Nationality, Ethnicity and Trust

Abstract

Trust is essential for the products of interpreting and translation to be reliable: yet the language intermediaries who are considered the most trustworthy may not be those whose language knowledge or translation and interpreting skills are greatest. This problem is at its toughest in military language encounters. The potential consequences of an unauthorized disclosure of information are so great that military organizations and personnel consider them to outweigh the consequences of a language encounter not being mediated by the person with the highest available skills. More precisely, the notion of trustworthiness was inherent in military conceptions of suitability for the task. It was determined with reference to collective categories and relied on an assumption that any person local to the conflict zone would be biased whereas any person foreign to the conflict zone would not. The foreign/international and local categories could be broken down into more specific categories that at times could also affect calculations about suitability. As seen in Chapters 2 and 3, certain work would be assigned only to a (foreign) linguist with military training and not to a civilian. Regarding local linguists, it was assumed that every Bosnian necessarily fell into one of three subcategories of localness — a Bosniak, a Croat or a Serb. Both these types of distinctions were important in how linguists and the reliability of their translations were viewed.