Managing a Discourse of Reporting: The Complex Composing of an Asylum Narrative

• Published in: Multilingua Vol. 42; no. 2; pp. 191 - 213
• Main Authors: Wadensjö, Cecilia, Rehnberg, Hanna Sofia, Nikolaidou, Zoe
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter Mouton 28.03.2023
• Subjects: Caseworkers; Civil Rights; Decision Making; Foreign Countries; Immigration; Interviews; Language Processing; Multilingualism; Professional Personnel; Public Agencies; Refugees; Russian; Second Languages; Speech Communication; Swedish; Transcripts (Written Records); Translation; Sweden
• ISSN: 0167-8507
• DOI: 10.1515/multi-2022-0017

The aim of this study is to demonstrate how the presence of an emerging written record may affect the content of an asylum narrative, based on which a decision concerning the asylum claimant's right to receive protection eventually is taken. The lion's share of studies on interpreter-mediated asylum interviews to date focus on risks involved with assigning non-professionals to perform the interpreting. This study draws specifically on a 3.5 min-long sequence taken from an asylum interview involving a professional interpreter, working between Russian and Swedish, and the corresponding paragraph of the Swedish-language written minutes, produced in parallel by the caseworker at a Migration Agency office. The study demonstrates something that hasn't been highlighted much in the literature on asylum interviews, namely the mutual impact of the interpreter-mediated communicative format--the specific turn taking order and the restricted linguistic transparency--and the parallel record keeping; the intricate passage from two spoken languages to an asylum narrative in the form of a text written in one of these languages.