NPIT – Interpreting Ideas

The Bloem Diaries – Part 3: On EFF, diversity and ‘black’ languages

The ‘Social Integration Event’ on campus has attracted hundreds of students this Saturday evening. Dance, music, beers and shishas everywhere. South Africa is a superpower as far as dancing and music is concerned (beer, not so much, the “Flying Fish” apple beer tastes like a mixture of cheap cider and ethanol…). A strong smell of weed. This is the paradoxical thing about South Africa. Cannabis is legal for personal use, the amount of gay, lesbian and trans-gender students on campus is probably higher than anywhere in Europe, same sex marriage and adoption are legal, Bitcoin is in the process of being recognized as a foreign currency.

On so many issues the country is extremely progressive. It is as if all the society’s reserves of hatred and conservatism were depleted by the tedious and thankless task of arbitrarily dividing people into categories according to their phenotype, and then trying to create ex post facto justifications for why these categories are all but arbitrary. The craftsmen then probably had no energy left to also condemn gay people because recognizing their existence would have created an existential problem: one would have had to decide which attribute must supersede the other (whether someone is a black gay man or a gay black man would suddenly have mattered).

Thanks to myself and three other foreign post-docs, the ‘Social Integration Event’ on campus is indeed ‘integrated’. Mtunzi already knows the other post-docs and comes to introduce himself. He is “into politics” on campus. He dances with us, encourages other students to approach us, wants us to feel at home. Yet I also notice that if one of the other students is too drunk or too eager to get close, Mtunzi immediately utters a few words in Zulu or Sesotho and the “trouble maker” invariably disappears. We are welcome but he is anxious to control the image we are supposed to walk away with from this event. He does not want it to be a bad experience for us. He takes my arm. “Come, let me show you around so that you can see how it is.”

I follow him through the crowd. His role in campus politics turns out to be more important than I suspected. Almost every student knows him, walks up to him for a high five or a few dance moves. He is indeed “showing me around”, I am both visitor and exhibit.

I start connecting the dots in my mind little by little. “So, politics, huh.” “Yes, politics.” “EFF?” He laughs out loud. “How do you know?” It was just a guess. The jovial and good-natured attitude, his popularity with the students, their reaction when they see me. There is an agenda to all of this and I remember the red EFF flags on campus, the students walking around in berets and EFF T-Shirts distributing flyers (EFF Website).

“So, you are Sankara’s grand children then…” He laughs even harder. Eager to condemn Sankara before he understands that I am actually quite fond of the guy. Not his authoritarian traits, but that is not a topic for discussion at a party on a Saturday night. EFF, Economic Freedom Fighters, the ANC break-away party founded by Julius Malema who said he wants to kick all white people out of the country. An international post-doc student being shown around by the local EFF representative. Much like his idol, Mtunzi will go far in politics.

The students at the Social Integration Event are a welcoming, fun and joyful crowd. South African music is something I can definitely get used to. After an hour or so of dancing the tension starts to wear off. The fear dissipates. When I look around, I see surprise and I see smiles. There is no hostility.

Later in the evening, one of the other international students tells me how someone almost stole his phone. But it is just a story of someone trying to steal someone else’s phone. It is not a story of ‘black people’ stealing a white person’s phone. Three hours ago it was a tour de force to resist the dominant narrative, but now my head is full of images of kids dancing and laughing. These kids were real, I saw them, heard them, danced with them, talked to them. The robbers and thieves in this weeks’ conversations are just shadows, snippets of other peoples’ lives, avatars created by fear rather than experience. I no longer feel the obligation to adhere to the narrative of anxiety I was presented with. Little by little, I am finding the protagonists of my own story.

Marie and Lizl are using their Sunday morning to prune and water the fruit trees on their compound. It is illegal to water the trees during the current drought but two of the peach trees might just be able to make it through the winter with a little water once a week. Their care for the trees is endearing. They will take me to their favorite place in Bloemfontein later: the Art museum. In addition to South African art it has a nice park with small hiking routes. Not surprisingly, the museum as such is underwhelming, but the building and surrounding park are indeed a lovely little oasis in the middle of a largely miserable town. The title of the temporary exhibit makes me a bit anxious. Terugblik. I am not sure I want to ‘look back’ here in Bloemfontein. The drawings are mostly of white people and rhinos. I decide that I do not need to understand the deeper meaning of this exhibition.

