The last decades have seen a movement of citizens throughout the world, affecting the linguistic and ethnic make-up of societies. As a result, public service interpreting (PSI) - or Community Interpreting (hereafter CI), as it is commonly referred to by researchers - is arguably the most common form of interpreting, enabling “people who are not fluent speakers of the official language(s) of the country to communicate with the providers of public services so as to facilitate full and equal access to legal, health, education, government, and social services” (Mikkelson, 1996: 77).
CI is also known as liaison, ad hoc, dialogue, face-to-face, contact, and cultural interpreting and there is little consensus amongst scholars whether or not these terms are synonymous (Hale, 2007). Some scholars such as Gentile (1997), Mikkelson (2010) or Roberts (1997) have warned against drawing distinctions between types of interpreting and argue that “the traditional labels attached to different types of interpreting are inadequate and may be contributing to the divisiveness we see among interpreters today” (Mikkelson, 2010: 2).
Broadly speaking, CI events may be police interrogations, immigration hearings, classroom interaction, doctor-patient consultations, Job Centre interviews, or social worker-client interviews. The language of the interaction may be spoken or sign language, and the working mode may be simultaneous, consecutive or sight translation. A fairly recent trend is the use of over-the-phone (or remote) interpreting, whereby services are provided via telephone or videolink and neither parties - nor the interpreter - are usually in the same location (Heh & Qian, 1997; Fowler, 2011). At present most remote interpreting is done consecutively, but the simultaneous mode is being increasingly used alongside new developments in technology (Braun & Taylor, 2012).
Legal or forensic interpreting is one specific modality of PSI, which has been defined by Gonzales, Vasquez, & Mikkelson (1991: 25) as an “interpretation that takes place in a legal setting such as a courtroom or an attorney’s office, wherein some proceeding or activity related to law is conducted”. A legal interpreter, therefore, is taken to be “a trained, qualified professional who provides interpreting (…) services to those involved, in whatever capacity, in a legal system in whose language they are not fully competent” (Hertog, 2011: 13). This type of interpreting can be further subdivided according to the setting where it takes place:
immigration, asylum, police (hereafter IAP) or courtroom interpreting (Pöllabauer, 2006: 244).
It is worth pointing out that court interpreting (i.e. judiciary or judicial interpreting) is sometimes broadly used as a synonym for interpreting in legal and “quasi-judicial” settings (Benmaman, 1997: 179; Berk-Seligson, 2000: 214; Pöchhacker, 2004: 14). For instance, Martinsen & Wolch-Rasmussen (2003: 41) state that the legal interpreter’s fundamental role consists in “facilitating a communication within the judicial system”, but fail to mention other aspects of legal interpreting, such as law enforcement.
According to Laster & Taylor (1994: 28) the use of the term court interpreting as an umbrella term “reflects the law’s own regard for the (…) court as the apex of the legal system”. However, this view contradicts studies carried out in Australia (e.g. Martin, 1991), which demonstrate that the courtroom has indeed a more marginal role in the determination of legal rights and obligations than classic legal studies theory allows. A high number of legal proceedings involving second-language speakers are shown to be dealt with in the pre-trial phase, particularly in police and immigration interviews (e.g. Morris, 2008).
Another distinction between courtroom and pre-trial interpreting can be drawn in terms of the interpreting mode adopted. In courts of law, on one hand, interpreting services tend to be provided in the simultaneous mode, although consecutive is the choice for witness or defendant testimony (Gonzales, Vasquez, & Mikkelson, 1991); on the other, interpreted pre- trial proceedings are likely to be in the consecutive mode (Tsuda, 1995).
Despite the differences between court interpreting and other legal interpreting events, there are also a number of similarities. According to a government publication issued by the US Census Bureau, Guidelines on the Use of Interpreters in Survey Interviews (Pan, 2005: 1), community interpreting is defined as “the genre of interpreting used where two or more parties do not share a language in a social encounter and where the interpreter must be present in order to bridge the communication gap” (my emphasis) - in the particular case of legal interpreting, in court hearings and police interviews. This definition leads to a series of assumptions or ‘special requirements’ for legal interpreting. Firstly, unlike conference interpreting, legal interpreting can be taken as a two-language direction process, i.e. the interpreter is required to interpret into and from both the target and source language. Secondly, the interpreter could also be seen as a “cultural mediator” (Kondo & Tebble, 1997:
158) to facilitate communication between the two parties. Together with language skills, the interpreter should therefore have cultural competence of both target and source culture in order to effectively convey the message.18 In addition, they all share certain “contextual constraints” (Jacobsen, 2009: 158), such as the ad-hoc, institutionalised and triadic nature of the speech event, in a setting involving the interpreter and two or more primary participants, typically a professional with a certain amount of power and a non-professional (usually the second-language speaker) with a small amount of power or no power at all (e.g. Englund Dimitrova, 1997; Jacobsen, 2010; Roy, 2000). Naturally, these and other contextual constraints have an impact on the way meanings are negotiated within the interaction (Jacobsen, 2002; Wadensjö, 1998; cf. also 2.2).
