METTE RUDVIN*

HOW NEUTRAL IS ‘NEUTRAL’?Issues in Interaction and Participation in Community

Interpreting.

One of the basic premises of this paper is the paradigm shift in translation and interpreting studies away from a simplistic positivism to a context-based approach. This paper will, in the context of community interpreting (or ‘public service interpreting’),1 examine how previously held positivist axioms of equivalence and ‘neutrality’ are being replaced by a more dynamic, interactional approach which looks at the community interpreter as an active agent in the construction of ‘meaning’ and attempts to account for cultural and individual factors involved in the

* SSLiMIT, University of Bologna. I would like to thank Gaby Mack and Patrick Leech for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Needless to say, any shortcomings are entirely my own. In the first draft and in my oral presentation of this paper at the SSLiMIT conference on interpreting in November 2000, I presented a national survey that I have been conducting - via questionnaires - among community interpreters and service providers in Italy, examining issues of neutrality. As the survey is still in its early stages, however, and the data still incomplete, I have decided not to present it in my contribution to the present volume.1 Definitions of community interpreting will not be discussed in this paper (for discussions on definitions see for example Mikkelsen 1996, Schweda-Nicholson 1994, Gentile 1995, Mason 1999). A very broad working definition of community interpreting has been adopted: an encounter between a representative of a host country institution and a client who does not speak, or does not wish to communicate, in the host country’s official language(s), interpreted by a third party. The term “service provider” (typically a hospital, a welfare institution, a police station, a court room, etc.) is often used in literature on community interpreting to denote the host institution; ‘client’ is typically a patient, an asylum seeker, a witness, a defendant etc. My working definition includes court interpreting because, although different parameters might apply to a highly formalized courtroom setting, the core issues regarding ‘neutrality’ are, in the final analysis, the same (see Berk-Seligson 1990 and Jansen 1995 for discussions on, respectively, interpreter participation and ‘neutrality’ in the courtroom.) Furthermore, the word “courtroom” is not always easy to define. Is a formal hearing in the judge’s office a ‘courtroom’ setting, for example? (Franz Pöchhacker’s suggestion (in this volume) to regard ‘interpreting’ on a continuum as “a conceptual spectrum of different (proto)types of activity” rather than getting stuck in a quagmire of definitions and strict boundaries is, in the present author’s opinion, an eminently sensible one.)

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translation/interpreting process. The findings of a survey conducted recently on job-induced trauma among community interpreters will also be touched upon (Baistow 2000). One of the many interesting points that has emerged from this survey is that an important source of stress for the community interpreter was the expectation that s/he should be ‘neutral’. Recognizing the community interpreter’s dynamic role as an active, decision-making protagonist rather than as a “pane of glass” or “conduit” (traditional translating/interpreting metaphors) during the interpreting encounter is, this paper claims, crucial and could offset the negative effects of stress (as described in Baistow’s study) for the community interpreter. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold: Firstly, to look more closely at what is really meant by ‘neutrality’. Is this, seemingly objective criterion, culturally defined? Secondly, to explore the community interpreter’s interactive role as a cross-cultural facilitator and to problematize cross-cultural differences.

1. Some theoretical premises

1.1. A dynamic view of language

An underlying premise in this paper, then, is a dynamic view of language and interpreting2 which sees language as a communication system in which each of the three interlocutors not only brings to bear of their own self to the exchange, but that which unfolds during the exchange (the ‘meaning’, result, conclusion) is a result of the interlocutors’ combined interaction. In an interpreting encounter this would mean that the ‘translational meaning’ is a direct – and unpredictable - result of a triadic interaction with the combined input of three parties. In other words, the interpreter is not interpreting a ‘fixed, set meaning’ already in place in the minds and utterances of the other two interlocutors. In the same way that conversation progresses as a result of the client-service provider’s combined interaction in a monolingual conversation, it also progresses and emerges as a result of the interpreter’s input. Needless to say, any translation decision that the

2 Many authors could be mentioned here; Cecilia Wadensjö’s valuable 1998 interdisciplinary study Interpreting as Interaction on interpreting from a dialogic - rather than monologic – perspective, deserves special mention event. The following quote summarizes her view of ‘interaction’ in language use: “[In a dialogic view of language] an utterance is seen as a link in a chain of utterances, as a thread in a net of intertwined communicative behaviour. Meanings conveyed are seen as resulting from joint efforts between the people involved. Hence, the meanings of an original utterance will depend on how it is reacted to by people present at it [...] on preceding and following sequences of talk, on non-verbal communicative behaviour and extra-linguistic features defined by and defining the speech situation” (Wadensjö 1998: 43, my emphasis).

