Abstract

Applying an interactional perspective, in line with the work of Francesco Straniero Sergio, this article focuses on the conversational mechanism of repair in prototypical examples of repair initiatives found in three interpreter-mediated asylum interviews. The discourse data is drawn from a corpus of eight longer asylum interviews and is part of the Swedish-based research project Asylum narratives – on co-construction and recontextualization. The interviews, involving talk in Swedish, Russian, Ukrainian and English, were audio recorded and transcribed in their entirety. For the presentation and analyses of data in the article, transcribed talk in Swedish, Russian and Ukrainian was translated into English. The examples demonstrate how repair initiatives can work in interpreter-mediated encounters. Most importantly, they show that in interpreter-mediated encounters, some basic functions of repair initiatives found in monolingual encounters, tend to be put out of play, partly due to the non-standard turn organization, which characterizes mediated interaction.

Keywords: repair, repair initiatives, asylum interview, social order, discourse of reporting

Introduction

The present article will focus on the work of repair (Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008) in interpreter-mediated asylum interviews. Repair is a conversational mechanism identified in monolingual, spontaneous spoken interaction (Schegloff et al. 1977), yet it has scarcely been explored as part of bilingual interaction nor, to my knowledge, been studied in the context of interpreter-mediated asylum interviews. The social order of asylum interviews is characterized by the implicit and explicit presence, production and usage of written texts. In Määttä’s (2015) terms, it is a discourse of reporting. The mandatory reporting in asylum interviews is performed according to given legal and administrative rules and regulations. The minutes taken down constitute an important basis for the decisions to be made in the respective asylum case. In view of the narrative being documented, participants may want to control, check and repair uttered words and expressions. The present article will shed light on how, more precisely, the specific interaction order in interpreter-mediated asylum interviews conditions the participants’ possibilities to control and repair discourse as it unfolds.

1. The asylum interview in Sweden

Asylum seekers in Sweden are rarely fluent in Swedish, which is the language used for the interview minutes. Hence, the interview must be carried out in Swedish with the assistance of an interpreter, even if the asylum seeker and the case officer share a common language. Case officers are not expected to be translation experts. They are supposed to type the minutes on their computer in Swedish – the language of the state authority – while simultaneously conducting the interview, with interpreter assistance. Apart from the case officer, the applicant and an interpreter, a legal counsel may be present at the interview.

Asylum interviews should be conducted in a certain predetermined manner. The routine is described in the Swedish Migration Authority’s internal documents, and also in documents published by the UNHCR (2017). Schematically, an asylum interview should be structured like this:

1. Introduction

2. Reasons for asylum

          a) The free narrative

          b) The probing phase

3. Questions from the public counsel

4. Closing

It should be noted that what in this article is referred to as ‘asylum interviews’ normally take place during asylum seekers’ second visit to a Migration Authority office. The first one is normally short and in principle only for registration and identification. The second visit, for the asylum interview proper, is where asylum seekers are supposed to present their case in detail. The case officer first explains his or her role and mode of working, the function of the interview, and sometimes also the interpreter’s role. Interpreters are often offered the opportunity to present their mandate, which includes being obliged to interpret everything the primary participants say, and maintain confidentiality and impartiality. In some cases, interpreters take the initiative to present their mandate without being prompted by the case worker. Asylum seekers are then invited to present their reasons for applying for asylum in the form of a free narrative. At the beginning of an interview, the case officer explains that the asylum seeker’s narrative will be taken down in written form, underlines the importance of the applicant telling all his or her reasons for applying for asylum, and urges the applicant to signal immediately if there are any communicative problems.

Case officers are supposed to take notes continuously without interrupting the asylum seeker and, in the next phase, ask follow-up questions. Officers are also supposed to prompt the asylum seeker for more details about the circumstances mentioned and simultaneously check for inconsistencies and contradictions in the narrative. Their task is in this way dual, partly conflicting and potentially undermining participants’ mutual trust, as argued by Linell and Keselman (2011: 174).

Towards the end of the interview, the public counsel can ask clarifying questions, addressing both the asylum seeker and the case officer. In the closing phase, case officers are expected to explain how the asylum case will be further handled. This includes applicants’ right to appeal if they do not agree with the forthcoming decision on their case.

