This paper proposes an ethnonarrative methodology to enquire and write about contemporary activist networks. It provides an epistemological-theoretical framework to explore identity, action and space in prefigurative social movements, and a set of narrative methods and analytical techniques to conduct an ethnography of communication. Drawing on my on-site and online ethnography of Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters, I discuss the ethical and political questions raised by my practice in, and writing about Babels, in the interdisciplinary context of social movement studies and interpreting studies in the first decade of the 21st century. I illustrate the use of this methodology, and discuss its extension beyond 2.0 participatory web, given the surge of videoconferencing platforms.
Boéri, Julie (in press, Online First May 11, 2023) “Online ethnography of activist networks of interpreters: an ‘ethnonarrative’ methodology for socio-political change”, The Translator. Taylor & Francis.
This paper develops and applies a methodology of qualitative inquiry that equips researchers to capture how social actors produce and contest accepted forms of knowledge at the margins of mainstream globalizing discourses in times of crisis. Standing at the intersection between conceptual and empirical research, and overcoming the dualism between ‘action’ and ‘discourse’, our methodology integrates narrative and practice theories into a joint framework for fieldwork and interviews. Its use in ethnographic case studies – such as interpreters’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Qatar – allows researchers to gain analytical granularity on participants’ storied practice and practiced stories of the crisis, to harness ‘peripheral’ knowledge and refashion public discourse.
Boéri, Julie and Deborah Giustini (in press; Online First Feb 20, 2023) “Qualitative research in crisis: a narrative-practice methodology to delve into the discourse and action of the unheard in the Covid-19 pandemic”, Qualitative Research. Sage Publishing
Professional and political imaginaries are increasingly produced, contested and negotiated online. Adopting a socio-narrative perspective, this paper explores collectivities of interpreters’ use communication technologies as they construct and compete over their organizational identity, practice and space. It focuses on Babels’ and AIIC’s use of babels.org and aiic.net, and cross-examines the narrative ‘position’ of these groups with individual members’ narrative ‘locations’, in the context of an inter-website, interorganizational conflict. It shows that the participatory web mediates and shapes how collectivities publicly project, enact and contest competing imaginaries of the profession, the interpreting community, and society at large.
Boéri, Julie (2023) “Inter-organizational conflict in the participatory web: (re)narrating interpreting and (re)imagining the community”, Translation in Society 2(1), 71-95. John Benjamins.
To decenter interpreting from this tradition and to steer its ethics toward social justice, this paper proposes a meta-ethical approach to and a model of interpreting. It explores activist interpreting in the global justice movement from 3 complementary standpoints: interpreting in the encounter (micro), politics of organization (macro) and enquiry (meso). Reconceptualizing social justice as a communicational and social performance, it provides a model to harness the liberatory potential of praxes, discourses and epistemologies found in the social movement milieu to refashion ethical language and thought in the field.
Boéri, Julie (2023) “Steering ethics toward social justice: a model for a meta-ethics of interpreting”, Translation and Interpreting Studies 18(1), 01-26.
In this conversation, led by Theo Hermans, a foundational figure in the field of Translation Studies, Sue Ann Harding and Julie Boéri, revisit Mona Baker’s foundational model for narrative analysis, which we have both used in overlapping and different ways in our research, and explores the questions of narratives and renarration, narrative and history, causation, narrative and fictionalization, and finally, reflect on narrative blind spots to spark new avenues of research at the intersection between narrativity and translation.
Hermans, Theo Harding, Sue Ann and Julie Boéri (2022) “
A Conversation about Narrative and Translation”, Cultus,: the journal of intercultural mediation and communication 5, 16-39.
Adopting an enlarged view of localization which goes beyond market interests and extends to public concerns, this paper examines the adaptive processes through which interpreters (and by extension providers and users) have localized the COVID-19 phenomenon in Qatar. Combining narrative and practice theories, it considers that practices are storied and narratives are enacted, and focuses on the ‘doings’ and the ‘sayings’ of interpreters. It draws on the rich stories of Qatar-based interpreters’ experience at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show that interpreters adapt to the COVID-19 crisis and contribute to its response in ways that are specific to the cultural, temporal and spatial configuration of practice.
Boéri, Julie and Deborah Giustini (2022) “Localizing the COVID-19 pandemic in Qatar: Interpreters’ narratives of cultural, temporal and spatial reconfiguration of practice”, The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 9(2), 139-161.
This paper focuses on a case of systematic resort to consecutive summary interpretation in French Asylum courtroom proceedings and provides the 1st analysis of this controversial practice. Drawing on conversational analysis, it shows that summary interpreting is framed as a separate interaction between interpreter and asylum seeker, under the eye of a remote court. The interpreter performs (cross-linguistic) “formulations” of what precedes and what follows in the proceedings, rendering, gatekeeping and facilitating the main elements of the source text, but also endorsing the role of an intercultural mediator.
