Translation and translating in a multilingual IT customer service unit

Translation in global businesses remains an under-explored phenomenon due partly to the limited recognition of translingual practices in such settings as “translation”. Through the combination of detailed textual analysis with ethnographic data from unstructured interviews and field observations, this chapter shows how translation features as part of the daily work of a B2B customer service unit within an Irish subsidiary of an IT multinational corporation. Explicit and unrecognized translation practices give rise to different conceptualizations of translation according to perceived normative criteria and goal-oriented communication behaviours, but linguistic choices reveal the prevalence of strategic language use in routine exchanges and highlight how staff deploy inter- and intralingual transfer skills across multiple audiences and channels not just to improve and facilitate communication, but to manage and control it. By bringing to the fore the translational nature of multilingual communication, this chapter calls for reclaiming the label of “translation” as a broad cognitive phenomenon of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic decision-making with many varied manifestations with a view to providing legitimacy to the sometimes intangible and unacknowledged practices encountered in today’s global businesses.