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 remove the personal, relational layer of language — tone, register, dialect, hesitation, idiom, rapport. People who used Google Translate described exactly this: the words were right, but it did not feel personal or connective.

That personal layer is not decoration. In an asylum hearing, it is the very thing a person is judged on — credibility is assessed on how someone speaks as much as what they say. So a translation that strips the personal layer strips the basis on which a person is believed.

This is why machine translation is inadequate for high-stakes settings, even when it is accurate: it removes the subtleties used to judge a person. And it is why human interpreting — which can carry that layer — must be done properly, because where it fails (wrong dialect, "good enough" standards), the same loss occurs.

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 result is not a reduced need for interpreters but a stronger one. A properly qualified, dialect-matched human interpreter is essential for safeguarding, for clarification, and for carrying a person’s voice and personality into a record on which credibility may turn.