This case study is based on a transcript of an authentic criminal proceeding in a Belgian Assize Court, where Dutch is the official language and the Frenchspeaking defendant receives simultaneous whispered interpretation of the prosecutor's closing speech. Examining six excerpts from the speech, which is addressed to the judges and the lay jury, the analysis compares the Dutch original with the French interpretation. The specific focus of the study is the Aristotelian concept of ethos, i.e. the image the speaker seeks to convey of himself by foregrounding his professional expertise, integrity and goodwill towards the audience. Since the rhetorical devices he uses for this purpose are often absent from the interpretation in the extracts analysed, the strategic persuasiveness of his speech is weakened. This means that the defendant is likely to gain an incomplete, misleading perception of his own case. In the light of the examples presented here, the authors argue that the theory of classical rhetoric affords a useful framework for exploring interpreter-mediated legal monologues in a dialogical perspective.
One of the more striking features of the twelfth century old French verse romance Partonopeu de Blois is the substantial change the heroine undergoes in the course of the romance proper. In the beginning as powerful and imperative as the fairy mistresses of the lai, Melior loses her magical powers at an early stage and when she marries the hero in the end she has become-at least apparently-a passive and submissive victim. Modern scholars have appreciated this evolution in many different ways. The most intriguing question seems to be how the contemporary audience may have reacted to this loss of power of the heroine. Did it welcome Melior's degradation as a return to the traditional social order or not? In an attempt to answer this question, this article explores two thirteenth century rewritings of the romance proper: the old French continuation as it is attested by manuscript T and the Middle Dutch adaptation of Partonopeu. Both versions add a considerable amount of text to the romance proper in which Melior plays an important part.
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