The challenges posed to Community/Public-service Interpreting by the introduction of ‘Plurilingual Mediation’ in the new Companion Volume to the Common European Framework for Languages

Abstract

The new Companion Volume (CV) to the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR) has significantly amplified the importance of mediation as a plurilingual language activity within its conceptualisation of communicative competence. This is to be warmly welcomed as a positive contribution to, and acknowledgement of, increasingly superdiverse plurilingual societies and the potential for multilingual language users/learners to act as ‘social agents’ in complex inter-lingual/cultural settings. However, this article wishes to raise a few important issues that need to be addressed in the new CV as, it is argued here, they have the potential of having a negative impact on the field of Community/Public-Service interpreting.