16.1381, Review: Forensic Ling/Discourse: Hale (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1381. Sat Apr 30 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1381, Review: Forensic Ling/Discourse: Hale (2004)

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1)
Date: 29-Apr-2005
From: Philipp Angermeyer < psa208 at nyu.edu >
Subject: The Discourse of Court Interpreting 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2005 13:54:07
From: Philipp Angermeyer < psa208 at nyu.edu >
Subject: The Discourse of Court Interpreting 
 

AUTHOR: Hale, Sandra Beatriz
TITLE: The Discourse of Court Interpreting
SUTITLE: Discourse practices of the law, the witness and the 
interpreter
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins Publishing Company
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2091.html


Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer, Department of Linguistics, New York 
University

INTRODUCTION

Following the ground-breaking work of Berk-Seligson (1990) on 
Spanish-English interpreting in U.S. courts, studies on multilingualism 
in the courtroom have proliferated in recent years, describing 
practices in a variety of different countries, including among others 
Austria (Kadric 2001), Belgium (D'Hondt et al. 2004), Britain (Morris 
1993), Denmark (Jacobsen 2002), and South Africa (Moeketsi 1999). 
Investigating Spanish-English interpreting in Australian courts, Sandra 
Hale has been a major contributor to this growing body of research. 
Her new book presents a culmination of her research, having arisen 
out of her doctoral thesis and incorporating several previous 
publications in its chapters (Hale 1999, 2002a, 2002b).

SUMMARY

Based on data from seventeen Local Court hearings in New South 
Wales, Australia, Hale investigates the language use of English-
speaking attorneys and Spanish-speaking witnesses and the ways in 
which translation by court interpreters affects the communication 
between them. The book is divided into eight chapters. In chapter 1, 
Hale introduces the topic of court interpreting by presenting brief 
discussions of previous research regarding two important points of 
debate, namely the definition of translation accuracy and the question 
of the interpreter's role. 

Chapter 2 presents a historical overview of court interpreting in 
Australia, from the first establishment of interpreter services in the 
1950's to conditions found today. Hale reviews various government 
reports and traces the developments of interpreter training and of 
certification criteria. In particular, she is critical of the National 
Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters for its policy of 
accrediting interpreters based on tests only, rather than requiring 
them to undergo professional training also. As a consequence of such 
policies, she considers the level of court interpreting services in 
Australia to be insufficient.

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the language use of lawyers and its 
translation by interpreters, chapter 3 dealing with questions and 
chapter 4 with discourse markers. Pointing out the importance of 
questioning in the Common Law system, Hale distinguishes between 
several question types based on their syntactic form and pragmatic 
force. Quantifying the observed questions, she finds differences in the 
distribution of question types based on whether a lawyer is 
questioning a witness for the own side ("examination-in-chief") or for 
the opposing side ("cross-examination"). She finds that open-ended, 
information-seeking questions such as wh-questions are more 
common during examination-in-chief. By contrast, more coercive, 
confirmation-seeking questions are more frequent in cross-
examination, in particular declarative statements that are pragmatically 
question-like (e.g. "I put it to you that ..."). In translating these 
questions, court interpreters are found to sometimes change the 
question type and thus alter the pragmatic force. For example, 
interpreters may render declaratives as interrogatives, which Hale 
claims has the effect of making cross-examination appear less 
coercive in translation. She argues further that these differences 
between English and Spanish versions are due in part to translation 
difficulties, as certain types of English tag-questions have no 
pragmatic equivalent in Spanish.

Chapter 4 continues the examination of the speech of lawyers and its 
rendition by interpreters by investigating the treatment of three 
discourse markers, namely well, now, and (you) see. Hale finds that 
lawyers use well and see to preface questions during cross-
examination, while now is used primarily during examination-in-chief. 
However, interpreters are found to omit these discourse 
markers "almost systematically" when they translate the lawyers' 
questions into Spanish (p. 62). Hale attributes these omissions to a 
presumed disregard for the importance of discourse markers, as well 
as to a lack of pragmatic equivalence to available Spanish discourse 
markers.

