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Interpreting Justice
Routledge Advances in Translation Studies

1. Applying Luhmann to
Translation Studies
Translation in Society
Sergey Tyulenev
2. Interpreting Justice: Ethics,
Politics and Language
Moira Inghilleri
Interpreting Justice
Ethics, Politics, and Language

Moira Inghilleri
First published 2012
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of Moira Inghilleri to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book.
ISBN: 978-0-415-89723-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-14796-2 (ebk)
Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

1 The Significance of Language in Translation

2 Ethical Communication

3 Morality and Im/Partiality on Trial: Toward a Justice-Seeking Ethics

Linguistic Hospitality and the Foreigner: Interpreting for Asylum

4
Applicants

5 Just Interpreting: Local and Contract Interpreters in Iraq

6 The Interpreter’s Visibility

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface

This book has its origins in my interest in the enduring issue of

incommensurability in language and culture. The complex issue of the
relationship between language, culture, and thought often settles around the
theme of incommensurability, which can be a matter of the capacity for
understanding evident between minds as much as between cultures, and
always mediated by some communicative form. The products and processes of
translation can symbolize the key to the often submerged but occasionally
glimpsed ‘holy grail’ of mutual understanding so commonly lost in the face of
human diversity, at the same time they can represent its ultimate
impossibility. My own intellectual trajectory with respect to this question has
taken a somewhat circuitous route. Though my original field of research was,
broadly speaking, sociolinguistics, sociological and philosophical methods of
analysis have guided my thinking the most. Since being introduced to the field
of translation and interpreting about a decade ago, these methods have
continued to inform my research. Within this field, incommensurability has
been examined mainly with regard to the translation of written texts,
especially through the interrogation of the notion of equivalence. This issue
has not been accorded the same attention with regard to the translation of the
spoken word. Perhaps this is due to the face to face immediacy of spoken
interpreted encounters which has encouraged more attention to the cognitive
demands of the interpreter’s task. Paradoxically, within the field, the problem
of the unacknowledged visibility of the translator of written texts has received
more critical attention than the questionable insistence on the invisibility of
the highly visible interpreter of spoken utterances. This book addresses this
deficiency through an examination of the status of interpreters’ visibility in
institutional contexts where interpreters are spatially and temporally co-
present with others in situations of considerable moral, ethical, and political
significance. In these situations, I argue, the challenge for interpreters involves
an instantly demanded ethical and political response.
In the book, relationships amongst the relevant actors, communicative
acts, and institutional settings are interpreted implicitly through a
Bourdieusian approach, though unlike this approach more generally, I am
concerned to represent both the communicative and social practices that
emerge from underlying structures and the agents who perform them. For
many sociolinguists, this must also include micro-analysis of the discursive
strategies which these agents carry out. This is not my aim, however. What
interests me more is what motivates and compels communicating agents’
responses to one another. For insights regarding these processes, I rely on
philosophical discourses on inter-subjective understanding amongst similar or
diverse others. The book thus attempts to characterize the social and moral
spaces in which the translation of the spoken word occurs in ways that reflect
the realities of the trans-nationally constituted, locally and globally informed
environments in which interpreters work.
Chapter 1 presents a perspective on language, culture, and thought that is
informed by insights from linguistic anthropology and linguistic philosophy,
reading these via a pragmatist mode of inquiry. The pragmatist perspective
introduced in this chapter serves as the foundation for the central arguments
of the book: that all endeavors toward mutual understanding between
different perspectives involve cooperative human action in interaction with
the environment; and that this is a dialectical process involving fragmentation
and incoherence as much as increasing coherence and integration.
Chapter 2 examines the ethical nature of all communicative encounters. I
explore the value and potential limitations of neo-Kantian and non-Kantian
approaches to ethical communication, with special reference to discourse
ethics and its implicit influence on interpreter codes of ethics, particularly as
evidenced in the principles of impartiality and neutrality. The chapter
reiterates the view that languages are not divided from one another as
incompatible systems, particularly where this view suggests the need for a
master vocabulary or system of meta-rules that would permit the
commensuration of all discourse. It concludes that the justification for
different beliefs articulated in communication is not achieved through
metaphysical guarantees, but through the very fissures, contradictions, and
innovations that it is the task of translation to reveal, not to obscure.
 Chapter 3 introduces the contrasting concepts of ‘role’ morality, which
claims objectivity through a discourse of professionalism, and ‘ordinary’
morality, which is perceived as subjective, whether individually or culturally
based. In this chapter, I link these concepts to the interpreting profession
where individual ethical responses to an interpreting situation are negatively
associated with partiality and are, therefore, considered violations of
professional codes. I then examine debates over legal ethics, particularly with
regard to lawyers’ neutral partisanship toward their clients to demonstrate
some distinctive and instructive parallels between the legal practitioners and
interpreters. In both professions, I argue that from a sociological perspective,
the notion of role morality ensures the maintenance of structural hierarchies
of power and knowledge, and from a philosophical standpoint, it encourages
moral unaccountability.
Chapters 4 and 5 present further empirical support for the theoretical
arguments presented in the previous chapters. Chapter 4 focuses on the
function of interpreting and interpreters in the asylum system, taking as its
starting point the question of hospitality and the irresolvable tension involved
in the ethical demand to grant safe haven to outside others, and the hard
realities of national sovereignty and global politics. Based on in-depth
interviews I conducted from 2002 to 2007 with the relevant players in the
asylum adjudication process—judges, lawyers, applicants, and their
interpreters—the chapter considers the different alliances that were formed
amongst these individuals and the extent to which these partnerships were
aimed at contributing to the overall presence of a justice-seeking ethics in the
asylum system. Chapter 5 examines the motivations behind the decisions
taken by Iraqis and other Arabic speakers to serve as interpreters and
translators for the U.S. military in the Iraq war, taking into account the
justifications for the invasion and occupation based on the principles of Just
War theory. I also consider the range of motivating factors, as reported in
media accounts, which were involved in these decisions, including: personal
histories, economic factors, politics, and patriotism. As in the previous
chapter, I consider the different types of alliances that emerged between
interpreters and military personnel—particularly in the face of the often
complex friend-enemy distinction that war creates—and the ethical demand
these generated for both. Both chapters highlight the tensions between the
relevant actors, their communicative objectives, and the institutional—
juridical, political, and military—settings in which their actions are embedded.
Chapter 6 circles back to the question of the interpreter’s visibility and its
central role in a reinvigorated ethics of interpreting. This chapter considers
the historical lack of perceived ties between the translation of written and
spoken language despite the ethical issues common to both. I suggest that
though part of the reason for this may lie with the linguistic orientation of
much interpreting research, it is also true that translation scholars have not
perceived any theoretical common ground between spoken texts and fictional
or nonfictional works. I conclude that, despite important differences in the
ethical relationships that interpreters and translators develop due to the
distinct environments in which they work, there are sufficient overlaps to
suggest the possibility of greater collaboration in research and practice and,
especially, a more productive dialogue between the two domains in the areas
of language, ethics, and politics.
Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book was made possible by a three-year
Fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) RES063–0-
27–0165 and three previous research grants (RES-000–23–1293, RES 000–22–
0521, and RES 000–22–3772) which funded an ethnographic study of
interpreters in the U.K. asylum system from 2002 to 2007. I am sincerely
grateful for the continuous support of the ESRC and for their acknowledgment
of the significance of translation and interpreting as important contributors to
the causes of justice and human rights.
I extend my deepest appreciation to Mona Baker, Joan Colin, Theo Her-
mans, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Ian Mason, and Christina Schäffner for their
support and efforts on behalf of my research.
I would also like to express my appreciation to the lawyers, judges, and
asylum applicants who gave of their time to participate in the research.
My conversations with the many interpreters who spoke candidly about
their experiences working in stressful and sometimes emotionally difficult
situations were a starting point for many of the issues I explore in the book.
The same is true for the interpreter trainers and coordinators I interviewed.
They may or may not agree with some or all of its conclusions. I would
particularly like to thank Ruswel Piñeiro for serving as a liaison with the
courts. And to Dragana Jakovljevic who graciously allowed me to observe in
her classroom, and who after many enlightening conversations became a
valued friend, I acknowledge my utmost thanks.
Finally, my greatest thanks are to my husband, Roger Hewitt, whose
unwavering emotional, intellectual, and domestic support, provided in vast
quantities throughout its different stages, helped to make this book possible.
A modified version of chapter 5 appeared in The Translator, 16 (2), 2010.
1 The Significance of Language in Translation

Acts of translating heighten our awareness of the fact that different languages
and cultures need not imply the impossibility of achieving a unity of ideas or
of purpose, however partial and impermanent. There are, however, radically
different views about how, or indeed if, language achieves this unifying
function and about the fundamental nature of language itself: its
epistemological and ontological status. Is it a medium, a tool, a set of rules for
our engagement with the material world, or reality itself? Translation
scholarship, with regard to the written word, has considered this question
through intellectual traditions such as German Romanticism, hermeneutics
and structuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. This range of
influences reflects the close relationship between translation studies, literary
theory, and the written word. Interpreting scholarship has considered the
same question with regard to the spoken word mainly through the lens of
structural linguistics, and has incorporated many of its assumptions and
orthodoxies about language—namely that signs have determinate forms, that
each form has a determinate meaning and capacity for linear, contrastive
combination with other signs, and that knowledge of this ‘system of signs’ or
langue is shared amongst its speakers. Saussure emphasized the primary
function of language as one of reference to a pre-given world; a
correspondence view that assumes a pre-linguistic consciousness, a ‘truth’
about the world to which language corresponds.
These ideas are particularly evident in the fundamental emphasis in
interpreting research and training in the interplay between rules pertaining to
linguistic or cultural competence and principles underlying codes of practice.
Much of interpreting theory and practice operates on the assumption of an
ideal sender-receiver, context—and culture-neutral model of communication,
in which thoughts are transferred from a speaker to a hearer and back again.
On this assumption, the interpreter is the channel which ensures that the
concept being transferred from one speaker to another becomes the ‘same’
concept in both linguistic systems. Variations on this, while allowing
interpreters a degree of interpretation of utterances based on contextual and
cultural knowledge, ultimately remain loyal to the pre-eminent status of
langue. This view can be directly traced to the evaluation inherent in
Saussure’s initial distinction between langue and parole, later reproduced in
Chomsky, where parole/performance is seen as largely irrelevant to the proper
workings of the language system. Even in situations where cultural mediation
is accepted as a legitimate part of interpreter practice, the communicative
competence deemed necessary is usually conceived of as a set of prescriptive,
pragmatic rules, similar in kind to rules of grammar. Consequently,
breakdowns in interpreted communication are usually attributed to one or
more of the participants’ inability to use language appropriately—to choose a
word, syntactic form, or utterance—based on rules of linguistic competence,
i.e., lexico-grammatical knowledge, or rules of communicative competence,
i.e., cultural or contextual knowledge (see Berk-Seligson 1990; Hale 2004). The
assumption is that where rules of competency are mastered, and the
appropriate choice selected, more successful translation, greater equivalence,
can be achieved.
This chapter critically examines some of the key ideas from structural
linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology that have influenced
many of the principles guiding interpreting theory and practice.1 I will argue
for an additional, alternative point of view regarding the relationship between
language, meaning, and the world which draws ideas from a number of
different but related perspectives, with a particular emphasis on relevant work
in linguistic anthropology and philosophy. My aim is to shift the focus of
attention in interpreting contexts, and in translation activity more generally,
from language as a mediating device or a barrier to communication to
language as a tool which, along with an assortment of other tools, helps
individuals achieve their communicative objectives in a given context. My
central point is that interpreted interactions are not constituted by the
presence of langue, but by the occasions of utterances. Interpreters must
therefore be permitted visibility, openly facilitating negotiations over meaning
and maximizing the possibility that the communicative objectives of all
participants are met. This, I suggest, has significant consequences for how the
interpreting task, and most importantly, the interpreter’s impartiality is
conceived.

