Foreign/Local Encounters in Interpreting

Abstract

Even t hough they came late in the histor y of operational language support in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the improvements made at the Linguistic Services Branch of HQ SFOR were significant. However, the locally recruited civilian linguists who benefited from them were only a subset of the number of local interpreters involved in the peace operations. Many were employed by other parts of the multinational force instead, and so they remained employees of the particular foreign military on whose bases they worked or of the contractors to whom the US military had outsourced interpreter recruitment. The experiences of local interpreters therefore had potential to vary greatly depending on which military they had been working for and even — because interpreter management was not fully standardized — depending on which base they had worked at, at which time. Many commonalities in their experiences can still be perceived.