The Battle to Intervene: Constrained Advocacy for Community Translators

This chapter begins by investigating the divide between academic aspirations for community translation and actual practice. Though academics may still be divided over faithful or freer approaches, there is agreement that a community translator’s role is one of enabling and empowering for a particular cultural and social outsider, who will often also be part of a marginalised culture. We then examine how the community translator is expected to enable and empower; and conclude that community translators should be competent in constrained advocacy. This suggests being constrained by some aspects of faithfulness, while at the same time intervening on the text, to allow the end user to read and to respond to the best of their abilities. In practice there is little evidence of any particular intervenient translation approach in the field of community translation, and we argue that this dearth is already noticeable at the trainee level. We take a Logical Levels/Iceberg model approach and discuss community translator competencies in terms of three levels: cognitive, metacognitive, and non-cognitive (or emotional intelligence). We argue that a lack of emotional competencies is blocking the ability of community translators to intervene for the reader. These competencies would equip translators with the skills to intervene on the text, but also to intervene with the source text producers and the authorities in general, who are at best sceptical about any form of mediation. We suggest that emotional skills, for example, assertiveness, empathy, and the ability to tolerate uncertainty and to take risks, are essential for community translators in their role as mediators between institutions and end users, and that these competencies should be introduced into translation curricula.