In today's global world, many people can move across borders as travelling has become much easier in many ways. However, the securitization of borders has not been relaxed, implying that multilingual police-civilian interactions are becoming more 'commonplace'. Within the framework of conversation analysis, this article presents a novel study on…

The internationalization of Anglophone universities could allow English-dominant students to benefit from experience with English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds, but US students have often complained of difficulty communicating with such instructors, especially International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Research has largely focused on…

This article addresses a question central for this special issue of Multilingua on audiovisual translation (AVT) -- of the relationship between the cross-cultural and the intercultural in audiovisual translation. The question underpins fundamental debates in the emergent field of AVT as cross/intercultural mediation, the focus in this volume, with…

This paper discusses how persons of multicultural backgrounds describe in interviews their everyday experiences when using Finnish. The focus is on categories of linguistic (non)belonging described in interview interactions. The data consist of 23 single and pair interviews of 33 informants in total and come from two interview datasets. Data are…

The codification of propriety -- talking with a 'proper' accent -- is recorded in audiovisual texts so that cross-cultural interaction between social groups is not left to verbal dialogue alone but to more or less accurate visual cues and to paralinguistic as well as prosodic information. This chapter will examine scenes from various audiovisual…

This paper offers a historiographic and ethnographic analysis of how reflexivity, as a communicative practice and valued personality trait, has been understood, regulated, legitimised and used to control Chinese workers from the planned-economy era to the present. Using a Shanghai-based multinational company as a case study, I document how and…

The Maybachufer Market is an urban street market in Berlin-Neukölln that constitutes a highly diverse urban context by bringing together people of different social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Through linguistic ethnography, this paper explores the negotiation of various resources in everyday communicative practices and activities of…

Insults are prototypical means to express impoliteness in social interactions. In film they are prime ways of staging conflict or jocular abuse, reflecting everyday communicative practices while contributing to the emotionality of dialogue, characterisation and plot advancement. Both original and dubbed films offer a privileged perspective to…

This article focuses on cultured identity construction via linguistic stylization among young domestic and external Chinese migrants. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, China and the Netherlands, this study contends that self-defined "Hanfu" fans stylize the classical "Wenyan" register to invoke and align with a…

This article concerns knowledge negotiations as an aspect of interactional power in three-way interaction between Arabic-speaking women, Swedish-speaking midwives and interpreters in Swedish antenatal care. The notion of epistemic stance is used to investigate how all three participants negotiate knowledge, and how this affects the ongoing…

This article examines the construal, cross-cultural relay and comprehension of misunderstandings by filmmakers, translators and audiences respectively of "Bridget Jones's Diary" (2001) and "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" (2004). It reports on findings of a case-study on implicatures in these two romantic comedies (Desilla…

Researching in heterogeneous communities can present challenges for the most experienced of researchers, especially in the context of ethnographic work, where the dynamism and unpredictability of a research setting can make it difficult to anticipate the languages spoken. Drawing on data from multilingual health consultations, I reflect on…

Multilingual crisis communication has emerged as a global challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Global public health communication is characterized by the large-scale exclusion of linguistic minorities from timely high-quality information. The severe limitations of multilingual crisis communication that the COVID-19 crisis has laid bare result…

The current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions -- person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a…

This theoretical paper adopts the point of view of the audience of subtitled films and outlines a theory of subtitles as communicative agents within the participation structures of film reception. Based on examples from three Swiss fiction films -- "Heidi" (2015), "Heimatland" (2015) and "Der Goalie bin ig" (2014) --…