Interpretation, Translation and the Mess in Our Courts
Bill Poser's post on the problems of court interpretation is a
stark reminder of how much linguists need to do in the matter of
justice for speakers of languages other than that of the courts (see
here and
here). A
few linguists have addressed the issues of court interpretation and how
critical it can be. Susan Berk-Seligson's
The Bilingual Courtroom (Chicago,
1990) and Sandra Hale's The
Discourse
of Court Interpreting (John Benjamins 2004) leap to mind but
there are others as well. One recent book related to court
interpretation of deaf people is
Language
and the Law in Deaf Communities, edited by Ceil Lucas (Gallaudet
University Press, 2002). It shows how the problems Poser mentions for
non-English speakers are even greater when the deaf take the
witness stand.
A few years ago I encountered this problem in a case in which English
transcripts of Spanish speakers in undercover tape recordings were used
as evidence. The prosecution provided only an English translation of
the tapes. Even with my limited knowledge of Spanish I could tell that
they were dead wrong in several crucial places. I pointed this out to
the defense attorney who then commissioned a translation of his own.
Not surprisingly, it showed that the government's translation was badly
in error. Naively perhaps, the judge then ruled that the two opposing
translators should get together and try to agree on a single, accurate
translation. This effort failed miserably, of course, and the judge
finally ruled that both translations could be used at trial. His
decision was hardly Solomonic but it was better than many of the usual
judicial rulings about the use of foreign languages at trial.
But this type of solution is usually not available in the case of
trial testimony, when on-the-spot interpretation is required. Last I
heard in such cases there is commonly no transcription of the original
foreign language used by the witness, thereby leaving no record that
can be checked for accuracy of the interpretation. So it has to be
accurate on the first try. The system simply skips this important phase
and goes directly to the interpreter's version of events which, as Bill
points out, becomes the official court record. This can be an
unmitigated disaster in terms of justice.
I recently had the opportunity to hear government translation officials
describe how the thousands of backlogged intercepted communications in
US intelligence offices are made available for security analysis.
Without embarrassment they told me that the translators select tapes in
order to discover what might be important for national security
purposes and then provide English translations of those passages that
they consider important. At least two crucial steps are missed entirely
here. First, translators are not intelligence analysts and cannot
possibly know what is "important for national security purposes" and
what is not. Second, this process offers no way to determine whether
the translations of those passages are accurate because they don't make
a transcription of the original language that can be checked or
verified for translation accuracy. No time for this, they explain, and
leave it at that.
Needless to say, linguists still have a lot of work to do in educating
the fields of law and government about language, interpreting and
translation.
Roger Shuy
Posted by Roger Shuy at March 13, 2006 12:05 PM