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Paper short abstract

This paper draws on a 14-month linguistic ethnography of a migrant-advice group in a low-income UK town. Taking a metapragmatic approach, it explores how interlocutors conceptualise digital translation technologies as participants in advice encounters, in theory and in practice.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on a 14-month linguistic ethnography of a migrant-advice group, in a low-income coastal in the UK. Amidst financial and bureaucratic pressures, organisations that provide advice on accessing economic and civil services in the UK are subject to logics of efficiency (Koch and James, 2022). This is particularly true of advice organisations that aid refugees, asylum seekers and new migrants, in towns already lacking in state infrastructure, where such logics manifest linguistically in the form of standardised (“scripted”) conversations and mediation through digital translation technologies. Attempts to make advice interactions “efficient”, however, are regularly opposed by the linguistic and emotional complexities of clients’ cases.

Amidst contradictions between standardised expectations and complex linguistic realities of advice encounters, this paper asks: how do interlocutors conceptualise digital translation technologies as participants in advice encounters, in theory and in practice? Drawing on sociolinguist Jan Blommaert’s (2010) concept of “truncated speech” – the patchworking of multiple speakers and multiple “bits” of linguistic competence to work through an encounter – it explores the ways in interlocutors switch between working with and working against translation technology to generate the advice clients need.

By offering a metapragmatic (Silverstein,1979; Gal and Irvine, 2019) approach to digital language technologies – that moves away questions of what language technologies are doing, on a pragmatic or technological level, and toward what participants perceive them as doing/being able to do – that we can begin to theorise how they might fit into otherwise human encounters about livelihood security.