Legal Translation: Professional Activities at the Periphery of the Juridical Field

The relevance of this topic is defined by the growing involvement of legal interpreters in legal proceedings. This article aims to study the peculiarities of the professional activities of interpreters in criminal legal proceedings involving migrants from post-Soviet states. The main characteristics of the field of legal translation are analyzed, and the peculiarities of the recruitment of legal interpreters and their interaction with the procedural parties in courts of different jurisdictions are revealed. The theoretical framework of the study is composed of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory, including his analysis of the juridical field, and contemporary approaches in the anthropology of professions. The main empirical methods include semi-structured interviews and nonparticipant observation. The study singles out the criteria of stratification of legal interpreters, and demonstrates how the institutional and sociocultural contexts influence the professional activities of interpreters. The forms of interaction of interpreters with procedural parties and the judge were analyzed, demonstrating the costs of communication between the interpreters and different actors of the juridical field. According to the results, legal interpreters follow informal rules that have been formed in the process of their everyday interaction with their main clients — law enforcement bodies. Structural and epistemic disagreements between jurists and interpreters were revealed. The research data also demonstrate that interpreters are not full-fledged actors of the juridical field, but they fulfill a technical function within that field. A conclusion is made about the weak structuring of the field of legal translation and predominance of precarious employment of actors of this field. The revealed problems could be solved by the institutionalization of the expert position of court interpreters.