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interpreter makes during the exchange stems directly and inevitably from his/her own interpretation of the situation, an interpretation that can – at least in theory - never be finite or fixed but will necessarily be the result of a hermeneutic process. When the interlocutors in the interpreting encounter come from cultures that are generally considered to be distant from each other, as typically happens in community interpreting, the frequency with which the interpreter will have to resort to bridge-building, or communication-facilitating strategies that go beyond the semantic level, is clearly much higher.

1.2. The concept of ‘neutrality’

The word ‘neutral’ is itself is slippery, vaguely understood to mean ‘objective’ and/or impartial (vs. bias), void of any subjective evaluation or opinion. The last few decades however have witnessed a surge of cultural critics, literary theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, etc. (primarily but not only the human sciences) who have been challenging the positivist assumption of ‘objectivity’, arguing that assumed states of objective neutrality are actually deeply inscribed not only in context but in the individual views of the participating agents. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a well-known literary theorist, notes how the very idea of ‘neutral’ or ‘free’ dialogue is illusory:

[A neutral communication situation of free dialogue] is not a situation that ever comes into being - there is no such thing. The desire for neutrality and dialogue, even as it should not be repressed, must always mark its own failure. To see how desire articulates itself, one must read the text in which that desire is expressed. The idea of neutral dialogue is an idea which denies history, denies structure, denies the positioning of subjects.” (Spivak 1990: 72, my emphasis)

In the same way as there is no such thing as neutral dialogue, nor can there be, this paper will argue, any such thing as ‘neutral communication’. In interpreting studies the positivist view claiming that interpreting is or should be ‘simply’ a neutral transfer of information is still alive, if not – now – kicking3. As Nancy Schweda Nicholson reports:

Don Barnes [...] characterizes the role of the interpreter as similar to a “pane of glass,” through which light passes without alteration or distortion. [...] Continuing with the “pane of glass” analogy, one

3 See Miriam Shlesinger 1991 for an example of a more context-based approach. Carr 1995 also contains several valuable contributions following this general approach.

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can say that the interpreter allows for communication of ideas, once again, without modification, adjustment or misrepresentation. (Schweda-Nicholson 1994: 82, my emphasis)

“While the facilitator role, the adaptation role, and the interpreter/conciliator role may be appropriate in certain situations,” Schweda-Nicolson continues, “it is important to stress that the “pane of glass” analogy is the one which most accurately reflects the most basic and fundamental function of the interpreter.” (Schweda-Nicholson 1994: 84, my emphasis). This argument is clearly difficult to sustain if the theoretical premises underpinning the general trend in cultural studies, as reported for example by Spivak, are accepted. If the interpreter is an active protagonist in the interpreting encounter, constantly making decisions – subjective decisions and fruit of individual interpretation – s/he can hardly be a transparent entity through which some assumedly fixed meaning passes, crosses linguistic systems and comes out the other side ‘untouched’. A prism might be a more suitable metaphor, if metaphors we need: through a combination of input and receptacle/mediator, ‘light’ is thrown out in many different directions and in many different colours, allowing for a series of possible interpretations depending on the angle or position from which it is seen. This paper suggests that the interpreter will necessarily affect the outcome (and consequently ‘truth value’) of the encounter and that his/her interpretation of any utterance is, inevitably, subjective.

1.3. Different cultures, different histories = different languages?

Underlying the call for neutrality, the author believes, is the Western individualist philosophy of ‘freedom from constraints’ which, many scholars believe, emphasises the role and rights of the individual and his/her responsibility towards institution/nation, in clear contrast to many traditional sociocentric societies in which a person’s main responsibility is towards the group/kin.4 By the same token agents in a triadic, cross-cultural interpreting encounter would, according to the Western tradition, be principally governed by their role in and their professional responsibility towards the host institution/nation. This might not necessarily be the case

4 For example Gellner 1964, Foley 1998, Duranti 1997, to name only a few (specifically, those mentioned in the bibliography). This is clearly a rather over-generalized presentation which begs further clarification and qualification, both of which are beyond the scope of this paper. Kim’s 1994 collection of essays Individualism and Collectivism contains useful analyses on how, for example, societies needn’t be either individualistic or collectivist, but contain both traditions and/or lie on a continuum; as such it constitutes a welcome warning against simplistic binary dichotomies (see esp. Sinha and Charan Tripathi, ch. 8).

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for a non-Western community interpreter and/or client where group-, kin-, social-, status-based identities might be governed by other norms.

