Triadic Exchanges

Studies in Dialogue Interpreting

Ian Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138151413
• eBook ISBN: 9781317640806
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Dialogue interpreting is a generic term covering a diverse range of fields of interpreting which have in common the basic feature of face-to-face interaction between three parties: the interpreter and (at least) two other speakers. The interaction consists of spontaneous dialogue, involving relatively short turns at talk, in two languages. It is usually goal-directed in the sense that there is some outcome to be negotiated.

The studies in this volume cover several different fields: courtroom interpreting, doctor-patient interviews, immigration interviews, etc., and involve a range of different languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, More and Austrian Sign Language. They have in common that they view the interpreter as just one of the parties to this three-way exchange, in which each participant's moves can affect each other participant and thus the outcome of the event.

In Part I, new research directions are explored in studies which piece together evidence of the ways dialogue interpreters actually behave and the effects of their behaviour. This is followed by two studies which discuss traditional interpreter roles - the 'King's Linguist' in Burkina Faso and the Oranda Tsûji, official interpreters employed in isolationist eighteenth-century Japan to ensure contact with the outside world. Finally, issues involved in training are the subject of two chapters relating to Austria and the UK. The variety of aspects and approaches represented in the volume - linguistic, cultural, pragmatic, historical - offer a rich and fascinating overview of the field of dialogue interpreting studies as it now stands.

Part I
Research Directions

Interpreting Expert Witness Testimony

Challenges and Strategies

CYNTHIA MIGUÉLEZ

One of the most challenging assignments a court interpreter faces is interpreting for expert witnesses. Advances in science and technology over the last few decades and the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard have made the use of expert witnesses from a wide variety of fields a common practice in American courtrooms. It has generally been assumed that the testimony of an expert witness is challenging substantively but not formally. Preparation has focused on specialized vocabulary and phraseology. However, after reading several hundred pages of transcribed courtroom testimony we saw that expert witness testimony from a number of different fields was not as lexically specialized as one would believe, but that it did contain many more grammatical, structural and syntactic errors than would be expected. In this study we have classified the most frequently occurring errors found in this transcribed testimony, and have noted the strategies used by both novice and experienced interpreters to deal with these challenges.

1. Introduction

The aim of this article is to identify the characteristics of expert witness testimony in order to establish strategies and techniques that will enhance the interpreter’s ability to successfully manage this type of interpreting assignment. The use of expert witnesses is becoming more and more common in court proceedings in the United States. The demands of the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard are leading both defense attorneys and prosecutors to offer ‘scientific’ evidence as proof in a growing number of cases. Crimes and crime scenes are becoming more complicated, and this, coupled with the era of specialization in which we live and the availability of increasingly sophisticated technology for the analysis of virtually everything from gunshot residue to document age and authenticity, has made the expert witness a key player in many legal cases.

A quick search on the internet or a look at a legal resources publication¹ produces a mind-boggling array of experts and fields of expertise available to litigators. In addition to the forensic scientists, crime scene specialists and ballistics experts that are among those most commonly called upon to give testimony in U.S. courts, these listings show that experts on topics such as doll collectibles, golf course design and even sports figures have testified. The range of possible expert testimony is understandably intimidating to court interpreters, who must consistently meet the same high performance standards regardless of the type of testimony being given. When faced with a challenging interpreting assignment that includes expert testimony – and assuming that notice is given prior to the proceeding regarding the nature of the testimony – an interpreter usually attempts to become familiar with the terminology related to the specific field in question. Specialized dictionaries and glossaries are sought out and studied, equivalent texts are culled for words and phrases, consultations with fellow interpreters are made. The interpreter then enters the courtroom with enhanced confidence and some sense of preparedness. However, a study of the testimony given by experts from a number of fields shows that the language used by expert witnesses and by attorneys when addressing them, is often grammatically faulty, convoluted, imprecise, repetitive and lacking in coherence. Therefore, preparing vocabulary, while useful, will not guarantee success, given that the challenges in comprehending and interpreting expert testimony are not always strictly – or even principally – lexical in nature.

2. Legal language

In the 1970s and 80s, several studies were published that attempted to define the specific characteristics of legal language. A number of scholars² did seminal work on American legal language in its written form. Crystal and Davy (1969) had done similar work on British legal language and had come up with several of the same conclusions. Legal language was found to be replete with passives, nominalizations, multiple negatives, misplaced or intrusive phrases, unusual and complex embeddings and unusual prepositional phrases and clauses. Other characteristics included lengthy sentences, limited verbal groups, and frequent post-modification in nominal groups. On the discourse level, legal language was found to be lacking in cohesion due to unusual use of anaphora, confusing repetition, and a mix of extreme precision and intentional ambiguity.

