Primary Asylum Interviews — Fieldwork

The policy work behind Translational Justice draws on lawyers, academics, inspectors, and researchers — everyone except the people it is about. First-hand testimony from those who have been through asylum hearings is needed both for accuracy and to make the argument human. We ask one thing only: what was your experience of interpretation? We do not collect case stories, legal details, or anything touching live proceedings.

Machine translation can be accurate and still lose the personal, relational parts of language: tone, register, dialect, hesitation, idiom and rapport. People who used Google Translate described the words as right but the exchange as impersonal and disconnected.

In an asylum hearing, that personal layer forms part of the evidence. Credibility is assessed through how someone speaks as well as what they say. A translation that removes those cues also removes part of what the decision-maker uses to judge the person.

Machine translation is therefore inadequate for a high-stakes interview even when its wording is accurate. Human interpreting can carry more of this layer, but only when the interpreter is properly qualified and matched to the speaker's dialect.

The policy link is direct. The Home Office has already encouraged this kind of reliance: in 2023, reporting on leaked guidance said that asylum claimants with limited English were advised to ask family or friends, or use “online translation tools”, to complete a high-stakes questionnaire in English. That places the impersonal tool described in this fieldwork inside the asylum process examined in Case Study 1.

The fieldwork strengthens the case for interpreters rather than reducing it. A properly qualified, dialect-matched interpreter can clarify uncertainty and carry more of a person's voice into a record on which credibility may turn.