TO FOLLOW A RULE
Interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology shifted the emphasis
from langue, the context-independent, synchronic logic of systems, to parole,
where speakers make choices in real time and real situations (see the
collection of influential papers in Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Giglioli 1972).
Dell Hymes distinguished between linguistic competence and communicative
competence in order to address the split introduced by Saussure and Chomsky
between competence and performance by offering an account of the role of
context and culture in relation to langue (Hymes 1972). Hymes’ view derived
from the cognitive anthropologist, Ward Goodenough, who defined culture as
whatever an individual needed to know in order to function as a member of a
group (Goodenough 1964). Culture itself was perceived to exist in the minds of
each individual member of a society, as a set of rules or organizing principles
for generating behavior appropriate to his/her culture. Thus, ‘appropriate’
linguistic or cultural responses to a given situation were seen as displays of
knowledge of the mental models or rules which ‘competent’ native speakers
possessed for perceiving and interpreting their own cultures. Communicative
competence assumed a knowing subject who was able to use language
appropriate to a given situation. It presented a view of competence that
included not just the natural acquisition of the rules of grammar, but the rules
for its use in a variety of cultural contexts.
The term communicative competence, however, although it purported to
write culture and context into communication, helped to sustain the view that
sentence meaning or langue (in Chomsky’s terms, competence) provided a
fundamental and context-neutral basis for communication; while parole (for
Chomsky, performance) acted as an extra-linguistic environment from where
information was drawn to assist communication in situations of uncertainty
or ambiguity. This conceptualization of communication thus reinforced the
dualist epistemology inherent in Saussurean accounts of language and
validated the synthetic/analytic dichotomy central to structuralist models.
Communicative Competence: Mastery of Rules or Language
Game?
Since Wittgenstein, critiques of systems- or rule-governed models of language
have centered on their inability to account for the flexible and innovatory
nature of communication and for their limitations in explaining the dialogic
or dialectical nature of communicative practices. In an insightful critique of
Saussure, the linguist Roy Harris has argued that langue was Saussure’s
attempt to resolve the apparent contradiction between the uniqueness of our
individual linguistic histories and the apparent facility with which we
communicate with other members of the same linguistic community (Harris
1987: 196–237). Like Chomsky’s universal grammar, Saussure wished to
guarantee a basic systematicity between sign and reference amongst speakers
of a language—and between speakers of different languages. Harris argues
instead for a ‘principle of cotemporality’ with respect to the sign that
acknowledges temporal parity not between signifiers and signifieds, but
between linguistic and non-linguistic events in human experience (Harris
1981).
The anthropologist, Johannes Fabian, has similarly suggested that speech
events are inextricably involved in temporality and can therefore never meet
the criterion of synchronic coexistence essential to the structuralist conception
of a code (1979: 9):
This also means that such temporal units are not conceivable in terms of
contrasts or oppositions only, they must also be seen dialectically, i.e., as
results of processes in terms of which contradictions are being worked out.
It is not difficult to think of contradictions as starting points and basic
determinants of communication. I and others, speakers and audiences,
speaking and silence, verbal and non-verbal, form and content,
inclusiveness and exclusiveness, of communication and so forth.
Contradiction then, and not correspondence, can be thought of as a
potential ‘starting point and basic determinant of communication’. More
recently, Fabian has returned to this issue, identifying such speech events as
instances of ‘ethnographic objectivity’ (Fabian 2001: 11–32) during which the
content of knowledge is transformed inter-subjectively through
“confrontation that becomes productive through communication” (ibid.: 25).
According to this view, it is not systematicity between sign and reference that
is the source of individual or inter-subjective understanding. Subjectivities
and collective understandings are created in and through the use of language,
not the rules of a language or cultural rules of appropriateness. It is in the act
of communicating with others that a shared world is apprehended: there are
no prior determinants, no prior truths. As Harris illustrates in the following
example (Harris 1998: 38):
Keeping in step, for example, as in a parade, might be regarded as subject
to rules, but the only rules that govern keeping in step require the parties
involved to synchronize the movement of their feet—the rules define what
constitutes keeping in step—they do not generate programmes that if
followed mechanically by the participants will achieve the required
synchronization. For that, each party must adjust from moment to
moment to the perceived movements of the others. A’s keeping in step
with B is dependent upon B’s keeping up with A. No system of rules can
in principle generate all and only the correct moves for either A or B to
carry out separately because the necessary adjustments required for
unpredictable contextual factors cannot be foreseen. In this context, the
potential behavior of A and the potential behavior of B present two
relevant but quite unpredictable sets of contextual factors.
In this dialogic account, a mastery of the rules of marching, i.e., what
constitutes keeping in step, can no more guarantee the successful
synchronization of the marchers than the mastery of the rules of a language
can guarantee successful communication. The fact that marchers do manage
to keep in step in a consistent and predictable fashion is not down to the rules
of marching but to their shared understandings of the task, an understanding
that develops through hard work, practice, and sometimes getting it wrong. In
interpreted events, ‘keeping in step’ may be even more unpredictable, given
that the moves take place amongst speakers who are members of different
linguistic or cultural communities, who do not necessarily share the same
understandings of communicative behavior, and whose restricted contact with
one another may mean they never will. This may particularly be the case in
situations defined by some form of conflict amongst participants, where the
individuals or groups who require an interpreter tend to be viewed as
excludable outsiders rather than persons with whom the other participants
seek to develop a mutually inclusive set of understandings regarding
communication and the nature and aims of a particular task.

Communicative Competence and the Ethnographic Encounter

It is important to note that Hymes’ notion of communicative competence was
initially introduced in order to support the claim that individuals from
different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, though not competent in the
same way (each adhered to different rules of appropriate communicative
behavior), were nevertheless equally competent. That is, it backed a difference
and not a deficit view of linguistic, cultural, and cognitive behavior.
‘Communicative competence’ thus operated as a politically expedient or
“strategically essentialist” (Spivak 1988) embrace of cultural and linguistic
relativism. The focus on ‘inter-cultural communication’ (Gumperz 1982) that
emerged in this period supported a similar agenda; it also appealed to a
number of explicit and implicit assumptions of relativism: that linguistic
differences reflect cultural differences; that individual and cultural
worldviews are potentially incommensurable; and that therefore, where
language variation occurs the potential for incommunicability exists. The
suggestion, that instances of failures to communicate between speakers from
divergent linguistic backgrounds, is due to misreadings or intentional uses of
culturally specific communicative strategies supports these assumptions.
Such conclusions, however, can end up supporting an inherent essentialist
rather than a strategic essentialist view of culture(s) that simultaneously
downplays variation within different groups. Such a view suggests that
individuals are often, if not always, trapped in their cultures through language
and vice versa. Moreover, it can create the assumption that individuals are not
capable of interactively ‘reading’ their own and others’ cultures through a
process of negotiation of social and cultural conventions into mutually
oriented or orienting communication. While this may sometimes be the case,
in the inter-cultural communication models, cultural differences become a
taken-for-granted fact rather than a potentially salient factor in interaction.
In a critical assessment of communicative competence, written some thirty
years ago when the notion had only recently emerged in sociolinguistics,
Fabian provides an insightful analysis of two uses of the concept that continue
to contribute to essentialist views regarding inter-cultural communication:
first, a reliance on binary terms like appropriate/inappropriate or
successful/unsuccessful, and second, an emphasis on pre-given, rule-governed
linguistic or cultural competencies rather than dialectically and interactively
created ones. In an effort to challenge these tendencies, Fabian points to types
of speech events in which paradoxes arise. He cites as examples from
ethnographic fieldwork occasions where in the course of an exchange,
information and intentions can turn from initial norms of ‘appropriateness’ to
‘inappropriateness’ in relation to code, participants, and/or setting, or where
some state of ‘inappropriateness’ is transformed into a state of
‘appropriateness’. In either case, change is brought about not by an
abandonment of the right or wrong communicative rules or codes of practice,
but by some form of explicit or implicit challenge to these, their applicability
or validity within the space of the interaction. Such changes, Fabian suggests,
are themselves crucial moments in the constitution of the speech event for
they demonstrate the ethnographic significance of communicative interaction
itself (Fabian 1979: 25):
Ethnographically, however, the results of either scenario can
indicate/establish the boundaries of communication in the movement and
the degree of ideological closure against outsiders. Both are instances of
creative communication (ethnographically speaking) even though or
because it is constituted by a negative dialectic. On the level of actual
communicative events, maintenance of a ‘wrong’, of a slightly wrong code
might have to be considered as creating intentional if not conscious
contradiction with prevailing norms.
Fabian refers to these moments of contradiction where violations of
‘communicative competence’ arise as ‘time outs’ or temporal intrusions, a
speech event embedded in a speech event (ibid.). His point is that though they
emerge out of apparent violations of appropriateness they paradoxically create
appropriateness for the larger ethnographic moment.
Interpreting activity can be experienced as a kind of ‘time out’, a temporal
intrusion into the workings of one or more normative linguistic and cultural
systems that have been determined in advance of the situation of use. As
suggested above, a dominant assumption with regard to interpreted
interactions is that interpreters must operate between two essentializing
mediums to ‘recover’ appropriate linguistic and cultural forms of competence
between two distinctive worldviews. Interpreters must simultaneously
embody and mitigate the effects of what is perceived as an intrusive
communicative violation; they are expected to move efficiently and effectively
between different instantiations of langue in order to resolve semantic
uncertainties. The underlying belief is that semantic and pragmatic certainties
are there to be found in the distinctive systems rather than created in and
through the interactional specifics of the particular interpreted communicative
event. This view of interpreting activity, however, denies the interpreted event
its ethnographic significance. It ignores the vital role that language and
translation play, not in recovering, but in indicating, establishing, and
challenging the boundaries of communication.
The continuing influence of this model of communicative competence is
evident in role play activity used in interpreter training to prepare community
interpreters to play an advocacy role in cases of cultural misunderstanding or
where discriminatory practices may be involved. The conflict scenarios
designed to train interpreters to negotiate misunderstanding between some
other professional and the individual or family in need of an interpreter are
for training purposes represented as a consequence of linguistic or cultural
differences which it is the role of the interpreter to perceive and help the
parties overcome. The role plays usually attempt to reproduce ‘worst case
scenarios’ with respect to the identity/social function dualism. The result is a
strong tendency toward cultural and linguistic essentialism and an emphasis
on the incommensurability between members of the host country, on the one
hand, and clients and their interpreters, on the other. The intended purpose is
to train interpreters to serve most effectively as advocates through
clarifications or repair of misunderstandings due to clashes of culture or
language while maintaining impartiality. In practice, however, the paradox
between cultural brokering and neutrality is often strengthened rather than
diminished. Interpreters are expected to key into some ‘essential’ social and
cultural nature of the interlocutors’ respective communities despite the
complex nature of such ties and, simultaneously, are obliged to occupy an
effectively neutral space between different cultural and linguistic
communities. Moreover, what frequently occurs is that role plays that are set
up to illustrate conflicts due to discriminatory practices are interpreted in the
same way as ones that would be better characterized as instances of
communication constituted by the ‘negative dialectic’ which Fabian refers to
above. In the latter cases, these involve interactional moves which may
produce ‘inappropriate’ or ‘unsuccessful’ responses in any of the participants,
but that can nevertheless create the possibility for critical and innovative
communication.
The adherence to rule-governed linguistic and cultural competency
models in interpreting theory and codes of conduct misconstrues language as
a medium and supports the view that it is different languages, in the sense of
langue, that act as barriers between peoples and cultures. It also encourages a
view of interlocutors as overly culturally determined. The role of the
interpreter becomes that of a mediator between different linguistic or cultural
systems, ignoring the other equally legitimate behavioral components—
individual beliefs and motivations, prior conversations, positional power—that
permit or constrain mutual understanding amongst communicative partners.
As a consequence, the dialectically and interactively created ‘conversation’
that comprises actual interpreted events—involving linguistic and non-
linguistic behavior—has remained undertheorized with regard to both
interpreting research and practice.

