Abstract
From discourse representation of Arabs in the media, a large number of clichés and negative representations of interpreters supporting military service forces have recently emerged in the depiction of the role of linguists in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This chapter follows the specific clichés that military personnel adopts when discussing the role of their native-speaker, non-army trained interpreters recruited in the field. By focusing on how this overwhelmingly negative style of narration might be prejudicing not only the interpreters but also the army themselves, as it is likely to prevent the army from getting the most out of their interpreters, the chapter engages with the embeddedness of a discourse on language mediators in situations of conflict and in the ensuing civil emergencies. This chapter challenges the smooth, unchecked transition of framing clichés from the military personnel into the media and back into general circulation, spreading current oversimplifications of the role of translators and interpreters in conflicts (especially those fought in Islamic or Arabic-speaking countries).
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Notes
- 1.
A terminological note is here necessary. The sobriquet ‘the Arab world’ should denote the 22 states comprising the Arab league, hence Afghanistan, which is not a member, is not an ‘Arab’ state (although Iraq is). However, Afghanistan’s geographical position in the Middle East has led to this distinction being blurred in both media and military discourse, symptomatic of a wider tendency in Western discourse to ‘invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse’ (Said 2014: 28). According to Said, ‘for imperialists… the Oriental… is a member of a subject race and not exclusively an inhabitant of a geographical area’ (Said 2014: 92). As the focus of this chapter is on developments in interpreting in conflict zones post-9/11, for the sake of coherence, ‘Middle East’ or ‘Middle Eastern’ is the term I have chosen to use in this paper. Although Afghanistan’s location as a Middle Eastern state is contentious, Stewart concedes that ‘since 9/11 Afghanistan is… included on maps of the Middle East, reflecting the importance of Islam in South Asia and the role that Afghanistan’s recent history has played in creating the leaders of militant Islamic movements such as Al-Qaeda’ (Stewart 2013: 25).
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Gaunt, C. (2016). Ghostly Entities and Clichés: Military Interpreters in Conflict Regions. In: Federici, F. (eds) Mediating Emergencies and Conflicts. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55351-5_8
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