LINGUIST List 22.737 Sun Feb 13 2011 Review: Translation: Hale (2010) Editor for this issue: Monica Macaulay <monicalinguistlist.org> This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.     Lelija Socanac , The Discourse of Court Interpreting: Discourse practices of the law, the witness and the interpreter Message 1: The Discourse of Court Interpreting: Discourse practices of the law, the witness and the interpreter Date: 13-Feb-2011 From: Lelija Socanac <lelijasocanacyahoo.com> Subject: The Discourse of Court Interpreting: Discourse practices of the law, the witness and the interpreter E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-2639.html AUTHOR: Sandra Beatriz Hale TITLE: The Discourse of Court Interpreting SUBTITLE: Discourse practices of the law, the witness and the interpreter SERIES: Benjamins Translation Library 52 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins Publishing Company YEAR: 2010 Lelija Socanac, University of Zagreb, Croatia SUMMARY The Discourse of Court Interpreting is a paperback edition with corrections of the book which was first published in 2004. As stated in the first edition, in many countries, including Australia, the practice of court interpreting often lacks a proper theoretical background and is ignored by researchers as a field of study. Since many court interpreters lack adequate professional training, attempts should be made to professionalize legal interpreting. As far as research is concerned, most of what is written on the subject is not based on empirical evidence. Since the first edition of the book, a number of positive developments have taken place, but most of the problems addressed in the first edition still persist. Based on the current reality of court interpreting in Australia, the book aims to fill part of the gap that exists in the knowledge about the practice of court interpreters. It deals primarily with the micro-linguistic analysis of Spanish interpreters' renditions in the courtroom, drawing on social and professional issues to explain the interpreters' performance. It describes the discourse practices of interpreters vs. those of the lawyers and the Spanish-speaking witnesses. The author analyzes in particular the way interpreters manipulate, filter and alter the messages of the main participants in their interpretation, and the impact such alterations may have on the legal process. The book shows how the lawyers' monolingual practices, such as the use of questions to maintain control and reinforce their power can at times be thwarted by the interference of the interpreter and at times reinforced by it. Power is being negotiated through the control of the discourse in the interpreter-mediated interaction. The book shows how subtle changes in interpreting, such as the omission of discourse markers, can have pragmatic significance on the message. The maintenance of equivalence of style in the interpretation of the witnesses' testimonies is presented as a strong argument for accurate interpreting. The data show that interpreters are often not faithful to the style of the original text even when they are faithful to the content. The results of experiments support the hypothesis that such changes can have an impact on the impressions of credibility, competence and intelligence formed about the witnesses. The data were extracted from seventeen Local Court hearings in New South Wales, whose proceedings are routinely audio-recorded. In Chapter 1, Court interpreting: The main issues, the author points to a great disparity in the quality of interpreters, from the very skilled and highly educated, who form a minority, to those with even insufficient bilingual skills. Interpreters should become aware of their responsibilities as professionals, which include understanding and recognizing the importance of their role, obtaining pre-service university training and in-service professional development to constantly upgrade their skills. The interpreting process consists of three main stages: comprehension, conversion and delivery. In order to interpret the utterances correctly, three relevant contextual factors should be considered: the register of the text, the pragmatic force of the utterance and the culture-specific genre requirement. At the conversion stage, the interpreter's main objective should be to convey the pragmatic meaning of utterances in a way that would achieve the same effect as the original utterance. The delivery phase has been perhaps the most neglected in the study and training of interpreting, and it is the main focus of the book. It refers not only to the production of the propositional content of the message, but also to the manner in which it is presented. Interpreters often make the mistake of interpreting the semantic meaning only, ignoring, misunderstanding or not conveying the pragmatic meaning of utterances. The interpreter's aim should be to replicate the original source language message in the target message in a manner that would have the same effect on the listeners. Chapter 2, Historical overview of court interpreting in Australia, provides an overview of the history and status of court interpreting by giving a review of government reports on interpreting and translation services in Australia, the status of legal interpreter and legal interpreting training and research. Providing interpreter services to those who do not speak English cannot ensure equal access to justice unless those interpreters are competent. Hence the linguistic aspect of interpreting: ''competence'' and the professional aspect: ''ethics'' impinge on the social aspect: ''access and equity''. The quest for access and equity should begin by ensuring that suitable training based on results of empirical research is available, that practicing interpreters be required to undertake such training and that performance and ethical behavior be