Language Support on the Ground under UNPROFOR

Abstract

Viewed from the perspective of members of a foreign military, the process of deploying to Bosnia-Herzegovina or a new area within it represented the performance for real of the tasks, duties and practices they had begun to learn during pre-deployment preparations and training. Among these preparations were the decisions about the length and content of language training, and about who should receive it, discussed in Chapter 1. The work of arranging for language support ‘on the ground’, at headquarters, battalion or company level, was thus for foreign soldiers a second phase of a language encounter that had originated in their home country. However, the militaries that took part in peace support operations did not meet their language needs universally or even primarily from their own ranks. From 1992 onwards, they would recruit thousands of native speakers of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian to work as ‘interpreters’, language intermediaries whose roles sometimes in fact blurred written translation and spoken interpreting. Foreign militaries thus became one of the most significant international employers in the new economy that emerged in Bosnia as a result of conflict and intervention. The language encounters of the locally-recruited language intermediaries — which could last up to twenty years for the longest-serving interpreters — began when foreign troops moved into a town, opening a new base and beginning to offer work.