Licoppe, Christian and Boéri, Julie (2021) “Is there such a thing as summary interpreting? Cross-linguistic formulation, facilitation and mediation in French asylum proceedings”, Language & Communication: An Interdisciplinary Journal 77(March 2021), 56-69.
This Spanish-English bilingual coedited volume explores the relation between Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism in the context of practice, teaching, and research methodologies. It combines individual and collective experiences of activist translators and interpreters, with analyses of past and present translational activism in the media, the courtroom, the class-room, civil society, academia, and in situations of conflict under dictatorships or wars of occupation.
Boéri, Julie and Carol Maier (2010, eds) Compromiso Social y Traducción/Interpretación – Translation/Interpreting and Social Activism, ECOS: Granada.
This Encyclopedia entry explores how citizen media, understood as the media of expression of emerging publics, are shaped by diversity in the linguistic, discursive, sociocultural and technological spheres. Diversity is shown to be inherent to the communication practices deployed across a constellation of media and by heterogeneous groups of actors. At the same time, this multi-layered diversity constructs a unique subject (an urban space, a cyber-space, a community), and in so doing creates the conditions of citizenship.
Boéri, Julie (2021) “Diversity”, in Pérez-González Luis, Blaagaard Bolette and Mona Baker (eds) Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media. London & New York: Routledge, 140-145.
This paper combines Narrative Theory with the Appraisal Framework to uncover the workings of manipulation in Al-Ittihad hard news reports, in its daily section dedicated to Qatar since the outbreak of the Gulf crisis. From the transediting of foreign sources attributions to the intersemiotic design of the newspaper layout, translational news reporting involves embedding personal and shared narratives into the micro- and macro-levels of the hard news section to construe Al-Ittihad’s negative evaluation of Qatar.
Boéri, Julie and Ashraf Fattah (2020) “Manipulation of Translation in Hard News Reporting on the Gulf Crisis: combining narrative and appraisal”, META, 65(1), 73-99. Special issue New contexts in Translation & Interpretation-oriented Discourse Analysis, María Calzada Pérez and Jeremy Munday (eds)
This is the book review of a compelling book about building a culture of justice through changing how we interact with other(nes)s. “Political Translation” refers to an informal and ephemeral practice that has developed among social movements to address the structural inequalities and patterns of marginalization of their deliberative and decision-making arenas. It opens up a new framework for radical democracy, engagement and translation.
Boéri, Julie (2020) Political Translation: how social movements democracy survive by Nicole Doerr (2018). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Translation Studies, 13(2), 247–250.
In an attempt to address the ethical issues raised by activist translation and interpreting, this chapter provides a brief historiography of activism in translation and social movements studies. It then examines positionality and organisation, two issues that have been the motive of frictions between political activism and translation. Finally, it accounts for the ethical doxa and heterodoxa around which these two competing and overlapping fields are configured.
Boéri, Julie and Carmen Delgado Luchner (2020) “Ethical Issues in Activist Translation and Interpreting”, in Kaisa Koshinen and Nike Polkorn (eds) Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics. London & New York: Routledge, P. 245-261.
Interpreting has evolved across time and space out of the influence of a myriad of players. This chapter sets out to explore the development of interpreting from within. Adopting a relational and dynamic approach to a sociology of interpreting in the making, it examines the unequal and changing power internal players exert in shaping the ways in which interpreting is theorized, practiced, provided, learnt and taught in our societies.
Boéri, Julie (2015) “Key players in the Development of the Interpreting Profession”, in Mikkelson, Holly & Renée Jourdenais (eds) Routledge Handbook of Interpreting. London & New York: Routledge, 29-44.
This chapter critically discusses how “natural”, “professional”, “novice”, “expert” interpreting have evolved to codify various degrees of status on the basis of interpreting skills, training, experience and a sense of community belonging. Rather than mutually exclusive, these categories overlap in time and space, as evidenced by ad hoc interpreting at the Nuremberg Trials in the aftermath of World War II, in the contemporary war zones and activist, resistant spaces.
Boéri, Julie (2012) “Ad hoc Interpreting at the Crossways between Natural, Professional, Novice and Expert Interpreting”, in Amparo Jiménez Ivars (eds) Interpreting Brian Harris. Recent developments in natural translation and in interpreting studies. Vienna: Peter Lang, 117-132.
This chapter puts forward a narrative model of analysis for a sociology of interpreting which accounts for the wide range of personal and institutional positionings upon which the field structures itself. I argue that analysts should pay particular attention to narratives that locate themselves at the margins of academia, the profession and society, as the networks of solidarity marginal narratives neat among them may well prefigure change towards greater justice.
