On translation, terminology, and the dangerous assumption of lexical equivalence
There is a word in English — hymen — that belongs to a specific epistemic order: it is medical, taxonomic, and deliberately neutralized. It names an anatomical structure while suppressing most of the cultural and moral meanings historically attached to it.
In Farsi, the same anatomical reality is not typically accessed through that kind of abstraction. It is described relationally: as a curtain, a threshold, a tissue at an entrance. The difference is not lexical. It is structural.
In a Canadian refugee hearing in 2018, that structural difference was treated as a contradiction — and nearly became a death sentence.
Nastran Yeganeh was a certified midwife in Iran with over two decades of experience. Part of her work involved hymenoplasty, a clandestine procedure in a context where the social consequences of perceived sexual transgression can be extreme, including lethal violence. After being discovered, she fled to Canada and sought refugee protection.
During her hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board, an adjudicator asked her to provide the “technical, anatomical term” for the membrane in question. Yeganeh answered in Farsi, through an interpreter. The interpreter rendered her answer faithfully. The terms that entered the record were “virginity curtain” and “virginity tissue.”
Those words were treated as evidence against her.
The claim was rejected. The reasoning was straightforward: a midwife who cannot name the hymen is unlikely to have worked with it. Therefore, her account was not credible. Deportation followed as the logical administrative consequence.
The Federal Court of Canada overturned the decision. Justice E. Susan Elliott identified the problem with precision: the adjudicator had fixated on the absence of a specific English term, while ignoring the descriptive content that had, in fact, been provided. The applicant had demonstrated knowledge of the anatomy — not through the expected label, but through a functional and spatial description that was, if anything, more informative.
What failed in that hearing was not the applicant’s credibility. It was the adjudicator’s model of language.
The decision rested on an assumption that rarely surfaces explicitly but operates with remarkable consistency in institutional contexts: that lexical equivalence across languages is available, stable, and cognitively accessible on demand. That assumption compresses several distinct errors into a single expectation.
First, equivalence is not symmetrical. Languages do not partition reality in the same way, nor do they distribute technical and non-technical registers along comparable lines. A speaker describing anatomy in Farsi is not necessarily selecting between a colloquial term and a clinical term in the same way an English speaker would. The categories themselves are not aligned.
Second, the interpreter’s task is not to repair that misalignment. When a speaker uses a descriptive expression, the interpreter renders that description. Substituting a standardized medical term that the speaker did not use would not be an improvement. It would be an intervention — one that attributes knowledge the speaker did not claim and alters the evidentiary record in the process.
Third, descriptive knowledge is not epistemically inferior to terminological knowledge. In many contexts — including clinical and procedural ones — it is the more reliable indicator of actual experience. Yeganeh did not fail to identify the structure. She identified it in a different way: through function, position, and use.
What the adjudicator treated as a deficiency was, in fact, a mismatch between linguistic systems — one that was misrecognized as a credibility gap.
This kind of misrecognition is not unusual. Institutional settings tend to operate with an implicit monolingual model of knowledge: if a concept exists, it is assumed to exist as a word; if the word is absent, the knowledge is presumed absent as well. Translation, under this model, becomes a process of retrieval rather than a process of reconstruction.
That model is not only inaccurate. In contexts like refugee determination, it is operationally dangerous.
In this case, the consequences were immediate. The initial decision concluded that Yeganeh should be returned to a country where the very practice she described could expose her to lethal retaliation. The error was not dramatic. It was procedural, almost invisible — a single lexical expectation applied without reflection.
But that is precisely how language operates in institutional environments: not as a neutral conduit, but as a structuring force. It shapes what counts as knowledge, what counts as evidence, and ultimately, who is believed.
When the assumptions embedded in that structure remain unexamined, the outcomes are not simply imprecise.
They are consequential.
Daniel Avilán
Sources
Yeganeh v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2018 FC 714, Federal Court of Canada, Justice E. Susan Elliott.
Available at: https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2018/2018fc714/2018fc714.html
National Post, September 2018.
“Federal court overturns refugee board decision that turned on whether Iranian woman knew word ‘hymen.’”
Linguistic Consultancy 