It is undeniable that translators and interpreters play a crucial role in the gathering of testimonies and that translation is, in a very literal sense, central to their transmission. In today’s global context when wars are immediately accessible through a variety of media outlets, the discourse of their legitimation and justification depends on translation. Translation is essential both to diplomacy and the (discursive) conduct of war. However, it is only in recent years that translation, and translator and interpreter agency, have become the subject of critical attention; for too long, translators and interpreters have been marginal and erased figures, considered to be a neutral conduit in the transmission of testimonial information.1

Such is the case in one of the groundbreaking books on testimony, Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.2 Shoshana Felman, in her discussion of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s film on the Holocaust, established the presence of the interpreter as necessary in the testimonial process. The interpreter’s presence is necessary because she renders an incomprehensible language (Polish) accessible to Lanzmann, the interviewer of Holocaust witnesses. The necessity of linguistic translation, and in this particular case the delay inherent to consecutive translation, demonstrates that testimony needs a translation, that is, that testimony in its original form isn’t understandable simultaneously with its delivery; it needs to be transformed into meaning. Testimony needs a double translation: first linguistic, because its language is foreign and, then, hermeneutic, because it isn’t understandable in and of itself without further “translation.” This second “translation” is performed by the interviewer, the historian, and the spectator. Translation is then an integral part of the film because it functions as a metaphor for the interpretation, transmission and passing-on of an historical event.

The act of linguistic translation represents the process of testimonial transmission (linguistic translation is a metaphor for the historical interpretation of testimony), and the interpreter’s linguistic performance becomes a theoretical metaphor for the kind of “translation” into meaning that the interviewer and the spectator perform. At the same time, the linguistic interpreter remains reduced to the position of the one who processes the literal meaning of testimonies and is denied the possibility of providing a historical translation because of the implicit understanding of linguistic interpreters as neutral conduits of information, and not as providers of interpretation. Indeed, Felman perceives any indication of the interpreter’s interpretative stance as a “distortion.” I argue, however, that this “distortion” is a unique and otherwise unrecognizable testimony of the interpreter who willy-nilly participates in the testimonial and interpretative process and who, because she has a central and indispensable role in the translation of testimonies, has interpretative agency that must be analyzed.

I focus on the role of the interpreter in the empirical situations of war translation, which may force us to rethink the relationship of testimony and translation. I propose the case of the Croatian interpreters in and of the war in order to analyze the ways in which “distortion” emerges as the interpreter’s testimony. The 1991-92 war in Croatia erupted as a result of a conflict about borders between Croatia and Serbia during the break-up of Yugoslavia. This first major armed conflict on European soil since World War II commanded the immediate attention of the European Community and demanded a swift action by the Western allied powers. At the time of the conflict, the European Community (EC) had not yet expanded its membership nor changed its name to the European Union (EU). The EC consisted of twelve member countries: Germany, France, United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Denmark and Luxembourg. However, the EC was unable to intervene, for, as long as the borders of Croatia were not internationally recognized, international law could not view the Serbian military invasion as a war between two sovereign countries, but rather as an internal settling of accounts, a civil war. Before adjudicating, the EC also wanted to establish the real aggressor in the conflict. They responded by setting up the European Community Monitor Mission (henceforth ECMM). ECMM’s task was to inform a larger international politico-military community of the war events in Croatia with the objectives of negotiating a cease-fire and of monitoring the respect of minority rights. In order to follow the progress of the conflict and to gather the information necessary to complete their task, EC monitors collected testimonies from the members of the warring parties, Croats and Serbs alike, civilians and military, on and close to the front lines. Croatian interpreters translated witnesses’ oral testimonies into English, the lingua franca of the Mission. Without interpreters these testimonies could not be transmitted and thus the triangular structure of translation was formed: the interviewer (an EC monitor), the witness (a Croat or a Serb), and the interpreter (a Croatian national).

This portion of the article is based on twenty-five interviews with Croatian interpreters from an unpublished study conducted by the Croatian social psychologist Ivan Magdalenic during Fall 1993. Ten interpreters are female, ages 19-50, and fifteen are male, ages 18-41. In addition to the accounts provided by Magdalenic’s interviewees, some of who are my former colleagues, I also draw in the following analysis on my own personal experience as someone who has worked as an interpreter in the same context.3

The first question that needs to be asked is: why accept to translate a war? Interpreters accept after the ECMM invites Croatians to volunteer for the job. They volunteer precisely because they are politically involved in the conflict. They volunteer out of “patriotism,” because they want “to do something,” “to help” by using their language skills. Interpreters also volunteer out of the desire to be a witness,

“to see for myself what is really happening on the front-lines.”

Most importantly, they accept in order to testify, a desire to which they confess only in situations outside interpreting:

“An interpreter cannot and should not be just a ‘transmitter.’ One needs to have unofficial conversations.”