It might be useful at this point to remind ourselves of Sapir-Whorf’s much-maligned contribution to (ethno)linguistics which in Hymes’ interpretation sees language not only as a phenomenon which is not static but and whose repertoire therefore both reflects and limits culture, but whose internal systems, structures and functions vary radically from one culture to another: “Different cultures often impose quite different conventions for the use and form of language in comparable social situations” (quoted in Foley, 1998: 249). Indeed, not only does language reflect a person and a group’s experience, but different languages are “distinct communicative systems” that emerge from different experiences and histories.5 If these observations are applied to community interpreting, it becomes clear that the expectations which client(s) and service provider bring to the interpreting encounter may vary radically, as do the strategies and skills – both linguistic and supra-linguistic – deployed (by all three parties) in managing that encounter. Far from a clearly delineated social act in which social conventions are agreed upon by all members of the group (as would normally happen, although arguably not always and not completely, in a monolingual encounter between a public-service user and the representative of a public institution), a situation arises in which the two – or often three - parties belong to different sets of social conventions and conventionalized language systems. Furthermore, underlying status- and power- affirmation or negotiation played out in a monolingual situation (e.g. between judge-defendant or doctor-patient) might, in bi- or tri- lingual conditions, be carried out (consciously or unconsciously) in forms largely unfamiliar to each party and according to completely different criteria. Even the seemingly spontaneous act of greeting is not only very loaded, but loaded differently in each culture6. The different expectations and

5 In Foley’s words: languages are “linguistic practices [which] are the primary communicative behaviour through which humans sustain ongoing histories of social structural coupling [...] [D]ifferent systems of such practices entail different trajectories of lived history, embodied in the habitus and its practices in the sociocultural world” (Foley, 1998: 250, my emphasis).6 Foley reports an interesting example of how forms of greeting reflect underlying social ideologies and systems. In Australia, a largely egalitarian society, the act of greeting is generally a way of establishing a relationship, however brief, based on equality and familiarity. The Nigerian Wolof greeting, by contrast, is profoundly non-egalitarian, reflecting and indeed constituting hierarchical relationships within the community. Any greeting involves self-lowering or self-elevating strategies in which the relationship between the two speakers is carefully negotiated: the respective hierarchy of each person in relation to the other is established during this short, obligatory interaction, occasionally involving some form of competition for status. Greeting routines, Foley believes, reflect

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conventions that each party has will naturally guide his or her spoken contribution to the interpreting encounter (typical questions of a hypothetical client could be: how much ‘space’ to give to the other party; should one be obsequious or take control? which level of politeness is appropriate/demanded? can one expect patronage in exchange for ‘giving the expected answers’? etc.).

If different linguistic systems do not necessarily overlap, fill the same functions or take the same form in similar circumstances, the interlocutors could easily end up talking at cross-purposes. In an already confusing communicative process fraught with difficulties, the contribution of the interpreter to this negotiation process will necessarily be a result of his/her interpretation of events. It cannot, the present author argues, in such a complex process, be considered ‘neutral’ in any absolute sense of the word. Only with difficulty, it could further be argued, can absolute impartiality be claimed: by ‘interpreting’ (in the wider – literary or legal - sense of interpreting) the situation and the utterances, is the community interpreter not taking a stand, and just as importantly (a point to which we will briefly return at the end of this paper), who decides what is ‘impartial’? The present author has demonstrated elsewhere7 that in some cases the interpreter is required by the client to interact in a lengthy, preliminary status-negotiation exchange before even beginning to interpret and before including the service provider in the communication process. (In this particular case study involving Kurdish refugee women, the interpreter found that before the client was willing to accept her as an interpreter, i.e. before even beginning to interpret, she had to negotiate ethnically-based and status-based roles with the client in order to establish their space, or roles, vis-à-vis each other.) It would be difficult in such cases to define an interpreter’s position, in any absolute terms, as ‘neutral’. Indeed, the outcome of such preliminary negotiations profoundly affects (and if successful, facilitates) the subsequent linguistic mediation.

1.4. The invisible observer?

In the last couple of decades, anthropologists have shown how the ideal of the ‘silent or invisible observer’ is more of a myth than a fact.8 In critiquing

the cultural construction of personhood (Foley 1998: 256ff) as well as, obviously, in-group roles.7 Paper presented at the UCL/UMIST conference ‘Research Models in Translation Studies’ in April 2000: “Community Interpreting in the Area of Mental Health. Psychosocial Implications of Interpreting Strategies”. The paper was based on a case study of a small group of Kurdish refugee women in psycotherapy sessions with a Western-trained analyst, using a Farsi-speaking interpreter.8 Geertz 1993, Haring 1972, Shweder 1989 or Clifford 1986 are only a few examples.