All of a sudden, on the terrace in the park, a little girl takes her first steps. When her parents clap she gets distracted and falls flat on her nose. Crying ensues. For a few seconds, we are all united in the understanding that we just witnessed a milestone in a little human being’s life. These moments where you can just be a human being without needing to take any kind of side are precious here, because they are so rare.

We have lunch in an upscale restaurant that offers all kinds of fish and seafood. The food looks excellent and after surviving largely on bread and peanut butter for a week (and a very nice Ethiopian meal the day before) I want to try everything on the menu. My eyes have become used to the ubiquitous colour coding. “Unity in diversity” is the Afrikaans motto that is reminiscent of Apartheid and can still be found on websites and buildings. In today’s Bloemfontein this loosely translates into ‘black people sitting with black people, Indians with Indians and whites with whites, but all in the same restaurant’. This is as far as this city has come since the official end of forced segregation. When you see a table that is ‘mixed’ you immediately seek an explanation: Is the white or black person a foreigner? Is it work mates eating out during their lunch break? In this city, any form of integration or mixing is a deviating from the norm that has to be duly accounted for.

I have not seen a single biracial couple in Bloemfontein, although I have seen small ‘mixed’ groups of students sitting together on campus. What should be normal is still rare enough to be noteworthy. Men can wear lipstick though.

Marie and Lizl are keen to talk to me about their South Africa, Afrikaans South Africa. Initially hesitatingly, fearing I might judge them. But once the ice is broken, they open up about how South Africa is both conservative and liberal, how certain things are worse now than they used to be – the quality of education at the university among other things (the University of the Free State started to admit non-white students in the 1990s and is currently phasing in English, and phasing out Afrikaans, as a main medium of instruction in most faculties – against strong resistance from Afrikaans right-wing identitarian movements such as the ‘Afriforum’). How they live in this country as a lesbian couple.

We talk about languages in South Africa because Lizl sometimes uses Afrikaans words when she does not know how to say something in English, and I often understand them because I speak German. “South Africa is such a diverse country. It is the most diverse country in the world.”

I have heard this statement repeatedly over the past few days and it never ceases to amaze me how it seems to be universally accepted as truth by ‘all sides’ in this country. Usually it is accompanied by an explanation about how different some ‘other’ is from one’s own group. And yet, this ‘truth’ flies in the face of empirical evidence in so many ways. To start with ‘difference’ is not the same as ‘diversity’: an emphasis on difference stems from a world view based on an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomy, while diversity is about a recognition of what makes each of us unique, an emphasis on identities as a cumulative and complex interplay of similarity and difference (see also Inghilleri 2017 on Translation and Migration).

South Africa is indeed diverse, mostly because there are white, black, coloured and Asian people, who until recently, for better or for worse, were forced to adhere largely to their own culture and language. Nevertheless, this diversity in skin colour, albeit visually striking, is not accompanied by a commensurate diversity in language, culture and genetics. Zulu, Sotho and Xhosa are to a large extent mutually intelligible languages. English and Afrikaans belong to the same indo-european language family and are even closely related within that family.

I wonder how Marie and Lizl would react if I told them that Nigeria, Ethiopia or even Kenya are actually much more diverse than South Africa – culturally, linguistically, genetically – even though most people there are just different shades of ‘dark’. Skin colour is not representative of genetic diversity… who would have thought?

I have no intention of trying to find out. “Most white people in South Africa speak English and Afrikaans and will know a little of the local language spoken in their town. And the black South Africans speak English, Afrikaans and often three black languages. It is very impressive, really.”

The admiration for ‘black’ South African multilingualism is sincere and meant as a compliment. But why do ‘white’ people speak English and Afrikaans and ‘black’ people speak ‘black languages’…

I tell them about the shops in town as another example of multilingualism. As I suspected, they had no idea that most of the shop keepers are not local black people but come from a country thousands of kilometers away. Their astonishment is genuine.

Coming home in the evening, my mind begins to wander. Is Amharic a black language then? The absurdity of this statement becomes obvious when considering that Amharic is a semitic language, therefore related more closely to Arabic and Hebrew than to the Bantu languages spoken in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. If one accepts that there is no such thing as ‘black languages’ one might get one step closer to accepting that there is no such thing as ‘black’ (or ‘white’) people.

I remember driving to the Ethiopian church that same morning. How far from the city centre it was, how many cars there were on the parking even though it was 6h30 in the morning. Marie and Lizl probably do not know that there is an Ethiopian church in their town, close to the airport, at the end of a gravel road in the middle of warehouses and factories. Or that there increasingly are people from many other African countries living in Bloemfontein, who are ready to disrupt and upset the carefully crafted local equilibrium of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’, simply by disregarding these categories as irrelevant for their own world view.

