Forest Books: Interpreting In Legal Settings

The Fourth Volume in the Studies in Interpretation Series

The work of interpreters in legal settings, whether they are spoken or signed language interpreters, is filled with enormous complexity and challenges. This engrossing volume presents six, data-based studies from both signed and spoken language interpreter researchers on a diverse range of topics, theoretical underpinnings, and research methodologies.

In the first chapter, Ruth Morris analyzes the 1987 trial of Ivan (John) Demjanjuk in Jerusalem, and reveals that what might appear to be ethical breaches often were no more than courtroom dynamics, such as noise and overlapping conversation. Waltraud Kolb and Franz Pöchhacker studied 14 asylum appeals in Austria and found that interpreters frequently aligned themselves with the adjudicators. Bente Jacobsen presents a case study of a Danish-English interpreter whose discourse practices expose her attempts to maintain, mitigate, or enhance face among the participants.

In the fourth chapter, Jemina Napier and David Spencer investigate the effectiveness of interpreting in an Australian courtroom to determine if deaf citizens should participate as jurors. Debra Russell analyzed the effectiveness of preparing sign language interpreter teams for trials in Canada and found mixed results. The final chapter presents Zubaidah Ibrahim-Bell’s research on the inadequate legal services in Malaysia due to the fact that only seven sign interpreters are available. Taken together, these studies point to a “coming of age” of the field of legal interpreting as a research discipline, making Interpreting in Legal Settings an invaluable, one-of-a-kind acquisition.

Debra Russell is Director of the Western Canadian Centre of Studies in Deafness and is the David Peikoff Chair of Deafness Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Sandra Hale is Associate Professor of Interpreting and Translation at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Contributors

Zubaidah Ibrahim-Bell is an Associate Professor in the Translation Studies at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya. Her specialization is the provision of court interpreting services in Malaysia. She is currently heading a nationally funded research project on the Deaf community in Malaysia that includes the description of Malaysian Sign Language on CD and the training of interpreters. Her articles on court interpreting have been published in local journals, and internationally in theCritical Link series.

Bente Jacobsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Business Communication at the Aarhus School of Business where she teaches court and conference interpreting to masters students of English. She is a member of the Research Group for Translating and Interpreting at the Aarhus School of Business. Her 2003 doctoral thesis (Pragmatic Meaning in Court Interpreting: An Empirical Study of Additions in Consecutively Interpreted Question-Answer Dialogues) and subsequent research has been devoted to interactional pragmatics and court interpreting. She is also a state-authorized translator and interpreter of English and works as a freelance court and conference interpreter

Waltraud Kolb holds a research and teaching position at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. The focus of her research is on literary translation, reception studies, and postcolonial studies. She received her PhD in comparative literature, and for many years lectured in the University of Vienna Departments of Comparative Literature and African Studies. She is a freelance translator and court-certified interpreter.

Ruth Morris is a former Brussels-based European Union staff interpreter (1972–1982). Since the early 1980s she has been a freelance interpreter and translator in Israel. While studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a master’s degree in communications, she came across the English case of Iqbal Begum, a Pakistani woman whose life sentence had been successfully appealed on the ground that she had not understood the interpreter provided at a trial. This sparked an interest in interlinguistic aspects of legal proceedings, which led to her researching the impact of interpreting on legal proceedings (a project based on observations at the multilingual Demjanjuk war crimes trial) and attitudes to court interpreters, for which she was awarded a PhD from Lancaster University, England. She is a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where she gives a research seminar in court interpreting as part of the master’s program in translation and interpreting studies. She continues to nurture a faint hope that one day, just as the institution of the public defender’s office in Israel arose out of a Tel Aviv University law course, the country will have a fully fledged court interpreting profession, perhaps as a result of her and her students’ research. She is co-author with Joan Colin of Interpreters and the Legal Process (Waterside Press, 1996).

Jemina Napier is a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney. Jemina has almost 20 years experience of signed language interpreting in the United Kingdom and Australia. Her major research interest is in the field of signed language interpreting, but her wider interests include effective translation and interpreting pedagogy, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. She has published several articles discussing aspects of signed language interpreting and interpreting pedagogy. She is the author of Sign Language Interpreting: Linguistic Coping Strategies (Douglas McLean, 2002) and co-author, with Rachel McKee and Della Goswell, of Sign Language Interpreting: Theory and Practice in Australia and New Zealand (Federation Press, 2006).

Franz Pöchhacker is Associate Professor of Interpreting Studies in the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked as a freelance interpreter and conducted research on various domains of interpreting. Following his doctoral research on simultaneous conference interpreting (Simultan dolmetschen als komplexes Handeln; Gunter Narr, 1994), he has devoted most of his subsequent work to interpreting in community-based settings. He is the author of Introducing Interpreting Studies (Routledge, 2004) and co-editor, with Miriam Shlesinger, of The Interpreting Studies Reader (Routledge, 2002). They are also co-editors of Interpreting: International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting.

Debra Russell is the Director of the Western Canadian Centre for Studies in Deaf and is the David Peikoff Chair of Deafness Studies at the University of Alberta. Her primary interests include factors that affect the quality of interpretation provided between Deaf and non-deaf people, particularly in legal settings such as courtrooms, and in inclusive education settings. Dr. Russell has also been involved in research examining the needs of students with disabilities in postsecondary settings, the evaluation of interpreters in medical settings, and the creation of best practice standards for support services for Deaf and hard of hearing learners in postsecondary settings. Dr. Russell has worked with and taught interpreters across North America and has written broadly on issues of interpreter assessment, consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, and curriculum development for interpreter education programs.