Accomplishing difference in bilingual interaction: Translation as backwards-oriented medium repair

Abstract

Speakers often perform impromptu translations during bilingual interaction. Such translations can hold a wide variety of socio-pragmatic functions including reiteration, emphasis, recasting, and repair. When translations occur in multi-party talk where the interactants are of mixed linguistic proficiencies, they may also serve to include interlocutors who have been excluded from prior talk that was delivered in their weaker language. In this respect, translations re-partition interactants in an inclusive way. Making use of both conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA), this paper examines a collection of such post-exclusionary translations video-recorded among Japanese–English bilingual teenagers at an international school. A detailed sequential analysis of this bilingual practice reveals that the act of translation makes relevant various elements of the speakers' and recipients' identities. When a bilingual speaker offers a translation to someone, he or she casts the recipient in the category of novice (or ‘non-native’), often even despite real-time claims to comprehension from that person. Indeed, the study found that when non-natives offered a receipt token after a turn delivered in a medium that was not assumed to belong to them, it often prompted the speaker to repeat the prior turn in the recipient's preferred medium.