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

• Autores: Esther Álvarez de la Fuente, Raquel Fernández Fuertes, Oscar Arratia García
• Localización: Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, ISSN 0143-4632, Vol. 40, Nº. 4, 2019, págs. 338-355
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • 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.