“The heart will stop beating”

Abstract

This article highlights some ethical questions in activist interpreting in the context of transnational patient mobility, with a specific focus on abortion travel from Poland to Austria. It presents a case study of Ciocia Wienia, a Vienna-based activist collective which facilitates access to abortion mainly for Poles and provides support and interpreting services in abortion clinics. Drawing primarily on the literature on activist interpreting and feminist interpreting and a corpus of 13 in-depth qualitative interviews with members and associates of the collective, this study explores ethical dilemmas experienced by the activist interpreters. We investigate the ways in which their translation choices are interwoven with the feminist and pro-choice agenda that the collective embraces. Our data show that Ciocia Wienia has developed a feminist approach to interpreting, one strongly informed by its political agenda. The activists adopt interventionist and sometimes highly visible strategies of interpreting, including direct confrontation or negotiation with clinic staff, and have much leeway to use an array of strategies of divergent rendition. While the priority of activist interpreters is to support and protect the women they assist, they also risk impairing patient autonomy and service-providers’ control over interactions.