This chapter builds on my research into the interactional dynamics in the unique bilingual Hong Kong courtroom, where interpretation is, by and large, provided for the linguistic majority. Drawing on authentic courtroom data, this study demonstrates how non-native English speaking (NNES) witnesses, by waiving their right to an interpreter, can be disadvantaged due to their linguistic incompetence. It explores how NNES witnesses are further disadvantaged in the antagonistic process of cross-examination, as counsel frequently violate the Gricean Cooperative Principle. It also discusses how this might compromise the access of other NNES court participants such as jurors to the trial in its entirety in the special context of the Hong Kong courtroom, and potentially impact the delivery of justice.
This chapter contains a discussion of the findings of a small study in which the authors applied voice recording technology to enable student interpreters to practise authentic legal question-and-answer discourse from the examination-in-chief and cross-examination phases of two jury trials in New Zealand. The chapter discusses the purpose of lawyers’ questions in the common law adversarial courtroom, and identifies the question types used in the video clips shown to students. It then focuses on student renditions, identifying which types of questions were interpreted most accurately, and which types of questions were interpreted least accurately. The authors offer some suggestions as to why some question forms may pose difficulties for interpreters, and make some practical suggestions to improve student understanding of the pragmatic intent of questions in the different parts of the trial process.
This chapter draws on relevant theory in the area of interpreting, with a particular focus on working with refugees, supplemented by the real-life experiences of field interpreters active during two refugee crises in the territory of the Republic of North Macedonia. Tackling the question of the discrepancy between the prescribed neutrality of interpreters and their real-life experience, the article will look at the different modes of work for interpreters for refugees in emergency situations, especially in three settings: interpreters as quasi-mediators, shuttle interpreters, and as agents for empowering the vulnerable. The analysis draws on aspects of the intersection between translation theory and mediation theory. In all three modes, it is important to place emphasis on specialised training to perform interpreters’ particular duties.
In a pioneering national survey of court interpreting in Australia, 84% of the surveyed interpreters responded that they did not receive any preparation materials prior to their court interpreting assignments.1 As part of a larger PhD project investigating the role of preparation using case-related materials2 in court interpreting,3 I conducted a national survey of Australian court interpreters’ preparation practices in 2016. This article highlights the survey results and presents a synthesis of findings from the quantitative and qualitative data collected in the survey.4
In interpreted encounters, it is important for the primary speakers to follow turn-taking rules. However, in real practice, overlapping speech and lengthy turns at talk happen from time to time, creating difficulty for the interpreter to perform adequately. Generating data from observations of authentic interpreted lawyer-client interviews in Australia, this study examines how lawyers and interpreters manage turns. Findings show that the two professionals work in a relationship featuring shifting alignment and confrontation. Most of the time, lawyers work collaboratively with the interpreters to manage turns to facilitate interpreting; at other times, they compete for turns to achieve their own goals. Better professionally qualified interpreters are more capable of managing discourse and meeting ethical requirements in cases of conflict with lawyers.
This chapter describes the first continuing education course on legal translation and interpreting in Spain for languages of lesser diffusion following guidelines established in EU projects. The course filled the formative gap for legal translators and interpreters who can act in police and court proceedings respecting the due process of law in the region of Valencia (Spain). In this paper we will analyse the advantages and disadvantages of the use of the blended format for both instructors and students, with special emphasis on the difficulties encountered by professionals in active employment as interpreters of languages of lesser diffusion in the legal settings, without academic training or professional accreditation. The results of questionnaires administered both to instructors and students in order to measure their satisfaction with the course are presented and discussed so that they can serve as a guide for improvement in future editions and for institutions willing to offer such training in the European Area of Justice.
The establishment and consolidation of sound professional organisations is a necessary step towards the professionalisation of community interpreting, alongside the adoption of legal provisions. This contribution will firstly focus on how the community of translators and interpreters in Spain is organised professionally. Next it will analyse its role in the current process of introducing a new regulatory framework for legal interpreting and translation (LIT) and a register of court interpreters and translators. These changes respond to the obligation to transpose EU supranational legislation which aims to secure interpreting and translation quality, and the right to a fair trial in multilingual proceedings. The main features and shortcomings of the newly introduced Spanish legislation (Ley Orgánica 5/2015) will also be addressed and critically discussed in this chapter.
