Translanguaging business: Unpredictability and precarity in superdiverse inner city Leeds (WP4)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Leeds business case study focuses on Klara, a Czech-speaking community interpreter and her work with advocates providing interpreting services on an hourly-paid basis for a number of organizations. Klara’s business is her interpreting work with advocates who are primarily concerned with assisting Czech and Slovak Roma migrants in Leeds with the problems they face with life in a new country, principally the complex business of claiming benefits. Our work with Klara allows an insight into the lives of these new migrants, living in precarious conditions, on the borderline between low pay employment and benefit claiming. We examine in detail the role of the different languages in these migrants’ interpreter-mediated interactions. We examine translanguaging in four different areas: English/Czech/Slovak interlingual translanguaging, intralingual translanguaging in English, intralingual translanguaging in Czech and Slovak, and interdiscursive translanguaging. Our study extends into Klara’s home life, where we see that Klara works hard to ensure that her children have access to the Czech language. We also examine her electronically-mediated communication, much of which exemplifies the blurring of boundaries between work and social interaction in online communication. The study took place in the Leeds suburb of Harehills. In the process of collecting data with Klara, we gained an insight into the lives of new migrants, living in precarious conditions, on the borderline between low pay employment and benefit claiming. We examine in detail the role of the different languages in these migrants’ interpreter-mediated interactions, using the notion of translanguaging. Klara’s work as a community interpreter means that language is crucially her business. Our study also extends into Klara’s home life, and we see that Klara also makes language her business there, working to ensure that her children have regular and consistent access to the Czech language. This report comprises eight sections overall. Following this introduction we provide background on the Roma in Leeds, the population who Klara has most contact with in her professional life. In Section 3 we discuss the foundational literature relevant to our study: superdiversity and neoliberalism; the employment and also exploitation characteristic in early stage migration; how linguistic ethnography can afford rich insights that it does into the events and practices we observe; a focus on the interpreting event from a literacy studies perspective; the site of interpreting as a contact zone; translanguaging at work and at home; and the use of social media in superdiverse multilingual environments. Section 4 on methodology details our overall approach, gives an overview of data collection, and describes the individual data sets, and how our analysis enables them to work in combination. The two central analysis sections (5 and 6) cover respectively interaction at work and translanguaging in the home, and we include a short section (7) on mediated discourse which straddles the work/life boundary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".