In the common-law system, closing arguments (sometimes called ‘closing statements’ or ‘closing speeches’) take place during the final stage of the adversarial trial and involve both prosecutors and defence attorneys, who, subsequent to the examination of witnesses, give a summary of their arguments with the intention of persuading the decision-maker to accept their version of the facts and rule in their favour. In the inquisitorial trial of the Chinese criminal courtroom, there exists something similar to the closing argument: the closing statement (最后陈述 zuihou chenshu ‘last statement’), which is given at the end of the trial. Unlike common-law practice in which both sides have the opportunity to make final arguments, in the Chinese context only the defence parties are entitled to these final words. Thus, it is usually defendants themselves, rather than their lawyers, who are given the opportunity to present the closing statement in front of judges. As one of the key stages of the legal proceedings, the closing statement is a final chance for defendants to have their voices heard. To communicate their propositions effectively requires defendants to speak with adequate linguistic competence. When they are unable to speak the language of the court, the defendants’ voice is often communicated to trial participants through an interpreter, a procedural right laid down in Article 9 of China’s 2012 Criminal Procedure Law (CPL).

References

Austin, John L.

1962 How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures by J. L. Austin. Edited by J. O. Urnson. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bai, Bing, and Jincun Cheng

2007 “刑事庭审被告人最后陈述权探析 [A study on the right of the accused to closing statement in criminal trials].” Journal of Chengdu Electromechanical College 39 (2): 86–89.

Berk-Seligson, Susan

2002 The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Berk-Seligson, Susan

2017 The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Biernacka, Agnieszka

2019 Interpreter-Mediated Interactions of the Courtroom: A Naturally Occurring Data Based Study. Berlin: Peter Lang.

Blommaert, Jan

2005a “Bourdieu the Ethnographer: The Ethnographic Grounding of Habitus and Voice.” The Translator 11 (2): 219–236.

Blommaert, Jan

2005b Discourse: A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cao, Deborah

2002 “Finding the Elusive Equivalents in Chinese/English Legal Translation.” Babel 48 (4): 330–341.

Cao, Deborah

2007 Translating Law. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Cao, Deborah

2010 “Legal Translation.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, vol. 1, 191–195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Cheung, Andrew K. F.

2012 “The Use of Reported Speech by Court Interpreters in Hong Kong.” Interpreting 14 (1): 73–91.

Cook, Guy

1989 Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Coulmas, Florian

1981 “ ‘Poison to Your Soul’: Thanks and Apologies Contrastively Viewed.” In Volume 2: Conversational Routine – Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, edited by Florian Coulmas, 69–92. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

Du, Biyu

2016 The Bilingual Trial: Access to Interpreting, Communication and Participation in Chinese Criminal Courts. PhD diss. University of Hong Kong.

Du, Biyu

2019 “Multilingualism in Legal Space: The Issue of Mutual Understanding in ELF Communication between Defendants and Interpreters.” International Journal of Multilingualism 16 (3): 317–335.

Dubslaff, Friedel, and Bodil Martinsen

2005 “Exploring Untrained Interpreters’ Use of Direct versus Indirect Speech.” In Healthcare Interpreting: Discourse and Interaction, edited by Franz Pöchhacker and Miriam Shlesinger, special issue of Interpreting 7 (2): 211–236.

Gill, Kathleen

2000 “The Moral Functions of an Apology.” The Philosophical Forum 31 (1): 11–27.

Goffman, Erving

1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

González, Roseann Dueñas, Victoria Félice Vásquez, and Holly Mikkelson

1991 Fundamentals of Court Interpretation: Theory, Policy, and Practice. Durham: Carolina Academic Press.

Gruber, M. Catherine

2014 “I’m Sorry for What I’ve Done:” The Language of Courtroom Apologies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hale, Sandra Beatriz

1996 “Pragmatic Considerations in Court Interpreting.” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 19 (1): 61–72.

Hale, Sandra Beatriz

2004 The Discourse of Court Interpreting: Discourse Practices of the Law, the Witness, and the Interpreter. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hale, Sandra Beatriz

2007 Community Interpreting. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hale, Sandra Beatriz

2010 “Court Interpreting.” In The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, edited by Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson, 440–454. London: Routledge.

Hale, Sandra Beatriz

2014 “Interpreting Culture: Dealing with Cross-cultural Issues in Court Interpreting.” Perspectives 22 (3): 321–331.

Hale, Sandra Beatriz

2015 “Approaching the Bench: Teaching Magistrates and Judges How to Work Effectively with Interpreters.” MonTI 7: 163–180.

Harris, Brian

1990 “Norms in Interpretation.” Target 2 (1): 115–119.