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their own fieldwork methodology, they show how the presence of an assumed ‘invisible’ third-party (in their case the fieldworker observing the research-subjects) can never be entirely ‘neutral’ but will, simply by virtue of the fieldworker being there, perforce influence the situation (be it the performance of a ritual or the narration of epic poetry). In the same way, 9 if the analogy is extended to mediating verbal communication, the mediator – the interpreter – cannot be wholly ‘neutral’ anymore than s/he can be wholly invisible. His/her very being there affects the outcome of the exchange. To become a “pane of glass” would mean denying his/her own personal experience, judgement and culture as well as the socio-cultural structural differences inherent in each language.10

Another interesting contribution that argues strongly and convincingly against the positivist ‘invisible fieldworker’ model from a rather different angle is Sherry Kleinman and Martha A. Copp’s 1993 study Emotions and Fieldwork. Kleinman and Copp argue that instead of denying (as sociologists and anthropologists have traditionally been trained to do) the fact that emotions – both positive and negative – arise during the course of fieldwork vis-à-vis one’s subject group/theme and/or individual informants11, these very emotions can in themselves be valuable data for the analytical process in that, being indicative of the fieldworker’s social/psychological culture-bound persona, they are clues (or ‘cues’) to the fieldworker’s culture-bound attitudes towards their informants (for example

9 It is by no means far-fetched to compare fieldwork methodology in anthropology or qualitative sociology to interpreting methodology, i.e.: the fieldworker’s process of observation of data; analysis of data; communication of data analysis to academia versus the interpreter’s listening (observation); interpreting, in the wide sense, linguistic and paralinguistic data (analysing data); interpreting in the narrow sense, i.e. ‘translating’ (communicating data).10 In their 1996 study Interpreters and the Legal Process, Joan Colin and Ruth Morris show how the courtroom interpreter is indeed far from transparent: “Aspects related to the provision of a linguistic link by an interpreter can affect the proceedings. Thus, an interpreter may interrupt in order to request clarification, or to ask for somebody to slow down or to speak up. Other people in the proceedings may comment on the fact that an interpreter is present. They may comment on aspects of the interpreter’s performance. All of this draws attention to the interpreter. The very presence of an interpreter in a particular situation may change the way in which people communicate” (Colin and Morris 1996: 23-24, my emphasis). A similar comment can be found in Sabine Fenton’s 1995 study: “Far from being that unobtrusive figure which the law prescribes the interpreter to be, recent studies (Berk-Seligson, 1990a and b) have shown to what extent interpreters are free agents and very visible verbal participants in the courtroom.” (Fenton 1995:32).11 Note the negative reaction to the diaries of Bronislaw Manilowski’s (pioneer of anthropological research and fieldwork), published posthumously, towards the fieldworker’s emotional engagement (especially negative emotions) humorously described by Geertz (1989).

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hostility towards a particular informant could be a cue to understanding a particular cultural phenomenon or perhaps current in-group dynamics)12.

This paper further suggests that the very act of speaking in the first person on someone else’s behalf, as is generally expected of dialogue interpreters, is a vivid reminder of the “pane of glass” analogy; they simply “aren’t there” and any personal contribution they might bring to the encounter is not only neglected, but regarded to be ‘misleading’.13

One might also ask what the implications are of service provider and client addressing each other directly (i.e. grammatically, 1st, 2nd person) but not the interpreter (i.e. addressing the interpreter as if s/he were the other interlocutor). Even the spatial positioning of the interpreter in the courtroom, police station, or more generally in liaison interpreting (sitting or standing directly behind one or both interlocutors, especially in chouchoutage) is such that s/he should seem ‘invisible’14. The whole scenario, or choreography, underlies and encourages the invisibility myth. A number of ‘political’ and ethical issues in terms of representation arise at this point – who speaks for whom? who is mandated to speak for whom? who gives the mandate, and is it legally incumbent upon an interpreter to accept that mandate if this creates an unsolvable dilemma – either of a cultural/linguistic nature, or of a moral nature?

1.5. Construction of personhood

12 In the same way as the fieldworker is trained to be ‘invisible’, interpreters are expected to be ‘invisible’ and emotionally ‘neutral’. Acknowledging the difficulties and paradoxes inherent in the situation and the negative feelings that often ensue, might help alleviate the burden or feelings of guilt that many interpreters have, as Baistow has shown, in respect to professional neutrality requirements. Indeed, as Kleinman and Copp’s fieldworkers, interpreters could be trained to use their negative feelings as paralinguistic cues, and use those cues to enhance their interpreting skills, thus improving performance, rather than suffering the burden of not feeling ‘professional’ because one has, simply by harbouring negative emotions, broken an ethical requirement to be neutral.13Another translation phenomenon which mirrors this ‘invisibility’ metaphor is that of film dubbing, in which the voice of the speaker is synchronically substituted for another’s, giving the impression that this substituted version directly renders the speaker’s utterance, when of course no such thing is happening: the original speaker’s utterance is, often radically, mediated through translation and through the utterance of the dubber. (For further references to film dubbing, see SSLiMIT’s ample literature on dubbing in the CLUEB series.)14 See Mona Baker’s 1997 article describing an interpreter-mediated interview with Saddam Hussein where the interpreter is called upon publicly, by Saddam Hussein, to account for his translating decisions. Such public manifestations of interpreter involvement which call attention to the interpreter so openly, rendering him/her visible, are the exception rather than the norm.

