Abstract Summary
The paper investigates the roles of multilingual interaction and language contact in a community dance group that consists of members with asymmetric linguistic resources. Translatory practices are needed to enable everyone’s participation, and they are found to be influenced by the participants’ shifting roles across artistic and linguistic participation frameworks.
Abstract :
This paper investigates the roles of multilingual interaction and language contact in a community dance group that consists of members with asymmetric linguistic resources. The group uses English as the primary shared language and hence the study falls under the framework of English as a lingua franca (ELF) research. Although present ELF theorization acknowledges that English is only one of the many languages involved in ELF interaction (Jenkins 2015), there is relatively little research on ELF communities of practice in which ad hoc translation and interpreting is a constant resource for enabling all community members’ participation. Translatory practice here refers to any type of interactional, interlingual translation, mediation, brokering or self-translation (e.g. Harjunpää 2017).
The community art group is led by a dancer-pedagogue and includes two researchers as participant observers as well as other Finnish and immigrant members with diverse backgrounds in the arts. Creating community art sets the parameters for the conversation in terms of speaker identities. The group members move across different layers of participation frameworks – artistic, linguistic, and cultural – as they describe, negotiate, direct, and engage in the conversation unfolding during the dance rehearsals. Their shifting roles as focal or peripheral participants in the frameworks (e.g. Lave & Wenger 1991) are found to influence the translatory practices emerging in the conversation, which ultimately aims at artistic collaboration.
Harjunpää, K. 2017. Translatory practices in everyday conversation. Bilingual mediating in Finnish-Brazilian Portuguese interaction. PhD dissertation. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.
Jenkins, J. 2015. Repositioning English and multilingualism in English as a lingua franca. Englishes in Practice 2(3), 49-85.
Lave, J. & E. Wenger 1991. Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
