Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language

In this timely study, Inhilleri examines the interface between ethics, language, and politics during acts of interpreting, with reference to two particular sites of transnational conflict: the political and judicial context of asylum adjudication and the geo-political context of war. One of her core arguments is that the rather restricted notion of neutrality that remains central to translator and interpreter practices does not adequately reflect the complex and paradoxical nature of these socially and politically inscribed encounters and others like them. Inghilleri aims to characterize the moral, social, and interactional spaces in which the translation of the spoken word occurs in ways that reflect the realities of the transnationally constituted, locally and globally inflected environments in which interpreters work. Her study offers an alternative theoretical perspective on language and ethics to those which have shaped and informed translation and interpreting theory and practice in recent years.