Abstract
During World War II, both the Finnish Army and its ally Germany were dependent on mediation practices provided by military personnel or civilians in the linguistic, cultural and ideological intersections of the given conflicts. By drawing on two autobiographical manuscripts – one written immediately after the war and the other later in the 1990s – this article examines the experiences of a female civilian interpreter engaged by the German Army from 1942 to 1945. In addition to directing attention to ordinary people in wartime translational tasks, this article contrasts the value of such post-hoc accounts in the historical translation analysis against the constraints imposed on them through their embeddedness in a certain communicative situation. It shows, furthermore, how the change in this communicative situation imposes changes on the writer’s emotional involvement and how this change mirrors her own stance towards the given narrative framework.
Highlights
The following discussion on the experiences of an interpreter in times of war is placed in the Finnish–German military alliance (1941–1944), which created a dynamic, multilingual space of Finnish–German administrative, military, ideological and cultural negotiations lasting four years
Depending on the specific context, these mediation practices were managed by military personnel or civilians and prisoners-of-war with sufficient language skills (Kujamäki, 2012)
This study has two objectives: first, at a general level, it discusses the methodological question of what kind of information can be obtained from personal accounts for the reconstruction of military translation cultures and how a chronological distance between the reported experiences and the moment of writing could constrain them. More importantly, it aims to make visible the ordinary people embodying the intercultural spaces of conflict who, more often than not, are sidelined in military historiography. All this defines the present approach as microhistorical: its primary focus is on an everyday translation and interpreting practice as experienced by a subaltern individual with complex relationships in the military and civilian social structures (Iggers, 2005; Munday, 2014)
Summary
The following discussion on the experiences of an interpreter in times of war is placed in the Finnish–German military alliance (1941–1944), which created a dynamic, multilingual space of Finnish–German administrative, military, ideological and cultural negotiations lasting four years In this space, a variety of translation and interpreting practices were called for, to sustain the interaction and interconnections in joint military projects and to support the coexistence of Finnish civilians and German military forces. To demonstrate one part of the wartime translation and interpreting practices and the potential agency of civilian interpreters, this article analyses two autobiographic manuscripts by Lahja Ikonen, who was recruited in 1942 as an interpreter for a German supply depot (“Armeeverpflegungslager 517”) in Hyrynsalmi, eastern Finland During her service, Ikonen took notes on her daily tasks, colleagues and local people and recorded her feelings about living in a male military space far away from home. All this defines the present approach as microhistorical: its primary focus is on an everyday translation and interpreting practice as experienced by a subaltern individual with complex relationships in the military and civilian social structures (Iggers, 2005; Munday, 2014)
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