in mediating multilingual communication in migration procedures, both at the initial application stage and at the tribunal, when an appeal is necessary. This work has led her to travel to Belgium in 2023 to spend time at Ghent University as a visiting scholar, and where she continues to have an external affiliation with UGhent’s Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees. She has presented her research to judges and other decision-makers from Australia and internationally and it has also been cited in EU Agency for Asylum guidance on credibility and evidence assessment.

Recent publications

Smith-Khan, L. (forthcoming). Incredible language and refugee legal processes: Challenging asylum credibility assessments, in J Setter et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice.
Maryns, K., Smith-Khan, L. & Jacobs, M. (2023). Multilingualism in asylum and migration procedures, in McKinney et al (eds), Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, 2^nd ed, Ch. 26.
Smith-Khan, L. (2023). Incorporating sociolinguistic perspectives in Australian refugee credibility assessments: The case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 24, 727-743 (invited contribution for special issue).
Smith-Khan, L. (2021). ‘I Try Not to Be Dominant, but I’m a Lawyer!’: Advisor Resources, Context and Refugee Credibility. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(4), 3710-3733.
Smith-Khan, L. (2019). Why refugee visa credibility assessments lack credibility: A critical discourse analysis, Griffith Law Review, 28(4), 406-430.

Professor Ludmila Stern

Professor Ludmila Stern is leading a team including Professor Sandra Hale, Professor Stephen Doherty and Associate Professor Melanie Schwartz from the University of New South Wales in Australia and a number of partner organizations on the project, Access to justice in interpreted proceedings: The role of Judicial Officers, funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant.

The research team is examining the ways judicial officers can improve courtroom communication and prevent miscommunication and error, particularly in criminal cases where speakers of ‘new and emerging’ and First Nations languages are involved, and where interpreters receive limited or no specialised training. Using an interdisciplinary approach that involves court observations, interviews with judicial officers and interpreters, and discourse analysis of court transcripts, the project aims to generate new knowledge about the variations in judicial officers’ communications practice when working with interpreters, and their impact on the effective transmission of information in the courtroom.

Having initially started in two international courts, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia / International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals and the International Criminal Court, the project then focused on the way judges and magistrates work in interpreted proceedings in Australia courts, with field work now completed in the Australian jurisdictions of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao recently completed her PhD on interpreting studies at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Her PhD project investigated the impact of court-specific factors on Simultaneous Interpreting performance and explains these factors’ effects using Cognitive Load Theory. Her research has provided empirical evidence that enhances the understanding of the impact of task-, environment-, and interpreter-related factors on Simultaneous Interpreting performance in the court context. Additionally, it offers insights into interpreter training and professional practices that align with both national and international standards aimed at improving interpreters’ working conditions.

Dr Xiaoyu Zhao is currently working as an adjunct lecturer at Monash University in Australia and as a research fellow at the Monash Suzhou Research Institute in China. Her current research projects include a corpus analysis of interpreted texts in court settings and court interpreting pedagogy.

Recent publications

Zhao, X. (2023). A multidimensional investigation of cognitive load and performance over time during simultaneous interpreting between English and Mandarin Chinese [Doctoral dissertation, UNSW Syndey]. UNSWorks.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to multilingualism in courts and tribunals, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next “LLIRN About Us” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Upcoming Events

Multilingualism in courts and tribunals is the focus of two presentations scheduled within a themed session at the upcoming Australian Linguistic Society Conference (26-29 November at ANU). The session’s overall theme is ‘Law-and-Linguistics Research: Language, Diversity and Inclusion in Law’, and includes:

• Joseph van Buuren presenting new research on Australian criminal appeal judgements where applicants claim they have been denied rights or procedural fairness on the basis of language difference;
• Helen Fraser promoting inclusivity and justice in the use of language as forensic evidence by analysing the origins of linguistic ideologies and misconceptions in the law.

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Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 07/07/2024)

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. Ella van Hest. Ella is a postdoctoral research associate at Ghent University in Belgium at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication, where she is a member of the MULTIPLES research group. She is also affiliated with the interdisciplinary Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees, also known as CESSMIR. Her research interests include language and migration, multilingual communication, (non-professional) interpreting, and language policy. Her previous research for her MA focused on the effects of Flemish language and integration policy on adult newcomers to Belgium.

Today we are going to talk about the research that she conducted for her PhD, which was a linguistic ethnography on language diversity at an abortion clinic in Belgium. The paper, which she co-wrote with July De Wilde and Sarah Van Hoof, is entitled Language policy at an abortion clinic: linguistic capital and agency in treatment decision-making and was published in 2023.

Ella, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr van Hest: Thank you for inviting me.

Brynn: To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to wanting to conduct research into the language practices of an abortion clinic in Belgium for your PhD?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, sure. So actually, when I was 17 years old and I had to make a decision on what to study, I just knew for sure, okay, I want to do something for languages. Like at that point, I was not so reflexive or so aware of what linguistics actually was or what you could do with it.

But I really wanted to do something with languages. So I started Applied Linguistics, German and Spanish, and then into Dutch, which is my native language. And after that, I did a master’s in interpreting.

And well, as I said, at that point, I was not so aware of all the options within linguistics and all the sub fields, but it sort of started when I was doing my master thesis research that I really got interested in the link between language and migration, and especially what it is like for people who come to Belgium, for instance, or any other host society, so to speak. How is it for them if they are learning the language, which was what I focused on for my master thesis, or how is it for them when they don’t speak the language, they’re needing language support, which was then the focus for my PhD research. So that’s how I sort of got interested in that.

And then the fact that I ended up doing research on abortion care and linguistic diversity in abortion care in Belgium was sort of a matter of, okay, what is an unknown context, an underexplored context or setting to study language diversity, because we already know something about it in other medical contexts, for instance, but I thought, okay, abortion care is so relevant and so understudied. And yeah, that’s actually a little bit how I ended up doing that. And I’m also, I have to say, I’ve been very grateful for the clinic, the abortion clinic where I could carry out my research that they allowed me in and let me do that ethnographic research there.

Brynn: That’s what I found so interesting about your paper was the setting. The research that I’m doing for my PhD also looks at medical settings and how language is assessed and how linguistic proficiency is assessed and then how interpreters are then called or used or not used. That’s what was so interesting in reading your paper was that it was at an abortion clinic, which I personally haven’t come across before. But as you said, it is such an important setting where we do need to know more about what happens with language at this clinic.

And in the paper, you start off by talking about the language policy of that clinic where you were conducting the research. This particular institution’s policy said that a patient seeking a medical abortion needed to have a strong proficiency in Dutch, English or French.

Can you just tell us as listeners, what exactly is a medical abortion? How does that differ from a surgical abortion? And why did the clinic state that this language policy was necessary?

Dr van Hest: That was indeed the most important point of this particular paper that we’re discussing now, which was also published in the Journal of Language Policy. So, like the focus was really on that particular aspect of the linguistic diversity in the clinic, because I also focused on, as you mentioned, right, like using interpreters or not, or also conversational, interactional dynamics of multilingual counselling sessions.

But for this particular paper, the focus was on this language policy about medical abortion. So, what is medical abortion? Well, in Belgium and also in a lot of other countries, but there are some differences, but in Belgium, usually women, when they want to terminate the pregnancy, they can choose between two different treatment types.

And one is a medical abortion and the other one is surgical. And the medical abortion, which this paper is mainly about, consists of taking several pills, medication. Usually this is done in two phases, but again, there are differences in approaches and in other countries, sometimes they only use one type of medication or they do it in a different way.

So, but the situation in Belgium is that usually women first take medication that blocks the pregnancy hormone. And then later on, like two days later, they have to take medication that actually will make the uterus contract and cause a miscarriage. So that’s one treatment option.

And that’s very different from a surgical abortion where it’s actually a doctor who performs the abortion, who empties the uterus via a suction, like a suction aspiration. And so those are two completely different types of treatments. And there’s some factors that influence eligibility.

For instance, pregnancy duration. And here there’s differences between countries, but in Belgium generally, they limit it until about eight, nine weeks of pregnancy. Because after that term, the foetus is larger and it could lead to more complications.

So, a surgical abortion is preferred. And then there’s also all other kinds of medical or psychosocial factors that could influence the decision for which treatment. But, and that’s the main point of this paper, in this particular clinic, also language plays a huge role.

And it’s actually a little bit complicated, so maybe bear with me. The whole point of this medical abortion, as I just explained, it’s about taking medication on two different days and it’s about your body causing you to have a miscarriage. And it’s really a whole process of managing, it’s a woman who has to sort of do the work.

There is a small risk of complications. It’s very small, it’s a very safe procedure in general, but something might happen, and usually that’s excessive blood loss. But in any case, these complications might occur.

And especially since COVID, there’s a lot of emphasis on making sure that the clinic can follow up while women are doing this treatment at home. So, before the pandemic, that’s also, I didn’t specify that earlier on, but a large part of my data collection was during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, the clinic made sure to sort of plan the two phases of the medication in the clinic.

So, women would have that miscarriage in the clinic usually, but also there, there was sometimes, the problem sometimes was that the miscarriage did not happen in the foreseen timeframe. And so, they reserved a certain time slot for women to be in the clinic to have that miscarriage, but then in some cases it didn’t happen. And then they sort of, they had to send her home and say, look, okay, you’re going to have this miscarriage at some point during the day.

In case there’s anything wrong or you have questions, you need to call us on this phone number. And so that’s where phone communication, verbal communication comes in and that’s where language starts playing a key role. And during the pandemic, the clinic decided sort of as a measure to limit the amount of people present in one physical space, right?

They said, okay, let’s do all these miscarriages from home. So, like, let’s have the women manage the miscarriage from home all by themselves, but with telephone backup, right? So, it’s sort of almost like a kind of help line to call the clinic, but not even just a help line.

Like they were actually also really supposed to call the clinic between a certain timeframe during a treatment to update them. Like how is it going? How is the blood loss? How is the treatment going?

And so, with that in mind, the clinic said, okay, this is too complicated when there’s a language barrier. When we cannot understand each other, it’s very hard for us to assess, are these cramps normal? Is this too much blood loss or is it a normal amount should we send this woman to emergency care or not? Yeah, what is she feeling? How is she doing?

And so, to ensure safety, the clinic said, okay, look, if there’s too much of a language barrier, we don’t offer this option. And as you mentioned, Dutch, English and French are the three languages which are allowed, so to speak, to have the medical abortion. So, if a woman has some or enough proficiency, whatever that is, because the definition of what exactly is enough proficiency is not that clear-cut.

But in any case, she needs to have proficiency in one of those languages. And that’s a logical consequence of the linguistic reality in Flanders, which is where I carried out my research. So in Flanders, Dutch is the official language, mother tongue of all the staff working in the clinic.

But since we’re in Belgium, and French is another official language, many of the staff also speak some French. And then there’s English as the global language that everyone in high school learns and is supposed to know or have proficiency in when they look for jobs and so on. So those three institutional languages, so to speak, are okay for being eligible for a medical abortion.

It’s quite complicated. It has to do with safety and the unpredictability as well of the medical abortion. Perhaps I did not emphasise that enough before, but I talked about the small risk of complications, but there’s just also a general unpredictability in the sense that with surgical abortion, you know upfront very clearly, treatment is going to happen like this and it’s going to take about 20 minutes.

Whereas with the medical abortion, for some women, this miscarriage happens within three, four hours. For others, it can last up to even 24 hours. So there’s a very high variation in how smooth it goes, also in terms of pain, like some women experience like bearable cramps, others have a lot of cramps, a lot of pain.

And so that’s why it’s so hard to manage. And that’s why communication plays a key role for this clinic.

Brynn: And it’s really interesting that what you mentioned about the communication on the telephone being so important, and especially in this sort of post-COVID world, and like you said, collecting this data during COVID, all across the world, we all know that medical centres kind of had to make a lot of choices. Whether you were in a hospital or a GP or an abortion clinic, anything like that, there was this real reduction in the number of people who could come into the medical centre. And so that’s what is fascinating in this paper, is the amount of telephone communication that needs to be happening in this circumstance.

And kind of on that note, a really interesting piece of data that you uncovered in your research was that this staff at this clinic seemed to be kind of unaware of the potential for using telephone interpreters with their linguistic minority clients. And that non-professional interpreters, or what we might call ad hoc interpreters, such as the client’s family member, were often used to facilitate communication, especially for the psychological counselling aspect. Can you tell us about why the clinic had not made the use of professional interpreters more of an institutional policy?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, of course. And I think I have to also nuance here a little bit or give some background information. First of all, you mentioned that sometimes they use non-professional interpreters, like the client’s partners or relatives or friends, like a person they brought along to the clinic with them for language support and other types of support.

And so perhaps I should explain here that in Belgium, women, when they want to terminate the pregnancy, they first need to receive counselling, like the first appointment. And then they have to sort of do this session with an employee of the clinic, which can be a psychologist or a nurse or social worker to sort of see, you know, are they sure that they want the abortion and then explore a bit the context. There’s usually also the whole explanation of the treatments, you know, like what to expect.

And, you know, also this decision-making usually when they’re eligible for both. And contraceptive counselling. So that’s sort of this first session.

And then, and then that’s stipulated by Belgian law, women have to wait for six days before they can have their actual treatment. Yeah, so then during that first appointment, it’s the second appointment for the actual treatment is then scheduled. And so, it’s during those counselling sessions that they do sometimes use professional interpreters. I have to say rarely, but I mean, there were staff who offered this option. I sometimes saw it happening. It was not the majority of cases while I was there for sure.