In chapter 5, Hale describes the speech style of witnesses and the 
way in which it is altered by the interpreters' renditions. In doing so 
she builds on research on the importance of speech styles for the 
evaluation of witnesses in the courtroom (Berk-Seligson 1990, O'Barr 
1982, Wodak 1980), in particular the distinction between "powerful" 
and "powerless" speech styles made by O'Barr and his associates 
(e.g. O'Barr and Atkins 1980, O'Barr 1982). Hale takes "powerless" 
speech style to be indicated by a variety of features, including 
repetitions, hesitations, fillers/hedges, pauses, backtracking, 
grammatical errors, and discourse markers, and she quantifies the 
presence of these features in both the witnesses' testimonies and the 
interpreters' renditions of them. When translating the testimony of 
witnesses into English, interpreters are found to omit many of these 
features, in particular repetitions, pauses, hedges, and discourse 
markers. At the same time, interpreters may introduce their own 
hesitations, repetitions or hedges, often resulting from processing 
difficulties in interpreting. While these added features of powerless 
speech may be taken to reflect negatively on the witness, Hale's 
quantitative analysis shows that the average number of powerless 
features in the speech of interpreters does not exceed that found in 
the speech of Spanish-speaking witnesses.

Chapter 5 also includes an analysis of several narratives by witnesses 
whose speech style Hale characterizes as "rule-oriented" 
or "relationship-oriented" following Conley and O'Barr (1990). Hale 
finds that interpreters do not alter the style of testimony in this respect. 
However, her analysis differs from Conley and O'Barr's by implying 
that the distinction between rule-orientation and relationship-
orientation is a question of speech style (e.g. whether a question is 
answered "directly" or not), rather than of witnesses' attitudes towards 
the law. Conley and O'Barr (1990: 80-1) note "a convergence of the 
tendencies toward the powerless speech style and the relational 
orientation, and a complementary convergence of rule-orientation and 
the absence of powerless stylistic features," but unlike Hale, they don't 
view the orientations themselves as stylistic features.

In addition, chapter 5 contains the results of matched guise 
experiments, some evaluated by Spanish-English bilinguals, others by 
English-speaking law students. Both groups rated "powerful" speech 
more highly than "powerless" speech. Bilingual evaluators showed 
significant differences in their ratings of original witness testimony and 
corresponding renditions by interpreters. English-speaking evaluators 
showed differences in their ratings of stylistically different interpreter 
renditions of the same source text. Where the target text 
replicated "powerless" features from the source text, both source and 
target received parallel ratings. The findings thus support Hale's claim 
that interpreters' changes in speech style alter testimony in meaningful 
ways.

Chapter 6 addresses the issue of discursive power and control in the 
courtroom, investigating how attorneys use questions in order to elicit 
desired responses from witnesses. Hale shows that interpreters affect 
the control of attorneys in two ways. They may diminish it by 
translating questions in ways that alters their pragmatic force 
(compare the discussion of chapter 3), but they may also help 
attorneys maintain control by omitting challenging or 
otherwise "inappropriate" elements from the translation of a witness's 
response. Hale measures the attorneys' loss of courtroom control by 
analyzing a variety of discursive features, which are discussed and 
illustrated in detail throughout the chapter. Among them is the 
tendency to sometimes refer to a witness in the third person, thus 
addressing the interpreter rather than the witness him- or herself. 
However, this feature could also be viewed as one that enables 
attorneys to maintain control, as it demonstrates that they have the 
power to relegate non-English-speaking witnesses to the status of 
non-participants, by speaking about them rather than to them.

Chapter 7 deals with the attitudes of interpreters, based on responses 
to a questionnaire administered by the author. The analysis is based 
on 11 responses from Spanish-English court interpreters working in 
Australia. As the survey was conducted several years after the 
fieldwork, the respondents are not the same interpreters as those who 
were recorded. In addition, Hale points out that the respondents are 
not representative of court interpreters in general, because the 
majority of them has had university-level interpreter training, and many 
were in fact taught be Hale herself. The respondents answered 
questions about interpreting and about the legal system, and they 
provided written translations of attorneys' questions and witnesses' 
answers. In their written translations the respondents acted differently 
from the interpreters studied in that they translated discourse markers 
and tag-questions to a greater degree. However, they still omitted 
many of the features of powerless speech included in the written 
versions of witnesses' answers.

