Lexical borrowing in refugee protection situations of social and remote interpreting: German, Spanish, Arabic and Russian combinations

Abstract

Today, we are witnessing an exponential growth in the number of refugees and migrants in Europe, driven by increasing demographic change and linguistic globalisation and accentuated by the latest war events. Social interpreters are major players in solving the language barriers encountered in public services and in facilitating the integration of newly arrived migrants into the host country social systems. Interlingual professionals need to manage the corresponding terminology and assist communication in bilingual contexts. The present study describes the phenomenon of loanwords observed in social interpreting situations involving communication with Spanish-, Arabic- and Russian-speaking migrants in both Spain and Germany. Within the study framework, we examine how migrants, having no previous knowledge of the host language, borrow and employ isolated terms from the host country language in their own mother tongue. We also attempt to systematise the borrowed terms extracted from the bilingual interviews to understand better the cognitive mechanism underlying the transfer of specialised lexical units from one language to another. This is our first attempt at this approach, in which terminological loanwords in the context of refugees and non-bilingual migrants are examined in the domain of Translation and Interpreting Studies and in these language combinations. Our empirical study helps to explain and why borrowed terms are used and supports better terminology management in multilingual communication and interpretation related to refugee politics.