Bilingual children as interpreters in everyday life: how natural interpreting reinforces minority languages

ABSTRACT

Children that grow up bilingually often interpret naturally between their two languages. This has been shown to be so in a variety of language pairs, regardless of children’s social and family situations and both within the family context as well as between the family and society (e.g. Álvarez de la Fuente and Fernández Fuertes 2012. “How two English/Spanish Bilingual Children Translate: In Search for Bilingual Competence Through Natural Interpretation.” In Interpreting Brian Harris. Recent Developments in Translatology, edited by M. A. Jiménez Ivars and M. J. Blasco Mayor, 95–115. Viena: Peter Lang; Angelelli (2016). “Looking Back: A Study of (ad-hoc) Family Interpreters.” European Journal of Applied Linguistics 4 (1): 451–431. doi:10.1515/eujal-2015-0029). This study analyses different contextual and linguistic variables that define the natural interpreting instances produced in spontaneous interactions by 19 young bilingual children (average age: 3;7) with different language pairs. In particular, we aim at characterising the bilingual practice used by these children and (i) involve the consecutive use of their two languages and (ii) are shaped by the communicative strategies used by parents at home. The analysis is based on freely available corpora in CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved from http://childes.psy.cmu.edu) (i.e. FerFuLice, Pérez-Bazán, Ticio, Vila, Deuchar, ; GNP) and diary annotations (i.e. Ronjat 1913. Le developpement du langage observe chez un enfant bilingue [The development of the language observed in a bilingual child]. Paris: Librairie Ancienne H. Champion; Leopold 1939–1949; Lanza 1988. “Language Strategies in the Home: Linguistic Input and Infant Bilingualism.” In Bilingualism and the Individual, edited by A. Holmen, E. Hansen, J. Gimbel, and J. N. Jørgensen, 69–84. Clevedon, UK: Multingual Matters, Lanza 1997. Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Lanza 2001. “Bilingual First Language Acquisition: A Discourse Perspective on Language Contact in Parent-Child Interaction.” In Trends in Bilingual Acquisition, edited by J. Cenoz, and F. Genesee, 201–229. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tilar.1.10lan) that comprise the spontaneous and longitudinal production of these children. Our results show that the language strategies followed by parents at home in combination with the linguistic communities where they live play a key role on this bilingual practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual children
• child natural interpreting
• acquisition data
• bilingual family context
• language strategies
• linguistic communities

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Esther Álvarez de la Fuente is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Valladolid (Spain). Her main research interest is the morphosyntactic analysis of the cases of Natural Interpreting/Translation (the translation done by bilinguals in everyday circumstances without academic formation in it) performed by bilingual children together with the analysis of the development of the translation ability in natural interpreters. As a member of the UVALAL research group (University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab), she works on the analysis of linguistic phenomena related to languages in contact observed in both spontaneous and experimental data from child and adult bilinguals.

Raquel Fernández Fuertes is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Valladolid (Spain) and she is the director of the UVALAL research group (University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab). She specialises in linguistic theory, comparative grammar and bilingual acquisition. In her research she makes use of linguistic theory and, in particular, of minimalist premises in order to account for language-contact phenomena and the latent relationship between native and non-native acquisition. This is achieved by means of the analyses of spontaneous and experimental data elicited via different methodologies.

Óscar Arratia García is a professor at the University of Valladolid (Spain). His scientific background comes from the fields of theoretical physics and applied mathematics. He has been responsible for the design and development of large relational databases on different topics that range from astronomy to linguistic applications. He is interested in the development of new technical tools to efficiently collect, manage and analyse big datasets. He is a collaborator of the UVALAL research group (University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab) which focuses on the research on language acquisition with the analysis of spontaneous and experimental monolingual and bilingual data.

Notes

1. All the transcripts of the recorded interactions that appear in the corpora presented in this paper follow the CHAT transcription system used in CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000). Some of the transcription codes that were not relevant for the specific issues under consideration in this study have, however, been removed in order to make the examples more transparent and easy to follow.

2. In the present study community language is understood as either the country (or majority) language in monolingual areas or the co-official languages in bilingual areas of a country. Minority language (also referred to as immigrant language (Lauchlan and Parafita Couto 2017)) is that spoken in the home context or in a limited social context.

3. The five children of the GNP corpus (i.e. Leila, Jessica, Gene, Olivier and Joelle) live in Montreal (Canada) or surrounding communities, which, according to the description of the GNP corpus provided in CHILDES, is a bilingual community where French and English are used on a daily basis; in the case of María del Mar, she lives in Catalonia, an autonomous community of Spain where Catalan and Spanish are used to different degrees in many areas of daily life.

4. Although in the description of the Deuchar corpus both parents are reported to speak Spanish to Manuela, in the English sessions in CHILDES her mother (together with her grandmother) addresses the child only in English, and in the Spanish sessions she predominantly speaks Spanish to the child but she uses English sometimes. Therefore, the strategy followed at home has been classified as a Bilingual-Monolingual Interaction (BMI).

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of the research conducted at the UVALAL (University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab) and has been partly done with the funding obtained from the Consejería de Educación, Junta de Castilla y León [VA046A06; UV 30/02], the Consejería de Educación, Junta de Castilla y León and FEDER [VA009P17], the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER [BFF2002-00442] and the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia [HUM2007-62213/FILO].