Abstract
This paper discusses a disturbance to the Danish legal system, a cornerstone in the state of law. We focus on ‘expressions of upset’ during a reorganization of Danish legal interpreting, which was followed closely by the Danish media. We analyze these expressions as ‘communicative uptakes’ and we discuss how they made different elements of the interpreting affair salient. The elements include assumptions about what legal interpreting is or should be, its societal role and relevance. We argue that the uptakes integrated the interpreting situation with the institutionalized aim of the social space in which they occurred, and we draw on Agha’s theory of ‘mediatization’ to account for the relations between the overall situation and the various expressions of upset, and between the institutional roles of participants and mediatized aspects of the spaces. Data come from a trial, a meeting in the Danish Parliament, and a blog thread. The study thereby illustrates a communicative (thus, social) process in a modern (thus, complex) society in which a social event at societal level (so-called large-scale) is received and made meaningful by many different social actors in a variety of ways, thereby creating links between otherwise unconnected spaces.
Acknowledgments
We thank prof. Asif Agha for his valuable advice regarding the application of the mediatization perspective in this paper.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: spaces of upset in the Nordic region
- Chaos in court: mediatized expressions of upset in relation to Danish courtroom interpreting
- Broadcasting the skeptron: the upset of sociolinguistic closure in Swedish public service television
- “We just want the language tone”: when requests to use minority languages lead to interactional breakdown in multilingual classrooms
- Language for work and work for language: linguistic aspirations in the marketing of domestic work
- Media panic, medical discourse and the smartphone
- Sociolinguistic upsets and people of color in social media performances
- Nordicity, language and the nation-state
- Varia
- Foreign language ideology and American Sign Language in US public education
- Making the case for linguicism: revisiting theoretical concepts and terminologies in linguistic discrimination research
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: spaces of upset in the Nordic region
- Chaos in court: mediatized expressions of upset in relation to Danish courtroom interpreting
- Broadcasting the skeptron: the upset of sociolinguistic closure in Swedish public service television
- “We just want the language tone”: when requests to use minority languages lead to interactional breakdown in multilingual classrooms
- Language for work and work for language: linguistic aspirations in the marketing of domestic work
- Media panic, medical discourse and the smartphone
- Sociolinguistic upsets and people of color in social media performances
- Nordicity, language and the nation-state
- Varia
- Foreign language ideology and American Sign Language in US public education
- Making the case for linguicism: revisiting theoretical concepts and terminologies in linguistic discrimination research