Katrijn Maryns’s research while affiliated with Ghent University and other places

This project aims to develop a multilingual notification system for asylum reception centres in Belgium using machine translation. The system will allow staff to communicate practical messages to residents in their own language. Ethnographically inspired fieldwork is being conducted in reception centres to understand current communication practices and ensure that the technology meets user needs. The quality and suitability of machine translation will be evaluated for three MT systems supporting all target languages. Automatic and manual evaluation methods will be used to assess translation quality, and terms of use, privacy and data protection conditions will be analysed.

Public service interpreters assume a key role in rendering accessible social services to newcomer clients. They could even be considered inherent to social work settings that are multilingual in nature, such as the interactional context of unaccompanied minors and their legal guardians. However, despite the intrinsic linguistic diversity and the unique position of interpreters in this setting, guardian–minor encounters remain unexplored in research. The current study therefore aims to provide insight into the multilingual needs and challenges in these encounters, focussing particularly on the roles interpreters play in this setting and how they are perceived to affect the interaction. To this end, the study draws on twelve semi-structured interviews with guardians of unaccompanied minors, collected as part of a research project examining the impact of multilingual strategies on the communication and relationship between guardians and minors in Belgium. Through thematic analysis, the study explores guardians’ insecurities, revealing confusion about the professional status of interpreters, concerns about interpretation quality and conflicting expectations of what interpreters should (not) do. The study provides recommendations with a view to improving both the confidence of guardians and the efficiency of guardian–minor interactions, and highlights the relevance of the findings for various other social work settings.

This article examines how the discursive tensions inherent to processes of categorisation play out in the credibility assessment of lesbian applications for international protection in Belgium. While most research has studied LGBTI applicants as an umbrella category, this article deals with lesbian applicants and the way in which their performance of sexual orientation is measured against normative categories and expectations of the asylum procedure. The article draws on an extended corpus of written judgments published by the Belgian Council for Alien Law Litigation. Using tools and concepts from institutional discourse studies, the analysis reveals how the asylum system is premised on normative and essentialising expectations of what kind of experience qualifies as ‘authentic’ lesbian experience, but also of how this experience ought to be expressed in order to be credible. It is concluded that a more intersectional approach to credibility assessment of asylum applications could mitigate essentialist categorisations and better respond to the individual needs and vulnerabilities of lesbian applicants.

Migrants are often perceived as a group of vulnerable victims, especially within a legal context such as the one in this study: lawyer–client consultations in the field of immigration law. The literature describes how institutional limitations often translate into asymmetric lawyer–client dynamics. The linguistic‐ethnographic data gathered for this study shows, however, that the reality is more complex. In operationalizing the concept of agency, this study focuses on the dynamic‐relational nature of power differences, which implies a move away from the binary conceptualization of structure and agency. The ethnographic lens helps to unpack agency and reveals a picture of strategic behaviour that is contextually embedded and multi‐layered. In this light, the performance of agency and vulnerability is shown to be (1) interactionally achieved, (2) indicative of an awareness of macro‐level processes, and (3) reflective of the philosophy behind the authorities’ migration management.

Discursive input functions as the core decisive element in answering the legal dilemma of whether someone is eligible for international protection. This pleads in favour of strengthening the narrative-discursive component in migration studies by offering a micro-sociolinguistic analysis of interactional data from diverse legal encounters with applicants for international protection. This article adopts a case study approach, bringing together two different data sets collected in a Belgian context. In focusing on asylum claims based on reasons of sexual orientation and gender identity, the article foregrounds discursive tensions emblematic for the treatment of disclosure in and around the asylum procedure. The first part of our article draws on data from the guidance and counselling side of the asylum procedure in examining legal consultations which took place in the lawyer’s office. The second part of our article turns to the communication that takes place during asylum interviews between applicants and asylum officers. Juxtaposing both analyses, reveals how disclosure is complicated by the different stakeholders that mediate the situated interaction as well as by the legal-administrative categories that govern the asylum procedure. The way in which institutional actors and assumptions are deeply implicated in the creation of asylum narratives, is not only at odds with the government’s evaluation premises about how stories come into being in isolation, it also entails a certain level of vulnerability as mediation holds the potential to obscure the indexical load of the asylum seeker’s testimony.

The constitutive role of discourse in asylum determination procedures cannot be underestimated. Legal decision-making in the domain of asylum and international protection is essentially discourse-based: spoken and written discourse form the main input for the (re)production and the assessment of asylum applications. As these proceedings can have a direct bearing on the lives of individual applicants, critical reflection and analysis of these discursive dynamics can be considered a core task for researchers in this area. But not a straightforward one. Issues of voice—in the Hymesian sense as the freedom of having one's voice heard—and linguistic-narrative inequality, are central to much of the data that we analyze in this field, but also apply to the impact of language research at policy level, where language is not given priority. We draw from our own experiences as ethnographic fieldworkers in the Belgian asylum and migration context to examine the dynamics of research design, access and dissemination of research findings. We argue for the strength of grassroots initiatives and public engagement in local organizations as fruitful arenas for developing a voice that can be heard locally, and, potentially, also having an impact higher up the institutional hierarchy.

In this article, we explore the multiple challenges faced by health service providers and immigrant patients when addressing sensi-tive issues in the context of HIV/STD counselling. To do so, we adopt a case-study approach which enables a deeply contextualised examination of the interactional process. The analysis will draw particular attention to the issue of contextual common ground, or the lack thereof, and how this correlates with the complex interac-tional conditions of the encounter. These conditions entail a combination of challenges, including the use of ad hoc inter-preters on sensitive topics, in a remote, non-face-to-face constella-tion and with the use of digital support tools that are not equally accessible for all participants. We argue that this accumulation of multilingual, multimodal and multi-contextual challenges engen-ders the emergence of parallel tracks and limited consonance between institutional-counselling concerns on the one hand and experiential-patient concerns on the other

This study examines interactional management practices and narrative coconstruction in lawyer-asylum seeker consultations in Flanders, Belgium. Drawing upon linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it presents a case study of a consultation between an Afghan applicant for international protection, his adviser, and his lawyer. The purpose of the consultation is to prepare the applicant for testifying at the upcoming asylum hearing. Data analysis focuses on (i) the reorientation of the asylum narrative from an authentic-experiential towards amore objectified formal-institutional account; (ii) the participants’ positioning work that indexes this reorientation process; and (iii) their fluctuating alignment of local-interactional and translocal-gatekeeping perspectives. In the discussion, we analyse the consultation in terms of competing legal and experiential voices and views on participant roles=responsibilities.We reflect on how this ambiguity of roles and ideologies relates to the constructed character of credibility, which reveals the importance of adequate legal assistance in this linguistically challenging context.