Empirical Studies of Translation and Interpreting

The Post-Structuralist Approach

Caiwen Wang, Binghan Zheng, Caiwen Wang, Binghan Zheng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000389845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Traitement du langage naturel

This edited book is a collection of the latest empirical studies of translation and interpreting (T&I) from the post-structuralist perspective. The contributors are professors, readers, senior lecturers, lecturers, and research students from an international context. The contributions are characterised by five themes:

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• Intervention in T&I

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• Process of T&I

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• Product of T&I

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• T&I and technology

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• T&I education

These up-to-date topics are reflective of the shift in attitudes that is being witnessed as a new generation of translation scholars rejects the subjective assertions of previous generations, in favour of an altogether more rigorous approach. The book will notably contribute to the development of T&I and enhance our knowledge of the areas. It will be a useful reference for academics, postgraduate research students, and professional translators and interpreters. The book will also play a role in proposing practical and empirically based ways of training for universities and the industry, so as to overcome traditional barriers to translation and interpreting learning. The book will additionally provide reference material for relevant professional bodies.

Part I

Intervention in T&I

1 Biopolitics, Complicity, and Community in Domestic Abuse Support Settings

Implications for Interpreter Guidance

Rebecca Tipton

Introduction

I propose to consider a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions.

(Butler, 2004, p. 19)

The lack of attention from policymakers to the specialised support needed by women from black, ethnic minority, and refugee and immigrant backgrounds in Britain has to be considered in the context of growing interest in matters of interpersonal violence at the domestic and international levels (Southall Black Sisters, 2019). Measures designed to respond to violence when it occurs, limit its extent and consequences, and provide care and support for those impacted are outlined in key instruments such as the Istanbul and Belém do Pará Conventions, supported by developments in international human rights law that promote the “positive obligations” of the state in this sphere (Rubio-Marín & Estrada-Tanck, 2013; Henn, 2019). However, the translation of such measures into coherent policies at the organisational level is often uneven, especially when it comes to language support provision. In the UK, at least, there is growing recognition of the barriers facing victims who do not have English as a first language (cf. HMIC, 2014; SafeLives, 2017), but a systematic response in terms of interpreter training and the commissioning of provision is lacking.

This chapter reports on the development of guidance for interpreters working in charity support services for victim-survivors of domestic abuse. It draws on underpinning research that has been discussed extensively elsewhere (Tipton, 2017a, 2017b, 2018, 2019b) and presents findings from recent experimental research. The chapter seeks to address the following questions: 1) to what extent can a biopolitical approach to victim support help to theorise “political community” in interpreter-mediated encounters? 2) what evidence of political community can be identified in simulated interpreting practice? and 3) what are the implications of 2) for developing guidance for interpreters in domestic abuse support services?

The chapter starts by situating recent approaches to domestic abuse in the context of human security frameworks and evolving policy formations. This serves as a basis for re-conceptualising victim support and interpreting as biopolitical enterprises, drawing on Butler’s (2004) concept of “community” as a response to circumstances in which bodies may be exposed to violence and complicit in it, and Inghilleri’s (2008) conceptualisation of a translation ethics that is informed by the ethical encounter itself. The final section presents examples from simulated interpreted encounters and interpreter reflections on both the encounters and the draft guidance to illustrate the affordances of a biopolitical approach in the achievement of political community in this setting.

Background and Theoretical Underpinnings

Developments in International and National Domestic Abuse Policies and Practice

The international response to domestic abuse and violence has been shaped by changing conceptualisations of human security, involving a move away from state-centred (e.g. territorial, military) to person-centred conceptualisations (Rubio-Marín & Estrada-Tanck, 2013, p. 240). This shift has influenced the emergence of “positive obligations” for states to actively take measures to protect human rights, together with due diligence standards, which include “the state’s duty to investigate and punish violations of non-state actors and properly redress the victims” (ibid., p. 244). Such developments, however, need to be considered in the wider political context of public management frameworks wherein person-centredness is often articulated in terms of what individuals can do to protect themselves (self-responsibilisation) rather than what protections the state can offer, reflecting neoliberal concerns for self-reliance.

