1.Introduction

Court interpreting may be considered a type of legal interpretation that happens in court settings (Hertog 2015, 21; ISO 20228 2019, 1), a type of community interpreting (Ng and Creeze 2020, 1), a completely independent profession (González et al. 2012; Mikkelson 2017, 1) or even a genre (Ortega 2011, 43). For the purposes of this chapter, it refers to the interpreting that takes place in a court of law and aims, using the words of the ISO standard for legal interpreting, at “ensuring equal access to justice to all persons as well as fair trials” (ISO 20228 2019, 1).

Court interpreters can work in law offices, law enforcement offices, prisons and other public agencies associated with the judiciary (Mikkelson 2017, 13). Of all these possibilities, this chapter is devoted to the work done by court interpreters when dealing with legal terms in courts of law and, specifically, in criminal proceedings. The main difference between civil and criminal proceedings is that in the former there are individuals or organizations that seek to solve legal disputes, whilst in the latter there is a public prosecution of a person/s by the government for an act that is considered a crime. In the former the persons involved, if found liable, can be made to pay money, or give up assets, whilst in the latter the person/s convicted of a crime may be incarcerated, fined, or both (Mikkelson 2017, 41–45).

Another important distinction regarding court interpreting is that of the legal tradition where the proceedings take place. For instance, the main difference between Common law and Civil law traditions regarding criminal proceedings is that the former usually follow the “adversarial” system, whilst the latter follow the “inquisitorial” system. According to González et al. (2012), in the adversarial system there are two sides, the prosecution and the defense, who present their version of the events and do all the questioning of witnesses, defendant/s and victim/s, after which a judge or jury choose the side that seems more plausible and credible. In the inquisitorial system, lay and professional judges question and listen to accounts of an alleged criminal event from witnesses, defendant/s and victim/s and control the flow of information (González et al. 2012, 345). The basic participants in criminal proceedings are the defendant/s, the witnesses, the victim/s, the judge or jury, the defense lawyer/s, the public prosecution and, sometimes, there is also a private prosecution. Regarding the type and stages of trials, they vary according to the judicial system of the country, but there are some basic features that are common in Civil law countries, such as the main two phases of the trials, known as summary and plenary proceedings, and the second stage -the plenary proceeding phase- is analogous to the criminal trial in the Common law tradition (González et al. 2012, 399).

The interpreters’ role in this setting is “to attempt to remove the language barrier and to the best of their skill and ability place the non-English speaker in a position as similar as possible to that of a speaker of English” (Hale 2004, 10). Of course, English needs to be replaced here by any other language that might be the one mainly spoken in the courtroom. The person who is not fluent in the language spoken in the criminal proceeding can be the defendant, the victim or a witness, and has received many names in the literature, including “limited language proficient” (Mikkelson 2017, 1), “persons who are not sufficiently proficient in the language of service used in the specific legal setting” (ISO 20228 2019, 6) and “user” (Gile 1995; Pöchhacker 2001, 411). The latter is the one adopted in this chapter.

Regarding the interpreter, as Mikkelson (2017, 2) points out, “despite the almost universal right to an interpreter in criminal cases, most countries do not have laws specifying who is qualified to act as an interpreter in court proceedings”. According to González et al. (2012), Mikkelson (2017) and Ozolins (1998), the first country to specify who is qualified to act as a court interpreter and to introduce a state examination for interpreting in the judiciary was Sweden, in 1976, followed by Australia and the federal courts of the USA in 1978, and then Canada and several individual states of the USA in the early 1980s. In the European Union, the right to translation and interpretation in criminal proceedings was officially adopted in 2010, through Directive 2010/64/EU, which requires all Member States to enact national legislation clarifying this right for criminal defendants and providing explicit guarantees. However, this regulation does not require the countries to have a state or official examination, and there are many Member States, such as Spain, where these regulations have not really changed (Blasco Mayor, and del Pozo 2015; Ortega 2015). In the UK, former Member State of the EU, court interpreting practice has even worsened during the last 15 years (Fowler 2012; Hertog 2015). In other countries such as Russia, there are simply no clear recommendations, qualifications, or professional associations for court interpreters (Babanina 2015, 18).