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It was claimed above that the call for neutrality in the Western interpreting tradition stems from the Western individualist model of seeing agents as accountable to institutions (institutions being, par excellence, representatives of nation, as the agents themselves are in virtue of their status as citizens of that nation) rather than to their immediate social group or kin. According to William Foley, a renowned ethnolinguist and folklorist, the construction of Western (individualist) vs. ‘traditional’ (socio-centric) identity and personhood is also reflected in language. 15 In Karmela Liebkind’s excellent study (Liebkind 1992) on the construction of identity, she too sees identity as a profoundly culture-based phenomenon and, commenting on the results of another scholar (Stryker 1987), she notes that people “who share particular concerns are predisposed by social structure to interact in particular situations and bring to bear particular interactional skills and resources” (Liebkind 1992: 158). Each interlocutor thus brings to the cross-cultural encounter different linguistic and paralinguistic behaviour patterns and a different understanding of his/her own self-hood and previous experience (see footnote 5 above) of him/herself in relation to others. Applying these observations to community interpreting, it could be concluded that each interlocutor’s construction of personhood is unique, tuned into their respective group identities. Not only will linguistic behaviour such as politeness and greeting forms be governed by their reciprocal understanding of this relationship, but also their expectations of the weight and function of the institutions themselves and the role the service provider plays in the institution, especially in terms of authority.

If linguistic practices reflect non-analogous constructions and concepts of personhood in the cultures at issue, the implication for interpreting would surely be that these differences cannot be simply ‘briefed away’; a simple pre-session brief16 between interpreter and client and/or interpreter and service provider is not sufficient, given the complexity of the process, to assure ‘neutrality’. This paper suggests furthermore that when they occur

15 Egocentric Western individualism which “leads us to view a person as an individual, an embodiment of absolute value in her own right, and not simply in terms of her position in any social pattern” (Foley, 1998: 265) is in stark contrast to a sociocentric context-dependent conception of personhood: “his embeddedness in the social context is the stuff of his definition as a person. Personhood is, thus, defined in sociocentric terms, according to the social position a particular human being occupies”; Foley 1998: 264-269).16 Briefings are short meetings between service provider and interpreter prior to the interpreting session to give a general outline of the situation, common practice in Australia, for example and also in the UK. Colin and Morris (1996) report that in judicial proceedings in the UK it is not unusual for the interpreter to meet also the client briefly before the interpreting session to make sure they speak the same language/dialect, but they are not allowed to discuss the case.

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(which they do not, in general, in Italy), these briefings – although welcome - will generally uphold the institutional and institutionalized power-hierarchy, and if they assure ‘neutrality’ it is ‘for’ the service provider.

2. Objectivity and language use in the courtroom

But are these same conditions applicable to formal courtroom interpreting, one might ask.17 A number of excellent studies on the ‘subjective’ and ‘cultural’ factor in courtroom interpreting such as Peter Jansen’s (1995) study, demonstrate that the neutral/objective/truth-finding foundations of the Western courtroom tradition are not quite as transparent as one might often like to think. Jansen reminds us that “the situation in which the interpreter has to translate bears directly on his or her translation strategies” and “hence, it is clear that there cannot be such a thing as a neutral translation. This insight seems to clash with the often claimed neutrality of the court interpreter” (Jansen 1995: 13).

In that courtroom language practice and ‘ritual’ are unique to each particular cultural community, they are therefore both subject to the constraints of that particular community and construed by them; consequently, these practices differ enormously from one culture to another (especially, seen from Italy, beyond the Western, or ex-colonial, frontier). Furthermore, in the meeting between cultures in the courtroom, the parties are not only drawing on different language and courtroom traditions but they are quite likely unaware of the existence of these differences. If speaking itself, as Foley explains, is a culturally construed act for which there are very different practices and traditions, it is even more so in the courtroom. In the European and American tradition, Foley says, upholding the strict rules and conventions, also linguistically, is crucial for a successful outcome: “Onlookers are never permitted to speak at all, under punitive measures labelled contempt of court. The judge has the widest latitude in speaking, she even controls the speaking of the other participants, but she too is bound by fairly defined conventional limits” (Foley 1998: 250-251) while “other cultures have different ways of settling such disputes. Commonly this consists of discussion between the disputing

17 As Bente Jakobsen rightly pointed out during the discussion that followed the oral presentation of this paper at the Forlì conference. Although I agree with her ‘at a practical level’- for interpreters accuracy obviously has high priority as they perform - I think the point can only be taken so far, and that neutrality in any absolute sense is illusory.

