Interpreting Europe: Sonic politics and the affective foundation of multilingual negotiations

ABSTRACT

The European Union employs the largest number of interpreters globally, surpassing even the United Nations. This analysis delves into the interpreted world of international politics and works towards appreciating sonic politics in conference and diplomatic interpretation. Drawing on testimonies of Portuguese interpreters of the European Union, the present paper examines the everyday practicality of institutional operations, what happens on the ground and what constitutes everyday diplomatic life – in other words, in other voices – so as to locate new sites of political activation, meaningful enactment of power and ideological encounters. The research shows that interpreters supply affective foundation to multilingual negotiations and that their emotive rendition gives form to inter-state understanding. The research explains how interpretation is politics emerging from visual and audible performance of the interpreters.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• European Union
• interpreting
• political aesthetics
• Portuguese
• sonic politics

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2024.2345523

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt gratitude goes to the Portuguese interpreters who agreed to share their precious experiences and provided me with suggestions of films, memoirs and blogs. I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for making constructive and pertinent observations that have directly benefitted the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The inspiration for the title comes from the 2023 edition of the ‘Interpreting Europe Conference’, formerly known as the ‘SCIC Universities Conference’. The theme of the 2023 event was ‘Attracting talent for an upskilled profession’. For the November/December programme, see: https://commission.europa.eu/events/attracting-talent-upskilled-profession-2023–11-30_en.

2. At the current stage of the research, it is more adequate to say sonic politics ‘in’ interpreting, rather than sonic politics ‘of’ interpreting. The preposition is important here: ‘in’ is more appropriate than ‘of’. I thank a senior colleague in my department as well as the anonymous reviewers for paying attention to this salient detail. My claim is not, as yet, how sound shapes power relations in world politics but how the emotional and expressive labour of the interpreters mediates European politics. The interpreters are certainly part of inter-state political processes and as one of them pointed out (004*), it is impossible to interpret as a complete outsider, to interpret is to play the part of an insider.

3. The names are exactly as they appear on YouTube. There is a large selection of official videos that concern EU interpreting. After a manual selection by title and description, I listened in full to those videos in which EU interpreters speak directly, in languages that I understand, and then I further reduced my sample to those that feature Portuguese interpreters while taking detailed notes of the subjects, keywords and examples. This online search lasted a few weeks and produced a wealth of secondary data. I then proceeded to design a preliminary questionnaire for interpreters to fill out. Strategically, I sought to convince the relevant EU interpreters to share their precious time with me, referring to the video contents and demonstrating that I had done substantial work beforehand (see the Appendix for more information on the later stages of the research).

4. Even as the interpreters I interviewed admit their embeddedness in EU processes, they do not all feel comfortable using the verb ‘intervene’ to describe the nature of their participation in European politics. I hereby use the verb ‘mediate’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Macau [SRG2023-00034-FSS].