“Regardless of the official function, I try to play the role of an unofficial representative of the Republic of Croatia, I explain the situation in this part of the world to the monitors.”

The patriotic response of interpreters who volunteer fulfills the first condition of possibility of translation—their physical presence.

However, the very structure of translation does not allow the interpreters to be the patriotic, engaged, witness that they want to be. Another condition of possibility conflicting with the desire to bear witness has to be satisfied before the translation structure can transmit testimony. Within this structure, the interpreters function as the conduit of an address from which they are excluded. Through the interpreter, the interviewer and the witness address and are addressed respectively: they become interlocutors. The interpreters as the third term remain outside the address; they are seen as intermediaries through whom the address takes place. The interpreters’ linguistic neutrality is necessary to the transmission of witness’ testimony, even in cases when interpreters feel insulted or attacked:

“I translated all of her words [insults] calmly.”

“One of the monitors was saying bad things about Croatian politics. I did not participate in the debate.”

To translate “calmly” indicates that the interpreter is focused on maintaining a certain relationship to language. On the other hand, not to “participate in the debate” testifies to their attempt to keep the linguistic function apart from their testimonial desire. The interpreter transmits the words of the witness without performing any evaluative or interpretative gesture in translation. They understand this structural neutrality in terms of professionalism and responsibility:

“I am a part of the team.”

“[I]t is all a part of the job.”

“Translation is a job of responsibility.”

“I try to maintain objectivity, professionalism. Even though I am a volunteer, I am still a professional.”

Because they are “professional[s],” they must erase themselves, at least while translating.

Thus, to translate for someone else was originally a way of bearing witness, a way of infiltrating the testimonial structure because of the desire to participate, to testify. But the requirement of professional neutrality erases the interpreter’s testimony. In other words, the interpreter who accepts to translate in order to testify is denied the very possibility of testimony. The two conditions that make translation in and of a war possible, the desire to bear witness and linguistic neutrality, come into conflict with each other. The positions of witness and interpreter are mutually exclusive. Thus we end up with this paradox of the interpreter of testimonies: while they see themselves as “a part of the team,” they are nevertheless marginalized and excluded from it.

The structural impossibility of speaking from within translation and equally the necessity of persuasion from within it, combine to produce an internal conflict in interpreters. The real borderline conflict that they translate every day for the international community produces in them a violent internal conflict: they are torn between political allegiance to their country and professional neutrality, in other words between testimony and translation. This tension is heightened by the life-threatening exposure on the front lines and the witnessing of psychologically challenging events:

“Six buses with [Croatian] refugees were arriving, and they [the Serbs] were shooting at them, the situation was very tense, and I was hiding with the monitors in some ditch.”

“On several occasions, I was at an exhumation (from the well, from the corn field) and at the exchange of corpses, and I translated the identification procedure. It was sickening to look at the corpse taken out of the well.”

Interpreters are further tested when the speakers of the target language do not have adequate linguistic competence in it:

“The most difficult situation is when monitors speak poor English and then sometimes blame me for what they didn’t understand.”

“Among monitors there are those who are not up to the occasion, also with poor language control, unfamiliar with translation techniques.”

Such pressures on interpreters eventually result in a failure of neutral, professional translation, a “distortion.” An interpreter was recalled from duty after

“[m]ostly interpreting, although I was explaining to them what was happening there.”

Other interpreters confess:

“I ‘jump in’, it’s more than translation: conversations with monitors, discussions about everything that is going on, explanation of our [Croatian] situation.”

“Sometimes there is a need to speak in one’s own language, without translation.”

The structure of address within which translation takes place is exploded as the interpreter stands on the physical borders of the front lines. Interpreters become subjects speaking for him or herself, no longer just an “intermediary” with no personal history. They become witnesses in their interpretation, in their failure to be (just) an interpreter. However, acting as a witness, the interpreter fails to render faithfully the testimony of an original witness. Interpreters divert the address to them and respond in lieu of the original witness, only to find themselves testifying, not, as she originally desired, to the war events, but instead to their own task and failure as interpreters, as well as to the inadequacy of language.

The interpreters’ disruption is undeniably a violence committed against witnesses and their testimony. But precisely because this failure of translation can at any given moment disrupt the testimonial structure, thereby reminding the witness, the interviewer, the historian and the spectator of the precariousness of the interpreters’ “professional,” “neutral” and “self-erasing” stance, I believe it has to be read as testimony. At that moment the interpreters testify to the fact that they have no testimonial stance within translation. Their internal conflict, otherwise kept under control with self-erasure, erupts in the failure of “neutral” translation and demands acknowledgment. Interpreters testify to the fact that while translating they can never bear witness politically. Their failure also reveals that they cannot bear witness to themselves structurally from within translation. Bearing witness to being an interpreter can only happen outside this structure, at the moment when translation stops, when there is no longer an interpreter.

