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This course introduces students to the theory and practice of court interpreting. The course aims at familiarizing students with court procedures and the language used in the legal context in both English and Chinese. The course will initiate and enhance students’ understanding of specific issues of intercultural and interlingual communication such as accurate and faithful interpretation, institutional discourse, power imbalances, ethics, ideology, and perceptions of role and functions. The course is designed to develop students’ basic skills in doing court interpreting in the mode of consecutive interpreting, whispered interpreting and sight translation. Students will develop these skills by completing interpreting tasks with incremental difficulty levels through a range of practices, role plays, mock trials and group discussions.
This book explores cognitive and linguistic barriers that court interpreters face everyday and ultimately result in an interpreter’s deviation from original linguistic content. The book begins with an overview of the interpreter’s role and responsibilities in the bilingual courtroom. Then, it describes the fieldwork procedures that were used to obtain and to study the data, and the relationship between turn length and the interpreters’ additions, omissions and changes. Next, the book examines two strategies- the interpreter’s interruption of a witness and use of the semiconsecutive mode, draws analogies between the interpreters’ use of length-reducing strategies, and considers the gender issues. Finally, it concludes with the linguistic and statistical findings.
