Interpreting on UN field missions: a training programme

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a training programme targeted at United Nations (UN) staff interpreters who go on field missions. The UN deploys staff interpreters to ensure effective multilingual communication in field missions. Whilst being professional interpreters, however, these interpreters do not have any formal training in interpreting in the field, where they sometimes face situations for which they may not be properly equipped. Against this background, a joint training programme was organised by the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva, and the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) in January 2019. After the course, a mixed-methods study was carried out to evaluate its effectiveness. In this paper, the following aspects will be discussed: the particularities of UN field missions; the functioning and the contents of the programme; and the results of the study. Our findings show that, at the end of the programme, the participants felt better equipped to face the challenges of interpreting in the field. We conclude that training programme design must take into account the specific needs of the participants and the contexts in which they work.

Exploring positionality management in complex interpreting interactions: a simulation method

“…In recent years, interpreting in challenging contexts has received increased attention in Interpreting Studies literature. These contexts include police interviews (Gallai, 2019;Määttä, 2015), asylum hearings (Bergunde & Pöllabauer, 2019;Inghilleri, 2003), human rights missions (Barghout & Ruiz Rosendo, 2022;Ruiz Rosendo, Barghout & Martin, 2021), humanitarian contexts (Delgado Luchner & Kherbiche, 2019;Ruiz Rosendo, 2023), legal proceedings (e.g. Hale, 2014), medical contexts (Gez & Schuster, 2018;Radicioni & Ruiz Rosendo, 2022a, 2022b, military contexts (Ruiz Rosendo, 2020;Snellman, 2016), refugee settings (Jiménez Ivars & León Pinilla, 2018;Todorova, 2016Todorova, , 2017Todorova, , 2019, and NGOs (Delgado Luchner, 2018;Tesseur, 2018), among other studies.…”

The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting

“…Because interpreters typically work within asymmetrical relations of power, they bear the emotional and affective burden of this asymmetry, and this burden includes their employment with anthropologists as well. Interpreters must create the right affective atmosphere for effective communication (Giustini 2019, Ruiz Rosendo 2021. Traumatizing settings such as war zones (C. Baker 2010, M. Baker 2010, Footit & Kelly 2012), truth commissions (Cole 2010), international criminal trials (Elias-Bursać 2015, García 2019), and refugee status or asylum interviews are common contexts for interpretation work (Blommaert 2009, Jacquemet 2011, Maryns 2014.…”

“…Global humanitarian industries also recruit interpreters for peacekeeping forces (C. (Ruiz Rosendo et al 2021). Anthropological research on the implementation of human rights regimes shows that interpreters and other multilingual actors have an unrecognized influence on the instantiation of human rights discourse on the ground through a process of "vernacularization" (Merry 2006; see also Babül 2017, Flemmer 2018.…”

Challenges facing Arab interpreters at the UN: A secondary data analysis in the light of interpretation between Arabic and English

“…The war on Iraq entails a necessity for providing Arab interpreters for the military forces, UN and Press Agencies. Thus, a number of different articles have investigated the factors that have impacts on the work of interpreters in various geographical regions (Rosendo et al, 2021) [17] . Researchers such as Palmer (2007) [15] , Inghilleri (2009) [13] , Ruiz Rosendo (2020) [17] along with others, have conducted researches on the dangers, difficulties, and ethical concerns that interpreters confront while doing their jobs.…”