Who says who interprets? On the possible existence of an interpreter system

ABSTRACT

If we ask who is selected to interpret in a particular setting, who is most trusted, the answers rarely concern interpreting as an independent social system. Different legal systems decide whom they trust as translators; institutional employers carry out their own exams; education systems provide signals of competence; the systems of controlled knowledge (science) and its diffusion (news) tend to rely on their own members who ‘know languages’ and, as has been seen in the case of pandemic-related information, rarely display constant trust in wholly independent interpreters. Analysis of interpreters’ trustworthiness in terms of Luhmann’s sociology can thus start from dependencies between at least four possible types of system: interpreters supply utterance; legal systems assume truthful utterance; education systems attest the relative trustworthiness of utterance; systems of knowledge control and diffusion (science, the military, government information, news) assume shared skills or ad hoc modes of professional hybridity. On this view, an interpreter system is only sometimes able to create its own signals of trustworthiness and have those signals accepted. In many instances, it must rely on intersystemic relations, which are often irritations ensuing from the way one social system is given to not understanding another.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpreting
• systems theory
• trust
• Luhmann

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The few translation theorists who have drawn on Luhmann seem to have avoided this problem by generally focusing on other aspects. Hermans (2007a, 2007b) does well when he sees translations as potentially forming a system that talks about representations and that can have an authorising function; he is very aware of the possible non-communication between a translation system and ‘client systems;’ yet he strangely seeks no way of testing whether a social system of any kind, including translation, actually exists beyond the theory of social systems. Vermeer seems to assume that translation is a ‘comprehensive social system’ (2006:5) to which one can apply Luhmann’s concepts. Hermans and Vermeer both lack discovery procedures that might test whether or not there is a translation system, or indeed a system specific to the work of interpreters. It should be clear that, in seeking such procedures, I have little concern here with applying the whole of Luhmann or pretending to any correct reading of his complex work. Nor would I want to suggest that Luhmann is the only way to develop a sociology of translation. Luhmann’s general approach overgeneralises the closedness of the legal system, projecting its properties onto all other social systems; he is excessively pessimistic about the ethics of human agency and the potential for dialogue in public space; and he has little awareness of the role of language in shaping perceptions – to the extent that his legal system has the appearance of being monolingual, which myopic assumption is then repeated in his engagements with other systems.

2. The distinction becomes tricky in languages where the same word is used for ‘confidence’ and ‘trust:’ confiance in French, confianza in Iberian Spanish, for example. The distinction in those languages can be made in the verbs: avoir confiance vs. faire confiance, or tener confianza vs. confiar en/fiarse de.

3. An example surfaced when we asked the head of the Provincial Court of Tarragona whether the court’s interpreters were qualified (Raigal Aran 2018). He replied that the main interpreter for English had somehow always been there (‘She came with the building’) and had not been selected through any specific act of trust. If she made a mistake, the accrued confidence would have been displaced but trust would not have been betrayed.

4. Luhmann’s conceptualisation of trust can be contrasted with Adballah and Koskinen (2007:677–678), for whom trust-building ‘entails that the perspectives and interests of each stakeholder are addressed, knowledge is shared, and information is clear, accountable and legitimate as far as all parties are concerned.’ In Luhmann’s terms, shared information can certainly build confidence, but trust need not assume transparency: it occurs when some information is explicitly not known and there is thus a risk of betrayal.

5. Irritation with the education system is by no means exclusive to interpreters. Translators have also been known to insist that their practical knowledge is everything, and that the rest is useless ‘theory’. One of the tactics that translators and interpreters use when irritating the education system is of course the benighted binarism of ‘practice’ vs. ‘theory,’ which overlooks the ways research can create knowledge on both sides of the divide.

6. This tension may lead to academic criteria being adapted to the interpreter system. In my time at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, from 2008 to 2016, I noted that interpreter trainers were justifiably given leave to work at conferences, and the rank of full professor could be awarded on the basis of interpreting experience, with no publications. I also witnessed irritation between the two systems, notably with respect to the academic qualifications elsewhere required in order to teach in a university system. For as long as there were no doctoral programs in translation and interpreting, the translation and interpreting professionals/teachers could argue that their Masters degrees, mostly from the same institution, were the highest academic qualification that could be required of them. Attempts to create a doctoral programme in the field became a source of irritation.

7. Real Decreto de 14 de septiembre de 1882 por el que se aprueba la Ley de Enjuiciamiento Criminal. https://www.boe.es/buscar/pdf/1882/BOE-A-1882-6036-consolidado.pdf

8. The strikes by interpreters saw the formation of new associations and a union, which could be seen as affirming the independent status of an interpreting system. Further, the vast majority of interpreters (95.1%) reportedly refused to register with the private company because they feared lower professional standards (Justice Committee 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony Pym

Anthony Pym works on sociological approaches to translation and interpreting.