Research Project

Children and Adolescents as Language Brokers

Background & Seminar Series

In May 2003, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK agreed to fund a series of five seminars on the topic of language brokering. The funding would allow a group of about twenty people to meet regularly for discussion about issues relating to researching child and adolescent language brokering.


What is child and adolescent language brokering?

A very common experience across the world, yet one of the most under-researched and under-supported, is everyday, non-professional language and literacy brokering. This might involve brokering within families when people relocate from one national language culture into another, e.g. refugees or immigrant groups (Baynham, 2000), brokering between deaf adult signers and hearing groups (Preston, 1994), or translation and scribing for people who can speak but not write a language (Mace 2003, 2000). While these roles often fall to adults, it is as frequently the case that the burden falls upon children, particularly in migrating families, as it is often children who first acquire competence in a new language. While this activity is very common, it has been almost completely neglected by the research community and this proposed seminar group aims to remedy some of this neglect.

The term language brokering has now been used in a number of recent papers exploring the experiences of translating and interpreting children (see Hall 2004). The term derives from the notion of cultural brokering developed by anthropologists to describe the activities of individuals who connect local with national worlds. Paine (1971). suggests that a ‘broker’ takes more independent measures to initiate action or promote negotiation. The extent to which a young person takes this more powerful role may well depend upon particular children or particular settings, but it is clear that in many circumstances, this role is exactly that undertaken by children (Preston, 1994; Candappa, M. and Egharevba, I. 2002; Hall, 2004). Language brokering children are therefore not simply ‘bilingual informants’ but active agents operating within with the complexity of a specialised social event. The advantage of the term brokering is that it focuses on the whole cultural meaning of such an event rather than just the translation, and reflects the dialogic complexity of such an intercultural transaction (Wadensjö, 1998; Temple, 2002).

There are some very significant issues surrounding the use of children to language broker:

  • Being a broker makes complex linguistic and cognitive demands upon children, but it also offers them a position of power and responsibility within the family, a position often at odds with their more usual role. Having a child in such a non-normative role raises questions about whether this shift extends beyond simply brokering and impacts on other aspects of family dynamics.

  • While some children seem to relish the opportunities offered by the position of language broker, for others the task complexity generates considerable stress and tension, as well as frustration and embarrassment (Hall and Sham, 1998). It can also generate resentment as child language brokers may miss out on aspects of the normal out-of-school lives of children (Hamlin and Robinson, 2001).

  • The role of the brokering child is also an issue for the other participants in brokering events. While some agencies have policies avoiding the use of child language brokers, this can be inconvenient to families as formal support is often not available when it is needed, or they may even prefer their own children to mediate very personal transactions. In practice child brokering tends to happen regardless of official policies (Cohen, S. Moran-Ellis, J. and Smaje, C. 1999)

  • While so many children, of so many different ages, are undertaking language brokering roles, there is virtually no formal support for them. Their work is largely invisible except to the families who depend on them. There have been occasional forays into developing training for these children (Harman, 1994) but these have never become fully established and, anyway, may not work without a better understanding of child brokering events by the other participants.

  • A largely unexplored issue relates to how brokering children develop their competence. Where do they get their knowledge of cultural conventions, customs, and practices which support effective brokering and how do they make sense of it? That this competence is extensive, both as language translators and interpreters, and in terms of social competence, has led one researcher to label the brokering behaviours of these children as ‘giftedness’ (Valdés, 2003).

  • An issue that has been completely ignored by researchers is how exactly do children perform as language brokers? Most research into child language brokering has relied on interview with adults about their memories of brokering or interviews/questionnaires about brokering. Yet, this issue is critical as it goes to heart of the quality and effectiveness of children as language brokers and from there to their language brokering usefulness to their families. Despite this centrality, until recently there has been only one example of a transcript of an actual child language brokering event (Shannon, 1990). Only very recently has there appeared research attempting to unpack the process of brokering (Valdés, 2003; Hall, 2004)


Research directions

The importance of this topic is now undoubted and this is being reflected in increased interest by the research community. However, there is a need to ensure that what is done is not simply more of the same, and that new research genuinely begins to tackle some of the more complex issues associated with child and adolescent language brokering.

There is a need to:

  • Share information, perspectives and experiences with a view to developing a substantial body of knowledge about the practice of child language brokering.

  • Explore theoretical, methodological, procedural and ethical issues associated with studying and researching child language brokering.

  • Develop agendas for research studies and develop proposals seeking funding for research studies.


The web site

This web site has been established with the aim of contributing to the above agendas. Although it originates from the ESRC seminar series, it seeks to generally provide useful information for anyone interested in the topic.

The website initially contains a working bibliography, some papers and some routes to other websites with information pertinent to children and adolescent language brokering.

We would welcome contributions that extend this information. If you can offer additional references for the bibliography, supply additional articles, or recommend more useful web sites, we would be very pleased to hear from you.


References

Baynham, M. (2000) Mediators and mediation in multilingual literacy events. In Martin-Jones, M. and Jones, K. (Eds) Multilingual Literacies: Comparative Perspectives On Research and Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Candappa, M. and Egharevba, I. (2002) Negotiating boundaries: tensions within home and school life for refugee children. pp155-171 in Edwards, R. (ed.) Children, Home and School. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Cohen, S. Moran-Ellis, J. and Smaje, C. (1999) Children as informal interpreters in GP consultations: pragmatics and ideology. Sociology of Health and Illness. Vol 21(2) 163-186.

Hall, N. (2004) ‘The child in the middle: agency and diplomacy in language brokering events.’ pp285-297 in G. Hansen; K. Malmkjaer and D. Gile (Eds.) Claims, Changes and Challenges in Translation Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hall, N. and Sham, S. (1988) Language brokering by children. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association, Belfast, 27th-30th August 1998.

Hamlin, Brenda and Robinson, Suzanne (2001) Social work with deaf people: response to Darby and Redhead. Deaf Worlds 17(1) 3-6.

Harman, J. (1994) ‘Towards empowerment: training secondary school students as community interpreters.’ In A. Blackridge (Ed.) Teaching bilingual children. Staffordshire: Trentham Books.

Mace, J. (2002) The Give and Take of Writing: Scribes, Literacy and Everyday Life. Leicester: NIACE.

Paine, R. (1971) A theory of patronage and brokerage. In R. Paine (Ed.) Patrons and Brokers in the East Arctic. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

Preston, Paul (1994) Mother father deaf. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Shannon, S. (1990). English in the Barrio: the Quality of Contact Among Immigrant Children. Hispanic Journal of Behavioural Sciences. 12 (3): 256-276.

Temple, B. (2002) Crossed wires: interpreters, translators, and bilingual workers in cross-language research. Qualitative Health Research, Vol 12, 6, pp81-93.

Valdés, Guadalupe (2003) Expanding Definitions of Giftedness: The Case of Young Interpreters from Immigrant Families. Mahwah, New Jersey: LEA.

Wadensjö, C. (1998) Interpreting as Interaction. London: Longman