Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture

Translating Childhoods, a unique contribution to the study of immigrant youth, explores the "work" children perform as language and culture brokers. Children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults. Readers hear, through children's own words, what it means be the "keys to communication" that adults otherwise would lack. From ethnographic data and research, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana's study expands the definition of child labor by assessing children's roles as translators and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result.