The Leeds business case study focuses on Klára, a Czech-speaking community interpreter and her work with advocates providing interpreting services on an hourly-paid basis for a number of organizations. Klára’s business is her interpreting work with advocates who are primarily concerned with assisting Czech and Slovak Roma migrants in Leeds with the problems they face with life in a new country, principally the complex business of claiming benefits. Our work with Klára allows an insight into the lives of these new migrants, living in precarious conditions, on the borderline between low pay employment and benefit claiming. We examine in detail the role of the different languages in these migrants’ interpreter-mediated interactions. We examine translanguaging in four different areas: English/Czech/Slovak interlingual translanguaging, intralingual translanguaging in English, intralingual translanguaging in Czech and Slovak, and interdiscursive translanguaging. Our study extends into Klára’s home life, where we see that Klára works hard to ensure that her children have access to the Czech language. We also examine her electronically-mediated communication, much of which exemplifies the blurring of boundaries between work and social interaction in online communication. The study took place in the Leeds suburb of Harehills. In the process of collecting data with Klára, we gained an insight into the lives of new migrants, living in precarious conditions, on the borderline between low pay employment and benefit claiming. We examine in detail the role of the different languages in these migrants’ interpreter-mediated interactions, using the notion of translanguaging. Klára’s work as a community interpreter means that language is crucially her business. Our study also extends into Klára’s home life, and we see that Klára also makes language her business there, working to ensure that her children have regular and consistent access to the Czech language. This report comprises eight sections overall. Following this introduction we provide background on the Roma in Leeds, the population who Klára has most contact with in her professional life. In Section 3 we discuss the foundational literature relevant to our study: superdiversity and neoliberalism; the employment and also exploitation characteristic in early stage migration; how linguistic ethnography can afford rich insights that it does into the events and practices we observe; a focus on the interpreting event from a literacy studies perspective; the site of interpreting as a contact zone; translanguaging at work and at home; and the use of social media in superdiverse multilingual environments. Section 4 on methodology details our overall approach, gives an overview of data collection, and describes the individual data sets, and how our analysis enables them to work in combination. The two central analysis sections (5 and 6) cover respectively interaction at work and translanguaging in the home, and we include a short section (7) on mediated discourse which straddles the work/life boundary.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)