Finally, chapter 8 summarizes the findings and presents a conclusion 
that addresses the role of the court interpreter and recommends best 
practices for the profession. Most importantly, she argues against the 
belief that translating is inherently inaccurate, claiming that "accuracy 
can be achievable in the courtroom context through a pragmatic 
reconstruction of the message. Accuracy is defined as portraying the 
intention of the original message in the target language, with the same 
illocutionary force, so that the listener of the interpreted message can 
perceive the message and its author in as similar a way as a listener 
of the source language would. .... [This] requires faithfulness of 
content and manner of speech." [p. 239]. Consequently, Hale argues 
that court interpreters should provide translations that accurately 
portray the speech style of the source speaker. As the court 
interpreters in her study don't do this, she proposes that interpreter 
training needs to be improved to include training in stylistic accuracy.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The research reported in this book provides an important contribution 
to the study of court interpreting by investigating in detail the ways in 
which the interpreters' renditions may alter the pragmatic force of 
questions and answers in the courtroom. However, some aspects of 
methodology and presentation warrant criticism, as does Hale's 
central argument for "stylistic equivalence" in translation. Also, the 
book does not always appear like a coherent whole, perhaps because 
several chapters (3, 4, and 5) correspond to separate publications. 
Cross-references between chapters are rather rare and are at times 
erroneous (e.g. chapter 3 is twice referred to as chapter 2; see pages 
176 and 209). 

The book contains numerous excerpts of transcripts that provide a 
wealth of data for future comparative analyses. These are presented 
in an unusual table format that effectively juxtaposes source and 
target segments, but does not indicate overlapping speech, pause 
length, or prosodic features. As transcripts are never theory-neutral 
(cf. Bucholtz 2000, Edwards 2001), a discussion of the motivations for 
choosing this particular transcription format would have been in order, 
especially given the author's emphasis on speech style. Instead, Hale 
states that "no particular transcription convention was followed" (p.37).

The analysis is also weakened by an over-reliance on quantitative 
claims based on the calculation of frequencies. For example in her 
report on the results of a survey of eleven interpreters, she 
consistently uses percentages where stating the number of 
respondents would have been more useful (i.e. she repeatedly refers 
to "nine percent" of respondents when she is in fact talking about one 
single person). Throughout the book, an abundance of detailed tables 
makes it difficult to identify which findings are truly significant. 
Moreover, the quantitative claims are not always convincing, because 
no measurements of statistical significance are employed. For 
example, on page 55, a difference of four percentage points between 
English source and Spanish target in the frequency of statements in 
examination-in-chief is described as significant without a statistical test 
having been conducted.

The survey presented in chapter 7 seems rather limited in its 
usefulness, given that it was taken by only 11 respondents (by 
comparison, Angelelli (2001) surveyed 293 interpreters, and Kadric 
(2001) asked 111 judges about their experiences with court 
interpreting). To increase these numbers, it could have been useful to 
include interpreters for languages other than Spanish. Alternatively, a 
qualitative rather than quantitative presentation of the results would 
have been preferable. For example, it would have been interesting to 
read individual responses to the question "what does accuracy of 
interpretation mean to you as an interpreter?" (p. 214). Instead, the 
answers have been coded to permit quantitative statements, such as 
the following: "the majority of university graduates ... most of whom 
were taught by the author of this book, had the view about accuracy 
that this book proposes." Given the participation of Hale's former 
students, the survey appears at times more like an exam, especially 
given the translation exercises that were part of it. Likewise, the 
presentation of the results is reminiscent of an explanation of grading 
criteria, for example when she remarks that 18% of respondents to a 
particular question demonstrated "an inability to express a logical 
reason" (page 214).