Or, as in the case of some of the Habesha students, by deciding to self-identify as white because, how could an Amhara *not* be part of whatever is the most powerful and dominant group in a location??? That would surely go against the natural and entirely unarbitrary order of things… But I digress…

The Bloem Diaries – Part 2: Kitchen politics

When someone asks you whether you mind sharing a room with someone from “another race” this messes with your brain in unpredictable ways. And you resent the person who implanted that question in your head. Now it sits there, like an intruder among all the other utterances of everyday life that you remember hearing. It hits you there and then that this question will leave an indelible mark on your mind, that your mind has been polluted, Chernobyl style. What is the half life of apartheid? In Bloemfontein at least, most off-campus residences still practice racial segregation. It is often sugar-coated, asking applicants to indicate their “preferred room mate” on a form that can be interpreted as asking for a specific name when it is actually used to indicate race.

Alamnesh cooks Shuro. While cooking, she names all the ingredients for me in Amharic and English. She later shows me the book she uses to learn English. It is written by an Ethiopian author who writes “BA in Journalism 2015” after his name, apparently to establish his expertise in language teaching. Many sample sentences involve conversations one might have in shops. Some sound very British and stiff, while others are translated so directly from Amharic that you have to mentally read them with an Ethiopian accent for them to make sense (“How are you?” “Thanks to God, I am well.”). Alamnesh needs to improve her English if she wants to get work in one of the shops in town.

I think of the Habesha shop keepers, embedded in a complex social network of dependencies and moral obligations. They are under pressure from their community to give work to Ethiopians, yet the South African context makes it crucial for them to provide work to locals. This is their best strategy to escape the wrath of impoverished communities in South Africa – a lesson learned through bloodshed a few years ago. Like pretty much every other group, African migrants too have become a target of violence in South Africa.

To the Habeshas I interact with, the difference between them and black South Africas could not be greater. They are perfectly oblivious to the fact that most white people cannot even make the difference between them and the local black population. “All the black students are thieves, you have to be very careful.” This warning from an Ethiopian PhD Student catches me off guard and I am not able to hide my disapproval of this kind of blanket statement. “Ok, maybe not all of them. But many.” The Ethiopian students here do not go out much. Compared to their rural home town in Ethiopia, Bloemfontein is a dangerous place. I understand the fear, but I at least want it to be evenly distributed and mess with people’s certainties a little bit. “You know, many of the white students are armed. Those are the ones I am most afraid of.” He considers this and agrees.

Food for thought.

“Do you mind sharing the kitchen with another race?” For the first time I feel genuinely angry. Not sad, just boiling with anger. “We have to ask you this question.” In some countries you would go to jail for asking me this question. “I mind sharing the kitchen with someone who answered yes to that question…” Her fake smile disappears but she still needs to sell her product, off-campus overpriced luxury accommodation for rich kids and visiting researchers looking for a simple solution to their Bloemfontein housing problem. Later, the manager is called and I am duly introduced (“This is Carmen, she wants to rent a room, she does not mind sharing with another race.”) Not even “a person of another race”, no just “another race”. Will they all fit in my kitchen? One billion Chinese, all at once?

They tell me that I will be sharing the kitchen with a coloured girl who already shared with a white girl before so she will not mind. I wonder whether the same girl would be as comfortable sharing the kitchen with a black girl. If I move there, I might try to find out. The financial details are explained to me by the financial manager. I have to sit in his office and as soon as the girl leaves he closes the door and apologizes for her lack of professionalism – she indicated a lower price than he will charge me now and he has no hesitation in making it look like it is her fault. As a result, I no longer feel angry at her but am annoyed at the smugness of my new interlocutor.

I cannot resist the temptation to ask him about the compulsory race question I was presented with earlier. I am curious to get his take on this. How would a black South African man explain this issue to a white woman from abroad? I give it a shot. The mental gymnastics he subsequently engages in are impressive. “You see, in South Africa it is like this. And not only white and black, even when I have Zulu and Sotho students, I cannot put them together because they have different cultures. And the Indian students like to live with other Indians because they are all vegetarians and so they do not want to share the kitchen with someone who eats meat.” Hm. “I am a vegetarian.” Also, on what planet is ‘black people also hate each other’ a good excuse for any of this? “Yes, but I am sure you do not mind sharing with someone who eats meat!” He triumphantly uses my lack of racial preference against me: the option ‘Do you mind sharing the kitchen with the same race?’ does not exist. And yet, after my experiences in the past days, that is the question I would have answered with a resounding yes.

