When the armies went back home

Abstract

Research on interpreting in war has investigated the role played by local civilians recruited by the Army as linguistic mediators. This chapter explores the aftermath of war for these local interpreters in the case of the conflict in Afghanistan, using the seven-year long debates on their fate in the UK, France and Denmark. In the arguments around the politics of protection, interpreting is located in three discursive spaces: at the supranational level, within the specificities of NATO multilateral operations on the ground, and in the space of individual nation-state agendas. In the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan, the Chapter argues, the greater public visibility of local interpreters did not materially change the ways in which interpreting in war was perceived.