Interpretation, translation and intercultural communication in refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France

This article explores the interplay between language and intercultural communication within refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, using material taken from ethnographic research that involved a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis in both countries over a two-year period (2007–2009). It is concerned, in particular, to examine the role played by interpreters in facilitating intercultural communication between asylum applicants and the different administrative and legal actors responsible for assessing or defending their claims. The first section provides an overview of refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, introducing the main administrative and legal contexts of the asylum process within which interpreters operate in the two countries. The second section compares the organisation of interpreting services, codes of conduct for interpreters and institutional expectations about the nature of interpreters’ activity on the part of the relevant UK and French authorities. The third section then explores some of the practical dilemmas for interpreters and barriers to communication that exist in refugee status determination procedures in the two countries. The article concludes by emphasising the complex and active nature of the interpreter's role in UK and French refugee status determination procedures

Voice and expressivity in free indirect thought representations : imitation and representation

This paper addresses issues in the philosophy of fiction from the perspective of a relevance theoretic approach to communication. Its departure point is the assumption found in both pretence approaches to irony (e.g. Currie 2002, 2006, 2010, Recanati 2000, 2004, 2007, Walton 1990) and Sperber & Wilson’s (1995, 2006, 2011) echoic approach that free indirect discourse and irony should be treated in parallel. Drawing on examples (mainly) from Mansfield’s short stories, It then addresses the question of how we should account for the role of so-called ‘expressives’ in free indirect style and argues that while authors may use them in the imitation of a character’s style or ‘voice’ (especially for the purpose of parody), they may also use them as a means of encouraging readers to construct their own meta-representations of a character’s state of mind. Finally, it addresses the question of what the narrator’s/author’s role is in creating these effects, and argues that the function of a ‘speaking’ narrator must be de-coupled from that of an organizing, selecting narrator (the communicator). Although this distinction can be explained in relevance theoretic terms, it implies that free indirect thought representations must be distinguished from irony and parody, where the relevance of the utterance lies in the audience’s interpretation of the communicator’s thoughts. Key terms expressive irony free indirect discourse/thought imitation (meta-)representation narrative/narrator parody pretence principle of relevance voic

What’s missing from legal geography and materialist studies of law? Absence and the assembling of asylum appeal hearings in Europe

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordData availability statement: Due to the ethical and legally sensitive nature of the research, ethnographic notes taken in court could not be made openly available. Appellant interviewees were not asked for their permission to share their interview transcripts in an online open archive because of concerns that they could misunderstand what was being asked for, or feel obliged to agree but subsequently feel less able to conduct free conversation in research interviews as a result, thereby negatively impacting on the quality of the data generated. Additional details relating to, and data resulting from, to a survey taken during observations of British asylum appeals between 2013 and 2016 are available from the UK Data Archive (persistent identifier: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852032).There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi‐sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully‐fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non‐attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practiced. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)European Research Council (ERC

Intercultural im/politeness: Influences on the way professional British Sign Language/English interpreters mediate im/polite language

Rachel Mapson - ORCID 0000-0003-0400-6576 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0400-6576https://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns.311.07mappubpu

The measurement of bilingual abilities: central challenges

In this handbook chapter I analyse the concept of bilingual abilities. Bilinguals vary widely in what they can do with their languages or in the ways in which they use their languages on a daily basis. This means that there is a great deal of variability in what the term covers. While many researchers subscribe to the holistic view of bilingualism, in the academic literature bilinguals are still often described in negative terms as having a "deficit" in one or another subsystem of their languages. The key aim of this chapter is to identify what makes individuals with bilingual abilities unique speaker-hearers in their own right, avoiding the fractional view of bilingualism, and how these abilities can be measured

Phonological variation in a synchronic/diachronic sociolinguistic context: the case of Costa Rican Spanish

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