Interpreting - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2008

The Quichua of Ecuador, along with other indigenous peoples of Latin America, have been struggling to attain the right to use their ancestral language and their traditional ways of administering justice in an effort to gain greater autonomy in a variety of sociopolitical spheres of life. Based on interviews with 93 Ecuadorians — judges, magistrates, lawyers, justices of the peace, interpreters, translators, and local and national political leaders — the study finds an ideological splintering of views on this subject. Among the disparate Quichua communities and among State justice providers (largely comprising the hegemonic mestizo/blanco sector of society) there is a lack of agreement on how justice is to be carried out and what role the Quichua language should play in it. Despite the heterogeneity of views, however, there is tacit agreement on one de facto language policy, namely, the use of untrained, ad hoc interpreters in judicial settings.

Along a continuum of interlingual interpreting which begins with police investigations and may end in a supreme court, consistent quality must be assured in order to comply with the standards of justice to which enlightened countries aspire and lay claim. With the advent of the global village, the quantity of cases requiring language mediation has exploded exponentially. The issues involved are not new, and simply put involve arranging for the provision of competent interpreters throughout the criminal justice system. However, the actual provision of quality interlingual interpreting in a criminal justice system is not a straightforward enterprise. The mere existence of legislation requiring the provision of interpreters in courts is not the key element. Nor are insightful comments made by appellate judges in cases brought because of an absence of satisfactory language arrangements. The article shows the problematic nature of interpreting arrangements in the criminal justice system for which the government and its players — even judges — assume no responsibility. The resultant “missing stitches” are likely to deprive those who do not speak the language of the proceedings of their fundamental rights.

This paper gives an overview of the interpreting arrangements at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946–1948), focusing on some sociopolitical aspects of the interpreting phenomena, and discusses the behavior of the interpreters and monitors during the testimony of Hideki Tojo, Japan’s wartime Prime Minister. It provides a contextualized examination of court interpreting rather than a microlinguistic analysis of interpreted texts. The study demonstrates how political and social aspects of the trial and wartime world affairs affected the interpreting arrangements, especially the hierarchical set-up in which three ethnically and socially different groups of “linguists” (language specialists) performed three different functions in the interpreting process. An examination of the linguists’ behavior during Tojo’s testimony points to a link between their relative positions in the power constellation of the trial and their choices, strategies and behavior in interpreting and monitoring. These findings reinforce the view that interpreting is a social practice conditioned by the social, political and cultural contexts of the setting in which interpreters operate.

This study examined the activities of military court interpreters at the Yehuda Military Court near Jerusalem over a period of one year. The aim of the study was to examine the norms and ethical rules that guide the interpreters’ work. In-depth interviews were carried out with eleven interpreters and officers, and court sessions were observed. The questions asked related to the interpreters’ powers and duties, the nature of their work, their personal preferences, the rules that guide their work, and the training they receive. The findings show that the interpreters’ powers and duties cover a range of areas over and above interpreting per se, and include translating documents, acting as ushers in the courtroom, and handling logistical matters. The study also pointed to the lack of a clear set of rules in relation to the interpreters’ work, and revealed that training is provided only after they have begun working. The study suggests the need for a code of ethics defining and providing a framework for the interpreters’ powers and duties, which should be limited to interpreting, and should not encompass administrative tasks, as the current situation causes confusion over the ethical boundaries of the interpreters’ work.

This article presents a small-scale empirical study of legal discourse which focuses on the use of direct and indirect speech in Danish interpreter-mediated court proceedings. The study analyses the practices of three Danish judges in three different interpreted proceedings. The primary objective of the paper is to study the potential correlation between the use of direct and indirect speech styles and certain stages of court proceedings. These stages are defined and classified in terms of explicit prescriptive legal norms ascribable to the participants in Danish court proceedings, acting in accordance with a predefined style of interaction (direct speech). In addition, the study investigates whether what the judges say about their speech style corresponds with their actual language use in court. The techniques combined in the study are survey research, participant observation and descriptive analysis based on transcriptions of authentic data from three audio-recorded criminal cases conducted by district courts in Denmark.

This article reports on an investigation of face in a triadic speech event, a prosecutor’s interpreter-mediated questioning of a defendant in a criminal trial at a Danish district court. The power differential of this particular speech event makes it inherently threatening for the less powerful individual, the defendant, who by consenting to make a statement potentially puts his face at risk in multiple ways. Moreover, his face-protecting strategies may result in the prosecutor’s face being threatened. Simultaneously, while attending to the face-work of the primary participants, the interpreter has her own face to attend to as a professional. Consequently, the aim of the investigation was to explore face-work in the speech event and the interpreter’s strategies for translating and coordinating face-work. The analysis revealed that the interpreter frequently modified face-threatening and face-protecting utterances in an attempt to protect her own face and/or the face of one of the primary participants.