Themes and methodological issues in Court Interpreting research

The field of Legal Interpreting encompasses a wide variety of contexts including police interviews and interrogations, lawyer-client conferences, tribunal and court hearings and trials. Most of the research carried out in the field to date has concentrated on the discourse of the courtroom in Common Law countries (Berk-Seligson 1988, 1990, 1999; Hale 1997b, 1999, 2004; Mason & Stewart 2001; Pym, 1999; Rigney 1997). This is partly due to the availability of the data, as most courtrooms are open to the public, but also due to the vast amount of research conducted into the language of the courtroom, which has served as a theoretical basis for the study of court interpreting. These studies draw on discourse analysis, the ethnography of language, pragmatics, experimental psychology and forensic linguistics to inform their methods. Other research into legal interpreting has looked at other , non-linguistic aspects of the practice, such as role perceptions and expectations, using social science methods of surveys, interviews and focus groups (Fowler 1997; Kelly 2000; Hale & Luzardo 1997; Angelelli 2004). Fewer studies have concentrated on the other aspects of legal interpreting, such as police interpreting (Krouglov 1999; Berk-Seligson 2000; Russell 2004; Wadensjš 1997) and tribunal hearings (Wadensjš 1992; Mason & Stewart 2001; Barsky 1996). With the exception of a limited number of experimental studies (Berk-Seligson 1990 and Hale 2004) most legal interpreting research studies have been descriptive, qualitative and speculative, providing useful information on the current state of affairs but little on the impact such practices have on the legal process. This contribution will concentrate only on court interpreting research. It will review the major research projects to date, highlight their strengths and weaknesses, identify the gaps that exist in our knowledge of the field andproposefurther research studies tofill such gaps.

Certified Interpreters’ Subjective Experience of Psycho-Affective Factors in Court Interpreting

This paper touches upon the theme of the certified interpreter’s psycho-affectivity, a construct studied within a branch of interpreting studies known as interpreter psychology, or more precisely, within its psycho-affective strand. What also lays the groundwork for the presentation of the outcomes of the investigation into the certified interpreters’ experience of the psycho-affective factors is an overview of certified interpreting. The major part of this paper is dedicated to the discussion of the results of a survey carried out among Polish-English certified interpreters who interpret consecutively in the courtroom. Seven factors experienced by study participants (i.e. anxiety, fear, language inhibition/language ego/language boundaries, extroversion/introversion/ambiversion, self-esteem, motivation and stress) are discussed. The discussion is supplemented with a selection of quotes taken from the certified interpreters’ responses, in which they directly or indirectly refer to the selected psycho-affective factors and their impact on the interpreting process and the output rendered. All in all, it emerges that, in quite a number of cases, in the respondents’ opinions, the psycho-affective factors under consideration are of a more negative than positive character, thereby disrupting the process of consecutive interpreting in the courtroom.

The interpreter as a sequential coordinator in courtroom interaction

We present here an ethnographic study of asylum court interpreting with remote participants and video links. First, we describe the multimodal resources interpreters have at their disposal to manage turn-taking and begin interpreting while an asylum seeker’s answer to a question has not come yet to a recognizable completion point. We distinguish between ‘implicit’ configurations, in which a collaborative turn transition is apparently achieved through reorientations of body and gaze, the use of discourse markers, or other conversational strategies, like overlaps and cases where a turn transition is achieved through the use of ‘explicit’ resources such as instructions to stop and requests to give brief answers. We show that the collaborative production of such long answers is affected by the remote placement of the interpreter, and that recurrent trouble in the management of turn transitions between the asylum seeker and the interpreter during extended narratives may be detrimental to the asylum seeker’s case.

From the Trial to the Transcription: Listening Problems Related to Thematic Knowledge. Some Implications for the Didactics of Court Interpreting Studies

Interpreting is a phenomenon of such complexity that, particularly in highly specialized fields, such as court interpreting, it is easy to detect errors and omissions made not only by students, but even by experienced professional interpreters. These errors are often attributed to a lack of competence on the part of the interpreter, but they can also arise from the highly specialized nature of the setting in which the task is performed. The present study focuses on the second of these two factors in relation to both transcription and interpretation. It sets out to characterise errors of comprehension that may precede target discourse production in another language due to a particular setting in which much of the dialogic exchange takes place within a closed circuit, in the form of a triangle consisting of the judge, the defence counsel and the prosecution, and from which the defendant (and his or her interpreter) is excluded. To this end, we worked with an oral corpus of recordings of real criminal trial proceedings and the transcripts of those proceedings made by technicians employed and trained by the TIPp project (Translation and Interpreting in Criminal Proceedings), led by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

When non-renditions are not the exception

This article seeks to explore the nature and function of non-renditions in a corpus of transcriptions of 55 authentic interpreted court proceedings from Barcelona (the TIPp corpus). By doing so, it establishes a dialogue with Cheung’s (2017) contribution about non-renditions in court interpreting in Hong Kong. The transcriptions of the TIPp corpus were annotated using the software EXAMARALDA following Wadenjsö’s (1998) distinction between “talk as text” and “talk as activity”. Non-renditions were considered a part of “talk as activity”. A distinction was made between justified non-renditions, i.e. those that were used to ask for a pause to interpret, to ask for clarification, to confirm possibly misheard information and to retrieve parts of the original message in case of a lapsus, and unjustified non-renditions, e.g. when interpreters give advice to the defendants or warn them, when they answer on behalf of defendants, or when they supply information not provided in the original utterances. The findings reveal alarming averages of non-renditions in the bilingual parts of the trial (58.3 per bilingual hour), with a higher ratio of unjustified non-renditions. These findings have a clear correlation with the poor working conditions of court interpreters in Spain and reveal an urgent need for professionalisation of this practice in this country.