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Intercultural Communication in Interpreting: Power and Choices

Book · May 2021

DOI: 10.4324/9781003179993

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Chapter 1 Interpreting intercultural communication

1.1 Between culture, language and power

But, but he [the refugee in the processing centre with a malfunctioning heart] has got a few
hours to live. I fully understood what he [the doctor] said. It’s not a language issue, but it was
issue of culture. How can I tell the person that you’ve got a few hours to live. It was very hard,
because in India and Bangladesh culture, no, we don’t pass on bad news and sad news straight
away. In our culture, supposing somebody takes his father to the doctor. Let’s assume that the
man has been diagnosed with a carcinoma cancer. The patient, the doctor will never tell the
patient I’m sorry you have a cancer. You have six months to live. He would say look, we are
trying, and the doctor will try to find his son or some other person and tell him that I’m very
sorry but he’s got cancer. He’s on treatment, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But in Australian
culture, the doctor will tell point-blank with you. This is wrong with you. So as an interpreter, it
was very hard to say you are going to die in three or four hours of time – Chandra, English-
Bangla interpreter

The story above is a real experience of Chandra, an English-Bangla interpreter, who was
called upon to interpret for a doctor and a Bengali refugee patient, who had only a couple of
hours to live due to his malfunctioning heart at the regional processing centre. The medical
facility at the centre was too limited to deal with his heart condition, and the only solution
was to fly the patient to Australia. Even this, however, was not possible, because his heart
was too weak to handle flying in high altitude. With the clock ticking, the interpreter had the
dilemma of how – and indeed whether – to break the tragic news to the patient that his life
would end soon. In trying to understand the depth of his dilemma, it is important to note that
the problem was not just cultural, but contextual and structural.

From a cultural perspective, there was a conflict arising from different approaches to dealing
with communicating a bad diagnosis in a clinical encounter where Australia and Bangladesh
were concerned. Whereas the principle of patient autonomy and truth-telling is valued in

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 Australia, non-disclosure in the case of a terminal illness is generally practised in Bangladesh
(see Section 3.5 for further details). Within the given communicative context, the interpreter
was also required to follow a professional code of conduct, which emphasizes accurate and
faithful interpreting with absolute neutrality (see Section 1.2.2 for further details). The
context is, then again, characterized by structural power differentials between the doctor and
the interpreter, because the doctor is almost always naturalized as an authority and controls
communication, leaving little power to the interpreter (see Chapter 3 for further details).

The dilemma faced by the interpreter, indeed, represents a site of contention, in which
structural constraints and individual agency clash in the context of cultural interactions.
Based on real experiences of professional interpreters, this book explores the workings of the
relationship between structures and agency by focusing on communicative dilemmas and
individual choices of interpreters in diverse intercultural contexts. In doing so, it aims to
investigate how and why individuals make the choices that they do in response to the given
constraints, a tension which is often mentioned but remains underexplored in intercultural
communication research, particularly from the perspectives of individual agents (Block
2013).

Interpreting is, needless to say, intercultural communication in itself. Not all instances of
intercultural communication require interpreters, but communicative encounters which do
involve interpreters are always instances of intercultural communication (Kondo et al. 1997).
It is perhaps not too much of a stretch to say that no single profession is more experienced
than interpreters in terms of intercultural communication, for they are centrally engaged in
day-to-day interactions where issues of culture, language and power constantly intersect.
Asking interpreters about the kinds of choices that they make in the face of communicative
conflict, therefore, makes utmost sense. A deep exploration of these choices is the key aim of
this book, which focuses on the causes behind and solutions to intercultural communicative
problems. This book specifically examines the hitherto-underexamined topic of individual
creativity relating to intercultural communication which, combined with possibilities offered
by a relevant communicative field, can rebalance power relations in a given context. Before
turning to explore the interpreter-informants’ accounts and reflections, however, it is

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 necessary to provide a background on what interpreting is and who interpreters are, for
readers who are unfamiliar with the profession and the people who practise it.

1.2 Interpreting and interpreters

This section begins by briefly introducing various contexts and types of interpreting for the
purpose of familiarizing readers with the profession and people. A more detailed discussion
of each interpreting context and interpreters working in a relevant field is provided in each of
the remaining chapters. It then moves on to examine the inter-relatedness of context, culture
and power embedded in interpreting in order to contextualize the book.

