The Other(’s) Language: Interpreters at the Core of Othering Processes in the French Asylum Procedure

At the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (French acronym: Ofpra), the institution that processes asylum applications in the first instance, interpreters hold an ambiguous position. They appear both as indispensable actors in the conduct of interviews and as precarious private workers whose linguistic skills are very often correlated with a migration background. Therefore, their formal mandate of neutrality and impartiality conflicts with the way they are actually identified by both asylum seekers and officials, which is on the basis of race and gender. This creates a specific institutional habitus, which is explored in this paper. To this end, the chapter presents the institutionalization of their function in the context of the neoliberal reform of Ofpra. It then questions the dynamics of identification that target interpreters, making them appear as internal Others at the service of the bureaucratic othering. Finally, the paper shows how interpreters, through their specific linguistic and sociocultural knowledge, can simultaneously occupy multiple positions within the institution. The chapter thus offers an analysis of the ambiguous making of multiple otherness in a neoliberal administrative context.