Translating/ed Selves and Voices: Language Support Provisions for Victims of Domestic Violence in a British Third Sector Organization

This article addresses issues of multilingualism in domestic violence support
services, building on Tipton (2017a) and findings from a small qualitative study
involving an organization in the North West of England. The aim is to shed light
on how organizations construct multilingual spaces, the role played by language
service provisions in the mediation of such spaces, and how interpreters handle
the specificities of working with victims given the lack of available specialist
training. The concept of communicative repertoire (following Blommaert and
Backus 2011) is introduced to support analysis of supported and autonomous
forms of communication in relation to the semiotic practices of survival in their
broadest sense, casting new light on the organization’s handling of multilingual
service delivery and the role of interpreter mediation.