The craft of translation: documentary practices within immigration advocacy in the United States

Abstract

AbstractThis article builds on anthropological research on bureaucratic inscription as a power‐laden process to explore the craft of document translation in contexts of immigration legal advocacy. In a legal climate characterized by suspicion and resource scarcity, immigrants who seek to regularize their status in the United States face steep evidentiary challenges, including the requirement that all documentation, including records from their countries of origin, letters of support from friends and family, and their own affidavits, must be translated into English. Approaching immigration document translation ethnographically and drawing on multi‐year fieldwork in a nonprofit providing legal services to low‐income, Spanish‐speaking immigrants, this article focuses on translation as neither straightforward and mechanical nor as impossibly complex but rather as a craft that involves exercising discretion. Practicing this craft with care is one way to counter the otherwise alienating and state‐centric nature of bureaucratic inscription.