I do not like how I feel right now. I feel like I need to justify myself somehow. He continues his explanations, apologizing again. Like the girl, he comes across as fake, just selling a product trying to find the right buttons to press for this particular customer. “I apologize but it is like this. I understand it might seem strange to you, I hope that three weeks from now you will come back and tell me that you have now gotten used to our context.”

“You don’t need to apologize. No, it is not strange, it is actually sad.” He swiftly agrees with me. “Yes, you are right, it is very sad.” I suspect he would have agreed with me regardless of what I said. If segregation is what customers want, then that is what for-profit residences will offer. Most customers seem to want this.

The Bloem Diaries – Part 1: Race and the city

In August 2017, I started my post-doctoral fellowship in the city of Bloemfontein, South Africa. A year prior, I visited the city and the campus because I did not want to go to a place not knowing what to expect. Once I found out what to expect, I decided to go anyway.

In a place characterized by division, stark racism, violence and conservatism, I found amazing stories of progressive thought, friendship and courage. Stories of ‘locals’, stories of migrants, stories of people crossing boundaries that are much less rigid than one might assume at first sight. I found these stories because, even though I was told not to leave campus, for it would not be safe, I decided to go out every once in a while.

To protect the anonymity of protagonists, many of these stories have a fictional component, but they are rooted in the reality of a city that, as soon as you leave it, seems like a surreal mirage that only exists in your imagination.

Little Ethiopia

The city centre becomes busy on Saturday. All of a sudden, Bloemfontein looks like any other African city, the hustling and bustling of shops, people crossing the street where ever they please, people shopping and chatting on the street. Most shops in town are run by the Ethiopian or “Habesha” community. The language mix in the shops is fascinating. Shop keepers employ a mix of Habeshas and South Africans and mutual learning takes place constantly. The shop keepers speak Amharic, English and have a basic command of Sesotho, while their staff, largely fluent in Sesotho and English, will speak Amharic with the customers they identify as Ethiopian. There is no fear of making mistakes, South African staff will happily throw in the odd Amharic word (qonjo, salamnew, tinish, kamis, chama…).

Most foreigners or even white South Africans (if they ever set foot in these stores, which, based on how staff reacted to my presence, seems improbable) are likely oblivious to this complex mix of languages and cultures, as they will perceive all people in the shop as belonging to the same group: ‘black people‘. There was no hostility towards me in the city centre. Indeed, my very presence there seemed to indicate that I was somehow weird, not South African, a different kind of “other” than the one people react to negatively in this context.

Alamnesh wants to buy a dress for church. She tries on several, all pink. She does not like anything with too many complications, she prefers simple designs without lace or buttons. The dress has to be long. “I short” she complains every time she tries on a dress that inevitably ends up being way too long for her. She also needs shoes. And eyeliner. And lip balm. But the transparent one, not the one with colour. I suspect that all this is for church. There is considerable excitement about going to church tomorrow. I agreed to drive them to mass, they normally cannot go there as it is out of town and starts at 6am. We leave without buying a dress but she has another one at home. Later on, they will tell me again that I don’t have to take them to church, that it is fine, no big deal, I can just sleep in the morning. But I know that all the preparations being made are based on the assumption that I will be there tomorrow morning.

Yonatan owns the clothes store. He speaks Amharic, English and Sesotho (main use case: yelling at his staff). One of his employees in particular is eager to speak in Amharic, although she knows barely more than a few words. To work at one of the shops in town, Alamnesh needs to learn English. Maybe in a few months she will also know some Sesotho. It is not language mastery in the sense we understand it in interpreting, rather, what is happening is rapport-building through language, similar to what we find in anthropology. The language is mastered enough to make the interlocutor trust you, to show them “I am similar to you, I respect you, I am interested in your way of being, in who you are, you can trust me.”

Learning a language is a way of acknowledging each others’ humanity. Nothing more but nothing less.

The two girls in the shoe shop laugh when they see me. Then exchange a few words in a language I cannot understand before looking at me again. “Whitey” one of them says in my direction, laughing. Whitey. Blunt like that. They do not even try to sugar coat the fact that I am wearing the wrong skin colour for the occasion. But she does not say it in a demeaning way, rather, she says it in an encouraging way, in a ‘we are surprised but happy to see you here’ kind of way. I laugh with them and reply “Yes, apparently. Nothing I can do to change that, can I?” They laugh. “No, true, you can’t. But it is good. Welcome.”

