Paper Short Abstract:

An autoethnographic narrative of my job as a video remote interpreter of English-Portuguese for a call center company, at my home office in Portugal. In what way is this kind of living and becoming (re)invented in daily interactions and routines? What kind of agency do these interpreters have?

Paper Abstract:

This paper is about an autoethnography of daily tasks and routines of precarious video remote interpreters at their home office for a big Portuguese call center company. This means autoethnography as a translation of living, as I’m also becoming an anthropologist while I travel through my daily routines at work. Interpretation as a job and ethnography as the translation of living will be discussed giving the example of health and healthcare interpreters. We are virtual migrants in the context of a neoliberal labour market in a space-in-between languages and cultures. I work full-time although being self-employed since September 2021, because of the type of contract I signed with this company. In spite of this, I like my job and the daily interactions I remotely maintain with other Portuguese or English-speaking people from many countries, nationalities and origins and the kind of agency associated with it. The clients sometimes call us “the machine” as we appear in iPads and other devices, appealing to a “cyborg manifesto”, so the borders between humans and machines get blurred. I will try to determine what type of agency do these remote interpreters have that allows them to have the strength to carry on despite precarity adversities. Through an autoethnographic narrative of my daily tasks and routines at my home office in Portugal, I will give concrete examples daily interactions that exemplify the kinds of agency that help us live and reinvent ourselves through our jobs.