In real life interviews, asylum seekers may find it difficult to give all their relevant reasons for seeking asylum in a consistent, free-flowing narrative, partly due to the communicative complexity of the interpreter-mediated asylum interview (Maryns 2006; Pöllabauer 2023). In the following examples, some of these complexities will be highlighted. Whilst the interpreters’ professional proficiency plays an important role, as argued by several researchers working with naturally occurring asylum-interview data (see for example Linell and Keselman 2011; Pöllabauer 2015), the quality of interpreting is not the subject of this article.

2. Method and data set

In the present article, three short interview sequences, drawn from the research project Asylum narratives – on co-construction and recontextualization^[1], will be used. This research project is based on discourse data collected in authentic asylum interviews with the aim to develop knowledge about how those taking part in asylum interviews contribute to the co-construction and recontextualization of asylum narratives. Within this project, conducted by Hanna Sofia Rehnberg (project manager), Zoe Nikolaidou and the present author, encounters related to five asylum cases were observed and audio recorded. In the Swedish context, the time allocated to an asylum interview is 2.5 to 3 hours. In some more complex cases, asylum seekers are offered a second asylum interview. The data include a total of eight interviews. The interviews were all carried out in Swedish and another language (Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish and English), languages that all or single members of the research team have a reasonable command of. The asylum interviews were subsequently transcribed. For preliminary analyses, talk in languages other than Swedish and English was translated into Swedish and/or English. For detailed and targeted analyses, talk in Swedish has also been translated into English. The translations were performed by members of the research team and checked by natives in the respective language. For each case, copies of written documentation in the form of minutes were also collected. The written data have been used to explore the recontextualization process in terms of transition from spoken to written discourse, an issue not dealt with in this article.

The study was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority, and all participants agreed that the research group could use the assembled documentation. In line with regular research ethics, proper names and other information that could potentially reveal the identity of the individuals have been changed.

Section 5 below will provide prototypical examples of repair initiatives found in the dataset. The asylum seekers involved in the examples, their (fictitious) names, their countries/regions of origin and the languages each of them spoke during their respective interview, namely Russian, Ukrainian and English, are listed in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Asylum seekers, home countries and languages spoken

Due to various reasons, not least the availability of certified interpreters, two of them, Ivan and Samuel, did not speak their respective first language during the interview. The interviews with Ivan and Michail were conducted with all participants seated together in an office at the Migration Authority. In the interview with Samuel, the interpreting was carried out remotely, with the interpreter on the phone with no video. The interpreters were educated and certified in their respective language combination. The case officers were all experienced in working with an interpreter, but none of them had special training in interviewing with interpreter assistance.

3. Approaching repair in interpreter-mediated discourse data

In 1998, Francesco Straniero Sergio published an article with the title Notes on Cultural Mediation, where he pleads for an exploration of translation and interpreting as social practices, as they occur in real life. Since then, research that applies an exploratory, interactional approach to interpreter-mediated discourse data has generated many new insights about the peculiarities and particularities of interpreter-mediated interaction in various settings (Gavioli and Baraldi 2011; Baraldi and Gavioli 2012; Davitti 2019; Nakane 2014; Angermeyer 2015; Licoppe and Veyrier 2017, 2020; de Boe et al. 2024, to mention just a few). Following Wadensjö (1998) and Roy (2000), interpreting performed in interaction is regarded as a dual task – that of rendering what the primary parties say in a new language and that of co-ordinating or managing the discourse flow. Exploring interpreters’ utterances as texts, Wadensjö (1998: 108) distinguishes between renditions and non-renditions, where the latter stands for interpreter utterances, which do not correspond (as translations) to the primary participants’ prior utterances. For instance, interpreters’ requests for repetition would be sorted as non-renditions. Applying an interactional perspective, Wadensjö (1998: 109–110) also classifies interpreter utterances as activities, more precisely as either implicitly or explicitly coordinating moves. Most interpreter utterances serve to coordinate the shared discourse flow implicitly, that is, when the interpreter provides a rendition of something just said, the primary parties can follow and react; hence, the conversation can proceed. In and by some utterances, however, the coordinating function can become explicit. For instance, by asking for repetition or for more time to interpret, interpreters can be seen as acting on their own behalf. Yet, as Svennevig and Hansen (2023) argue, the inherent flexibility of interpreters’ participation status – shifting between talking for someone else and on their own behalf – can occasionally make it unclear for whom a speaker designs a repair in interpreter-mediated encounters.