1.2.1 Types and roles

For the purpose of this section and the remainder of the book, it is essential to distinguish the
terms ‘translation’ and ‘interpreting’. Although the terms are often used almost
interchangeably outside the field, they denote two distinctively different activities. To put it
simply, translation refers to the process of converting written texts from one language into the
other. Interpreting is defined as oral translation, in which spoken words are rendered from
one language into the other. As such, a key difference between translation and interpreting is
the medium through which meanings are conveyed. It bears noting that a communication
context is much more relevant to interpreting than to translation due to the nature of
interpreting as a highly interactive activity. In a broad sense, the various areas of interpreting
fall into two distinctive categories: community and non-community contexts.

To begin with, community interpreting services are provided to residents of a community,

who do not speak the dominant language of a society. Community interpreting began in the
context of the creation of twentieth-century welfare systems in migrant-receiving
Anglophone countries, with the goal of ensuring fair and equitable access to public services
for immigrants (Gentile, Ozolins & Vasilakakos 1996). Because of its service-oriented
nature, community interpreting mostly occurs in institutional settings of a given society such
as school, healthcare, immigration, law and welfare contexts (Pöchhacker 1999). In these

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 settings, interpreters usually deal with short dialogue-like interactions between a doctor and a
patient, an immigration officer and a refugee, a judge and a defendant, or a school principal
and a migrant parent, for example.

Non-community types of interpreting usually include business and diplomatic settings.

Diplomatic interpreting occurs at multiple levels including national institutions, international
institutions, and a number of intra-governmental or inter-regional military organizations. The
images of diplomatic interpreters working in a soundproof booth with interpreting equipment
(e.g. headsets, control consoles and microphones) are perhaps the most familiar
representations of interpreting among laypeople. Interpreters working in booths speak at the
same time as the speaker with a lag of a few seconds, and are thus referred to as simultaneous
or conference interpreters. The opposite of simultaneous interpreting is consecutive
interpreting, where the interpreter speaks when the speaker finishes talking. Consecutive
interpreting is widely used not only in the aforementioned community settings but also in
business interpreting. As business operations have expanded globally in search of new
markets, the dynamics of communication have inevitably undergone significant changes,
hence the need for language professionals specializing in corporate matters. Business
interpreters deal with not only short dialogue-like communications at meetings but also
longer forms of formal speeches, such as a New Year’s address by a CEO to employees.

In all of the aforementioned communicative contexts, interpreters perform the same

professional duty of communicating language and culture. When it comes to the question of
whether interpreters are intercultural communicators, however, role expectations seem to
vary in the interpreting scholarship. Various role descriptions have, indeed, been attached to
interpreters, who are seen as ‘intermediaries’, ‘mediators’, ‘go-betweens’, ‘brokers’, ‘gate-
keepers’ and even ‘non-persons’ (see Wadensjö 1998 for details). With a view of interpreting
as intercultural communication, interpreters are described as ‘intercultural mediators’
(Baraldi & Gavioli 2007; Pöchhacker 2008), ‘intercultural agents’ (Barsky 1996) and
‘cultural interpreters’ (Taft 1981), but hardly ever as ‘intercultural communicators’. Why
then, despite the central role that they play in communicating language and culture, are
interpreters not recognized as communicators in their own rights? This question is closely

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 related to the issue of power, which governs the field of interpreting and delimits individual
choices.

1.2.2 Structure and agency

Power structures are deeply embedded in interpreting contexts, in which interactions usually
occur between an individual whose linguistic and cultural proficiency aligns with dominant
forms of language and culture, and a person less proficient in the valued forms of linguistic
and cultural capital (Angelelli 2004). In a typical triadic context in which interlocutors
speaking two different languages and the bilingual interpreter are engaged, it is usually the
party who works for the institution and possesses associated knowledge and information that
is more powerful than the others. Taking legal interpreting as an example, there is almost
always power inequality between legal professionals, who are formally authorized by
institutions (e.g. judges and lawyers), and laypeople (e.g. the defendant and the accused).
This type of macro power relationship is not just limited to a given communicative context,
but is, in a way, a reflection of broader social structures and power distribution. When we
come to look at communication from a structural viewpoint, we move towards a discussion of
how individuals respond to structures and things become more contentious.