But very often this person that the client had brought along would act as the interpreter during that consultation, that counselling session, let’s say. But then this medical abortion and then this whole fact of, you know, it has to be followed up on by telephone. There, indeed, as you mentioned, I noticed while interviewing staff that they were not really considering to use telephone interpreters and that they were not really aware of the technical option to do so, so that you sort of have like this three-way telephone conversation.

But what they also mentioned, and that’s actually true, looking at the numbers of interpreting services in Flanders, is that there’s just a shortage of certified interpreters. And especially in terms of what I just explained about this unpredictability of the medical abortion, the clinic says, yeah, look, even if we would know how to technically do this with telephone interpreters, we’re still not sure that there’s actually an interpreter available at that point, because we never know when the client is going to, if she’s going to call us, if so, when she’s going to call us to ask about certain problems or complications that she’s experiencing. So that unpredictability aspect is still there, despite, I mean, even if you would have the technical knowledge to connect an interpreter on the phone.

And then what I perhaps should also explain is that in this particular clinic where I carried out my research, it was just one, like it didn’t visit various clinics in Flanders or in Belgium for that matter. But the majority of clients is, well, let’s say, I mean, I have difficulty using the word native, but you know what I mean? Like there’s usually like not really a huge communication barrier.

And there’s sort of like this minority parts of the clientele with whom the staff need to find ways to communicate. So perhaps it’s also, I can imagine, for instance, settings where clinics, where there’s a higher amount of migrant clients or that have a very specific target audience, for instance, where they would be more aware of and more explicit about language. But that was not really the case here.

And then in general, the use of interpreters. So even, let’s say for the counselling part, leaving aside now the medical abortion for a moment. Also there, I noticed, I mean, they have the infrastructure, they do sometimes offer, I mean, they have like this agreement with the certified interpreting service.

What I saw there was a lot of differences between staff members in terms of how familiar they were with the options of how to book an interpreter, how to make the phone call, what to ask, what to do when you’re doing a consultation with an interpreter. And yeah, also just like personal preference. Like there was a lot of discretionary power for staff to sort of decide what they wanted to do about it.

But I have to say that actually now I’m still in touch with people from the clinic where I conduct my research. So, I finished my PhD in October last year. So now I’m sort of seeing with them how we can make the findings of my PhD usable, like having really practical relevance for them and to sort of help them with decision-making aids on when to use an interpreter or when not and this kind of thing.

So, I do have to say that being there as a researcher, as an ethnographer, as an observer, this language awareness and awareness of using interpreting services did sort of grow. Yeah.

Brynn: And that part that you were just saying about it being so discretionary and how the decisions would sort of differ between staff members about, does this person have enough language proficiency to be eligible for a medical abortion or no, they don’t have enough language proficiency. They need to only be able to get a surgical abortion. That was really, really fascinating to see that there wasn’t sort of this, you know, assessment checklist or anything like that, because I’ve come across that in my research as well, that really having some sort of a concrete step-by-step process of this is how you assess a patient’s language proficiency, it doesn’t exist in that many places in the world.

So it was interesting to read in that context that that was happening for you too. And I’m really glad that you mentioned about how you as a researcher and ethnographer, sort of the research that you’ve conducted has now potentially led to some effects, which I want to get back to that. I want to hear about that in a minute.

I do want to come to one point in the paper because it stuck out to me. In the paper you say, and this is a quote, among the diverse group of clients in the clinic, a social order or stratification becomes apparent due to the linguistic capital that is unequally distributed.

Talk to us about what you mean by linguistic capital because not everyone who listens to us is a linguist. They might not know what this concept of linguistic capital is, but how did that capital affect the clients from different linguistic backgrounds?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, okay, so linguistic capital, we’re really entering into sort of the theory of social linguistics now, right? So basically, what’s the most important to understand that that’s sort of the viewpoint for which I look at language is that it’s a very social thing. Language can be a regulator or an enabler.

It’s like a resource for people to use. Language allows us to act as social human beings, you know? And this concept of language capital or linguistic capital, which was coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, is sort of a concept that helps us to see how language functions as a form of social power or within the framework of Bourdieu.

It’s a kind of cultural capital that gives you access to certain spaces in society and that has a certain value, and that’s the most important. So that’s also the linguistic capital. So Bourdieu theorized it as this kind of economic metaphor, like some languages are more valuable on the market than others.

So yeah, that idea of his has then been sort of picked up by social linguists, and then nowadays we also see this more as a dynamic. We use the concept to sort of also unpack the dynamics of how do these processes of differentiation come about and so on, whereas with Bourdieu it was a little bit more like static, there’s a certain value or not, whereas nowadays we sort of also look more like how do linguistic resources travel, right? That’s an idea of Jan Blommaert, this idea that your linguistic capital or your resources may be valuable in one place, but then when you go somewhere else, they’re not, or they’re only valuable in certain contexts or domains of society.

So yeah, that’s a little bit what linguistic capital is about. I mean, in a nutshell, right? I am sure there’s others who would explain this so much better than I do now, but I sort of found the concept useful to discuss what was going on in the clinic here because it sort of seems like certain clients in this abortion clinic, when they do have the linguistic capital, they have the free choice to choose between medical and surgical abortion, which is often also important emotionally, because there’s a difference between the clients in the clinic in that they have different linguistic capital, and if they dispose of the right linguistic capital, it sort of allows them to freely choose between medical or surgical abortion, which are two completely different ways of experiencing an abortion.

So, there’s this emotional aspect to it. And it also goes beyond the choosing between the two treatment types. I’m also thinking about looking up information on the website, for instance, before they actually go to the abortion clinic.

Also, the website is available in Dutch, French and English of this abortion clinic. And so, you sort of have this difference in which linguistic capital you can, or how much your linguistic resources are worth in that setting. And Dutch, English and French are highly valued because they allow for you as a client to be cared for when you’re at home doing the medical abortion and the clinic is talking to you on the phone. So that’s what it’s about, actually.

Brynn: It’s really evident in the paper, and that’s something that I found really fascinating, was this idea of choice and how somebody who comes in with that linguistic capital of speaking or having, quote, high proficiency in French, Dutch or English, they are going to have a choice. They’re going to a certain extent, obviously. At a certain stage of the pregnancy, they’re going to have a choice if they want to do the medical abortion or the surgical abortion.

And you’re right. It can be an emotionally trying decision or time. And to give a person a choice in that type of situation does mean a lot.

And like you said, if someone is deemed to not have that proficiency, then that choice is kind of automatically taken away. And their treatment option is chosen for them. And in the paper, towards the end of the paper, you discuss a concept called exclusive inclusion, which was written about by Roberman in 2015.

What does exclusive inclusion mean? And how did you see it play out in the language policy at this clinic?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, so this concept, exclusive inclusion, refers to a kind of exclusion, but not the exclusion that we typically think of in terms of completely discriminating people or not allowing them access to crucial spaces in society or crucial services or means. So, what Roberman explains is that when we look at inclusion, exclusion dynamics, we should look beyond material sufficiency and sort of like her paper is also titled, not to be hungry is not enough. So, it’s like it’s not just about making sure that people can buy food and that they’re not living in poverty.

It’s also about making sure they can actually participate in spaces, practices that are socially relevant. Yeah, that are, as she describes it, it’s about access to social resources of real value and to participation in the arenas of social recognition and belonging. So, in terms of the abortion clinic and why I found the concept applicable in this case is because I thought, well, these women for sure also receive good abortion care.

They’re helped by this very engaged team of practitioners, which I also really want to emphasise. They were so engaged. They were so helpful. This whole policy was also thought of for their safety, right? So, it’s like out of genuine concern. And they receive good care.

They’re helped in a timely manner. You could actually even say that the surgical abortion is sort of, I mean, and there’s definitely discussions about that, but I mean, it’s sort of like, I talked about this unpredictability, right, of the medical abortion, whereas, you know, with surgical abortion, you know, like, okay, it’s that day. It’s going to be just 20 minutes, then it’s over. It’s immediately checked with an ultrasound and so on. It’s like sort of, I mean, it is a good abortion care. It is a good abortion treatment.

So, they’re not excluded, but they are exclusively included in the sense that they don’t have the same level of participation. They don’t have the same level of choice. When you compare them to other clients who did possess or do possess the right linguistic resources.

So that’s for me what the concept is about.

Brynn: Yeah, it’s all about that choice, right? It’s saying that, okay, well, this group of people can have a choice. This group of people is still going to get good treatment, but they can’t have the same level of choice as the other group of people.

And you do in the paper, you really do a great job, I think, of taking great care to mention that this abortion clinic really did create this language policy from a place of genuine precaution and medical care for its clients. And you mentioned that it’s been reconfiguring other policies to reflect its linguistically diverse clients. You do reflect that it could do more to make medical abortions accessible to clients of all linguistic backgrounds.

And maybe that circles us back to what you had sort of hinted at before, that you’re working with that particular clinic now and talking about what the clinic could do to facilitate that. Are you able to tell us anything that you’re working on in that space now with the clinic?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, sure. So, first of all, again, I cannot stress it enough that this clinic where I studied the language practices, I mean, I do adopt sort of a critical stance in the paper, of course. I mean, it’s a critical social linguistic endeavour, but they were so engaged as a team.

And so, I remember their literal wording about their clients, also talking to them on the phone, such as, I’m worried because, you know, like they’re really, they really want to just make sure that they’re safe. And it’s also a matter of responsibility, obviously, like legal responsibility, you know, like as a clinic, they’re responsible for making sure these abortions happen in safe circumstances. And, you know, as soon as that cannot be fully guaranteed, they have to be very careful with that.

But then, yeah, again, you could say, OK, this is safety and these safety concerns are justified, but the safety structure or the sort of securitizing structure that’s now in place, fully relies on verbal communication. And I think that’s something that they, where they might rethink the possibility, like the role of communication, perhaps with the use of technology, perhaps making sure there are some visual aids with which clients could, I don’t know, indicate the levels of pain they’re experiencing or the amount of blood loss or something like that. I don’t know.

I mean, of course, it’s not a quick solution that’s available for us, but rethinking the need for verbal communication and thinking about alternatives, I think. And then perhaps I should also mention here that it’s not only telephone follow-up, like on the day where women are self-managing the miscarriage. There’s also an important aspect, communication aspect, to the counselling or to the, let’s say, when women come to the clinic to receive their first medications.

Remember, I explained, first they take medication that blocks the pregnancy hormone. So, when they come for that first medication, that’s done in the clinic because at that appointment, they also receive all the instructions for them managing the miscarriage two days later in their homes. And so those instructions are also really detailed.

You know, it’s like it’s two pages with written instructions, which are again available in Dutch, French and English. And that then usually nurse goes over and explains point by point, like you should be careful for this or when this happens, this is normal, when this happens, this is not normal. Then you should call us, then you should go to emergency care.

You know, like all this kind of, also the schedule, like when to take the medication, how many pills, which pain medication can you take and when and so on. So, they’re like quite complicated instructions. And also on that part, the staff is worried in terms of language, like that clients might not understand fully how they should then perform the abortion themselves.

But there, for instance, I think you could work with translated or multilingual video instructions or translated materials in any kind of way. And then to answer your question about sort of what I’m working on now or talking about now with the clinic is that they actually do have these videos explaining the different treatment types and again, available in Dutch, English and French, but they are considering to on the long term having those translated as well to, I would say minority languages, but I mean, languages that a considerable part of their clients speak. So that I think would be one step where you sort of have like the all the control over the process of explaining the instructions.

But then again, the telephone follow-up from a distance will remain an issue. Now, one of the ideas that I’m currently discussing with the person responsible for the clinic, like coordinator, is to understand how abortion practitioners abroad deal with language diversity when offering medical abortions. Because, I mean, generally, as we were mentioning, as we were discussing in the beginning, there hasn’t been that much attention for linguistic diversity in abortion care.

And I mean, abortion care generally, it’s like, as I said, the linguistic aspects of that are quite understudied. And so, I would love to set up a study to investigate how the medical abortion is dealt with abroad. Because I think, and as I mentioned in the beginning, there are some differences between different countries.

And whereas in Belgium, you still sort of have like very high, I mean, majority of the performed abortions are still surgical abortions. But there is an evolution towards more medical abortion that’s ongoing. Like, I think in like 10 years or so, the amount of medical abortions doubled.

And so, it’s really some more and more often chosen treatment type. And so, I think it would be very interesting to see, okay, in countries where this medical abortion is already more common. I mean, it’s impossible that they don’t face a linguistic diversity among their clients.

So how do they do it? And what could be learned from them? Which best practices are there that could be applied also here?

Brynn: That would be really interesting to be able to do that type of research with other people abroad. Because you’re right, it really does differ country to country. And I would be so fascinated to hear what you learn.

And I love that idea of the potential for video instructions. It reminds me of a paper that I read for research that I did that talked about translated discharge papers like from a hospital. They found that the patients that needed it translated into other languages sometimes also had low levels of literacy in general.

And they found that it was easier to actually audio record the discharge paper instructions. And they were able to put it into… Have you ever seen those greeting cards where you can open them and they’ll play a song?

Dr van Hest: Right, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Like birthday cards?

