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.

In the service of surveillance: Immigrant child language brokers in parent-teacher conferences by Jennifer F. Reynolds, Marjorie Failstich Orellana, and Inmacilada Garcia-Sanchez, the authors discussed how the children of immigrant families in America serve as, what Lucy Tse called in 1995, language brokers. They serve a highly important job to their parents as being permanent, built in translators for various aspects of the immigrant families who live in a new country form a different language from their own. Specifically, the authors set the example of the language broker’s role in their own parent teacher conferences in school. As these kids have their role of language broker the authors state that it gives the children multiple layers of surveillance over what they are now involved in. The ethnographic research that the authors based their findings from as well as their own ethnographic research, as stated by the authors, was very wide-ranging. The main study the argument is based off, is a study of immigrant-child language brokering among Latino immigrants in Chicago and Southern California. It involved an enormous amount of participant-observation, informal interviews with families, children’s research journals, and audio-recordings of children in a variety of translation situations over a period of several years.

The authors argue that these roles, of the children who were put into such family situations, have different opportunities and outlooks into certain situations in life that most American born families never have to think of or experience. The authors use the example of how, in the situation of the parent teacher conference, the teacher praised the student. The translations tended to be more directly verbatim of what they said. Rather than when something was said less praise-worthy. The students were more inclined to summarize what the teacher said and translate to their parents . The evidence provided by the authors very clearly accompanied the argument of the children being put into different positions versus non immigrant children. The authors allowed readers to see how the lives of immigrant children are given different tasks opposed to the others. As well as how the children take their language broker expertise and use it in their favor.

The reader now has an inside view on the job many immigrant children are tasked with. The author gives various examples of the struggle these children have to endure, more specifically, with the example of the parent teacher conference.The children are now open to surveillance over situations most non-immigrant are not put into.

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.