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Professional interpreters are obliged by their codes of ethics to interpret the speakers’ speech faithfully, including offensive, profane or vulgar language. In order to achieve this goal, interpreters need to be pragmatically competent, so as to understand the intention and effect of the offensive remark in the source language and be able to appropriately render it into the target language to achieve the same effect in the hearer. Research has shown, however, that not all interpreters abide by this requirement, and many tend to tone down or even omit any offensive language, for a number of reasons, including attempts to protect the hearers or to save their own face. This study examined the ways in which Arabic, Mandarin and Spanish speaking interpreters interpreted offensive language by a suspect in a simulated police interview into English. Experienced qualified interpreters in the three languages, maintained the highest levels of pragmatic equivalence.

This paper explores linguistic and cultural complexity within immigration legal advice communication. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study, ethnographic and interactional data from two linked advice meetings about UK refugee family reunion processes are subject to deductive analysis using Risager’s model of the language-culture nexus, within which the intersection of language(s) and culture(s) in a communicative event is conceptualised as a nexus of linguistic, languacultural, discursive, and other (non-linguistic) cultural resources and practices. The paper operationalises this intercultural communication theory in a new and exploratory way to investigate how cultural complexity is manifest, and interactionally managed, at different levels of meaning. The substantive analysis shows how a range of divergent resources, brought in by the different participants, are drawn upon and externalised as communicative practices in both legal advice meetings. Understanding is negotiated interculturally at different levels of meaning – the linguistic, the languacultural, and the discursive – in contrasting ways in each meeting. Methodologically, the paper argues that a strength of Risager’s framework is that it supports a methodical and structured analysis of communicative events characterised by linguistic and cultural complexity, which can be linked to other discourse analytical approaches. The model’s complexity, and its foregrounding of verbal over other semiotic modes, are highlighted as challenges for the analyst.

Most studies on campus and private policing take on political, anthropological, sociological, and criminological perspectives. Although there were investigations on policing in South Africa during apartheid, scant research has focused on how students in South African higher education (SAHE) relate their experiences of campus policing. Due to recent unrest on SAHE campuses and radical changes that include the militarization of police forces, examining how students perceive the legitimacy and integrity of campus policing is vital. As such, this paper presents a discourse analysis focused on descriptions of students’ campus experiences in the aftermath of the #FeesMustFall (#FMF) protests. Combining critical discourse analysis (CDA) with systemic functional linguistics, through transitivity, it offers insight into the ideological power struggles between students and police. It shows the types of voices students reveal as an aggrieved group in the hope of identifying non-aggressive approaches to address emotionally charged events (such as protests). Adding transitivity analysis to CDA provides a solid framework for decoding radical meanings at the peak of chaotic situations in which social change in post-apartheid South Africa can be facilitated by understanding marginalized groups.

This paper discusses symbolic violence in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism. It revisits an archived recording of a group discussion between four boys about their chances of having sex with a female researcher. The data is rife with symbolic violence. Most obviously, the conversation enacted a heterosexist form of symbolic violence. This was, however, not the only direction in which violence was exerted. As argued by (Bourdieu & Wacquant. 1992. An invitation to reflexive sociology . Cambridge: Polity), symbolic violence involves two fundamental elements – domination and complicity. In the case at hand, the boys’ sexist banter conformed to dominant expectations about their linguistic behavior, imbued in the research event. This is symbolic complicity of the kind that the Bourdieusian notion foresees. Yet another subordination to the dominant vision occurred when the researchers captured the conversation on tape, but decided to exempt it from publication. Here, we argue that giving deepened attention to sociolinguists’ own run-ins with symbolic violence during research is valuable, because it provides an opportunity to reflexively consider the social conditions of the research practices, in relation to the data produced and analyzed. Ultimately, this reflexive exercise may help sociolinguists sharpen their tools for understanding the give and take of dominance and complicity unfolding in their data.

This study examines how the transnational lives of two Sinhalese-speaking Sri Lankan families in the rural U.S. influenced family language policy (FLP) and how they (re)positioned themselves in response to their transnational lives. Employing an ethnographic design, including interviews and observations, this study explores the families’ language ideologies and management strategies and the factors that shaped their policies. Both families held similar language ideologies but contrasting management strategies that were informed by a differing socioeconomic status and eventual home country return, and which in turn led to different ways of FLP formation and implementation. FLPs were aimed at accruing capital and social prestige to facilitate the navigation of spaces in family members’ present and (imagined) future lives in Sri Lanka and the U.S., and possibly beyond; yet, these same policies created a sense of ambivalence in regards to transnationals’ cultural and linguistic identities and attachments. The findings show the competing and contradictory forces at play in transnational bilingual children’s heritage language development. This study draws attention to how transnationals navigate global citizenry and how they make decisions about language as they reimagine and refashion their membership into multiple communities in an interconnected world.