The ISO 20228 2019 standard for legal interpreting also acknowledges that, although standards of legal interpreting training and practice vary widely around the world, current trends in several countries “go in the direction of de-professionalism due to shortage of financial means, absence of specialized training and lack of awareness of the risks of using non-professional legal interpreters” (ISO 20228 2019, 1). The lack of consensus and regulation regarding the accreditations or examinations to be court interpreters can also be seen in the standards for what must be interpreted and how -i.e. in which interpreting mode, simultaneous interpretation (SI), consecutive interpretation (CI) or just giving a summary at the end of the hearing. For instance, the recommendations included in ISO 20228 are very vague, and only mention that “consecutive interpreting, chuchotage (whispered interpreting), and sight translation should be used throughout the hearing” and that “simultaneous interpreting can also be used, depending on equipment availability in court rooms”; it also indicates that “distance interpreting (remote interpreting) through video-conference can also be required in some situations” (ISO 20228 2019, 18).

According to González et al. (2012) and Mikkelson (2010, 2017), interpreters in the US are expected to do SI of every word heard in the courtroom, while in many other countries, interpreters are not allowed to provide SI but are asked to give summaries of evidence in CI or, in some cases, just a CI of the judge’s summary of the proceedings after the trial has concluded. Even inside the US, there are important differences regarding the place where the interpreter should be sitting -next to the defendant or far from him/her- and the existing equipment to provide SI changes a great deal among courts.

2.Main difficulties

Fulfilling the aim of delivering an accurate rendition to place the user in a position as similar as possible to that of a speaker of the language of the court is not an easy task. In this chapter, we are addressing the issue of dealing with legal terminology, which is an important difficulty for court interpreters, but it is certainly not the only one.

The numerous studies and surveys conducted so far in court interpreting practice around the world11.For instance, Berk-Seligson 1990, 1999; Biernacka 2019; Christensen 2011; Dhami et al. 2017; Fraser and Freedgood 1999; González et al. 2012; Goodman-Delahunty et al. 2014; Hale 1997, 1999, 2001, 2004; Jacobsen 2004, 2008; Lee 2009, 2010, 2011; Liu and Hale 2018; Mason 2015, 2018; Mason and Stewart 2001; O’Barr 1982; Rigney 1999; Teng et al. 2018; Wong 2020. describe habitual problems such as misunderstanding of the court interpreters’ role by lawyers and users alike (Hale 2004; Matoesian 2005), poor working conditions (Hale 2004; Mikkelson 2017; Vigier Moreno 2020b), low remuneration (Hale 2004; Ortega 2011, 2015), and the low level of proficiency of the user in the language of communication between user and interpreter (Angermeyer 2021; Du 2019; Rickford and King 2016). In this sense, as Mikkelson (2017, 10) points out, currently there are record levels of international migration and court cases involving multiple languages, due to “the relative ease of travel and rapid communication, the globalization of trade, as well as ethnic strife and international border disputes”. This constant demographic change has made it very difficult or impossible to predict -let alone train and monitor- court interpreting in languages which are not the “major languages”, and this is what happens with most native speakers of African languages, who are asked to communicate with the interpreter in English or French, not only in Europe, but also in China, for instance (Angermeyer 2021; Bestué 2019b; Chromá 2016; Du 2019).

Regarding the problems related to dealing with legal terminology, it is important to start by defining what is meant by “legal terminology”. The legal language used in the courtroom is system-bound and falls clearly under the phraseological continuum in the language of the law proposed by Biel (2014, 36–48). This continuum includes not only what has traditionally been understood as terms and phraseology (collocations, multi-word lexical units and lexical bundles or phraseological patterns) but also phrasemes (the linguistic environment of terms) and what has been called “non-terminological word combinations”. The following sections include examples of all the continuum. For the purposes of this chapter, this continuum is considered “legal terminology” since the court interpreter needs to deal with all of it.

