Translingual negotiation strategies in CMC contexts: English-medium communication in online marketplaces

2.1 Previous studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC)

Having, as mentioned above, characteristics of both spoken and written discourse (Paltridge 2012; Paolillo and Zelenkauskaite 2013), CMCs in the online marketplace are construed in this study as contact zones in which translingual online chats are synchronously and asynchronously exchanged between sellers and buyers, creating meaning-negotiation situations with the potential of entailing conflicts instigated by linguistic and cultural differences (Pratt 1991). This approach differs from those used in previous studies on CMC, which have analyzed efforts of international companies to accommodate the needs of their transnational and transcultural customers (Martin 2011); the teaching and learning English for multilingual speakers using the online public space of social network services (SNSs) such as Blogs, Wikis, Facebook or Twitter (Flanagan et al. 2014; Reinhardt 2019); and one-on-one chat in online library reference services (Foley 2002; Shachaf 2008; Shachaf et al. 2008). Here, by focusing on real-time chat between customers and sellers to achieve potentially problematic negotiations such as returning goods and canceling orders, the authors investigated CMC in what Murray (2000) has referred to as “the continuum of orality and literacy of CMC” (p. 400) and Herring and Androutsopoulos (2015) as featuring synchronous speech-like discourse structure “at the utterance level” (p. 131). These speech-like features, which often violate the grammatical rules of written discourse, are combined with the speed-pacing of real time chat among multilingual interlocutors whose focus is less on correctness of expression than on solving problems expeditiously, thus bringing out the wide range of communication strategies available in the online chat medium.

In this investigation of a type of interaction of commercial transactions becoming increasingly common in online contexts, the translingualism lens provided a theoretical framework through which to capture sophisticated implicit/explicit meaning negotiation strategies in detail as well as interlocutors’ ability to shuttle between modes/platforms.

2.2 Translingual meaning negotiation strategies

As the international status of English affects all actors in the global marketplace, meaning necessarily takes precedence over form (Canagarajah 2007). Moreover, as Canagarajah (2013) has also stressed, the globalization of English has blurred the boundaries between nativeness and non-nativeness, particularly in the marketplace, as long as competency is sufficient to avoid misunderstanding and hindrance of business goals. As an example of such practical communication between two English users in a business setting, Canagarajah (2013) reinterprets a transcribed telephone conversation, originally presented in Firth and Wagner (2007), between an Egyptian cheese importer and a Danish cheese exporter. The Egyptian buyer complained that the dairy product purchased from the Danish company was “blowing,” an utterance that necessitated a meaning-making negotiation process because the Egyptian buyer was not familiar with an English idiom, “gone off,” for spoiled food that was used by the Danish cheese seller. Postulating that in this context “blowing” was derived from an Egyptian expression for spoiled food, Canagarajah shed light on the interlocutors’ subsequent meaning-making negotiation strategies to achieve their goal in this business interaction and called attention to the implicit influence of the individual’s native linguistic background on his/her of ELF.

The data from the online marketplace used in this study demonstrate the dynamics of Canagarajah’s (2013) four key translingual negotiation strategies of envoicing, recontextualization, interaction, and entextualization, to which we added a fifth strategy, transmodality, to capture translingual practices in the CMC contexts. First, envoicing refers to the ways speakers encode their linguistic, cultural, and social identities into their language usage (Bakhtin 1986). Unlike other frameworks for intercultural communication, which have often focused on the practicality of meaning transfer from one language to another, translingualism approaches language-in-use as expression of voice, for which translingual speakers inevitably face complicated decision-making moments in online synchronous conversation. Second, recontextualization may occur once speakers have envoiced their identities. This strategy is a framing process through which speakers’ intentions achieve a better position for uptake. In the language contact zone of online marketplaces, meaning-negotiation processes avert misunderstandings that might be caused by interlocutors’ different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Third, Canagarajah (2013) defines interactional strategy as “a social activity of co-constructing meaning by adopting reciprocal and collaborative strategies” which will be realized when “interlocutors match the language resources they bring with people, situations, objects, and communicative ecologies for meaning-making” (82). Fourth, entextualization refers to “how speakers and writers monitor and manage their productive processes by exploiting the spatiotemporal dimensions of the text” (Canagarajah 2013: 84). What speakers say and writers write in CMC are not only enactments of their identities and positioning for uptake but indications of their discourse-specific knowledge. Changes made during interactions reflect the language monitoring strategy of accommodating responses from other members of an online community.

