Paper short abstract:

In response to the increasing linguistic and ethnic diversity in Germany, which presents challenges to state authorities, migrant translation associations have been formed. This paper analyses the self-conception of language mediators as cultural specialists, helping the state actors to categorize.

Paper long abstract:

The increasing linguistic and ethnic diversity in Germany presents challenges especially to state authorities. How do they deal with situations of multilingualism and different linguistic spaces? Often they use people with knowledge of the origin language as brokers, who bridge information divides, know different languages and always have a relative outside position. In response to the increasing need for translation in state institutions, several associations of migrants have been formed, in order to mediate language and culture. Their work is often honorary and not recognised; nevertheless, specific trainings have been developed and numerous authorities come back to the support of this so-called language and cultural mediation.

Based on my ethnographic research, interviews and participant observation on interactions of migrants with state institutions, in this paper, I analyse the self-conception of a group of people who describe themselves as language and cultural mediators or brokers. Often they themselves have migration experience and therefore see each other as specialists in their "respective" culture, claiming the cultural dimension of social phenomena. They could also be identified as para-ethnologists (Beek/Bierschenk 2020), who defend their field of activity and competence externally, even against university anthropologists.

My contribution focuses on the aspects of brokerage, on emic translation theories and notions of "culture". My paper discusses, how migrants as cultural brokers experience state institutions and their clients and why they produce categories of "lying" migrants, by showing simultaneous complicity with the state authorities, as they are able to understand and to "know who is lying".