As translators between immigrants and their lawyers, “we are put in a position with not inherently a lot of power,” said Will Weeks ’20. That’s because a translator’s job is to render the words of a client without embellishment or opinion.��

But translators have “a lot of power at the same time,” Weeks added — both to convey a client’s story and to demystify legal terms.��

Weeks is a volunteer translator for the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, a nonprofit that provides free or low-cost legal services for recent immigrants, particularly those seeking asylum in the United States.��

�ֲ���ý students in French and francophone studies help interpret between ILAP’s Lewiston-based attorney and asylum seekers from French-speaking African countries, like Djibouti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since the start of the relationship between �ֲ���ý and ILAP, in 2015, students have interpreted, translated legal documents, done research, and even interned for ILAP.��

During a panel at �ֲ���ý’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance, three student translators — Weeks and fellow seniors Emma Wheeler of Bergen, Norway, and Elizabeth Kiley-Bergen of Troy, N.Y. — explained the complex work that goes into effective legal translation.��

Neutral, but visible

Asylum seekers often come to ILAP for help filling out legal documents that explain why a person does not feel safe in their home country, and why the United States should grant them asylum.

Seniors Elizabeth Kiley-Bergen, William Weeks, and Emma Wheeler pose outside Perry Atrium in Pettengill Hall. The trio are volunteer translators for the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Asylum seekers tell their stories to ILAP lawyers, who can take them on as clients or send them to pro bono attorneys with other firms. �ֲ���ý student translators are there to make sure a client’s story gets accurately told.��

When people come from environments of persecution or even torture, their stories are hard to tell — and hard to hear. But when translating, neutrality is key.��

“We have to be mindful of imposing power and privilege.”��

“While maybe it would be a first instinct to try to play up or play down these traumatic experiences, we have to stay within ourselves,” Weeks said. “We have to be neutral and translate, one for one, what these people are saying.”��

That can be tough, since clients’ stories are not necessarily linear. “Asylum seekers are sometimes giving us bits and pieces at a time and that’s what we have to translate, just bits and pieces,” Weeks added.��

“If we attempt to make a coherent story out of it all, we are inherently assuming and deconstructing. We have to be mindful of imposing power and privilege.”��

Being neutral, however, doesn’t mean fading into the background. The lawyer, interpreter, and client all have to keep in mind that context and meaning change from one language to another.��

“We have to make clear that the words we are translating are coming from a foreign source,” Weeks said. “It has to stay loyal to what these asylum seekers are saying.”��

Translating context as well as words��

Though the student interpreters’ goal is to translate word for word, sometimes they need to ask for more words.��

Imagine, said Kiley-Bergen, two Americans talking about American politics. If the Green Party comes up in the conversation, both people are likely to know what that minority political party is. But if an American is talking to, say, a French person, the American might have to explain what the Green Party is, how it differs from the French Greens, and where it fits in American politics.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth, right, teaches a class in 2015. That year, the relationship between �ֲ���ý and ILAP began when Dauge-Roth invited one of the group’s leaders to speak to his class. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

A similar translation of context has to happen during the asylum-seeking process. A person could be fleeing their country because of the persecution of a certain political party. But “an immigration officer who’s never had an individual come to them from that country is not going to recognize that political party’s name,” Kiley-Bergen said.��

“So we have to supplement and define what that is. There’s a constant tension between keeping somebody’s context and doing that justice, while also making it legible in the American system.”��

Theory behind practice��

To do the complex and multifaceted job of translation, �ֲ���ý students must understand their own perspectives and privileges.��

It’s a requirement of the job — they have to not only speak fluent French, but also have a level of cultural competence to understand where ILAP clients were coming from and their own position and limitations as translators. Translators draw from their own cultural backgrounds, study-abroad experiences, or both.��

The academic field of translation also proves helpful. Wheeler, Kiley-Bergen, and Weeks used the work of translation theorist Lawrence Svenuti to understand how their work as legal translators differs from literary translation.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read speaks to students in his oral French class as they prepare to perform a play about a young Algerian woman. The French curriculum’s focus on francophone Africa, plus numerous study-abroad opportunities, helps prepare students to be effective legal translators for refugees and asylum seekers from the continent. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

When translating a novel or poem, translators often focus more on the meaning of the text than the word-for-word translation. This often leads to “domestication” — in translating a French coming-of-age story for Americans, a translator might replace the name of a French department store with its American equivalent, to better convey the role of the store in teenage culture.

