Qualitative interviewing in multilingual research

A growing body of research in super-diverse societies is conducted, by necessity, in multiple languages. Multilingual research practices can play a fundamental role in empowering participants and privileging their voices, especially in migration-related studies. Yet, questions of cross-language interviewing are for the most part avoided or ignored in mainstream research. This contribution seeks to bring cross-language communication back into the focus of methodological discussions. Our paper builds on multilingual interview material extracted from a two-year linguistic ethnographic research project on forced migrants’ integration trajectories in Luxembourg. It looks at interpreter-mediated research encounters, as well as interviewees’ translation and translanguaging moves. Audio recordings and field notes from collaborative data analysis sessions underpin the data for this contribution. Our examples show that there is merit in fixing our analytical gaze on the minute details of language use across different codes, as these allow for a novel inquiry into specific moments of meaning making, role performances and rapport-building in qualitative interviewing