Boéri, Julie (2012) “Dinámica de confluencia y confrontación en el campo de la interpretación: una aproximación narrativa”, in África Vidal et María Rosario Martín Ruano (eds), Traducción, Política(s), Conflictos: legados y retos para la era del multiculturalismo, Granada: Comares, 143-160 [Dynamics of Convergence and Divergence in the Interpreting Field: a narrative approach].
This paper focuses on Babels, one of the most politicized community of interpreters, and on a public controversy surrounding its volunteer interpreting at the World Social Forum. It provides a narrative analysis of the Babels discourse and of a critical letter published against the network, at the elite end of the interpreting profession. The study alerts to the disempowering effect of narratives of expertise and rationality on new generations of interpreters to bring about justice.
Boéri, Julie (2008) “A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy: competing perspectives on activism in conference interpreting”, The Translator 14(1), 21-50; Manchester: St Jerome Publishing/Routledge.
Conducted in Barcelona in October of 2011, this interview resulted from several years of thought-provoking exchanges between Carol and me. When I was invited by her colleagues at Kent State University to contribute to a Fetschrift in honor of Carol, I immediately thought of an interview as an appropriate tribute to her, to her work, and to the inspiration that this literary translator-scholar has prompted in me and many other colleagues in our quest for justice in our torn-apart world.
Boéri, Julie and Carol Maier, published in Translators Writing, Writing Translators, Françoise Massardier-Kenney, Maria Tymoczko and Brian James Baer (eds). The Kent State University Press. Kent: Ohio, 97-106.
This is a critical review of 3 different books, through the prism of survival and recognition of the interpreting profession: Phelan, Mary and Krisztina Zimányi (2010), eds. Community Interpreting in Ireland and Abroad, special issue of Translation Ireland 18 (2). Monacelli, Claudia. (2009). Self-Preservation in Simultaneous Interpreting. John Benjamins. Inghilleri, Moira. (2012). Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language. Routledge.
Boéri, Julie (2013) “Survival and Recognition: new perspectives in Interpreting Studies”, in Translation and Interpreting Studies 8(1): 137-142.
This is a critical review of Translating and Interpreting Conflict is an edited collection of essays originally presented at the First International Conference on the topic, jointly hosted by Salford University (UK) and Kent State University (USA) in 2004. The volume heralds a shift in the concept of conflict as more than a metaphor for the tension and resistance involved in translation and inter-cultural communication, towards engaging with violence.
Boéri, Julie (2010) Translating and Interpreting Conflict, Myriam Salama-Carr (ed.) Rodopi: Amsterdam/New York, 2009, in The Translator 16(2): 364-369.
This article seeks to account for the processes of interlinguistic, cultural, technological and scientific mediation at play in innovation. It focuses on the phenomenon of ICT-mediated cooperative translation, from an interdisciplinary standpoint (Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, and Science and Technology Studies) and streamlines the political and ethical issues at stake within the Foucault-inspired concept of “cooperative translation dispositifs” (« devices »/ »apparatuses »).
Boéri, Julie (2018) “Les enjeux politiques des dispositifs de traduction coopérative à l’ère de la mondialisation”, Hermès: La revue, 82, 73-80 [The Political Challenges of Cooperative Translation Platforms in the Age of Globalization].
The socio-technological device deployed by Babels provides an interesting case to examine conflict management in an online community of practice in the making. This chapter analyses the socio-technical and semiotic construction of Babels’ organizational model. It proposes to address issues of power, knowledge, subjects(-actors) in the communication of organizations by bringing together the Foucaldian concept of dispositif (“device/apparatus”) and récit (“narrative”).
Boéri, Julie (2015) “Émergence d’une communauté virtuelle de pratique : regards croisés sur les dispositifs et les récits”, in Sylvie Parrini-Alemanno (ed.), Communication organisationnelle, management et numérique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 309-319 [Emergence of an Online Community of Practice: at the cross-roads between apparatuses and narratives].
This paper focuses on the Babels and its interpreting policy in the alter-globalization movement. The analysis of its device will be structured around the dialectic between freedom and constraints which, within this transnational social movement, takes the shape of four sub-dialectics: representation / participation, revolution / deliberation, event / process, verticality / horizontality.
Boéri, Julie (2015) “Les langues au cœur des dispositifs des mouvements sociaux transnationaux : processus d’innovation au sein du réseau Babels », Questions de communication, 28, 191-210. [Languages at the Heart of Transnational Social Movements Apparatuses: innovation processes within the Babels network].
Resorting to narrative theory, this paper focuses on interactions among actors within the communicational device of Babels, the international network of volunteer translators and interpreters, born in the context of the social forums, and examines the ways in which practitioners grant meaning to their engagement in time and space.
Boéri, Julie (2014) « Vers une approche communicationnelle de l’engagement : les récits des traducteurs-interprètes du réseau Babels dans le mouvement altermondialiste », Revue Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication 5. [Towards a Communicational Approach to Engagement: narratives of Babels translators-interpreters in the Alter-Globalization Movement].