The task of the interpreter requires a radical self-erasure while translating. What is erased is the interpreter’s testimony. But in addition, interpreters also erase the witness’s testimony as they translate it. The structure of consecutive translation is such that in order to “receive” the continuous flow of the testimony, the interpreter must listen, deliver a translation and erase from memory what was just translated in order to repeat the move over and over again: receive, deliver, forget. Translation is not a memorizing but a forgetting—a forgetting of oneself and a forgetting of what is heard. For the interpreter, the event of testimony is an unrecognized event. Paradoxically, the transmission of a testimony, which is translated precisely in order to be remembered, happens through a forgetting. Translation requires yet another erasure: the erasure of translation itself. The self-erasure of the interpreter incarnates, as it were, the self-erasure of translation. As the interpreters erase themselves, make their physical presence transparent, so the translation erases itself from the testimony that it translates. Born out of an interlinguistic gap, translation aims at making us forget this gap, pretending that there is no need for translation.

So, what does the failure of self-erasure in translation testify to? The failure in translation highlights, first of all, the erasure that the structure of testimony requires. It reminds us that the witness’s testimony is “normally” passed on through the erasure of the interpreter and of translation itself. In their failure interpreters are testifying to the interlinguistic gap that motivates translation, to the erasure that it requires and to the impossibility of providing a smooth and exhaustive translation. Their failure indicates that there is something that does not lend itself to translation, that testimony will always remain partially unavailable. The interpreters’ failure is a mark of the untranslatable, the inaccessible. In the case of a war, the failure of translation is a passing-on of the untranslatability of the conflict and its history. It tells us that the scandal of a war is unacceptable and inassimilable to mere translation. Not only does the failure testify to a conflict, but also its violent disruption reiterates the very scandal of war. It reminds us that the shock, the violence of an event such as a war, cannot be translated/processed without ‘shocking’ the very structure of its transmission, and especially its claim to neutrality. War is a proof of history that is too complex, too inaccessible, untranslatable, to be understood it in its own terms. Instead, war opens itself to recognition in the moment of failure, the literal inscription of tension and violence in the translation. Moreover, the failure of the interpreter testifies to the fact that the war is accessed only through translation, mediation, the fact that is otherwise erased with the self-erasure and neutralization of the interpreter. Finally, the failure bears witness to the fact that the translation of a conflict cannot remain neutral, that the interpreter cannot remain a marginal on the border of the conflict. The occasional failure of the interpreter’s self-erasure cannot simply be dismissed as “distortion” caused by patriotic or ethnic allegiance. The interpreters’ failure, their need to testify, is a part and parcel of the historical narrative they translate. In other words, the parti pris of the interpreter is always already a part of the transmission of war. Not to recognize that “distortion” is an integral part of the process is perhaps to silence the war and its scandals.

The interpreters inhabit a double bind: on the one hand, they are central to the testimonial process, while, simultaneously, they are forced by neutrality into the margins of the process they enable. Nevertheless, their failure turns into something other than failure: it becomes a testimony to their role as interpreters, which is otherwise erased and forgotten, or condemned as “distortion.” The interpreters’ distortion says that which cannot be said in the moment of translating the testimony; it is it is a testimony that can happen only outside translation, outside of its own frame of reference, in the moment when translation stops. Their intervention in the testimonial process interrupts the smooth flow of history—history as testimony and history as translation—reminding us of its internal conflicts that cannot be smoothed over and reminding us that no matter how smooth the translation, wars are always mediated.

I hope to have shown in this brief analysis of the case of wartime interpreters that there is interpreter agency that always disrupts translation and thus shows that the translation is not outside of the functioning of history, not outside its own historicizing narrative, but rather complicitous with it. Thus it is, indeed, by reinscribing the interpreters, their position and their “distortion” into the process of historical transmission, as well as into theories of testimony and theories of translation, that our understanding and knowledge of history changes.

1. 1 See Mona Baker, Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, London & New York: Routledge, 2006; Zrinka Stahuljak, “War, Translation, Transnationalism,” in Essential Readings in Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker, New York: Routledge [forthcoming 2009].
2. Here I also must correct a common misperception in the use of the term “translator” in situations of wartime and testimonial translation; the correct term is “interpreter,” which I use throughout.↩
3. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York; London: Routledge, 1992.↩
4. All translations from Croatian to English are mine. A longer version of this article appeared as Zrinka Stahuljak, “Violent Distortions: Bearing Witness to the Task of Wartime Translators,” Traduction Terminologie Rédaction 13:1 (2000): 37-51. Another article “The Violence of Neutrality: Translators in and of the War (Croatia, 1991-92),” College Literature 26:1 (1999): 34-51.↩