Translating and Interpreting in Danger Zones

Abstract

The role of languages in contexts of war and conflict has previously generated some interest in the cultural turn in War Studies, particularly through research conducted as part of the AHRC-project ‘Languages at War’, led by Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly (Footitt & Kelly, 2012a, 2012b; Kelly & Baker, 2013). The project’s contributions to this very journal have helped to establish a place for languages in cultural analyses of war and conflict (Baker, 2010; Footitt, 2010, 2016; Tobia, 2010), yet the process of translation has not yet found a central place in war and conflict research. Footitt (2016), in this journal, argued that because the on the ground encounters of war take place in ‘transnational spaces’, War and Culture Studies should place the notion of ‘translation’ at its core to be able to fully understand the cultural products found in these inevitably multilingual spaces. Translation Studies, Footitt argued, should become a leading contributor to War and Culture Studies, and the key notion of translation should be incorporated in analyses of war and culture, because translation in the linguistic sense ‘is not an optional extra, something useful to have in selected areas, but a project central to our future understanding of war and culture’ (2016: 218). In response to Footitt’s call, as well as to Debra Kelly’s (2016) acknowledgement of its importance for the journal, this special issue explores the role of translation and interpreting in transnational encounters in ‘danger zones’. If we understand ‘zone’ according to Pratt’s (1991) conceptualization of a contact zone, i.e. as ‘the social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’, then a danger zone is one where such relations can cause, or have caused, a threat or a perceived danger to some of the actors in the contact zone. This special issue brings together five contributions that are based on a series of papers delivered as part of the ‘Translating in Danger Zones’ seminar series that I organized in the Department of Modern Languages journal of war & culture studies, Vol. 12 No. 3, August 2019, 215–219