Book reviews

Anxo Fernández-Ocampo and Michaela Wolf (Eds.). Framing the

interpreter: Towards a visual perspective. London: Routledge, 2014. 204
pp. ISBN 978-0-415-71274-3 (hbk), 978-0-415-71273-6 (pbk).
Reviewed by Michael Cronin

Seeing is only half believing. Or so it would seem when it comes to interpret-

ers. When we begin to look at how photography has made them visible, we be-
gin to question the circumstances, the pressures, the unspoken assumptions in
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the moment when they are captured by the lens. In this absorbing new collection
of essays, Anxo Fernández-Ocampo and Michaela Wolf draw on the testimony
of photography (and to a lesser extent of engraving) to explore how interpreters
have been represented in a variety of different situations from the colonial period
through the First and Second World Wars and into the Cold War. As they argue,
‘Framing the Interpreter is not unrelated to the “fictional turn” […] in translation
studies, which places literary or cinematic fictional translators and interpreters at
the heart of its research, but our focus is on the application of classic iconographi-
cal models to archive documents that stage interpreters in portraits or ordinary
scenes’ (p. 4–5). The choice of ‘framing’ is not innocent. A frame is both a prism
with which to view the world but also a way of ‘framing a shot’, a way of deciding
a camera angle or an arrangement of the subject matter that seeks, consciously or
unconsciously, to determine the reception of the photographic image. Elizabeth
Edwards, in an excellent methodological essay on interpreting photographs, notes
how an excessive emphasis on context can drain an object or subject of any mean-
ing. Once you know the context, there is nothing more to be said. The notion of
framing, on the other hand, implies ‘process, activity and affect’ in the photograph
and the act of photography so that photographs are always in excess of the circum-
stances of their creation. There is more to them than meets the eye if only because
they will be viewed in different times and places. The conditions of reception are as
important as the situations of production. In the volume, the photographs chosen
for analysis relate primarily to specific kinds of situations, namely conflict and war.
War, unhappily for its participants, has the photographic advantage of bringing
people from many different nations and ethnicities into contact with each other.
In addition, war proves to be a powerful spur for technological advance, and pho-
tography is no exception. The development of lighter and more portable cameras
meant that more and more ordinary people could begin to record what they saw.
The democratisation of the photographic act is apparent in Framing the Interpreter

Interpreting 18:2 (2016), 285–289.  doi 10.1075/intp.18.2.07cro

issn 1384–6647 / e-issn 1569–982X © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 286 Book reviews

as the essays move from analysis of professional engravings and drawings to the
mass-produced postcard to the private photographs of the family album, showing
that the ‘cult of the amateur’ is not the prerogative of the internet.
The photographs of the interpreter from the colonial period are notable for the
status anxiety that informs the images. The ‘Arab interpreter’ can be depicted in
rich, ethnically distinctive dress, or the wives of interpreters in French Indochina,
discussed in an essay by Anxo Fernández-Ocampo and Michaela Wolf, can be
displayed in regional clothes in ethnically choreographed interiors as evidence
of the status attaching to the profession in the colonial economy. In this respect,
what these photographs suggest is the ‘garment metaphor’ that has been a stan-
dard trope for translation over the centuries, where translation involves a change
of dress, one language being dressed up in the clothes of another. Cross-dressing
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inevitably excites suspicions, however, and the unease is captured in the analysis
by Birgit Mersmann of an Abyssinian interpreter, Yussuf. He is presented in full
frontal view to the camera wearing what appears like a military tunic and a fez, ‘a
symbol of Ottoman modernity throughout the Arab world of the near East and
Northern Africa, insignia of high military or civic rank’ (64). Yussuf is, however,
barefoot. His role as language intermediary, as one who has a monopoly of that
scarce resource, bilingualism, brings with it a degree of recognition, but his social
standing in the eyes of the colonial is only ever incomplete. Only part of his self
will be admitted into the dress code of modernity. In her discussion of a pho-
tograph from the end of the nineteenth century, Rachael Langford points to the
unhappy fate of a native interpreter working for the British in Sierra Leone. In the
photograph, we see the interpreter in native dress carrying the British standard.
The standard-bearer would later be killed in a native uprising in Sierra Leone.
Positions of power or trust are obviously very differently construed depending on
which side you are on. It would be wrong, however, to simply reduce the inter-
preter photographs of the colonial period to the right-on logic of victimhood. It is
clear that the native interpreters were highly resourceful in negotiating complex,
difficult and often dangerous situations. If they are picked out as the central sub-
ject of a photograph, it may be from the point of view of the colonial photogra-
pher as ethnic metonym or as reassuring evidence of an entente cordiale between
coloniser and colonised. But as they stand isolated in that middle distance, they
also bear witness to the tenacity of humans who, in fraught circumstances, can use
language skills not simply as an avenue to success but more prosaically, as a means
to survival.
Wars are rarely the affairs of single nations. From the Seventh Coalition on
the Plains of Waterloo to the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ involved in the 2003 inva-
sion of Iraq, cooperation between different nations and armies has been central
to political and military strategy. The reality on the ground, however, may be very
 Book reviews 287

