A critical analysis of manuals for interpreters in refugee contexts

Abstract

The intensification of human mobility makes it necessary to reflect on how to ensure the linguistic rights of people with little or no proficiency in the official language(s) of a country, including refugees, who are excluded from assistance systems because they speak different languages from the agents who provide these services. Faced with such a challenge, it is necessary to implement a language assistance policy, based on the creation of an integrated training, certification and accreditation system for language mediation professionals. Although few countries offer specialized courses in the field, many of them rely on manuals and codes of ethics to guide the work of community interpreters, which are drawn up without the necessary basis in linguistic studies or, even less so, in specialized reflections on translation/interpretation. In this context, this reflection aims to describe some of these materials, focusing on the concepts of language, translation and interpreting and the representations that emerge from them. The data was processed using corpus-driven discourse analysis, which allowed us to identify the predominance of an idealized and fanciful view of the translation activity and the role of the community interpreter, manifested linguistically through words such as “neutrality”, “impartiality” and “precision”, among many others. It can be seen that, although produced by countries with a history of welcoming immigrants and with language assistance services, the manuals convey reductionist and essentialist concepts of the supposed transparency and invisibility of the translation activity.