Brynn: Yeah, like birthday cards. So they were able to record the discharge instructions onto these cards where you would open it and it would play the instructions for you. And so obviously something like that wouldn’t necessarily work in this type of a medical situation, but kind of what you said, just sort of thinking outside the box, reconfiguring things, making things different than they have been potentially could be a solution.

Other than this really, really interesting postdoctoral work that you’re doing, is there anything else that’s coming up for you? Any other projects that you’re working on or anything that your research group is doing that you find interesting that you’d like to talk to us about?

Dr van Hest: Yeah, so as you mentioned in the beginning, when introducing me, I’m now a postdoctoral research associate here at the department. So, I’m not really working currently, I’m not really working on the abortion topic, but I do hope to sort of find ways in the near future to develop the ideas I have now and sort of collect more data. But what I am working on now is on something completely different.

Nothing to do, it has nothing to do with abortion, but it is still about language and migration and linguistic diversity in institutional settings. But I’m currently working on a project which is very applied, very practice oriented and which is called MATIAS, which stands for Machine Translation to Inform Asylum Seekers. And the idea is that we develop a prototype of a notification tool, a multilingual notification tool that can be used in asylum centres, in asylum reception centres.

So, we also work together very closely with the federal agency, the Belgian federal agency for the reception of asylum seekers. And so, I’ve been visiting various reception centres for data collection in the past year, because what we want to do with this tool is it’s going to be a tool that will allow staff working at reception centres to sort of to update and inform residents about activities and practical stuff, things that are going on in the centre. Like, oh, apologies, the water will be shut off between four and five tomorrow because they’re going to come and do some works.

Or don’t forget, tomorrow we have this activity at 8 p.m. Please join us, something like that, because that’s often very rapid communication or it’s not always feasible to translate that in so many different languages. And obviously in asylum perceptions facilities, there’s a lot of linguistic diversity. And the idea is that the tool would then allow staff to just write that message in Dutch, English or French.

Again, we have those three dominant languages there. And that then the system will translate and send out the messages in the right language to the residents who would then receive the message on their smartphone. And then, you know, one resident would receive that same message in Arabic and the other one in Turkish, for instance, and another one in Pashto.

And so that’s the idea. So, something completely different, very, very practice oriented, very practical, very applied. But it’s really, it’s a lot of fun and it’s my first steps in the field of machine translation as well and language technology.

So that’s fascinating. And then on the sides, I am obviously still developing my ideas on the data I collected for my doctoral research. And also, this whole phenomenon of nonprofessional interpreting really caught my attention when I was doing my PhD.

So, they have like these clients bringing in relatives or their partner or a friend, someone close to them for language interpreting. And what we see in interpreting studies is, I mean, there’s already a lot of research going on that takes this very interactional and institutional point of view. Sort of like, OK, in this particular setting, you have these people coming and going.

And I’m very fascinated to see how those interpreters, those nonprofessional interpreters, so to speak, how they sort of make sense of that and also of their own role and how does that differ when they go from one setting to the other and so on. So, I’m working on something to hopefully in the near future research that. And yeah, I’m also working together with my colleagues on collecting work that deals with nonprofessional interpreting and sort of trying to really get this contextualised perspective.

Like, who are these people? What are the institutional, interactional expectations to sort of shed light on all these different kinds of nonprofessional interpreting practices and different kinds of nonprofessional interpreters? So yeah, that’s sort of something that really became a topic of interest for me research wise.

So yeah, and then we’ll see what the future brings and what I can get funding for and so on. It will also depend a little bit on that. The connecting thread for sure is always language and migration, linguistic diversity in institutional settings.

So, I will continue to be working on that, yes.

Brynn: Ella, your work sounds so cool. Massive congratulations to you for finishing your PhD last year. As someone who has just started on her PhD, I’m looking at you and thinking, okay, I can do this. She did it. We can do it.

Dr van Hest: It’s so exciting for you. You still have the whole trajectory ahead of you. So yeah, enjoy it, I would say as well. It’s so fascinating.

Brynn: Exciting and scary, but also very awesome. So, all of the things. Ella, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today, to talk about your work. And I can’t wait to hear where your work goes from here.

Dr van Hest: Thank you so much again for having invited me here today. It was amazing to talk to you.

Brynn: And thank you for listening, everyone. If you liked listening to our chat today, please subscribe to the Language on the Move podcast. 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.

Until next time.

NSW Police (Image credit: Edwina Pickles, SMH)

Editor’s note: The Language on the Move team closely collaborates with the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN). To raise awareness of LLIRN and feature the research of its members, we are starting a new series about exciting new research in specific areas of language and law.

In this first post in the series, LLIRN founders and conveners Dr Alex Grey and Dr Laura Smith-Khan introduce the research of three early career researchers working on language, policing, and criminal justice.

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Alex Grey and Laura Smith-Khan

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The Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) came into being in 2019, after an initial symposium involving a group of academics and students, mainly from Australian universities, whose research is interested in the various intersections of language and law. One of our key goals of the symposium was to learn more about each other’s work and create new opportunities to collaborate.

Since then, LLIRN has grown and we have organized and run a number of different initiatives, including multiple panels at conferences across both linguistics and law, a special issue that showcased the work of several of our (mainly early career) members, and a lively and growing mailing list.

Fast forward to 2024, our Listserv now includes members from at least 37 different countries, at diverse stages of their careers, working as academics, as language or legal professionals, and/or in policy or decision-making roles. However, as LLIRN convenors, we have felt that we still have much to learn about the members who make up the network, the expertise they have and their goals. This new blog series intends to address this gap: we want to learn (or “LLIRN”) more about each other, and to make our learning public so that others too can learn more about us.

Northern Territory Supreme Court (Image credit: Dietmar Rabich, Wikipedia)

In the first of this new series, we showcase LLIRN members, Alex Bowen, Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, and Dr Kate Steel, who are working in areas related to language, policing, and criminal justice.

Alex Bowen, University of Melbourne, Australia

Alex Bowen’s in-progress PhD looks at communication about criminal law and justice with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. His earlier research was about how police in the NT explain the right to silence in police interviews, producing the publications listed below.  He has previously practised criminal and commercial law.

Alex Bowen is interested more broadly in police interviewing, language in legal processes, interpreting and translation, how we understand and talk about law and justice interculturally, and how legal language is influenced by monolingual and colonial assumptions. He is interested in discussing these topics, especially with Indigenous scholars and practitioners, and developing interdisciplinary and intercultural resources for training and education. He may be available for peer review related to the above topics.

Recent publications

Bowen, A. (2019). ‘You don’t have to say anything’: Modality and consequences in conversations about the right to silence in the Northern Territory. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 39(3), 347–374.
Bowen, A. (2021). Explaining the right to silence under Anunga: 40 years of a policy about language. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 18–49.
Bowen, A. (2021). Intercultural translation of vague legal language: The right to silence in the Northern Territory of Australia. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 33(2), 308–340.
Bowen, A. (2021). “What you’ve got is a right to silence”: Paraphrasing the right to silence and the meaning of rights. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 28(1), 1–29.

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, University of Lincoln, UK

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida has experience conducting ethnographic and conversation analytic research in police and judicial settings. This has included research on police interviews with suspects in the UK, criminal hearings in Brazil and, more recently, International Criminal Court (ICC) trials, producing the publications listed below. He is currently working on a paper about the role of judges in witness examination at the ICC, focusing particularly on the tensions associated with their dual-role as both referee and truth-finder.  He lectures in Criminology.

International Criminal Court, The Hague (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Ferraz de Almeida is broadly interested in studying social interactions in any form of police or legal context and welcomes contact from researchers with similar interests.

Recent publications

Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Drew, P. (2020). The fabric of law-in-action: ‘formulating’ the suspect’s account during police interviews in England. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 27(1), 35-58.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2022). Two ways of spilling drink: The construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police interviews with suspects. Discourse Studies, 24(2), 187-205.
D’hondt, S., Perez-Leon-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2022). Evidence about Harm: Dual Status Victim Participant Testimony at the International Criminal Court and the Straitjacketing of Narratives about Suffering. Criminal Law Forum, 33, 191.
D’hondt, S., Pérez-León-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2024). Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court. Language in Society, 1-22.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2024). Counter-Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims in Police Interviews for Low-Level Crimes. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 37, 119–137.

Dr Kate Steel, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK

Dr Kate Steel’s PhD (2022) and continuing research explore interactions ‘at the scene’ between police first responders and victims of domestic abuse, producing the publication below. This work draws from police body-worn video footage within one force area in the England & Wales jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This research responds to the typical simplification of the crucial role of communication at the scene is and its under-emphasis in official procedure for the first response to domestic abuse, at both local and national levels.

Dr Kate Steel is now working with another police force to develop language guidance specific to the policing context of domestic abuse first response.  She lectures in linguistics.

Recent publications

Aldridge, M., & Steel, K. (2022). The role of metaphor in police first response call-outs in cases of suspected domestic abuse. In I. Šeškauskienė (Ed.), Metaphor in Legal Discourse (224-241). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Available from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9900169
Steel, K. (2023) “Can I have a look?”: The discursive management of victims’ personal space during police first response call-outs to domestic abuse incidents. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 37(2): 547-572.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to criminal justice and language, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next LLIRN “What’s new in language and law research?” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Upcoming events of interest in this area

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Dr Kate Steel will both be presenting their research in the coming months, including at the IAFLL European conference in Birmingham. Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida will also present at the Forensic Conversations in Criminal Justice Settings Symposium in Loughborough in September.

Dr Hlavac is a senior lecturer in the Monash Intercultural Lab in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics. He is a NAATI-certified and practicing professional interpreter and translator. NAATI is Australia’s National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters.

Dr Hlavac’ research interests relate to interpreting in healthcare settings, interprofessional practice with trainee professionals with whom interpreters commonly work, and the incidence of interpreting and translation amongst multilinguals and in multilingual societies.

In the conversation we explore how professional interpreters, language mediators, and language brokers help to support fair and equitable access to healthcare and other forms of social participation.

How does interpreting work in practice in a hospital setting? Who gets to interpret? How is the need for an interpreter identified? Who pays? What is the role of policy vis-à-vis bottom-up practice? Is the process the same for all languages? Will AI make human interpreters superfluous?

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel, leaving a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Further reading

Healthcare interpreting (Image credit: Sydney Local Health District)

Beagley, J., Hlavac, J., & Zucchi, E. (2020). Patient length of stay, patient readmission rates and the provision of professional interpreting services in healthcare in Australia. Health & Social Care in the Community, 28(5), 1643-1650.
Hlavac, J. (2014). Participation roles of a language broker and the discourse of brokering: An analysis of English–Macedonian interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, 70, 52-67.
Hlavac, J. (2017). Brokers, dual-role mediators and professional interpreters: a discourse-based examination of mediated speech and the roles that linguistic mediators enact. The Translator, 23(2), 197-216.
Hlavac, J., Beagley, J., & Zucchi, E. (2018). Applications of policy and the advancement of patients’ health outcomes through interpreting services: data and viewpoints from a major public healthcare provider. The International Journal for Translation and Interpreting, 10(1), 111-136.
Hlavac, J., Gentile, A., Orlando, M., Zucchi, E., & Pappas, A. (2018). Translation as a sub-set of public and social policy and a consequence of multiculturalism: the provision of translation and interpreting services in Australia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 251, 55-88.
Long, K. M., Haines, T. P., Clifford, S., Sundram, S., Srikanth, V., Macindoe, R., Leung, W.-Y., Hlavac, J., & Enticott, J. (2022). English language proficiency and hospital admissions via the emergency department by aged care residents in Australia: A mixed-methods investigation. Health & Social Care in the Community, 30(6), e4006-e4019.

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick)

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney.

My guest today is Dr Jim Hlavac. Dr Hlavac is a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting at Monash University in Melbourne. Today we’re going to talk about language barriers in a diverse society and how they can be bridged through interpreting between different languages. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Dr Hlavac: Thank you very much for the invitation, Ingrid, and to be on the Language on the Move Podcast.

Dist Prof Piller: Maybe I should say servus and tell our listeners – Jim and I are old friends, and usually we would have this conversation in German because that is our main shared language. So, doing this in English is actually a bit unusual for us. Maybe, Jim, you can tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into interpreting?

Dr Hlavac: Well, Ingrid, it’s probably not uncommon for people in my situation to have been brought up bilingually, or with even three languages, but also mobility – living in different countries – being born in Australia but then going to the birthplace from my parents when I was 7.5. And then, going back to other places where I have relatives and friends, spending time in Europe growing up, then coming back to Australia. So, often mobility has been affected which has accounted for my acquisition of languages and also my use of them.

When I travelled again from Europe to Australia in 1995, I had done kind of ad hoc unpaid translation and interpreting work for others, and I decided I really should formalise my credentials. So, I attempted a test and passed it, and since then I’ve been a what’s called a NAATI – NAATI for those who don’t know – it’s the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters – I’m a NAATI translator and interpreter, and I work across 3 languages – English, Croatian and German.

Dist Prof Piller: Thanks a lot, Jim. Jim, maybe can you tell us what a professional interpreter actually does? I don’t think everyone knows. I mean, it sounds very glamorous. What do you do?

Dr Hlavac: I’m glad it sounds glamorous. Some parts are glamorous, some parts are less glamorous. So, what you do if you’re a professional interpreter is that you should have training, which I do have. You should have credentials such as I have from NAATI. Basically, when you work with other people you are working with 2 or more people who don’t have another language. When you work with them, you interpret everything that they say or sign – everything – so you don’t leave things out. You don’t add things. You don’t distort things. You’re impartial. You’re neutral. You’re not on anyone’s side, regardless of who’s paying for you. If you do have a particular relationship with a particular party, that should be declared to the other one.