monitored. Chapter 3, Courtroom questioning and the interpreter, presents the discourse of the adversarial system in Australia, explaining the purpose of examination-in-chief and cross-examination. The author describes question forms and types, pointing to differences between questions in examination-in-chief, which are freer and more open, and those in cross-examination which are more coercive, narrow and closed. Within the pragmatic framework, each question type is then described in terms of level of control, tone, and illocutionary point and force (Searle 1990). Level of control refers to the way a question can constrain the respondent by limiting the choice of expected answers. Tone refers to the level of politeness and the level of hostility or friendliness attached to questions. Some speech acts may have the same illocutionary point, but not the same force. Different question types may have the same illocutionary point, to obtain a particular answer, but one may be more forceful than the other. In the courtroom, subtleties of word choice can impact on the jury's perceptions of events, the relationship between participants is unequal, and the institution of the law provides validity to the different speech acts in use. The study presented in this chapter was conducted with 13 English-Spanish interpreted Local Court hearings held in New South Wales, Australia, between 1993 and 1996. Four more cases were later added. Each hearing was transcribed. Once the hearings were transcribed, all questions asked by each counsel, together with their interpretations, were extracted. The questions were then divided into cross-examination and examination-in-chief for their analysis. All questions were coded for syntactic type, after which all types were quantified in each language and percentages calculated. The questions fell into one of three broad grammatical categories: interrogatives, declaratives and imperatives, with a number of subtypes. Overall, the English cross-examination questions have a higher percentage of declaratives than interrogatives. Since declaratives are more coercive than interrogatives, such a difference seems to make the English interrogation more coercive than the Spanish interrogation. Tag questions were found to cause interpreters most difficulty, so that the tag was omitted most of the time. It was found that the main reason for the interpreters' omissions of certain features was a lack of syntactic and semantic equivalence. However, it was proposed that pragmatic equivalence can be achieved by maintaining the same or similar illocutionary force. This was presented through a detailed analysis of all occurrences of declaratives with tags and modal interrogatives with their respective Spanish interpretations. Chapter 4, The use of discourse markers in courtroom questions, concentrates on the use of ''well'', ''now'' and ''you see'' prefacing lawyers' questions both in examination-in-chief and in cross-examination. The data demonstrate that in cross-examination, these discourse markers were used as an assertive device, indicative of superior authority. When found in examination-in-chief, they were mostly used to maintain control of the flow of information, as well as to mark progression in the story line. When found in cross-examination, they were generally used as markers of argumentation and confrontation, mostly initiating disagreements or challenges. Interpreters omitted these markers almost systematically, with very few exceptions. Examples showed that at times the incorrect translation of a discourse marker changed the implicature of an utterance. Most other instances of complete omissions showed a change in the illocutionary force of the utterance, even if the illocutionary point remained the same. Chapter 5, The style of the Spanish speaking witnesses: answers and the interpreters' renditions, looks at witness testimony through their answers. It discusses the importance of testimony style in witness character evaluation and looks at how such styles are either maintained or altered by the interpreter. It explores features of powerless and powerful speech styles as well as the concept of relational vs. rules orientation in witnesses' testimonies. The author also presents the results of matched-guise experiments on impressions of credibility, competence and intelligence. Those defendants who demonstrated a relational orientation presented stylistic features of powerless speech style, while the rules-oriented defendants' styles were consistent with the powerful speech styles. Jurors reported that they believed the speakers who used the powerful speech style to be more convincing, more truthful, more competent, more intelligent and more trustworthy (O'Barr 1982: 74). The answers from the corpus were analyzed for features common to powerless speech: the use of hesitations, discourse markers, fillers and hedges, repetition, pauses, and backtracking. As grammatical errors were found to be a feature common in interpreters' renditions, these were also analyzed. The results showed that very rarely were powerless speech features maintained in the interpretation as a conscious translation of the original. Most of the time, when they appeared in the interpretations, they were the interpreters' features and not the witnesses'. Interpreters had substantially fewer repetitions, backtracking, pauses, fillers, hedges and discourse markers than the original Spanish answers. The study showed that witnesses' speech styles are constantly altered by interpreters, while other features which can also be construed as powerless speech features or detrimental to the evaluation of the witness's character and credibility were often added by the interpreter. There were incidents where the interpreter omitted repetitions and hedges, for example, but added grammatical errors, a poor pronunciation and a number of hesitations, while