Abstract

The mass arrival of refugees in Turkey from Syria since 2011 has created a growing demand for Turkish and Arabic speaking community interpreters in order to fulfill their health, educational and psycho-social needs and to facilitate their integration into Turkish society. The district of Sultanbeyli in the periphery of Istanbul has been formed through successive waves of migration and is now home to the third most important Syrian population in Istanbul. National and international NGOs, municipal authorities and public institutions collaborate so that Syrian refugees can benefit from psycho-social assistance and health services. Furthermore, they realize projects aiming their integration into the host society. Community interpreters play a major role in helping Syrian refugees benefit from these services and overcome linguistic and cultural barriers. Based on Bourdieu’s key concepts in the sociology of translation (habitus, field, capital, illusio, doxa, self-reflexivity), our study focuses on community interpreting practices in Sultanbeyli in order to understand personal histories and linguistic dispositions of community interpreters, their roles and interactions with service providers who work at various NGOs. Ethnographic and qualitative methods were used to reveal the relationship between migration and translation. This study is an attempt to test the above-mentioned concepts of Bourdieu forged during his experiences in Algeria and developed in France in the dynamism and fluidity of Sultanbeyli.

Syrian Refugees and Community Interpreting: An Attempt at a Sociology of Translation in the Example of Sultanbeyli

Abstract

The mass arrival of refugees in Turkey from Syria since 2011 has created a growing demand for Turkish and Arabic speaking community interpreters in order to fulfill their health, educational and psycho-social needs and to facilitate their integration into Turkish society. The district of Sultanbeyli in the periphery of Istanbul has been formed through successive waves of migration and is now home to the most important Syrian population on the Asian side of Istanbul. National and international NGOs, municipal authorities and public institutions collaborate so that Syrian refugees can benefit from psycho-social assistance and health services. Furthermore, they realize projects aiming their integration into the host society. Community interpreters play a major role in helping Syrian refugees benefit from these services and overcome linguistic and cultural barriers. Based on Bourdieu’s key concepts in the sociology of translation (habitus, field, capital, illusio, doxa, self-reflexivity), our study focuses on community interpreting practices in Sultanbeyli in order to understand personal histories and linguistic dispositions of community interpreters, their roles and interactions with service providers who work at various NGOs. Ethnographic and qualitative methods were used to reveal the relationship between migration and translation. This study is an attempt to test the above-mentioned concepts of Bourdieu forged during his experiences in Algeria and developed in France in the dynamism and fluidity of Sultanbeyli.

Keywords

• Syrian refugees
• Pierre Bourdieu
• community interpreters
• sociology of translation
• NGOs

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