Faith-related interpreting as emotional labour: a case study at a Protestant Armenian church in Istanbul

ABSTRACT

Emotional labour refers to displaying, eliciting or suppressing emotions in order to meet role expectations in a given context. Typically associated with care work in professional settings, this notion has repercussions for our understanding of community interpreting, especially religious interpreting. The present study discusses faith-related interpreting as emotional labour, highlighting the interpreter’s active emotional involvement. Data have been collected through ethnographic methods at a Protestant Armenian church in Istanbul, serving first generation immigrants from Armenia as well as members of the Turkish-Armenian community and ethnic Turkish converts to Christianity. Here, a volunteer interpreter renders the sermon simultaneously from Armenian into Turkish. The interpreting service serves two purposes: to provide a transnational bridge, and to reach out to Turkish-speaking visitors in line with the missionary and evangelizing agenda of the church. The study explores the emotional labour that the interpreter undertakes to these ends, focussing on her strategies of emotional mirroring/amplification during simultaneous interpreting and the wider context of community interpreting, which is an integral part of community services provided in the church.

KEYWORDS:

• Faith-related interpreting
• religious interpreting
• church interpreting
• emotional labour
• affective labour

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude for the cooperation of the anonymous interpreter during my fieldwork; this piece of research would not have been possible without her generous help. I would also like to thank Carmen Delgado Luchner and Kobus Marais for commenting on previous versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Duygu Tekgül obtained her BA degree in translation and interpreting studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, then completed an MA in publishing and language at Oxford Brookes University and a PhD in sociology at Exeter University. She currently teaches translation and intercultural communication at Istanbul Şehir University. She is also a research associate at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, carrying out research in the sociology of translation.

ORCID

Duygu Tekgül http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6577-4272

Notes

1 Interpreting in religious contexts has been variously called ‘religious interpreting’, ‘faith-related interpreting’ and ‘interpreting in religious settings’ (see Hild, 2015, p. 244; Tipton & Furmanek, 2016, p. 237). More specifically, cases of interpreting in Christian churches are referred to as ‘church interpreting’ (Balcı Tison, 2016; Hokkanen, 2012, 2017). The terms ‘faith-related interpreting’, ‘religious interpreting’ and ‘church interpreting’ are used to account for the same phenomenon in this study and are therefore used interchangeably.

2 There are still others who do not distinguish between the two strands and use the terms ‘emotional labour’ and ‘affective labour’ interchangeably (see e.g. Batnitzky & McDowell, 2011; Kurtuluş Korkman, 2015; Veldstra, 2018).

3 This case study could also be approached from a linguistic perspective, investigating whether and to what extent the message itself is shaped or enhanced in an emotive way, but that would best be addressed in another paper as the focus of the present study is on the cultural aspects of interpreting.

4 Turkish-Armenians and immigrants from Armenia are two distinct communities; the former are citizens of the Republic of Turkey and have been living in Asia Minor for centuries. The Turkish-Armenian population in Turkey is estimated to be around 60,000, whereas immigrants from Armenia number around 3000. Immigration from Armenia is a relatively recent phenomenon along with immigration from other former Soviet republics.

5 All quotes from fieldwork notes are my translations into English.

6 A Catholic priest was shot to death in his Trabzon church in 2006, three missionaries were brutally murdered in Malatya in 2007, and Hrant Dink, the editor-in-chief of an influential Istanbul-based Armenian newspaper, was assassinated in the same year.