Accessing contextual assumptions in dialogue interpreting: the case of illegal immigrants in the United States Resumé: This article considers the importance of Ian Mason’s work, on accessing contextual assumptions in dialogue interpreting, by evaluating its implications as regards the kinds of translation and interpretations issues that arise when authority figures encounter ‘illegal’ immigrants in the Southern USA. Based on findings from a large-scale research project completed in 2009, the author argues for a higher level of engagement on the part of the interpreter, such that s/he truly will assume the role of ‘interpreter’ as opposed to ‘translator’, active participant instead of a (disingenuously) ‘objective’ intermediary. On the basis of this work, the author suggests methods of alleviating some of the horrific consequences of the xenophobic lust for ‘security’ through border enforcement, and the misguided efforts to create immigration law out of a series of haphazardly assembled proposals and guidelines that hapless police officers are forced to enforce. By Robert Barsky, Vanderbilt University Ian Mason’s work provides theoretical sophistication to analyses of crucial real-life cases of translation and interpretation, illustrations of which can be found in his own corpus of writings and in applications of his insights to important interpreting settings. An interesting implication of his work is that it helps us think about how interpreters come to be involved in the production of the output of a dialogue in settings where it could be politically valuable. I have suggested elsewhere (Barsky 2007) 1 that activist translation presumes that translators ought to be involved and engaged in the process of communicating information, over and above the act of substituting one lexical item for another, and I will recall sections of this work in order to argue that this could be a positive contribution to the translator’s work, in particular if the activism is directed to lofty causes (such as properly representing the views of persons regularly maligned or misrepresented, like asylum seekers, homeless persons or “illegal immigrants”). I will also argue that when the “translator” decides to become an “interpreter,” a move for which I have argued in the past (Barsky 1996) the subjectivity of the latter will trump the so-called “objectivity” of the former, but it will also offer the possibility that the interpreter will more adequately represent the victim of intercultural or inter-class misunderstandings which are bound to arise in certain translation settings. I will work under the assumption that the situations in which the interpreter could be most valuable are those in which at least one party to the hearing is a ‘foreigner’, either in terms of class, race, religion, or nationality. I am willing to take the risk that advocating activism over machine-like fidelity in these interpreting settings is salubrious, because the abuses in certain realms of law are so egregious, and the stories so horrendous, that most translators who are given the right to speak out will take the road towards humanity, in my opinion, and my own work in these realms has borne out this suspicion (Barsky 1994; 2001). One point that is not fully-articulated in this position is that any determination of how the interpretation process is unfolding is contingent upon our accessing the “contextual assumptions” at work during the process of interpreting, and Ian Mason’s 2006 article entitled “On Mutual Accessibility of Contextual Assumptions in Dialogue Interpreting” provides tools for doing so. This work is of particular importance in realms such as legal settings in which individuals from cultures deemed foreign are accused of some misstep because this area almost always involves the ‘dialogue 1 Arguments and sections from this work are taken up in the current discussion, since Mason offers grounds for their re-elaboration, and for clarification of their importance.