From transliteration to trans-scripting: Creativity and multilingual writing on the internet

Although research on multilingual writing has widely explored transliteration and, particularly, Romanization practices, we know little about how related phenomena are reconfigured in social media contexts where users can manipulate a wide range of writing resources and navigate between multiple intertwining audiences. By analysing more than one thousand tokens of forms that illustrate what appears as reversed Romanization (i.e. English-related forms written with Greek characters, engreek), the study aims to discover, first, how these forms are created and, second, for what purposes, and for whom, they are mobilised at given moments. In order to address these questions, I propose a translanguaging lens for the study of multilingual digital writing and draw on the notion of trans-scripting as key for understanding such writing practices as creative and performative. My findings reveal that there is a link between trans-scripting as a creative practice and digital orality, as users orient primarily to phonetic respellings of the English-related forms and associate such spellings with particular forms of stylized speech and social personas. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the study’s implications to research on the role of English as a resource for multilingual writing and current debates about language diversity and fluidity in the digital mediascape

“Imagine this kebab is the Greek national economy”: Metaphor scenarios in mediatized explanations of economic news

This article investigates a series of explainer videos that offer explanations of financial institutions, policies, and terms used in news coverage of the European financial crisis, particularly as reported in relation to the 2015 Greek bailout negotiations. By approaching digital news explainers as multimodal meta-commentaries, the study focuses on the prevailing metaphorical scenarios (Mussolf, 2012) and their strategic use as key stylistic resources for explaining complex financial issues. In addition to the dystopic metaphors of DISASTER or WAR found in mainstream financial reporting, financial matters are explained in my data primarily through metaphors that liken national economies and currencies to FOOD and economic policies to COOKING. The article discusses how verbal and visual modes work together in projecting metaphorical scenarios from the domain of home economics that embed specific evaluations and stances toward national economic policies. The study concludes with a critical discussion of the implications of such metaphorical scenarios for discourses of agency and accountability in the European financial crisis, and situates the digital genre of explainers in the context of wider sociocultural shifts related to the process of mediatization

Media convergence and publicness: towards a modular and iterative approach to online research ethics

The aim of the article is to build a bridge between assumptions about publicness and ethics in traditional (mass) media research and similar issues pertaining to research ethics in so-called new media environments. The article starts off with unpacking ‘publicness’ as defined in authoritative ethical guidelines that regulate research on (and through) media. It points to the challenges media convergence - and, particularly, the increasingly multimodal, multiauthored and multimedial content of websites - have brought to perceptions of publicness, as previously understood in mass media research. With reference to language-focused research on multilingual digital writing in such contexts, I critically engage with ethical tensions related to collecting and analysing internet data, on the one hand, and presenting and publishing data extracts from new media contexts, on the other. Drawing on modularity as a key organising principle of web design and discourse (Androutsopoulos 2010: 208; Pauwels 2012: 251), the article proposes a modular and iterative approach to research ethics that takes into account the complex and fluid configuration of web environments and attends to the conditions of multiple authorship and multiple publics that are increasingly typical of such contexts

I’m an Aθenian too: trans-scripting practices in the urban linguistic landscape of Athens [in Greek]

In this paper we examine practices of translanguaging and linguistic hybridization in the urban landscape of Athens. Our study focuses on phenomena of translanguaging that emerge from the mobilization of primarily graphemic resources, also known as trans-scripting. We pay particular attention to cases of vernacular respellings of English-related forms in the Greek script (e.g. engreek or Hellenized English) and propose a cross-contextual approach to their study, drawing on insights from research in computer-mediated communication, multilingualism and linguistic landscapes. Our analysis shows how such respellings become indexically related to ideological stances and identity positions in contemporary social-mediatized societies

Managing information, interaction and team building in nurse shift-change handovers: a case study

Whilst there is a wealth of literature on medical handovers, discourse analytic work based on recorded interactional data on these pivotal speech events in health care is less prevalent. This case study of a shift-change nursing handover at a UK hospital Medical Assessment Unit (MAU) takes a microanalytical perspective on nurses’ talk and interaction, which enables us to examine its structural and functional complexity at utterance level. Our methodological approach comprises observations, one semi-structured interview with senior nursing staff (and many informal conversations with various staff), and in total twelve audio-recordings of interactions during, and around, the twice-daily shift-change handovers. By adopting ‘a multiple goals in discourse’ perspective and the framework of activity analysis, we demonstrate the nurses’ interactional management of multiple discourse and activity roles and pursuance of goals that transcend the medically and institutionally crucial transmission of information. This shows the nurses’ orientation to the handover task as not only a structured institutionally regulated event, but also one that tolerates more spontaneous activities that can potentially contribute to team cohesion and staff well-being

Nursing handovers as unbounded and scalar events

In this paper we analyse data from nursing handover meetings in terms of the interplay of different voices that operate at different interactional and institutional scales. We suggest, firstly, that the handover is not a single bounded event, as suggested in previous literature, but rather a gradual moving in and out of focus of a particular discourse activity; and, secondly, that while different phases within the handover as an extended event are characterised by voices operating at a specific scale, there are continuous movements between scales in each phase. This leads us to suggest two categories of rescaling as an activity: translational rescalings, as the handover shifts between phases and from one scale to another, and digressive scales, in which the scale of interaction that typifies a specific phase is temporarily interrupted by another. We illustrate how both these categories serve important revoicing functions and, on the basis of this analysis, extend the use of scales theory in interactional linguistics through the addition of dynamic systems theory and a-curve distributions, in which 20% of token types predominate, while the remainder, or tail, perform essential complementary activities that over time can open up space for gradual shifts in the characteristics and overall function of the activity itself

Conceptualizing language awareness in healthcare communication: the case of nurse shift-change handover meetings

The paper develops the concept of language awareness (LA) by considering the material-social-discursive nexus of the communicative situation that affords professional practice. It also presents a mixed-methods study that provides a deeper and multi-layered understanding of LA in action and sets out a methodological framework for similar research in healthcare communication. Our study addresses: (i) the need for LA (re)conceptualisation in research on healthcare contexts, (ii) the ways in which a mixed-methods approach provides a deeper understanding of both implicit and explicit LA and (iii) the opportunities raised for reflection on practice through researcher-practitioner contact. Drawing on our linguistic ethnography of nurse shift-change handover meetings in a hospital unit, we draw on and expand van Lier’s model by demonstrating the shortcomings of limiting LA to awareness of language as system rather than as activity embedded in particular socio-discursive situations. Regarding nursing handovers, we argue that handover practice and ongoing patient safety not only require the implementation of communication protocols, but also depend on nurses’ reflective practice as the different types of interactions address crucially different levels of awareness. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and methodological contribution of our study to the fields of LA and healthcare communication