Arriving in a language you don't speak
| Multilingual families, Arriving, Family life
At seven or eight I started interpreting for my parents. Not in an office and not at the doctor’s, the way it turns up in features about immigrant families, but at home: letters and phone calls. There was no appointment for it and no preparation. A letter was lying there, the phone rang, and then it was my turn.
When people ask me today how that felt, pride is not the first thing that comes. What comes is being out of my depth, and underneath it one very specific fear: getting something wrong.
The child stands where the adults usually stand
When people write about immigrant children, they mostly write about school. About the first day, about grades. The part that weighed more in my case rarely comes up: that somebody in the family has to speak, and that this somebody is in primary school.
Something shifts there that has nothing to do with language at first. A child translating a letter his parents cannot read is standing, for a few minutes, where the adults usually stand. He knows no more about the matter than they do. He only has the tool.
Nobody could have told me whether it was right
What makes that fear persistent is the situation it grows in. At school a wrong word gets a red mark. On the phone it does not. The only person in the room who speaks both languages is the same child who is doing the translating. Responsibility and control sit in one person, and that person is seven or eight.
Whether I often got it wrong I do not know. That is exactly the point: I would not have noticed.
Research describes it differently than I remember it
There is a term for what I was doing. It is called child language brokering, children interpreting for their family. I went to see what the research says, expecting a clear answer. There is none. The overview of the field lists work describing strain, and alongside it work reporting accelerated development and closer bonds with parents. Children often name both at once. One study on exactly that side states it in its title: Reconstructing the experiences of child language brokering: a focus on the socio-emotional impact of the practice by Federica Ceccoli.
A second title from the same field hit me harder than any finding: Caught in the middle: child language brokering as a form of unrecognised language service by Rachele Antonini. Unrecognised language service. That is exactly what it was. What I was doing had no name, no job description and no hour in the day. It was simply something that came up in the household, like the shopping.
My memory carries only one of those sides. I cannot find the pride in it. Maybe it was there and got lost, maybe it really was not there for me. What I am writing down is what I remember, not what is typical, and the difference belongs in the text.
And yet that is exactly where I arrived
If I have to say when I arrived in this language, it was not in a classroom and not with a grade. It was while translating for my parents. The same situation I remember as being out of my depth was also the one that showed I had the language.
Maybe that answers the contradiction above. Not that I remember it wrongly, but that both halves sit in the same scene and I kept only one of them. So if you want to know when a child arrives in a language, the report card is the wrong place to look.
What I wish the adults had done
I am reluctant to hand out advice to families going through this. I was the child, not the parent. Two things I did need at the time, and those I can write down.
The first: that the person at the other end notices they are talking to a child, and slows down. Not louder and not friendlier. Slower.
The second: that somebody tells me afterwards how it turned out. Whether that would have helped me I do not know. I would have liked to know.
And if I am to give one piece of advice after all, it is this sentence: a mistake of yours is not your fault. A child that age is not an interpreter. He is helping out because he can.
None of this appears in the children’s book I wrote later. Mind Garden is not about arriving, and Mika’s language is not his problem. He has simply decided too early what he cannot do. I still see the connection: both children have to say something without knowing whether it is right. One says it to a stranger’s voice on the phone, the other to himself.
This piece is by Dr. Wahed Hemati, author of the children’s novel Mind Garden: As You Think, So You Grow for children aged 9 and up.