different from the public rhetoric of instant solidarity and brotherhood in arms.
Michael Kelly, probing photographs of French interpreters taken during the First
World War, wonders whether the photographs themselves do not contradict the
claims that between the French and the British all was comradely understanding.
Producing postcards showing French and British troops together was important
in creating the impression of a united or common front. However, more often
than not, the photographs reveal distance, a staging of intimacy that is belied by a
profusion of details that suggest all is not quietude on the Western front. French
interpreters attached to British regiments may have been in France but, spending
much of their time with their British allies, they frequently suffered from loneli-
ness and feelings of isolation. These feelings were compensated for, however, in
certain cases, by the unexpected social ascension that war brought. Albert Jacques
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Veillet Levallée sent a postcard to Sybil Swindeles, showing himself in full military
uniform mounted on a horse and towering over his British groom or batman. As
Franziska Heimburger points out, Veillet-Levallée, before his promotion to inter-
preter in 1916, was an ordinary rank-and-file soldier in the French army and ‘his
social position as a schoolteacher meant he probably would not have had a per-
sonal servant or butler before the war’ (p. 101). The low-angle shot of the eques-
trian interpreter testifies to the unexpected benefits of the entente cordiale. During
the First World War, as Michaela Wolf points out, an estimated six to eight million
men were held in camps as prisoners of war. Historians disagree about the con-
ditions in these camps and, in particular, on the deployment of POWs as forced
labour. However, there was an obvious need for interpreters. Wolf, in her examina-
tion of the photographs of these interpreters, shows how at one level the aim was
to show interpreter provision as a reassuring sign of the humanitarian credentials
of the captors. At another, however, it is clear in the framing of the interpreter that
he is unmistakably placed on the side of the powerful and the victorious and, as
such, he exercises authority by proxy over the vanquished.
The duties of interpreters are multiple, in war and in peace. Hilary Footitt
analyses these duties as primarily those of communicating with clandestine forces,
liaising with civilians, dealing with prisoners of war and negotiating for peace.
Footitt notes the importance of interpreting in the Second World War as part of
counterinsurgency operations. This emphasis on the need to win hearts and minds
becomes increasingly important as warfare shifts from the staged encounters be-
tween combatants on designated territories (Waterloo) to wars that cover the
whole of the territory and directly involve the civilian, non-combatant population.
That this situation creates particular difficulties for interpreters is borne out by
Kayoko Takeda’s discussion of Chinese interpreters in a Japanese-occupied region
of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Captions are crucial in
determining how photographs are to be framed by recipients, but they also reflect
 288 Book reviews

how the photographic subject is subsequently seen by those outside the initial pho-
tographic encounter. A snapshot shows a man in in Qingzhou, China in uniform-
like clothing and a Japanese army cap. The photo comes with two inscriptions — a
note written in Japanese on the back of the photo, indicating that this is a Chinese
man in Qingzhou, and another comprising two separate captions in English.
As Takeda explains, these were provided by the reseller of the photo, and read:
‘Chinese interpreter (Japanese Army)’ and ‘Chinese Traitor’ (p. 152). The captions
are telling in their differing judgements and indeed a number of these interpreters
were executed for their collaboration with the occupying forces. Paradoxically, in
view of conventional understandings of what happens to translators, it was their
visibility, not their invisibility, that was the undoing of these interpreters. In a simi-
lar vein, although the American occupation forces in Japan were keen to put on
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photographic record the role of (the often female) Japanese interpreters in the con-
struction of the new Japan, the interpreters themselves, as Takeda points out, were
considerably more reluctant to be visibly identified with the work of their media
savvy victors. Visibility is, of course, a matter of point of view. Making visible the
successes of the Finnish army during the Continuation War (1941–44) was cru-
cial to sustaining national morale. The physical capture of the Red Army General
Kipichinkov in 1941 was a propaganda coup that needed equally to be captured on
camera. What the photographs reveal, as Pekka Kujamäki points out, is the shift-
ing visibility of the interpreter Lieutenant Georg Baronin, who makes the seem-
ingly informal encounters with the Finnish General Lennart Oesch linguistically
possible. The staged intimacy of collaboration is a carefully constructed linguis-
tic fiction. The most disturbing photographs in the collection are undoubtedly of
the interpreters depicted during the unfolding of Operation Barbarossa on the
Eastern Front. There is something inescapably forlorn in the grainy photographs,
as discussed by Xoán Manuel Garrido-Vilariño, of the native interpreters taken as
private mementoes by German soldiers. These were interpreters that in many in-
stances translated for a people haunted by the spectre of extermination.
The threat of extermination would, of course, become global with the advent
of the Cold War, and the closing chapters by Jesús Baigorri-Jalón, María Manuela
Fernández-Sánchez, Icíar Alonso-Araguás and Brian James Baer look at the emer-
gence of a professional cadre of interpreters in the Cold War period paralleled by
the brutal realities of interpreting in the killing fields of Korea and Vietnam. Baer
notes that the technical trappings of postwar interpreting, with the emergence of
the interpreting booth, gave credence to a notion of interpreting as a disembodied,
exact, instrumentalised encoding of the source message. The interpreting reality,
as revealed in the memoirs of interpreters, was wholly different, as they constantly
grappled with what needed to be said and how it was going to be received: ‘If
the positivist model of communication constructed the interpreter as a kind of
 Book reviews 289

linguistic machine, the pressures of the Cold War era exposed the need for the in-
terpreter to assume the role with far greater urgency — to become […] a diplomat
as well as a linguist’ (p. 198).
In revealing the immense interpretive possibilities of photography itself for
the history of interpreting, Anxo Fernández-Ocampo and Michaela Wolf and the
other contributors have greatly added to our understanding of what it means to
interpret at different times and in different circumstances. By putting interpreters
back into the picture, they have genuinely opened our eyes.
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