Chapter 9
Who is speaking?
Court interpreters’ use of first-person versus third-person interpreting
The previous chapter illustrated how the problem of jury comprehension is aggravated and particularly worrying in the Hong Kong courtroom, where most jurors do not have a native command of the English language. It explored how the participation status of these NNES jurors could be prejudiced when they do not have full access to the trial in its entirety because of the use of chuchotage in court, thus potentially compromising the delivery of justice. Besides, the differential social relationship between the judge and jurors renders many jurors too intimidated and unwilling to communicate with the judge and to flag up a comprehension problem (Gibbons 2017: 146).
Building on the premise of power asymmetry between legal professionals and lay participants in court, this chapter explores how interpreters represent the voice of judges and counsel versus that of lay participants in the interpreted proceedings in Hong Kong courts. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, this chapter focuses on interpreters’ treatment of legal professionals’ first-person reference and its Chinese counterpart used by Chinese witnesses or defendants and it compares the interpreting styles adopted by the court interpreters. This chapter reviews and evaluates relevant literature on the use of first-person (or direct speech) and third-person interpreting (i.e. reported speech) and seeks to add a new dimension to the issue. It explores how the complicated notion of audience in the bilingual Hong Kong courtroom may have a bearing on the interpreter’s strategies in representing the voice of the speaker (see also E. Ng 2011, 2013c).
Article outline
- 1.First-person interpreting as the norm
- 2.Third-person interpreting as a deviation from the norm
- 3.Data, methodology and quantitative results
- 4.Findings and analysis
- 4.1Substitution of judges’ and counsel’s first-person reference with third-person reference in Chinese interpretation
- 4.2Ellipsis/omission of judges’/counsel’s first-person reference in Chinese interpretation
- 4.3A shift from first-person to third-person interpreting
- 5.Findings and disassociation theory
- 6.Power asymmetry in the adversarial courtroom and hypotheses
- 7.Questionnaire results and analysis
- 7.1Different interpreting styles for different speakers
- 7.2Content of utterances and interpreting styles
- 7.3Rationale behind the styles of interpreting
- 7.3.1Psychological factor
- 7.3.2Pragmatic consideration
- 7.3.3Inherited practice
- 7.3.4A self-protective device
- 8.Impact of third-person interpreting
- 8.1Impact on the participant role, invisibility and neutrality of the interpreter
- 8.2Impact on illocutionary force of the speech act
- 8.3Ambiguity associated with the omission of first-person reference in Chinese interpretation
- 9.Conclusion
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Notes