Being an Interpreter in Conflict

Abstract

Conceptions of the ideal role of language intermediaries occupy a spectrum from invisibility to activism. Historically, translators have been expected to render themselves unseen in the work of producing a fluent target-language text (Venuti 2008: 1–2); standards for interpreters established since the professionalization of interpreting after 1945, based on the expectation of working in ordered institutional settings such as conferences and tribunals, demand a strict neutrality in which speakers, listeners and interpreters themselves accept the interpreter as a mouthpiece that faithfully facilitates comprehension of the source. At the other end of the spectrum, language intermediaries may approach their work with the goal of political engagement or supporting a particular cause (Stahuljak 2010; Tymoczko 2000). Between these two poles lie many degrees to which translators and interpreters become voluntarily or unwillingly implicated in disseminating, resisting, selecting and representing public narratives — processes which become far more acute and fraught when linguists are working on or in conflict situations rather than in spaces with agreed norms for interaction and the resolution of disputes (M. Baker 2006).

‘Never anything else but English … and the desire to assimilate: we were British soldiers now, we didn’t want to speak German. Unless we saw a German, then we might speak German to him.’¹

‘In 1995, in Bosnia, Serbs in Bosnia were under air strikes, and then in four years, again, Serbs were attacked by NATO. And I was in NATO uniform during that time. I was also, in my mind, against Milošević and the regime in Serbia, but I was in a really bad situation.’²