Participation in bilingual interactions: Translating, interpreting and mediating documents in a French social centre

- Procedural complexity may leave language differences in the background.
- Mutual understanding is potentially hindered by the non-transparency of documents.
- Participation's description should include the whole system of activities' organisation.
- Interpreters translate, report dyadic interactions, scrutinise documents.

This study1 explores social encounters in which 'social mediators' (SM) offer assistance to migrants and help them access social, legal and healthcare services in France. One recurrent activity in this context is the understanding and subsequent explanation of procedures for dealing with administrative paperwork, obtaining civil or legal rights, etc. Such activities may encompass several forms of mediation: firstly, providing information about the required documents or procedures to gain access to a public service; secondly, the reading and oral reformulation of any written documents migrants may have; thirdly, the oral translation of talk, provided by a lay interpreter2 when participants do not speak a common language. Participants are thus called upon to construct an understanding of the required service and procedure. This is achieved by putting together the information offered by the migrant, the information found in the documents, and the social mediator's and interpreter's own knowledge and experience in dealing with the procedure or issue in question. The analysis specifically focuses on the organisation of participation and on the use of the users' documents, which become the object of close inspection. It shows in detail that understanding the documents' content and the procedure, and explaining them to the user is not a one-way process but rather a complex and multiparty enterprise. In this sense, the interpreter's activity is oriented to co-occurring activities. Our methodological framework includes conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis to analyse the data, drawn from a corpus of video-recorded encounters in a French social centre.