29.3316, Review: Creole, Haitian; English; Polish; Russian; Spanish; Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics; Translation: Angermeyer (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3316. Wed Aug 29 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3316, Review: Creole, Haitian; English; Polish; Russian; Spanish; Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics; Translation: Angermeyer (2015)

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Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 15:08:46
From: Jonathan Downie [jonathan.downie at gmail.com]
Subject: Speak English or What?

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36359837


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-4665.html

AUTHOR: Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer
TITLE: Speak English or What?
SUBTITLE: Codeswitching and Interpreter Use in New York City Courts
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Studies in Language and Law
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Jonathan Downie, Heriot Watt University

SUMMARY 

“Speak English Or What?” provides an in-depth and challenging insight into the
performance and outcomes of interpreting in small claims courts in New York
City, USA. Covering the context in which the interpreting takes place in terms
of institutional and professional norms, the diversity of the surrounding
population and interpreter hiring practices and differences in discourse
management styles of the arbitrators hearing the cases, it provides a wide and
yet nuanced account.

The first chapter covers the meaning assigned to the choice of language used
by those whose first language is not English when they choose to represent
themselves in hearings. This chapter serves as a basic introduction to the
methods used in the study, including transcripts and ethnographic interviews,
and introduces one of the key themes of the book: the idea that language
choice in court is meaningful to the court and to speakers of languages other
than English, yet its meaning is obscured by arcane and counter-productive
monolingual legal norms.

The second chapter provides a detailed overview of the research site in New
York City, including the linguistic and cultural makeup of the surrounding
areas and a justification of why small claims courts are a unique research
site and yet one which represents some of the key issues in both court
interpreting research and the questions of universal access to justice that
are common in legal research. The chapter also provides helpful insights into
the background of the interpreters who work at the court, differentiating
between those who have received professional training and those who have
arrived at that career through different routes. This difference will prove to
be one of the key variables in the book, with those who had not received
training often taking more nuanced and contextually helpful decisions than
those who had. Lastly, the chapter provides a detailed account of the nature
of cases heard by the small claims court and why that route is chosen by some
litigants instead of going through more costly litigation.

In a departure from the majority of research in Interpreting Studies, the
third chapter moves away from examining the role of interpreters to focus on
the role and discourse management styles of the arbitrators in the small
claims court. Here, the author finds a binary distinction between arbitrators
who treat the small claims court as a miniature trial, tending towards
procedural inflexibility, and arbitrators who treat the process as an open
conversation, tending towards taking time over evidence gathering and creating
space for all sides to have their say to their satisfaction. Embedded within
this is a discussion of the narrative strategies that are deemed most
acceptable to arbitrators, with their legal background, meaning that they
prefer litigants to state their claims in terms of legal provisions rather
than in terms of their relationships with the other people involved in the
hearing.

The fourth chapter is the most fundamental and most challenging for
Interpreting Studies. In it, Angermeyer offers a critical account of the roles
of interpreters in the setting he examined and offers a critical analysis of
the outcomes of the roles they adopt. As his study included data from 66
interpreters, covering 27 different languages (p. 70), it forms a robust and
wide-ranging account. While this chapter does revisit some extant literature
in court interpreting and dialogue interpreting more broadly in order to
situate the patterns he found in his study, it advances this literature by
illustrating time and again the shortcomings of the traditional court
interpreter role as a neutral conduit. These range from the most specific,
where a choice to simply relay what a speaker said with no commentary leads to
confusion as to who is speaking to whom (e.g. p. 86-87), to the more general,
such as claim that following codes of conduct that ban interpreters from
providing explanations or summaries puts participants with limited English
skills at a disadvantage (pp. 98-100).

Chapter 5 discusses the difficulties and possibilities faced by those who
testify to the court in a language other than English. The foundational tenet
of this chapter is that interpreted testimony is not and cannot be the same as
testimony given in English. The very presence of the interpreter, their
choices and the structural limits of consecutive interpreting all lead to the
testimony becoming fragmented and open up the possibility for
misunderstandings. While the author suggests some advantages of simultaneous
interpreting, he argues that there is a need to re-evaluate whether it is
useful for courts to treat interpreting as if it were an all-or-nothing
proposition. It may be that mixing interpreting, code switching and L2 English
could provide the fairest means of providing testimony.

This leads to Chapter 6, which deals specifically with code switching in the
courtroom. While this chapter begins with a theoretical account of the
phenomenon, it quickly moves to examples from the author’s field data and the
challenges they pose for the court and for interpreters. Despite the
challenges posed by code switching, the recurrent theme of the chapter is that
code switching is often used deliberately for specific and important reasons, 
such as contesting translations, improving cohesion or addressing perceived
semantic differences between assumed equivalents in different languages. This
means that efforts to impose a language ideology that tries to eliminate code
switching are not only doomed to failure but disadvantage those who may
petition the court in a language other than English.

