Interpreting Justice

Book excerpt: In this timely study, Inghilleri 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. The book characterizes the social and moral spaces in which the translation of the spoken word occurs in ways that reflect the realities of the trans-nationally constituted, locally and globally informed environments in which interpreters work alongside others. One of the 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. This 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.