Interpreting - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2010

Between 1900 and 1914 many so-called “insane re-migrants” (geisteskranke Rückwanderer) from America were admitted to the psychiatric institution in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg. These patients were mainly East European emigrants who had left Europe via Hamburg, had been classified insane and had been sent back by the US authorities. A total of 446 relevant medical files are available. This article concentrates on the years 1900 through 1903, and focuses on the issue of foreign language interpreting in psychiatric practice. Two cases — two multilingual Friedrichsberg patients who assumed the function of interpreters in each case of a foreign “insane re-migrant” — will be described in detail. The interpreters played a significant role in the reconstruction and documentation of the medical histories of their fellow patients. Conversations and interrogations carried out by them and recorded by their own hand have been passed down in the medical files of the patients they “examined”. The files of the multilingual patients themselves were also found in the archives. Thus, their activity as asylum interpreters can be viewed in the context of their own medical histories, i.e. their own mental condition.

This paper presents a case study of an interpreting event in a Danish courtroom setting. The study investigates the interpreter’s influence on the interaction as well as factors influencing the behaviour of all the participants involved. The study also investigates what happens when the interpreter’s performance is perceived by participants as inadequate in order to achieve the communicative goal of the event. The model of translation culture, in which cooperativeness, loyalty and transparency are key concepts, is used as an explanatory tool. Although the interaction under study, like all courtroom interaction, is determined by the inherent institutional power differential, it is appropriate to describe it in terms of cooperativeness. The conflict regarding the interpreter’s non-normative behaviour is negotiated and settled by way of consensus, and the trial is carried through with the same interpreter despite doubt about her competence. The paper concludes by discussing the effect of special contextual conditions, as well as ethical implications.

Drawing on the discourse of interpreter-mediated examinations of Korean-speaking witnesses in an Australian courtroom, this paper explores court interpreters’ renditions of reported speech contained in witnesses’ evidence. Direct reported speech is generally preferred in the courtroom because of the evidentiary rule against the admission of hearsay. However, Korean-speaking witnesses who are not familiar with this rule and with the discursive practices of the court tend to use indirect reported speech. This paper examines how Koreans’ general preference for indirect reported speech is handled by court interpreters. The findings suggest that the tendency among Korean interpreters to convert indirect into direct reported speech in English renditions may have implications for the accuracy of interpreted evidence.

This article is a study of how the participation status of asylum-seeking children is interactively constructed in interpreter-mediated asylum hearings. We have undertaken a discourse analysis of 50 non-repair side-sequences from 26 hearings with Russian-speaking, asylum-seeking children in Sweden. A side-sequence is here defined as a monolingual sequence conducted in only one of the languages involved in the interviews. It involves the interpreter and only one of the primary interlocutors. In this article, four extracts are chosen for a micro-analysis in order to elucidate how interpreters can challenge asylum-seeking children’s participant statuses. We show that the right of the child to make his or her voice heard can be challenged, especially when the interpreters exclude, distort, discredit and guide the voices of the children, which is often done with the tacit approval of caseworkers.