This concluding chapter presents a summary of the findings of this study and discusses their pedagogical implications and contributions to existing literature on court interpreting, forensic linguistics and translation studies. This chapter also makes recommendations for best practice in the provision of court interpreting and for further research.
Article outline
- 1.Summary of findings
- 1.1English trials in a Chinese dominant society and modes of interpreting in court
- 1.2Limitations of chuchotage in the Hong Kong courtroom
- 1.3Complexity of audienceship
- 1.4Power of bilingual participants and of the court interpreter
- 1.5Impact of interpreter intervention on monolingual court actors
- 1.6Judges’ intervention in witness examination and its impact on accuracy of court interpreting
- 1.7Disadvantage of non-native English-speaking witnesses testifying in English and the impact on other participants in court
- 1.8The issue of jury comprehension in the Hong Kong courts
- 1.9Different interpreting styles for different speakers
- 2.Contributions of the present study
- 2.1Contribution to existing literature on court interpreting
- 2.2Contribution to translation and interpreting and sociolinguistic studies
- 2.3Contributions to forensic linguistics and social benefits of the study
- 3.Pedagogical implications
- 3.1Coping with legal language and strategic use of language in court
- 3.2Coping with challenges
- 3.3Interpreting for the record
- 3.4Dealing with lexico-grammatical differences
- 3.5Consistency in interpreting styles
- 4.Recommendations for best practice in the courtroom
- 4.1Team interpreting and the use of simultaneous interpreting equipment
- 4.2Training for court personnel
- 4.2.1Recognise the interpreter as a team member
- 4.2.2Pause at regular intervals for consecutive interpretation
- 4.2.3Avoid interruptions, rapid and overlapping speech
- 4.2.4Use plain English where possible
- 5.Institutional and administrative recommendations
- 5.1The need to raise the entry requirements
- 5.2The need to improve remuneration and career prospects
- 5.3The need to make pre-service training mandatory
- 5.4The need to restructure the Court Interpreter grade in Hong Kong
- 5.5The need to review the deployment mechanism
- 6.Recommendations for further research
- 6.1Participation status of jurors in an interpreter-mediated trial in the Hong Kong courtroom
- 6.2Contrastive study of the discourse of the witnesses’ testimony in a monolingual Cantonese trial with that in a bilingual English trial
- 7.Concluding remarks
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Notes