From Cultural Translation to Clinical Consultation: Working Between Languages, Working Between Disciplines

This article discusses the findings of a translation “workshop” run at intervals between 2011-2015, which
brought together a) students of a liberal arts graduate program in Cultural Translation and b) recently arrived
asylum seekers in Paris. The evolution of these workshops prompted the decision to explore the field of
transcultural psychiatry and clinical practice as it has developed from its inception at the Hôpital Avicenne
in Paris, where it continues to be developed and taught under the direction of Professor Marie Rose Moro.
The aim of the collaboration was to support and theorize the inclusion of a marginalized, potentially
traumatized and multilingual public within the frame of the liberal arts classroom. Reviewing, first, the
reasons for reaching beyond the discipline of translation studies to that of psychiatry and psychotherapy, this
article will explore this “case” of interdisciplinary practice through a comparative analysis of the group
dynamics operating in the translation workshop, on the one hand, and in the teaching and clinical
environment on the other. It examines the different modes of production for discursive acts in the two
contexts—situating, first, the processes of positioning within each of these multilingual groups, in order,
second, to foreground the relative importance accorded to textual productions versus oral enunciation. This
difference offers a useful magnifier for understanding the conceptions of subjectivation at work in the
respective approaches to multilingual transcultural communication.