Chapter 6

Judges’ intervention in witness examination

The previous chapter illustrated how monolingual counsel and the judge lost their power and control over the evidence to the interpreter, who overstepped her role boundary by negotiating meaning with the witness. This chapter explores how counsel lose their power and control over the communicative act in court and how the accuracy of interpretation is compromised when judges change their participant role from a default auditor to a speaker in the examination of witnesses. It explores how judges’ intervention in the proceedings impacts on the mode and provision of interpretation and thus on the participation status of other court actors who do not speak the language of the court or have a native command of the language.