In a Bourdieusian sense, structures, which refer to systems of objective relationships and

rules, are said to govern individual agents in their actions and choices (Bourdieu 1990).
Bourdieu argues that individuals’ rational actions or practical alternatives are possible only
within the limits of a specified social structure, which creates a ‘fictitious reconciliation of
mutually contradictory theories of action’ (Bourdieu 1990, p. 38). This notion of structure
and agency is strongly informed by one of the central concepts developed by Bourdieu,
habitus, which is ‘constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions’
(Bourdieu 1990, p. 52). According to Bourdieu, habitus for individuals and groups is formed
through the internalization of embodied dispositions and structural practices linked to social
agents’ particular histories and conditions. The theory of habitus posits that as individuals
internalize their objective social conditions in which they find their places (e.g. social class),
social agents learn and perform appropriate practices commensurate with their social
positions.

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 Applying the concept of habitus to translation and interpreting, Inghilleri (2003) describes
what she refers to as the ‘habitus of interpreters’. According to Inghilleri, the habitus of
interpreters is not shaped as an abstract form of consciousness, but constituted as a discursive
space governed by social norms that function to elevate certain linguistic practices and
suppress disagreement over linguistic legitimacy. She notes that interpreters working in legal
contexts, for example, are often required to perform word-to-word interpreting without
adding or changing anything in an original speech. Even though these interpreters were aware
of potential issues resulting from conversions at a word level (e.g. a sacrifice of naturalness
and meaning distortions), many ended up conforming to the institutional requirement of
‘linguistic orderliness’ (Inghilleri 2003, p. 262). The interpreters’ decisions are influenced by
not just contextual power relations but also professional communicative norms, which is
usually represented formally by codes of ethics. It is thus important to understand how
professional codes of ethics for interpreters tend to operate.

A code of ethics was first introduced in 1957 by the Association Internationale des
Interprètes de Conference (International Association of Conference Interpreters) or AIIC in
Paris, which is the first global association of conference interpreters. With the aim of
achieving an enhanced professional standing for interpreting, AIIC’s Code of Ethics
emphasizes absolute respect for working conditions, confidentiality, commitment to
excellence and professional integrity. The Code is recognized for its contributions to the
regulation of the labour market by enforcing standard renumerations and enhancing
interpreters’ welfare (Boéri 2015).

In recent years, organizations that represent community interpreters have also begun to
develop their own codes of ethics. While the move is regarded as a meaningful step in the
professionalization of the relatively less-known field of community interpreting (Gentile,
Ozolins & Vasilakakos 1996), it should be noted that unlike AIIC’s code, codes for
community interpreters tend to provide specific performance instructions on how a work
should be done (Diriker 2015). Among various requirements such as accuracy, confidentiality
and impartiality, accuracy rules which emphasize faithfulness and completeness of

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 interpreting merit our attention. The following excerpts are taken from various codes of ethics
practised in different parts of the world:

Interpreters and translators do not alter, add to, or omit anything from the content and intent of
the source message. (Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators, Australia)

In adhering to the essential function of their role, interpreters make what amounts to a vow to
remain faithful to the original message as they convert utterances from one language into
another without adding to, omitting from, or distorting the original message. (National Council
on Interpreting in Healthcare, United States)

Practitioners shall interpret truly and faithfully what is uttered, without adding, omitting or
changing anything; in exceptional circumstances a summary may be given if requested.
(National Register of Public Service Interpreters, United Kingdom)

In the field of interpreting, responses to the accuracy norms required of interpreters vary.
Some argue that the working definitions of accuracy, in which complete renditions must be
delivered in the target language, assume that there is possibly only one meaning in every
given utterance, reducing interpreting to a simple mechanical process (e.g. Angelelli 2004a;
Angelelli 2004b; Inghilleri 2013; Mason & Ren 2012; Wadensjö 1998). Others, such as Hale
(2007), argue that codes do not support verbatim renditions of the original, but rather
represent the highest ethical standards that interpreters should aim to achieve. The very fact
that these codes are connected to one’s ‘ethics’, however, may pose a dilemma for
interpreters, who are expected to honour ‘the norm of “honest spokesperson”’ (Harris 1990,
para. 12). While codes in general mention the need for interpreters to exercise independent
judgement when applying guidelines to practice, disparate individual beliefs held by
practitioners may be seen as contravening the professional ethical standards, hence norms
working as a ‘psychological reality’ (Marzocchi 2005, p. 89) for interpreters.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, frictions between the codified norms and actual practice are not
uncommon in interpreting (e.g. Gibb & Good 2014; Inghilleri 2013; Shlesinger 1989).
Conflicts are particularly unavoidable when cultural diversity comes into play in interpreted
communication. In what follows, May, an English-Thai interpreter based in Australia, shares
an experience when serving as a court interpreter for a Thai woman, an alleged rape victim.
During the court proceeding, a defence lawyer asked the accuser where exactly the

