Paper short abstract:

The interpreting is part of control maintained not only on the state borders but also on the frontiers of language, by controlling the modes in which actors were expected to speak. Production of plausibility is demonstrated by ethnographic data from Slovak asylum courts.

Paper long abstract:

In my paper, I argue that the interpreting is part of control maintained not only on the state borders but also on the frontiers of language, by controlling the modes in which actors were expected to speak. During the years 2016–2019 I conducted ethnographic research at the Regional Court in Bratislava, Slovakia. I focused at: (1) how the participants create communicative spaces before and during the trials; (2) how participants define and interpret culture-specific concepts and legal jargon in a multilingual legal setting; and (3) how selected linguistic mechanisms function in the context of verifying the credibility of those seeking asylum.

Asylum applicants, the representatives of the state, lawyers and interpreters negotiate the forms of communication during asylum process. Communicative space is what makes credibility conceivable. The question is how the participants conceptualise their own work, habits, norms and routine, in their modes of speaking, and how what is spoken becomes written and the written becomes the fact. If there is no space, people cannot move, not just between countries but also within an argument.

Communicative space refers to circumstances which make the speakers’ statement acceptable even before the argument is reasoned - the context in which the whole utterance becomes in/valid. It refers to expectations of what could be said, and also what could finally get into the report. The lack of communicative space for the explanation of concepts which are products of institutions in a multilingual legal setting might result in ineffective proximations.