The fact that Canagarajah (2013) did not conceptualized the four translingual negotiation strategies to explore CMC discourse has left a space for this study to contribute to the field by proposing transmodal strategy in online marketplace transactions among translingual interlocutors (see Figure 1). The conceptual grounding of transmodality is not entirely new but is in line with previously suggested notions that seek to capture the creative ways in which meaning-makers exploit to visit diverse platforms that might have no obvious overlaps, to marshal multiple resources from disparate sources, and to actively code-mesh combinations of these resources to express themselves (Jewitt 2009; Kress 2000; Newfield 2009; Pennycook 2007; Wyatt-Smith and Kimber 2009). Following Li’s (2011, 2016, 2018) concepts of translanguaging space and translanguaging instinct, which emphasize enhanced contacts among various cultures and discourses to provide opportunities for new identities and creativity to emerge and merge, CMC is viewed as a translanguaging space wherein interlocutors’ translanguaging instinct regarding transmodality facilitates their moves across various online platforms as they pick up, combine, and re-form linguistic cues to represent their intended meanings efficiently. Today’s digital generation may well be equipped with this instinct in that they were exposed to new ways of being literate from a young age. Their familiarity with the use of digital devices for literacy practices provides the basis for naturally developing transmodality.

Figure 1:

Translingual meaning negotiation strategies in CMC context.

3.1 Data sources and collection

Data consisted of postings shared among members of two online communities in Korea open for the public to read and make comments (see Table 1). These three sets of data of this study were derived from two large online communities in Naver.com in 2018 spring to fall. Table 1 provides an overview of the sources, interlocutors, situations, type of CMC systems and synchronicity of the communication data. Two data sets (no. 1 and no. 3) were selected from NikeMania (https://cafe.naver.com/sssw), an online community in which those interested in sports and street clothing brands such as Nike, Adidas, Supreme, and Palace exchange information, questions and answers about products, online purchases, returns and refunds, and many more issues involved in online transactions. Another data source (no. 2) was Mijunmo (https://cafe.naver.com/gototheusa), an online community of people preparing for study and work in the US, mostly married women who exchanged advice, often shopping tips, on living in the US.

We manually assembled a corpus of postings that provided anecdotal illustrations of the challenges of communicating in English in online marketplaces. Postings were excluded if they were fragmentary or showed insufficient turn-takings. From this corpus, three cases were selected for the purpose of this study that presented the most visible meaning negotiations, two from customer service platforms and one from an online community bulletin board. These chats included questions about delivery tracking and canceling a wine subscription. One data set was drawn from NikeMania, a Korean online community in which members consulted with each other concerning the appropriateness of the wording of a communication with a customer service representative. These were selected to investigate the Korean English speakers’ understanding of communication in English as well as norms of communication emerging collaboratively among Korean speakers of English.

All names are pseudonyms, and no personal information is disclosed in discussions of or extracts from chats and postings. Therefore, use of the data can be considered ethically legitimate.