in other instances the interpreted version was noticeably improved. The results of the matched-guise experiment showed that there was a significant difference between the evaluations elicited by the original Spanish speakers and by their interpreters' renditions. In three cases the interpreter's versions were rated as more competent, more credible and more intelligent, while in one case it was the opposite. This confirmed the hypothesis that interpreters can alter the style of the witnesses' testimonies either to their benefit or to their detriment. It can be concluded that the accuracy of interpretation must involve both accuracy of content and of style. Chapter 6, Control in the courtroom, looks at the interaction between questions and answers and explores the notions of power and control in the courtroom, the institutionalized division of roles and the interpreter's interference with this notion. It also discusses the power of the interpreter to manipulate language in subtle ways. The chapter also highlights the constant negotiation of power that occurs in the courtroom. Lawyers in the courtroom exert their power mainly through their strategic use of questions which narrows the witness's choice and length of answers, allowing the examiner to phrase the evidence, rather than the respondent. Similarly, the role of questioner gives lawyers the power to control the agenda or the topics that are introduced in the courtroom (Agar 1985, Sibley & Merry 1986, Walker 1987, Maley & Fahey 1991). However, despite the fact that power is invested in the institutions, its exercise becomes personal and individual and less legal in character. The power struggle between lawyer and witness becomes interpersonal as manifested through the discourse. This can produce outcomes ranging from successful subordination of the witness to challenge and even negation of the lawyer's position. When a lawyer has to address a person through an interpreter, some of the power slips away from him or her and shifts to the interpreter who is now in control of the language, monopolizing the means of communication (Fenton 1997:30). The findings emphasize the intricate nature of courtroom interaction with its allocations of power which need to be constantly defended by those who possess it, and the heightened complexity of interpreter mediated struggles for power. Chapter 7, The interpreters' response, presents the results of a questionnaire sent to practicing Spanish interpreters asking about their views on issues of role, accuracy and the language of the courtroom and asks them to translate segments extracted from the data which are then compared to the results previously discussed. Their answers were not always consistent with their translations, i.e. their translations did not always reflect the views they expressed about accuracy of interpretation or role of the interpreter. Chapter 8 concludes the book by summarizing the results of each chapter and arriving at a further understanding of the linguistic performance of interpreters working in the courtroom. It suggests possible implications of interpreters' discourse practices, defines the role of the court interpreter based on the results, and makes recommendations for further research and training. EVALUATION The Discourse of Court Interpreting is an important contribution to a number of areas. It is primarily aimed at the field of court interpreting, adding to the limited knowledge about its practice and theory. It provides answers to practical problems based on empirical results, and its findings will be useful to court interpreters, interpreter educators and researchers. The book also makes a contribution to the field of discourse analysis regarding the discursive practices of different agents, the way in which discourse is negotiated in an institutional setting, and the way social roles are affected by discourse. Another contribution is made to the translatability of oral discourse between Spanish and English, from the lexical and grammatical to the pragmatic aspects of both languages. The book is also a contribution to achieving a higher standard of justice to speakers of non-dominant languages in the context of the courtroom. It provides linguists, interpreters and legal practitioners alike with invaluable insights into the multiple ways in which pragmatics can have a crucial role in interpreted legal proceedings. REFERENCES Agar, M. 1985. Institutional discourse. Text 5 (3), 147-168. Fenton, S. 1997. The role of the interpreter in the adversarial courtroom. In The Critical Link: Interpreters in the Community. Conference proceedings, S. Carr, R. Roberts, A. Dufour and D. Steyn (eds.), 29-34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Maley Y. & Fahey, R. 1991. Presenting the evidence: constructions of reality in court. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 10: 3-17. O'Barr, W. 1982. Linguistic Evidence. Language, Power, and Strategy in the Courtroom. New York: Academic Press. Searle, J.R. 1990. A classification of Illocutionary Acts. In Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact, D. Carbaugh (ed.), 349-372. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sibley, S.S. & Merry, S. 1986. Mediator settlement strategies. Law and Policy 8 (1): 7-31. Walker, A. G. 1987. Linguistic manipulation, power and the legal setting. In Power through Discourse, L. Kedar (ed.), 57-80. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Lelija Socanac is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Croatia. She is the coordinator of the Centre for Language and Law, and she currently directs the project Legal and Linguistic Aspects of Multilingualism. Her main research interests include sociolinguistics, contact linguistics and legal linguistics. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 13-Feb-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.