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Translingual Practices in Global Business. A Longitudinal Study of a Professional Communicative Repertoire

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Translanguaging as Everyday Practice

Part of the book series: Multilingual Education ((MULT,volume 28))

Abstract

This chapter draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of a Finnish engineer’s communicative repertoire that develops in the process of professional migration. The participant first works as a factory intern in Germany, then as a project engineer and project manager in Finland, and latterly as an operations manager in China. Here, repertoire is viewed through dynamic and flexible translingual practices, in which people follow, appropriate and invent norms, combine and shuttle between languages, ways of speaking, semiotic resources and modalities in the transnational work space in order to meet, interact, make meaning and build relationships and, ultimately, do their jobs. The data selected for this chapter provide an overview of the professional’s translingual practices in speaking (face-to-face and computer-mediated) and writing at work. The analysis combines temporal and spatial dimensions and demonstrates how the professional communicative repertoire manifests itself through translingual practices, some of which remain in the repertoire over time while others change.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Terms used for such acts of languaging include poly-lingual languaging (Jørgensen, 2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010), transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet, 2005) and codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2011). All this terminology is linked to a wider move within applied linguistics from seeing languages as distinct systems to seeing them as resources.

  2. 2.

    Leppänen et al. (2014) and Leppänen et al. (2017) advocate for a similar approach in the context of digital social media practices.

  3. 3.

    See Räisänen (2013) for a description of the multi-sited ethnographic project.

  4. 4.

    The level of detail in the transcription differs between audio and video-recordings since audio-recordings lack non-verbal information.

  5. 5.

    All the examples in this section occur at Oskari’s office.

  6. 6.

    The transcript includes line numbers, participant identification (O=Oskari, T = researcher), actions (middle) and modality used (right: writing, reading, etc.). Strike-through text indicates the action of deleting text. Bold text is part of the final product (see Excerpt 9.7).

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Academy of Finland and the University of Jyväskylä. I wish to thank Sirpa Leppänen, Anne Kankaanranta, Zhu Hua and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful and helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, and Christina Higgins for hosting my research visit at University of Hawai’i at Manoa during this project. I would also like to thank Eleanor Underwood for providing suggestions for increasing readability and the editor for his support and feedback. All remaining weaknesses are my own responsibility.

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  1. Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Tiina Räisänen

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Correspondence to Tiina Räisänen .

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  1. Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Gerardo Mazzaferro

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Räisänen, T. (2018). Translingual Practices in Global Business. A Longitudinal Study of a Professional Communicative Repertoire. In: Mazzaferro, G. (eds) Translanguaging as Everyday Practice. Multilingual Education, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94851-5_9

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