The Interpreter and the Canadian Convention Refugee Hearing: Crossing the potentially life-threatening boundaries between “coccode-e-eh,” “cluck-cluck,” and “cot-cot-cot”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Interpreter and the Canadian Convention Refugee Hearing: Crossing the potentially life-threatening boundaries between "coccode-e-eh," "cluck-cluck," and "cot-cot-cot" — This paper discusses the obstacles facing interpreters and translators in inter-cultural situations with reference to Canadian Convention refugee hearings, taped in 1987. The author sets forth a theory of interpretation suited to the sometimes comical, but usually tragic elements of failed human interaction as they occur in legal hearings. The article begins with a comparison between a fictional rendering of failed communication from the work of Primo Levi, but then moves on to the plight of persecuted persons who have come to Canada to claim Convention refugee status. Obvious similarities emerge in a comparison of the two processes; but ultimately it is the language of persecution — silence, scars, tears, pleas, and impassioned cries — that is the most difficult to interpret and translate. Given the dynamics of inter-cultural legal discourse and the gravity of the issues at stake, the author argues for a broader mandate for the interpreter, such that s/he will also be permitted to act as a medium through which inter-cultural information can pass, rather than yet another grid into which pained words must fit.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".