In recent decades, the idea of a coherent and homogeneous national community has been challenged domestically through individual and collective claims-making regarding ethnic, religious or gender-based rights, and on an international level through the increasing inter-connectedness of nation states due to patterns of regional and global movements of people and economic capital. Both local and global patterns broaden the scope of individual states' rights and responsibilities towards various categories of  'citizens', including resident aliens, guest workers, immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. 

Interpreters and translators play a major role in helping to secure rights (e.g., political, social, cultural and economic) for migrants both within and across international borders. The panel will consider the linguistic and cultural meanings negotiated by and through interpreters and translators in a number of different contexts and countries. Papers are welcome that focus attention on interpreting and translating the 'rights of others'. Relevant topics would include: the processes involved in translating one culture and its sociolinguistic codes/conventions into another; the role that unequal relations of power may play in such processes; the interplay between internationalised discourses of human rights and national political discourses of exclusion and inclusion; and the possibilities of the emergence of transnational or migratory subjectivities emerging in interpreted speech events and translated texts.

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