Court Interpreting as a Shared Responsibility: Judges and Lawyers in a Corpus of Interpreted Criminal Proceedings

Abstract

This article seeks to examine and describe the role of judges and lawyers in criminal proceedings when interpreting is required for the defendant or witness. It is based on the analysis of the first corpus compiled from real criminal trials in different Criminal Courts of Barcelona. The corpus contains interpreting between Spanish and English, French or Romanian and was transcribed and annotated using EXMARaLDA, a software tool for working with oral corpora. The annotation used Cecilia Wadensjö’s distinction between “talk as text” and “talk as activity” to classify the various problems that interpreters encounter when working with criminal proceedings and the strategies or techniques that they use to solve those problems. The present article focuses on the interactional problems that arise when judges and lawyers are talking. By analysing to what extent judges and lawyers deviate from recommended standards of practice when communicating through interpreters, the author critically examines some of the factors that come into play in the characterisation of court interpreting practices in Spain.