3.2 Data analysis

Following Lester and O’Reilly (2018) description of conversation analysis as examination of “the changing sequence of actions that occurs between individuals or groups of people” (p. 4), we used conversation analysis of CMC (González-Lloret 2013) to systematically explicate the sequences of interactions between Koreans and English speakers. When a candidate phenomenon, described by Lester and O’Reilly (2018) as “a tangible, viewable example of something within the data” (p. 160), was found, it was compared with phenomena within and between data sets to determine what the speakers intended to do and how their intentions were realized through negotiation strategies. Also we employed Herring and Androutsopoulos’s (2015) “seven-move schema for dyadic instant messaging conversations” (p. 133) as a lens to guide our focus during data analysis. As discussed above, along with methodological considerations, we drew theoretically upon Canagarajah’s (2013) model of translingual speakers’ meaning negotiation strategies (envoicing, recontextualization, interactional, and entextualization), which was extended to include our own suggestion, transmodal strategy.

In the analysis of online communications using the translingual meaning negotiation strategies framework, overlaps among translingual strategies were made visible, showing complementary relations. As Canagarajah (2013) pointed out, the strategies do not function independently; rather, they work together to accomplish meaning negotiation in translingual interactions. An utterance may play multiple strategic roles in a context in which previous and following turns also influence its function. Nevertheless, the findings are organized under Canagarajah’s four translingual meaning negotiation strategies and the one that emerged in this study as discrete categories in order to highlight the prominence of each strategy in relation to the others throughout the selected communications.

For identifying the meaning negotiation strategies used in the online marketplaces and understanding their contents, our positionality as researchers was also an important analytic tool within the linguistic and social context of this study. Our competencies in both Korean and English languages and cultures gave us insight into the unconventional and sometimes unintelligible English usages by Korean speakers and Korean usages by English-speaking customer service agents. Moreover, our theoretical orientation toward translingual practices led us to attend less to linguistic accuracy within a single turn; but more to the interactional strategies and socially and interactionally constructed messages conveyed and understood by the interlocutors. Thus, we used conversation analysis to focus on the range of translingual meaning negotiation strategies used in the communications between Korean speakers of English and English speaking interlocutors.

4.1 Envoicing

Speakers in online translingual contact zones employ envoicing strategies to communicate their personal and cultural identities to their interlocutors (Canagarajah 2013). For example, Lee, a Korean translingual speaker with relatively low English proficiency, used his non-native English speaker status as an envoicing strategy. In the excerpt below (Extract #1-1), Lee had just provided the tracking number of a purchase and asked Mark A about the shipping status of his order. When Mark A asked Lee about the contents of the order, Lee explicitly mentioned himself as a Korean speaker and thus non-native speaker of English.

When Lee did not understand what Mark A asked for, he directly asked “What?” followed immediately with “What do you want me to tell you?” (#36). This kind of blunt response, often made by low proficiency English speakers (Takahashi and Beebe 1987), might sound rude because native or more proficient English speakers would be likely to embed their uncertainty in polite phrasing such as apologies and modal verbs as hedges. However, the Korean speaker’s envoicing strategy of explaining he was not an American, confirmed by his odd phrasing, “I am a South Korean person” (#37), softened the impression of discourtesy in his initial response. Mark A’s next turn, in which he elaborated that he needed “the contents of the package with the tracking number” (#38), suggested that the envoicing strategy worked. And, Lee provided the answer, “One pants” (#39), and then checked to make sure if he was responding accurately by asking Mark A if he is looking for the contents (#40). After Mark A’s lengthy explanation (#41), Lee repeated in a full sentence, “The set includes 1 pants” (#42). Lee’s text contained phrasing, such as “1 pants,” that native or proficient speakers of English would be unlikely to use, but Mark A’s “let-it-pass” attitude, evident in his tolerance of linguistic mistakes as long as they did not interfere with intelligibility and his alertness to cues in the message (Firth 1996), allowed the interaction to succeed. It may reasonably be inferred that Lee’s envoicing strategy encoding his non-native speaker of English status and clarifying the relationship between the two speakers would set the stage for their co-constructed intelligibility.