Also, claims made by the author (and the publisher?) about the 
generalizability of the study are exaggerated. While it is claimed that 
the "results can be extended to any language combination" (see back 
cover) and to interpreting contexts "in the rest of the world" (p. xvi), 
these claims are not backed up by evidence provided in the book. On 
the contrary, Hale's discussion of the difficulty of translating English 
tag-questions into Spanish (chapter 3) suggests that certain pragmatic 
aspects of interpreting may be highly language-specific. Likewise, the 
importance of questioning types and of attorney control is arguably 
more pronounced in the Common Law system than in other legal 
settings. Moreover, such claims fail to situate the interpreting event in 
the context of the sociolinguistic relationship between the respective 
linguistic communities that are in contact. They also ignore typological 
differences between languages, such as for example the absence or 
presence of a T/V-distinction, gender-marking, or evidentials, all 
characteristics that can be expected to have an impact on the ways in 
which the interpreter renders one person's speech and addresses 
another. 

Finally, Hale's central proposal about "accuracy of speech style" in 
translation deserves to be addressed in detail, as it invites a 
discussion about the role of court interpreting and about the 
implications of linguistic research for the professional practice of 
interpreters. Hale's research provides further evidence for the claim 
that speech style is an important factor in the evaluation of witnesses, 
and from these findings she draws the conclusion that court 
interpreters should strive to replicate the speech style of the source 
speaker. "Ideally, the interpreter should perform like an actor ... In this 
way the interpreter would take on different roles with their 
accompanying linguistic characteristics: style, accent, register, 
grammatical errors and other features" (p. 130). Recent work by 
Queen (2004) on film dubbing, specifically on the translation of African 
American English into German, demonstrates the difficulties involved 
in translating stylistic and dialectal variation. More importantly, the 
evaluation of speech styles depends on stereotypes and language 
ideology, particularly the evaluation of non-native and non-standard 
varieties. Thus it is a discriminatory practice (cf. Lippi-Green 1997). 
The fact that individuals with a "powerless" speech style tend to be 
perceived as less credible or less intelligent than individuals with 
a "powerful" speech style does not mean that this is a true reflection of 
their credibility or intelligence that deserves to be entered into 
evidence. Consequently, it may help interpreters to be aware of these 
practices, but they should not actively support them by enacting 
stereotypical speech styles.

At best, this kind of stylistic accuracy requires an unrealistic degree of 
sociolinguistic knowledge from interpreters (e.g. in detecting 
hypercorrect speech in one language and replicating it in another). At 
worst, it invites interpreters to indulge in their own linguistic 
stereotyping and to openly cater to the presumed stereotypes of 
others, i.e. those of judges or jury members. In fact, some such 
stereotypes are found in the book itself. For example, Hale suggests 
that, in aiming for stylistic accuracy, interpreters should compensate 
for errors in the speech of witnesses by making intentional errors in 
their translation. However, her definition of errors (pp. 124-136) 
betrays a prescriptivist language ideology, as some of the features 
that she classifies as errors can be attributed to features of non-
standard varieties of Spanish (e.g. dequeísmo) or to language 
contact. The remaining cases are idiosyncratic examples that may be 
performance errors, perhaps resulting from hypercorrection by 
witnesses who are nervously attempting to use a formal register in 
court.

As a court interpreter and teacher of interpreters, Hale is 
understandably concerned with improving interpreting services, with 
the ultimate goal of achieving a higher standard of justice for 
witnesses who do not speak the language of the court. This goal is 
commendable, and it has been shared by other researchers on court 
interpreting and community interpreting in general, who have identified 
a number of problem sources that professional interpreters can be 
taught to avoid. However, research on dialogue interpreting has also 
shown that interpreter-mediated discourse is fundamentally different 
from monolingual discourse, because it alters the turn-taking structure 
of the interaction (cf. Davidson 2000, 2002, Roy 2000, Wadensjö 
1998). For example, consecutive interpreting leads to a fragmentation 
of discourse, e.g. interruptions in the flow of narratives. Nevertheless, 
Hale appears to believe (in line with legal opinions on court 
interpreting) that a well-trained interpreter is capable of placing a non-
English speaker in the same position that an English-speaker would 
be in. But after an initial phase of surveying and improving court 
interpreting practices, time has perhaps come for linguists working in 
the field to recognize that there are limits to what court interpreting 
can achieve. As Bourdieu (1991) has pointed out, the legal system 
and the state that it supports are inherently unjust by privileging 
speakers of a particular linguistic variety that is elevated to official 
status. As a consequence, no amount of interpreter training can 
produce true equality for individuals who do not speak this variety. 
Forensic linguists would be better served to investigate the pragmatic 
consequences of these inequalities instead of assisting the legal 
system in placing all responsibility on the interpreter.