Legal translators, on the other hand, have to “foreignize” — keep the asylum seeker’s own cultural and political context front and center.��

“Within an administrative context, it’s not our job to frame the story in a specific way or interpret the meaning behind the story,” Wheeler said. “That’s really for the asylum seeker or the legal help to do. We’re really just facilitating.”��

Above all, ask questions��

An asylum seeker’s words are only one part of an asylum application. Asylum seekers and their lawyers also use corroborating documents and country-specific research to make their case.����

While �ֲ���ý student translators are fluent in French, they are not professional translators — something everyone in the room knows and is willing to work around.��

“My favorite technique is just asking clarifying questions constantly,” Weeks said. “If I don’t understand, I’ll ask questions, then I will explain what I asked to the lawyer. That way, we’re all on the same page, and we’re not imposing our own knowledge onto their story.”��

Asking questions means “putting our pride aside,” Wheeler added. “It’s so much better for everyone in the room to be frustrated” — by the stop-and-start nature of a meeting — “than me glossing over something that could have potentially played an important role in their case.”��

Though translators have to be neutral, asking questions is also a way to express empathy and respect.��

“When they see that you’re being attentive and you’re making sure you’re checking in with them, that gives them tremendous comfort,” Kiley-Bergen said.��

The six films that are screening at the second annual Tournées Film Festival this week and next have two things in common: They’re all in French, and they were chosen by current �ֲ���ý students.

Otherwise, the films range widely in setting, style, and message — from a classic Jean-Luc Godard film to a coming-of-age story in Tunisia to an animated dystopia. ��

“One of my personal goals for the festival is to show the many different cultures, viewpoints, animations, and people that make up the French-speaking world,” says Trevor Fry ’19 of Groton, Mass., who along with Gillian Coyne ’19 of New York selected the festival films in the spring. ��

A promotional still from A peine j’ouvre les yeux (“As I Open My Eyes”), a Tunisian film to be screened at the Tournées Film Festival.

The festival, which began Oct. 30 and runs through Nov. 11, is sponsored by the , which promotes French-American cultural exchange and supports film festivals on many college campuses.

The student organizers chose films from a list of several dozen that the foundation provided. One film had to be a classic in French cinema, but otherwise, they had plenty of wiggle room.

To pick the films and organize the festival, Fry, Coyne, and other French and francophone studies students drew from what they’d learned in their classes and in their work in the community: that French is spoken not only in France, but in African countries, in Canada, and in the United States.

“Our students are very sensitive to the idea that the French-speaking world is not just France, and that the francophone world has been dealing with this conflicting postcolonial history,” says Laura Balladur, a lecturer in French and francophone studies who advised the student organizers.

They also know that the multiplicity of French-speaking cultures extends to Lewiston.

“In Lewiston we have those with Franco-American roots, but we also have a big [French-speaking] immigrant population,” says Alyssa Frost ’18 of Boxford, Mass., a student organizer. “It’s up to us to go through all the synopses and find what resonates best with our community.”

Alyssa Frost ’18 of Boxford, Mass. and Avery Margerum ’18 of Wyncote, Pa., pose with a poster for the Tournées Film Festival, starting Oct. 30. As members of the Francophone Club, Frost and Margerum helped organize the festival. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

While five films will be screened at the Olin Arts Center, Examen d’état, a documentary about Congolese students preparing for a national exam, will be screened at the in Lewiston, preceded by a reception with Congolese music and food.

The Franco Center, a community hub for French speakers and learners in Central Maine, serves both Franco-Americans and people with roots in French-speaking African countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“It’s important for people to be able to see themselves in films like the one we’ll be showing,” says Jacynthe Jacques, language and cultural programs director at the Franco Center, “and it’s important for the community living here to be able to see other French-speaking cultures around the world, how different they are, but also how similar.”

A promotional still from Examen d’état (“National Diploma”), a film to be screened at the Tournées Film Festival. Examen d’état will show at the Franco Center.

Each film will be followed by a panel discussion with students and faculty from a range of departments, like German, anthropology, and gender and sexuality studies.

The goal, Fry said, is to show that the French language is relevant and accessible from any perspective. ��

“Lewiston’s francophone heritage is sparkling, and this festival should serve as a tool to continue its renaissance,” Fry says. “By having a community-wide program with publicity both on campus and off, the film viewings and discussions can work as bridges between various francophones or toward people who are simply interested in learning more about our world.”