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parties in the presence of the assembled members of the camp or village” (Foley 1998: 252).18

The interpreter finds him/herself then not only in the role of cultural and linguistic mediator/facilitator but forming a bridge (quite possibly unconsciously to herself and to the two interlocutors) between different institutional practices, practices that are a direct result of the understanding of self and personhood in the respective cultures. These differences are so deeply inculcated that they cannot be surpassed simply by ‘goodwill’ or even ‘good interpreting strategies’.

2.1. Politeness

In terms of linguistic and paralinguistic features that influence the interpreter’s performance, the use of greetings and politeness markers is perhaps one of the features which has received most attention in literature on interpreting.19 As Tariq Rahman notes, just as “impolite words are not always interpreted by addressees as being impolite, so polite words are not always interpreted as being polite. They may be used ironically, insincerely, or in jest. Politeness then does not inhere in linguistic or non-linguistic from, it inheres in the decoding of that form by adressees.” (Rahman 1999: 193, my emphasis). Colin and Morris note for example how appropriate politeness and deference in one language might sound like mockery in another, and conclude that interpreters omit such features at their own peril, risking the charge of ‘editing’ (Colin and Morris 1999: 22ff.). In interpreter-mediated interaction politeness forms are, furthermore,

18 This form of settling disputes is common to many so-called ‘traditional’ cultures, for example that of the Pathans in Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan, in the so-called ‘jirga’ system: a closed meeting of the village elders which meets to discuss and decide upon legal and other matters that affect individuals and/or the group as a whole; the physical conformation of the forum – delineated spatially in circular or semi-circular form – is itself profoundly symbolical of clan power-distribution. Fredrik Barth’s work is perhaps the most well-known focussed study of Pathan group identity. An important – if secondary to the study itself – conclusion of his fieldwork (Barth 1969) was the inherently dynamic nature of group identity and its potential for change and adaptation. It is indeed crucial to remember that identities – be they at an individual level, group level, community level or at the level of nations – have in themselves the potential for change.19 Susan Berk-Seligson’s 1990 The Bilingual Courtroom is perhaps the most quoted study in this regard. Much has been written on cultural variations in politeness/greetings in fields such as anthropology and sociolinguistics, of course; Clifford Geertz’ study on Java ‘Linguistic Etiquette’, reprinted 1972, is well worth looking at, as is Susan Ervin-Tripps’ classic study on sociolinguistic rules of address in the same volume. Multilingua – Journal of Cross-cultural and Interlanguage Communication – has dedicated an entire volume (1989/8-2/3) – as well as a numerous individual articles - to politeness forms in different cultures. Many others could of course be mentioned.

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a direct result of power/status relations in the triadic configuration. The differences between politeness codes in the two cultures often remain unacknowledged, potentially leading to tension and hostility between parties and, even more importantly, hostility from the jury. If sharing certain information is considered taboo or impolite because of the structural rapport between the interlocutors, this may lead to a breakdown in communication.

Based on the author’s own work with and knowledge of Pakistani culture (in Pakistan and in Italy), it seems to be clear that politeness and status negotiation (in which politeness markers and face-saving techniques, especially self-lowering and elevation of the interlocutor, play a crucial part) might in some cases hinder the sharing of information and knowledge. Seeking ‘patronage’ or indeed ‘compassion’ in a hierarchical relationship, through positive face is one possible way of escaping a potentially threatening situation, for example during a trial or at the police station but severely condemned in the same institutional context in a different culture. Or an attempt to please and establish – through self-lowering – a hierarchical relationship between oneself and the interlocutor, one might be inclined to not divulge ‘offensive’ information and only provide the answers one believes that the interlocutor expects or wants to hear. By the same token, an attempt-to-please ‘yes’ might actually mean ‘no’, a situation which would be understood and expected in the client’s own culture, but not in the host country.

2.2. Knowledge economy

There are two more aspects of language-based communication in the court-room which differ widely from culture to culture that could be interesting to consider here, namely that of ‘knowledge economy’ and what might be called ‘the truth factor’. The access to and right to information, or knowledge is, in some traditional cultures far more restricted and jealously guarded than in the Western tradition. Whilst in the Western tradition ‘economy’ is considered to be based on material property and property rights,20 the Australian Aboriginal culture, for example, emphasises intellectual property. Information – controlled, restricted and highly guarded – is gained through kinship and initiation (Foley 1998: 253). This could have drastic consequences in the courtroom, Foley says:

[T]he principles underlying the Aboriginal restricted ‘knowledge economy’ can preclude a particular Aboriginal witness from

20 Although it must be mentioned that many scholars, most notably Bourdieu, have pointed to the status- and prestige- value of other forms of ‘capital’ in Western societies.