At approximately the same time these studies were being done, similar studies were being done on spoken legal language. O´Barr and his colleagues Conley and Lind³ developed schemata for the registers of spoken language in legal settings based on their field work in North Carolina courtrooms, and González (1976 and 1977) undertook a study in Arizona to determine the complexity of the speech of judges, attorneys, experts and witnesses in order to devise indices that could be used as a set of constructs for a test of functional English proficiency. A decade later, Berk-Seligson (1987, 1988, 1990) studied speech styles and how they affect the outcome of legal proceedings. These studies show that testimony given in courtrooms and the language used in other legal settings (police stations, detention centers, county jails, attorneys’ offices) for other legal purposes (arrest, booking, initial attorney-client interview, depositions) spans the range of registers from the highly frozen and formulaic language often used by judges and attorneys to the highly colloquial language used by defendants and witnesses to describe individuals and recount events. Slang, regionalisms, jargon, dialectal variations and even idiolectal idiosyncracies appear frequently in spoken legal language. Moreover, participants in court proceedings or legal interactions often make use of and mix several registers or speech styles in their discourse. Other paralinguistic elements of speech such as hedges, hesitations, false starts, self-corrections, inconsistencies and mis-speaks are all common in the spoken language used in court.

3. Expert witnesses

In the United States, expert witnesses can be called either by the prosecution or by the defence to clarify a controversial point in a criminal or civil case. Their credentials must be established at the outset of their testimony, and the Court must formally recognize them as professionally qualified to give the specialized information that is being sought. The general perception of expert witnesses is that they are well-educated, well-versed in their fields and well-spoken. They are presumed to be experienced at and comfortable with discussing their area of specialization with other professionals as well as with the uninitiated. As they are not directly affected by the outcome of a trial, their anxiety level as regards testifying in a court of law is thought to be lower than that of defendants or other participants such as eyewitnesses or third parties. As a result, it is widely assumed that expert witnesses will produce coherent, understandable speech that may be substantively, but certainly not formally, challenging. However, an analysis of several examples of expert testimony shows that this assumption is false and that the speech produced by expert witnesses is often as challenging in form as it is in substance. Additionally, the range of registers, speech styles and paralinguistic elements that were found to exist in general courtroom language are also typical of expert witness testimony. All of these elements contribute to the general difficulty that interpreting for expert witnesses entails.

4. The study

During my time as a visiting research scholar at the National Center for Interpretation Testing, Research and Policy (University of Arizona, USA), I was involved in a project to prepare training materials for aspiring court interpreters. Several thousand pages of authentic transcribed courtroom testimony were combed for materials for this project⁴. Early on in that process, the following text was encountered:

Q: Now referring to the other areas that you mentioned, density, what is density?

A: This is the weight of the mass of an object, the weight in air as against water. It was the old Greek principle when Archimedes got into the bathtub and there was so much water came out that was specific gravity so much water displaced. The density of an object is measured in this relation between the relation of its weight and mass in air as against its weight and mass in liquid. In the laboratory the way we run density we actually take a glass particle and we bounce it in a liquid mixture and in this case the mixture is ‘Bromifoam alcohol’. Bromifoam being a heavy liquid on which you can float the rocks and alcohol being very light and you put in a glass particle and it neither rises nor falls in that liquid. You can either do that by two ways, by heating the liquid and making it lighter and the object will fall. If you cool it and make the liquid denser the particle will rise. Here is a point where we actually balance it in liquid, neither rises nor falls, a little particle so small you have to use a magnifying glass. At that time when we finally let it down, the equilibrium, we have a definite balance and we take the count of liquid which gives us our density reading. So, we read the density of the liquid, which is very sensitive, much more sensitive method, much more sensitive than the old method they have of giving the specific gravity.

Upon reading this fragment, we were above all struck by the fact that there was virtually no specialized jargon here and yet the answer was quite incomprehensible. This response to a seemingly straightforward and simple question posed to a recognized expert was so convoluted that it led us to question whether this type of language use by experts was a fluke or a regular occurrence. We therefore decided to pull out all of the examples of expert testimony we came across as we read through the court transcripts. The result was some 300 pages of text, which produced a corpus for study of approximately 75,000 words. This number is based on the entire attorney-witness exchange, in other words, attorneys’ questions and experts’ responses, as limiting the corpus to true expert testimony would decontextualize those responses. Excerpts were taken from both federal and state court cases and fields of expert testimony included accounting, fingerprinting, serology and blood typing, hair and fibre analysis, pathology, biological sciences, geology, botany, minerology, chemical sciences, mechanical engineering, firearms and ballistics, crime scene management including collection of evidence, chain of custody and crime scene illustration, and social work, substance abuse and family therapy.⁵

An initial reading of the transcripts produced a preliminary categorization of items of linguistic interest, ranging from simple grammatical errors to complex stylistic problems. Subsequent readings were carried out to cull the texts for examples that would correspond to the categories that had been established and to allow for modification of the original schemata. While the exact number of occurrences was not tabulated, categories were only created when several examples could be found in the testimony of different experts so that a category did not reflect any one individual’s idiolect. Given that the study was carried out on written transcripts of oral testimony, special efforts were made to exclude items which might be attributable to court reporter transcription error. The idiosyncratic use of punctuation and the general ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Transcription Conventions
• Part I – Research Directions
• Part II – Traditions
• Part III – Issues in Training
• Notes on Contributors
• Index