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Article published In:
Translation and Interpreting in Non-Governmental Organisations
Edited by Wine Tesseur
[Translation Spaces 7:1] 2018
► pp. 65–91

The journey of Arabic human rights testimonies, from witnesses to audiences via Amnesty International

ORCID logo | University of Oxford

Within the human rights knowledge production infrastructure, information undergoes processes of entextualisation, archiving, publication, and reception. This article examines the place of testimonies – first-person accounts of suffering and/or historic events – in Amnesty International. A network of agents form around testimonies to produce them through translation from the witnesses’ languages – spoken varieties of Arabic – to the language of globalised governance – written English – and to formal written Arabic. The co-construction of meaning, in encounters between human rights researchers and witnesses, is a modern ritual that is entextualised in the genre ‘testimony’; its translations between spoken and written modes, languages and styles, are exercises in persuasive rhetoric aimed at redressing ‘testimonial injustice’. The researchers are not professional translators, yet their unselfconscious translations are constitutive of the knowledge that audiences receive. The data is based on interviews and questionnaires with Amnesty International staff, textual analysis of publications, and on focus groups and surveys.

Keywords: sociology of translation, Arabic, testimony, human rights, linguistic anthropology, NGOs, epistemic justice, networks of production
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Networks of agents performing rituals and translations
  • 2.Collecting testimonies: Notations in a meaning-producing event
  • 3.Entextualising and archiving testimonies: Reiterating the genre
  • 4.The publication of a testimony: Orchestrated polyphony
    • 4.1Locking testimonies into persuasive formulations
    • 4.2Contracting testimonies’ professional translation: Internal power relations
    • 4.3Translators’ styles: Channelling norms and designing audiences
    • 4.4Modifying testimonies: Stretching the connection with witnesses for the persuasion of audiences
  • 5.Disseminating testimonies: Reception in Arabic
    • 5.1Witnessing in focus groups
    • 5.2Surveying regional commonalities and discords
  • 6.Conclusion: Translating for epistemic justice
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.00004.haw
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