BEYOND OBJECTIVISM AND RELATIVISM

A range of instructive alternatives for considering the role of language and
culture in creating or constraining exchanges between communicative
partners can be found in contemporary philosophical debates which attempt
to account for the fact that what we think of as the ‘meaning’ of an utterance
is not given in language via some form of direct correspondence, but is an
outcome of the relationship between utterances in specific contexts where
‘language’ is but one of many tools used by participants to communicate. This
observation raises relevant questions regarding the contingent, historicized
nature of linguistic practices; how communication is achieved without an
appeal to stable shared rules; the origin of any consensus that may arise in
habitual patterns of communicative action; and the role of social and political
hierarchies and authority in forms and contexts of communication. A
consideration of these issues in interpreting contexts can shed light on
interpreted communication in ways which challenge the underlying
assumptions of existing interpreter codes of practice and allow us to envision
alternative ways of understanding communication more generally.

The World Brought Into Being

Eighteenth-century rationalist and empiricist accounts of knowledge mostly
did not challenge the Cartesian distinction between the ‘inner’ minds of
individual human subjects and the ‘outer’ phenomenal world of sense data.
Both rationalists and empiricists shared the view of language as a medium for
intervening between the self and reality, a means to ensure their contact. Kant
attempted to unify these points by asserting that the basis of all human
knowledge was certainly received from the outside world, as the empiricists
had claimed, but that human beings themselves organized this data through
the imposition of a priori forms and categories. The world of experience, the
phenomenal world of appearance was the outcome of innate, conceptual
categories that established the necessary conditions of possible experience.
Importantly, however, though Kant attempted to synthesize sensory data and
understanding, the ‘world’ remained essentially the phenomenal world only,
as it had been for the empiricists. Because for Kant all our thoughts are only
about things as they appear in the mind, in order to answer the question of
how we come to know things as they are he posited the existence of a
noumenal world, the world of things-in-themselves, but this was a world that
humans could never directly know. The world was accessible to them only
through innate categories of the mind, and the perceptions which these
engendered unveiled a reality that was necessarily separate and distinct from
the world of things-in-themselves. So although Kant explored foundations of
human knowledge that were neither solely innate nor experiential, he
underemphasized the role of an active, creative, and unconstrained perceiving
mind.2
It was not until the twentieth century that philosophers began to view
how humans relate to the world through language in radically new ways.
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations introduced the notion of meaning
as given in or by use: the idea that what we think of as meaning is a matter of
words being used as part of broader purposeful human activity, rather than a
matter of a special mental act of grasping of an abstract/sensory entity of
some kind. For Wittgenstein, attributions of meaning and understanding were
possible only between human beings within social practices. He wrote
(1953/1963: 53):
But can’t the meaning of a word that I understand fit the sense of a
sentence that I understand? Or the meaning of one word fit the meaning
of another?—Of course, if the meaning is the use we make of the word, it
makes no sense to speak of such ‘fitting’. But we understand the meaning
of a word when we hear or say it; we grasp it in a flash, and what we
grasp in this way is surely something different from the ‘use’ which is
extended in time!
Wittgenstein raises questions here about two related phenomena—what he
refers to as words and meanings ‘fitting’ one another and meaning being
grasped in a ‘flash’. The idea of words and meanings ‘fitting’ one another
recalls the feeling we intuit when we produce a word or utterance which
strikes us as right. This is the phenomenon of seeing that a word has the
meaning required by a particular situation: those moments when we feel that
a word, the meaning of a word, fits a particular context or when we see that
one expression can be substituted for another in a certain sentence without
changing the significance of the sentence.
The idea of grasping meaning in a ‘flash’ is the phenomenon we
experience at the moment of reception of an utterance when we have the
feeling of things making sense, a confidence that we have come to understand
a certain expression. This experience can happen when one is trying to
understand a particular term or someone is trying to explain its meaning and
an example or analogy is used, at which point something clicks and we feel
confident that we can go on and use and understand the term correctly, that
we have grasped the meaning.
For Wittgenstein, from these feelings of flash and fit, it does not
necessarily follow that a meaning has been represented in the mind through
language. He viewed these experiences more as cues for understanding—
ultimately whether one’s choice of meaning works is a matter of whether the
proposed use of the word works. What is experienced in such moments is not
language serving as a mediating element between our minds and the world.
This leads to the mistaken assumption that language somehow fits the world,
that it functions as a unity of sorts, a third thing that stands in some
determinate relation with two other unities, our individual selves and some
objective reality. This assumption, as Richard Rorty has suggested, has led to
the erroneous view that a language is like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle
(representing the world) with all languages capable of being united with all
other languages in one grand super language. This assumption makes sense
only, according to Rorty, “once we accept the view that there are non-
linguistic things called ‘facts’ and ‘meanings’ which it is the task of language
to represent” (Rorty 1989: 13), a view which Rorty and others reject.

A Pragmatist Perspective on Language

The perspective on language presented above shares something in common
with a pragmatist model of philosophical inquiry. The relationship with
pragmatism is indirect in the case of Wittgenstein (see Putnam 1995;
Goodman 1998), while Rorty explicitly identifies with the pragmatist tradition.
Though pragmatism has meant different things to different people, what is
relevant to the present discussion is its focus on the human agent as actively
engaged with the world and its understanding of the relationship between
language, thought, and meaning.
William James and Charles S. Peirce, whose work established the earliest
principles of pragmatism, understood our beliefs about the world as rules of
action rather than attempts to represent reality. For James, different and
conflicting forms of inquiry—e.g., common sense, scientific, philosophical—
provided evidence for the idea that our beliefs were not insights into the
nature of things; they were routes of inquiry and investigation, all equally
‘true’, in the sense that they were instrumentally good for different purposes,
“mental modes of adaptation to reality” (James 1975/1907: 94), subject to both
modification and justification. In the pragmatic tradition, the justification of
beliefs is not given in the form of metaphysical guarantees but through
cooperative human interaction and the active intervention of the
environment.3 As the pragmatist philosopher Hilary Putman explains, quoting
James (Putnam 1995: 71–72, original italics),
The problem of subjectivity and intersubjectivity was in the minds of
pragmatists from the beginning—not as a metaphysical worry about
whether we have access to a world at all, but as real problems in human
 life. They insisted that when one human being in isolation tries to
interpret even the best maxims for himself and does not allow others to
criticize the way in which he or she interprets those maxims, or the way
in which he or she applies them, then the kind of “certainty” that results is
in practice tainted with subjectivity. Even the notion of ‘truth” makes no
sense in “moral solitude” for “truth presupposes a standard eternal to the
thinker”.
Central to the pragmatist tradition and to Wittgenstein’s view of language
as a ‘form of life’ is the idea that words acquire meaning in interaction with
others, not in isolation or by being paired with experiences or things; for both,
the meaning of words is determined by use. For Wittgenstein, language games
are also ways of acting based on habits, instincts, and emotions. In his case
against the possibility of a private language, Wittgenstein argues that it is
impossible for speakers to know whether they are using the words of their
language ‘correctly’ or the ‘same’ with reference to a sensation or an object or
an experience, for no language can refer to a sphere of private things.
Pragmatists like Rorty and Putnam share this understanding and the
implication underlying it: that the impulse to ‘view the world from Nowhere’
or from a ‘God’s eye view’ is untenable (Rorty 1989; Putnam 1981). They
reject the notion of rationality as fixed by a set of immutable rules and a
priori principles, preferring to view rationality as revisable and contextual,
grounded in public norms and practices.4
The influential language philosopher Donald Davidson has similarly
argued against adhering to this distinction between determinate realities and a
set of words or concepts which may or may not be adequate to them. For
Davidson, all attempts to describe the ‘truth’ of utterances through notions of
conceptual schemes fall back on the same erroneous assumption that
languages organize or fit something like an objective ‘reality’ or sensory
experience (Davidson 1984: 183–198). According to Davidson, there is no such
task for language to perform. Our intuitive predictions about others’ beliefs
are not a product of linguistic or cultural competence in the way this is
understood in structural linguistics or sociolinguistics. Davidson argues
against the assumption of stable shared rules for linguistic or cultural
understanding. Instead, he suggests that speakers proceed on intuitive
predictions of meaning based on their immediate context and previous habits
of linguistic understanding. In interpreting others—within their own or into
other languages—speakers assume a connection between the contents of their
own thoughts and those of their interlocutors. They attribute rational
causality to how those thoughts got there in the first place. Although
Davidson would agree that what we call a ‘natural language’ is an existing
pattern embodying a set of distinctive conventions, he would not agree that it
is by virtue of these existing patterns that a hearer/interpreter is able to
understand the meaning of what another speaker says. For him, there is
nothing for a language to be, only the occasions of utterances.
Davidson wishes to replace a correspondence view of truth, language, and
reality with the view that when we communicate we have only our ‘passing
theories’ to rely on—a set of guesses about our interlocutors’ total behavior,
theories which must constantly be adjusted to new circumstances with the
same or new interlocutors (D. Davidson 1986). This suggests that what two
people need if they are to communicate with one another is the ability to
converge on their passing theories from utterance to utterance. Where
communication succeeds, an individual’s passing theory about what to do
next, including what utterances to use and their expectations about what each
other will do or say under the circumstances, more or less coincide (ibid.: 446):
A passing theory is really like a theory at least in this, that it is derived by
wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar,
knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb
for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely.… In
linguistic communication nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence
as often described. There is therefore no such thing [as a language, as
usually conceived by linguists and philosophers] to be learned, mastered,
or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared
structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.
Our own passing theories allow us to interpret other speakers’ sentences
as ‘holding true’. They allow us to anticipate that speakers will mean what
they say, and on the occasion of an utterance, to decide what was meant.
With speakers whose beliefs or values prove unfamiliar or different from our
own, we try to accommodate the views they hold based on a ‘principle of
charity’. In constructing a viable theory of beliefs and adversarial meanings
‘held true’ by our conversational partners, “there is a presumption in favor of
truth of a belief that coheres with a significant mass of belief” including our
own (D. Davidson 1990: 121). This is the common ground on which we make
whatever sense we can of one another in a particular context. This three-way
conceptual inter-dependence between knowledge of oneself, knowledge of
others, and knowledge of the world is the ‘other orientedness’ of
communication. It is this, our very inter-subjectivity, that constitutes
‘objective meaning’. For Davidson, this implies a rejection of cultural
relativism, of the idea of incommensurable systems of belief (see also, Hollis
and Lukes 1982; Rorty 1991c) on the grounds that to possess attitudes and be
capable of speech is already to be capable of interpreting others and to be
open to interpretation by them. As Davidson remarks (1984: 196–197),
What matters is this: if all we know is what sentences a speaker holds
true, and we cannot assume that his language is our own, then we cannot
take even a first step towards interpretation without knowing or assuming
a great deal about the speaker’s beliefs. Since knowledge of beliefs comes
only with the ability to interpret words, the only possibility at the start is
to assume general agreement on beliefs […] this method is not designed to
eliminate disagreement, nor can it; its purpose is to make meaningful
disagreement possible, and this depends entirely on a foundation—some
foundation—in agreement.
The ‘foundation’ Davidson has in mind is the ‘other orientedness’ of
communication which, for Davidson, constitutes ‘objective meaning’. This
view shares something in common with Fabian’s notion of ‘ethnographic
objectivity’ which views the ethnographic encounter as an action-driven
processual theory of knowledge. Both views understand ‘objective’ knowledge
to be achieved in communication through confrontations of beliefs and
attitudes. They consider communication with others—reacting and responding
to others—as central to the concept of an objective world. Both also reject the
idea that meaning is convention- or culture-bound in favor of the view that
the ‘truth’ of an utterance is relative to the circumstances of its use.
Importantly, in both these perspectives, dialogue, in the sense of meaningful
agreement or disagreement, is viewed as emerging from a cognitive capacity
for mutual understanding, rather than as the means to achieve it. For
Davidson, we can’t have any ideas to reach agreement or disagreement over
until we share a picture of a world.5
 Interpreter codes of practice which view the interpreter’s job as one of
resolving questions of semantic uncertainty frequently appeal, sometimes
simultaneously, to relativist arguments about language and culture and to
objectivist accounts of meaning. Relativist arguments, following notions of
communicative competence, construct the interpreter as a cultural mediator
whose role it is to identify and explain difference in order to overcome it.
Objectivist arguments support a universalist account of language and
cognition and the accompanying belief that there is meaning ‘out there’ to
recover through the medium of language. The consequence of embracing
either of these perspectives is to perceive the interpreter’s role as one of
seeking to establish the sameness of a world beyond language. But this view
of the interpreter role only serves to reinforce a view of language as a ‘unity’
intervening between the self and some non-linguistic reality, culturally or
universally given, which it is the task of language to represent (see Rorty 1989:
3–22). The alternative view proposed here, that there is nothing for language
to be, only the occasions of its utterances, shifts the focus of attention to
language as a tool which along with other tools helps interlocutors to achieve
their communicative objectives in a given context. As Putnam suggests (1981:
116),
One can understand the assertion that a translation fails to capture exactly
the sense or reference of the original as an admission that a better
translation scheme might be found; but it makes only an illusion of sense
to say that all possible translation schemes fail to capture the ‘real’ sense
or reference. Synonymy exists only as a relation, or better, as a family of
relations, each of them somewhat vague, which we employ to equate
different expressions for the purposes of the interpretation. The idea that
there is some such thing as ‘real’ synonymy apart from all workable
practices of mutual interpretation, has been discarded as a myth.
In interpreted interactions, the search for ‘workable practices of mutual
interpretation’ includes factors such as: what is at stake for individual
participants in an interpreted event; what are the professional, ethical,
political, social, or personal risks involved in the interaction; is there a
potential for conflicting views over what may be reasonably meant or
understood by an utterance in the particular situation; and what ethical,
political, or social factors may lie behind a claim that one participant’s
understanding of an utterance is reasonable or that another’s should be
challenged.

