Crisis Translation - Federico New Zealand

Notes from a secondee

27 March 2019 - Dr Federico Federici (UCL)

With cicadas singing as a background to my first week of secondment in Auckland, New Zealand, I had returned to this country finding it as inspiring as when I left from my previous secondment in 2017. With plans to ensure that the INTERACT activities and ideas would outlast the EU-funded network and continue our research projects with the friends and colleagues that are making the project happen, it was a time of excitement. Rich in hope and opportunities, the 2-month secondment were going to present challenges, what should I do first, how can we build a sustainable citizen training in collaboration with translation and interpreting professionals, how can we ensure that crisis translation considers authentic situations and create proper crisis scenarios for training, and then there was also this idea to chase, that grant proposal to write, that article to finish, and…

Then an atrocious act killed Muslims during their Friday prayers. As it happens ever too often world-wide, many Muslims are killed regularly by civil conflicts, external wars, terrorists.

Then a racist acted in New Zealand. Another terrorist attack carried out by a white racist.

The embodiment of the ultimate misunderstanding that human beings are not a single species and one single race. We are one race and one species. But ignorance keeps feeding people appalling ideas on diversity. This ignorance struck killing families, children, refugees. For most people here, this deranged ignorance killed New Zealanders as the powerful message of the “Love & Solidarity” poster, which soon started circulating, shows.

Poster with a heart and three hands advocating for an end to racism.

An embodiment of the opposite of what genuine, complex, and always incomplete but ongoing acts of translation and interpreting try to achieve, that is, mutual understanding of different sorts and shades and for different needs. With lack of understanding or willingness to understand each other come inevitable divisions. The people of Christchurch, and most New Zealanders have shown that the current feeling for the vast majority is to not let this happen.

From spontaneous, genuine, firm reaction, and sympathetic gestures of the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, to school children, people out and about for their own businesses joining in, to the Muslim owner of the local corner where I’m staying who has lost friends there, most New Zealanders have shown a dignified grief in the dazed week that followed the terrorist attack. They have shown the true meaning of unity and solidarity in this first shell-shocked week.

History will tell whether local politicians have been doing it for political positioning. On the surface, it does not feel that way. It feels real. It feels that New Zealand has a willingness to consider its issues and see how to address them. Unfortunately, history seems to speak many foreign languages to monolingual speakers of none of such languages, and whether some are willing to learn is doubtful.

Fellow-INTERACTER Jay Marlowe wrote an editorial for national daily Newsroom on 20 March. There, he reminds us that unity now hides underlying issues:

“While the statement ‘this is not us’ that has come out of this terror event is well-intentioned, it requires pause and critical reflection. We might like to think, the actions of one person (or a small group) may appear as an extreme aberration but the sentiments and beliefs that underlie such wanton violence sadly are not.”

Christchurch hosts large communities of migrants who have often arrived to recover from the devastating impact of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes.

Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities from forced migrations, but also economic migrations, take time to integrate. They also need political and social willingness to let the integration occur. Racism can take up roots if the integration and immigration policies are not backed with genuine intent. But also, a lot of work has gone on in New Zealand to make all residents, New Zealanders because that is the culture of this land.

Even if the New Zealand politicians were to be posturing – spare my cynical soul a thought – the words, attitudes, and gestures of Jacinda Ardern remain so much more empathetic, appropriate, democratic, rational, and ultimately humane that those of most politicians reacting to terrorist. As unity and integration in superdiverse societies is a long and tortuous journey, these acts remain so poignant for migrants such as myself, when I compare them with those my own country of migration, the UK. There, the absurd, right-wing bickering that has created rifts and divisions, thanks to the inane doings of the right-wing UK government at the time of Brexit, or of its non-existent opposition, stem from the diametrical opposite dimension of the political spectrum. I find it possibly even more painful to engage with a comparison with my country of origin, Italy, and its current neo-Fascist government, with illegal immigration policies. To those, the message here doesn’t compare: “Ōtautahi, Kia tūtahi tonu tatou, Christchurch, let us all continue to stand together”, it is process that had started and will continue.

A political discourse gone sour and vitriolic, with right-wing supported uncritical media, empowers extremists to feel they can pursue their insane plans and deranged vision of racial differences.

Aspiring to a different political, social, and mediatic reaction to divisions and racism, I’m learning in this secondment, doesn’t need to feel idealistic or utopian. It doesn’t feel easy either, but it is not a superfluous pursuit that we can give up because it is difficult and bordering on the impossible.

Courtyard of a Maori meeting house on Epsom campus, University of Auckland.

At such a sensitive time, during the week that is ending, I was also welcomed through a pōhiri ceremony at Tūtahi Tonu Marae, Epsom Campus. Called in with a song, the karanga, I was welcomed with speeches and singing in Te Reo Maori. This experience was even more meaningful as it is a ceremony to learn of the intentions of newcomers (me) in Maori communities. I was humbled by the process, the Whikorero (or speeches) focused on Christchurch, on New Zealand and its past, and the role of working together (there I was, included in this ‘working together’) to become wiser through knowledge and resolve problems together. It felt intimate, it felt deeply-troublesome for a guy with a very provincial background and little understanding and knowledge of the world, but an interest in studying and writing. It felt there is an important role in all of our loved/hated clichés of translation as bridge, passage, wave and what-not. It felt that researching multilingual communication in crisis comes with serious responsibilities.

It’s a sunny, warm Saturday morning cheered by the sound of cicadas and refreshed by a soft and gentle breeze. It is 23 March 2019. During this very same week that ends, Minako O’Hagan, Jay Marlowe, and I also had a meeting with our Red Cross partners. They took time to speak to us INTERACTERS just after returning from Christchurch. I felt the meeting was wrongly timed and my asking for the meeting almost an insensitive imposition. My hubris of trying to second guess others’ ideas was soon humbled, once more. The Red Cross officer reminded us that working together on citizen translation training, reaching out to professional translators and interpreters to ensure communities have inside and outside support to communicate and integrate, is now more important than ever. I had not thought about it that way; I felt our deliverables and deadlines were dwarfed by the events and my pushing for a meeting totally untimely. I was doubting my own judgement and gone into an ethical questioning of my willingness to push on with our research plans.

Among the learnings of these two weeks of secondment, I consolidated my feeling that researching how communication can support social integration and resilience in crisis contexts is undeniably hard. My concern about research integrity, when working with responders on our research questions and plans at a time when they are involved in responding, clashed with their need to keep looking for better communication and dialogue. This need is real and pressed our frontline responders, who support the affected communities in Christchurch and CALD communities across New Zealand, to continue to work together. The work is needed to create further channels of direct, culture- and language-specific communication with the CALD groups. As integrating CALD groups in multilingual societies is one way to ensure superficial issues of incomprehension don’t become abyssal divisions and unbridgeable rifts in the long-term, so that crises can be mitigated, if not avoided.

It was a lot to learn, I wished I could have learned not because of the cascading effects of racism leading to a terrorist attack and a crisis. I wished there were books to learn it from, not through such an atrocity.

About the author: Dr Federico Federici

Federico Federici is Reader in Translation Studies at University College London. His research to date has focused on translators and interpreters as intercultural mediators, on translators working in crises, and on reception of translated text. From 2005 he has organised the ‘Translating Voices’ conference series, which focuses on the topics of minority and regional languages, with particular focus on risks, disasters and regional crises.

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