Harvey, Malcolm

2000 “A Beginner’s Course in Legal Translation: The Case of Culture-bound Terms.” In La traduction juridique: Histoire, théorie(s) et pratique / Legal Translation: History, Theory/ies, Practice (Proceedings, Geneva, 17–19 February 2000), edited by GREJUT, 357–369. Bern/Geneva: ASTTI/ETI.

Harvey, Malcolm

2002 “What’s So Special about Legal Translation.” Meta 47 (2): 177–185.

Heffer, Chris

2013 “Projecting Voice: Towards an Agentive Understanding of a Critical Capacity.” Working Papers in Language and Literature. Cardiff: Cardiff University.

Heffer, Chris

2018 “When Voices Fail to Carry: Voice Projection and the Case of the ‘Dumb’ Jury.” In Meaning and Power in the Language of Law, edited by Janny H. C. Leung and Alan Durant, 207–235. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heffer, Chris

2019 “Ways of Losing Voice While Using It.” In Rethinking Language, Text and Context: Interdisciplinary Research in Stylistics in Honour of Michael Toolan, edited by Ruth Page, Beatrix Busse, and Nina Nørgaard, 237–253. New York: Routledge.

House, Juliane

1977 A Model for Translation Quality Assessment. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

House, Juliane

2015 Translation Quality Assessment: Past and Present. Abingdon: Routledge.

Hu, Xitong

2017 “对刑事速裁程序保留被告人最后陈述的反思 [Challenges to the reservation of last statement by defendants in the criminal immediate judgement procedure].” Law Science Magazine 38 (7): 133–140.

Hymes, Dell

1996 Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor and Francis.

Li, Changsheng

2008 论对抗式刑事审判 [On the adversary criminal trial]. PhD diss. Southwest University of Political Science and Law.

Marszalenko, Jakub E.

2016 “Conduits, Communication Facilitators, and Referees: Revisiting the Role of the Court Interpreter in the Japanese Context.” SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpreting 9 (2): 29–43.

Mikkelson, Holly

1998 “Towards a Redefinition of the Role of the Court Interpreter.” Interpreting 3 (1): 21–45.

Morris, Ruth

2008 “Missing Stitches: An Overview of Judicial Attitudes to Interlingual Interpreting in the Criminal Justice Systems of Canada and Israel.” In Doing Justice to Court Interpreting, edited by Miriam Schlesinger and Franz Pöchhacker, special issue of Interpreting 10 (1): 34–64.

Poon, Wai-yee Emily

2002 “The Pitfalls of Linguistic Equivalence: The Challenge for Legal Translation.” Target 14 (1): 75–106.

Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson

1974 “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735.

Šarčević, Susan

1997 New Approach to Legal Translation. The Hague: Kluwer Law International.

Šarčević, Susan

2012 “Challenges to the Legal Translator.” In The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law, edited by Peter M. Tiersma and Lawrence M. Solan, 187–199. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Searle, John R.

1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shlesinger, Miriam

1991 “Interpreter Latitude vs. Due Process: Simultaneous and Consecutive Interpretation in Multilingual Trials.” In Empirical Research in Translation and Intercultural Studies: Selected Papers of the TRANS-SIF Seminar, Savonlinna 1988, edited by Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit, 147–155. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

Shlesinger, Miriam, and Franz Pöchhacker

2008 “Introduction: Doing Justice to Court Interpreting.” In Doing Justice to Court Interpreting, edited by Miriam Schlesinger and Franz Pöchhacker, special issue of Interpreting 10 (1): 1–7.

Siems, Mathias

2018 Comparative Law. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tiffen, Brian Witney

1974 The Intelligibility of Nigerian English. PhD diss. University of London.

Wang, Jian, and Bingjun Yang

2007 “我国法庭口译面临的机遇与挑战 [On the opportunities for and challenges to court interpretation in China].” Journal of Sichuan International Studies University 23 (3): 115–120.

Yu, Qihuo

2008 被告人最后陈述权研究 [On the defendant’s last statement]. Master thesis. Southwest University of Political Science and Law.

Zhu, Yao

2010 “被告人最后陈述权实证研究 – 以中国法院网直播的50个案件为素材 [Empirical study on the right of the accused to closing statement – based on 50 cases broadcast by China Court website].” Journal of Hunan University (Social Sciences) 24 (6): 131–135.

Zhu, Yupeng, and Yuanlu Yu

2014 “刑事诉讼翻译制度的缺陷及重构 [On the defects of the criminal court interpreting system and its reconstruction].” Journal of Shanxi Politics and Law Institute for Administrators 27 (2): 103–105.