On the Frontline: Mediating Across Languages and Cultures in Peacekeeping Operations

Abstract

This study explores the issue of interpreters’ positionality as outsiders to the forces’ personnel and insiders to the local communities. Twenty local interpreters who worked in the different peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in the Bosnian War, and seven members of the forces’ personnel were surveyed on their personal and professional background, their experiences with working conditions and training as well as the particularities and challenges of PKOs. The results indicate that the status, motivations, hiring procedures, and working conditions of the interpreters changed under the different PKOs, and that this had an impact on the positionality of the interpreter. The findings suggest that specific training programs are needed to better train interpreters to work in PKOs, and that consideration should be given to the issue of how to better train peacekeeping forces to work with interpreters.

Creación de materiales didácticos para la formación de intérpretes en conflictos

“…Además de realizar labores de interpretación y de traducción a vista de documentos, los intérpretes también pueden ser responsables de traducir documentos escritos, como tratados de paz (Ruiz Rosendo y Persaud, , 2019, contratos legales o informes de situación. Esto requiere un alto nivel de competencia lingüística y una comprensión profunda del contexto político y cultural en el que se encuentran (Prieto Ramos, 2011).…”

Exploring positionality management in complex interpreting interactions: a simulation method

“…While these contexts pose multiple challenges to interpreters, including linguistic and other interpreting challenges, of particular interest to this paper are challenges related to the interpreter's positionality. Recognising that it is a broad term, and building on work by Mullings (1999), Ficklin and Jones (2009), Delgado Luchner and Kherbiche (2018) and Ruiz Rosendo and Persaud (2019, in this article we understand positionality to refer to a matrix of complex, interlinked factors arising from an individual's experiences, background, education and social identity, conditioning their personal worldview and influencing their reactions and behaviours. Positionality responds to changes in external factors (including the work environment) and manifests itself differently in each context depending on other stakeholders (each with their own equally complex positionality).…”

Crisis Translation

“…However, three factors have influenced this focus on the written modality: (1) the fact that the role of written translation had thus far been overlooked in this setting and so attracted the attention of scholars whose main focus and expertise was in translation; arguably, interpreting for crises has also received insufficient attention, though it has been given more consideration in the domain of conflict, military, refugee, or peacekeeping settings (e.g. Gaunt, 2016;Moreno-Bello, 2021;Ruiz Rosendo, 2020;Ruiz Rosendo & Persaud, 2019;Todorova, 2020;Valero Garcés, forthcoming), in health (e.g. Ng & Crezee, 2020), or police settings (Del Pozo Triviño, 2020;Drugan, 2020), to give just a few examples; (2) the crisis cycle entails far more than a 'response' stage (discussed above, and see below for further discussion) and the written modality has perhaps even more to offer in these other stages of a crisis; and…”