Passing Theories and the Relative Status of Interpreters

In an instructive discussion of the interpreting in the O. J. Simpson trial,
Anthony Pym (Pym 1999) references Davidson’s notion of ‘passing theories’
in his analysis of the various theories about language and interpreting that
were offered by the trial judge and the prosecution and defense lawyers,
amongst others. Pym notes how these theories served as active constraints on
discourse as the behaviors they ‘described, justified or condemned’ moved the
discourse in the courtroom some ways more easily than others (ibid.: 275). In
the context of the trial, certain articulated beliefs about a particular
interpreted exchange (regarding the interpreter, choice of word, cultural
factors, etc.) circulated in the courtroom, influencing the flow of discourse
both within and outside the trial itself. Pym points to potential problems with
allowing discourse such latitude. He suggests that granting equal time to
effective and ineffective hypotheses can simply add to a “directionless
diversity” (ibid.: 281). Pym concludes:
The problem of the Simpson trial, with its plethora of theories, was that it
made far too many constraints visible, pushing issues well beyond any
criterion of importance. Oppositional passing theories were allowed to
prevail over stronger consensus-building approaches.
That the plethora of theories in this case were framed in essentially
oppositional/monologic rather than consensual/dialogic terms is not
surprising given the adversarial legal system in which they were expressed.
But for Pym, the bigger issue is how different theories can work more
effectively to create consensus concerning semantic or pragmatic matters in
interpreted interactions. He proposes that “default trust” should prevail in the
decisions of interpreters themselves (and presumably the theories that
underlie them) and that outside interventions should be permitted to help
solve a specific problem only, not to propose entirely new sets of principles.
While this proposal appears oriented to grant interactional authority to the
interpreter role, at the same time Pym suggests that interpreters themselves
should not be encouraged to comment on a specific problem that arises in
their interpreting, fearing that this would pose an unnecessary and potentially
harmful challenge to the existing theory of professionalism that proposes:
“interpreters do one thing (‘verbatim translation’) and lawyers do another
(‘interpretation’).” Instead he argues, “If there are to be comments on the
problems of cross-lingual rendering, it seems they should ideally come from a
further profession, that of experts and scholars, whose theories need not
directly challenge those of lawyers, since the latter can ‘interpret’ them as
well” (ibid.: 280).
This view seems to contradict the default trust Pym wishes to invest in
interpreters. Moreover, it assumes that professional demarcations like the one
above are objective and that the presumed distinction between ‘verbatim
translation’ and ‘interpretation’ is a valid one. It is unclear why more
legitimacy should be granted to “experts and scholars” than to interpreters’
attempts to resolve ‘problems of cross-lingual rendering’, and it is also unclear
why lawyers would be better able to ‘interpret’ the former’s passing theories
than they would those of the interpreters involved. This adds a clear social
dimension to the idea of a passing theory; one that establishes an unequal
distribution of both knowledge and authority within the communicative space
regarding what does or does not constitute an effective theory. The idea that
explicit commentaries by interpreters on ‘problems of cross-lingual rendering’
are problematic for lawyers is a view that has also been expressed by Susan
Berk-Seligson (1990: 195–196) who is cited in Pym’s article. Based on evidence
from mock trial settings which were designed to examine the effects of
interpreters in bilingual courtrooms, she emphasizes the problems for
attorneys when interpreters bring themselves and their task into view:
Both Hispanic mock jurors and the entire sample as a whole consider an
attorney to be less competent when the interpreter stops him repeatedly in
order to clarify some point in reference to her impending interpretation, or
to request that he repeat a portion of his question for her. Such
interruptions often can justifiably be interpreted by the listener as an
indirect criticism of the attorney by the interpreter. When an interpreter
states that the attorney’s question is so long that it exceeds the limits of
her retention, she is in effect complaining to him that he is not sensitive to
her professional needs. It is to imply that he should know better. When
 she asks permission to change the grammatical form of the question, she is
indirectly criticizing the lawyer for not being sensitive to the linguistic
needs of the witness. Apparently mock jurors, particularly Hispanic mock
jurors, judging by their evaluations of the attorney who is interrupted,
sympathize with the veiled criticism made by the interpreter. For Hispanic
listeners an attorney who repeatedly is interrupted by an interpreter is
perceived as not only less competent, but also less intelligent.
At first glance, Berk-Seligson appears to be commenting here about the
negative effects of interpreter interventions on the mock jurors’ views of the
attorneys. In the same passage, however, she interjects her own belief in the
justifiability of their interpretations. It is not at all clear why the mock jurors
or Berk-Seligson perceive the interpreter’s requests for clarification, shorter
sentences, or changes in tense negatively as ‘veiled criticisms’ of the
attorney’s intelligence or his lack of sensitivity to the needs of either the
interpreter or the witness rather than as positive interventions designed to
better ensure that mutual understanding occurs amongst all participants in the
trial. This is the presumed objective of both the interpreter and attorney, and
the witnesses and jurors as well. This is not to say that all interpreters perform
their tasks equally competently or tactfully, but this can also be said of
attorneys and other professionals. The real issue, however, is not about
competence, but about the relative status being allocated here to interpreters
and lawyers. Although Pym wishes to demonstrate in his article how ‘passing
theories’ consistently serve as active constraints on discourse not “in terms of
specific people, norms or institutions” (1999: 175), what he reveals in the end is
precisely how they are actively constrained by these very terms with his
recognition of “a significant degree of power-play underlying the various
levels of theorization, most prominently in the silencing of interpreters’
theories” (ibid.: 280). Pym ultimately has to acknowledge, though not without
some degree of ambivalence, what I wish to argue in this book: that the
interpreter’s part in the situated evaluation of what an utterance is intended to
communicate is very like that of their conversational partners. All proceed on
intuitive predictions of meaning based on the current context and previous
habits of linguistic understanding. The decisions taken by any one of the
interactants—for example, about whether to attempt to disambiguate the use
of an utterance, whether to privilege only the verbal aspects of an interaction
or to in some way explicitly or implicitly recognize or reveal their wider
purposes, whether to accommodate or fail to recognize another’s view of the
world, whether or not to attribute rational causality to utterances—will be
influenced by previous contexts, institutional demands, political or economic
motivation, and, in situations of heightened or violent conflict, the decision to
recognize or not another’s human rights. Where interpreters differ from their
conversational partners, however, is in their right to have their ‘passing
theories’ recognized and ratified without constraint.

ACKNOWLEDGING UNCERTAINTY
While professional codes of practice may offer some protection to interpreters,
may help guide their decisions, these codes erroneously assume that the
principle demand on interpreters is a linguistic or sociolinguistic one. Across a
range of interpreting contexts, and particularly in situations defined by
conflict—whether an asylum application hearing or the heightened conflict of
a war zone—the decisions interpreters make and must make extend far
beyond their linguistic abilities. They force them to confront the boundaries of
their knowledge, their beliefs, their prior experiences, and their ethical
practice both professionally and personally. It is precisely at these moments
where professional codes stressing impartiality and loyalty confront questions
of justice and individual conscience. And it is precisely at these moments
where notions of objectivity and inter-subjectivity become one and the same.
Attempts to resolve semantic uncertainties by any one of the participants
involved in a communicative exchange, interpreted or not, involve decisions
not discoveries about the meaning of a spoken utterance. Particular accounts
of these sorts of decision processes in interpreted encounters are presented
below in the form of personal reports taken from interviews I conducted with
interpreters and asylum judges working in the U.K. asylum system and the
published written accounts of two military interpreters working in Iraq and
Guantánamo.6 Their comments offer important insights into what is at stake
in interpreted events that go beyond the linguistic and cultural issues typically
foregrounded in codes of practice.

Communicative Objectives, Situated Knowledge, and Utterance

Meaning
In the first example, the interview segment begins with me asking an
interpreter to articulate her approach to interpreting for a lawyer and a client
during an interview about an asylum application claim. In the course of the
interview, the interpreter illustrates her approach to interpreting by describing
an intervention she made in the course of an appeal hearing in the course of a
summation to the judge made by a Home Office representative, the
government agency responsible for immigration and border control, designed
to discredit an Iranian appellant’s case for asylum (Interpreter interview,
2004):

M: What would you do if you were speaking to a solicitor who perhaps

wasn’t very experienced say with Iran or, having any Iranian clients, for
example and what if something came up that you knew to be potentially
confusing in the way that the person
INT: I would intervene of course I would give them the background of that,
yes.
M: Right, and now what would constitute your feeling that you ought to
intervene, I mean would it be a meaning of a word or would it be if they
were discussing a political situation
INT: Yes
M: Either way
INT: Yes
M: If you felt the solicitor needed your
INT: Yes, I would give the solicitor some more information about, just about
the political matters, if it’s about the cultural, especially cultural matters,
yes … I was sitting monitoring one hearing about nine months ago when
the Home Office representative was pointing out to the judge that this
man is saying he never left the country [Iran] but he says that he’s been
in Azerbaijan. And the judge was listening, the interpreter didn’t say
anything, I just checked with my barrister and made eye contact, and
the barrister asked permission to talk to his interpreter and it was given
and I told the barrister, look Azerbaijan is in Russia, fine, but one part of
Azerbaijan is in Iran, that part of Azerbaijan in Russia belonged to Iran
 once, that’s why it’s called Azerbaijan, it still has the name, but the
Azerbaijan our client is talking about is the part which is in Iran, so we
just left it there, as the barrister wanted it to be left, or our client would
lose credibility. So they have to be very aware of the situation, that
interpreter didn’t get the point. I’m sure he knew that Azerbaijan was in
Iran, definitely, because he was a doctor, but he didn’t notice that point,
these are the crucial points that we have to pick up quickly, don’t let it
go, and explain about them later. This is the last chance the client has
sitting there in front of an independent judge.