This sets the scene for the final chapter, which discusses language ideology
and its legal outcomes in detail. Here, the shocking yet well-evidenced point
is that court interpreting as it is commonly provided does not, and indeed
cannot, put the speaker of a language other than English on an equal footing
to English-speakers. The chapter goes on to argue that this disadvantage stems
from the powerful language ideologies in the legal system of US small claims
courts. When arbitrators expect a rigid adherence to court norms that may be
foreign to speakers of languages other than English, enforce an all-or-nothing
approach to the use of interpreters and do not take into account the inherent
differences between an interpreted and non-interpreted testimony, they add to
the already considerable power imbalance of the court.

EVALUATION

There can be no doubt that Angermeyer’s book represents a well-evidenced and
powerful challenge to current practice and expectations of court interpreting.
While experienced interpreting researchers may expect the sustained criticism
of the traditional conduit model of legal interpreting, his argument that
interpreting itself can disadvantage speakers of languages other than English
will come as a shock to researchers and practitioners alike. Further research
will be needed to empirically verify whether the difficulties found in his
data lead to marked differences in legal outcomes, especially given that his
initial findings were unclear on the matter (pp. 200-202).

Despite the power of the argument of the book, its structure could be clearer,
as it does sometimes seem that the author begins with one point and analyses
an example in so much detail that the force and clarity of his argument is
lost. The length of the chapters can at times exacerbate this problem; and end
of chapter summaries, especially in complex chapters such as chapters 2, 3 and
5 would have helped greatly. Dividing the book into more but smaller chapters
would also have helped readability. Both modifications would have also helped
to clarify the ways in which the arguments of one chapter build on the
findings of each previous one.

It should be noted, however, that the complexity of this book is likely
related to the complexity of its subject matter. The author should be credited
with providing a detailed description of the socio-economic and
socio-linguistic context of the small claims courts, as well as the legal and
organisational foundations of the work of the courts. IHe has set the standard
for further research in legal interpreting by demonstrating the value of
attempting to tie data generated in specific legal hearings with wider
institutional practice, socio-linguistic norms and language use.

By moving beyond the  common discussions on interpreter’s lexical choices
(e.g. Pym, 1999) and examinations of specific instances legal interpreting
based on pragmatics (Berk-Seligson, 2002; Nakane, 2009), Angermeyer shows that
our understanding of familiar topics such as turn-taking, repairs, lexical
choice and footing is incomplete until it is contextualised, not just within
the specifics of a given case, but also within the norms and requirements of
the institutional setting in which they occur. In this regard, this book
serves as a useful contribution towards linking sociological investigations of
the environments in which interpreting takes place and detailed examinations
of how interpreters act in these environments. This in turn would go a long
way to resolving the long-standing “contextualist” vs. “cognitivist” debate in
Interpreting Studies (as discussed in Pym, 2008).

This book will therefore be most suitable for researchers in court
interpreting and those interested in linking interpreter behaviour with the
context in which they work. For them, the difficulty of clambering through
some of the rather dense and detailed prose in some places will be rewarded
with the challenging insights and theoretical contribution. Practising court
interpreters and active lawyers would also benefit from this book, but the
lack of chapter summaries may put them off. 

In short, this is a powerful addition to research in Interpreting Studies,
that deserves to be read by researchers in all areas of the field for its
challenging argumentation and detailed data analysis. While it could have
benefitted from slightly clearer structuring and chapter summaries, this does
not detract to the overall value of the book.

REFERENCES

Berk-Seligson, S. (2002) ‘The Miranda warnings and linguistic coercion: The
role of footing in the interrogation of a limited-English-speaking murder
suspect’, in Language in the legal process. Springer, pp. 127–143.

Nakane, I. (2009) ‘The myth of an ’invisible mediator’: An Australian case
study of English-Japanese police interpreting’, PORTAL journal of
multidisciplinary international studies, 6(1).

Pym, A. (1999) ‘“Nicole Slapped Michelle”’, The Translator, 5(2), pp. 265–283.
doi: 10.1080/13556509.1999.10799044.

Pym, A. (2008) ‘On omission in simultaneous interpreting. Risk analysis of a
hidden effort.’, in Hansen, G., Chesterman, A., and Gerzymisch-Arbogast, H.
(eds) Efforts and Models in Interpreting and Translation Research: a tribute
to Daniel Gile. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 83–105.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jonathan Downie is a consultant interpreter and independent interpreting
researcher, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His PhD examined expectations of
church interpreters and his publications since have covered using social media
to encourage engagement with research, interpreting research methods and the
question of interpreter visibility. His first book, ''Being a Successful
Interpreter: Adding Value and Delivering Excellence'' was published by
Routledge in 2016 and won the ProZ.com Community Choice Award for Best
Interpreting book the same year.





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