Svennevig and Hansen (2023) and Hansen (2022) investigate repair sequences in interpreter-mediated encounters between medical professionals and patients (placed in the same room), where the interpreter carries out the interpreting remotely, through video technology. Hansen (2022) demonstrates that interpreters’ embodied displays of trouble in these settings are found to initiate repair, and also that the video-mediated environment provides a complex interactional space for participants’ perception of these initiatives. Svennevig and Hansen (2023) distinguish two features in repair sequences, characteristic to settings where interpreting is carried out consecutively. Firstly, the repair initiator may occur unusually late, that is, later than the first possible point to indicate a problem. Secondly, in some cases, it may be unclear whether the speaker designs the repair for the interpreter or for the monolingual conversational partner, due to the interpreter’s flexible participation status.

Dahnberg (2015) maps communicative differences between scripted and non-scripted role plays, organized for reasons of the training or certification of interpreters, and finds that the presence or absence of a script affects both turn-taking and the unfolding of repair sequences. Lee and Hong (2020), in a case study based on about 2.5 hours of video-recorded investigative interviews documented in South Korea, show that repair was an important part of collaborative and co-constructive sense-making activities in these interviews. Focusing on the quality of interpreting, the authors conclude that ‘it is crucial to engage competent interpreters who can not only make the repair process transparent to all parties but also resolve repairs successfully’ (Lee and Hong 2020: 522). Straniero Sergio’s pioneering research on repair in interpreter-mediated televised talk shows will be treated in greater detail below.

 The term ‘repair’ was coined in the Conversation Analytical (CA) tradition. According to Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008), it is defined as a communicative phenomenon characterized by the following:

• Everything in a conversation can be ‘repaired’.
• As soon as participants in social interaction identify a problem source, a danger of not being understood in the way they want to be understood – for various reasons – they can initiate a repair. Repair is a resource for securing a shared and common understanding.
• Repair is organized according to preferences (Schegloff et al. 1977), in the following order:
  1. Self-initiated self-repair – the kind of repair most commonly found in monolingual conversation.
  2. Other-initiated self-repair – a listener indicates understanding problems and the speaker repairs.
  3. Self-initiated other-repair – the speaker indicates problems with finding words and a listener assists.
  4. Other-initiated other-repair – a listener suggests how the speaker may reformulate something just said.

4. Straniero Sergio’s pioneering studies on repair

It is well known that Straniero Sergio in his research scrutinized media interpreting, and interpreter-mediated televised talk shows in particular. He explored and explained general and specific features of these kinds of communicative events in detail, and precisely demonstrated how social order was constructed and maintained in them; how communication was affected by the presence of an interpreter; and how an interpreter could affect televised interaction. For instance, in the posthumously published paper You are not too funny, Straniero Sergio (2012) provides numerous examples, showing how talk show hosts constantly challenge the performing interpreter’s position and authority, and how this is done through repair initiatives. In the article he concludes: ‘It is surely not by chance that repair is mostly initiated for humorous purposes rather than for clarification and that it tends to take the form of teases’ (Straniero Sergio 2012: 94). And indeed, the show hosts, when doing repair and re-doing translation, display their orientation towards the audiences. They are acting both as elicitors of talk for overhearers, as gatekeepers of translation, and – first and foremost – as television entertainers. Now and then they create humorous time-outs from the interview proper – a characteristic trait of the televised talk show as a communicative genre (Straniero Sergio 1999).