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 penetration occurred, which she could not pinpoint due to a specific concept of virtuous
women in Thailand:

Thai women do not mention genitals. There is a concept of good women and bad women and
good women do not do such and such things, and bad women are prostitutes and sex workers
and do such and such things. In this rare case, the alleged perpetrator, the guy, what’s it called,
homestay family, yes. He allegedly raped her, and he denied it, of course. The court wanted to
know where was the penetration. There is a certain definition of rape, technical word. But when
they asked her about her vagina, she would not say the word ‘vagina’. She kept saying ‘down
there’, or something equivalent to ‘down there’, ‘that part’. At one stage, um, it was so, so
tense, and embarrassing and humiliating for the victim. Because the defence lawyer asked her
to stand in front of a camera. Because we were in a separate room, her support worker, she, and
I were sitting in a remote room and giving evidence. So she was asked to stand up and point to
whatever she referred to, because she refused to say. Because as an interpreter with my code of
ethics, I couldn’t change what she said, you know. I know that the boy got out. He got
acquitted.

Apart from the influence of the accuracy norms, the relational power hierarchy between the
interpreter and the legal professionals is worth noting. May reported that she had, in fact,
discussed potential issues relating to the concept of virtuous women with the lawyer in a pre-
conference. The critical piece of information from the interpreter was, however, dismissed by
the lawyer as irrelevant to the case, and he did not reword the questions in a way that would
have helped the alleged victim to testify better. While this case shows the impact of power
constraints in interpreting, it is important to note how the structures turned out to activate
individual agency. Following the experience, the interpreter set up a non-profit organization
designed to provide cultural and social information relating to Thailand, and worked pro bono
with legal professionals to help Thai migrants. The decision was triggered by her agency,
which she felt was too suppressed within the professional field, and the activist shift provided
her with an outlet to, in her own words, ‘overcome the limitation of my role’.

The case of May highlights a dual nature of structures, which serve as both the ‘medium and
the outcome of the social practices they recursively organize’ (Giddens 1984, p. 25). As
structures do not always constrain individuals’ choices but can also enable their actions,
witnessing communication breakdowns in interpreting can provide agency and legitimacy to
interpreters to make individual choices (Kaufert & Putsch 1997). Thanks to their bilingual

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 and bicultural abilities, interpreters are well equipped with micro power, which includes
strategies, tactics and techniques exercised to bring about temporary changes within
communicative interactions (Mason & Ren 2012). Exploring micro-interactional power of
interpreters is, therefore, expected to deepen our understanding of how human agency
responds, resists and negotiates power relationships within a given communicative context.
Examining this issue in various interpreter-mediated intercultural contexts requires
addressing the relationships between culture and interpreting, and the next section explains
how to approach intercultural communication specific to interpreting.

What would you do, if you were the interpreter?

The sections above aim to help readers to understand interpreting as a field of

power relations, in which individual choices are often limited. Considering the
structural factors, some readers might wonder how Chandra, the English-Bangla
interpreter mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, dealt with the
communication problem involving the dying refugee patient. Serendipitously, the
doctor attending to the patient was from a similar cultural background, and
understood the difficulty relating to passing on a poor prognosis to a patient.
After saying to Chandra that the patient had only three or four hours to live, the
doctor told him ‘Please deal with it in your own way’. With the permission from
the doctor, the interpreter took the liberty of handling the situation in a way that
he considered was most appropriate to the situation. Below is an excerpt from the
interview with Chandra, who described how he conveyed the news to the patient:

How are you, brother? Everything is okay. The doctor’s trying hard but you know,
I’m sorry, your condition is not very good. By the way, by the way, uh, did you
talk to your parents recently? Then he said I haven’t spoken to her [mother]
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recently. Then I told him why don’t you give her a call. He said I don’t have a
 1.2.3 Culture and language in contexts

As this research cuts across various academic disciplines – interpreting, sociolinguistics and
intercultural studies –, my understanding and application of culture in this book has been
influenced by various and yet inter-related perspectives on culture. To begin with, it is
important to define ‘intercultural communication’ as well as ‘cross-cultural communication’,
a term commonly used in the field of interpreting. My own understanding of intercultural
communication is similar to that of Hatim (2020). According to Hatim, cross-cultural
communication is ‘research that compares communication practices of one language/cultural
group with another’ (p. 11), whereas intercultural communication is defined as
‘communication between speakers from different language/cultural backgrounds’ (p. 11). As
the concept of intercultural communication does not necessarily focus on differences between
cultural groups but is driven by contextual variables and sensitivity, it is less essentialist and
is better suited to unravel complexity relating to the context-boundness of power and agency
in various interpreting settings.

