Translanguaging and multimodality in workplace texts and writing

ABSTRACT

Professionals working in international companies in Sweden are expected to speak, read, and write in Swedish and English in their daily work. This article discusses professional writing in different languages. Through the use of methods from linguistic ethnography, we aim to enrich the understanding of workplace literacy by studying writing and texts in multilingual business contexts. Our results show that professionals are expected to navigate between a translanguaging mode and a more monolingual mode in everyday communication. Also, when they opt for producing monolingual texts, literacy practices that surround those texts are often multilingual. Moreover, they imagine a future, secondary audience for their texts, often resulting in the choice of English for reaching out, or in the choice of Swedish as a way of keeping matters local. Knowing when to choose a translanguaging mode or a more monolingual mode is a necessary skill or competence in this type of workplace. Our results also show that the use of multimodal resources includes the material placement of texts, and that old materialities such as pen and paper are still essential. Different linguistic and semiotic resources are used, including resources from academic, business and personal discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• writing
• literacy
• linguistic repertoires
• workplace
• linguistic and semiotic resources

Acknowledgements

The data comes from the research project ‘Professional Communication and Digital Media: Complexity, Mobility and Multilingualism in the Global Workplace’, [Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, 2016–2019], under Grant number 2015.0093. We wish to thank participants at both companies for generously contributing to our project, Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan for the invitation to present the initial version of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term multilingual is used as a broad term to refer to the coexistence of and use of more than one language.

2 All company and personal names have been replaced by pseudonyms.

3 The research group consisted of the two researchers Carla Jonsson and Mona Blåsjö, and the project assistant Sofia Johansson. The latter conducted the search of keywords.

4 For transcription conventions, see section below. Our translations from Swedish.

5 In Swedish, the dates would more generally be written either in the order Date, Month, Year or alternatively Year, Month, Date.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation: [grant number 2015.0093].