Interpreting the peace is a case study examining the role of language policies and practices employed by international forces attempting to secure and maintain peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s. To clarify, the study is not attempting a discourse analysis of language used in the peacekeeping operation. Rather, drawing on conceptual tools from language policy studies and oral history studies, the authors focus on language practices and the personnel charged with implementing them during the conflict. The majority of the data comes from fifty- two interviews with people who participated in UN and NATO activities—an impressive array of military personnel, linguists, language instructors, and local civilian translators.
The introduction provides a compact summary of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as the methodological background for the study. Chapter 1 details the shortage of linguistic capital among UN/NATO forces early in the conflict and the measures taken in response, including the deployment of a small group of heritage speakers of so-called ‘Serbo-Croat’ (the language's name is itself the subject of discussion) whose effectiveness varied. Hastily organized language courses for military personnel failed to produce even baseline proficiency in the early months of the conflict; later on, longer courses aiming for ‘colloquial’ proficiency performed marginally better.
Chapter 2 examines specialist military personnel: army-trained interpreters and linguists—mostly British—who attended an even longer, more intensive course in ‘Serbo-Croat’. These language specialists eventually saw their technical linguistic roles as interpreters transferred to local civilian interpreters as they took on other military responsibilities—gathering intelligence, acting as liaisons for commanding officers, and training the civilian local-hires. Chapter 3 outlines efforts to recruit these local interpreters, which developed from ad hoc beginnings to a structured process, including the adoption of proficiency guidelines. Chapter 4 describes the insufficiency of extant UN/NATO language support and then documents how the ‘patchwork of improvised services’ was centralized and improved. Ultimately, the ending of the armed conflict allowed for an administrative overhaul, which was orchestrated with the expertise of a senior NATO linguist.
Chapter 5 investigates the experiences of locally hired interpreters and their sometimes precarious employer/employee relationship with the international forces. Also explored are the tensions attending the privileged position in which many interpreters found themselves—being gainfully employed during a conflict in a war-ravaged economy. Chapter 6 details the challenges of working in a conflict zone fractured along ethnic lines, and the complications resulting for language work, especially in identifying ethnicity and building trust between international forces and their local interpreters.
Chapter 7 documents the challenges of orchestrating the multinational UN/NATO peacekeeping forces, and specifically linguistic issues encountered in formal command structures and relations between different national contingents. Chapter 8 recapitulates the study, presenting a series of ‘lessons identified’.
In sum, Interpreting the peace greatly nuances our understanding of language support in multi-national peace operations, with implications for other large-scale translation work across institutional contexts (e.g. humanitarian intervention, education, business). Its findings will be of interest to researchers/practitioners working in both language policy and translation.
