‘He was obliged to seek refuge’: an illustrative example of a cross-language interview analysis

This paper provides one of the first inquiries into the interactional dynamics of an interpreter-mediated research encounter. All spoken interactions – that is, originals and real-time translations produced in a multilingual interview conducted with a Syrian refugee – were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim using conversation analysis notation, retranslated and collaboratively analysed from three major perspectives: common language, equivalence, and loss and gain in translation. A stimulated recall interview, field notes and audio-recorded work sessions documenting our interpretative practices complement the data. Fixing our analytical gaze on the minute details of language use across English–Arabic allowed for a novel inquiry into specific moments of meaning making, role performances and rapport building in qualitative interviewing. Our examples illustrate how an agreed-on sense of the source meaning is established not only during the interview itself, but also at the point of its multilingual representation and analysis

Transcribing multilingual voices: moments of choice and doubt

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ARAB-MUSLIM TRANSNATIONAL FAMILES AND THEIR CHILDREN’S EXPERIENCES OF EDUCATION: INVESTIGATING ISSUES OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND SCHOOLING IN LETTERKENN, COUNTY DONEGAL, IRELAND

This study sought to explore how research into transnational and migrant families might benefit from an account of Arab-Muslim families and their children's experiences in dynamic and conflictual contexts. Ten transnational families and their children narrate their lives as part of transnational families. From their stories and the analysis thereof, we learn how they negotiate the unique positions they occupy in transnational families and gain insight into how their cultural identities are shaped. This study also explores shared and distinctive transnational family experiences which were identified despite the small size of the sample, and emphasizes how each family and each child possesses unique resources with which they confront familial and sociocultural challenges. This study argues that social scientists, educators, and policymakers concerned about migration have much to learn from these experiences. This research also suggests that Arab-Muslim transnational families and their children's voices and lived experiences can help reframe current understandings of the effects of immigration and education systems on families in Ireland and internationally, and identifies several implications for future research and theorizing about the civic participation and engagement of children whose parents are transnational migrants

Transcribing (multilingual) voices: from fieldwork to publication

Several authors have argued in the past that transcribing is a political act: it involves judgements about how to represent voice in writing, what level of detail to choose, in which language(s) and for whom. This chapter provides an in-depth account of the processes and politics of multilingual transcribing. In reflexively analysing different transcript formats, it casts light on the complexities, challenges and opportunities that emerge in making collaborative decisions about the translation of speech to a written medium, as well as into other languages. The transcripts for the analysis have been pulled from a larger qualitative study on forced migrants’ linguistic integration. Special focus is thus given to transcripts that capture the sometimes unorthodox resources and mixed language practices of migrants, and to their reception in an interdisciplinary framework

Qualitative interviewing in multilingual research

A growing body of research in super-diverse societies is conducted, by necessity, in multiple languages. Multilingual research practices can play a fundamental role in empowering participants and privileging their voices, especially in migration-related studies. Yet, questions of cross-language interviewing are for the most part avoided or ignored in mainstream research. This contribution seeks to bring cross-language communication back into the focus of methodological discussions. Our paper builds on multilingual interview material extracted from a two-year linguistic ethnographic research project on forced migrants’ integration trajectories in Luxembourg. It looks at interpreter-mediated research encounters, as well as interviewees’ translation and translanguaging moves. Audio recordings and field notes from collaborative data analysis sessions underpin the data for this contribution. Our examples show that there is merit in fixing our analytical gaze on the minute details of language use across different codes, as these allow for a novel inquiry into specific moments of meaning making, role performances and rapport-building in qualitative interviewing