It must be added here that, in order to behave as gatekeepers of translation, the Italian-speaking show hosts in Straniero Sergio’s material must have had a certain command of the foreign languages spoken. In his article from 2012, the foreign languages were English and French, and the show hosts might not have had a genuine need for interpreter assistance, as revealed by some of their repair initiatives. The interpreter service was primarily for those who knew only one language, the interviewees, the studio audience, and the viewers at home. In a setting where the participants do not understand each other’s languages at all, and with the limited transparency and the necessary delay between an utterance in one language and the rendition of this utterance in another, repair initiatives are likely to work differently (cf. Lee & Hong 2020; Svennevig and Hansen 2023). In the following, I will discuss in some detail how this may occur in interpreter-mediated asylum interviews, where asylum seekers’ narratives must be taken down in written form. The crucial and decisive function of asylum interviews makes their social character far from that of ordinary, everyday conversations, let alone from that of talk show interviews. Hence, the participants in this situation may tend to carefully measure and correct their words, and may also be asked to clarify some words or expressions, that is, to repair in CA terms.

5. Repair initiatives in three interviews

In the following, three excerpts drawn from interpreted asylum interviews will show various functions of repair initiatives. Excerpt 1 is drawn from a case where the asylum seeker, Ivan, speaks Russian and the interpreter (Int.) renders into Swedish. Where it starts, Ivan is trying to explain why he is being prosecuted in his home country, what he has been accused of doing.

Excerpt 1

Just like in monolingual conversations, participants in interpreter-mediated conversations may self-repair when they are insecure about words and what to say. For various reasons they may want to reformulate their words and start anew. In this sequence, the asylum seeker is trying to find the correct words when explaining the accusations – in his view fabricated – against him from the Kazakh authorities, which was one of the reasons why he felt forced to escape from his country: ‘allegedly I’m provoking e:: e- e- ethnic enmity (.) allegedly I’m provoking ethnic enmity be- be- between the Uighurs and the Chinese’ (lines 1–3).

We do not know how, more precisely, the interpreter makes sense of the repetition in this utterance, whether or not she reads them as self-initiated self-repair. In a monolingual conversation, this kind of initiative tends to be noticed as such by the participants. In an interpreter-mediated encounter, however, the monolingual participants are likely neither to sense the existence, nor grasp the ownership, of a self-initiated self-repair, irrespective of how they are treated by the interpreter. In a post interview, the interpreter in the above example expressed her commitment to relay into Swedish everything the asylum seeker said (in Russian) as it was said. This, she argued, is what the Migration Authority requires from interpreters. In practice, her rendition (lines 4–6) can hence be understood as signalling the applicant’s self-repair, but it can also be understood as her own self-initiated self-repair, in her correcting of the wording in Swedish (saying 'ethnic groups’ instead of ‘the ethnic groups’, lines 4–5). At the end of her rendition, she hesitates and switches to Russian. Apparently, she needs to check the latest word as she asks, in Russian: ‘between the Uighurs and?’ (line 6), a typical other-repair initiation. The applicant repeats what he just said (and the interpreter did not quite catch), in Russian: ‘and the Chinese, these’ (line 7). The response can be classified as an other-initiated self-repair. In a monolingual conversation, there would typically have been a third turn from the person requesting the repair, confirming shared understanding. But here, in the interpreter-mediated encounter, such a confirmation is absent. The next turn comes in the other language. The interpreter here speaks in Swedish, for the case officer and for the record. The interpreter’s Swedish translation of ‘and the Chinese’ (line 8) is designed to complete her ongoing rendition (lines 4–6). Notably, the interpreter reclaims her turn (in line 8) by repeating her latest Swedish word och (‘and’) (line 6), and then adding the missing word: och kineserna (‘and the Chinese’) (line 8). In line 7, it seems as if the applicant is on his way to specify which Chinese, more precisely, he had in mind (‘and the Chinese, these’), but before he can do that, the interpreter needs to finish her rendition of the applicant’s previous utterance in order to provide a full sentence for the case worker and the minutes. Hence, while the interpreter returns to the rendition of the asylum seeker’s utterance, his (attempt to) self-repair (in line 7) slips the interpreter’s and subsequently the other participants’ attention. The applicant immediately reclaims his interrupted turn and continues specifying which Chinese he had in mind – the Chinese in the Xinjiang province (line 9–10). The interpreter is simultaneously making a new effort to establish her previous repair ‘the Chinese’ as correct, however (line 11), so she does not grasp ‘the Xinjiang province’, and this piece of information never enters the minutes. The applicant must have missed that the interpreter never mentioned this geographical name in her rendition of his utterance into Swedish. Only at a later occasion, when he went through the minutes with his public counsel, would he have the chance to realise this absence, but he did not. Analysing more and longer sequences drawn from this particular encounter, Wadensjö, Rehnberg and Nikolaidou (2023) explore in more detail the relation between the minutes and the corresponding oral discourse. Here, the example is to illustrate that the interpreter’s repair initiatives may come at the first possible point to indicate a problem, as shown in line 6, just as in monolingual interaction, but the specific interaction order may nevertheless obstruct mutual understanding since confirmation of repair needs to be made evident in one and the other language.

