The craft of translation: documentary practices within immigration advocacy in the United States

Abstract

This article builds on anthropological research on bureaucratic inscription as a power-laden process to explore the craft of document translation in contexts of immigration legal advocacy. In a legal climate characterized by suspicion and resource scarcity, immigrants who seek to regularize their status in the United States face steep evidentiary challenges, including the requirement that all documentation, including records from their countries of origin, letters of support from friends and family, and their own affidavits, must be translated into English. Approaching immigration document translation ethnographically and drawing on multi-year fieldwork in a nonprofit providing legal services to low-income, Spanish-speaking immigrants, this article focuses on translation as neither straightforward and mechanical nor as impossibly complex but rather as a craft that involves exercising discretion. Practicing this craft with care is one way to counter the otherwise alienating and state-centric nature of bureaucratic inscription.

“For just decisions we need you!”: Relational decision‐making and the bureaucratic exclusion of “poor others”

“…Unpacking administrative decision-making must therefore consider the sequence of interrelated decisions (including the assessments of other organizations) that various actors (e.g., translators, as Coutin and Fortin [2023] demonstrate) take within a specific context (Hawkins, 2003).…”

“…Simultaneously, as outlined by Halliday et al (2009), they make assumptions about the information that CMOs are looking for, hence choosing the information they provide to either support already existing images of deservingness or contest them (see Coutin & Fortin, 2023), for example, through standardized and minimal communication as one office told Lisa (fieldnote, social services 2020). Thus, legal requirements guide practices and create hierarchies, but (formally) less powerful actors can strengthen their own organizational goals by making use of the legal instruments of other administrative fields that suit their own ethics and ethos.…”

“…Rather, as we argue, information transmission and decisions go back and forth; they are not linear nor made in a vacuum and circulate simultaneously within a network of actors. These actors, in-or outside of state administration, participate in numerous decisions preceding the outcome and in shaping the legitimacy of the final decision (see also Coutin & Fortin, 2023 on translations in legal procedures and their interpretation by various audiences). As a result, this relationality allows the veiling of structural inequalities (e.g., racist and classist exclusions, see Gupta, 2012;Reinke & Bevilacqua, 2022) and the portrayal of decisions as the result of collective action (Hull, 2003), thus creating the image of a coherent and neutral bureaucratic state (Sharma & Gupta, 2006).…”

“Everything I Have Seen There, That I Know …”: Witnessing the Colombian armed conflict through refugees’ narratives of implication

“…This understanding of witnessing-as an act that marks the witness as risky, apt for persecution and displacementhas important implications for border crossers embroiled in immigration, asylum, resettlement, and deportation systems. In the US context of racialized crimmigration (Stumpf, 2006) and legal violence (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012), which primarily affects people from Latin American and Caribbean countries (Armenta, 2017;Vazquez, 2015) and those who resemble them (Rosas, 2012), proving one's eligibility for asylum requires lengthy and complicated processes of bureaucratic inscription (Horton & Heyman, 2020), the craft of translation (Coutin & Fortin, 2023), and bodily evidence of persecution (Fassin, 2011;Fassin & d'Halluin, 2005;Ticktin, 2011). States that are signatory to the United Nations 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, such as the United States, generally accept or reject asylum claims based on the definition of a refugee as "someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion" (UNHCR, [1951] 2010, 3).…”