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divulging certain information in answer to a question, even if he knows it. This follows from the fact that he may not have the right to such knowledge and may face severe social or supernatural sanctions if he should divulge it. Failure to do so, of course, may leave him open to the legal sanction of contempt of court, leaving the witness with a potentially very difficult choice. [...] Our received legal concepts of truth and perjury are simply not relevant here.” (Foley 1998: 253, my emphasis)

It might be interesting to further explore the implications a difference in one’s understanding of ‘knowledge economy’ might have in a legal context for example, or one related to the welfare or health sectors, for that matter. How much information is the client willing to – or feel s/he is ‘allowed to’ – share, and how does this affect the outcome of the trial or medical visit? This could, the author suggests, seriously hamper understanding between client and service provider, and jeopardize the client’s needs and/or rights. It is hardly surprising then that the community interpreter who finds him/herself ‘mediating’ this situation and is expected to function as a cross-cultural bridge, or facilitator, feels severe stress under the pressure of having to communicate such complex socio-structural differences by ‘simply interpreting’ (in the sense of ‘translating’).

2.3. The truth factor – history as truth

The second aspect that could be worth exploring here is that the narrative forms used in courtrooms, or other institutions fulfilling similar functions in different cultures, do not necessarily correspond to one another. In the Western courtroom tradition, the ‘objective’ sworn-in recounting of ‘facts’ is fundamental to the judicial process. In contrast, the Philippine Ilingot use a form of “crooked speech” (Foley 1998: 252ff) in negotiating legal matters, the goal of which is subtle persuasion – as opposed to exclusively examining witnesses’ accounts of past events. The anthropologist Jan Vansina reminds us that “historical truth is also a notion that is culture specific. [...] In many cultures truth is what is being faithfully repeated as content and has been certified as true by the ancestors. But sometimes truth does not include the notion that x and y really happened” (Vansina 1985: 129). He adds further

Status and truth are sometimes related. In Mande land (Guinée, Mali) truth is appreciated according to the antiquity of the family of the professional who speaks: the older, the more truthful. A correlation between truth and rank seems to occur in some stratified

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societies: the higher the rank of the speaker the truer what he says, even if he speaks about the past. (Vansina : 130).21

Another anthropologist, Ruth Finnegan (1977), reports how the history of one particular tribe is recounted, orally, from generation to generation and how during this process a form of selective memory pruning takes place, for mnemonic and other practical reasons, and information is thus amended, omitted or added. This form of chronicling of events spills over into judicial situations (often entailing the pleading of a case in front of the tribe’s elders) when evidence is taken and given. It is considered no less ‘truthful’ or ‘objective’ - on the contrary it is expected (by the community). If a Western judge were to find the same inconsistencies and gaps in a witness or a defendant giving evidence, it could seriously jeopardize the latter’s credibility and, probably, the outcome of the trial to the subject’s disadvantage. It is clear, then, that ‘swearing to tell the truth and nothing but the truth’ can potentially be much more complex in a cross-cultural situation than in a monolingual Western tradition (Foley 1998).22

2.4. Power relations

The issue of the host institution’s hierarchical relationship with the client has already been touched upon. If ‘neutrality’ is not only the norm, but this is a culturally constructed norm, who, might one ask, sets the norm?23 And if the interpreter must choose between conflicting demands, where do his/her loyalties lie? Whose interests are being served? In most cases, so this paper claims, it is the host culture and/or each specific institution to which the clients must do their best to adapt (and by whom they are paid).24 This again puts into doubt the possibility of using

21 The truth-rank link might of course apply also in class-conscious or hierarchical Western societies. It is likewise true that in the Western courtroom tradition the rhetorical force of a lawyer and his/her ability to sway the jury is often far more decisive in terms of influencing the final sentence than are the defendant’s or other parties’ testimonies or rendering of events. For ethical reasons, this is not openly acknowledged.22 But even within the Western tradition itself, Jansen reminds us, “[t]ruth, however, is not an objective and independent fact. In the context of a criminal lawsuit, what is meant by “truth” is really a coherent story about how the law was broken (if it was broken) by the defendant. [...] Once all the information needed for the judicial classification of the offence is gathered, the story is marked as “true”” (Jansen 1995:19).23 This question was raised by Sergio Viaggio at the Forlì conference during the question session following Franz Pöchhacker’s keynote address on community interpreting. Unfortunately, no discussion ensued.24 According to information provided by a judge at a conference on legal interpreting (in Sicily, Italy in October 2000), in Italy the defendant is actually expected to pay the (very low) interpreter’s fees in judicial proceedings. In practice, however, according to the same source, they often cannot afford the expense and the state pays.