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 The conceptual understanding of culture in relation to interpreting is informed by a growing
non-essentialist and action-oriented research on culture in the field of sociolinguistics. While
any cultural practices result from the ‘validations of a past’ (Baumann 1996, p. 31),
approaching cultures from macro-traditional perspectives risks potentially overlooking micro-
individual aspects of culture, thus taking individuals out of the equation, despite the crucial
issue of individual agency and power (Sarangi 1994). As a filter that impacts the way people
perceive and understand, culture interacts with the individual layer, where every individual is
different from another, even those from the same ‘cultural’ background (Katan 2009).
Considering individual diversity, Piller’s (2017) notion of culture, which is defined as
‘something people do’ (p. 9), rather than as a fixed entity, is particularly relevant to
examining the performative aspects of culture, which are essential characteristics of
interpreting. While individuals in any social settings come with a diverse range of life
experiences, this may be particularly salient in interpreter-mediated encounters, where at least
one party has often lived transnationally and being situated in a network of various systems,
and may therefore tend to perform a series of overlapping and sometimes contradicting
behaviours (Rudvin 2007). When performing culture, individuals do so with language as a
key medium, and language is, therefore, the most important element in both intercultural
communication and interpreting (House 2020).

The performative aspect of language and culture in interpreting needs to be examined with a
particular reference to a context, which has been significantly under-explored in the field of
translation and interpreting, despite its importance to communication (Baker 2006). As a
discursive context in which a set of cultural rules, practices and conditions govern how
people talk (Foucault 1981), context is never a neutral field, but is a ‘field of power relations’
(Lindstrom 1992, p. 102), for the existing rules and conditions place limits on what can be
said and how it can be said. While the contextual conditions for talking produce power
imbalances among interactants, it is important to note the micro power that individuals hold
and may exercise. Despite the seeming rigidity of context governed by certain rules, people in
less powerful positions may say or do things that are not expected to be done to challenge the
context (Lindstrom 1992). When this happens, recontextualization occurs, which potentially
rebalances the field of power relations, and this is where interpreters’ micro-interactional

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 power matters. Considering the inter-relatedness of context, power and language in
interpreting, intercultural communication in interpreting can be defined as broad patterns of
behaviours that are performed by people within contextual power structures, with language as
a key medium.

Finally, analysing intercultural communication in interpreting requires a key analytical prism,

in which full intercultural complexity can be best captured. In this regard, Holliday’s (1999)
concept of small cultures represents a useful interpretive framework. According to Holliday,
culture can be divided into large and small cultures in a broad sense. Large cultures are
strongly associated with the notion of ethnicity and nation, and provide only one possible
dimension of culture. Cautioning that large culture approaches risk overgeneralization and
reductionism, Holliday proposes small cultures as an alternative cultural paradigm. As non-
essentialist cultures, small cultures relate to ‘small’ entities such as academic, family,
hospital, office or organizational groups. Within the small culture paradigm, culture refers to
‘the composite of cohesive behaviours in any social grouping’ (p. 237), which is not
subservient to large cultures but is more concerned with social processes. Rather than being
confined to the physical boundaries of each constituent entity, small cultures go beyond the
national borders and are characterized by a certain degree of cohesiveness, which constitutes
a ‘seamless mélange’ (Holliday 1999, p. 240).

It is important to note that small cultures are more to do with activities taking place within a
particular group than being determined by the nature of the group itself, and provide a
‘structuring’ (Holliday 1999, p. 255), within which particular conduct maybe understood.
This activity-oriented nature of small cultures ideally suits in interpreting, in which language
and culture constantly interact and form dynamic communicative processes. Furthermore,
regardless of geographical location, interpreting settings have structural coherence in each
communicative setting (e.g. a doctor and a patient, a judge and a defendant, and a teacher and
a migrant parent), which constitutes a micro-social context to analyse cultural interactions in
small communicative settings. The concept of small cultures, therefore, enable context-driven
approaches to capture complexity in intercultural communication in interpreting, and each
chapter of this book is based on small cultures as a key analytic element.

