“Join our community of translators”: Language ideologies and/in Facebook

In this chapter, I am concerned with the language ideologies present in — and expressed through — the metalinguistic discourse of Facebook’s “translations” application and the metalinguistic commentary of the Facebook “translators” as a community of what can be termed “language mavens” (Cameron, 1996), “language brokers” (Blommaert, 1999), or just “language workers” (Thurlow, 2007). Metalanguage is often understood simply as language about language, but, as Jaworski et al. (2004, p. 4) suggest, this is too literal a characterization for what they prefer to describe more broadly as any “language in the context of linguistic representations and evaluations.” Certainly, the individual “translators” of Facebook are engaged in policing language in the sense that Blommaert et al. (2009, p. 203) talk about the “production of ‘order’ — normatively organised and policed conduct.” Metalanguage thus inevitably works at an ideological level, influencing people’s actions and priorities in a number of often quite concrete ways. The case study I am presenting here offers an insight into the ways language ideologies are uniquely produced by the “community of translators” who are themselves also facilitated (and encouraged) by Facebook Inc.