Language from the Margins to the Center. Studying the Participation of Interpreters to Asylum Interviews in France

Refugee status determination processes do not rely on material evidence, but on asylum seekers’ narratives and discursive performance during asylum interviews. In a context of restrictive migration policies and of structural suspicion, the bureaucratic format of these interviews radically shapes the reception of their words. Asylum seekers’ empirical and personal point of view is confronted with the supposedly objective expertise of officials. This makes the intervention of specific intermediaries particularly decisive: interpreters.

Although they are daily actors of asylum administrations, interpreters are not public agents. Their linguistic competence most often comes from common socializations with asylum seekers, which gives them a direct understanding of the situations; but their precarious institutional position pushes them to follow the bureaucratic agenda of quantitative performance. This communication aims to contribute to a linguistic decentering in research on asylum. It proposes to overcome the marginalization of translation and language practices, but also to go beyond a reformist call for improved professional standards. It aims to discuss the political issues inherent in dealing with the languages and words of asylum seekers in their confrontation with the state. The purpose is to question how and why translation is, in this case, interwoven with domination.

A sociohistorical analysis (based on the study of administrative archive) shows that interpreters have started to regularly intervene only in the 1990s, in the wake of the restriction of asylum policies. In-depth interviews (35, covering a total of 43 languages) highlight the diversity of interpreters’ conceptions and practices, depending on their dispositions (personal experience of migration, racial and gender socializations, seniority...). Observation of asylum interviews at Ofpra (10) provides an insight into how they manage the contradictory objectives of making asylum seekers’ voices heard and of turning their stories into simplified bureaucratic evidence.