The perception of professional court interpreters is that dealing with legal terminology is a clear difficulty and that they would benefit from more specialized training, as can be seen in surveys such as the one conducted by Wallace (2015, 182) among practicing court interpreters in the US. This survey found that 81% of the respondents said they were “likely” to attend interpreter training opportunities and, when asked to choose in which areas, the most mentioned ones were terminology and specialized areas, such as criminal terminology. These findings are coherent with Hale’s (2004) survey in Australia. In that study, court interpreters said that the main difficulty for interpreting accurately in the courtroom was witness’s incoherent language and then, in the second place, legal terms and witness’s colloquial language.

These findings are also confirmed by what has been observed in descriptive studies such as TIPp (“Translating and Interpreting in Criminal Proceedings”),22.For a detailed explanation of the research project and the findings, see Orozco-Jutorán 2018 and 2019. where the practice of interpreters in 55 criminal proceedings in 2015 in three different language combinations in Spain was analyzed. The findings of the TIPp study showed that on average there were 2.7 inadequate solutions regarding terminological issues (i.e. omissions, additions and major shifts of meaning) per minute. Of these inadequate solutions, there were an average of 21 ‘critical’ errors per hour, ‘critical’ meaning that the error could affect the outcome of the trial. Figure 1 shows an example of a critical error observed in the TIPp study. As the reader can appreciate in the back translation into English of the judge’s utterance, the underlined part, which is omitted by the interpreter, contains terms with legal consequences which are essential information for the defendant to be able to answer the question of the judge.

The following sub-sections focus on specific problems faced by court interpreters when handling legal terminology.

3.Standards for quality in court interpreting

In a previous research (Orozco-Jutorán 2019), court interpreting quality was operationalized into two indicators in a theoretical framework inspired by Wadensjö’s (1998) dialogic discourse-based interaction paradigm. Wadensjö’s approach goes beyond the monologic view (what she calls “talk as text”) and complements it with the dialogic view (“talk as activity”), understanding interpreting not only as a translation task, but also as mediation and coordination. In this way, she accounts for the double role of dialogue interpreters: relaying original utterances (renditions) and coordinating conversation (non-renditions).

This approach is actually very close to most official practice standards for court interpreting in different countries, although they might use other names. For instance, Mason (2018, 663) mentions “accuracy and protocol/demeanor” as the features of good quality court interpreting set in the US by professional associations as the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT) and the entity that certifies who may serve as an interpreter in the federal court system, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts: “The standards of accuracy and protocol/demeanor are aimed at maintaining both the quality of the interpreter’s renditions and the discursive relationship of the main actors in a courtroom proceeding” (Mason 2018, 664).

Fidelity (e.g. Mikkelson 2017), loyalty (e.g. Chen and Chen 2013) or accuracy (e.g. Hale 2004), referring to the same concept with slight variations, are mentioned in all models of court interpreting quality. The definitions and indicators chosen by scholars to explain what is meant by accuracy, fidelity or loyalty include several aspects that are important to bear in mind when interpreting legal terms.

For instance, Pöchhacker (2001, 413), after a thorough review of the literature on models of quality in any kind of simultaneous interpreting, suggests four common criteria to observe accuracy, which range from the lexico-semantic core – “accurate rendition” and “adequate target language expression” – to the socio-pragmatic sphere of interaction – “equivalent intended effect” and “successful communication”. Lee (2008, 169), referring specifically to court interpreting, adds that the level of accuracy may be reflected in the extent to which deviations, such as omissions, additions and unjustifiable changes or misinterpretations of the meaning and intention of the speaker, are observed in interpreting performance. ISO 20228 2019 states that interpreters shall “accurately, faithfully, and impartially interpret the substance of all statements without any additions, omissions, or other misleading factors that could alter the intended meaning of the speaker’s message” (ISO 20228 2019, 7).

Also regarding accuracy for court settings, Mikkelson (2017) talks of a fidelity continuum where a full rendition involves conveying every element of meaning of the source message, without adding, omitting, editing, simplifying, or embellishing, that is, maintaining the tone and register of the original message, even if it is inappropriate, offensive, or unintelligible and maintaining also comments, pauses, hesitations.

