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UNITED KINGDOM
NETHERLANDS
Yara Rodrigues Fowler - 1 - Prologue: Translation as survival
28 October 2023
When the children of migrants translate it is because something needs to be done and their parents are powerless to do it. Food ordered from a restaurant menu. Paperwork submitted to avoid deportation. Translation, we learn, is always a negotiation, always about power and, sometimes, a question of survival.
Translation often occurs — or does not occur — at the interface with the state. In 2010s, when a right-wing government implemented austerity policies across the UK, one of the first services cut was translation. At the time, I was the trustee of a women’s refuge for Latin Americans. Without translation, migrant women escaping abusive partners, often with their children, could not access the UK justice system, the UK housing benefit system or UK schools.
Right now, as I write in English, the Israeli state is bombing Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli state has stopped the supply of food, medicine, electricity and water to Palestinians in Gaza. The UN has called this a crime against humanity and fears it will become a genocide.
By the time Demir has translated this text into Dutch, many more Gazans will have died.
Palestinians in Gaza are being prevented from telling us what is happening to them by the Israeli state. As people with access to electricity and the internet, as people who are not fleeing our homes, as people who are still alive, we must speak for them. We must translate, which is to say we must negotiate with power on their behalf. It is a question of survival.
There must be an immediate ceasefire. And a free Palestine in our lifetimes.
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