The right of individuals to understand and be understood in judicial procedures is enshrined in several international and national legislative instruments. This right is often exercised through the intervention of translators and interpreters whenever individuals do not speak or understand the language of the country in which they are a party in a judicial procedure. In order to make such a right effective, legislation has moved a step forward in recent years and established the need to guarantee quality translation/interpreting. One mechanism provided to ensure quality is training of police and judicial staff to effectively work with interpreters. This chapter describes a 20-hour training course taught to a mixed group of Spanish police officers.
Reports from practising healthcare interpreters in New Zealand suggest that they and the health professionals they work with often have conflicting understandings of the healthcare interpreter role. This chapter reports on the findings of a series of surveys among health professionals and healthcare interpreters in New Zealand designed to investigate these differences. Separate surveys were posted for health professionals and healthcare interpreters respectively and answers as to role expectations were compared. The survey findings showed that health professionals’ role expectations conflicted with the code of ethics followed by New Zealand trained interpreters in some key areas. It is hoped that these findings may provide insights which can be addressed in interpreter education or in professional development sessions for health professionals working with interpreters.
This chapter presents the results of a questionnaire-based study carried out in the paediatric emergency department of one of the main hospitals in the Region of Murcia (south-eastern Spain). It explores the perceptions of the triage nurses who communicate with immigrant children and their families, and the current solutions being applied to address those communication needs. The results show that nurses experience mainly linguistic difficulties when communicating with non-Spanish-speaking patients and their families, and that informal, ad hoc solutions are the order of the day.
Medical Interpreting (MI) as a profession is a recent development and has previously been implemented in Hong Kong (HK) on an ad hoc basis. The roles that medical interpreters play in providing ethnic minorities with equal access to public health services in Hong Kong is informally widely recognised, yet hardly discussed in either the academic or public arenas. In 2010, the Hospital Authority outsourced its medical interpreting services to social services institutions that developed their own methods for meeting the growing demand for medical interpreting services. This provided a research opportunity, which adopted a participatory action approach to developing medical interpreting training materials and courses that involved different stakeholders such as the service providers and the ethnic minority interpreters themselves. Using Schuster’s (2013) systematic sociological model of the five transitional stages of language access in the public sector, this chapter focuses on the emergence and development of the profession of medical interpreting in Hong Kong, before turning to a description of the training programme that was developed utilising materials based on real-life situations.
The progression towards multicultural societies impacts on the quality of communication between professionals and their clients. This chapter focuses on the analysis of communication in a specific setting, namely the Spanish healthcare system, and concludes that language is a significant barrier to optimal patient outcomes. An analysis is given of one of the approaches used to mitigate the language barriers between medical professional and patient: INTER+MED, a project which aimed to design training for, coordinate and monitor a team of interlingual and intercultural mediators working in health centres in the Madrid region of central Spain. An analysis of the data obtained from surveys of patients and professionals is presented, followed by a discussion of themes which emerged from the interpreter observation forms pertaining to specific ethnic groups.
This chapter addresses the paucity of interpreter-focused studies in mental health interpreting and presents the voices of spoken-language interpreters reporting on relational, situational and discourse features of the speech of interlocutors with whom they work. Responses from 10 interpreters are presented on pre-interactional contact and briefing, physical configuration of setting, discourse of mental health clinicians, and discourse of mental health patients. Despite guidelines to both clinicians and interpreters, occurrence of a pre-interaction briefing is variable. An equidistant position to other interlocutors is the most common configuration. Descriptions of discourse relate to pace of speech, brevity, clinicians’ alignment with patients, with the physiological, emotional and psychological state of patients listed as challenging features. Code-switching as an unmarked speech variety but also as a conspicuous feature relevant to diagnosis is also reported.
