What most people call “translating” and “interpreting,” we like to call “language brokering.” When young people translate speech or text for their families, they are often doing much more than simple word-for-word movement between languages. This is because they are not just translating words; they are translating ideas. They are figuring out how to set the right tone for different audiences, how to paraphrase long ideas, how to funnel information in culturally appropriate ways, and more. In this section, we’ll share some of the major skills that language brokers develop when they broker for their friends, families, and communities.
Language brokers have to:
- Decipher and make sense of information about a wide range of subjects that are often expressed by speakers and writers in complex or unclear ways.
- Choose words that are appropriate for the genre, topic, and context.
- Choose appropriate ways of speaking that the audience can understand. (This includes dialect, word choices, tone of voice, and the degree of formal vs. informal speech, among other nuances.)
- Assume appropriate social roles – for example, as children speaking to and for adults in authority positions.
- Attend to the needs and expectations of multiple audiences – for example, a parent and a teacher.
- Convey information while juggling these competing social demands.
Examples:
Vocabulary and Word Choice:
Take a look at the following journal entry from one of Marjorie Elaine’s research projects with child language brokers in Chicago. Notice how Maria narrates translating fine-grained vocabulary-level differences for different kinds of shoes: “flip flops,” “sandals,” “jelly shoes,” and “open-toed shoes.” She had to find the appropriate way to communicate these distinctions and how to emphasize certain ideas over others, like “rubber bottoms, only.”