Language Work at International Criminal Courts

Abstract

This article seeks to bring the often-invisible labor of interpreters and language assistants at the International Criminal Court and the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia into sharper focus. I highlight the far-reaching and extensive tasks of language workers, paying particular attention to their efforts to negotiate and mediate witnesses' accounts of atrocity, including sexualized violence, inside and outside international courtrooms. In doing so, I illustrate how language work is central to the life of an international court and the vision of international criminal accountability. I argue that attention to the dynamics of language work provides opportunities to consider the project of international criminal justice in new and important ways, focusing on its practical work, its social encounters and its complex engagement with relations of difference.