Sight Translating Interview Transcripts

Providing a translation of an interview transcript (also called transcript, written statement, protocol, interview report, or interview record; hereafter, ‘transcript’) is one of the most critical things that an interpreter may perform in an asylum procedure. As the source text is in written form, the term that is used to refer to this is ‘sight translation’. The sight translation of a transcript functions as a checking procedure for the content of the transcript. Depending on the country that the interpreter works in, there may be different conventions in how oral statements made by asylum applicants are written down. In most countries, a transcript of an asylum applicant’s words is then sight translated back to them by the interpreter. In other countries, the convention may be that there is no sight translation of a transcript. The information provided in this unit applies to situations in which the interpreter is required to provide a sight translation of the transcript to the asylum applicant during the course of the asylum interview.