Difficulties have long been observed in communicating legal rights to some Aboriginal people in Australia. In the Northern
Territory, audio translations of the right to silence in Aboriginal languages can be used in police interviews. This study examines two sets
of audio translations in two Aboriginal languages. Also included in each case are front-translations – intermediate English texts used to
facilitate translation – as well as the legal texts that likely informed the translations. The audio translations include far more explicit
information than either legal texts of the right, or oral explanations from police (evidenced in transcripts from police interviews).
Analyses of context and implicature highlight that the legal text of the right is indeterminate: It is unclear what the text is intended to
imply and communicate. Aboriginal translators are better placed than legal communicators to develop informative texts, because of their
audience knowledge and intercultural skill. However, translators can only work with meaning provided or approved by their clients. Legal
authorities, not translators, should be responsible for deciding the information to be communicated about rights, to meet the objectives of
policies about rights. When the challenging and imperfect nature of intercultural legal translation is recognised, translators can use their
insight into legal meaning to greatly improve communication with target audiences.
In the Northern Territory of Australia (NT), it has long been recognised that the right to silence ‘caution’ is difficult to communicate, particularly with some Aboriginal suspects. This article reviews paraphrases used by NT police to explain the right, asking how they could be understood by Aboriginal people and offering initial conclusions about the meaning of paraphrases involving choice, rights and force. Meanwhile, the consequences of staying silent are consistently omitted from police paraphrases, highlighting that suspects must recover important meaning from context. This article argues that a significant source of contextual knowledge about the caution is discourses about rights, which are a complex and culture-specific way of thinking and talking. There is every risk that suspects without required contextual knowledge fail to obtain anything useful from many versions of the caution, a situation which likely entrenches disadvantage in the justice system. To communicate the caution across a large cultural gap requires specifying more meaning, but only policy-makers can decide what information the caution is supposed to communicate and what effect it is supposed to have. Evaluation of potential cautions should ask whether they are comprehensible, informative and credible and ultimately what effect they have for relevant audiences.
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