Multilingualism is part of everyday life on Finnish construction sites. In addition to Finnish, Estonian, and English, one can often hear Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Romanian. This linguistic diversity creates challenges for workplace communication. When workers do not share a common language, messages often need to be translated from one language to another during interaction. This research project examines language brokering (i.e. informal translation) both as an interactional phenomenon and as a practice with social consequences in multilingual and socially stratified working life. We video-record everyday work situations in construction and analyze instances of language brokering using multimodal conversation analysis. The project investigates how language brokering takes place in interaction through talk, gesture, and translation tools such as smartphone apps, and how it relates to the organization of work and the formation of social relationships in multilingual workplaces.

2026

2030