Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 55, Issue 1, 2017

Public service interpreters (sociaal tolken in Dutch) – who work in hospitals and legal settings (such as courts and police stations) – play a fundamental role in the communication and integration process of allochtonous people. It is therefore not surprising that the final report of the Special Interest Group of Translation and Interpreting for Public Services points out that the profession is referred to as: ‘not just a matter of communication, but a matter of natural rights, of human rights: rights to be promoted, defended and guaranteed’ (SIGTIPS Final Report 2011, p. 7). Despite its significant social function, public service interpreting still lacks professionalization, even though the situation often changes from country to country. In some European countries, privatization and outsourcing of public service interpreting result in the violation of the right to linguistic assistance in public services, a phenomenon which has had significant repercussions not only at social level, but also on interpreters’ self-perception of their status. Drawing on Inghilleri’s theories on the way in which macro-social features have an impact on interpreting (2004; 2007), the present contribution presents the findings of a survey on the professional status of 39 public service interpreters working in The Netherlands, a multicultural and multilingual country where the provision of interpreting services has been particularly impacted by national policies. Special attention will be paid to the following questionnaire sections: income, perception of status, social value and the future of the profession.

‘People enough that are called fox, pig or lamb. But the other way round?’: a zoopoetical comparison between Charlotte Mutsaers' and La Fontaine’s animal texts

This article aims to highlight the yet unexplored zoopoetical relation of the Dutch writer and artist Charlotte Mutsaers (1942-) to the famous animal fables of Jean de la Fontaine. A couple of important animal configurations will be identified in Mutsaers’s work through the analysis of animal discursive devices and metamorphoses in La Fontaine. In this respect, La Fontaine’s fable ‘La Chatte métamorphosée en femme’ (‘The cat metamorphosed into a woman’) (1688-1693) will be compared with Mutsaers’s novel Koetsier Herfst (2008). The literary-philosophical frameworks of metamorphosis and hybridity as well as the becoming-animal motif, drawn from research in the Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS), will prove useful to show how animal aspects in Mutsaers and La Fontaine relate to each other and correlate with different political discourses about the animal. The analysed creative and discursive human-animal patterns in Mutsaers’s and La Fontaine’s texts set out significant social-philosophical reversals of perspective about the animal-human bond and shed new light on Mutsaers’s artistic practice.

In 1979, the Dutch author Louis Ferron published the novel De gallische ziekte, a literary work that often is linked to postmodernism. The nineteenth century tale ‘Der Sandmann’ by E.T.A. Hoffmann serves as one of the narrative’s many intertexts. In this article, I will examine whether the same cultural templates show up in both ‘Der Sandmann’ and De gallische ziekte. Although De gallische ziekte does include more or less the same cultural templates as ‘Der Sandmann’, my research also shows in which way Ferron adapts those templates to suit his own worldview.