Why Handling Power Responsibly Matters: The Active Interpreter Through the Sociological Lens

Abstract

This contribution is based on empirical findings from an ethnographic case study on the administration of asylum applications in a branch of the former Austrian Federal Asylum Office. I adopt a sociological perspective to explore the relationship between public official and interpreter in asylum interviews and thereby hint at the complexity and contours of the power imbalance in these institutional(ised) interactions. As existing literature suggests, the relation is more complex than a simple contractee-contractor relation and, as a part of that, interpreters are often in a more powerful position than officials would want them to be. Against this background, I argue that both researchers and practitioners need to focus more on professionalism and ethics in community interpreting, especially in the context of international protection.

Silence and Voice in Oral Hearings: Spatial, Temporal, and Relational Conditions for Communication in Asylum and Compulsory Care Hearings

“…However, in asylum hearings, “telling everything” is a dimension of the communication that the claimants have limited control over since everything that is uttered by the claimants needs to be translated into Swedish by an interpreter. Previous research has demonstrated how this process of translation may alter and change the meaning of a narrative and how this is used by decision-makers to reject asylum claims (Gibb and Good 2014; Dahlvik 2019; Nikolaidou, Rehnberg, and Wadensjö 2022). During one oral hearing I observed, the interpreter translated what the claimant said into “ we heard gun shots”, but in the protocol from the first asylum interview at the Swedish Migration Agency (with another interpreter), the transcription stated that he had said “ I heard gun shots”.…”

Interstitial position or ‘bastard’ status? Interpreters at the French National Court of Asylum

“…In fact, the two go hand in hand: the interpreter's role as an expert in providing contextual, historical, geopolitical and cultural details -both during and after the hearing -serves to support the applicant's case. As Dahlvik (2019) shows in the context of the Austrian asylum procedure, interpreters often deal with tensions between the demands of professionalism and professional ethics, and even more so when they feel the need to transgress the rules in order to fully perform their function.…”

“…Since the 1990s, the literature published in English has contributed to clarifying the role and position of interpreters within asylum procedures, based on fieldwork conducted in Canada (Barsky, 1994) in the United Kingdom (Good, 2007; or in Austria (Pöllabauer, 2004;Dahlvik, 2019). French research has turned to this issue only recently, before which such questions fell within a relative blind spot (Pian, 2020(Pian, , 2017, both in the work on preparation of asylum narratives and in the work on the asylum adjudication system.…”

‘Do I Have to Say Exactly Word by Word?’ (Re)producing and Negotiating Asymmetrical Relations in Asylum Interviews

“…Furthermore, they are often conducted in two or even more languages, and the linguistic resources tend to be unequally distributed amongst participants. The fact that many of these encounters are interpreter mediated further contributes to the complexity of the communication (Barsky, 1994;Dahlvik, 2019;Jacquemet, 2014;Määttä, 2015;Wadensjö, 1998).…”