The multiple roles of interpreters in asylum hearings in Italy

Italy has recently been one of the main entry points for asylum seekers and refugees into Europe (UNHCR 2023). Credibility assessment of claims in asylum procedures heavily hinges on the applicants’ ability to (re)construct their refugee identity in written declarations and oral testimonies, which are in turn shaped and reshaped within the interaction in the further course of the procedure, not only but also by interpreters. Over the past 30 years, a growing number of publications testifies to the importance of asylum interpreters’ roles and ethics and show that asylum interpreters rarely fulfil the expectations of normative role prescriptions. This paper aims to gain a better understanding of some critical aspects of interpreting in the asylum context in Italy, an understudied area of interpreting so far, mainly for difficult access to data. It is based on a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews to some of the participants in the hearings and documentation about our dataset, which was collected at a Prefecture in central Italy in 2023. After an overview of the normative aspects of the right to asylum in the world and, more specifically, in Italy, we discuss the main issues concerning the complex profile and role of asylum interpreters and provide a description of the Italian international protection system. We then contextualise the dataset and the linguistic-ethnographic methods adopted to unravel the complex interactional dynamics under investigation. Based on our data analysis, we conclude that, in order to provide quality services, more specialised interpreter training is needed – not only in terms of language, legal knowledge and terminology, intercultural and communication skills, but also in terms of interviewing techniques and interactional mechanisms, as well as awareness of roles and respective boundaries in the asylum hearing.