As Liu, and Hale (2018) affirm, it is generally agreed by scholars (they quote Benmaman 1997; Berk-Seligson 1990; De Jongh 1992; González et al. 2012; Laster and Taylor 1994) that only verbatim (word for word) interpretation does not enable real communication in court interpreting settings, something most necessary in a trial. They affirm that accuracy should include the complete transfer of content, style and illocutionary force used by the speaker: “quality interpreting in court should accurately relay both the content of original utterances and the style of the speaker” (Liu and Hale 2018, 300). To back this idea, these authors quote the most recent Code of Ethics of the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT 2012, 10), which establishes that interpreters are required to preserve “the content and intent of the source message or text without omission or distortion”. This means that, to be considered accurate, a rendition requires “the complete transfer of the propositional content, as well as the illocutionary force of the source language. In this way, the pragmatics of courtroom interaction may be maintained” (Liu and Hale 2018, 300). To observe accuracy in court interpreting, they suggest four main dimensions to be considered: propositional content, linguistic accuracy, illocutionary point (Austin 1975) and degree of strength (Searle and Vanderveken 1985). They describe propositional content as the informational content of an utterance, at the semantic level, while illocutionary point refers to the speaker’s communicative intention. They give the following example of inaccuracy in illocutionary point:

Liu and Hale (2018, 309) explain that, in this example, the prosecutor uses sarcasm, expressed in the form of a constant polarity tag question, to discredit the accused and imply that it would be highly unlikely for him to not be aware of the fact that his friend was a notorious drug dealer, “given that the news of his arrest was ‘all over the newspapers’”. The authors suggest that a pragmatic translation could have been achieved in this case “by employing additional linguistic devices, such as adding an adverb 难道 (emphatic adverb) which can imply the speaker’s disbelief and mockery of the addressee” (Liu and Hale 2018, 309).

By degree of strength the authors mean “the strength with which the illocutionary point is portrayed” (Hale 2004, 6) and give the following example:

Here, the prosecutor used a negative yes-no question, which is different from the positive yes-no question, is always conducive and often accompanied by an emotion of surprise or disbelief (Quirk et al. 1985, 808). The authors point out that in the example the interpreter fails to show conduciveness and disbelief by using a neutral positive yes-no question, mitigating in this way the degree of strength of the utterance (Liu and Hale 2018, 310). Finally, according to these authors, linguistic inaccuracy can be seen in aspects such as grammar and pauses or hesitations.

Other scholars place more emphasis on the pragmatic aspect of accuracy (e.g. Angermeyer 2009, 2021; Fraser and Freedgood 1999; Hale 1996; Jacobsen 2004, 2008). An example of a pragmatic aspect in court interpreting accuracy is whether interpreters translate another person’s speech in the first person (direct speech), or in the third person (indirect or reported speech). This implies that they speak as the person whose speech they are translating, or that they speak about him or her. Angermeyer (2009, 5) affirms that these variants differ considerably in their implications for the interpreter’s participant role in the interaction and his or her stance towards the user. He also states that other participants may not always recognize the participant role of the interpreter and at times may falsely attribute responsibility for translated talk to the interpreter, as in an example given by Wadensjö (1998, 239), where a rejected visa applicant perceived the interpreter as the co-author of the translated message “we have decided not to give you permission to stay in Sweden.”

Dhami et al. (2017) provide yet another model for accuracy in court interpreting and highlight the manner of delivery, the force of the utterance, the register chosen by the speakers and the discourse strategies used by law enforcement agents, including rapport-building features, as accuracy elements. O’Barr (1982) emphasizes special linguistic structures and legal terminology due to the effect they have on the interaction and on evaluations of credibility. Figure 4 shows an example observed in the TIPp study of an inaccurate rendition of all the features mentioned in the models of Dhami et al (2017) and O’Barr (1982). The prosecutor says “arrest” and “crime of theft”, and the interpreter lowers the register and uses colloquial language to translate these legal terms as “caught by the police” and “taking something”, thus losing the legal force of the utterance.

With this inaccurate rendition, the interpreter changes the way in which the user, who is the defendant, perceives the prosecutor. The prosecutor is not seen as a legal expert who uses legal terms, as the original utterance suggests, but as someone who speaks in a standard or even colloquial register, and this could have consequences in the language used by the defendant to answer the prosecutor’s questions and in turn influence the perception the judge and the other counsels have of the defendant. As stated by Angermeyer (2009, 3): “sociolinguistic studies of variation in the courtroom have shown that individuals whose language variety or speech style differs from that of legal professionals are likely to be evaluated negatively by judges or jurors”.