Support for those fleeing abuse and violence in the home has traditionally been provided by the charity sector and funded through a combination of public donations and government funding. In the United Kingdom, austerity policies rolled out since 2010 have led to one in six refuges closing and around 60% of women seeking places being turned away (The Independent, October 2019), a situation exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the consultation in 2019 on enhanced services and legal obligations for local authorities, the Domestic Abuse Bill 2020 only reached its first reading in parliament on 7 July 2020, with many expressing concerns that it does not go far enough in ensuring that immigrant women are able to report safely and are not penalised because of their immigration status (The Guardian, March 2020). Though many of the impediments to support experienced by immigrant women are in common with those facing the wider population, such as childcare, housing, and transport, “each of these issues may also carry culturally-specific inflections, exacerbated by racism and class position” (Burman et al., 2004, p. 336); language and communication needs, while often acknowledged, are seldom a focus of political or sector-specific debate.

Difficulties in seeking help are doubtless compounded for those who have been forcibly displaced and who are consequently more likely than others to “lack a secure form of biopolitical personhood” (Parson & Heckert, 2014). This means that the scale of what may be termed the “labour of the self” they face in reconciling and moving on from experiences of abuse can be particularly burdensome, especially if prior experience of interpreter-mediated institutional encounters is perceived as negative (Tipton, 2019a). Regardless of background, the question of how limited English language–proficient individuals can take responsibility for themselves and even hold on to a sense of self when at their most vulnerable (McCormack & Salmenniemi, 2016) has particular resonance in the context of interpreter-mediated encounters, in part due to the high degree of self-reflexivity required, i.e. the ability to reflect on social circumstances and transform them (Green, 2011; Beck et al., 1994). The complex entanglements of the victim–interpreter relation therefore require a lens through which to identify ways in which forms of (structural) violence particular to the victim experience risk being perpetuated and how they can be mitigated. The affordances of an approach grounded in biopolitics are explored in what follows.

Biopolitics and Its Relation to (Interpreter-Mediated) Victim Support Services

The concept of biopolitics has a long history in the academy. Liesen and Walsh (2012) analyse what they term the “competing meanings” of biopolitics in the political sciences, observing a shift from the incorporation of theories and data from life sciences into the study of political behaviour and public policy, to more postmodern orientations that draw on the work of Michel Foucault (e.g. 1978) in an attempt to examine the power of the state on individuals. Through a series of lectures at the Collège de France in the 1970s, Foucault (2007, 2008) addressed “the themes of a peculiarly modern notion of governmental reason and its implications for the bio-political management of populations” (McNay, 2009, p. 55). As McNay observes, the lectures presciently reflected on notions of the self as enterprise, as well as the normalisation of biopower in the techniques of government and governance. Foucault developed the concept of biopower to “capture technologies of power that address the management of, and control over, the life of the population” (Holmer Nadesan, 2008, p. 2), though, as has been observed, the very scant references to the concept in Foucault’s oeuvre as a whole call into question the extent to which he provides a coherent theory of biopower (Adams, 2017).

In work that offers a reflection on the normalisation of biopower, Green (2011, p. 91) argues that victimisation and vulnerability have been socially constructed to serve political and economic interests in ways that have led to the foregrounding of the “ideal victim” (Christie, 1986), i.e. the type of victim that generates the most sympathy from society. The exclusion of (im)migrant women from much of the public debate on victim protection and victim support underlines the complex process of subjectification such women undergo, especially in relation to prominent social discourses on migration that portray them as potentially dangerous others and therefore less deserving of support.

Green also explores the relationship between the market economy and victimhood, drawing attention to the fact that victims of (all) crime have become a commodity; as such, they have “an exchange value that exists outside of any actual experience of victimisation” (2011, p. 107), leading to the development of a whole economy of victim services. Empirical and anecdotal reports of unevenness in the commissioning of interpreting services in both the statutory (e.g. HMIC, 2014) and voluntary sectors suggest hierarchies of practice are in o...