REFERENCES

Angelelli, Claudia. 2001. Deconstructing the invisible interpreter: A 
study of the interpersonal role of the interpreter in a cross- 
linguistic/cultural communicative event, Stanford University: Ph.D. 
Dissertation.

Berk-Seligson, Susan. 1990. The Bilingual Courtroom: Court 
Interpreters in the Judicial Process. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, 
Mass: Harvard University Press.

Bucholtz, Mary. 2000. The politics of transcription. Journal of 
Pragmatics 32:1439-1465.

Conley, John M., and O'Barr, William M. 1990. Rules versus 
Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press.

D'Hondt, Sigurd, Beyens, Kristel, Machiels, Bieke, Meeuwis, Michael, 
Blommaert, Jan, and Verschueren, Jef. 2004. Interculturele 
communicatie in rechtbanken. Brussels: Politeia.

Davidson, Brad. 2000. The interpreter as institutional gatekeeper: The 
social-linguistic role of interpreters in Spanish-English medical 
discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4:379-405.

Davidson, Brad. 2002. A model of the construction of conversational 
common ground in interpreted discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 
34:1273-1300.

Edwards, Jane A. 2001. The transcription of discourse. In The 
Handbook of Discourse Analysis, eds. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah 
Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton, 321-348. Malden Ma.: Blackwell.

Hale, Sandra. 1999. Interpreters' Treatment of Discourse Markers in 
Courtroom Questions. Forensic Linguistics 6:57-82.

Hale, Sandra. 2002a. How faithfully do court interpreters render the 
style of non-English speaking witnesses' testimonies? A data-based 
study of Spanish-English bilingual proceedings. Discourse Studies 
4:25-47.

Hale, Sandra. 2002b. How are courtroom questions interpreted? An 
analysis of Spanish interpreters' practices. In Triadic exchanges. 
Studies in dialogue interpreting., ed. Ian Mason, 21-50. Manchester: 
St.Jerome.

Jacobsen, Bente. 2002. Pragmatic meaning in court interpreting: an 
empirical study of additions in consecutively interpreted question-
answer dialogues, Department of English, Aarhus School of Business: 
Ph. Dissertation.

Kadric, Mira. 2001. Dolmetschen bei Gericht: Erwartungen, 
Anforderungen, Kompetenzen. Vienna: WUV, Universitätsverlag.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an Accent: Language, 
Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.

Moeketsi, Rosemary. 1999. Discourse in a multilingual and 
multicultural courtroom: a court interpreter's guide. Hatfield, Pretoria: 
J.L. van Schaik.

Morris, Ruth. 1993. Images of the Interpreter: Studies of Language-
Switching in the Legal Process, Lancaster University: Ph.D. 
Dissertation.

O'Barr, William M., and Atkins, Bowman K. 1980. "Women's language" 
or "powerless language"? In Women and Language in Literature and 
Society, eds. Sally Mc-Connell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furman, 
93-110. New York: Praeger.

O'Barr, William M. 1982. Linguistic Evidence: Language, Power, and 
Strategy in the Courtroom. New York: Academic Press.

Queen, Robin. 2004. 'Du hast jar keene Ahnung': African American 
English dubbed into German. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8:515-537.

Roy, Cynthia. 2000. Interpreting as a discourse process. New York: 
Oxford University Press.

Wadensjö, Cecilia. 1998. Interpreting as Interaction. London/New 
York: Longman.

Wodak, Ruth. 1980. Discourse analysis and courtroom interaction. 
Discourse Processes 3:369-380. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at 
New York University. He is currently finishing his dissertation 
entitled "'Speak English or what?' Codeswitching and interpreter use 
in New York Small Claims Court."





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