You also observe confidentiality. Often, interpreters work in situations where people are talking about quite personal or intimate details, and it’s important for an interpreter to observe that confidentiality and to not pass on to anyone else information of events happening in interpreting assignments.

Interpreters work sometimes on site face-to-face with others. Sometimes it’s remote by video interpreting facilities or telephone. We all know about COVID. Everything went remote. So, there are different modes that you can use to communicate with people. But that, in a nutshell, is what a professional interpreter does.

Dist Prof Piller: So, you’ve been stressing “professional” interpreter now, and I’m wondering about – I mean any bilingual can interpret, right? People who don’t have the qualifications you have can also go and interpret, so can you maybe tell us what’s the difference between a professional interpreter and a language mediator or language broker?

Dr Hlavac: So, Ingrid, lots of bilinguals do interpret. If you speak to some bilinguals, they’ll say, “I can’t interpret, and I hate having to do it,” so it’s not a natural progression. It is something else, but you’re right in that many bilinguals do, as a matter of course, do it within their families or circles of friends or whatever.

So, what distinguishes a professional interpreter from a mediator or a broker is the following. I’ve talked about a professional interpreter. A mediator typically is someone who has a different role. They might be a youth worker, a settlement worker, a social worker, housing worker or perhaps a guide at a hospital, etc. where their primary role is to do something else, i.e. to help a person find employment or housing or what have you. And they might do so using another language other than, let’s say, English in Australia, which is the dominant language. Sometimes they’re just having conversations in that language. Sometimes they might be working with an English speaker as well, in which case they do interpret. But they often don’t know or care to know that when they work as an interpreter relaying other people’s speech or signing, that they have to do so fully without distortion. They can’t add their 2 cents’ worth, so to speak.

So, there’s always an issue with a mediator that their own primary role gets in the way, or they’re advancing the situation of a person for settlement or housing, and often the linguistic skills that they have are questionable. Sometimes they can be good, but they haven’t been tested. They don’t see themselves as an interpreter. They don’t know about ethics, etc.

A broker is something else. A broker is typically a family member who is often pressed into service. Sometimes they put their hand up, but often they’re pressed into service. Often, it’s a child who, if the parents don’t speak English, let’s take Australia, is there to interpret what the parents say to an English speaker and vice versa. Classic situations are hospitals, maybe police stations, other places, etc. Now, a broker is a family member, and so although they might look like a person doing interpreting, what they’re doing, their primary role, is being a family member. They’re looking after their parent, or whoever it is. They’re advocating for their interests. They’re making sure that what they hear and what they say is conveyed to their advantage. They’re also available all the time. They understand the parents’ language very well, etc. They’re also available all the time, and they’re free. So, they sound like they’re really great people to use in these situations, and often they are.

But there are some pitfalls, and the pitfalls are that not every child wants to or should be in that kind of a situation. A child can never typically tell a parent how to behave, what to do, because the power relations are such that they’re there to simply hear what they’re told to do.

There’s also many cases of brokers intentionally or unintentionally changing things. Imagine in a healthcare interaction the parent says something and the child doesn’t quite understand or really fully grasp what it’s about and says what they think the parents says. They convey that into English, and so what the healthcare worker hears is a description of symptoms that are actually different from what the parent says. Or, conversely, they might not understand the healthcare professional properly, be too shameful or kind of shy to ask for repetition or clarification, and they tell the parent something else that they think they’ve heard from the healthcare professional.

So that can lead to misdiagnosis, forms of treatment being misunderstood or not followed, to quite embarrassing situations. Let’s say an adult has a particular health issue which is an intimate issue. Is it appropriate that the child is privy to that information, and are they really likely to convey that? And also, when you think about yourself, would you like to go to the doctor and have your brother-in-law sitting next to you and you’re divulging information about your medical history and expecting your brother-in-law or whoever it is to recount this accurately and correctly, and they’re not going to change things that the doctor might say to them? How does that affect your relationship with your brother-in-law afterwards if he’s privy to all these things?

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I’m sure there are many, many difficult situations, and you’ve probably got a huge amount of stories to tell us. You’re not only an interpreter yourself, you’re also an interpreting researcher. A lot of the research you do is in healthcare, and you’ve already started us on healthcare. I guess, by the sound of it, it sounded like you’re not a huge fan of language brokering, and you pointed out all the problems that there are with family members actually interpreting for other family members.

But at the same time, we kind of know that it happens, and so I guess I’d be curious to hear from you specifically about interpreting and language mediation and language brokering in the healthcare system. What are the main barriers that patients in Australia who do not speak English, or who don’t speak English well, what kind of barriers do they face in accessing adequate healthcare in Australia?

Dr Hlavac: Typically, they have a number of barriers. There are often low levels of health literacy. They don’t know the health system in this country. They don’t know what services are available or that they’re entitled to. If they don’t speak English fluently, then they might not know that they’re entitled to an interpreter in most healthcare interactions that they’re likely to have. If they don’t know that, then they’re not going to ask, or ask a family member to ask on their behalf.

So, the challenge is for healthcare workers to recognise that a person is unable to communicate effectively in English and to offer or to organise an interpreter on their behalf. I’ve done some research, and even amongst those people who claim that they do know that health interpreting services are for free, it’s often the healthcare provider who still ends up providing them. And it sounds silly, or sounds obvious, but often people with so little English don’t know how to ask for an interpreter. They don’t even have those skills sometimes. And if you haven’t got effective communication, then, as you know, as the healthcare professional, they can’t work out what the symptoms are, what the level of health literacy is. They can’t work out a diagnosis and things like that.

Dist Prof Piller: So, who actually has to ask? I mean, you’re saying patients may not know they have the right to an interpreter, or they may not know how to ask. What’s the role of the healthcare professional, or how does – if I go to the doctor and I don’t speak any English, how does it actually work that an interpreter comes in? How is that decided, and what’s the process?

Dr Hlavac: So, the process is that, if you go into a large hospital, particularly in a metropolitan area like Sydney or Melbourne, you’re likely to have front of house staff who knows that this is one of the questions that they would ask as a regular feature when they’re addressing you for the first time through triage or whatever. Now, if you can functionally express yourself clearly, fluently, then they’re unlikely to ask you, but they still might. So, they’re obliged to ask this question, “Do you need an interpreter?” or “What language would you like your healthcare services provided to you in?”, which is a kind of optimal question, you know.

So, it’s up to them, and there’s a lot of cultural competence training happening in hospitals. There’s a lot of information that healthcare workers learn through professional development through their respective professional associations – how to work with interpreters. There’s a lot of skilling up that has happened across, particularly, hospitals. GP clinics are not so skilled up very much. I’m tracking data that’s looking at use of interpreters by GP clinics. It’s lower. Aged care facilities are also lower, so we do have variation. They key thing is, often it’s the front of house person to make the diagnosis. If they don’t, though, the healthcare professional can make the call that this person, this patient, needs an interpreter. So that’s how it usually happens.

The other challenge is, I mentioned health literacy and what have you. There’s a lot of information that’s been translated as well. I know we’re talking about interpreting mainly, Ingrid, but here in Victoria, I’m based in Melbourne, there’s the Victorian Health Translations website, which is 28,000 translations of material related to healthcare across 150 languages. There’s a lot of information out there to advise people about healthcare conditions, and one of the challenges is the discoverability of these resources. How do you get to them? They’re there, but how does the person for whom they are intended actually access them?

Dist Prof Piller: I’ve been wondering about that a lot, actually, because they’re usually organised by language, right? So, if you’re not good at spelling the Latin alphabet, or if you don’t know the name of your language in English, it’s really hard to find that information.

Dr Hlavac: It is. Typically, it’s a family member often, a younger family member, I did talk about brokers, who can lead them there. But they also need to know about this existing. So we do have a challenge in the accessibility of this information to people we want it to reach. When you do get to that site, you’ll find that there’s not just written text there. They’re moving now to audio files as a way of conveying information to people because we have a lot of data to tell us that this is the way people like to consume health information. Not through written text, but through an audio file. And there’s audio plus video. So, the repository of translations in Victoria does reflect people’s preferred ways of reading or gaining information in other languages. And it’s also quality checked.

There’s a lot of work happening recently of, firstly, the translations being checked and sampled amongst communities. And secondly, when healthcare departments or healthcare facilities are looking to compose a document in English, let’s say about Covid or whatever, that they actually involve translators at the stage where the plain English version is developed in the first place. It’s very helpful if you can have translators as part of the group, working on them, so that when the translations are then developed you don’t have the issues of “What does this mean? Let’s rephrase this”, etc. So, there is a lot of work happening in this area to optimise health translations. But we’ll go back to interpreting because I know that’s your focus.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, well look, I mean translation is fascinating too, and that leads me to another question. How do we actually know which languages are needed? We can go back to the clinics, so the receptionist establishes that this person needs an interpreter, but how do they find the right interpreter? Or, going back to your translations, how do we actually know in which languages do we need to make available information about a particular condition, for instance?

Dr Hlavac: The big hospitals collect data on not only interpreter requests, but the languages that are being requested, and they direct their resources to employing interpreters either in-house or freelance for those languages which are in demand. But they could have, you know, within the catchment area of northern health here in Melbourne, they service residents across 150 languages. They also have data from the ABS. Every 5 years we have the census.

So, we do have a fairly fine-grained idea in each municipality or local government are, what the profile is of the languages of the residents there, and also the level of English proficiency. The census data, the census has a question – “If English is not your language spoken at home, what is your level of proficiency in English?”, right? There are 2 gradings – “not at all” and “not well”. When residents tick those responses, that’s pretty indicative that those are people that will need an interpreter. So, we’ve got some demographic data. We’ve got data from hospitals themselves to know which languages are needed.

In terms of sourcing the interpreters, yes, Ingrid, this is a challenge because for bigger languages we do have an ok kind of cohort of interpreters to fall back on, but for new and emerging languages like Rohingya, when Rohingyas started to arrive say, 5, 6, 7 years ago, Chaldeans 15 or 20 years ago, we had to quickly develop testing for potential interpreters for those languages. Then getting them out to be able to work in communities. Often, it’s a kind of chicken and egg situation where you kind of approach people who are community leaders and ask them if they know of people who have good language skills who might have been doing this before migrating to Australia. And to locate people who have the attributes that you’re looking for in a potential interpreter and supporting them through training.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I guess one problem that also kind of relates to named languages, you know. I mean, in my own research I’ve encountered people who’ve said they needed an Arabic interpreter, but they actually needed someone with Sudanese Arabic but then got someone with Lebanese Arabic and it was really, really difficult. The interpreter couldn’t really understand them. Or there have been all these media reports about the Yazidis in northern NSW who speak a variety of Kurdish but couldn’t really work with the Kurdish interpreters because their brand of Kurdish was quite different. So, I guess that’s an additional challenge.

Dr Hlavac: It is, and we do know about them. South Sudanese Arabic – there are 3 varieties of Kurdish that NAATI credentials. There are regular meetings, and I’ve been a part of them, between the language service providers who are at the coal face (Australian or British idiom for “front end” or “grassroots level”). They supply the interpreters, and they get together with NAATI, with the professional associations, and they say, “Hey, we’ve got this problem. We can’t find interpreters for this language. We’ve got a high incidence of people reporting this language, but they can’t understand the interpreters.” There are different varieties of Kurdish, etc. So, these things are fairly quickly made aware to the people who need to know about them, and we do respond accordingly.

Australia, through NAATI, is probably the only crediting organisation to have 3 varieties of Kurdish. And that’s simply because, as you said, there are Kurdish varieties that are mutually incomprehensible. And the whole thing of interpreting is that you need to be able to communicate effectively. If Lebanese Arabic interpreters aren’t able to communicate effectively with a South Sudanese Arabic speaker, the interpreter needs to inform the service provider, the English speaker, about this issue, that they are unable to communicate properly and that they need to rebook the assignment with a South Sudanese Arabic interpreter.

You do have speakers who might be speaking varieties that are not your primary one. You kind of, well you know about this very well, Ingrid, you practice accommodation. You try and work out how do they speak, you try and avoid things that are specific to your variety. I’m often working with Slovenians, who I don’t understand that well, and they, through misallocation that happens. If you really can’t understand that, the onus is on the interpreter to declare this issue, and for that assignment to be booked with the correct interpreter.

Dist Prof Piller: So, does that happen a lot? Like, you talk about misallocation. Is that a problem in the system, and then if I’m, I don’t know, I need to attend the emergency department, for instance. Maybe there is not a whole lot of time, actually, for people to find out what language I speak, and then to book and rebook, so how does that work?

Dr Hlavac: Yeah, it’s not easy, but there is infrastructure to address this. If you turn up to emergency and you’re incoherent or what have you, there are people at front of staff who will try to work out how much English you have, and if you don’t have English, what’s your language. They’ll often ask you anything – your country or language – in English, etc. It’s often possible for front of house staff to at least work out the language or the country of birth. Often, the country of birth does not coincide with the language, but that’s at least a piece of information that’s helpful for the front of house staff to start the process of locating an interpreter.

The free interpreting service is available 24/7. This is financed by the federal government. It’s free, so the healthcare facilities with emergency departments use this service, particularly after hours, and the ability to be able to locate and get an interpreter on the other end of the phone is not bad. The waiting time is usually between 3 and 5 minutes on average, which is not bad. There is a fair bit of infrastructure in place to address this issue.