4.2 Recontextualization

In a negotiation between parties from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, speakers need not only to make their intentions clear but also to frame their conversation to be easily understood. In the following online chat (Extract #2), this strategy was realized in three ways: the use of emojis and emoticons; the English speaker’s use of transliteration into the customer’s L1 (i. e. Korean); and the English speaker’s use of the customer’s L1.

The example below shows a situation in which Sunny, a Korean customer, wanted to cancel her wine delivery subscription, and Ashton, an English speaking customer service agent, tried to persuade her to keep it and skip a delivery whenever she wanted. However, when Sunny still wanted to cancel, Ashton complied, following which they bantered about his use of her language and used emojis and emoticons to express congeniality.

The conversation between these two speakers contained various emoticons to express pleasant and regretful feelings such as :), :3. :D, ^^ and TT, and emojis such as and . As laughter and other sentiments can be a sign of uptake in face-to-face communication (Canagarajah 2013), online communication embodies emojis and emoticons for expressing feelings in CMC literacy practices (Davies 2006). These resources for expressing feelings were used at the end of almost every turn. When Ashton used the emoticon :) to signal a smile or friendliness in line #9, Sunny replied with the emoji TT to indicate tears or regret (line #10). Ashton used another smile emoticon, :3 (line #16) and Sunny responded with one suggesting a large grin, :D (line #21). Of particular interest, Ashton used “Fighting” (line #30), which is the Korean way of saying “go for it” or “good luck,” and bolstered its meaning by adding an emoji of biceps, , to which Sunny responded with an emoji of a smile (#31). This use of image-based semiotics allowed the two speakers to create an amicable atmosphere to relieve possible tension in exchanging speech acts in a situation with negative aspects. This communication shows how a customer service agent and a customer recontextualized a potentially contentious situation by using language and symbols to turn a business transaction into a friendly conversation, leaving the door open, perhaps, for future business.

Ashton’s use of Korean contains such mistakes as incorrect word spacing and grammar errors. His “munjega anida” in line #22 seemed to be an attempt to say “Not a problem” in Korean, but this was not how native speakers of Korean would say it, suggesting he had put the English phrase into Google translator and obtained this result. Similarly, Ashton’s sentence “너도 좋은 하루 되셨다!” for “you too have a good day” shows the wrong use of the deferential ending, which would sound awkward to Korean speakers, again suggesting he received a verbatim translation for the English expression from an electronic translator.

Although Ashton’s and Sunny’s attempts to speak each other’s language include many errors, they did not hinder the smooth flow of the conversation between two interlocutors or evoke corrections from either side. Rather, Ashton’s use of recontextualization strategies, for instance, surprised and pleased Sunny, who responded delightedly in similarly flawed English, “You can Korean. Ha ha!” as seen in line #29. They were creating exchanges in which they were collaborators in a mutual effort to communicate emotional as well as semantic meanings across languages. In this effort, Ashton seemed to recognize that his Korean might be unclear by repeating the meaning of his Korean sentences in English as seen in lines #9, from #23 to #24, from #26 to #27, and #32.

This online chat in English between a Korean speaker and an English speaker demonstrates the recontexualization strategy. By sensitively and playfully responding to each other’s turns with the use of emoticons and emojis and translations, the two speakers bridged their different linguistic and cultural backgrounds by recontextualizing their communication to be conducive to friendly uptake and comprehension. This successful exchange was facilitated by the multimodal nature of an online translanguaging space (Li 2018), in which translingually-oriented speakers could draw upon a range of resources to construct communication that served both commercial and personal purposes.

4.3 Interactional

In the process of turn-taking, interlocutors put mutual effort into maintaining communication without breakdowns and to achieve alignment, for which, Canagarajah (2013) states, they “match the language resources they bring with people, situations, objects, and communicative ecologies for meaning-making” (82). The complexity of this interactional strategy may make it more vulnerable to problems, as shown Extract #1-2 below from a live chat between a Korean customer and an English speaking customer service agent. It demonstrates how different perceptions of a culturally-bounded speech act may create awkwardness between two speakers from different cultures. This extract captures the moment when two different “conversation closers” appear to unravel at the end of what had seemed to that point to be a successful conversation.