This chapter builds on my research into the interactional dynamics in the unique bilingual Hong Kong courtroom, where interpretation is, by and large, provided for the linguistic majority. Drawing on authentic courtroom data, this study demonstrates how non-native English speaking (NNES) witnesses, by waiving their right to an interpreter, can be disadvantaged due to their linguistic incompetence. It explores how NNES witnesses are further disadvantaged in the antagonistic process of cross-examination, as counsel frequently violate the Gricean Cooperative Principle. It also discusses how this might compromise the access of other NNES court participants such as jurors to the trial in its entirety in the special context of the Hong Kong courtroom, and potentially impact the delivery of justice.
This chapter contains a discussion of the findings of a small study in which the authors applied voice recording technology to enable student interpreters to practise authentic legal question-and-answer discourse from the examination-in-chief and cross-examination phases of two jury trials in New Zealand. The chapter discusses the purpose of lawyers’ questions in the common law adversarial courtroom, and identifies the question types used in the video clips shown to students. It then focuses on student renditions, identifying which types of questions were interpreted most accurately, and which types of questions were interpreted least accurately. The authors offer some suggestions as to why some question forms may pose difficulties for interpreters, and make some practical suggestions to improve student understanding of the pragmatic intent of questions in the different parts of the trial process.
This chapter draws on relevant theory in the area of interpreting, with a particular focus on working with refugees, supplemented by the real-life experiences of field interpreters active during two refugee crises in the territory of the Republic of North Macedonia. Tackling the question of the discrepancy between the prescribed neutrality of interpreters and their real-life experience, the article will look at the different modes of work for interpreters for refugees in emergency situations, especially in three settings: interpreters as quasi-mediators, shuttle interpreters, and as agents for empowering the vulnerable. The analysis draws on aspects of the intersection between translation theory and mediation theory. In all three modes, it is important to place emphasis on specialised training to perform interpreters’ particular duties.
In a pioneering national survey of court interpreting in Australia, 84% of the surveyed interpreters responded that they did not receive any preparation materials prior to their court interpreting assignments.1 As part of a larger PhD project investigating the role of preparation using case-related materials2 in court interpreting,3 I conducted a national survey of Australian court interpreters’ preparation practices in 2016. This article highlights the survey results and presents a synthesis of findings from the quantitative and qualitative data collected in the survey.4
In interpreted encounters, it is important for the primary speakers to follow turn-taking rules. However, in real practice, overlapping speech and lengthy turns at talk happen from time to time, creating difficulty for the interpreter to perform adequately. Generating data from observations of authentic interpreted lawyer-client interviews in Australia, this study examines how lawyers and interpreters manage turns. Findings show that the two professionals work in a relationship featuring shifting alignment and confrontation. Most of the time, lawyers work collaboratively with the interpreters to manage turns to facilitate interpreting; at other times, they compete for turns to achieve their own goals. Better professionally qualified interpreters are more capable of managing discourse and meeting ethical requirements in cases of conflict with lawyers.
This chapter describes the first continuing education course on legal translation and interpreting in Spain for languages of lesser diffusion following guidelines established in EU projects. The course filled the formative gap for legal translators and interpreters who can act in police and court proceedings respecting the due process of law in the region of Valencia (Spain). In this paper we will analyse the advantages and disadvantages of the use of the blended format for both instructors and students, with special emphasis on the difficulties encountered by professionals in active employment as interpreters of languages of lesser diffusion in the legal settings, without academic training or professional accreditation. The results of questionnaires administered both to instructors and students in order to measure their satisfaction with the course are presented and discussed so that they can serve as a guide for improvement in future editions and for institutions willing to offer such training in the European Area of Justice.
The establishment and consolidation of sound professional organisations is a necessary step towards the professionalisation of community interpreting, alongside the adoption of legal provisions. This contribution will firstly focus on how the community of translators and interpreters in Spain is organised professionally. Next it will analyse its role in the current process of introducing a new regulatory framework for legal interpreting and translation (LIT) and a register of court interpreters and translators. These changes respond to the obligation to transpose EU supranational legislation which aims to secure interpreting and translation quality, and the right to a fair trial in multilingual proceedings. The main features and shortcomings of the newly introduced Spanish legislation (Ley Orgánica 5/2015) will also be addressed and critically discussed in this chapter.