A further common constraint of ‘institutional’ nature is the professional Code of ethics, which “applies to the majority of the skills and practices common to all forms of legal interpreting” (Benmaman, 1997: 189). Despite the existence of Codes of Conduct, legal interpreters are still not entirely seen as reliable and competent professionals, partly due to some negative media coverage (cf. NRPSI in Introduction). Indeed, many of these ‘beliefs’ about interpreters have some empirical foundation. Research on training and provision of legal interpreting services (e.g. Adams, Corsellis & Harmer, 1995; Corsellis, 2005, 2008; Grbić 2001; Mikkelson, 2010; Sandrelli, 2001) shows that many of the deficiencies blamed on interpreters are the result of systemic problems, e.g. the lack of uniform education and testing to develop high levels of professional competence,19 and the failure to further mechanisms for service delivery. Underlying these factors there seems to be the lack in public funding for the provision of legal interpreting services and levels of pay for interpreters (e.g. Perez & Wilson, 2009). This contributes to the ‘Cinderella’ image traditionally attached to all forms of PSI. As Gentile (1997: 117-118) points out, “[PSI] will continue to be regarded as a second rate form of interpreting which is not worthy of specific attention in terms of status, training, remuneration and research.”
18 For instance, in Australia several studies have been conducted which explore the cultural barriers for
Aboriginal people in accessing court proceedings (Cooke, 2002; Eades, 2003; Goldflam, 1995; Howard, Quinn, Blokland & Flynn, 1993).
19 The issue of PSI training and the pedagogical issues surrounding it are highly relevant to accreditation systems
and have received growing attention by PSI scholars. The stress usually lies on quality, training models, task requirements and skill requirements for PSIs, including linguistic skills and socio-cultural knowledge needed for interpreting (e.g. Hertog & Van Gucht, 2008; Towsley, 2011).
Finally, courtroom and pre-trial interpreting are similar in virtue of taking place within the professional domain of law, which - together with other fields such as medicine - is a “tightly- knit dominant profession” (Abbott, 1988: 72). Legal organisation is maintained and developed through the creation of complex divisions of roles for other subordinated professional categories. Interpreters, as much as courtroom listing officers or ushers, are subordinate professional groups as their tasks are defined by the requirements of the legal profession (Abbott, 1988).
Professional subordination is reiterated through symbolic practices. In the case of legal interpreting, such practices are shown in the judges’, police officials’, barristers’, and solicitors’ casual treatment of interpreters (Fowler, 2003; Laster & Taylor, 1994).20 For instance, the solicitor or police officer may fail to brief the interpreter as required (Shepherd, 2007) and the prosecutors are unwilling to allow the interpreter to study the documentation regarding the case. In this context, it is also worth mentioning the stress related to work environment factors: the personal risk, the adversarial nature of the court, the lack of physical accommodation for the interpreter, the poor acoustics of the interview rooms, etc. (Hale, 2011; National Union of Professional Interpreters and Translators, 2004). Finally, both courtroom and police interpreters’ Codes of Practice often state that interpreters should “just interpret”, and the interpreter is seen as a ‘conduit’ or a ‘machine’, someone who can produce verbatim renditions of the original utterances. As Laster & Taylor (1994: 17) put it:
This is part of an ongoing struggle in which interpreters strive to assert their independent professional identity and lawyers [and other legal professionals] project a “counter-image” of interpreters as mere assistants, with a role and status inferior to that of their own.
Nowadays most scholars (e.g. Colin & Morris, 1996: 99ff; Knapp-Potthoff & Knapp, 1986; Morris, 1995; Roy, 1993/2002) agree that this requirement for literal renditions - or formal equivalence - is untenable (cf. 2.2.1).
Legal interpreting research on this and other related aspects has had profound consequences for interpreter training, accreditation and professionalisation, widening the gap between prescriptive, institutional constraints and the reality of the interpreter-mediated
communication. In the next section, I will analyse the contribution of such academic work, which draws from a growing body of literature within sociology, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and cultural studies, amongst others.