Text drafting is an essential component of many of the contexts in which interpreters are called in to ensure communication (Määttä 2015). As Komter (2006) shows, the drafting process itself can be considered a turn in the interaction. Interpreters involved in such contexts thus perform a communicative pas de quatre, crossing not only the language divide, but also the modal divide (oral vs. written). In this paper, we analyse how an interpreter in a Belgian police interview handles this complex task. It appears that she procedurally and declaratively recognises a written turn in the interaction and uses its authoritative voice to silence the witness by sight-translating the turn as it is being typed on the screen. In line with previous research on interpreters’ handling of dialogues (Hale 1997), the interpreter also shapes turns, including the written turn, to the needs of the addressees: upgrading the register properties of the interviewee’s talk and downgrading those of the written turn.
1991 “Story Generations: From Dialogical Interviews to Written Reports in Police Interrogations.” Text 11 (3): 419–440.
Komter, Martha
2006 “From Talk to Text: The Interactional Construction of a Police Record.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 39 (3): 201–228.
Määttä, Simo K.
2015 “Interpreting the Discourse of Reporting: The Case of Screening Interviews with Asylum Seekers and Police Interviews in Finland.” The International Journal for Translation and Interpreting 7 (3): 21–34.
2014Interpreter-Mediated Police Interviews. A Discourse-Pragmatic Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nilsen, Anne Birgitta, and May-Britt Monsrud
2015 “Reading Skills for Sight Translation in Public Services.” Translation and Interpreting. The International Journal for Translation and Interpreting Research 7 (3): 10–20
Pesquié, Brigitte
2002 “The Belgian System.” In European Criminal Procedures, edited by Mireille Delmas-Marty and John R. Spencer, 81–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2011 “Het proces-verbaal van een verdachtenverhoor: een bron van informatie? Diverse formats van geschreven communicatie tussen politie en parket.” Cahiers Politiestudies 4 (21): 123–144.
Song, Zhongwei
2010 “Skill Transfer from Sight Translation to Simultaneous Interpreting: A Case Study of an Effective Teaching Technique.” International Journal of Interpreter Education 21: 120–134.
van Charldorp, Tessa
2011 “The Coordination of Talk and Typing in Police Interrogations.” Crossroads of Language, Interaction and Culture 8 (1): 61–92.
van Charldorp, Tessa
2014 “ ‘What Happened?’ From Talk to Text in Police Interrogations.” Language and Communication 361: 7–24.
Wadensjö, Cecilia
1998Interpreting as Interaction. London: Longman.
Cited by
Cited by 6 other publications
Defrancq, Bart & Sofie Verliefde
2023. A Dutch discourse marker in interpreter-mediated police interviewing with drafting: A corpus-based approach to dialogue interpreting. Research in Corpus Linguistics 11:2 ► pp. 50 ff.
Havnen, Randi
2022. Fight for focus: attention and agency in sight-translated interaction. Perspectives 30:1 ► pp. 39 ff.
Määttä, Simo & Tuija Kinnunen
2024. The interplay between linguistic and non-verbal communication in an interpreter-mediated main hearing of a victim’s testimony. Multilingua 0:0
Määttä, Simo K, Eeva Puumala & Riitta Ylikomi
2021. Linguistic, psychological and epistemic vulnerability in asylum procedures: An interdisciplinary approach. Discourse Studies 23:1 ► pp. 46 ff.
Vandenbroucke, Mieke & Bart Defrancq
2021. Professionally unaligned interpreting in Belgian marriage fraud investigations and its consequences. The Translator 27:1 ► pp. 12 ff.
Verliefde, Sofie & Bart Defrancq
2023. Interpreter-mediated access to the written record in police interviews. Perspectives 31:3 ► pp. 519 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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