Excerpt 2 shows a case officer’s repair initiatives in an interview with a Ukrainian-speaking asylum seeker, Michail. It is drawn from an interview, which was recorded in 2018, that is, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the proclamation of the Donetsk and the Luhansk people’s republics in 2014, but before Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, starting in 2022. Interestingly, the interpreter responds to the case officer’s two repair initiatives (lines 3 and 13) in different ways. The instances are similar, however, in reflecting the fact that, in an interpreter-mediated conversation, the turn-taking order can be experienced as ambiguous – depending on how participants perceive the role of interpreter, that is, whether interpreters are seen exclusively as individuals relaying what others have said or as persons that can also be addressed as well as speak for themselves. In excerpt 2, X is given as the name of a Ukrainian village.

Excerpt 2

The first repair initiative ‘wait what did you say now at the end there’ (line 3) is immediately rendered into Ukrainian by the interpreter as a clearcut request for repetition directed to the applicant: ‘can you repeat what you said please?’ (line 5). As can be seen, she does not render the officer’s account for initiating the repair, nor the first bit: ‘I didn’t follow the last thing you said’ (line 4), nor the following: ‘since I’m writing at the same time so::’ (line 6), indicating that the case officer is struggling with the double task of conducting and simultaneously documenting the interview. This struggle does not surface in the rendition, and the rendition is not followed by the applicant’s repeating anything. There is a moment of silence (line 7), potentially an opening for the applicant, but the interpreter takes the turn. The shortness of this silence indicates that the interpreter hardly expects the asylum seeker to start repeating his (rather lengthy) account from a moment ago. She quickly fills in with something the applicant just said (not shown in excerpt 2); more precisely, she picks up the last part of her latest rendition into Swedish (lines 1–2) and speaks in Ukrainian, for the applicant to confirm: ‘the military base was in X, but ATO was mainly in Charkiv, yes?’ (lines 8–9). At this point, the applicant confirms: ‘yes’ (line 10). In terms of repair, the interpreter’s utterance in Ukrainian (lines 8–9) stands out as an other-initiated other-repair. Having received the confirmation (line 10), the interpreter renders her suggested formulation in Swedish (lines 11–12). In other words, this interpreter here takes upon herself to remember for the applicant, or rather, to involve him in the recapitulation of what she just said on his behalf to the case officer, a statement which is to be recorded in the minutes. To the interpreter, it is probably clear that the officer’s repair initiative (line 3) is designed for her, rather than for the asylum seeker (cf. Svennevig and Hansen 2023), but she treats it as directed both to herself and to the applicant, yet simplifies the exchange of turns, which potentially saves time (possibly also face) and keeps the asylum seeker updated. To the monolingual participants, the ownership of the repair remains ambiguous. The case officer can read it either as the interpreter repairing for the applicant (other-repair) or for herself (self-repair).

The case officer follows up with another repair initiative: ‘but ATO? or what did you say?’ (line 13). This time he makes it more explicit for whom the repair initiative is designed, repeating precisely the interpreter’s formulation ‘but ATO’ (line 11). The interpreter seemingly suspects that this standard abbreviation is unfamiliar to the case officer, as she spells it out at first mention (line 2). ATO is how military defence activities were talked about in Ukraine in the years following 2014. Now she repeats: ‘anti-terror operation’ (line 14). Being directly quoted and being a language expert, she here takes it upon herself to reply to the case officer’s repair initiative (line 13), this time without involving the applicant. Seemingly, the classification of repair initiatives depends – at least partly – on the participants’ attribution of responsibility for words spoken. It could be added that the case-officer did not ask for further explanation at this point. In the minutes he (erroneously) noted ‘anti-terror organization’.

