This chapter provides a discussion of communication problems that arise in a multilingual legal context. We analyse witness interview reports and interviews from both the UK and the US in order to assess the difficulties that non-English speakers can face in an English-speaking justice system. The problems encountered indicate the need for the provision of adequate language support and improved professional training that will focus on particularly problematic lexical and grammatical contrasts for translation. We argue that people’s language rights can be endangered as a result of the difficulties we discoverd, even for speakers of a major language (such as Spanish). We conclude that for the purpose of equality in access to justice these problems need to be addressed by both scientific and professional communities involved.
Submitted. Separating investigation from interpretation: The issue of mixing the interviewer and interpreter role in police interviews.
Abad Vergara, S
2014A Study of Interpreter Training in the UK on a Legal Context: Issues of Language Contrasts, Policies and Practices. MA dissertation, University of East Anglia.
Berk-Seligson, S
1990The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in Judicial Process. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Berk-Seligson, S
2009Coerced Confessions – The Discourse of Bilingual Police Interrogations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Council of Europe Convention on Action against trafficking in Human Beings
2014Let’s talk: Special report. Scientific American Mind, September/October: 64–69.
Drugan, J
2013Quality in Professional Translation. London: Bloomsbury.
Fausey, C.M. & Boroditsky, L
2010Subtle linguistic cues influence perceived blame and financial liability. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 17(5): 644–650.
Fausey, C.M. & Boroditsky, L
2011Who dunnit? Cross-linguistic differences in eye-witness memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 18(1): 150–157.
Filipović, L
2007Language as a witness: Insights from cognitive linguistics. Speech, Language and the Law 14(2): 245–267.
Filipović, L
2013aThe role of language in legal contexts: A forensic cross-linguistic viewpoint. In Freeman & Smith (eds), 328–343. Oxford: OUP.
Filipović, L
2013bConstructing causation in language and memory: Implications for access to justice in multilingual interactions. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 20(1): 1–19.
Filipović, L. & Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I
2015Motion. In Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics [Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 39], E. Dabrowska & D. Divjak (eds), 527–545. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Freeman, M. & Smith, F
(eds.) Law and Language: Current Legal Issues 15 Oxford OUP
Gibbons, J
2003Forensic Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gibbons, J
2011Towards a framework for communication evidence. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 18(2): 233–260.
2012The Criminalisation of Migrant Women. Cambridge: Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Hales, L
2014The Language Barrier to Rehabilitation. Cambridge: The Bell Foundation.
House of Commons Justice Committee
2013Interpreter and translation services and the Applied Language Solutions Contract.
Sixth Report of Session 2012–2013
. HC 245. London: House of Commons Stationary Office.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. & Filipović, L
2013Lexicalization patterns and translation. In Cognitive Linguistics and Translation, A. Rojo & I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano (eds), 253–284. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Mendoza-Denton, R
2010Are we born racist? Inside the science of stigma, prejudice and intergroup relations. [URL]
Ministry of Justice
. April2016Offender Management Statistics Bulletin, England and Wales. Quarterly October to December 2015. Annual January to December 2015. [URL]
Mulcahy, L
2011Legal Architecture. Justice, Due Process and the Place of Law. Abingdon: Routledge.
Quernton (Section 3) 2012A Gender Analysis of UK Asylum Law, Policy and Practice. London: Asylum Aid Publications.
Roberts, F., Margutti, P. & Takano, S
2011Judgments concerning valence of inter-turn silence across speakers of American English, Italian and Japanese. Discourse Processes 48(5): 331–354.
Slobin, D.I
1996Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning, M. Shibatani & S.A. Thompson (eds), 195– 317. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Slobin, D.I
1997Mind, code, and text. In Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón, J. Bybee, J. Haiman & S.A. Thompson (eds), 437–467. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2004The many ways to search for a frog. In Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual PerspectivesS. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), 219–257. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
2003The Difference in Resulting Judgments when Descriptions Use High-manner Versus Neutral-manner Verbs. Senior dissertation, University of California at Berkeley.
2022. The tale of two countries. Interpreting. International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting 24:2 ► pp. 254 ff.
Huynh, Jennifer
2021. La Charla: documenting the experience of unaccompanied minors in immigration court. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47:3 ► pp. 616 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.