Paper short abstract:

This paper explores controversies regarding the role of community interpreters based on interviews with local officers, interpreters, and users of their services in Japan. It focuses on “trust” as one of the essential factors and analyzes how “trust” is constructed in their narratives.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores controversies regarding the role of community interpreters based on interviews with local officers, interpreters hired by them, and users of their services, mainly in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, which has the second-largest number of foreign residents, especially of Brazilian and Peruvian origins, of any prefecture in Japan, after Tokyo. Thirty years have passed since Japan amended the “Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act,” permitting foreigners with Japanese ancestry to work and live in Japan. However, there is still an urgent need to overcome language and cultural barriers at schools, hospitals, and various local services to guarantee access to communication as well as information issued by local governments, etc.

In accordance with the revised Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication’s Promotion Plan for the Multicultural Local Society (2020) and its encouragement to local governments to offer multilingual assistance for foreign residents to facilitate their daily life and make them feel at ease living in Japan, many local governments provide multilingual consultation services for foreign residents. In this context, interpreters and bilingual staff are hired to provide multilingual assistance.

Nevertheless, Japan has no national certification program or accreditation system for community interpreters and expectations regarding the role of “interpreters” in public services are diverse. Furthermore, for minority languages such as Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Nepalese, as well as Portuguese and Spanish, the interpreters or bilingual staff hired are native speakers of these languages and sometimes cannot read Japanese ideographic characters.

The interviews identified some controversies regarding the role of an interpreter: some consider them to be merely bilingual staff and not professionals, while others consider them skilled and specialized professionals who need proper training. However, the common theme that emerges is the importance of “trust” between the interpreter and users of the interpreting services or the service provider. The panelist will show how “trust” is constructed in their narrative, even in situations in which the interpreter cannot read Japanese characters or in other circumstances.