The article responds to the existing political claims that translation and interpreting reduce the incentive of recent immigrants to learn the language(s) of the host country and thereby impede their ...integration. To verify these claims, quantitative and qualitative research was conducted among asylum seekers in Slovenia, i.e. a group of recent immigrants who have access to free interpreting and translation services and free courses in the dominant language of the host country. A questionnaire was used to gather quantitative data on the language profiles of 127 current and former residents of the asylum seeker centres in Slovenia, while qualitative data were obtained through semi-structured interviews conducted with a representative group of 38 asylum seekers. The results show that all surveyed migrants had a positive attitude towards the host country language and that all of the interviewed migrants who had been in the host country for 7 months or more, regardless of their educational attainment, also took the state-funded course of the host country language. Additionally, although the provision of translation and interpreting is recognised as essential in high-risk situations, it is not the preferred communication strategy of the migrants, and therefore does not hinder their functional linguistic inclusion.
Abstract
Migrants’ intended length of stay influences their choices between using a lingua franca, language technology, ad-hoc interpreters and translators, intercomprehension, or learning the host ...country’s dominant language. To study this influence, data were collected through a questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and a focus-group discussion from 15 long-term migrants (university language teachers) and eight mid-term migrants (teachers at two international schools) working in Slovenia. The results show that the long-term migrants all learned the host language, while the most common mediation strategy of the mid-term migrants was use of a lingua franca. Ad-hoc interpreters and translators were used not only in healthcare but also for the translations of official documents. Moreover, the French-speaking mid-term migrants attempted to learn the host language and often ended up learning English, while the group of native English speakers tended to form a linguistic enclave. It is argued that the preferred mediation strategy depends not just on the intended length of stay but also on the status of the migrant’s L1 in the particular host country.
This paper is an extended version of a conference paper presenting the categorization of verbal multi-word expressions (VMWEs) according to the PARSEME COST Action Shared Task 1.1 Guidelines. The ...categorization is universal but takes into account the characteristics of the individual languages included in it. The Shared Task was used to annotate over 13,000 sentences of the Slovene ssj500k 2.0 training corpus, which resulted in nearly 3,400 identified VMWEs categorized as inherently reflexive verbs, light verb constructions, inherently adpositional verbs, and verbal idioms. The paper presents both the quantitative and qualitative results of the analysis, compares the suggested categorization system to existing work on VMWEs in Slovene linguistics, and evaluates the use of the proposed system for future work.
Prispevek se sprašuje o upravičenosti določenih političnih ukrepov, ki odrekajo zagotavljanje prevajanja in tolmačenja migrantom, ter zagovarja nove pristope k jezikovni in prevodni politiki, in ...sicer prek raziskave, ki je bila zasnovana kot odziv na trditve, da prevajalske in tolmaške storitve ovirajo integracijo nedavnih priseljencev. Raziskava je bila izvedena na skupini prosilcev za mednarodno zaščito v azilnem domu v Ljubljani. Najprej smo zbrali podatke o jezikovnem ozadju vseh stanovalcev azilnega doma v avgustu 2014 (56 stanovalcev iz 19 različnih držav), nato pa sestavili reprezentativno skupino 18 prosilcev za mednarodno zaščito na podlagi njihovega maternega jezika in jih razdelili na dve skupini glede na čas bivanja v Sloveniji v času intervjuja (krajše ali daljše obdobje). Kvantitativne podatke o jezikovnih profilih smo zbrali z vprašalnikom, kvalitativne pa s pomočjo polstrukturiranih intervjujev, izvedenih v letu 2014, in dveh ponovitvenih intervjujev v letu 2015. Nato smo kvalitativno analizirali transkripcije vseh posnetih intervjujev, pri čemer smo se osredotočali na jezikovne in komunikacijske rešitve na različnih stopnjah migrantovega življenja v državi gostiteljici. Rezultati kažejo, da je osnovne kompromise mogoče doseči, saj so prevajalske in tolmaške storitve komplementarni koraki do neodvisnosti in kot take ne ovirajo učenja dominantnega oz. nacionalnega jezika države gostiteljice, temveč ga podpirajo.
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