People say, “This costs a lot of money”, etc. But if you look at the sums and if you look at the rates of misdiagnosis, healthcare workers not being able to communicate properly, the health effects, etc. and how much it costs the health system when these things happen – it’s much cheaper to pay for interpreting services that address the linguistic discordance in the first place.

Dist Prof Piller: Jim, you’ve got fantastic data, actually, on how the provision of interpreting services kind of reduces length of stay in hospital and how it reduces readmission rates for linguistically diverse people. So, really, this kind of value for money that our interpreting system gives Australian society – can you maybe talk us through that research and how interpreting really, you know, improves outcomes for people from non-English speaking backgrounds and overall lowers the burden on the Australian taxpayer if you will?

Dr Hlavac: So Ingrid, yeah, that was data that was collected by a colleague of mine, and friend, Emiliano Zucchi, based at Northern Health here in Melbourne. He tracked the use of interpreting services over 10 years. In those 10 years, interpreting services greatly expanded, as did the population in the area, but what we had happening was, and we can’t quite say it was only the interpreting services that resulted in lower length of stay in hospital and lower readmission rates. We’d need to do what’s called multivariate analysis to say that conclusively. But what we did see was that the increase in interpreting services co-occurred with these really good health outcomes – reducing the length of stay in hospital, lowering readmission rates – those are compelling reasons. They’re also reasons that hospital managers like to see. It’s not just the fact that patients and healthcare workers can communicate with each other optimally. There are great healthcare outcomes that have occurred or co-occurred with this happening.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s really brilliant. I mean, we’ve already been talking about NAATI a lot and provisions in Australia. Our listeners come from all around the world, so I was wondering whether you could talk us through how Australia compares in terms of provisions for people who don’t speak English or don’t speak it well to other countries and the interpreting provisions and translation provisions available there?

Dr Hlavac: So, Australia compares favourably. I go back to really 1975 when they changed the macro policy, social policy of Australia, to introduce multiculturalism. If it wasn’t for multiculturalism, the flow on effect of that such as interpreting services would not be in this country to the extent that they are. So, Australia compares favourably in that throughout your provision of services acorss health, education, defence, employment, welfare – no matter what it is, each department has to have a multiculturalism policy, including linguistic diversity.

Part of linguistic diversity is the linguistic diversity of the government employees in that department, but also the people who use those services. So, when you’re unemployed and you need welfare assistance, the government department that you go to has to have a policy on providing interpreting services if you require them. Health is a big area, what I’ve mentioned. The courts, police, defence, tourism, etc. So, it’s actually built into the provision of all government services.

When you have money from government at federal and state level to support this, you can build up an infrastructure. When you don’t have the government support, it’s much harder. It’s much less prevalent and widespread, so that’s really the reason why Australia does compare favourably and why, compared to other countries, you do find, you know, a good service in terms of interpreting service and translation.

Dist Prof Piller: So, you’ve already spoken a lot about top-down and that the policies in Australia are really favourable, and the funding situation is quite favourable. Can you maybe talk us through bottom-up efforts? What needs to happen in institutions? Government can only do so much, you know. We need the policy framework in place, but at the same time at the institutional level, as you said earlier, people have to make things happen. There has to be a commitment to multilingualism and service provision for everyone and so on and so forth. I know that, from your research, you’ve also done a lot at the institutional level. Can you tell us a bit about what works and what doesn’t work?

Dr Hlavac: That example I gave before, when language service providers gather around a table to talk shop, to talk about what’s happening, what are our problems, issues, things we’re not doing well. That’s an example where people who are at the coal face do tell those people further up about what their gaps are and how they can be addressed. People aren’t short of suggestions. Now, sometimes those suggestions can’t always be addressed, but there’s this interchange of people at various levels that does characterise the system here which is pretty comprehensive.

If I go back to the 1970s though, when I was talking about multiculturalism being a key thing, there were people such as police officers complaining to their local members of parliament to say, “I can’t actually interview this potential witness because they don’t speak English and I don’t speak their language. They’re getting someone off the street to interpret. What are you going to do about it?”. You had doctors writing letters to say, “I can’t treat my patients. What are you going to do about it?”. When the country had actually gotten to a stage where they thought, “Ok, migration is an ongoing thing. This problem is not going to go away. How are we going to solve the problem?”. There were a lot of activists in that period coming up with lots of suggestions, and that’s how a lot of almost revolutionary things happened in that period. We’re fortunate we’ve had bipartisan support from both Liberal and Labor parties. Both sides of politics continue to support multiculturalism. So, interpreting services have not become a political football which can affect their future existence. So, that’s how things kind of panned out.

I’m sorry I’m not giving you a very good bottom-up example, but there’s a lot of interchange happening at many levels, and the system is kind of being fine-tuned, reviewed, and it’s open to lots of suggestions which are forthcoming from lots of people.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, I mean, that’s the democratic process, I guess, and it is encouraging to see it working. Now, I hear a lot of people currently coming forth with suggestions about AI and saying, you know, “We won’t need interpreting anymore in the very near future because AI is going to do it all for us,” and all those translation apps and so on and so forth. So, I have to ask that question, Jim. Are language technologies going to make human interpreting and translation superfluous?

Dr Hlavac: Ingrid, what a question! It might, one day, not tomorrow or the day after. With voice recognition technology which is the basis for technology understanding human talk and then being able to convert it into another language is really advancing, as we all know. We can turn on the captions function and that will probably give a pretty good rendition of what I’m saying and what you’re saying.

So, we’re speaking English, and hopefully we’re speaking standard English and speaking reasonably slowly and clearly, so voice recognition technology is good if you’re speaking a big language slowly, clearly, and a standard version of it. If you’re speaking a slow, standard version of another big language, you’re probably going to be able to use technology that is going to, I don’t know, probably interpret most of what is said correctly without too many mistakes and distortions. So, the technology is there, and it’s improving.

However, there’s two things. Most of the interpreting assignments that interpreters work in in this country is they’re working with people who typically don’t speak standard varieties who are often, particularly in health, they might be sick, distraught, unwell, unhappy, they don’t speak coherently. They don’t speak slowly. They don’t speak clearly enough. And so, the technology is not there to be able to pick up what they’re saying to then reliably be able to transfer it into English.

For the time being, the technology is not good enough to deal with the vast array of different varieties that people use in their vernaculars when they’re interacting with a healthcare worker. You need a lot of feeding of data from all sorts of languages, including colloquialisms, dialect, variation, etc. to have a voice recognition technology system that reliably can replace an interpreter. I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow or soon, but it might happen in 10 or 15 years, but it’s up to interpreters to work with this because there still needs for many things to be some sort of human overview, or at least supervision of this.

I’ve got a PhD student who’s testing voice recognition and using a tablet and asking interpreters, “Do you want to take notes like you normally do, or do you want to look at the tablet and see what the transcription looks like? When you interpret, is it easier from that or from your notes?”. So, there’s research happening.

The other thing is though, Ingrid, if the technology makes a mistake and there’s some sort of horrible outcome, who has liability for it? If you try and contact Google Translate and say, “Hey you made a mistake and this cost me $100 million. Can I sue you?”, you won’t get an answer, probably, because it is unclear who is responsible for that transfer of recorded speech from one language into another if you use automatic or neural translation technology. So, it’s a grey area, but we’re not going to be replaced tomorrow I don’t think.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, look, personally I don’t even think in 10-15 years. I mean, there is so much technology hype, and I guess I’m also interested in the dangers of that belief that at some point in the future interpreters will be replaced because, as you’ve pointed out, it’s the most vulnerable and the most high-stakes situations where technology actually fails. Technology is great if I need to get directions, if I’m a tourist somewhere and sort of in the leisurely, fun situation. Then it’s really, really good to have Google Translate or Google Lens or whatever. But if I’m in a vulnerable situation, a high-stake needs situation in healthcare, before the courts or whatnot, I think there is a real danger, actually, of thinking that this leisure and fun situation is somehow going to transfer to that situation where it really matters. Where we need human accountability. Where we need to make sure that it’s the right variety, it’s all those connotations that are there and so on and so forth as you’ve explained so beautifully.

Dr Hlavac: Yeah, things are developing. People might think, “Hey, I used it on holiday, why can’t I use it with my legal client here?”. There are some disclaimers and warnings out there. So, for example, Optus has a particular function where they can do speech recognition software, so you can speak, let’s say, German to someone. And at the other end of the telephone call, someone can speak Italian or Swahili or whatever. They said this is good for general communication only. They’ve kind of used the term “general communication”.

They do warn that this is not suitable for health or legal or high-risk situations. So, it’s often up to people to assess what the level of risk, particularly if there’s a miscommunication or mistranslation, what the consequences of that are. So, you know, the messages, as you said, it might be good in low-risk situation, but as soon as you have something at stake, you need to ask yourself questions. And human beings are a better evaluator of risks are. Human beings do make mistakes, but they are better in dealing with high-risk situations than what the technology has to offer us at the moment.

Like we say to our students, though, those interpreters who don’t work with interpreters will end up without a job, but those interpreters who do work with technology can look forward to continuing to have a job.

Dist Prof Piller: Well thanks a lot. I think that’s sort of a good note to end on actually. Thank you so much, Jim. And thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on our podcast or 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.

Til next time!

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon interviewing unidentified Yanomami people

Editor’s note: How do researchers in anthropology and sociology deal with linguistic diversity? Do they learn the language(s) of the people they work with or do they hire interpreters? Turns out that they are quite naive about language and do neither systematically, as new research by Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky shows. How to make good decisions about language choice and language mediation in fieldwork needs to become part of research training.

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Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky

***

We have surveyed field researchers in sociology and anthropology programs in the United States and found only limited proficiency in field languages, accompanied by a widespread reliance on translators and interpreters. The scholars, therefore, did not dispense with translators as early-twentieth century anthropologists called for (Mead, 1939); instead, they dispensed with the myth of linguistic fluency. At the same time, results indicate disparities in the use of vernacular and translation services in the post-colonial societies and haphazard ‘hiring’ patterns of interpreters that cause ethical and methodological concerns.

The imaginary anthropologist is a fluent polyglot; the real anthropologist is too time-poor to learn another language

When you think about an anthropologist, what stereotypes do you imagine?  Maybe a gaunt Englishman wearing a pith helmet with a copy of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940) stuffed in his back pocket? Our imaginary anthropologist is, of course, fluent in a language at risk of extinction, learned during years of field research while living with an endangered community.

Perhaps your image of a sociologist is quite different. You might conjure a scholar working in an urban setting in their home country, which of course is in one of the complex industrial societies. They are studying social problems using their native language with locals who also speak the same tongue.

The shape of today’s societies however, as well as forms of field research challenge those effigies. Anthropologists cannot permit themselves the ‘luxury’ of spending years within a single community, being involved in many projects and teaching duties at home institutions. Sociologists, on the other hand, now work in culturally diverse settings and face the same issues as anthropologists a century ago.

Experience with Fieldwork Translation by Discipline

Yet, the scholarly associations and method textbooks are virtually mum on the problem of language, translation and interpreting in field research. To the contrary, a blatant disregard for translation services is noticeable in some discussions, that – righteously – attempt to reclaim the status of research assistants: “Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just [! – exclamation and bold added] translators or interpreters.” (Dean & Stevano 2016)

We surveyed US-based scholars about their language practices

That is why we surveyed US-based scholars from anthropology and sociology programs. We analyzed 913 answers that provided insights into our respondents’ linguistic capabilities and their experiences conducting research in over 180 countries and interacting with over 400 languages. A more extensive presentation of the results may be found in our article published by Multilingua (Sepielak, Wladyka & Yaworsky 2022).

We discovered that in only 24% of the field sites with languages other than English present did scholars assess that they had professional (or higher) fluency. In almost 60% of cases, our respondents interacted with languages in which they reported a proficiency at or below a limited working level.

It would seem it’s not all bad news with 75% of respondents reporting fluency in at least one fieldwork language. However, they were typically fluent in languages derived from the colonizers, such as French and Spanish, but rarely in languages from the colonized.

Social science researchers are “getting by”

It is then worth noting that most anthropologists and sociologists were getting by at times like everybody else, using interpreters and translators, or conducting research using the English language. ‘Only’ 54.1% of the sociologists in our sample ever collaborated with a translator compared to 68.9% of anthropologists.

Translation and interpreting are often rendered invisible

Example: #interpreter was literally erased from this photo of meeting between Iran's Rouhani and Malaysia' Mahathir in media coverage #xl8 https://t.co/RIcNpy38t2 pic.twitter.com/aNCCivzY0F

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 30, 2020

It would, however, be spurious to claim that American sociologists had less need for translators due to their linguistic proficiency. It is rather due to the traditional research interests exposing anthropologists to an increased number of languages and geographies. In comparison, sociologists frequently work in the US and regions like Western Europe where one could claim to “get by” with English.

One could ask how can this reality diverge so significantly from the ideal of language fluency and dismissal of interpreters pushed by generations of authoritative field scholars?

Is English proficiency really the superpower of today’s social scientists?

English is the language superpower of the world (Piller, 2022). And our thematic analysis indicates that researchers turn to this ‘superpower’ quite often. This is due to a variety of circumstances hampering the acquisition of fluency in another language, such as short-term studies, multi-sited fieldwork, international collaborative research, or studies of communities with multiple co-existing languages. While the global popularity of English appears as one of the deterrents to mastering field languages among scholars, one should also note that Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Tlapanec and thousands of others are virtually extinct from academic curricula in the US.