Perhaps one of the widest descriptions of accuracy in court interpreting is the one by Hale et al. (2019, 115). They mention accuracy of propositional content, accuracy of manner of delivery (pragmatic force, register and style), accuracy of legal discourse and terminology, including a specific use of question types, specific grammatical structures and institutional standardized phrases, besides legal terms referring to specific acts, names of illegal substances and terms relating to the criminal justice process. They give an example of an inaccurate rendition with major omissions, change of style and inaccuracy of illocutionary force (Hale et al. 2019, 118):

They also give some examples of incorrect legal terminology renderings observed in court. For example, the rendering into Spanish of the term “caution”, in the sentence “before we commence, I must inform you of the caution”, as “precauciones” (precautions), thus completely changing the legal meaning of the term (Hale et al. 2019, 118).

4.Training court interpreters to handle legal terminology

As many practitioners and scholars explain (e.g. González et al. 2012; Mikkelson 2010, 2017; Edwards 1995) court interpreters work with bilingual glossaries or terminological records, with greater or lesser degrees of complexity and depth according to the characteristics of the event in which they are going to perform. They study and memorize such glossaries/records before the event, so as to enter the courtroom already prepared. Therefore, when training court interpreters, learning how to create these glossaries is of great importance. The pedagogical suggestions and materials in this section are based on the training experience acquired for years on the master’s degree on legal translation and court interpreting at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in the English-Spanish language combination.

The resources that can be used to create these glossaries are both primary or direct resources and secondary resources, which provide access to primary resources: monolingual and bilingual specialized dictionaries and glossaries, both on paper and online, thematic lexicons, terminology databases, corpora, legal texts, including civil and penal codes, handbooks and textbooks on subjects such as forensic pathology, scientific articles, annual reports, legislation such as rules of criminal procedure, websites of international organizations, national judicial institutions, professional associations, universities, public libraries, and so on.

Among the existing bilingual lexicographical resources, there are some created especially for English-Spanish court interpreters, such as Benmaman et al. 1991; Mikkelson 2000 and Stromberg 2013. They cover specialized terms, some legal -basically criminal and procedural- and some in a range of areas that are not legal per se but which are very likely to appear in trials (traffic and automotive terms, drug-related terms, weapons terms and medical terms). Edwards (1995, 53–62) also provides some helpful sources for terminology search and glossary building. However, they are all limited to one English variety (American) and one Spanish variety (Mexican), so they could not be used in any other context. This limitation of resources is also true for other language combinations, in which there are even less bilingual resources available. Therefore, as Mikkelson (2017, 132) affirms: “Bilingual dictionaries (…) should be supplemented with more specialized dictionaries and reference works, as well as non-traditional sources of information”. In this sense, besides terminological databases and lexicographical sources, in the research to build glossaries, other useful sources can be specialized websites and blogs by professional associations, scholars (e.g. Abril and del Pozo 2015, who provide a website including terminology, legal background knowledge and recommendations for interpreters in domestic violence cases) or experts (e.g. Jowers 2015, a thematic lexicon, and Jowers 2017, a blog on legal terms).

5.Conclusion

Court interpreters face many difficulties, so to be competent and offer good quality court interpreting is not an easy task, as has been commented and exemplified along this chapter. In this context, dealing effectively with legal terminology is crucial to interpret accurately and to keep the legal intent of the message. To do that, the need of creating glossaries has been established and some suggestions have been given regarding how to create them, starting with monolingual research and then adding the bilingual work to provide equivalents in the target language.

Although we have tried to cover the most important points to give an overview of court interpreting, focusing in dealing with legal terminology, there are obviously many important matters that could not be covered in a single chapter. Court interpreting is a field in need of practice improvement and has a great research potential as well. More descriptive studies and specialized training programs would be very beneficial to increase and ensure equal access to justice to all persons who are not proficient in the language spoken in a court of law all around the world.