Neutrality Affected: Negotiating the Promise of Empathy in Interpreters’ Memoirs

ABSTRACT

As embodied agents of interlocuters in communicative encounters, professional interpreters use the narrated ‘I’ to tell the stories of others, while the narrating ‘I’, that is the interpreter’s personal self, is often kept invisible for the sake of performing the professional role. This paper focuses on three contemporary interpreters’ memoirs that recount their life and work experiences in different locations and settings. The paper explores how interpreter-memoirists challenge the expectation for interpreter’s non-affectivity by exercising their affective labour and adjusting their empathetic positioning in their work as interpreters. With a focus on empathy as affective labour, I investigate how these interpreter-memoirists perform their professional roles by handling emotionally charged scenarios in different ways. I argue that interpreters can function as agents of empathy who are capable of modulating speaker-intended emotions and coping with the impact of empathy as part of their felt and regulated emotions. The fact that the empathy is negotiated and mediated by interpreters challenges normative views on the interpreter’s objectivity and neutrality. This study offers new possibilities for reinstating interpreters’ agency in handling empathy and acknowledging the positive outcome of interpreters’ affective work.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective labour
• empathy
• interpreter agency
• interpreter’s memoir
• neutrality

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer and the editors of this special issue for their thoughtful feedback. I would like to thank Professor Moira Inghilleri for her illuminating guidance. I would also like to thank Ms. Miranda Lutyens for carefully proofreading my drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yan Wu

Yan Wu is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching associate in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her MA in Conference Interpreting and Translation Studies from University of Leeds and her MA in Applied Linguistics from Anhui University. Her research interests include translation and migration, translation and multilingualism, history of interpreting, and translation theory. She is a certified English-Chinese interpreter and translator (CATTI Level II&I). Besides her academic pursuit, she works as a freelance interpreter in various community and conference settings.