Editorial: "Voices across Borders: Navigating Linguistic and Cultural Landscapes for LGBTQ+ Migrants in Host Countries"

Horas Wong^1,2*Miranda Lai³

• ¹Susan Wakil School of Nursing and Midwifery, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
• ²University of New South Wales Centre for Social Research in Health, Sydney, Australia
• ³Translating and Interpreting discipline, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

recognition of interpreting's role in producing credible narratives. A key implication is that when institutions demand narrative consistency without supporting interpretive consistency, they effectively shift risk onto applicants.At the meso level, ethics are conceptualised as situated judgement exercised within triadic relationships, rather than as abstract neutrality. Touma et al. analyse a structured dialogue between community interpreters, a service provider, and a community member in the Australian settlement context. They show how English language dominance sets the terms of intelligibility and produces epistemic and structural injustice for LGBTQ+ forcibly displaced people. They argue for solidarity as a form of language justice, even when it conflicts with professional expectations of impartiality, including those set out in the AUSIT Code of Ethics. Read alongside Lai et al., their analysis underscores that ethical interpreting in LGBTQ+ migration contexts turns on real-time decisions about voice, exactness, explanation, and stigma management under unequal authority.At the micro level, the papers show how access to language underpins personhood and belonging in everyday encounters. Drawing on interpreters' accounts with LGBTQ+ clients settling in Australia, Lai et al. show how lexical gaps, contested or non-standardised terminology (including pronouns), and culturally specific taboos shape what can be said and what can be heard. Interpreters describe weighing linguistic accuracy against cultural intelligibility when concepts do not align across languages, while absorbing the affective labour of mediating stigmatised or traumatic narratives. Their recommendations include multilingual LGBTQ+ resources such as contextually grounded glossaries, improved briefing practices, and interpreter education that treats LGBTQ+ competence as core professional knowledge, framing terminology as infrastructure for safer disclosure and reduced misrecognition. Related interactional stakes appear in Touma et al., where a community member's account of being "filtered" shows how small shifts in wording, explicitness, and tone can determine whether someone is conveyed as they intend.Across levels, interpreter labour conditions set limits on what mediation can realistically achieve. Monzó-Nebot examines the working lives of LGBTQ+ interpreters on temporary contracts in international organisations. Drawing on interviews and Arendt's (1998) distinction between labour, work, and action, the article uses the notion of a "minority tax" to describe how insecure employment, heightened self-protection, and limited collective voice place disproportionate burdens on minoritised identities. Monzó-Nebot argues that these arrangements depoliticise interpreters' work by narrowing their capacity to contest conditions and by recasting structural constraints as individual professional shortcomings. The article also cautions that while remote interpreting and other neoliberal labour arrangements can enhance the physical and mental safety of LGBTQ+ interpreters by reducing travel to contexts where same-sex relations are criminalised, these arrangements can also intensify isolation, strain, and precarity, limiting opportunities for solidarity and collective action. In this framing, ethical and sustainable mediation requires stable employment conditions and participatory agency, not merely technical competence. LGBTQ+ migrants through its protocols, relational dynamics, and labour arrangements. When institutions depend on mediated communication to determine rights, protection, and care, the conditions of that mediation become a matter of justice. Collectively, the authors call for a shift from delivery fixes to accountable mediation-treating interpreting and translation as integral to institutional processes of recognition, assessment, and care rather than as ancillary services. Meeting this standard requires specialist training and oversight where credibility or access to services is at stake. It depends on multilingual supports for interaction, including context-specific terminology resources, and on briefing and debriefing practices that position interpreters as collaborators. Sustaining interpreter agency through fair labour conditions is essential. Ultimately, institutions must be accountable for how meaning is mediated, particularly when decisions hinge on interpretation. That responsibility must remain institutional and must not be shifted onto interpreters or entrusted to technological tools that cannot account for context, power, or care.