While this conversation would seem to be successful in that it ended without problems, not only the Korean speaker’s unintelligible English sentences but also the speakers’ culturally different understanding of the way to finish a communication brought it to a rough finish. Mark A’s question in line #54 had two functions, to literally ask if he could offer further help, and to signal that their conversation was finished if there was no other request, a typical closing sentence in the English-speaking discourse of customer service. Lee’s answer (line #55) seems to have nothing to do with Mark A’s question because he started giving unrelated information about Korean dishes and a city (lines #57 to #60), interrupting Mark A’s move to finish their conversation. Moreover, Lee’s utterance in line #55 was confusing because he used “I” is an agent of the action “come to South Korea,” as if he were not already there, when he probably meant “you.” In addition, some of Lee’s comments, such as line #60, “Kimchi is also poetry,” would not be intelligible even if spoken in Korean to native speakers of Korean, which may be the result of a machine translation of a Korean sentence to English.

Lee’s unexpected deviant behavior above might be understood as an Asian speaker’s way of expressing politeness (e. g. House 2003) or as an expression of gratitude and reciprocity in that right after talking about Korean dishes, Lee even gave Mark A his phone number (line #63). Such a disclosure of personal information to a stranger would be considered inappropriate in many cultures. Moreover, it is not clear whether Lee’s sentence “Call at Incheon Airport 010-****-****” meant that Mark A should use the number to call the airport or to call Lee when he arrived at the airport. Nevertheless, no matter how perplexing this communication might have been to him, Mark A seems to have understood Lee’s intent of expressing thanks, because he answered casually, indicating a smile by writing “HAHAA” with an exclamation mark (line #65).

When Mark A’s intention to finish their conversation did not work, he explicitly stated it was over if there were no more questions (line #66), to which Lee responded directly saying “No you can quit now” and “bye” (lines #68 and #69), which again may sound very abrupt to a native speaker of English but could be understood as a literal transfer of meaning from Korean to English with the intention of meaning something like “no, I’m good.” Lee signaled, again, his amicable attitude towards their conversation by adding the Korean emoticon of a smile, ^^, in line #70.

When speakers of different L1s communicate in English-medium online conversations, the second/foreign/additional language speaker utilizes not only linguistic but also cultural and pragmatic knowledge of his/her own (Lee 2006). To participate in interactions that may require complex speech acts, non-native speakers are culturally aware that they need to take extra measures to show their politeness and avoid face threatening acts; however, their lack of linguistic as well as pragmatic knowledge sometimes leads them to “use erroneous language forms and produce speech acts that sound deviant or even create communication failure” (Olshtain and Cohen 1989: 62). In this communication, Lee may have been seeking ways to say goodbye and express his gratitude to Mark A for doing his best to solve the problem. In responding to Mark A’s intended closing statement by talking about meals or hosting Mark A in a hypothetical future visit to Korea, Lee was reflecting greeting and farewell expressions common in many Asian cultures, including Korea and China, which often include talking about food (Lee 2018). But whereas Koreans’ fond farewell is usually expressed by saying “let’s have a meal some time” (Chung 2018), Lee’s conversation closer here was much longer and detailed than usual, which from the Korean perspective could be interpreted as his desire to show how grateful he was to Mark A.

While the conversation between the two parties ended with a successful resolution to a problem that might have involved miscommunication, it demonstrated misalignment, particularly Lee’s seemingly irrelevant deviations into talk of food and travel at the end, elements of the chat that Mark A deflected while focusing on the issue at hand. Thus, there were failed interactional strategies within the exchange that were probably attributable to the parties’ lack of shared cultural understanding.

