Intercultural Mediation

The term ‘mediation’ has a long history both as a legal term (as in 'alternative dispute resolution’) and as a popular practice. It is also a well-developed discipline in, for example, sociology (c.f. Wadensjö (1992: 42). In one of the very many "Training & Resource Guide[s] for the Mediator", we learn that mediation "denote[s] the interaction of two parties gathered together with the assistance of a neutral party (mediator) to assist both parties resolve their dispute in a mutually satisfactory manner" (Bullen: 2012: 3). It is not immediately clear how translation and/or interpretation (T/I) might have anything to do with conflict resolution. Indeed, in a current survey on the subject, T/I respondents said they were "increasingly using 'mediation' activities, but not 'translation', since the latter is seen as a sentence-level replacement exercise" (Pym 2013). In many fields requiring T/I, ‘intercultural mediation’ is carried out by a growing group of non-T/I specialists. In business, for example, there are ‘intercultural consultants’, ‘writing consultants’ and ‘localization’ specialists. In public services, for immigration there are ‘cultural mediators’. Clearly the idea of interpretation or translation as a form of mediation has yet to become mainstream. Where T/I has been understood as a form of mediation, two very distinct strands have evolved: language (or linguistic) mediation, and intercultural (cross-cultural or cultural) mediation.