Refugee credibility assessment and the vanishing interpreter

To grant protection to asylum seekers, officials in the global north require them to communicate a fear of persecution. Not only that, they also must believe them. The process of evaluating an asylum claim and an asylum-seeker’s credibility involves multiple forms of communication, and given the transnational nature of seeking asylum, this setting is one with a great deal of linguistic diversity.

Therefore, it should be obvious that interpreting is a common feature in asylum procedures and that interpreters play a crucial role in facilitating the communication of the various participants involved. Yet misconceptions about interpreting can affect participation in interpreter-mediated encounters and can also influence the way asylum communication is evaluated as part of the credibility assessment process.

Existing studies have found that interpreters’ work is sometimes devalued, and interpreters are even made invisible within institutional structures, discourses and practices. This is despite a large body of research about the many roles and impacts interpreters have within the encounters they mediate, both in asylum procedures and beyond.

Below I’ll share some of my own research, focusing on refugee credibility assessment in Australia. I will introduce some key “language ideologies” that operate in asylum procedures. I believe this is important, because “the study of interpreters, their experiences, and the ideologies of voice and language within which they work offers ways to interrogate the contradictions of global capital and its related humanitarian enterprises” (Kunreuther & Rao, 2023, p. 250). So I will explore how these ideologies have an impact on institutional understandings of interpreting, and through this, how they can undermine how asylum seekers’ communication and credibility are assessed.