As mentioned above, the interpreter’s utterance ‘the military base was in X, but ATO was mainly in Charkiv, yes?’ (lines 9–10), can be characterized as performing an other-initiated other-repair. The applicant confirms what the interpreter suggests as correct, and she formulates it again, for the case officer, that is, in Swedish. In a monolingual conversation it would have been clear to all participants who was suggesting what, but this is not necessarily the case in this bilingual encounter. The example points to the fact that communicative problems can be detected and also solved in interpreter-mediated interaction by way of repair initiatives, just like in monolingual conversations. How this unfolds exactly, however, may not be noticed by the monolingual participants. Repairing something one just said should in CA terms be identified as self-repair. In a sense, the interpreter-mediated encounter can be seen to challenge this identification, since the interpreter evidently can be understood as repairing for the other – that is, as doing other-repair. The interpreter in this sequence utilized her regular second turn at talk not to repair immediately, but to involve the other in the repairing (lines 8–9). The example confirms Svennevig and Hansen’s (2023) observation, that a repair initiator may occur unusually late in interpreter-mediated conversations. Moreover, it shows, I would argue, that some of interpreters’ repair initiatives can be explained by their sensitivity for the bilingual talk’s limited transparency and to the thereby connected potential risk for mutual mistrust between the primary parties.

Excerpt 3 is drawn from an interview where the languages are Swedish and English. It shows a type of repair initiative specific to the communicative situations discussed here. Referring to himself as ‘the interpreter’, the interpreter makes explicit efforts to coordinate the discourse flow.

Excerpt 3

1 Int.:     so wait wait okay vänta lite tolken behöver

                           wait a bit the interpreter needs to

2           be sökande tala i kortare meningar.   

         ask the applicant to speak in shorter sentences.

3     sorry, interpreter here you are speaking- you tend

           to be speaking in quite long paragraphs.

4 Samuel:  [okay

5 Int.:     [and it's hard for me especially when you mention a  

           lot of names or dates

6 Samuel:  [okay

7 Int.:     [it’s very hard for me to remember all that

8          information exactly as you said it so if I could ask

9          you to sort of try and stay at one sentence at a

10         time and then just stop and let me jump in and

11         interpret before you go on. I think that would

12         greatly speed things up here and ensure that I don’t

13         miss anything.

14 Samuel: [okay

15 Int.:    [so if you could repeat what you just said for me please.

The transcription starts where the interpreter explains to the case officer that he needs a time-out in the interview proper in order to instruct the applicant to speak in shorter sentences (lines 1 and 2). Then he starts explaining in English (line 3) addressing the applicant, Samuel. In this sequence, it seems, the interpreter visualizes the asylum narrative under production as a written text. In Swedish, addressing the case worker, he says ‘shorter sentences’ (line 2) and in English, addressing the asylum seeker, he says ‘stay at one sentence at a time’ (line 11).

The interpreter’s elaborate repair initiative (lines 3, 5, 7–13 and 15) would fall into the categories of non-rendition and explicit coordinating move (Wadensjö 1998: 108–10). It should be noted that he first, following interpreters’ guidelines, explains his forthcoming initiative to the case officer (lines 1–2). Next, addressing the asylum seeker, the interpreter instructs him on how to best deliver his talk in the ongoing asylum interview and finally he asks him to repeat what he just said (line 15).

This was one of many instances where the interpreter urged the applicant to speak in shorter sentences during the same interview. Paradoxically, the applicant took more and more initiatives to self-repair, to repeat or clarify in yet other words what he had just said, which made the interpreter struggle even harder. In a post interview, the interpreter explained that, while on duty at the Migration Authority, he aimed at relaying not just the full content of what the applicant said but also how it was said, following the ideal advocated by the institution. This aim, however, again and again clashed with the narrative strategy applied by the asylum seeker, seemingly unsecure about what to say and how to express himself. The interpreter was indeed making an effort to relay everything the applicant was saying, as he was saying it, including prolonged vowels, self-repair and pauses. The fact that this goes in line with the Migration Authority’s guidelines might indicate that the authority expects that case workers should be able to detect if an asylum seeker’s narrative lacks coherence – and thus credibility – in how it is delivered. Moreover, the authority might not fully understand the work of repair initiatives in interpreter-mediated interaction and the possible consequences of these.

