Translation and Rights: A Practical Grid for Protection Settings

Abstract

This article proposes a three-part grid – reliability, verifiability, equity- as an interdisciplinarity tool for reading translation in protection settings. The grid is borrowed from two well-established traditions: global governance and international protection law. For decades, governance scholars have judged institutions by three questions: Are they effective, accountable, and legitimate? (Archibugi and Held, 1995; Buchanan and Keohane, 2006). International protection law asks much the same thing in its own terms: It requires accurate information, procedural safeguards, and fair treatment for vulnerable people (Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951; UNHCR, 2019). The article brings these traditions together and adapts them to translation studies, so that very different kinds of research can be placed within an emerging protective turn. The grid is not a theory. It is a reading tool: it makes studies comparable, shows where scholars have focused their attention, and points to the gaps that remain. Three illustrative readings, all drawn from the existing literature, show the grid at work, and a set of proposed instruments is added in the appendices for future testing. The article argues throughout that translation in protection settings cannot be studied well without law, political science, and sociolinguistics. Here, interdisciplinarity is structural.