“I aim to examine how dominant ideologies of gender, class, and racialization of settler colonialism influence First Nations interpreters’ performance and behavior regulation.”
Congratulations to Dr. Irem Ayan, Assistant Professor of French, for receiving a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for her research project titled “Voices of the First Nations: Reflecting on Race and Gender in Indigenous Interpreting”.
About the research project:
In a news article on July 24th, 2022, Henry Pitawanakwat, one of the twenty interpreters in Ottawa translating the Pope’s visit into various Indigenous languages and whose mother was a residential school survivor, indicates that he has to “set those feelings aside” in order to translate issues that he “suppressed in the past”[1] to deliver “a proper translation regardless of what topic is spoken”.[2] While Pitawanakwat’s words resonate with the norms of the professional practice and codes of ethics, which impose neutrality upon interpreters through a form of feeling and behaviour management, his account also indicates a form of “emotional labour” in Hochschild’s (1983) sense of the term that is carried out for the sake of performing the imposed neutrality for a wage.
Existing research in the field of translation and interpreting studies do not offer an acute analysis of race, gender, and class embedded in the interpreter’s role, especially in settings of unequal power relations in the Canadian context. Bringing voices from the field and drawing on feminist and Indigenous standpoint theory, settler colonialism, and theories of resistance, my interdisciplinary project seeks to challenge the normative assumption and theoretical view of the interpreter’s neutrality by drawing on First Nations translators and interpreters’ lived experiences working with English and French. As an uninvited immigrant on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people, I aim to examine how dominant ideologies of gender, class, and racialization of settler colonialism influence First Nations interpreters’ performance and behavior regulation. In a blend of socially expected (and dictated) neutrality with the interpreters’ striving towards it, it is not just the content of their rendering that matters, but also the performance of the rendering itself. It can provide us with an understanding of the way norms of ethics and professional practice are enacted and even subverted in the context of settler colonialism. In light of this, I want to understand whether there is an individual and/or collective sense of resistance emerging from First Nations interpreters’ status. I will also look at how these norms under which First Nations interpreters operate affect Indigenous Language Revitalization in Canada.
