La mediazione linguistica come pratica di negoziazione, resistenza, attivismo e ospitalità sulle sponde del Mediterarraneo

The metaphor of the bridge and of the encounter among cultures has for a long time characterized the history of translation, at least starting from the so-called ‘cultural turn’. This turn marked the breakthrough of a phenomenology rooted in the relation with the other, involving a process of permanent and inevitable exchange that affects our daily life. Presently, both the concept and the practice of translation have acquired new connotations and implications due to the recent enormous movement of migrants and refugees into and across Europe, a movement which demands clear definitions for the ethics and the politics of hospitality. This paper reports on a research project that involved conducting interviews with a group of interpreters, translators and language mediators who assisted the newly-arrived migrants in Southern Italy by not only interpreting for them, but also advising and helping the ‘boat people’ to claim and negotiate their rights in the ‘hosting’ country. Interview questions addressed a range of urgent issues, many of which demonstrate how the practice of language and cultural mediation is particularly relevant in today’s context of migration emergency and post-terrorist attacks. Indeed, it may also help ‘mediate’ and ‘soften’ the Italian mistrust of and suspicion towards the newly-arrived migrants, vulnerable people who have come from various war zones. However, interview answers do not provide simply an idealistic and idealized vision of welcoming the other. Rather, they outline a geography of proximity marked by the ancient hospes-hostis dichotomy that denotes the complexity, the ambiguity, the uncertainty, the unpredictability and the contingency characteristic of relations with the other. Thus, drawing on the current debate on how language construes alterity and diversity, the aim of this paper is to delineate how translation engages with a politics of hospitality in the Mediterranean. It does this by examining how, and to what extent, interpreters, translators and language mediators ‘humanize’ the migrants’ transfer to and detainment in different detention centers across Italy. The provisional findings suggest that the interviewed interpreters, translators and language mediators construct a “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998): the interviewees work not as a mere aggregation of individuals fulfilling only the central task of translation, but as a ‘living’ network held together by a sense of hospitality that is not only crucial to their mediation practice, but also to their model of plurilingual, participative and active citizenship.