Anthropologists, in particular, may be wary about revealing these linguistic deficiencies due to the fear it might undermine their ethnographic authority. They will be mindful of Margaret Mead’s fieldwork being criticized as ‘superficial’ in part due to her linguistics deficiencies (see Freeman 1983) or Napoleon Chagnon wasting months analyzing the fictitious and scatological “names” of Yanomamo villagers presented to him by amused tribesmen (see Chagnon 1992), mold current beliefs of scholars?

Paying lip-service to the importance of linguistic proficiency does make fluent researchers

Well, it would seem so, with 81% of our respondents perceiving knowledge of local language as important and 95% agreeing that knowing the vernacular enriches the understanding of “local knowledge”.  They also agreed that researchers who don’t speak the vernacular miss important data and have less control over the study. A clear example of detachment between the persisting ethos and contemporary practice reported in previous paragraphs.

The invisible translators and interpreters of social science

In this context, the question about what this heavy reliance on translators means for Western representations of post-colonial societies, persists as well. How do scholars perceive its effect on the research process? For one, most respondents agreed that translators help in gaining access to data and that scholars with foreign-language deficiencies should collaborate with them. Nevertheless, concerning was a trend of haphazardly “hiring” persons that interpret (including research assistants, spouses, colleagues, representatives of local institutions) driven by cost and convenience. This widespread practice carries a series of ethical, methodological, and even security risks rarely considered during methods training.

To that end, field researchers did not dispense with translators as early 20^th century anthropologists called for, instead, they dispensed with the sleight of hand of linguistic fluency. This state of affairs should at the very minimum deserve greater attention in current methodological and ethical discussions regarding fieldwork and collaboration with interpreters.

To read the full article

Sepielak, K., Wladyka, D. & Yaworsky, W. (2022). Language proficiency and use of interpreters/translators in fieldwork: a survey of US-based anthropologists and sociologists. Multilingua. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0071

Related content

Laihonen, Petteri. (2020). Do concepts and methods have ethics? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/do-concepts-and-methods-have-ethics/
Piller, Ingrid. (2016). Herder – an explainer for linguists. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/herder-an-explainer-for-linguists/
Piller, Ingrid. (2021). The interpreting profession in ancient Egypt. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/the-interpreting-profession-in-ancient-egypt/
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-to-challenge-anglocentricity-in-academic-publishing/

References

Chagnon, Napoleon. 1992. Yanomamo: The last days of Eden. New York: Harvest Books.
Deane, K. & Stevano, S. 2016. Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique. Qualitative Research, 16(2). 213-228.
Fortes, Meyer, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1940. African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. 1939. Native languages as fieldwork tools. American Anthropologist 41(2): 189–205.
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/women-life-freedom-the-slogan-swimming-against-the-global-tide/

[Image credit: “Language, power and identity share an entangled relationship”, Michael Joiner, 360info]

Yu Qi and Venus are both victims of a language barrier in Australia that seriously affects their wellbeing. Language barriers can make public communication inaccessible and exclude people from equitable participation in education, employment, healthcare, welfare, and all aspects of social life.

The number of people who suffer from linguistic exclusion is high. UNESCO estimates that 40 percent of students worldwide experience a mismatch between their language repertoires and the language of instruction. Even within OECD countries, the literacy skills of over 30 percent of the adult population are insufficient to cope with complex bureaucratic demands.

Language barriers can relate to language choice, medium, and platform.

Language choice barriers exist where institutions privilege one particular language in communication with multilingual populations. These barriers mostly affect migrant and indigenous minorities. The mismatch between the language of the institution and that of stakeholders can be egregious. Australian research, for instance, found that schools communicated enrollment information exclusively in English, even if up to 98 percent of families in the catchment area spoke a language other than English.

Even people who speak the language of the institution well may be confronted with language barriers because institutions usually preference the written medium. Written communication is often mismatched to the audience’s level of education. The readability of COVID-19 restrictions published by the NSW Health Department, for instance, was found to be pitched at readers with a tertiary education. This means many people did not have a fair chance to understand what was required of them. Even so, children as young as 13 and people with an intellectual disability were fined for not abiding by these restrictions.

These two forms of language barriers increasingly combine with a third, where an institution’s communication platform may not be equally accessible. As more and more communication has become digitised, people without computer access or with low levels of computer literacy may be excluded from vital information. For example, the health authorities in Indonesia’s West Nusa Tenggara province provided information about how to stop the spread of COVID-19 mostly on the web. Yet only 20 percent of the population use digital technologies to access written materials.

Yu Qi’s problem was a language choice barrier: her dominant language is Chinese, and she feels overwhelmed by the written English information she receives from her son’s school. At the same time, she lacks the linguistic confidence to request or attend a parent-teacher interview. Therefore, she relies on information she can glean from her son, from other Chinese parents, and she seeks extracurricular tutoring from commercial Chinese-language services. She is not aware that government-sponsored interpreting services exist in Australia, which could help mediate her communication with her son’s school.

Venus experienced a different sort of language barrier: having grown up in West Africa, she is a fluent English speaker. However, her literacy level is low, and she has hardly any knowledge of Australian occupational health and safety legislation, leave entitlements, and workers’ compensation provisions. Therefore, all she could do was “argue” with her supervisor. She could not set in motion the written bureaucratic process of documenting her injury and making a claim that would have secured proper care and mitigated any long-term health consequences.

Supporting language diversity is a matter of social justice. It is a starting point to making institutions more accessible and inclusive. Australia put a plan in place at the national level in the 1980s with the National Policy on Languages. However, having since fallen into disuse, the National Policy on Languages would require an update to adequately serve the changing communication needs of the times.

A comprehensive, effective language access plan includes the provision of translated materials and interpreting services as necessary. It also includes robust communication chains, where low-literacy people have the chance to talk things over as needed. And a needs assessment of the platforms best suited to communicate with the target population would help the plan be accessible and inclusive.

There is no one size fits all but providing information in the languages of key stakeholders, and adjusting the communication medium and platform to their capacities is key to reaching everyone in the community.

In a linguistically diverse world, institutions are likely to already have people with the right linguistic skills among their ranks. Harnessing and rewarding those linguistic skills unlocks potential and allows institutions and individuals to thrive. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, communication is a vital aspect of disaster preparedness and response. As we take lessons in a post-pandemic world, every institution could benefit from having a language and communication task force embedded.

The Bainu social media platform in China

Bainu was founded by two young Mongols in 2015 and now it is the only surviving Mongolian language social media platform in China. A 2015 news report claims that there are around 400,000 registered users although that number has shrunk significantly since the government’s crackdown on Mongols’ protests against the 2020 bilingual education reform.

Although many subjects cannot be discussed openly on Bainu, one topic has never stopped attracting Mongols’ unwavering attention: the “purely” linguistic matters which include but are not limited to Mongolian grammar, spelling, translation, standardization, and regional dialects. Perhaps it is precisely because of the strict policing of social media spaces that seemingly “professional, innocuous, and apolitical” discussions of language proliferate there.

This map briefly settled the debate over “sheep meat” vs “sheep’s meat”

Big debate: “sheep meat” or “sheep’s meat”?

A long-running debate has been over whether it is honin mah (literally “sheep meat”) or honin-ii mah (“sheep’s meat”). To support their respective arguments users post pages from their old middle school grammar textbooks or carry out surveys among speakers from different regions. Recently, the debate was briefly settled (it has now flared up again) when one Bainu user, to the awe of many, triumphantly posted a self-made language map.

This map at least temporarily resolved the question that has intrigued, excited, and frustrated Bainu users for months. The map maker, having attributed the differences in expressions to regional differences, did not forget to settle another long-lasting debate, too: whether it is “putting on a hat” or “wearing a hat”. According to the map, the regions with red shade are areas where “sheep meat” and “putting on a hat” are commonly used, while the rest say “sheep’s meat” and “wear a hat.”

Translation debates

Apart from grammatical problems and dialect differences, the translation of new terms is another field of battle where foes and friends are made. In June 2020, the question of how to translate “emoji” into Mongolian sparked a spirited debate. Some advocated for a native Mongolian word while others supported charaiin ilerel, which is a word-for-word translation from Chinese: 表情 (“facial expression”). Yet others have adopted an internationalist stance and have chosen emoji. My observation over the year 2021 suggests that emoji seems to be winning out among Bainuers.

But not all terms are controversial as shown in their almost unanimous approval of translating “barbecue” into shorlog, or the terms translated by the volunteer translation group anabapa, mostly comprised of Bainu users (see “brake light” image).

Why do metalinguistic discussions proliferate on social media?

Emoji on Bainu

You might wonder why Bainu has become a key platform where metalinguistic discussions proliferate or why users are so keen to translate new terms to replace the common Chinese loans in Inner Mongolia, or to what extent these Mongolian translations are successful.

You can find an answer in a new study of Mongolian linguistic purism discourse on Bainu by myself and my co-author Cholmon Khuanuud. In the study, we situate purist discourses in the sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic context of Inner Mongolia. We show that the weakened autonomy of minority Mongols compounded by the spread of market economy, and China’s drive to build a nation essentially following the “one people, one language (Mandarin Chinese)” model exerts tremendous pressure on the maintenance of Mongolian language. This produces linguistic anxiety, and it underpins purist discourses saturating mediatized spaces such as Bainu.

“Mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss

We find that, apart from translating new terms, another two key purification strategies are prominent in Bainu. First, as with language activists in many other minoritized communities, Mongol purists construct “mixed” Mongolian as an emblem of loss, including the loss of land, culture, political rights, racial “purity,” and language over the last seven decades. By doing so, they stigmatize “mixed” speech forms, raise awareness about ethnolinguistic boundaries, and invoke historical experiences.

What is noteworthy is that the explicit association of the losses experienced by minority Mongols with mixed language has almost disappeared since the 2020 reform for fear of punishment.

Another widely used purification strategy is to faithfully transcribe “mixed” everyday speech and post it on Bainu. In particular, by positioning the transcribed “mixed” speech vis-à-vis the “pure and correct” Mongolian, purists banish the “mixed” speech to the realm of non-language.

In the context of Inner Mongolia, the stigmatizing power garnered by the orthographic representation of “mixed” Mongolian also has to do with the highly-ideologized classical (vertical) Mongolian script. This traditional script has been retained in Inner Mongolia while abandoned in the country of Mongolia for the Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Clearly, the purists’ transcription of “deviant and impure speech” through the medium of a valued classical Mongolian script enhances the shaming effect.

To learn more, including how the transnational status of Mongolian language influences purist discourses, who exactly Bainu users are, what “wooden Mongolian” is, or how technology impacts minority language ideology and practices or vice versa, our article has just been published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics – it is open access so feel free to click through to the journal!

Reference

Baioud, Gegentuul, & Khuanuud, Cholmon. Linguistic purism as resistance to colonization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, n/a(n/a). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12548 [available open access]

Related content

Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Fighting Covid-19 with folklore.  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/fighting-covid-19-with-folklore/
Baioud, Gegentuul. (2020). Will education reform wipe out Mongolian language and culture?  Retrieved from https://languageonthemove.com/will-education-reform-wipe-out-mongolian-language-and-culture/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Anatomy of language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/anatomy-of-language-shaming/
Piller, Ingrid. (2017). Explorations in language shaming.  Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/explorations-in-language-shaming/

Malinche mediating between the Spanish and the Americans (Source: Lienzo de Tlaxcala, mid 16th c)

We live in an age of crisis, as humanity confronts an ever-escalating climate and environmental disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a steep decline in social and political trust. How to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters presents a set of fundamental collective action problems. Collective action can only come about through communication. That’s why language and communication need to be written into robust disaster prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Social and linguistic exclusion go hand in hand

Those who bear the brunt of disasters are often the most marginalized members of society. One aspect of their marginalization is their linguistic exclusion. Linguistic exclusion can take many forms and the most pertinent language and communication barriers relate to:

• A mismatch between the language chosen for public communication and the language repertoires of the target audience
• A mismatch between the medium chosen for public communication and the literacy levels of the target audience
• A mismatch between the channels chosen for public communication and the channels accessible to the target audience

Where these mismatches pile up, as they often do, the result is, first, that excluded groups may lose out on vital information. Second, social fragmentation and loss of trust are likely to follow. These can deepen inequalities further and may result in a vicious circle working against constructive collection action.

Crisis communication in context

Language and communication are fundamental to both the problem and the solution of crises. Students in this year’s postgraduate unit about Literacies in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University undertook research projects to gain a better understanding of language as both problem and solution in the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of their research projects was devoted to water scarcity in India. Despite receiving good rainfall, lack of access to safe drinking water has reached crisis proportions in India. The problem is human-made and linked to a poor understanding not only of water conservation but wider political processes that impinge on water allocation, contamination, and over-exploitation.

Those most affected by water scarcity are poor rural women, for whom limited access to safe water intersects with low levels of literacy. Solving their water crisis thus must be embedded in participatory communication processes – in their language, communicated orally, and part of mutual, engaged face-to-face interactions.

This video by Hida Fathima Kassim, Ingrid Ulpen, Thi Tuyet Trang Tran, and Xiwen Chen sums up the students’ findings about water communications.