Hair is cut, shaved and braided on the sidewalk, in broad daylight, next to small stalls where women sell goat (or sheep?) heads and feet in transparent plastic bags. I have never seen this kind of open air hair dressing in a large town, it somehow makes the city centre look poorer and more miserable. The strands of hair and extensions on the sidewalk give the street a somewhat sinister look. My brain creates associations with piles of human hair seen on photos taken in a different context decades ago – a context I have spent more time than usual thinking about since I arrived in Bloemfontein.

One of the shops has hired a DJ. He stands at the entrance with his mixing table, over-saturated loudspeakers blasting Hip Hop beats onto the sidewalk. A man who looks both drunk and homeless dances to the music as if his life depended on it. Like the loudspeakers, he is having a blast. Some passers-by laugh and enjoy the spectacle, others ignore the guy as if he was the most normal thing in their world. The DJ looks at me, pleadingly, as if wanting to apologize that I have to witness this. And yet,this is what I came to see. Just life on a Saturday morning.

“Do you like this city?” Alamnesh asks me. I want to say no. I think of the strands of hair on the sidewalk, the goat (sheep?) heads being sold in transparent plastic bags, without skin but with teeth, the three keys, two remote controls and one access card that separates my room from my office, the constant reminders that people are out to rob and rape you, that it is not safe. But I do not want to discourage her, after all, she has to live here and is likely to give birth to a child in this town. “It’s okay, I think I will get used to it.” My reply is half affirmation, half resolution. “Me no like it” she says, looking determined.

Yet, for about two hours this Saturday, Bloemfontein became just a normal African city.

I was able to forget about the guy writing his PhD about the positive aspects of fascism in Europe.

I was able to forget about the girl who explained to me that it is not possible for students of different races to share the same apartment because the black men do not respect “their” women, so they will just walk in and out of a black girl’s room whenever they please and white parents do not want their daughters to be ‘exposed’ to that (i. e. raped).

I was able to forget that a professor had told me that last year during the racial violence at the University of the Free State (#ShimlaPark), white parents came to campus with their pick-up trucks, armed with baseball bats, ready to beat up black students. That residence managers had to hide terrified undergrads in different campus buildings.

I was able to forget about the three white post-graduate students who gave a theatrical presentation on how black students perceived these incidents on campus last year, well-meaning and yet totally oblivious of their own positionality in all of this. Whitesplaining should be a word in this country.

And yet, research on identity among local students also reveals a darker, self-deprecating side. When no one else listens, students will say things like “I am ashamed of my skin colour. I am ashamed of being white.” I wonder how much of the white anger is due to this deep feeling of inadequacy, this not knowing how to “be” in this “New South Africa” and where else to be if not here. If 1970 was a place, I suspect quite a few white South Africans would want to emigrate there.

It all comes back when we reach the mall. All of a sudden 15 muscular young white men in shorts walk into the mall and start singing. I am legitimately scared for a second (anything sung by 15 males in shorts sounds like a war song), before realizing that it is probably just a bachelor party. The tension messes with your brain here. Everything looks threatening when you are constantly told to be scared.

As we walk down the aisles and look at shop windows, I decide to follow up on our earlier conversation. “So, Alamnesh, you do not like this city?” She smiles “I do like it.”

The mall is a safe place.

The “interpreter factor” in ethnographic fieldwork

La première mission by Benoît Cliquet. — Drawing by Benoît Cliquet.**

“Anthropologists are normally expected to ‘learn the language’, and while most try to do so, many of us feel we fail. Since this means failure to measure up to a publicly required occupational definition, anthropologists have often taken refuge in silence.”
(Tonkin, 1984, 178)

Learning the language spoken by their research participants and in the location where they carry out their field research is a point of pride for many anthropologists. However, there are many reasons why it is often not possible for anthropologists and ethnographers from other disciplines to enter their research field having full mastery of their languages:

the time allocated for fieldwork in research grants is often very limited,
the location of a study might have to change at the last moment because political turmoil or natural disasters render the original destination inaccessible
finally, learning a language takes far longer than the time allocated to this endeavor even in the most generous research projects!

It is simply not very realistic for anthropologists to achieve sufficient mastery of their participants’ language in six months to one year – not to the point where they can discuss complex and often intimate issues with their participants.

Indeed, according to Mudimbé “most anthropologists only speak pidgin” (1988, 66), and numerous publications acknowledge the presence of a “research assistant” during fieldwork, although one sometimes has to read between the lines to understand that this assistant is also an interpreter (Mandel, 2003; Molony and Hammett, 2007).

