INTERPRETING WITH AN ACCENT
Getting Through Customs
My first reaction to this statement was a familiar surge of deep frustration, immediately followed by relief that the person speaking brought it up here. I’m running a session at an Army Corps of Engineers site for staff on how to engage with international visitors and language interpreters. The group is comprised of completely white, English-speaking U.S. citizens, all apparently eager to learn how to better serve a global population. The statement was made without malice, the speaker unaware that their words reflected a long history in the United States of denigrating immigrants and other diasporic communities: their ability to be truly “American,” their authenticity as representatives of their origin cultures, and their capacity to interact in a socially acceptable way with visitors and coworkers alike.
“So, I’m actually very happy you said that in this session,” I responded, in front of the group. “Your coworker does speak Spanish, real Spanish. It’s like saying that someone from Boston or Louisiana doesn’t speak ‘real’ English. We all have certain phrases, accents, and ways of speaking that aren’t going to match what everyone who walks in the door is going to understand. To be honest, you’re more likely to encounter someone more familiar with his conversational form of Spanish than the Castilian a
college professor might bring to the table. Also, please don’t ever tell someone that they don’t speak ‘real’ X language.”
The participant nodded enthusiastically and the discussion went on productively, but the moment stayed with me so well that here, thirteen years later, it’s still a great example of the sort of perceptions I’ve encountered in not just the interpretive community but also society as a whole. While running other sessions that delve into the boundaries between interpretive skills for inspiration versus manipulation, I frequently see feminine-presenting interpreters shocking their masculine-presenting counterparts at how often they need to use some manipulative techniques. They do so in order to get through their programs without being constantly questioned on their intelligence, experience, and knowledge of the subjects they’re interpreting.
As a woman who is also a second-generation immigrant, over the decades I have witnessed many disturbing but unsurprising parallels between our national narratives about women and people from marginalized communities, especially those who can’t or won’t adapt themselves to the expectations of the “mainstream,” white-centered culture.
"The High Tide of Immigration" - A National Menace cartoon, Judge Magazine, August 1903. Photo by Louis Dalrymple.
For example, at my first NAI National Conference, in the now-defunct International Section, I was solemnly informed that immigrant communities all are living hand-to-mouth without the resources or education to become heritage interpreters. That the continents of Africa, Asia, and South America have no interpretation aside from certain “advanced” groups. (Yes, seriously.)
Even now, I will regularly hear that immigrants don’t come to interpretive sites unless it’s for big noisy parties. That interpreters’ attempts to entice immigrants to visit or volunteer at their sites fall flat even with free passes and transportation. When asked if the interpreters have attended any community events in “that” part of town, the response is often in the negative. Not always, but very often the underlying messages coming through relate to the discomfort of the interpreter as much or more than the logistical difficulties. That isn’t to say that communication, cultural differences, and literal logistics don’t get in the way of bridging these gaps, but they also serve as overtly valid reasons to avoid questioning the discomfort, the hesitation, and the assumptions.
What’s interesting is that as personal as these issues can be, there’s a national narrative engendering and enforcing them that we need to unpack to better understand what we’re facing and how to undo its influence. Unfortunately, that national narrative relates to the popularity of the eugenics movement–the belief, mainly asserted by Western European-descended peoples, that there are inherently superior genetics to be found in Western European-descended populaces that account for intelligence, health, beauty, a tendency toward or away from mental illness or alcoholism, and a variety of other traits.
On the other hand, it was believed (again, mainly by Western European-descended peoples) that “inherently inferior” genetics in the peoples of Asia, Africa, Eastern and Southern Europe, Judaism, Native America, and Latin America threatened this ideal concept of a population; and that immigration from “inferior stock” into the U.S. would pollute the nation and ultimately lead to its downfall.
Proponents of the eugenics movement existed throughout the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, and committees such as the Harvard University-originated “Immigration Restriction League” contributed to the federal government’s draconian Immigration Act of 1921. Even into the 1970s and 1980s, children in my part of Connecticut who entered the school system speaking a language other than English were removed from standard classrooms and placed in Special Education groups created for students with severe learning disabilities, even though this had been illegal for over a decade. I escaped this because my mother discovered the practice while interpreting for families of the affected students.
What those eugenicists and schools failed to understand is that immigrants, far from being cognitively diminished by their bilingualism and culture-straddling, develop a cognitive complexity full of skills (such as code-switching) that allow greater pathways to communication and societal improvement.
Code-switching—the constant dance between cultural paradigms—is a skill honed by discomfort, or rather the awareness of the discomfort of others, while passing between and among two or more communities. My own experiences, and many documented experiences of code-switchers, often show that the communities you switch between don’t tend to perceive the full range of the switcher’s scope, but rather the lack of “authentic completeness” in the transcultural person’s cultural presence on their own end. On the other hand, this will likely be the first person they will go to when there’s a need or desire to understand more about the other community’s world.
It’s in the space between these magnetic poles that one can see the ebb and flow of the battle, but the atmosphere in there is difficult to breathe in. Children of diasporas don’t tend to feel settled; there’s no place to sit down, and it feels like the passages out of it will only take a percentage of you, never the whole.
Third International Congress of Eugenics Announcement. Photo by Eugenics Survey of Vermont Archive.
The NAI and interpretive discipline as a whole has such a deep history of both embodying and critiquing the historical narratives of a nation, such a community of passionate scholars ready to welcome almost anyone into the fold and celebrate their contributions to these important discourses. Because of this, even as I feel the alienating presence of eugenics-promoted beliefs, I also see the ways we are learning to better interrogate and address them.
In that spirit, I would like to ask anyone reading this article to think of a time they might have veered away from engaging with an immigrant or diaspora community, and to ask themselves why. If there were times they felt a need to fact-check information that came from a feminine source when they didn’t feel the compulsion from a masculine one, and ask themselves why. If the narratives they find themselves most frequently engaging with hinge on “Great (white) Man” tradition, and ask themselves why. Then, keep asking more questions. Trust me, there are many waiting to be asked.