The right of individuals to understand and be understood in judicial procedures is enshrined in several international and national legislative instruments. This right is often exercised through the intervention of translators and interpreters whenever individuals do not speak or understand the language of the country in which they are a party in a judicial procedure. In order to make such a right effective, legislation has moved a step forward in recent years and established the need to guarantee quality translation/interpreting. One mechanism provided to ensure quality is training of police and judicial staff to effectively work with interpreters. This chapter describes a 20-hour training course taught to a mixed group of Spanish police officers.
Reports from practising healthcare interpreters in New Zealand suggest that they and the health professionals they work with often have conflicting understandings of the healthcare interpreter role. This chapter reports on the findings of a series of surveys among health professionals and healthcare interpreters in New Zealand designed to investigate these differences. Separate surveys were posted for health professionals and healthcare interpreters respectively and answers as to role expectations were compared. The survey findings showed that health professionals’ role expectations conflicted with the code of ethics followed by New Zealand trained interpreters in some key areas. It is hoped that these findings may provide insights which can be addressed in interpreter education or in professional development sessions for health professionals working with interpreters.
This chapter presents the results of a questionnaire-based study carried out in the paediatric emergency department of one of the main hospitals in the Region of Murcia (south-eastern Spain). It explores the perceptions of the triage nurses who communicate with immigrant children and their families, and the current solutions being applied to address those communication needs. The results show that nurses experience mainly linguistic difficulties when communicating with non-Spanish-speaking patients and their families, and that informal, ad hoc solutions are the order of the day.
Medical Interpreting (MI) as a profession is a recent development and has previously been implemented in Hong Kong (HK) on an ad hoc basis. The roles that medical interpreters play in providing ethnic minorities with equal access to public health services in Hong Kong is informally widely recognised, yet hardly discussed in either the academic or public arenas. In 2010, the Hospital Authority outsourced its medical interpreting services to social services institutions that developed their own methods for meeting the growing demand for medical interpreting services. This provided a research opportunity, which adopted a participatory action approach to developing medical interpreting training materials and courses that involved different stakeholders such as the service providers and the ethnic minority interpreters themselves. Using Schuster’s (2013) systematic sociological model of the five transitional stages of language access in the public sector, this chapter focuses on the emergence and development of the profession of medical interpreting in Hong Kong, before turning to a description of the training programme that was developed utilising materials based on real-life situations.
The progression towards multicultural societies impacts on the quality of communication between professionals and their clients. This chapter focuses on the analysis of communication in a specific setting, namely the Spanish healthcare system, and concludes that language is a significant barrier to optimal patient outcomes. An analysis is given of one of the approaches used to mitigate the language barriers between medical professional and patient: INTER+MED, a project which aimed to design training for, coordinate and monitor a team of interlingual and intercultural mediators working in health centres in the Madrid region of central Spain. An analysis of the data obtained from surveys of patients and professionals is presented, followed by a discussion of themes which emerged from the interpreter observation forms pertaining to specific ethnic groups.
This chapter addresses the paucity of interpreter-focused studies in mental health interpreting and presents the voices of spoken-language interpreters reporting on relational, situational and discourse features of the speech of interlocutors with whom they work. Responses from 10 interpreters are presented on pre-interactional contact and briefing, physical configuration of setting, discourse of mental health clinicians, and discourse of mental health patients. Despite guidelines to both clinicians and interpreters, occurrence of a pre-interaction briefing is variable. An equidistant position to other interlocutors is the most common configuration. Descriptions of discourse relate to pace of speech, brevity, clinicians’ alignment with patients, with the physiological, emotional and psychological state of patients listed as challenging features. Code-switching as an unmarked speech variety but also as a conspicuous feature relevant to diagnosis is also reported.