The Rhetorical Mediator: Understanding Agency in Indigenous Translation and Interpretation Through Indigenous Approaches to UX

By Nora K. Rivera
Utah State University Press (2024)
175 pages

Review by Jurgita Antoine

The Rhetorical Mediator focuses on the experiences of Indigenous people working as interpreters in Mexico and Peru. These coun­tries have significant populations that speak Indigenous lan­guages and there are needs for interpreters when these speakers must interface with Western institutions. Author Nora K. Rivera’s data consists of 12 semi-structured testimonios (interviews) with practicing interpreters who attended a two-day international con­ference of Indigenous translators and interpreters in Oaxaca, Mexico. Rivera, a Mestiza professor who teaches at a U.S. univer­sity and helped organize the conference, grounds her analysis in Indigenous, decolonialist, and translation theories, using UX (user experience) methods to advocate for language equity and to seek solutions to improve the work experiences of interpreters working with Indigenous languages in Latin America.

The author shows that Indigenous interpreters in Mexico and Peru are a vital link between the Indigenous language speakers and Spanish language government institutions. The interpreters work in courts and healthcare centers, facilitating communica­tions in emotionally charged situations with their role often extending into advocacy. However, Indigenous languages and the work of their interpreters lack recognition and status that inter­preters of other world languages, especially European languages, enjoy in these societies and academies.

Rivera also explores numerous issues that resonate with Native North American languages in the United States. Interpreter agency (i.e. the freedom to construct the meaning in the interpre­tation process), translators as cultural brokers, the lack of formal­ization of translation services, and interpreter certification are issues familiar to all Native American language speakers. In Mexico and Peru, speakers of Indigenous languages number in the thousands and hundreds of thousands, while in the U.S. Native languages are less frequently spoken and few communities have monolingual Indigenous speakers needing assistance to communicate within Western institutions. Moreover, in the U.S., teaching and certifications in Native American languages are left to the local authorities. Native American translation work is wrapped in research and teaching practices, and translation as a separate area of scholarship and practice is also hardly recognized despite the fact that educational institutions where these languages are taught, such as tribal colleges and universities, are inundated with translation requests, both from inside and outside the communities.

Rivera’s interviewees’ narratives reveal not only that the inter­preters feel underestimated, but that there is a lack of acknowl­edgement by the authorities that their societies are multilingual. While the author mentions that there are language laws at the national and international levels to protect the rights of Indigenous language speakers, there is too little information to understand the legal and policy contexts in which the inter­viewed interpreters work. The message is that discrimination and marginalization of Indigenous languages and a lack of awareness about language rights result in a rapid decline in the use of Indigenous languages.

To be sure, The Rhetorical Mediator draws attention to Indigenous translation and interpretation, but it seems that just as the Indigenous people get lost navigating Western social and institutional structures, the issues discussed in the book also get tangled up in the Western theoretical frameworks and positioning and fail to deliver anything more substantial than a public rela­tions message that Indigenous peoples face discrimination in Mexico and Peru. While the stories recorded by the author are powerful and informative from the perspective of qualitative research, such a small number of interviews with the geographical coverage of two continents provides little context to the discussed experiences and practices. Nevertheless, the book confirms that translation needs to be part of the language revitalization move­ment just as much as teaching and learning. Translation networks and frameworks could be one area to advance for new regional Native American language resource centers.

Jurgita Antoine, PhD, is an applied linguist and director of the Midwest Native American Language Resource Center at Little Priest Tribal College.