If you want to learn more how water scarcity has been made on the subcontinent, I’d recommend Mohsin Hamid’s novel How to get filthy rich in rising Asia. It illuminates how water has gone from fundamental elixir of life to capitalist commodity through the rags-to-riches story of a poor village boy rising to bottled water tycoon.

Confronting crises throughout history

Ours is not the first generation confronting the destruction of our world, even if we might be the first to do so on a global scale. Disasters and crises are painfully evident to students of language and culture contact. Foundational moments in language history – for instance, the prehistoric spread of Indo-European across Eurasia, the emergence of English out of a series of invasions of the British Isles, or the dawn of English as a global language – all went hand in hand not only with the elimination of other languages but also the destruction and large-scale transformation of conquered civilizations.

How did former generations deal with such crises?

In another postgraduate unit in the Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University, Languages and Cultures in Contact, we sought answers to this question by exploring objects of language and culture context that bear witness to the crises precipitated by often violent language and cultural contact. One of our case study objects was chocolate.

Additionally, we traced the stories and experiences of some of the most engaged – whether voluntary or forced – linguistic and cultural mediators. One of our case studies was of the inhabitants of precolonial Sydney who had to face the disaster of British colonization. How did they deal with the havoc wreaked on their world?

We studied the example of the warrior Bennelong, who was kidnapped by the British with the perverse intention to convince him of their kindness and to teach him English. Initially forced into the role of mediator, Bennelong soon actively sought to establish kinship relationships that would bind the Australians and the British together in a set of mutual obligations.

While we do not have first-hand accounts from Bennelong and the other First Australians who had to become crisis communicators as they confronted the destruction of their world, some of their stories can be gleaned from the accounts of the conquerors, as Inga Clendinnen does in her historical ethnography Dancing with strangers:

Inga Clendinnen "Dancing with Strangers"

In this thread students @MQLinguistics read Clendinnen's historical #ethnography based on the diaries of the officers of the 1st fleet to learn about #InterculturalCommunication between British colonizers and Sydney's Indigenous people pic.twitter.com/dfm6DbHNU7

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) October 7, 2021

Women as linguistic and cultural mediators

Historical ethnography can also give us insights into the experiences of cultural mediators in the Americas. In precolonial American societies, women had long played roles as cultural mediators. Restoring peace after conflict and war was a role for which linguistically and spiritually gifted girls were trained for from a young age in some societies. The aim was that they would be able to act as interpreters and mediators by forging new kinship relationships and mutual obligations so as to minimize violence and suffering on both sides.

Some American societies tried to use this tried and tested approach to mediate inter-ethnic conflict in their encounters with the Spanish or British invaders, too. Some multilingual and multicultural women communicating at the frontline of the invasion crisis have gained ever-lasting fame and the names of Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea are still familiar today. These larger-than-life characters provide fascinating case studies in crisis communication on two levels: first, as intercultural communicators in their own right, and second, as the symbols of intercultural contact into which they were molded by later generations.

This video by Brynn Quick, Lydia Liu, and Vanessa Sanchez-Guayazan introduces these three women as misremembered linguistic interpreters and cultural ambassadors:

Preparing crisis communicators

In her book Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols, Rebecca K. Jager argues that the precolonial societies into which these women were born had processes and procedures in place to prepare for crises by identifying and training talented girls to become linguistic and cultural mediators.

Malinche, for example, received an elite rhetorical education through the medium of Nahuatl before being sent to live in a Mayan trading hub, from where she was given to the advancing Spanish. This way, she already was an experienced language learner and intercultural communicator by the time she became the interpreter, advisor, and lover of the Spanish commander, Hernán Cortés. In a sign of respect from both sides, the Spanish bestowed the honorific title Doña Marina on her, and the Americans used a honorific title in their language, Malintzin. From what we can gather from the historical record, it seems that Malinche genuinely believed that accommodation between the Americans and the Spanish might be possible, and that she was prepared to work towards bringing about a joint future.

To return to the present day, what processes and procedures do we have in place to prepare the next generation of crisis communicators? How could those processes and procedures be strengthened and improved?

The Sumerian Empire under King Shulgi (2094 to 2046 BCE) (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Do you know in which language the Sumerians started the written chronicle of humanity?

It is a cliché to state that everyone who reads this sentence is an heir of the Sumerians, regardless of what your genetic background may be. The Sumerians were the first inventors of writing; and the Latin alphabet in which this text is written is a distant descendant of the cuneiform script they invented about 5,000 years ago in the ancient Middle East.*

Most people have heard that the Sumerians of Mesopotamia invented writing, along with agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals, metallurgy, urbanization, and social stratification. Their Neolithic revolution fundamentally reshaped the world, and ultimately ushered in the Anthropocene in which we find ourselves today (Crosby, 2004).

But have you ever stopped to think in which language they were writing? Unless you are an Assyriologist – an expert in the languages, cultures, and history of the ancient Middle East – you may not know the details, but you are likely to assume it was one particular language.

Well, you’d be wrong. The Sumerians were multilingual, and language contact is evident in the written record from Day 1.

The multilingual Sumerians

Sumerian is a language isolate that is not related to any other known language, living or dead (Cunningham, 2013). However, back then, as today, most languages of the Middle East were Semitic languages, like modern Arabic or Hebrew. The continuum of Semitic dialects the Sumerians were most in contact with is called Akkadian. And contact between Sumerian and Akkadian is apparent from the very beginning of the written record (Hasselbach-Andee, 2020).

The Manishtushu Obelisk (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

A key indicator of language contact lies in the fact that the language name “Sumerian” is not actually a Sumerian but an Akkadian word. The Sumerian word for their language was “Eme-gir,” which literally means “native language” (Cunningham, 2013).

The earliest written documents legible to us date from around 2,600 BCE. These documents all provide evidence of sustained multilingualism (Crisostomo, 2020). This evidence takes three forms, namely language mixing, parallel translations, and metalinguistic commentary.

Language mixing

First, there are texts that include loanwords from one language into the other or texts that are so heavily mixed that they cannot even be assigned to one language or another. An example comes from the Manishtushu Obelisk, which dates from between 2,277 and 2,250 BCE. The obelisk is basically a title deed to four estates. This is a short excerpt, with Sumerian words in roman font and Akkadian words in italic (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410):

šu‐niĝin 10 ĝuruš be‐lu gana gu kug‐babbar gana ša‐at e‐ki‐im ù zi‐ma‐na‐ak (“Total: 10 workers, lord of the fields, recipients of the payment of the field of Ekim and Zimanak.”)

As can be seen the text makes use of both languages in about equal parts – translanguaging avant la lettre!

Today, this kind of language mixing is relatively rare in writing, particularly formal writing such as legal texts. The Sumerians clearly had no such qualms about keeping written languages neatly separate. Anyone who went to the trouble of chiseling a record like this into stone surely put up the best kind of language they could think of. So, mixing languages must have felt right and sufficiently “weighty” for such an important title deed.

Whatever the writer’s reasoning was, “Sumerian and Akkadian (Semitic) are, throughout much of our material, intertwined and interconnected” (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 416).

Multilingual texts

In addition to administrative texts, some of the earliest surviving texts are – surprise, surprise – bilingual word lists (Michalowski, 2020).

Sumerian was the powerful lingua franca of the time, but it may well be that, by the time writing really began to take off, most people had switched over to speaking Akkadian. New scribes may not necessarily have been proficient in Sumerian. Therefore, they had to receive formal training in that language as part of their scribal training (Michalowski, 2006). That is why bilingual word lists can be found among the earliest written documents: they served a didactic function and the institutionalization of language learning clearly went hand-in-hand with the institutionalization of writing.

“Ubil-Eshtar, brother of the king, Kalki, scribe, is your servant” (Image credit: British Museum)

Because writing was invented by the Sumerians, writing itself seems to have become associated with Sumerian. It seems likely that Sumerian died out as a spoken language long before it ceased to be used as a written language (Michalowski, 2006).

As a result, scribes not only needed to learn the art of writing, but they also needed to be formally trained in the Sumerian language.

An intriguing example in the kind of diglossia that ensued can be found in an oft-quoted record about an escaped slave. This text records the event in Sumerian (roman font) but reports direct speech in Akkadian (italic font): “Lugalazida, the slave of Lugalkigal, escaped from the Ensi. About his hiding place, the slave girl of Urnigin said: ‘He lives in Maškan-šapir. He should be brought here’” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410).

Metalinguistic commentary

Over a period of around a thousand years, writing developed from proto-cuneiform – a logographic aide memoire – to become a language-specific writing system, of the sort we are familiar with today. Over the same period, people who knew how to write established themselves as a small and powerful elite of scribes (Taylor, 2013). What made them powerful was not their writing skills per se but the fact that scribes controlled the Sumerian bureaucracy and administration. In short, they collected and distributed goods.

The status of scribes is evident from cylindrical seals – like modern trademarks and signatures. These served to confirm the authenticity and legitimacy of traded objects (Pittman, 2013). The famous seal of Kalki provides an example. The seal is understood to depict a foreign expedition, which included a hunter, the scribe’s royal patron with an ax, and the scribe with tablet and stylus.

As scribes established themselves as a powerful professional caste, training of scribes became formalized and included Sumerian language teaching, as explained above. In keeping with the importance that was accorded to learning Sumerian in scribal education, some of these comments allow us a glimpse into ancient language teaching methods. Then, as today, teachers seem to have taken it upon themselves to act as language police, as this student complaint shows:

“The one in charge of Sumerian said: ‘He spoke Akkadian!’ Then he caned me.” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 408)

At the other end of the social spectrum, speaking multiple languages gave you bragging rights – also just like in our own time. Ancient kings are well known for their boasts inscribed in stone, and Shulgi, “King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the Universe,” whose reign lasted from around 2,094 to 2,046 BCE, had this to say about his prodigious language capabilities:

By origin I am a son of Sumer; I am a warrior, a warrior of Sumer. Thirdly, I can conduct a conversation with a man from the black mountains. Fourthly, I can do service as a translator with an Amorite, a man of the mountains. I myself can correct his confused words in his own language. Fifthly, when a man of Subir yells, I can even distinguish the words in his language, although I am not a fellow-citizen of his. When I provide justice in the legal cases of Sumer, I give answers in all five languages. In my palace no one in conversation switches to another language as quickly as I do. (Shulgi, 2000, pp. ll.20-220)

“Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Image credit: Louvre)

Note that Shulgi does not even spell out his first two languages – taking it as implicit that a Sumerian must be bilingual in Sumerian and Akkadian.

What about translation and interpreting?

It should have become obvious by now that the Sumerians operated a bilingual language regime. This is certainly true of the scribal caste – and keep in mind that everyone else would have been illiterate – and the kingly elite. Because these groups were bilingual, there was no need for interpretation between Sumerian and Akkadian.

However, linguistic mediation was necessary with the speakers of other languages, such as Shulgi’s third, fourth, and fifth language.

Like the Ancient Egyptians, the Sumerians institutionalized the role of linguistic mediator for trade and diplomacy. The status of interpreters seems to have been similar to that of scribes, as is evident from another famous seal, the seal of the interpreter Shu-ilishu. The idea of professional certification – modern as it may seem – is also first in evidence with the Sumerians, as this seal demonstrates. This seal also happens to be the first-ever known depiction of an interpreter in action – predating the interpreting relief in the Tomb of Horemheb by almost a thousand years.

The writing on the seal says that it belongs to “Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Edzard, 1968). The image on the seal depicts a Sumerian dignitary being approached by two figures, presumably Meluhhans, and a small interpreter sitting between them. It is not entirely clear what the Meluhha language was and who the Meluhhans might have been, but they are assumed to have been located in the Indus valley, where the Sumerians had extensive trade interests (Thornton, 2013).

Sumerian multilingualism lives on

As is to be expected from the above, the Sumerians used two different words for “linguistic mediator” – a Sumerian word (“eme-bal”) and an Akkadian word (“targummanu”). Now remember that recently we encountered “dragoman” as a fancy English word for “interpreter”? Do you notice that there is a vague similarity between “targummanu” and “dragoman”?

(Source: Thornton, 2013, p. 601)

“Dragoman” first appeared in English around 1300. It is a relatively rare word that refers specifically to interpreters working in the Middle East and with the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages. “Dragoman” arrived in English from Old French “drugemen” or Medieval Latin “dragumanus” and, via late Greek “dragoumanos,” goes back to Old Arabic “targumān.” The modern Arabic word is tarjumān, and from Arabic it goes all the way back to the Sumerians.

“Targummanu” not only made it into English as “dragoman” but into many other modern languages, too. The words for “interpreter” in Turkish (“tercümen”), Georgian (“tarjimani”), Russian (“tolmač”), Polish (“tłumacz”), Hungarian (“tolmács”), and German (“Dolmetscher”) all go back to the same source (Jyrkänkallio, 1952).

It is fitting that the word for “interpreter” in so many modern languages should link us back to ancient Mesopotamia, and remind us that all language is an unbroken chain of transmission from the time when humans first learned to speak some 300,000 years ago.

In fact, “targummanu” did not start in Akkadian but was a borrowing from Luwian, a language spoken in another multilingual and multiethnic empire the Sumerians came into contact with, that of the Hittites, in modern-day Turkey (Melchert, 2020). The Luwian word is likely a borrowing from yet another language, which has been covered by the sands of time (Popko, 2008).

In the peoples of the Ancient Middle East we see our modern selves like through a very old, cracked, blunted, and dusty mirror. One feature we see reaching back into that long history is the commonality of our linguistic diversity.

