Linguistic ethnography in interpreting studies

Linguistic ethnography (LE) combines linguistic and ethnographic approaches to understand how social and communicative processes operate in a range of settings. The core goal of LE is to examine language use in context, thus various qualitative interpreting studies could be considered as LE studies. I give an overview of LE and how it can be used to examine interpreter-mediated interactions, highlighting examples from previous interpreting research that could be considered as LE and drawing on examples from my own studies of sign language interpreter-mediated communication. I propose the affordances of examining interpreter-mediated communication through the framework of LE encompassing multi-methods approaches, which could re-frame what we mean by mediated communication and contribute to a changing paradigm in interpreting studies.