Our contemporary world is characterised by mobility and migration. People are on the move for various reasons: to flee war and persecution in their home countries, to get reunited with their families, to work and live abroad. Movement always involves a displacement of individual people who find themselves in a new socio-cultural context and a new linguistic environment. Overcoming linguistic and cultural borders and facilitating communication often requires some form of mediation, which is often practised in institutional sites of contested discourses. Translating and interpreting narratives of migration as told by migrants entail the (re)construction and transformation of these narratives, and affect the representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as well as policies of social inclusion and community cohesion.

The proposed issue intends to explore the role of language, translation and interpreting in constructing narratives of migration. It invites contributions from the perspective of different research fields (translation and interpreting studies, linguistics, journalism studies, sociology, political science, etc.) on topics such as the following:

Which policies and practices are in place to use (or reject) translation and interpreting for engaging with narratives of migration?What factors influence the construction of narratives in interpreter-mediated events (e.g. asylum hearings)?How are narratives (re/de)constructed and transformed in processes of translation and interpreting?What types of narratives are constructed and (re/de)constructed (narratives of difference, of belonging) and how do they influence the representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’?What are the implications of rendering narratives of migration for translators and interpreters in respect of professional ethics?Which approaches and models are suitable for investigating such questions?

Call for abstracts: 16 December, 2019

Notification of acceptance: 23 December 2019

Call for papers: 16 March, 2020

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