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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]