Being an Indigenous Interpreter in Chaco (Argentina): Stakes of a Category Under Construction

Abstract

This work is part of a collaborative investigation on the roles of translators-interpreters in indigenous languages in the legal and judicial field of the Province of Chaco, Argentina. There, a mechanism was developed to guarantee the presence of translators-interpreters in indigenous languages in Justice, which includes training, job positions and a coordination between the indigenous peoples and the Justice system. These measures, aimed at allowing a certain group of people access to certain resources, constitute positive discrimination policies. We understand that identities are flexible and interactive categorizations, and so we are interested in describing who the beneficiaries of this mechanism are and how the category “indigenous” influences the decision to join the Special registry of indigenous interpreters and the request (or not) for remuneration. The corpus is made up of the audio-visual recordings of interpretation and terminology workshops for indigenous translators-interpreters of the Judiciary and students of the Indigenous Language Interpretation Training College between 2016 and 2019, interviews with translators-interpreters and actors in the judicial field, as well as legislation. Our theoretical framework takes elements from Social Theory, such as the concepts of aboriginality, symbolic and social borders and foreignness, with special emphasis on the procedural and flexible character of the borders and the interactional nature of the categorization. We think that this work can contribute to the understanding of translation policies for native languages in Latin America, from an interdisciplinary perspective.