Babel - Volume 66, Issue 2, 2020

The European Convention on Human Rights and EU Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation have been transposed into national law. At national level, legislation has led to fundamental changes. In recent years, and varying with the work area and phase of the legal procedure, different needs for interpreters and translators have arisen. Also, the required profile of translators, and especially of interpreters, has changed – due to the implementation of new technologies. What role and status should interpreters and translators now play and have, and above all what skills and knowledge should an interpreter or translator working in the legal field now have.

The article focuses on this pioneering project, which is still in the early stages but already shows great potential.

In the present market situation in the UK when inexperienced, unqualified and frequently unvetted individuals are allowed to practice, it is crucial for interpreters to differentiate themselves as professionals, which entails Continuing Professional Development. Joint training offers a unique opportunity for police officers and interpreters to share experiences and have meaningful discussions on the daily challenges they face. It provides a number of learning points for police officers and enables best practice for interpreters.

In the context of increasing demand and shrinking internal resources, the reliance on outsourcing appears to be a sensible approach in institutional translation. However, in the complex environment of multilingual law-making, working with external partners introduces additional risk factors. This article is an attempt to analyse this specific multiplayer situation and identify some practices which can guarantee sustainable quality performance, from the point of view of the middle manager in charge of in-house staff and workflow. The approach discussed focuses on improved communication with external contractors through a better information flow and enhanced feed-back.

Globalisation, cross-border human mobility and international migration flows have prompted cross-linguistic and cross-cultural services (e.g. translation and interpreting) in all spheres of current societies, including a sector as sensitive as justice. In Spain, as in many other countries, in the last two decades, despite fierce criticism from practitioners and academics, there has been a trend for the authorities to meet these needs by outsourcing these services to private companies rather than hiring qualified professionals individually, on the grounds that this system allows for cheaper and more efficient services. This article presents the most relevant results of a research project based on the analysis of a corpus of authentic interpreter-mediated criminal proceedings, the first project of this kind in Spain. After briefly explaining how the project was carried out and how the corpus was transcribed, annotated and analysed, special attention is paid to the findings in relation to the interpreters’ performance in terms of fidelity and accuracy, and some illustrative examples are provided. The aim is to address the quality of outsourced interpreting services in Spanish criminal courts as well as to indicate areas for improvement.

The iso en 17100:2015 (Translation Services – Requirements for Translation Services) is a quality standard including a set of provisions (requirements and recommendations) for all the core aspects of the translation process, considered as an industrial asset. Its main (or, rather, its only) goal is the implementation of a series of activities deemed as necessary for the delivery of a quality translation end-product, on the assumption that a quality process leads ineluctably to a quality end-product. The standard’s provisions do not refer to what is in Spain known as traducción jurada (sworn translation). This paper addresses what the standard leaves out: a proposal for the implementation of its provisions, combined with the usage of the blockchain1 and other disruptive technologies to sworn translation, by focusing on the illustrative case of Spain. It discusses the applicable regulations concerning sworn translation and sworn translation standardization and explores the methods through which the combined application of a functional translation methodological framework, the provisions of the iso en 17100:2015 standard, a standardized macrotextual pattern and a number of security devices and disruptive technologies might contribute to building a quality management system in the domain of sworn translation.

The article examines the translation of court documents (indictments, penalty and arrest warrants, court decisions and court orders) and the challenges they pose. The activity of court translators is regulated by law. This unique position entrusts them with a special responsibility. Even if the actual addressees of the translation are unlikely to fully understand the text, the translation must be accurate and complete. This requires a thorough knowledge of both legal systems and an understanding of both legal languages. The present article discusses parts of a court document from a translator’s point of view, analysing the difficulties of translating court names, titles of laws, classification units and standardised formulations. The article contains many examples from the language pair German-Russian but is also comprehensible and of potential interest for translators from and into other languages.

Time and again, the topic of “Proceedings in English at German courts’ haunts the German media. Despite the failure of this experiment in some German cities, others keep trying again and again. This is intended to secure Germany as a court location in the long term. Other countries in Europe, such as Belgium, the Netherlands or France, have also been toying with these possibilities. What are the results there? Have they led to the expected securing of the place of jurisdiction? Are all those involved in the proceedings, such as judges, public prosecutors and lawyers, any witnesses, clerks, court ushers, the office and the interested public up to the challenge of following or conducting the proceedings in a language foreign to them? What are the experiences?

The translation of handwritten historical documents faces many challenges due to variation in the writing style, local language, and an inevitable language change. Even the transliteration from Cyrillic to Latin characters is standardized by the bijective transliteration standard ISO 9. This presentation introduces a number of tools offered by Transkribus for the automated processing of documents, such as Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Document Understanding, which are needed for the translation of historical documents. Next to the problem of decoding handwritten documents, written for example in Kurrentschrift using ancient terminology, changed meanings and different spelling have additionally to be considered during the translation of texts from earlier centuries. Resolution strategies on a case study show different methods for ensuring quality translations.

In this paper, I discuss choices concerning the legal content for interpreting students based on the syllabus of a lecture on Legal Interpreting in the Master of Arts in Conference Interpreting at the University of Leipzig. The topics were chosen on the basis of the professional experience of sworn interpreters in Germany. The aim is to prepare students for working in the different legal contexts (court, police, notary public, prison, psychiatric hospital, public administration etc.) in Germany by offering basic legal knowledge in those fields. Based on this syllabus, students are enabled to discuss the role of interpreters as seen by themselves and by professional associations in comparison to professionals in the legal field, and also ethical questions. It entitles them to act professionally and ethically in all these contexts.

Interpreters face distinct challenges when deployed remotely via video link, due to their virtual presence but physical absence in the conversation. Depending on the interpreting service, interpreters can also be exposed to greater spontaneity and hence increased pressure if video-mediated interpreting is offered as an instant service. The examples discussed in this paper draw on an interpreting studies-based analysis of the Austrian pilot project “Video-mediated interpreting in healthcare.” In this study data were generated by means of an observational protocol, five recordings of authentic video-mediated interpreted communicative events, five retrospective interviews with the interpreters from the recorded video-mediated interpreted communicative events, and eight expert interviews with all interpreters from the pilot project. The scope of this article is to present some of the main findings and draw attention to a crucial strategy used in remote interpreting, namely a reliance on relevant sensory awareness.