Translation as Protection: Conceptual Foundations of an Emerging Field for Human Rights Settings in the Arab World

Abstract

In settings where rights are granted or withheld – asylum hearings, civil registration, the recognition of qualifications, the documentation of gender-based violence – translation does not simply carry meaning across languages. It decides whether a person can be heard at all. Yet, the Arabic – speaking world, which sits at the center of some of the largest migration corridors of our time, still lacks a shared conceptual vocabulary for studying translation in these settings. This article offers a first step toward that vocabulary. Drawing on seven established strands of translation studies, it presents a trilingual glossary (French, English, Arabic) of thirty-eight working concepts and organizes them into a single map of the field. The glossary is framed by a simple but consequential claim: that translation in protection settings operates on two thresholds – a threshold of recognition, which decides whether a person is admitted as a legitimate speaker, and a threshold of participation, which decides the quality of that person’s presence in the procedure. The aim is neither exhaustive nor final. It is foundational: to give researchers, trainers, and practitioners in the Arab world a common ground on which an emerging field can be built.