The suggestion that an applicant is lying about any aspect of his or her
case is a common strategy used by the government to discredit an entire
claim. As such, the Home Office representative has represented Iran and
Azerbaijan as two different countries in order to render the appellant’s
utterance as contradictory. The interpreter’s intervention demonstrates her
awareness of this strategy and of the importance of re-establishing this client’s
credibility in the face of the government’s attempt to identify his statements
as contradictory. She provides the appellant’s barrister/lawyer an account of
the historical and political geography of the region of Iran under scrutiny—
describing Azerbaijan as ‘in Iran’ in order to interpret the appellant’s
utterance that he never left Iran but had been in Azerbaijan as ‘holding true’
based on their assumed shared knowledge. The official interpreter in the
proceedings has not intervened to make this point, although in the interview
the interpreter appears certain that he too would share this knowledge,
implying that his position as a doctor would make this so. Though it is not
clear why the official interpreter does not intervene, the interpreter suggests
that it is the lack of awareness on his part of the strategic move being
undertaken by the government and the importance of the point of clarifying
this issue for the official record.
Despite the interpreter’s expressed belief in the common knowledge of the
region held by the three Iranians involved—the appellant and both interpreters
—the appellant’s lawyer recognizes that the complex and contested history,
politics, and geography of the territories currently known as Iran, Azerbaijan,
or Russia cannot be materially established in the present by the court’s criteria
of indisputable and relevant fact. All that can happen is that the interpreter’s
information can be formally recorded as offered to the court to contradict the
claim by the Home Office. The ‘truth’ of each position exists not in relation to
an immediately evident material reality, but as competing forms of coherence,
or language games, presented simultaneously as part of the record of the
court’s proceedings. The government official may have been willfully
interpreting the appellant in such a way as to convince the judge to make a
negative decision in order to win his case. It is also possible that neither of the
interpreters present may be ‘interpreting’ the appellant in the way in which he
intends, despite the certainty the interpreter expresses in the interview.
Attempts in the context of the asylum system to link inconsistency of
utterances to credibility are a strategic move in a legal and political game, but
they do not reflect ‘facts’ and an objective reality which an interpreter should
hope to or be expected to resolve.
In the next example, the interpreter, himself a torture victim, discusses
interpreting for some Kurdish applicants who claim to have undergone torture
(Interpreter interview, 2004):
I have witnessed liars get granted asylum and genuine refugees be refused.
I have been tortured so I know what torture is. When I hear people say
they have been tortured for 5 to 10 minutes with electric shock I know
they are lying as it only takes 1 or 2 minutes to make an impact. I know
what the pain of torture feels like. When you are hung in chains, for
example, you sweat, lots of people never mention this, I think they are
lying.
For this interpreter, torture means his experience of torture. He assumes
continuity between his experience and those of other people who claim to
have been tortured. Where this continuity does not appear in a claimant’s
utterances, he assumes they are lying. His own experience of torture has come
to represent an ‘objective truth’ for him; he never suggests the possibility that
torture may vary or that thresholds of pain or physical responses to pain may
vary. But having said this, this interpreter simultaneously recognizes an
alternative set of intentions which asylum applicants’ utterances regarding
can also reflect—not about what torture is or is not, but what the claim to
have been tortured means in this context. Both the ‘liars’ and ‘genuine
refugees’ share a similar communicative objective, one which he himself has
already met—to establish a recognized valid claim for persecution in order to
strengthen their chances of being granted asylum. About the alleged liars, he
tells me, “[Y]ou gotta do what you gotta do”, and utterances claiming torture,
according to this interpreter, serve these applicants’ communicative
objectives. The fact that genuine refugees lie to achieve certain objectives,
however, is recognized within the refugee system. As Dawes reports, citing
Larry, a legal officer working for UNHCR (Dawes, 2007: 83),
Even those who truly merit refugee status will lie if they believe another
story will be more likely to succeed, if they believe they will harm
somebody by telling the truth, or if they wish to hide how they managed
to enter the country. “Human nature being what it is, when someone lies
to us we think they’re a liar”, Larry comments. “You have to put that
aside. Someone can lie and still be a refugee”. Legal officers, Larry
explains, have several strategies for cross-checking facts and gauging
consistency of stories during interviews, and he emphasized that they
work carefully to determine which lies are irrelevant and which are
material to the final decision. It is slow work.
In a similar vein, although the interpreter interviewed appeals to his set of
‘facts’ about torture to brand certain applicants as liars, he implicitly
recognizes a separate reality created by the particular context—that liars and
genuine refugees may indeed be one and the same thing.
In the next example, the focus shifts to interpreters in the asylum system
who can themselves come to embody the national or ethnic conflicts on which
a claim is based. Utterances are ‘interpreted’ by any or all participants within
a larger symbolic economy of legal rights and political positioning, and trust
amongst conversational partners can be easily undermined. The segment
below is taken from an interview conducted between myself and an asylum
judge. The judge is discussing the dilemma she faces when she senses or sees
what she takes to be a sign of conflict between interpreters and appellants, in
this case, Eastern European interpreters and Roma Gypsies (Immigration
Judge, 2004).

A: Well, there have been instances in the past where I have had Eastern
European interpreters, with perhaps a Roma gypsy, and I can immediately
see that the predator that they [the Roma] face in their own country is
sitting right next to them, because they [the Interpreters] are sitting three
feet away, whereas normally you would expect the distance to be a
 normal sort of chair, perhaps eighteen inches, that sort of thing
M: Yes, and does that, I mean apart from the kind of unpleasantness of that in
the space that they’re occupying, does that concern you that then it would
be affecting the interpreter’s ability or willingness or in some ways distort
the interpreter’s role?
A: Yes, well, I’m conscious of that, and I think in those circumstances it’s
important to keep the questions straightforward and simple, but it’s very
easy when you’re speaking English to, or any language I guess, to make a
very convoluted question. And if you’ve got to the point where I felt that
it was affecting, although your question is how would I know it was
affecting, then I would just stop and adjourn and give them another
interpreter. But I have, in the appeals system we have written statements,
we have what they’ve said in the past, so provided nothing, if something
totally different came out, and I thought the interpreter was
misinterpreting, I would stop immediately.

In her comments, the judge likens the interpreter relation to the applicant
to a predator, a predator in this case menacing its prey from a notable
distance. For this judge, the body language of the actual interpreter and her
experiences with previous interpreters from Eastern Europe indicate the
possibility that the interpreter’s view of the world does not necessarily
accommodate the appellant’s view regarding the persecution of Roma Gypsies
or of this Roma Gypsy in Eastern Europe. In cases such as these, the judge
claims to consciously adjust her language, to keep her questions
‘straightforward and simple’ to make both the questions and subsequent
responses less vulnerable to the potential manipulation of the appellant’s
utterances she anticipates by the interpreter. She also registers the possibility
of consulting previous statements on record (which are produced from
previously interpreted oral testimony) and, if all else fails, to cease
communicating with this particular interpreter altogether.
It is interesting that in this case the judge is prepared to use
inconsistencies between past accounts and present spoken utterances to
challenge the interpreter’s credibility, not the appellant’s. She implicitly
recognizes that any participant’s utterance in an interpreted event, including
the interpreter’s, can operate strategically to achieve communicative
objectives. She acknowledges that she cannot operate with absolute certainty
about the correspondence between utterances and facts about the world but
must rely on extra-linguistic factors as well, including body language, her
prior experience of similar instances, and her authority to adjourn the hearing
and start the process all over again.

Interpreting the Enemy

A similar tension is evident in the written accounts of two U.S. military
linguists: Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More than You (Williams 2005) based
on her time in Iraq from 2002 to 2003 and Eric Saar’s Inside the Wire (Saar and
Novak 2005) based on his six months in Guantánamo in that same period.
Both accounts reveal a set of tensions: for Williams in her relationship to the
Iraqis she was sent to liberate; and for Saar in his relationship to the detainees.
In her book, Williams recalls the orders given to her ‘peacekeeping’ unit
when the threat level is placed at high. When confronting a ‘guy on the side
of the road with a cell phone’ they are instructed to point their weapons at
him and if he won’t get off the phone, to opt to shoot him in the event he is
revealing their position to the insurgents. Williams, who believes she is “better
equipped than most soldiers to see these civilians as people” because she
speaks Arabic and has Arab friends, describes the point at which she and her
unit choose certainty over self-doubt and decide to “assume the worst about
everyone” (Williams 2005: 238):
In truth, every incident that happens is a completely discrete incident, but
it’s almost impossible to live this way. Basically we all reach a point
where we have to assume that everyone is friendly (and respond
accordingly), or assume that everyone is a potential enemy (and treat
them as such). It simply becomes too overwhelming to play that line at
every single moment. To look at each person and make that choice over
and over and over again. To ask yourself: Will I give this person food? Or
will I point my gun at this person? So we make one choice: We come to
assume the worst about everyone. And we stick with it.
Like the judge in the previous example, Williams and her unit rely on
prior experiences to interpret a certain behavior in a certain way, even though
in her case it may mean shooting an innocent person. Her unit’s decision ‘to
assume the worst about everyone’ requires that they must stop judging each
person each time in order to make the right choice. Similar to the judge,
Williams and her unit make a decision about who is the predator and who the
prey in a context where trust has broken down. Unlike the courtroom,
however, in the uncertainty of war, there is little time to think about whether
one’s judgment is correct, and there is no way to postpone a life or death
confrontation and start all over again.
During the same period, Saar operated in a dual capacity at Guantánamo
Bay as a translator and in military intelligence operations. His book offers an
‘insider’ account of the treatment of detainees in the camp and of the illicit
tactics used by military intelligence during interrogations. Part ‘confessional’
and part exposé, Saar reveals an ongoing tension between his patriotism
concerning the ‘war on terror’ on the one hand, and on the other, his moral
uncertainty regarding the treatment of many of the prisoners during
interrogations in which he participates in his capacity as interpreter.
Saar recalls a particular conversation with one of the detainees, Wael, a
university-educated Saudi living in Afghanistan who had been captured by
the Northern Alliance during a raid on his village outside Kandahar along
with “every Arab man in the area” (Saar and Novak 2005: 80). Wael has
requested an interpreter in order to claim his innocence and appeal for help,
and Saar consents to listen to him after Wael accepts that Saar can do nothing
for him in his role as a linguist (and not his interrogator). In response to Saar’s
question about how he ended up in Afghanistan, Wael explains that he went
there in the late 1990s looking for work, got a job in an orphanage, met a
woman, got married, had three children, and ended up working for a farmer.
He then tells Saar about his arrest and torture by the Northern Alliance and
subsequent detention and interrogation by the Americans. The following
exchange, which takes place in Arabic, is described in the book, followed by
Saar’s commentary:

S: Wael, I know you wanted to tell me your story, but there is really nothing
I can do.
W: Basam, I miss my children. They have no idea why their father is gone.
How do I explain this to them?
S: What do you want me to say, Wael?
W: I just wanted you to know. I want anyone who will listen to know. I
believe that you cannot help me. I just want you to know. Don’t believe
all the lies they are feeding you, Basam. Not every detainee is a terrorist.
Just ask some of the men who haven’t seen their interrogators in months.

As Wael speaks, a number of different worlds converge for Saar, as

evidenced in the following passage (ibid.: 81–82):
I had noticed that many of the detainees never seemed to go to
interrogations, and I wondered why this was the case. We linguists had
heard many similar stories of detainees being seized by the Northern
Alliance, an ad hoc confederation of anti-Taliban militia and warlords
with whom the United States had formed a loose and strictly expedient
partnership in the war in Afghanistan. Recent press reports had indicated
that the United States was paying bounties for terror suspects, and
American officials had made reference to this happening as well. It was a
troubling piece of information. We all knew people who would turn in
their own grandmother for the right sum, and five thousand dollars went
a long way in a place like Afghanistan.
Both Wael and Saar enter into the conversation to achieve a particular
end. Wael’s objective is to voice his innocence and to try to gain support for
his wish to be released. He lets Saar know who he is, where he comes from,
and that neither he, nor every detainee, is a terrorist. As one of the linguists
assigned to Guantánamo, Saar has experienced frustration at being assigned
the job of translating day-to-day communication with the detainees, instead
of working on intelligence analysis and interrogations. But he has also become
increasingly doubtful, as have some others in his unit, about the involvement
of many of the detainees in terrorism. The conversation with Wael creates an
opportunity for Saar to learn for himself whether the stories and press reports
about bounties and the Northern Alliance as well as his own observations
about detainees and interrogations have any bearing. Though the book does
not provide any information about whether speaking to Saar directly helped
Wael achieve his ultimate objective, Saar reports leaving the conversation
with some of his former beliefs disturbed, if not altered (ibid.: 82):
Later that night, after dinner in front of the TV, Wael’s story nagged at
 me. I wasn’t necessarily convinced it was true, although he sounded
believable. But the very possibility that he could be right, the notion that I
could be contributing to this man’s wrongful detention, bugged me.
Ahmad had mentioned his doubt that all the detainees at the camp were
really terrorists on my very first day inside, but until that conversation
with Wael, I’d been able to put the issue very effectively out of my head.
Saar relies on a number of factors to decide whether Wael’s story was
true: the accounts about the Guantánamo detainees he had heard from others;
his own observations in the camp; and the statements from Wael that sounded
believable to Saar, including, perhaps, his concern for his children, his
connection to his family. Given the wider context in which this occurred,
however, though it may have led Saar’s beliefs to converge with Wael’s at the
time, and over time, it did not necessarily secure Wael his release.7 Saar was a
member of the military and was thus complicit in the war and in Wael’s
detention. However, his position as a military linguist is not untypical of
interpreters more generally. In interpreted interactions, interpreters act on and
in the world as communicating social agents, whether they are perceived or
see themselves as helpless or useful conduits, cultural mediators, language
brokers, cultural experts, or social workers. They participate through language
in contexts which foster ambiguity, contradiction, misunderstanding, and
different forms of violence and betrayal which are resolvable only in relation
to the communicative objectives which give rise to them in the first place, not
through an appeal to an objective reality outside the boundaries of the
encounter itself. In contexts in which these objectives are tied to social,
political, economic, or militarist agendas, interpreters face additional
challenges to their professional roles and ethical codes of practice.

OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY REVISITED

Acknowledging semantic uncertainty as an aspect of all communication and
all interpreted interactions does not imply that confrontations of beliefs and
attitudes in communicative encounters must lead to misunderstanding or
reinforce differences. All confrontation is productive communication in that it
defines over and over again, from one communicative context to another, how
we understand, perceive, and experience the world. There is, however, no way
to stand outside of our beliefs to check their validity, or to check whether our
beliefs coincide with the beliefs of others.
In dialogic encounters, the relevant interlocutors enlist their own
interpretive theories to understand the role that any utterance produced plays
in its producer’s (and interpreter’s) relation to the world. It is through these
interpretive theories that interlocutors come to an understanding about the
reasons, i.e., the content of the beliefs, behind a particular utterance, including
the specific context in which it is presently embedded (as in the interpreter’s
understanding of the use of the word torture by the asylum applicant). An
interlocutor’s interpretive theory is not evidence of a conceptual scheme or of
communicative competence, however; it is an outcome of the triangulation
between speakers, hearers, and an ‘object’ or environment which represents
the “simplest interpersonal situation” (D. Davidson 2001: 129). Importantly, it
is not until people start communicating that they perceive a relationship
between their thoughts. This does not mean that they will mean the same
thing by the same words, only that they interpret what each other will say or
do based on expectations formed at the time as well as on prior experiences
that assist them in their present understanding. There is no guarantee that
interlocutors will accurately predict the effects of their words or control their
effects, though it is the case that where individuals interact with one another
verbally in ways that are effective enough, often enough, for all concerned,
then more or less congruent patterns of verbal production and uptake can
emerge.
2 Ethical Communication

For interpreters and their interlocutors—those for whom and with whom they
speak—codes of ethics and codes of practice serve as non-binding contractual
agreements that aim to ensure the truth and accuracy of all interpreted
utterances. Given that it is frequently only the interpreter who understands all
of the languages used in an interaction, these codes also serve to reassure the
other participants that interpreters have an obligation to speak their words in
the way they intended. The existence of codes that guarantee an interpreter
will not add, alter, or omit any aspect of an utterance reinforces the notion of
inter- and intra-lingual systematicity between signs and referents: that aside
from the occasional need for cultural clarification of a word or an utterance
meaning, semantic and pragmatic equivalence is a realizable end, and one that
is achievable without the need for engaged interpretation or negotiation of
meaning.
The previous chapter argued that many of the prevailing perceptions
about language and communication that inform interpreting theory and
practice do not adequately reflect the actual tasks involved in all forms of
communication. This chapter questions the extent to which existing codes of
ethics, and the principles they subscribe to, permit interpreters to honor their
professional obligations and, at the same time, to act socially and ethically
responsibly. I explore the sources in deontological, or duty-based, ethics for
the principles of neutrality and impartiality that inform these codes and
consider whether they serve as adequate guides for the decisions interpreters
are sometimes compelled to make. I also consider alternative perspectives on
ethics which move beyond questions of duty and impartiality and help to
chart new ground for an ethics of interpreting which acknowledges semantic
uncertainty and moral certainty as legitimate guides for interpreter practice.
ETHICS AND THE INTERPRETED ENCOUNTER
Codes of ethics and codes of practice are commonly taken to be perceived by
all the parties in an interpreted interaction as serving both a practical and an
ethical purpose. From a language perspective, such codes are seen to limit the
potential for misunderstanding and guarantee that interpretations are true and
accurate. From an ethical perspective, they are deemed to provide the
necessary ground rules for ethical conduct primarily through the maintenance
of ‘neutrality’ and the ‘faithful’ reproduction of original utterances—the
adherence to truth. Codes are assumed to help interpreters avoid certain
practices such as: omitting potentially incriminating information;
manipulating testimony or questioning in favor of one party or another; or
offering meta-textual information to any one party which might provide an
unfair advantage with respect to their communicative objectives. The
obligation of interpreters to aspire to objective or impartial positions, it is
assumed, encourages them to interpret utterances not based on their own or
another party’s self-interest, but on rational, objective criteria established by
and in language itself.

The Limits of Duty

Codes of ethics are not legally binding contractual agreements. Interpreters
comply with codes of ethics not from fear of prosecution but from a sense of
duty and professional obligation. A deontological approach to ethics—that is,
ethics perceived as a set of objective rules or duties that decide ethical
behavior irrespective of their consequences—is stressed in both interpreter
training and practice where the emphasis on duties and obligations is tied to
principles of fidelity and neutrality. The assumed link between duty and
neutrality is what permits interpreters to claim, and their interlocutors to
demand, that the interpreters should ‘just translate’ even where abuses of
power or instances of injustice are in evidence, or when faced with questions
of personal conscience.1
Justification for this link is partly rooted in a deontological approach to
ethics associated with Kant which relates duty to rational principles and the
establishment of compulsory moral rules of ethical behavior. To be truly
ethical, according to this approach, our perceived duty toward others must be
rooted in rational and universal principles, such as the maxim that all human
beings deserve the right to freedom and control over their lives. These
principles must be intended to serve, without contradiction, as a universal
maxim for all. The deontological view imagines a process in which a rational
individual puts him or herself in the position of another and reaches a moral
judgment that would hold for or be applicable to all across time and space.
And importantly, individuals behave morally responsibly when acting out of a
sense of duty to these principles rather than responding to personal emotions
or a concern for the consequences of their behavior, legal or otherwise. In
interpreted interactions, interpreters’ compliance with the principle of
impartiality is viewed as crucial to their fulfillment of this ethical obligation.
The following extracts, taken from interviews I conducted with
interpreters in the U.K., illustrate some potential benefits of impartiality to the
parties involved. The first involves a Roma Gypsy from Poland seeking to
apply for asylum. In this example, a Polish interpreter describes her
interaction with a Roma Gypsy and a lawyer in the U.K. She expresses her
dismay at having to repeat the client’s words verbatim, because the applicant
was swearing a lot and because in her view he (and others like him) was
lying. The interpreter bases her decision to be “the voice of this person and
nothing else” on her duty as an interpreter, despite her apparent disapproval
of the style and content of the Roma asylum seeker’s utterances:2
You just see the person, you just hear when they start saying things and
you just, oh my god, you know, but you can’t do anything, you can’t do
anything. Then you are interpreting, you were interpreting and they were
swearing, yes they were swearing, I was swearing to the solicitor, and I
was saying exactly what they were saying. So there’s a lot of things and
it’s like you just want to say, ‘oh my god, what are you doing, just stop’,
but you can’t, you are the voice of this person and nothing else.
(Interpreter #3)
In the second example a Lebanese interpreter describes the testimony of a
Lebanese Palestinian asylum seeker who she felt “pretty sure” was giving his
lawyer intentionally false information about the Lebanese or Palestinian
government’s issuance of IDs for travel. Although she believed the “solicitor
didn’t have a clue what the client was talking about”, she also felt she
“couldn’t get involved really”. This interpreter does not mention her duty;
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 CHAPTER IX
COUNTIES AND RURAL COMMUNITIES

The purpose of this chapter is to show how the counties, towns, and
villages of the United States are governed, who their local officials are, and
what they do.

