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Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 63:2 (2017) ► pp.174–199

Non-renditions in court interpreting

A corpus-based study

| Hong Kong Polytechnic University

By examining the types and frequencies of non-renditions in a 100-hour corpus of court interpreting records from Hong Kong, this study demonstrated that court interpreters actively coordinate communication when carrying out their interpreting duties. Non-renditions are interpreters’ utterances that do not have a corresponding counterpart in the source language, and such renditions are ordinarily used to coordinate interpreter-mediated exchanges. This analysis revealed that in the Hong Kong court setting, non-renditions were less common in English (the court language) than in Cantonese (the main language of the witnesses and defendants). In the Cantonese subsample, interactional non-renditions were more common than textual non-renditions, and most of these utterances were self-initiated rather than prompted by others. In the English subsample, textual non-renditions were more common than interactional non-renditions, and most of them were other-prompted. The skewed distribution of non-renditions, and particularly the tendency to address non-renditions to the lay participants, suggests that court interpreters may not be absolutely impartial.

Keywords: non-rendition, court interpreting, textual, interactional, self-initiated, other-prompted
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Non-renditions in dialogue interpreting
  • 3.Interpreters behavior and the roles of primary participants
  • 4.Non renditions and perceived impartiality
  • 5.Methods and the corpus
  • 6.Findings
    • 6.1Relative frequency of non-renditions
    • 6.2Types of non-renditions: Textual versus interactional
    • 6.3Types of non-renditions: Self-initiated versus other-prompted
  • 7.Extracts of non-renditions
    • 7.1Self-initiated non-renditions
    • 7.2Other-prompted non-renditions
  • 8.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 31 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.63.2.02che
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