When interpreters are explicitly mentioned in papers (Ficklin and Jones, 2009; Turner, 2010; Temple and Edwards, 2002), we get an idea of the complexity of the “interpreter factor” and the challenges researchers face when collaborating with bilinguals who simultaneous take on the role of research assistants, fixers and interpreters.

What is rarely questioned, however, is the capacity of these ad hoc interpreters to adequately perform their task. To my knowledge, only two papers dwell on this “detail” in some length, namely Borchgrevink (2003) and Gibb and Danero Iglesias (2017). Their authors highlight the complexity of language mastery, and emphasize on an aspect that, in my experience, is very relevant during fieldwork interactions: language mastery comes in degrees. The two articles are really worth reading for practicing or aspiring field researchers!

The fact that language mastery is not something that, like a bit, comes only as either “1” or “0” might seem completely obvious but it is nevertheless often neglected. Knowing a language is not just useful to “do” research: even a very basic mastery can allow a researcher to establish a trust relationship with her participants or understand the basic ideas of a conversation overheard in public transport. More importantly, basic language mastery paired with a few tricks can also allow a researcher to check on the work of her research-assistant-cum-interpreter.

The “interpreters” found in ethnographic fieldwork are rarely trained in this task and perform it to the best of their judgement and ability. Although their presence undeniably has an impact on the research process, the data collected and the results obtained, their influence is rarely acknowledge in anthropological publications.

Based on my research into interpreter positionality and non-professional interpreting in a variety of settings, I have developed a list of questions that each anthropologist should ask himself or herself when working with an interpreter. These questions will allow the researcher to make the interpreter visible in her research, think about the influence of this person during fieldwork, and account for this factor in publications:

1. Positionality and role of the interpreter:

• Who chooses the interpreter and according to what criteria?

• What role does the interpreter have during different stages of the research project?

• What non-interpreting tasks does the interpreter take on during the research project?

2. Language skills:

• What level of mastery does the interpreter/the researcher have in each of the languages used in the study?

• How did the interpreter/the researcher acquire her language skills?

3. Relationships and ethical aspects:

• What is the relationship between the interpreter and the research participants?

• Is the study likely to change the relationship between the interpreter and the research participants? If yes, how is this relationship likely to evolve during the study?

• What participants might not be accessible to the interpreter/the researcher?

• What is the relationship between the interpreter and the researcher? How is this relationship likely to evolve during the study?

• What information does an academic readership require in order to understand the role of the interpreter during different stages of the research project (research design, data collection, data analysis, write-up)?

Can you answer all these questions for your interpreters? Have you thought of all these elements before writing up your interpreter-mediated research project? If not, this list of questions might be worth keeping in mind during fieldwork.

*The ideas in this post follow from a research paper on the use of interpreters in anthropological fieldwork that I recently submitted in collaboration with Dr. Yvan Droz. His contribution is gratefully acknowledged here and the paper will be referenced here one it is published.

** The illustration above was drawn by a very talented conference interpreter: Benoît Cliquet. Thank you, Benoît, for allowing us to use these illustrations in our work!

References

Borchgrevink, A. (2003). Silencing language: Of anthropologists and interpreters. Ethnography 4(1), 95–121.

Ficklin, L. and B. Jones (2009). Deciphering ’voice’ from ’words’: Interpreting translation practices in the field. Graduate Journal of Social Science 6(3), 108–130.

Gibb, R. and J. Danero Iglesias (2017). Breaking the silence (again): on language learning and levels of fluency in ethnographic research. The Sociological Review 65(1), 134–149.

Mandel, J. L. (2003). Negotiating expectations in the field: Gatekeepers, research fatigue and cultural biases. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24(2), 198–210.

Molony, T. and D. Hammett (2007). The friendly financier: Talking money with the silenced assistant. Human Organization 66(3), 292–300.

Mudimbe, V.-Y. (1988). The Invention of Africa. Rochester, NY: James Currey and Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Temple, B. and R. Edwards (2002). Interpreters/translators and cross-language research: Reflexivity and border crossings. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 1(2), no pagination.

Tonkin, E. (1984). Language learning. In R. F. Ellen (Ed.), Ethnographic research: A guide to general conduct, pp. 178–187. London, UK: Academic Press.

Turner, S. (2010). Research note: The silenced assistant. Reflections of invisible interpreters and research assistants. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51(2), 206–219.