What Local Government Is.—The functions The division of

performed by governments fall into two governmental
divisions. First, there are functions which relate functions.
mainly to the life and activities of the neighborhood, such as police
administration, fire protection, the cleaning of streets, and the care of
the poor. These things can best be managed by the local authorities.
Second, there are functions of a more general character which relate
to the life and activities of the entire state or nation, such as the
regulation of the railroads, the coining of money, the maintenance of
post offices, and the control of corporations. These functions we
have committed, accordingly, to the state and national governments.
In earlier days, before industry and commerce developed so greatly,
local functions were the more numerous; but as population grows the
whole country tends to become one great community, hence many
functions formerly performed by the local authorities are being taken
over by the states and the nation. It is impossible to lay down any
rule as to what functions are local and what functions are general. A
few years ago each town and village made its own regulations
concerning the speed limit for automobiles; to-day that matter has
been taken over almost everywhere by the state authorities.
The Beginnings of Local Government in Local government
the United States.—Local government is the in the colonies.
oldest branch of government; both the state and the national
government have grown out of it. When colonists first came from
England to Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay they settled on small
farms and built their houses within short distances of one another. In
Virginia, on the other hand, the colonists took up large plantations for
the growing of tobacco and cotton; their homes were spread over a
wide area. Because of the difference in the manner of settlement the
New England colonists organized themselves into towns (or
townships) while the Southern colonists created larger units of local
government known as counties. From the Atlantic seaboard these
two types of local administration—township and county government
—have spread out over the rest of the country. In the course of this
spread they have been considerably altered from their original forms.
 County Government
The County.—Every state in the Union is now Nature of the
divided into counties.[59] The division is made by county.
the state legislature, but when county boundaries are once fixed they
are seldom changed thereafter. In the older states the counties are
often small; in the newer states they sometimes cover several
hundred square miles.[60] Counties, like cities, are public
corporations, that is to say they have the right to own property, to
raise taxes, to borrow money, and to make contracts. They may sue
and be sued in the courts. But counties have no inalienable rights of
their own. All their powers are derived from the state. They are
merely political divisions of the state, created for the more
convenient administration of local affairs. In a few states the people
of each county are permitted to select and establish such form of
county government as they may choose, but as a rule the state
legislature prescribes a uniform type of county government for all the
counties within the state.
The County Officers.—The chief governmental authority of the
county is the county board, the members of which are usually known
as commissioners or supervisors. These members are either directly
elected by the voters of the county or sent as representatives from
the townships. County boards may have only three members or as
many as fifteen—each state has its own regulations on this point.
The board has its headquarters at the county seat, where the county
courthouse is located.
The functions of the county board may be County functions.
summarized under six heads. 1. Financial. Most
county boards have the right to levy county taxes and to make
appropriations for expenditure. They have authority from the state
legislature to borrow money on the county’s credit. This borrowing
power is exercised in order to construct county roads, build bridges,
or provide county buildings. 2. Highways and bridges. In many states
all the main highways are designated as state or county roads. The
towns and townships are responsible for the construction of minor
highways only. The state roads are built by state highway
commissions or some such body; the county roads are constructed
and maintained by the county board. In some states these county
roads are numerous; in others they are very few. Main bridges,
which connect two cities, towns, or townships, are also built and
maintained by the county board. 3. Public buildings. Every county
requires certain public buildings, including a courthouse, a county
jail, a registry of deeds, a county poorhouse, and sometimes a
county hospital. These buildings are erected and managed by the
county board. 4. Poor-relief and correction. The function of providing
public poor-relief is to some extent performed by the state and
municipal authorities but a good deal of the responsibility still rests
upon the county boards. 5. Elections. In most states of the West and
South the county board has charge of the local arrangements for
state and national elections. It designates the polling places,
appoints the election officers, and provides the ballots. The county,
in most of the states, serves as the unit for the selection of senators
and assemblymen in the state legislature. 6. Miscellaneous. Finally,
the county boards have sundry other functions. Occasionally they
grant charters of incorporation to companies. In some states they
construct irrigation works and arrange for the abolition of grade
crossings on railroads. They often help in the selection of jurors and
have authority to grant certain licenses.
Have County Boards been Satisfactory?— The faults of county
The work of the county boards has not received government.
much public attention in most of the states until the last few years.
The county has been called “the jungle of American politics” because
the masses of the people know so little about what is going on in the
offices of the county authorities. On the whole county government
has not been conspicuously bad, but it has been far from what it
ought to be. American counties, as a rule, have been more honestly
and more economically governed than American cities. The
fundamental objection to the existing system of county government
is that it places in the hands of an elective body, the members of
which are usually chosen for purely political reasons, the
performance of many difficult executive functions. The management
of finances, construction of roads, bridges, and public buildings, the
proper treatment of the poor, the sick, and the insane are all tasks
which require ability, skill, and experience. Elective county
supervisors cannot reasonably be expected to perform them well,
and this is especially the case when the nominations and elections
are dominated by professional politicians.
The County Manager Plan.—In view of the large amount of
executive work, requiring skill and experience, which is imposed
upon the county boards, and especially in consideration of the fact
that this executive work is steadily growing, it has been proposed
that the boards should confine themselves to matters of general
policy, leaving to a county manager the entire work of actual
administration. In a few counties this proposal has been adopted.
The county manager, a trained and highly-paid official, is appointed
by the county board to purchase all materials and supplies, to hire
labor, to prepare contracts for the construction of public buildings,
and to attend to all the details which arise in connection with the
board’s work. In this way, by concentrating authority in a single hand,
a great deal of waste and inefficiency is avoided. The plan is in
harmony with the principle that responsibility for purely executive
work, particularly when it is of a technical character, should be
entrusted to men who have special qualifications for performing it
(see pp. 197-198).
The County as a Judicial Area.—In the County courts.
administration of justice the county plays an
important part. County courts exist in nearly all the states, and
although they form an integral part of the state judiciary they have
jurisdiction over such matters within the county as the laws may
provide. Both the organization and the jurisdiction of the county
courts differ greatly from state to state. In some states each county
has its own judge; in others there is one judge for a group of
counties. This judge holds sessions in one county after another. The
county court usually hears appeals from the local courts and has
original jurisdiction in cases where a jury is in order. The probating of
wills is in most cases a function of the county court. Appeals from its
decisions may usually be carried to the higher tribunals of the state.
His functions.
 The Sheriff.—Every county has a peace officer known as the
sheriff, usually elected by the voters of the county. He is the chief
guardian of the law and the right-arm of the county court. Historically
this is the oldest office in the country. It goes back to the time of
William the Conqueror or earlier, when the shire-reeve was the agent
of the king in keeping law and order. Sheriffs have the right to
appoint deputy-sheriffs whose duty it is to help preserve the public
peace, to make arrests, and to serve court papers. Sometimes the
sheriff and his deputies are paid regular salaries, but more often they
obtain their remuneration from fees. The sheriff is the custodian of
prisoners in the county jail; he summons the jurors to the court
sessions and carries out all the judgments rendered by the court.
The Prosecuting Attorney.—Attached to Work of the grand
every county court there is a legal officer who is jury.
commonly known as the prosecuting attorney or county attorney,
usually elected by the people.[61] His chief duty is to conduct
prosecutions before the county court. He investigates crimes,
prepares the evidence, and usually lays the case, first of all, before a
body known as the grand jury. This jury, as will later be explained, is
selected by lot from among the voters of the county. It does not go
into the question of guilt or innocence, but merely determines
whether an accused person should be placed on trial before a trial
jury in a county court. In some states it is not necessary for the
prosecuting attorney to lay the case before the grand jury; he may
merely file a sworn declaration, called an information or complaint,
stating his belief that there is sufficient ground for placing the
accused person on trial. Prosecuting attorneys everywhere have a
good deal of discretion in the way of discontinuing or “nol-prossing”
criminal cases.[62]
Other County Officers.—There are various other officers
connected with county government. The county assessors go about
the county and assess or value property for purposes of taxation.
The county treasurer receives the taxes and pays the county’s bills.
The county auditors inspect the financial accounts of all county
officers. The registrar of deeds or recorder keeps books in which all
deeds and mortgages on land are entered.[63] The coroner.
The county coroner has the duty of holding an
investigation or inquest whenever a death takes place under
circumstances which excite suspicion of crime. For this purpose he
summons a coroner’s jury of citizens to determine the facts. They do
not determine guilt or innocence, but may recommend that a
suspected person be arrested and held for trial. In some states the
office of coroner has been abolished and its functions given to an
appointive official known as the medical examiner, who is always a
physician. In many counties there is a county superintendent of
schools whose duties are indicated by his title. Practically all these
officers are elected, usually for a short term of years.
Civil Service Reform in Counties.—Besides The selection of
the foregoing officers there are, in the service of county employees.
county government, large numbers of subordinate officials and
employees, including deputy-sheriffs, attendants in the jail and
poorhouse, foremen on road construction, clerks in the county
offices, and so on. All of these are still chosen, in most counties,
under the spoils system. Positions on the county pay roll are given
almost everywhere the reward of party or personal service. The merit
system of selecting subordinate officials by competitive examination
has made little or no progress in the counties of the United States
although there is no good reason why it should not be used there as
well as in the municipal, state, and national service. The county
remains the last fortress of the spoils system because the people as
a whole have not been fully awakened to the importance of its work
and because the political influences which control county
government have heretofore been strong enough to prevent the loss
of patronage which the introduction of the merit system would entail.
The Metropolitan Counties.—Special Relations of county
problems of county government arise whenever and city.
a large city spreads itself over a whole county or even over a very
large portion of it. The growth of great municipal centers during
recent years has changed many American counties from rural into
urban or metropolitan areas. Examples are to be found in New York
City which includes five counties within the city limits. The city of
Philadelphia includes the whole of Philadelphia county; Suffolk
county is almost entirely covered by the city of Boston, and the city
of Cleveland contains nine tenths of the population of Cuyahoga
county. The cities are largely independent of the counties within
which they are located, but the functions of city and county
government run close together at many points. For example the
sheriff of the county and the police commissioner or police chief of
the city are both responsible for the maintenance of law and order.
The result is, quite often, a duplication of work and a waste of
money. It has been proposed that the city and county governments,
in the case of metropolitan counties, should be substantially
combined to prevent this duplication. To some extent this has been
done, as in the case of St. Louis, Baltimore, Boston, and San
Francisco. In other large cities various plans for entire or partial
unification are under way.
The Reform of County Government.—For Desirable changes
the improvement of county government in county
throughout the country three important changes organization.
in present organization and methods seem to be needed. In the first
place some provision should be made for the 1. A centralized
better handling of executive work. As matters executive.
now stand there is no county official corresponding to the President,
the governor, and the mayor in national, state, and city government
respectively. Responsibility is scattered into too many hands. It ought
to be centralized in a county manager or some other single
administrative official. Second, the number of 2. A shorter ballot.
elective county officers should be reduced.
There is no sound reason why treasurers, auditors, and
superintendents of schools should be appointed in cities (as is
usually the case), but elected in counties. The practice of electing so
many administrative officers makes the ballot long and cumbersome;
it also leads to the choice of men who have no qualifications other
than popularity. What is even worse, it encourages frequent changes
in the incumbents of these offices and thus interferes with the
efficient management of the county’s business. 3. The merit
Finally, the merit system could be system.
advantageously extended to include all subordinate county positions.
 Towns and Townships
The Areas of Community Government.— The various units of
For purposes of local administration the counties local government.
are divided into towns, townships, or county districts, but whenever
any portion of the county becomes thickly settled it is usually
organized as an incorporated village, an incorporated town, a
borough, or a city. It will be seen, therefore, that there are at least
seven different units of community government in the United States,
not to speak of the special districts which exist in some individual
states. The reason for this great diversity is to be found in the fact
that the American system of local government has grown up
gradually and in each state independently. In most European
countries the system of local government is uniform; in the United
States it is not. Each state has its own system and in no two states
are these systems exactly alike. For this reason only the broad
outline of the subject can be presented; the details must be studied
in the localities concerned.
The New England Town.—Among the areas The town meeting.
of community government the New England
town is the oldest and the most interesting. It is not always, or even
usually, a thickly-settled place. These towns differ greatly both in size
and in population; they are usually quite irregular in shape and may
contain anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand people.
The New England town does not possess a charter of incorporation
but it has the usual corporate powers (see p. 177). The chief
governing organ of the New England town is the town meeting, an
assembly of all the voters, both men and women. This town meeting
is called together at least once a year and often three or four times. It
elects the town officers, votes the appropriations, and decides all
questions of general policy. Sometimes the town meeting lasts all
day; occasionally it continues even longer. Every citizen has the right
to a voice and a vote.
During the interval between the town meetings The selectmen.
the affairs of the town are managed by a board
of selectmen, composed of three or five members, elected by the
voters. The selectmen prepare the business for the town meeting
and carry out its decisions. The larger towns also maintain various
other boards, such as a school board, a water board, and a board of
health, the members being in all cases elected at the town meeting.
Other town officials include a town clerk, a treasurer, an auditor, and
a superintendent of schools.
When towns grow large the town meeting Recent changes in
becomes unwieldy and the system of the system.
administration by numerous boards fails to work smoothly. For this
reason some New England towns have recently adopted a “limited
town meeting” system, by which the voters of the town elect
delegates to represent them in the town meeting. A few towns have
also abolished the various administrative boards and have placed
town administration in charge of a town manager appointed by the
selectmen.[64]
The Township.—In the great group of Central and Middle
Western states, ranging from New York and Pennsylvania to
Nebraska and the Dakotas, the principal area of community
government is the township, although it is sometimes called the
town. In the older states these townships (or towns) are of irregular
shape; in several of the newer states the so-called “congressional”
townships were laid out in uniform blocks, six miles square. In some
of the states, both old and new, the towns or townships have town
meetings, as in New England, but nowhere outside of New England
have these meetings attained any great importance. Their chief
function in the Central and Middle Western states is to elect the town
or township officers. The work of township (or town) administration is
carried on either by a board of trustees or by a single official
commonly known as a supervisor. There are also various
subordinate officials, all of whom are usually elected by the voters.
The County Districts.—In most states of the South and Far West
there are no townships. The county remains the principal area of
local government, but for the management of various community
affairs the county is divided into districts. There are school districts,
road districts, and election districts, for example. Each district has its
own elective officers who are in charge of the function for which the
district was established.
 The Incorporated Communities.—The Incorporated towns,
vitality of townships and district government has boroughs, and
been weakened by the practice of incorporating villages.
as a village, town, borough, or city, any portion of the area which
becomes thickly settled. The laws of the various states usually
provide that whenever any part of a community becomes sufficiently
populous a designated number of the inhabitants may petition for
incorporation. The question is then submitted to a vote, and if the
vote is favorable, a charter of incorporation is granted. A certain
minimum of population is required; usually from two to three hundred
in the case of a village, one to three thousand in the case of a town,
and more than three thousand in the case of a city. These figures
vary from state to state. In some Western states the minimum for
incorporation for a city is only a few hundred. In any event when the
place becomes incorporated as a village, town, borough, or city it
becomes separate, for administrative purposes, from the township or
district to which it belonged and sets up a local government of its
own. The nature of this government, the officials, and the scope of
their powers are all fixed by the laws of the state. There are more
than 15,000 incorporated villages, towns, boroughs, and cities in the
United States, nearly three fourths of them being places of less than
2500 population.
The Merits and Defects of the Local The advantages.
Government System.—The most marked
feature of the American system of local government, when surveyed
as a whole, is its decentralization. Nothing is uniform throughout the
country; each state follows its own plan, and everywhere a large
measure of home rule in local affairs is granted. Contrast this with
the system of local government in the French Republic for example,
where all communities, whether large or small, are governed in
exactly the same way and strictly controlled by the central authorities
in Paris. The American system has the advantage of allowing each
section of the country to adopt whatever scheme best suits its own
particular needs. It also facilitates the making of experiments in local
government and through these experiments we learn better ways of
doing things. The large measure of local home rule brings
community government close to the people, giving them control over
it and responsibility for it. It fosters initiative and tends to develop a
wholesome rivalry in good work. Local government is a fine school
for the teaching of democracy.
On the other hand the American system has The defects.
its defects. So many areas of local government
have been created in some of the states that the people are over-
governed. The multiplication of local offices has led to wastefulness.
Local home rule, moreover, has in some cases been a synonym for
local misrule. The result is that we have required, during recent
years, an increase in the amount of control exercised over the
government of the local communities by state and county authorities.
Townships, towns, and villages are areas of government established
to meet local needs, but they are also the channels through which
the state authorities carry on a portion of their work. This latter phase
of local self-government should not be overlooked.
General References
Everett Kimball, State and Local Government, pp. 309-344;
Charles A. Beard, American Government and Politics, pp. 638-705; Ibid.,
Readings in American Government and Politics, pp. 556-566;
James Bryce, American Commonwealth, Vol. I, pp. 596-616;
W. B. Munro, Government of the United States, pp. 535-571;
H. G. James, Local Government in the United States, especially pp. 254-299;
John A. Fairlie, Local Government in Counties, Towns and Villages, especially
pp. 57-140; American Academy of Political and Social Science, County
Government, pp. 81-111; Cyclopedia of American Government (see under County,
Towns and Townships, Borough).
Group Problems
1. Should the county-manager plan be adopted? With what county functions
do you now come into contact? How important to you and to your home is the work
of the county officials in the matter of road-building, the maintenance of prisons,
the care of the poor, the registration of deeds, and the supervision of schools? Are
any of these things now mismanaged and, if so, in what way can the situation be
improved? The present multiplication of county authorities. Duties of each. How
these duties are performed. The cause of waste or inefficiency. What the county-
manager system aims to do. Comparison of the city-manager and the county-
manager plans. References: H. G. James, Local Government in the United States,
pp. 425-451; John A. Fairlie, Local Government in Counties, Towns and Villages,
pp. 75-94; H. G. Gilbertson, The County, pp. 151-180; “County Government” in
the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. XLVII
(May, 1913); National Short Ballot Organization, Documents on County
Government; C. C. Maxey, County Government, pp. 45-62.
2. How town government can be improved. References: H. G. James, Local
Government in the United States, pp. 254-283; C. S. Bird, Town Planning for
Small Communities, pp. 311-340; Cyclopedia of American Government (see under
Towns and Townships); Annual Reports of Town Officers.
3. What your township officials do. References: John A. Fairlie, Local
Government in Counties, Towns and Villages, pp. 164-181; H. G. James, Local
Government in the United States, pp. 268-283; John Fiske, Civil Government in
the United States, pp. 89-95; Everett Kimball, State and Local Government, pp.
333-344; Annual Reports of Township Supervisor or Chairman.
Short Studies
1. The importance of local government in a democracy. A. de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America, Vol. I, pp. 74-87.
2. French and English methods of local government. H. G. James, Local
Government in the United States, pp. 1-65.
3. The county board. John A. Fairlie, Local Government in Counties, Towns
and Villages, pp. 75-94; Everett Kimball, State and Local Government, pp. 317-
332.
4. Politics in county government. H. S. Gilbertson, The County, pp. 43-65.
5. Where the county’s money goes. H. G. James, Local Government in the
United States, pp. 232-250.
6. City and county consolidation. Ibid., pp. 437-448.
7. A New England town meeting. John Fiske, Civil Government in the United
States, pp. 16-34.
8. The enforcement of the state laws in rural communities. J. M. Mathews,
Principles of American State Administration, pp. 430-462.
9. How good planning helps the small town. C. S. Bird, Town Planning for
Small Communities, pp. 1-19; 76-99.
10. Home rule for counties. H. S. Gilbertson, The County, pp. 207-250.
11. The government of an urban county. Cook County, Board of
Commissioners, A Study of Cook County, pp. 5-21.
12. The county courts. J. W. Smith, Training for Citizenship, pp. 185-197;
American Academy of Political and Social Science, County Government, pp. 120-
133; Illinois Constitutional Convention, 1920, Bulletins, No. 11, pp. 905-925 (Local
Government in Chicago and Cook County).
Questions
1. Why do we need a system of local government? Suppose all the areas of
local government were to be abolished and the management of local affairs taken
over by the state, what advantages and disadvantages would result?
2. To what extent does the constitution of your state restrict the freedom of the
state legislature in interfering with local government? Are these restrictions too
great? Why should not counties and towns be given complete home rule?
3. Name the qualifications which a good sheriff ought to have. An efficient
coroner.
4. Why do we need a registry of deeds? If deeds were not registered what
difficulties would be encountered? Is a deed invalid if not registered?
5. If counties were to be abolished, which of their present functions would you
transfer to the state and which to the townships, towns, or villages?
6. Why is it thought desirable that when places become thickly-settled they
should be given separate incorporation?
7. Explain how local government serves as a school for democracy.
8. What ought to be the minimum limit of population for an incorporated village,
an incorporated town, a city?
Topics for Debate
1. All county administrative officials, except the highest, should be chosen by
civil service rules.
2. City and county government should be consolidated in cities like Chicago,
Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Los Angeles.
 CHAPTER X
CITY GOVERNMENT