6. Concluding notes

Describing the notion of ‘repair’, as mentioned above (Section 3, Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008) argue that everything in a conversation can be repaired. As the examples in this article show, the interactional organisation of interpreter-mediated encounters tends to put this basic conversational mechanism, at least partly, out of play. The primary participants’ possibility to control how they are understood – or misunderstood – by their respective counterparts is more limited than in a monolingual conversation.

The Migration Authority are taking precautions for the possible emergence of misunderstandings in asylum interviews. The institution regularly appoints public counsels to asylum cases who together with the asylum seeker are expected to detect and clarify any misunderstandings in the minutes and submit corrections in written form to the authority. Yet, repairing and controlling a shared understanding of what one means to say immediately, in an ongoing exchange, is something very different from correcting a text that was written some time ago. Notably, public counsels, who conduct retrospective interviews, may need an interpreter to interact with the asylum seeker.

The third turn, typical in monolingual talk, designed to confirm shared understanding, does not necessarily appear in interpreter-mediated interaction, where interpreters, when given/taking the turn, following their professional obligation, are focused on rendering what has been said in the other language, rather than on giving feedback to the preceding speaker. Interpreters’ ways of resolving repair situations are worth paying more attention to in both training and research (cf. Lee and Hong 2020).

Among the reasons why repair initiatives work differently in interpreter-mediated and monolingual encounters are certainly the inherent linguistic non-transparency and the necessary delay in the progression of talk. Notably, these are factors that may cause lack of trust between the parties, and building trust is something interpreters need to make efforts to do, one way or other. Excerpt 2 showed how the interpreter, via a repair initiative, made an effort to update and involve the asylum seeker in an exchange where he otherwise would have been excluded.

Regardless of how proficient interpreters are, those taking part in an interpreter-mediated encounter do not necessarily achieve a mutually shared understanding of this encounter’s content and progression. The dual nature of the case officer’s task in asylum interviews – that of supporting the telling of a free narrative and simultaneously controlling the trustworthiness of this narrative (cf. Linell and Keselman 2011) – is one of the factors that makes this kind of interpreter assignment particularly challenging.

In interpreter-mediated encounters, participants may identify problems in interaction and initiate repair, as demonstrated. A repair initiative may be designed for the interpreter, and the interpreter may – and may not – treat it as an utterance that should be rendered in the other language. To the monolingual parties, it will not always be clear on whose behalf interpreters initiate a repair and repair – their own or the other’s. Moreover, other-initiated other-repairs do not seem to constitute face threats to the same degree as they do in monolingual conversations. Rather, it is taken for granted that interpreters are entitled, and sometimes even understood to be obliged, to repair for a primary party in order to prevent communicative breakdowns and/or to simplify the distribution of turns. Hence, we have both similarities and differences in the function of repair in monolingual and interpreted encounters. Surely, spontaneously spoken interaction, also in asylum interviews, where an asylum narrative is to be reproduced in the minutes, tends to unfold in chunks of talk that sometimes need to be checked and clarified, and not (at least not exclusively) in clear, full sentences. The consequences of how interpreters render in another language – or do not render – ongoing repair activities, and of how case workers reproduce (attempted) repair activities in written form, are issues that deserve further research.

Francesco Straniero Sergio published much of his work in Italian, a language I unfortunately do not read, so perhaps he developed thoughts on the function of repair that I am unaware of. Nevertheless, I am glad to say that the research tradition that Straniero Sergio developed in so many ways and started to promote quite some time ago has generated much new and interesting knowledge about interpreting, translation and mediation, and its potential is far from exhausted.

About the author(s)

Cecilia Wadensjö is professor emerita at the Institute of Interpreting and Translation Studies, Department of Swedish and Multilingualism, Stockholm University, Sweden. She has published extensively on interpreter-mediated social interaction, drawing on naturally occurring interpreter-mediated discourse, documented in institutional settings. Among her publications is the monograph Interpreting as Interaction.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

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