Power Relations in Postcards of French First World War Military Interpreters

«He became our interpreter, our spokesman, he had a leading role!». Interpretar en los campos rusos de prisioneros de la Primera Guerra Mundial

“…The series Palgrave Studies in Languages at War at Palgrave Macmillan deals in detail with the question of language in terms of communication with the home front; propaganda and language manipulation; the representation of the war in letters and diaries; or the documentation of language change (Declercq and Walker, 2016; Walker and Declercq, 2016), yet, without an explicit focus on interpreting or translation. Other publications look at specific issues such as the French interpreters in the British-French Allied Coalition (Heimburger, 2012a) or at the depiction of interpreters on WW I's postcards and private pictures (Heimburger, 2014;Kelly, 2014;Wolf, 2014). Peter Cowley (2016) examines three autobiographical and fictionalized accounts of World War I, written by French interpreters, as representations of the role of the interpreter in more general terms.…”

Declining the interpreter’s role in World War I

“…4 All translations from Hansi and Tonnelat (1922) are my own. 5 In contrast to the narrative accounts studied here, Heimburger (2014) explores the use of staged portrait photographs as a strategy used by "First World War interpreters […] to come to terms with their particular position", notably their isolation from their French comrades in arms, and the accusation of embusquage [shirking] (pp. 96-97).…”