ABSTRACT

Situations of conflict offer special insights into the history of the interpreter figure, and specifically the part played in that history by photographic representations of interpreters.

This book analyses photo postcards, snapshots and press photos from several historical periods of conflict, associated with different photographic technologies and habits of image consumption: the colonial period, the First and Second World War, and the Cold War. The book’s methodological approach to the "framing" of the interpreter uses tools taken primarily from visual anthropology, sociology and visual syntax to analyse the imagery of the modern era of interpreting. By means of these interpretative frames, the contributions suggest that each culture, subculture or social group constructed its own representation of the interpreter figure through photography.

The volume breaks new ground for image-based research in translation studies by examining photographic representations that reveal the interpreter as a socially constructed category. It locates the interpreter’s mediating efforts at the core of the human sciences.

This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in translation and interpreting studies, as well as to those working in visual studies, photography, anthropology and military/conflict studies.

part I|20 pages

Methodological Approaches

chapter 1|8 pages

Interpreting Photographs

Some thoughts on method

part II|46 pages

Colonial Exposures

chapter 3|12 pages

Framing and Masking

Photographing the Interpreter in/of Colonial Conflict

chapter 5|10 pages

The Minoritization of Interpreting

Cultural brokerage between incapacitation and self-empowerment

part III|32 pages

First World War

chapter 9|9 pages

Staging Prisoners of War

The interpreter figure in First World War postcards

part IV|45 pages

Second World War

chapter 11|12 pages

Interpreting for Generals

Military interpreters in Finnish propaganda photography

chapter 12|10 pages

Ordinary Snapshots of Interpreters at War

A narrative of disaster

chapter 13|10 pages

The Visibility of Collaborators

Snapshots of wartime and post-war interpreters

part V|39 pages

Cold War

chapter 15|9 pages

Interpreters in the Field

Friends or foes?

chapter 16|9 pages

“The Biggest Round Table”

The interpreters' visibility at the Potsdam Conference

chapter 17|10 pages

Through the Cold War Lens

Russian and US interpreters as cultural and political mediators