4.4 Entextualization

Entextualization, which includes the inscription of speech into writing, is a strategy by which online communicators encode their speaking voices into a text. Canagarajah (2013) referred to this relatively macro-strategy as showing “how speakers and writers monitor and manage their productive processes by exploiting the spatio-temporal dimensions of the text” (84).

Email is a commonly used medium in which people encode their spoken language into written forms, which can be a difficult task for English learners. For example, determining the best approach to communicating a speech act of request (Biesenbach-Lucas 2007), not to mention writing an appropriately worded email message, can be challenging, especially for those with low levels of English proficiency. Unable to use complicated structures or nuanced language, these speakers are likely to use direct expressions (Takahashi and Beebe 1987), which may seem rude to native speakers. As shown below, aware of this possibility, a Korean customer posted a query on an online community board asking whether it was okay to say “I’m sorry but I will cancel. If you do not refund $ 10 shipping” (line #1), explaining that he was not good at English and thus had used a Google translator. In response, people in the community pointed out the connotations of his sentences and suggested better ways to express what he intended to say.

In the following Extract 3, the Korean data are presented in their original form followed by translation into English in square brackets. Numbers indicate turns and small alphabet letters identify different speakers.

This communication, in which Korean speakers conferred on appropriate ways to write an email request for an order cancellation in English, illustrates the nature of entextualization strategies in online translanguaging space. Unlike synchronous online live chat between English speaking customer service agents and Korean speakers, in which adjustments can be made during communications, they had to consider the effects of putting the words in writing and dealing with Korean to English translation issues. By commenting that writer a’s original sentence might sound intimidating if not threatening (lines #3-4, #10, #11, and #12) and suggesting polite ways to make the request (line #8) or simply asking for cancellation (line #10), the respondents highlighted the face-threatening possibilities in non-face-to-face communications. The writer’s use of Google translator (line #2) is a common strategy of non-native speakers of English, but what is interesting from a translingual perspective was his dependence on other online community members to monitor his entextualization process by checking whether his message conveyed his intended disposition as well as meaning. This example shows how translingual speakers behave differently in asynchronous and synchronous communication discourse, as the former provides time and space for acts of monitoring and gathering collective intelligence to make a better product and so can be expected to meet a higher standard of appropriateness.

4.5 Transmodality

Transmodality is a CMC-specific strategy that is drawn from our own data sets. Transmodality, which may also partly encompass other strategies, refers to the practice of shuttling among different on/offline modes and platforms to encode and decode languages, emotions, and cultural perspectives. This strategy is particular to CMC in that the CMC discourse not only combines characteristics of spoken expression and written discourse but also because online communication offers a wide range of resources and multiple strategies for accomplishing meaningful interaction.

As seen from the data presented above, in CMC speakers encode their spoken into written language while referring to such aids as online translators (Extract 1–2). Moreover, expressing emotions in CMC as shown in Extract 2 also requires speakers to convert their physical features and behaviors (e. g. smiling, laughing, crying) into non-verbal, written representations (i. e. emoticons and emojis). In cross-cultural and language situations, such conversions require interlocutors to consider the cultural differences among the parties. In addition, as shown in an asynchronous communication on the online bulletin board of a Korean street clothing brands community (Extract 3), a request for collective knowledge to answer a question can promote intellectual convergence (Harasim 2012) by changing an information exchange space to a site for online collaborative learning (OCL). Transmodality, in the extract above, not only allowed the person who posted the question to monitor his language by referring to his own knowledge and an online translator, but also rendered his communication and call for feedback from other members into a collaborative learning space.

Transmodality, therefore, expands Canagarajah’s (2013) translingual meaning negotiation strategies by capturing translingual speakers’ online communication strategies that involve shuttling among languages, cultures, and multiple modes/platforms. By these means, interlocutors can combine and transform multimodal resources to achieve a level of clarity that, in instantaneous spoken or written online interactions, would be difficult to reach if they depend only on their own linguistic competence.