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 In Chapter 2 on business interpreting, gender figures as a key cultural variable of corporate
organizations, which are often characterized by male dominance. Considering the fact that the
field of interpreting is heavily feminized (Cho 2017), gender serves as a primary prism
through which to explore the impact of gendered power relations on interpreted encounters. It
focuses on not only Australia but also Korea and Japan where corporate interpreting is highly
developed. Shifting a focus from business to migrant communities, Chapters 3 to 5 examine
diverse types of community interpreting, which include medical, school and legal interpreting
in the specific context of Australia. Chapter 3 investigates communicative issues and
strategies in medical interpreting, with a focus on ethnic migrant communities as a space
which is closely related to the lives of many migrants. It explores how doctor-patient
communication can be impacted by elements of migrant community cultures, which range
from social isolation among elderly migrants, fear of community gossip over medical
conditions, to home cultural approaches to communicating bad news in a medical context.

Chapter 4 on school interpreting deals with so-called ‘education cultures’ among Asian
migrant parents in Australia. Rather than interpreting the phenomenon through an essentialist
cultural lens (e.g. Confucianism), the chapter illustrates how educational attainment is used as
a means to actualize migratory dreams, which are often limited by migrants’ present
exclusion relating to a perceived lack of linguistic and/or racial legitimacy. With teacher-
parent meetings as a key site of analysis, the chapter shows the impact of social stereotypes
associated with ‘Asian tiger parents’ on communication between local teachers and minority
parents. Chapter 5 on legal interpreting explores monolingualism and monoculturalism in
interpreter-mediated courtroom and refugee settings. It specifically focuses on the
intersections between culture, language and race, and the impact of monolingual and
monocultural ideologies on representation and credibility assessment of people of minority
backgrounds. The concluding Chapter 6 highlights interpreting as a dynamic social act in
which power and choices constantly interact with each other to create unique intercultural
stories.

1.3 The stories untold

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 In line with the key aim of exploring intercultural communication from the perspective of
interpreters, I recruited professional interpreters to hear about relevant experiences through
face-to-face interviews. The online directory of the National Accreditation Authority for
Translators and Interpreters, which contains contact details of all interpreters in Australia by
language category and location, served as the primary means through which to recruit
participants. I emailed interpreters from various language backgrounds across Australia to see
if they would be interested in participating in one-on-one interviews. During the participant
recruitment phase, I happened to encounter a lawyer and a school teacher, both of whom
were bilinguals and were regularly engaged in interpreting at work. Both of them were happy
to join the research, and a total of 50 people participated in the interviews carried out
throughout 2018.

At the same time, it was necessary to recruit participants from other countries to explore
gendered corporate aspects of business interpreting, because interpreting in Australia is
largely community interpreting designed to serve the day-to-day needs of migrants. South
Korea, where I am originally from, emerged as an ideal place, due to the strong presence of
business interpreting and the professional network that I have developed over the years. I
contacted former graduates who had studied translation and interpreting at Macquarie
University (where I currently hold an academic position) and were working or had worked as
corporate interpreters in Korea at the time of the interviews. With the additional recruitment
of five Korean interpreters, a total of 55 interpreters participated in the research, representing
22 languages. All participants had English as part of their language combinations, and the
interviews were conducted in English, except for the Korean interpreters all of whom
preferred to use Korean for the interviews. The details of the participants can be found in
Appendix 1 for which I used pseudonyms in order to protect their anonymity.

One thing that struck me during the interviews was how keen the informants were to speak.
Many appreciated the opportunity to have a conversation about their professional
experiences, for they had seldom, if ever, been given such a chance to express their own
opinions. In the words of Sanah, an English-Hindi interpreter:

Actually, this is the first time to have an opportunity to express myself, to talk about something
about my profession. Yes, although I have been doing this job for the last 25 years, there has

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 been no opportunity. Now I feel that I have so much experience, I want to… share that with
people. I want to share my experience with new interpreters, but I don’t have any… uh, facility
or any platform for that.

I sincerely hope that this book will serve as a platform to disseminate the unique experiences
of the participants within and beyond the interpreting community. Apart from expected
benefits for professional interpreters, the fascinating stories of intercultural encounters
relayed by the informants will also, I believe, be useful for scholars as well as laypeople
interested in the topic. As Ewick and Silbey (2003) pointed out, ‘all stories are social events’
(p. 1331) which reflect social reality and expose taken-for-granted social structures. The
participants were great storytellers full of insight, sensitivity and wisdom, and I was honoured
to be the first person to access their stories, which had remained unexplored and needed to be
told. The telling of their untold stories begins now.

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