Paper Short Abstract:

The communication focuses on the participation of interpreters to the evaluation of credibility within the French asylum procedure, by analysing how they deal with both moral and organizational standards which are indirectly imposed by the institution.

Paper Abstract:

Ethnographic approaches to asylum bureaucracies have highlighted the importance of institutional encounters, which articulate sociomoral and organizational dynamics in the formation of decisions (Dahlvik, 2018; Affolter, 2021). But they have not focused on the role of interpreters in the process, while language researchers have demonstrated that it is crucial in the assessment of credibility (Maryns, Smith-Khan and Jacobs, 2023).

In France, at the Ofpra (Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides, the French first instance of the procedure), interpreters are now present in 90% of the interviews. But if their intervention is supposed to guarantee asylum seekers’ right to express themselves, they are confronted with the inquisitive and accelerated processing of applications. My communication will therefore analyze how the French institution has shaped the intervention of interpreters in the evaluation of credibility, according to moral standards of sincerity and managerial objectives of performance.

To this end, I will offer a sociohistorical scope on the institutionalization of interpreters’ function, based on interviews with professional interpreters and on (administrative) archive analysis. This perspective will be cross-fertilized with an analysis of their participation to the entextualization of asylum seekers’ words, which I will provide by comparing official transcripts of interviews (written by the caseworker) to personal ethnographic notes of the same interactions. I will thus offer an insight on the participation of interpreters in the construction of the administrative truth in the asylum process.