Participation roles of a language broker and the discourse of brokering: An analysis of English-Macedonian interactions

This study focuses on a language broker - a younger family member who performs lay interpreting for other family members. This paper examines three real-life interactions between a broker who relays speech from English-speakers to Macedonian-speaking family members. Adopting Goffman's notions of 'footing' and 'participant roles' that a speaker can assume, this paper examines how a broker engages with the conversational moves of others for him to assume the role of not only animator and author, but also principal. Transcribed speech shows evidence of features that are characteristic of interpreter speech: 'relayed inter-lingual transfer' and 'recipient design'. At the same time, inter-lingual transfer is punctuated cyclically by responses and prompts from others to engage with the broker as a speaker in his own right. This paper shows a broker's positioning to the role of principal and how this is negotiated and re-negotiated in changes of footing in which the broker can assume this role and then relinquish it.