Interpreting In and For the Community, Between Practice and Practitioners: A Few Theoretical Premises

Abstract

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all individuals should have equal right to access legal, social and health services; this is, metaphorically, the ‘Hippocratic oath’ on which our profession rests. We would also argue that the right to trade and to pursue international contacts should also be a basic civil right. With steadily increasing migration around the world, the need to communicate between groups of people and communities who speak different languages is essential not just for day-to-day cohabitation and establishing working interpersonal relationships between people from different ethnic groups living in the same territory, but also for very practical purposes such as trade, co-governance, education and the smooth running of institutional life. The sad truth, however, is that language services in much of the world are so poorly organized and undervalued that this premise is frequently flouted because one of the parties does not speak the majority language. Indeed, the lack of a common language becomes a serious obstacle to equal access to such basic services. Establishing an interpreting profession – whether we call it ‘community interpreting’, ‘public service interpreting’, ‘liaison interpreting’ or the broader ‘language mediation’ found in many Mediterranean countries – is one way of securing this basic civil right.