Judged in a foreign language: a chinese-spanish court interpreting case study

Abstract

Recent legislation in Spain has transposed Directive 2010/64/EU, which recognises interpretation as an essential tool for safeguarding fairness in criminal proceedings, in particular, for preventing any state of defencelessness. Previous research, however, has suggested important deficiencies in court interpreting in this country. This article analyses court interpreting from Chinese to Spanish, based on a case study of a recording of a criminal trial that took place in Barcelona in February 2015. The trial was transcribed verbatim and annotated in accordance with Cecilia Wadensjö’s distinction between “talk as text” and “talk as activity.” The analysis focuses on examples of errors of interpretation (non-translated speech acts, omissions, and additions), speech style and non-renditions. The results are compared with those of a corpus of 55 court proceedings in which the interpretation was from Spanish to English and from French to Romanian. The article concludes with a discussion of the factors—such as lack of specialised training, lack of deontological codes or general unawareness of the interpreter’s role—that may have affected the quality of the interpretation in the trial analysed. The low proportion of interpretation during that court session (only 17.6% of the total duration) is perhaps the most striking result of the case study.