Legal advice-giving communication in intercultural and multilingual contexts: challenges, complexities and strategies for success

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Effective communication between lawyer and client is fundamental to the delivery of legal advice. However, communication can be a great challenge in many key areas of legal practice, including in asylum and refugee law where individuals' fundamental human rights are at stake. The doctoral research project on which the Fellowship is based investigated intercultural and multilingual communication in asylum and refugee family reunion legal advice meetings. Drawing on audio recordings and observations of advice meetings which took place in England between an experienced immigration lawyer and a range of asylum seeker and refugee clients, the research examined the ways in which lawyers and clients who come from different linguistic or cultural backgrounds communicate with each other in order to give and receive crucial legal advice. From this project, an understanding of the range of strategies that lawyers and clients can use in legal advice communication across languages and cultures, and the role that interpreters can play in this, has emerged. The goal of this Fellowship is to share the results of the research project, the insights gained from it, and the practical implications, with a diverse range of relevant groups and individuals.Firstly, the Fellowship will support engagement with legal advice practitioners, particularly those working in fields where clients are likely to come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, in order to share the findings of the research and identify practical applications in legal advice practice. Engagement will also be sought with legal educators and interpreter trainers, so that contributions of the research to legal advice communication education and training on the one hand, and legal interpreting training on the other, can be explored. Secondly, the Fellowship will support awareness-raising activities with asylum seeker and refugee communities in the UK, and civil society organisations which support them to access legal advice services. Through workshops and the publication and dissemination of practical advice, such activities will raise awareness about what to expect from legal advice sessions, how clients can prepare for them, and what they can do to facilitate communication with legal advisors.Thirdly, the Fellowship will enable dissemination of the research findings to a range of relevant academic audiences through publications, presentations and academic exchange and networking activities. Activities will be focused on harnessing the future potential for practice-based impact of the research. Key audiences include scholars and researcher-practitioners in the fields of applied linguistics, intercultural communication, public service interpreting, vocational and clinical legal education, asylum and migration studies, and the sociology of institutions, for whom the research and its findings have a range of implications for enhancing practice.