The purpose of this chapter is to explain who the city authorities are and
what they do.

What is a City?—The poet Cowper once said To be a city a place

that “God made the country and man made the must have a
town”, a remark which was not intended to flatter charter.
the cities. Nor is there any reason why life in a crowded community
should particularly appeal to poets although it may have a strong
fascination for more worldly-minded men. A large body of people
living closely together, a place of busy streets and tall buildings, a
huge, noisy, jostling throng—that is the customary notion of an
American city, and on the whole it is not far wide of the facts. Not all
cities, however, are big, busy, and congested. In the entire United
States there are today about a thousand places which call
themselves cities, yet more than half of them are places of less than
fifteen thousand people. In Massachusetts no place can become a
city until it has at least ten thousand people; but in Oklahoma the
figure is two thousand and in Kansas only two hundred. A city may
be anything, therefore, from a rural hamlet with only a few hundred
people to a great metropolitan community with several millions. Size
or population are not the things that determine cityhood. A place is a
city if it has been so incorporated and possesses a city charter. So
far as its government is concerned, it cannot be called a city, no
matter how populous it may be, unless it has been given a charter by
authority of the state.[65] In the West the practice has been to grant
such charters to relatively small places; in the East the requirements
are more strict.
 THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN CITIES
The table and diagram on the reverse of this page
will serve to make clear the phenomenal growth of
American cities during the past hundred and thirty
years. In 1820 only one person in twenty lived in cities
and towns of over 8,000 population; today nine
persons in every twenty live in these communities. The
population of the whole country has been growing
steadily during the past hundred years; but the cities
have been increasing even more rapidly. These figures
should be studied in connection with the discussion on
pages 184-186.
—Population in Places of 8,000 Inhabitants or More:
1790-1920.
PLACES OF 8,000 INHABITANTS
OR MORE.
CENSUS Total Population. Number Per cent of
YEAR. Population. of total
places. population.
1920 105,710,620 46,307,640 924 43.8
1910 91,972,256 35,570,334 768 38.7
1900 75,994,575 25,018,335 547 32.9
1890 62,947,714 18,244,239 445 29.0
1880 50,155,783 11,365,698 285 22.7
1870 38,558,371 8,071,875 226 20.9
1860 31,443,321 5,072,256 141 16.1
1850 23,191,876 2,897,586 85 12.5
1840 17,069,453 1,453,994 44 8.5
1830 12,866,020 864,509 26 6.7
1820 9,638,453 475,135 13 4.9
1810 7,239,881 356,920 11 4.9
1800 5,308,483 210,873 6 4.0
1790 3,929,214 131,472 6 3.3
 Population in Places of 8,000 Inhabitants or
More at
Each Census: 1790-1920.]

The Phenomenal Growth of Cities.—The Why American

remarkable drift of population into the cities has cities have grown
already been pointed out. It is one of the most so rapidly.
striking social facts in American history during the past hundred
years.[66] In the days when the national constitution was framed there
were only eight or ten places that could be called cities and even
these were, with one or two exceptions, nothing but good-sized
towns. New York, the largest of them, had a population of less than
50,000; it has grown a hundred-fold since that time. In Washington’s
day no country had as many as fifty cities and the largest city in the
world, London, had less than a million people. The cities counted for
very little in the early days of the Republic; they then contained less
than five per cent of the national population. During the course of the
nineteenth century, however, cities sprang into existence
everywhere; a large part of the immigration poured into them; the
development of industry and commerce built them up; and today
about half the people of the United States reside in cities of all sizes.
There are now more cities in America than in any other country and
more large cities. We have twelve great centers with populations
exceeding half a million,[67] while the entire British empire (including
India, Canada, and Australia) has only ten; Germany has only four
and France has only two. At the present rate of progress the United
States in 1950 will probably contain more large cities than all the rest
of the world put together. The causes of this remarkable growth have
been indicated elsewhere and there is no need to repeat them.
Factories, railroads, and steamships have been the great factors in
this urban expansion.
Effects of City Growth upon the National Some features of
Life.—The growth of large cities has had city life:
profound effects upon American life and temperament. It has
changed the whole character of the country, its problems and its
habits of mind. A century ago the United States was predominantly
an agricultural land; the great majority of the people were engaged in
earning their living from the soil. They had the same occupation and
common interests. But with the growth of 1. Diversity of
industries in cities the occupations of the people occupation.
have become diversified, and no bond of common vocation holds the
population together. The city-worker in the shops and factories is
employed at a specialized task which the division of labor assigns to
him (see pp. 44-46); he develops expertness at this one task and
depends upon others for everything else. The farmer supplies many
of his own wants, but the industrial worker depends almost wholly
upon others. Among the rural population there is 2. The absence of
a large property-owning class, men who own strong home ties.
their farms and homes; but in the cities, particularly in the larger
cities, the great majority of the people live in homes that are owned
by others. In New York City seven families out of every eight live in
rented houses or apartments; in Boston four out of every five. This
tends to make the population restless; the people are constantly
moving about from one job to another and from one home to
another; they do not acquire a strong attachment to any
neighborhood, as is the case in rural districts. One result of this is
that people in the crowded centers know little about their neighbors,
and strange as it may seem, the crowded sections of the large cities
are in some respects the most lonely places in the world.[68]
 The tendency of the city population is to 3. The docility of the
become absorbed in its daily work, to depend people.
upon the newspapers for its opinions and to display marked docility
in obeying its leaders. The people of the cities depend upon official
or professional organizations for pretty nearly everything: if disorder
breaks out, they expect the police to attend to it; when they want
recreation, they expect the city authorities to provide it (by furnishing
parks, playgrounds, band concerts, neighborhood dances, and so
on); the functions of the home are largely given over to the school,
the club, and the social organizations. The city is thought to be
radical; but it is radical only in spots. Its population as a whole tends
to be conservative (see p. 108, footnote).
The city is a place where extremes meet. 4. A place of
Great wealth and abject poverty exist in the extremes.
cities side by side; in the rural districts there is a closer approach to a
common level. The same is true if we compare city and country from
the standpoint of education, earning-power, obedience to law,
respect for government, or any other social feature. The city runs to
extremes; it contains both the highest erudition and the most utter
ignorance; it has earners of enormous incomes and plenty of people
who can earn no incomes at all; it has reactionaries in one quarter
and anarchists in another—a strange social mosaic when you study
it and very much in contrast with the general uniformity of the rural
area.
Nevertheless, along nearly all lines of activity 5. A place of
the cities lead the nation. To say that half the leadership.
people live in cities does not tell the whole story. The influence which
this half exerts is greater than its numerical strength implies. The
cities are the headquarters of those who direct the great industries,
the transportation systems, and the banking interests of the country.
The newspapers of the great cities influence the moulding of public
opinion the country over. The political power of the cities, their
influence upon every phase of public policy is very great. Hence the
character and the spirit of the cities will go far to determine the
national characteristics of the future.
The City and the State.—The inhabitants of a The city charter.
city are a corporate body with certain legal rights
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