This paper argues that the socio-economic, geopolitical and socio-professional circumstances in which interpreting takes place should be taken into account in our explorations of quality. The case study of ad hoc innovative initiatives to veil for interpreting quality in social forums invites for an approach to quality that is both contextual and bottom-up. This can safeguard against the risk of universalizing quality parameters arising from institutionalized settings.
Boéri, Julie (2013) “Interpretación y formación ad hoc. Una aproximación contextual y ascendiente a la noción de calidad”, Quaderns: revista de traducció 21, 211-223, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. [Interpreting and ad hoc training. A Contextual and Bottom-up Approach to the Notion of Quality].
This is a review of a book gathering six case studies on the internationalization of meetings in professional and higher education contexts. It analyses the « parler plurilingue » (multilingual way of speaking) of European elites (managers, students, teachers, intellectuals, experts) in professional and learning contexts. It considers interaction as the site where various versions of the social bound intersect and where culture is constructed.
Boéri, Julie (2014), Cosmopolitan Interactions: the organization of multilingual participation, Lorenza Mondada, Luci Nussbaum (eds) Limoges : Lambert-Lucas, coll. Info-com, 2014, in Questions de communication 26, 379-380.
For the tenth anniversary of the Babels network, this magazine article discusses the political significance as well as the logistical challenge of organizing interpreting at the Social Forums, an itinerary and periodic gathering of social movements and activists from around the globe.
Boéri, Julie (2014), “Plusieurs langues pour un autre monde”, Le monde diplomatique, Oct. 2013. [Several languages for another world]
Published a couple of days before the Athens European Social Forum (2006), this magazine article explains Babels’ interpreting policy of including Eastern European languages, Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish and its impact in terms of participation and inclusion.
Boéri, Julie (2014),“The Babels network: a political tool of the Social Forum”, Eurotopia 3:6 The TransNational Institute.
Published after the London European Social Forum, this magazine article critically reflect on what has come to be recognized as one of the most contentious organizational processes. Committed to language diversity, Babels was embroiled in the political battles over how the Forum should be organized: as any other conventional event or as a process organized by many people who try to put in practice their ideals. In each scenario, translation and interpreting take on a very different political meaning.
Boéri, Julie and Stuart Hodkison (2004),“Babels and the Politics of Language at the Heart of the Social Forum”, RedPepper, 01 December 2004.
This paper provides an in-depth examination of the politics of organizing interpreting in the context of the Social Forum and the Alter-Globalization Movement. Babels’ activist, critical and self-reflective project of volunteer interpreting is examined as emerging and evolving out of a series of internal and external pressures : implementing the principles of horizontality, deliberation, participation and prefiguration, and delivering interpreting efficiently on the day of the event, while not undermining the professional market of conference interpreting.
Boéri, Julie (2012) “Translation/Interpreting Policy and Praxis: engagement and professionalism revisited”, The Translator 18(1): 269-90.
This Encyclopedia entry provides a critical literature review of activism in Translation Studies. It covers the research trajectories and themes which activism has sparked in the field, and the spaces and sites of intervention that have been explored so far. Epistemological approaches adopted are also discussed.
Boéri, Julie (2019) “Activism”, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London & New York: Routledge, 1.
This Encyclopedia entry provides a critical review of activist approaches to Interpreting Studies. It maps the different case studies of activist communities of interpreters, the controversies to which they have given rise and reflects upon the politically engaged paradigm from which this emerging scholarship has been undertaken.
Boéri, Julie (2016) “Activism”, in Franz Pöchhacker (ed) Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies. London & New York: Routledge, 6-7.
This paper reflects on how to initiate transformative training practices that set out to enhance social awareness of the role of conference interpreting in an asymmetrical society. It presents the Marius training project whose overarching objective is to train interpreters beyond market needs. It shows how socio-critical pedagogy, action-research, and an emancipating use of technologies can bring about change in the learning environment and in society as a whole.
Boéri, Julie and Jesús de Manuel Jerez (2011) “From Training Skilled Practitioners Towards Educating Reflective Citizens: a narrative approach to socio-critical pedagogy and action-research in conference interpreting”, Interpreter and Translator Trainer 5(1), 41-64.
This paper examines the narratives that have shaped interpreting as a social practice and an object of enquiry at the core of the field and examines alternative approaches arising at the margins of the field. It focuses on a case study of interpreters’ ad hoc training in the European Social Forum, which demonstrates the transformative potential of cooperation between players with varying degrees of power in the field (grassroots and academic trainers, scholars, activists).
Boéri, Julie (2012) “Emerging Narratives of Conference Interpreters’ Training: a case study of ad hoc training in Babels and the Social Forum”, Puentes: hacia nuevas investigaciones en la mediación intercultural 9, 61-70.