„Potem przemówił komendant Brygady naszej tow. Hiszpan w języku niemieckim i tow. kapt. tłumaczył”

And Then the Commander of Our Brigade, Comrade Spanish, talked in German and Comrade Captain Interpreted. Interpretation in the International Brigades during the Civil War in Spain 1936-1939 The aim of the present article is to describe multilingual interactions at the XIII Jarosław Dąbrowski International Brigade between volunteers of different nationalities, mainly Poles, and the Spanish population as narrated by Boruch Nysembaum, a communist from Warsaw and a participant of the Spanish Civil War. At the same time, it is the first presentation of onthe- spot memoirs written by a volunteer who did not return from this war. On the basis of his narrative, the article tries to answer the questions concerning the way volunteers, who lacked adequate foreign language skills, communicated with the Spanish population and with other volunteers, the forms of their communications, and finally, the specific characteristics of this multilingual communication.

Intercultural Communication, Cultural Code-Switching, Gender and Food

The aim of this paper is to present a part of an ongoing research into the roles food plays in the present-day communication. It provides an interdisciplinary insight into those aspects of intercultural communication that occupy significant role in the changing relationship between public and private spheres. These spheres represent spaces where the aspects of gender become more visible if combined with the elements of food. The author tries to argue that women and food act as ones of the most intriguing features in the ‘Circuit of Culture’ and their participation in intercultural communication is very complex and worth more detailed investigation. The concept of code-switching is often viewed as the one applied in the situations where multilingual communication takes place. The discussion in this paper focuses on those cultural communication contexts in which the cultural code-switching is used as a response to various gender facets in both public and private spheres. Food, that has become one of the most visible parts of both public and private domains of the human existence in the 21st century enters all aspects of the intercultural communication that is performed in smaller and larger social groups and its existence, production, distribution, consumption and representation are directly linked with gender perspectives.

Beyond aid: Sustainable responses to meeting language communication needs in humanitarian contexts

This article navigates the complexity of the humanitarian system, the potential of the humanitarian-development nexus, and the commitments of the World Humanitarian Summit of 2016 as a backdrop to designing sustainable interpreter training programmes. It argues that these programmes must be locally designed to respond to real needs and developed and implemented by local actors living and working in the contexts where building trained interpreter capacity is essential to the success of the humanitarian agenda. It further highlights the crucial importance of decolonising aid and empowering local actors in efforts to advance the cause and quality of multilingual communication in crisis contexts. Two case studies from conflict-affected regions in the Middle East and East Africa—Jordan and Kenya—illustrate how cross-cutting issues from national, regional and international politics, humanitarian agendas, international aid, Higher Education in Emergencies, and country-specific policy agendas inform the design, development, and implementation of university-level training programmes in humanitarian interpreting.

Das internationale Autorenliedfestival „Lehesaju Muusika“ in Tartu als spezifische Form der Kulturvermittlung und Analyseobjekt für Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung

The Lehesaju Muusika International Music and Poetry Festival in Tartu as a Specific Form of Cultural Mediation and Object of Analysis for Research on Multilingualism. The paper focuses on the multilingual discourse of the Lehesaju Muusika international music and poetry festival, which takes place annually in Tartu, Estonia. Being an international cultural event organised by ethnic minorities, Lehesaju Muusika represents a unique source of empirical data for research on multilingualism. The festival attracts songwriters and performers of the so-called ‘author song’ or ‘bard song’ not only from Estonia, but also from all over the world. The key feature of this genre is the dominance of the text over the music. The spatial organisation of a concert hall represents a specific power constellation within a microsocial structure. Performing artists have the power to decide in which language they perform and address the multilingual audience, while the audience itself has an indirect effect on this decision. The artist’s dialogue with the audience represents a peculiar discursive entity within the discourse of the festival. Code-switching appears to be one of the inherent characteristics of this discursive entity. The present paper summarises some key features of international music and poetry festivals as multilingual cultural events, focusing on the discourse of the Lehesaju Muusika festival. It offers a brief analysis of the audience’s language profile based on the results of a microsociological case study carried out during the latest festival, in 2019. To illustrate the complexity of the multilingual communication during the festival, three situations of code-switching during the performance of an Estonian native speaker in front of the multilingual audience are described and analysed.

Yiddish–Slavic language contact in multilingual songs: Describing deliberate code-switching

Aims and objectives/purposes/research questions: The aim of the article is to describe what language contact phenomena are present. The research questions are as follows: (a) what types of code-switching (CS) are at work; (b) is there any preference for any particular type of CS; and (c) what Jewish (seemingly) monolingual songs in Slavic languages can tell us about contact varieties of Slavic used by Jews. Design/methodology/approach: Collecting texts of Yiddish–Slavic and Jewish folk songs in Slavic languages; and qualitative analysis of CS and structural change. Data and analysis: Sixty-two Slavic–Yiddish texts were chosen from Jewish songs’ collections and CS instances analysed. Findings/conclusions: Both insertions and alternations are present but alternations are preferred. There is an asymmetry between Yiddish insertions into Slavic (nouns) and Slavic insertions into Yiddish (all parts of speech). Alternations may be just renditions of the same meaning in another language but most often they play the same role as in naturalistic speech described in the literature on multilingual communication (change of topic, addressee, etc.). Originality: Previous research on multilingual Jewish songs concentrated on the choice of languages and interpretation of the symbolic role that each language plays but not structural analysis of multilingual texts. Significance/implications: Now that some tendencies are identified, it remains to be seen whether naturalistic Yiddish–Slavic speech exhibits the same patterns of CS.

Promuovere un’educazione plurilingue parlando a casa di cose di scuola Esiti da una ricerca-azione

The positive effects of multilingual education are hindered when some languages in one’s repertoire do not develop beyond the level of primary socialization, as is often the case of children of immigrant families: on the one hand, monolingual use at school limits the sociolinguistic functions of home languages; on the other, inadequate parental competence in the language of schooling hinders their involvement in scholastic practices at home. Starting from these presuppositions, the paper describes a research project aimed at promoting multilingual communication related to school matters and practices within immigrant families of children attending Italian primary schools. Enhancing the use of heritage languages can promote parental participation in homework interactions thus enhancing CALP-related practices within the family.