The crucial role bilingual children take in their families and communities as translators goes largely unnoticed. The article, In the service of surveillance: Immigrant child language brokers in parent-teacher conferences by Jennifer F. Reynolds, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and Inmaculada García-Sánchez, discusses the circumstances in which children of immigrants translate or interpret for their families using their linguistic repertoire of their mother tongue and the native language of their current living status. This circumstance has been coined as “language brokering.” Immigrant families work to provide for their families and establish a foundation for their families to survive and thrive in a new country. Their children provide support by completing everyday tasks that may seem small to natives of the country such as answering the phone, running errands, making purchases, researching information on the internet, reading written information, and interpreting for their families in public encounters with doctors, teachers, lawyers, store personnel and others (“In the service of surveillance: Immigrant child language brokers in parent-teacher conferences” 2015).

Reynolds, Orellana and García-Sánchez discuss the use of surveillance to determine the different ways child language brokers make an impact in their communities and their society as a whole. While surveying a parent-teacher conference, they’ve determined that students who speak multiple languages are given agency to be a bridge of communication for their parents and teachers since they understand both parties. This can be a challenging task in itself since the students, in most cases, have to speak to and for both their parents and teachers. There’s pressure for them to truthfully convey the thoughts, comments and opinions of both parties verbatim. There are words that have different meanings and alternative uses that can be difficult to interpret. The article uses “cool” as an example for describing a person. In Jamaican Patois, someone who is cool is usually referred to as a “gangsta” but in English, “gangsta” is a person involved in gang activity and thus viewed as a negative description. Teachers are evaluating the proficiency their students have with language which can develop into racialization of these students and their cultures. Although some of these child language brokers may be unaware of it, they’re representing their people and culture through their interactions during these conferences, and it doesn’t stop there. Child language brokers are being evaluated in more explicit ways like when they’re talking on the phone or talking to authority figures and in more subtle ways such as going to a clerk to purchase something.

These child language brokers suddenly change from being a helpful service to their parents and teachers into being misunderstood representations of an entire ethnic background and/or race. The importance and difficulty of this task is overlooked because of the stigma brought against immigrants that they should know the language of the country they reside in, without considering the circumstances as to why these immigrants don’t know the language. There needs to be more consideration and appreciation for this fantastic ability.

Citations

Reynolds, J, M Orellana, and I García-Sánchez (2015). “In the Service of Surveillance: Immigrant Child Language Brokers in Parent-Teacher Conferences.” Langage et société 153(3): 91-108.