This case study examines how a court's perception of the defendant's socio-legal identity may be affected by interpreting. Since this perception relies largely on language, interpreters are expected to minimise their impact on the dynamics of direct communication between primary participants. The analysis focuses on an interpreter-mediated defendant's examination, recorded in an attempted murder case tried before the Belgian Assize Court, identifying possible departures from the principles of orality and authenticity. The recordings include exchanges, not necessarily audible to the court, between the defendant and the interpreter. Our analysis shows that: (a) the participation framework (directness) of the defendant's input is altered, while the relative inaudibility of the interaction between defendant and interpreter deprives the jury of access to authentic features of the defendant's delivery; (b) the interpreter's intervention may shift the defendant's oral exposition into a different style, and hence condition the way the defendant is eventually perceived by the jury.

No abstract

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.

No abstract