*Postscript, 21/07/2021: I’ve been asked by a learned reader to clarify that the Latin alphabet does not directly descend from cuneiform. It does not, and you can find the full line of known transmission here and here. Early alphabetic writing systems are more closely linked to Egyptian hieroglyphs than to cuneiform. Whether they were invented independently or inspired by hieroglyphs, and whether hieroglyphs were invented independently or inspired be cuneiform is a matter of ongoing debate that may never be resolved. Given what we know about the ubiquity of linguistic and cultural contact – in the ancient world, as today – I am inclined to think that mutual inspiration is much more likely than independent invention. While there is clear evidence for the independent invention of writing at least three times (Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica), the emergence of several writing systems in the Ancient Middle East in relatively close proximity to each other (geographically and chronologically) would suggest, at the very least, transfer of the general idea.

Related resources:

• Who invented writing?
• The Latin alphabet’s take-over of the world’s languages

References

Crisostomo, C. J. (2020). Sumerian and Akkadian Language Contact. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 401-420). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Crosby, A. W. (2004). Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cunningham, G. (2013). The Sumerian language. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 95-110). London: Routledge.
Edzard, D. O. (1968). Die Inschriften der altakkadischen Rollsiegel. Archiv für Orientforschung, 22, 12-20.
Hasselbach-Andee, R. (2020). Multilingualism and Diglossia in the Ancient Near East. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 457-470). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jyrkänkallio, P. (1952). Zur Etymologie von russ. tolmač “Dolmetscher” und seiner türkischen Quelle. Studia Orientalia, 17(8), 3-11.
Melchert, C. (2020). Luwian. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 239-256). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Michalowski, P. (2006). The lives of the Sumerian language. In S. L. Sanders (Ed.), Margins of writing, origins of cultures (pp. 159-184). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Michalowski, P. (2020). Sumerian. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. 83-105). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Popko, M. (2008). Völker und Sprachen Altanatoliens (C. Brosch, Trans.). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Pittman, H. (2013). Seals and sealings in the Sumerian world. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 343-366). London: Routledge.
Shulgi. (2000). A praise poem of Shulgi (Shulgi B). Retrieved from https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr24202.htm
Taylor, J. (2013). Administrators and scholars: The first scribes. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 314-328). London: Routledge.
Thornton, C. P. (2013). Mesopotamia, Meluhha, and those in between. In H. Crawford (Ed.), The Sumerian World (pp. 624-643). London: Routledge.

Joseph is sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers

Academic interpreting often labors under the assumption that the profession was born in the early years of the 20^th century. Billions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, of course, know better. They first encounter an interpreter in the biblical story of Joseph, the favorite son of Jacob. Sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, Joseph rises to become the deputy of the pharaoh by the grace of God. When the Israelites’ harvest fails, the brothers must travel to Egypt to buy grain. Joseph, who oversees the grain trade, recognizes them, but they do not recognize him. Joseph imposes a series of tests on his brothers to see whether they have repented. Eventually, he forgives them and the whole clan of Jacob moves to Egypt to share in Joseph’s good fortune.

One of the reasons the brothers did not recognize Joseph was that, as an Egyptian official dealing with foreigners, Joseph used an interpreter to communicate with foreign merchants. According to Genesis 42, 23 “[the brothers] did not realize that Joseph could understand them, since he was using an interpreter.”

Interpreting was institutionalized in the Egyptian bureaucracy

Trade was one of the domains that brought Egyptians into contact with speakers of other languages, as in the example of the Israelites. Diplomacy was another area and captive taking yet another. To cope with the intercultural communication demands raised by Egypt’s considerable external dealings in Africa and the Middle East, ancient Egyptians instituted the role of interlingual mediator in their bureaucracy (Kurz, 1985, 1986; Salevsky, 2018).

Some of the earliest evidence for Egyptian interpreting practices comes from the tombs of the princes of Elephantine, which date from the 3^rd millennium BCE. The princes of Elephantine were the governors of the Nubian border province in the south of Egypt. Their titles included “secret advisor for all business concerning the south of Upper Egypt,” “steward of the southern lands of Upper Egypt,” and “the one who has brought back the produce of all foreign lands for his royal lord and who spreads the fear of Horus in foreign lands” (Chrobak, 2013).

In short, the princes of Elephantine were in charge of what was essentially a colony and regularly led raids further south, into what they called “the land of Yam.”

To communicate with their non-Egyptian subjects and contacts, they employed interpreters, as is apparent from another one of their titles: “overseer of dragomans” (Gardiner, 1915). “Dragoman” is a fancy word for “interpreter” (Hermann, 1956), and one I will write about next time.

Whether “dragoman” or “interpreter,” the exact meaning of the hieroglyph “wa” remains a matter of some debate (Falbo, 2016). The hieroglyph is an abstraction of a loincloth that was only used by foreigners or by people speaking a foreign language (Salevsky, 2018). The Egyptologist who first deciphered the inscriptions had already cautioned that it might refer to any “speaker of a foreign language” (Gardiner, 1915). As such the duties of the “interpreter” were probably not restricted to linguistic mediation only but were quite wide-ranging in maintaining various forms of contacts with foreigners (Chrobak, 2013).

The interpreter relief in the tomb of Horemheb

The interpreting relief from the tomb of Horemheb. The interpreter (in the middle) mediates between Horemheb (left) and foreign envoys (right) (Image credit: Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden)

A striking depiction of the work of an Egyptian interpreter can be found on a bas-relief in the tomb of Horemheb, which dates from the 14^th century BCE. Horemheb was a general under the pharaoh Tutankhamun before he became pharaoh himself. The relief shows envoys from Libya, Nubia, and Syria prostrating themselves before Horemheb. According to the inscription, these foreigners are begging the Egyptians to send their armies and turn their countries into protectorates because the people there “live like animals in the wilderness” (Kurz, 1986).

One cannot feel but cynical about the age-old lies with which empires justify their exploits to themselves.

Between Horemheb and the envoys, we see an interpreter in action. It is a clever visual depiction of an essentially oral act: the interpreter is shown twice, once facing Horemheb and once facing the envoys. We can almost see him turn from one interlocutor to the other, as the image gives us a strong sense of the dynamism of the interpreting act.

Sadly, it is today impossible to get a full view of the complete interpreting scene because in the 19^th century the relief was broken up into pieces and sold to European tourists. The three pieces that make up the interpreter relief are today housed in museums in Berlin, Leiden, and Vienna (Kurz, 1986).

Training an interpreter corps

The records suggests that, for the longest time, Egyptians could not be bothered to learn foreign languages themselves (Hermann, 1956). In an eerie resemblance to today’s English monolingual mindset, they felt that for an Egyptian, speaking Egyptian was just fine. It was non-Egyptians who had to adjust and become bilingual by learning Egyptian.

Despite their strong sense of superiority, they did no want to leave the business of interpreting in the hands of foreigners. Therefore, they systematically created an interpreter corps of people who were not only bilingual but also Egyptian in culture and tastes. At least since the Middle Kingdom (2040 to 1782 BCE), they did this by bringing sons of foreign royal families to Egypt at an early age so that they could learn the Egyptian language and be socialized into the role of interlingual mediators (Kurz, 1986).

Only when the Egyptian empire began to decline, did Egyptians themselves start to learn foreign languages. From the 6^th century BCE, Egyptian boys were sent to live with Greek families so that they could become bilingual in Greek. The Greek historian Herodotus reports that, by the 4^th century BCE, their descendants had congealed into an interpreter caste, whose status ranked between that of merchants and seafarers (Kurz, 1986).

Interpreting gives way to multilingualism

By then, the power of the pharaohs had waned, and Egypt had become a multilingual polity. With the Persian conquest of 525 BCE, Aramaic replaced Egyptian as the language of the state, and with Alexander’s conquest in 332 BCE, Greek became the dominant language (Thompson, 2009).

Multilingual Cleopatra

When the pharaohs’ power had been assured, they could leave the pesky work of intercultural communication to others. Not so Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, with whose death in 30 BCE 5,000 years of Egyptian empire came to an end. In addition to Egyptian and Greek, she knew at least seven other languages. According to Plutarch’s Life of Antony (27, 3-4), “in her interviews with Barbarians she very seldom had need of an interpreter, but made her replies to most of them herself and unassisted, whether they were Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes or Parthians.”

References

Chrobak, M. (2013). For a tin ingot: The archaeology of oral interpretation. Przekładaniec: A Journal of Literary Translation, Special Issue 2013, 87-101.
Falbo, C. (2016). Going back to Ancient Egypt: were the Princes of Elephantine really ‘overseers of dragomans’? The Interpreters’ Newsletter, 21, 109-114.
Gardiner, A. H. (1915). The Egyptian Word for “Dragoman”. Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 37, 117-125.
Hermann, A. (1956). Dolmetschen im Altertum. In K. Thieme, A. Hermann, & E. Glässer (Eds.), Beiträge zur Geschichte des Dolmetschens (pp. 25-59). Munich: Isar Verlag.
Kurz, I. (1985). The rock tombs of the princes of Elephantine: Earliest references to interpretation in Pharaonic Egypt. Babel, 31(4), 213-218.
Kurz, I. (1986). Das Dolmetscher-Relief aus dem Grab des Haremhab in Memphis: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Dolmetschens im alten Ägypten. Babel, 32(2), 73-77.
Salevsky, H. (2018). The Origins of Interpreting in the Old Testament and the Meturgeman in the Synagogue. The Bible Translator, 69(2), 184-198. doi:10.1177/2051677018786366
Thompson, D. J. (2009). The Multilingual Environment of Persian and Ptolemaic Egypt: Egyptian, Aramaic, and Greek Documentation. In R. S. Bagnall (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of papyrology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199843695.013.0017

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

Here, Peter O’Keefe uses media sources to explore the public health communication strategies employed during Melbourne’s COVID-19 outbreak in Brimbank, a highly linguistically diverse suburb and, at the time, a COVID-19 hot spot.

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A drive-in Covid-19 testing site in Melbourne (Image credit: Bloomberg; Photographer: Carla Gottgens)

Melbourne is a city that takes pride in being one of the most cosmopolitan in the world. Like the rest of Australia, it is home to many migrant communities and in some local government areas like Brimbank, the number of migrants exceeds that of those born in Australia. It seems then rather unfair that in this time of emergency, communicating vital information to residents who rely on a language other than English for day-to-day life has come in an ad hoc fashion. This piecemeal approach to public health communication has resulted in a delay that could arguably be claimed responsible for it becoming a “hotspot” for COVID-19 infections this past winter. I will argue that failure to communicate effectively about vital pandemic information leads to distrust; and distrust in the government not only fuels conspiracy theories but undermines social cohesion at a time when we need everyone to stand together.

Crisis communication in linguistically diverse societies

There is no doubt, COVID-19 has laid bare failure in policy for emergency communication delivered in minority languages by governments all over the world. Delivering pandemic information in linguistically diverse countries is a serious challenge and Australia is not alone in this regard. What is clear, though, is that some countries, most notably China, have taken the challenge a little more seriously and acted with greater speed in addressing it. From the outset of the New Corona Virus crisis in Hubei province, expert linguists were called upon to aid with not only dissemination of information but also with patient-doctor interaction in what is now known as ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic (Li et al 2020).

Poor translation quality undermines trust

Compare this with the response in Australia, in particular in Brimbank. Although there were top-down efforts to deliver translations of pandemic information in various community languages, these were seemingly symbolic rather than serving a practical purpose.

All of these translations appear to have been simply machine done. The Japanese translation I examined contained pragmatic and discursive errors along with curious word choices.

Would the government seriously consider communicating with other governments in the world using Google Translate? Using poor translations is a sign of disrespect.

Deploying monolingual door knockers undermines trust

Perhaps in an effort to address the issue of communicating with non-internet users, the Victorian government dispatched door knockers to deliver in-person information about testing in hot spot suburbs. The private company to which this task was outsourced, employed poorly trained staff without proficiency in the main non-English languages of the area, whose communications reportedly caused further confusion.

Main languages spoken in Brimbank, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data

Migrants cop the blame for public communication failures

This communication breakdown may also have contributed to stigmatizing migrants as unwilling to participate in the public health effort and get tested.

The chief health officer of Victoria at one point declared that conspiracy theories circulated by migrants on social media were perhaps “partially responsible” for people believing that COVID-19 wasn’t real. However, there actually was no evidence that anyone refused a COVID-19 test on the grounds of not believing that COVID-19 was real.

What is sadly ironic about this claim is that conspiracy theories rely on people’s distrust of government to be believed. Lack of effective communication with the community especially in times of emergency creates distrust, so surely the government must accept some responsibility for any conspiracy theories that may have been circulating.

COVID-19 crisis communication is a test of social cohesion

In this post I have attempted to argue that emergency pandemic communication is more than merely conveying information. It serves a purpose to also persuade and comfort. If it can be effective in comforting, then this will build trust. This is necessary to ultimately persuade people to change their behaviors in a spirit of cooperation. The Victorian government’s actions in this area have had the opposite effect.

Just as COVID-19 has exposed the injustices and inequities across societies, it has also shown the different levels of social cohesion in various countries around the world. It takes a team effort to beat a pandemic, where all members of the community stand together regardless of their language, their political and cultural beliefs, or their level of literacy.

Reference

Li,Y., Rao, G., Zhang, J., and Li, J. (2020). Conceptualizing national emergency language competence. Multilingua, 39(5): 617–623.