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‘neutrality’ as an absolute parameter. Indeed, in some cases there is no question of neutrality, presumed or otherwise; advocacy and loyalty can sometimes be explicitly required, for example in totalitarian regimes (the ex-USSR can be mentioned) or wartime interpreting. During the Nazi occupation of Norway, for example, under the Quisling government, the word ‘interpreter’ was closely associated to ‘interrogator’. 25 Interpreters were required to acquire as much information as possible from the ‘client’, information which would then be passed on to the interrogator, the party in power (in this case power relations are blatantly obvious, but it could be argued that in many if not most community interpreting situations the issue of power relations and power negotiation is relevant, if less visible and traumatic). Because of his/her unique position, understanding both languages and therefore having access to everything that is being said, the interpreter is able to communicate exactly what s/he chooses and the interlocutors are completely dependent not just on the interpreter’s communicative ability but on his/her loyalty.26

If an interpreter is expected to conform to the linguistic conventions of the host institutions it could be plausibly argued that as such they are the mouthpiece of the host institution and their overriding goal is therefore to safeguard the latter’s interests. In theory, it is the client’s unalienable right to be able to communicate in his/her own language, but if – as this paper argues is commonly the case – the interpreter’s main loyalty27 is to the host institution, are the clients’ rights really safeguarded? If the premises, or ‘pulls’ (between client and service-provider) contradict each other, the interpreter’s loyalty will be expected to lie with the service provider.28 From

25I am grateful to Patrick Chaffey of the University of Oslo for this information.26 The author suspects (based on personal communication with community interpreting colleagues) that the interpreters themselves do not necessarily always agree to these unspoken terms, but it is no less true that they are expected to do so.27 Not necessarily emotionally, but in the underlying ‘status-negotiations’ the strongest party is almost inevitably the host institution. Again, this assumption is based on the author’s personal experience as a community interpreter, and not on statistics. She is currently in the process of collecting data, however, which, to present date, confirm these claims, at least certainly as far as Italy is concerned.28 This is perhaps one of the reasons why service providers (in the author’s own experience this applies particularly to judges) are almost obsessed by ‘neutrality’. The author believes that what might be meant by this neutrality requirement is not so much, or not only, ‘objective truth’, but that the service provider wants all the information s/he needs to proceed – i.e. s/he doesn’t want to ‘miss out on anything’. Whether or not the client gets all the information s/he needs is perhaps less crucial - or important only insofar as it must satisfy the bureaucratic and judicial requirements of the host country (for example that a defendant is allowed to communicate in his/her own language, that they are read their rights in their own language, etc.), otherwise the case might be annulled for breach of procedure.

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one point of view, this might be more palatable if it were somehow stipulated in the unwritten ‘contract’ (i.e. if this is what is the interpreter is paid for), it is far less so, however, if the illusion of complete neutrality and equal rights/access to communication is taken for granted. Even in the – extremely welcome – pre-encounter briefings, this author would argue, these power relations still hold. It is always the host country and/or the host country institutions that set the norms.

3. In conclusion: What’s neutral, then?

Many interpreting scholars, although recognizing the need for culture-sensitive interaction and the interpreter’s active participation, still uphold the positivist ideal of complete objectivity, impartiality, neutrality, and translating ‘exactly what you hear’. This paper has attempted to show that this is a myth and deeply embedded in Western paradigms of self and personhood and the authority/sanctity of a ‘rational/scientific/objective model. One of the underlying assumptions among interpreters and service providers alike is that ‘being neutral’ equals translational equivalence. If decades of research in translation/interpreting theory (especially the descriptive approach) have suggested that the positivist ‘equality’ paradigm is illusory and not a productive avenue for investigation, surely this should lead us, as researchers, to question the neutrality paradigm.

The author of this paper is not supporting advocacy of clients’ causes; clearly, interpreters cannot and should not become freely-choosing advocates of either client or service provider. To some extent at least this paper has played the part of the devil’s advocate, attempting to highlight problems rathre than success stories, whilst ‘on the ground’ interpreters naturally have to perform according to the mandate of the host institution and have to provide (or create) ‘translational equivalence’ without ‘taking sides’. Nor is it suggesting, however, that interpreter-mediated cross-cultural communication is impossible, quite the contrary: Culture, as group identity, is not only rigid structure, but has in itself the potential for and impetus to change and adapt. Moreover, interlocutors are individuals, not merely products of culture, and each interpreting encounter is a unique event. In that interpreting encounter each party has certain interests that need to be fulfilled and over time they will tend to adapt themselves to new norms. Although status and power distribution will generally favour the host country and clients will generally adapt to the former’s norms, host institutions will inevitably have to acknowledge and cater to the presence of new nationals, temporary or permanent, and to growing multiculturalism.

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