+Click here to see the festival lineup.

A professional athlete negotiates a contract extension. A hiker negotiates difficult terrain.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth is known internationally for his research into the narratives of survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. When he uses the word “negotiate,” he means this:

“For the survivor of genocide or another traumatic experience, the meaning and memory of that experience has an ongoing resonance, or rather a haunting dissonance, that requires constant negotiation, which is triggered��by the cultural and political demands that define the present from which the traumatic past is re-envisioned.”

For more than a decade, Dauge-Roth and his students have traveled to Rwanda to interview survivors and hear their stories. This indirect act of “bearing witness,” he explains, is nevertheless a “mutually transformative encounter for both survivor and interlocutor” — one that demands an approach to�� testimony as a “social and cultural practice of negotiation.”

Alexandre Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French and francophone studies, shown during a class. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

On the one hand, he continues, “survivors negotiate the possibility of having their trauma socially recognized and their present-day demands heard.”

The concept of negotiation “highlights the fact that cultural and existential trauma requires an ongoing and demanding effort.”

On the other, “we — the listening community — must negotiate the historical place, cultural resonance, and political meaning we are willing to give to a highly disturbing experience that embodies the transgression of all ethical norms and the collapse of the social bond.”

In the end, the concept of negotiation “highlights the fact that bearing witness to cultural and existential trauma requires an interruption, a demanding effort to listen, and an ongoing creativity. The meanings of experiences of pain and suffering are confined neither to a past experience nor to survivors alone.”

All testimonial encounters between survivors and their interlocutors engage “multiple views, expectations, trajectories, histories, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and all the relationships of power and knowledge that the cultural negotiation of a traumatic past entails within a mutually shared present.”

Academic disciplines often assign particular and surprising meanings to common words. The series “What I Mean When I Say” explores those meanings.

A scene from Kivu Ruhorahoza’s 2015 film “Things of the Aimless Wanderer.”

Kivu Ruhorahoza, an award-winning Rwandan filmmaker, presents two of his films at �ֲ���ý College: 2015’s Things of the Aimless Wanderer at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 29, and Ruhorahoza’s 2011 feature debut, Grey Matter, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 2.

Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza presents two of his films at �ֲ���ý.

Both screenings take place in Room G52, the Keck Classroom, in Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). Sponsored by the French and francophone studies department at �ֲ���ý, the screenings are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8293.

Ruhorahoza’s second feature film, Things of the Aimless Wanderer comprises a series of cryptic and loosely connected narrative shards. Each depicts an uneasy encounter between an African woman and a male figure of authority or menace, be it a 19th-century white explorer, a 21st-century Western journalist or a Rwandan man performing reconnaissance for a shadowy internal agency.

In each story, a female figure is an object of lust, surveillance, fascination or violence, inevitably disappearing from the narrative. Every disappearance becomes a sort of chorus, punctuated by enigmatic images and haunting musical soundscapes.

Grey Matter is the first feature-length narrative film produced in Rwanda by a native Rwandan filmmaker. Set in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, this self-referential film-within-a-film depicts the vision and trials of a determined filmmaker as he tries to produce his first feature, The Cycle of the Cockroach.

That trenchant drama about a brother and sister dealing with the aftermath of genocide finds no support from agencies only interested in funding upbeat policy-friendly films. As the filmmaker borrows recklessly from a loan shark, Cycle plays out on the screen, subtly measuring the horror and systematic madness of events hardly unique to Rwanda, while offering insight into the nature of political violence.

Ruhorahoza was born in Kigali in 1982. A self-taught filmmaker, he won the award for Best African Short at Montreal’s 25th Pan African International Film Festival and Best Short at the Kenya International Film Festival in 2009 for his short film Lost in the South.

Slant Magazine observed that Ruhorahoza employs film to “communicate the unthinkable consequences of mass tragedy” — the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Grey Matter received a Jury Special Mention for Best Emerging Filmmaker and won the Best Actor award at the 2011 TriBeCa Film Festival. The film went on to win, among other honors, the Grand Prize at the Tübingen French Film Festival; Best Director and Signis Award at the Cordoba African Film Festival; and the Jury Prize at the Khouribga African Film Festival.

Ruhorahoza has taught directing and screenwriting workshops for various organizations and has served as a mentor at the TriBeCa Film Institute for underprivileged aspiring filmmakers from New York.