Police interviews are high-stakes activities that bear legal consequences when the cases move to court proceedings. A wide range of literature exists on police interviewing strategies aiming to obtain complete information from the interviewee; however, this literature focuses primarily on monolingual settings only. This paper reports on an empirical study examining the word choices made by interpreters of 11 selected languages in three scripted police interview excerpts. The study found that considered verbal strategies deliberately employed by police in investigative interviewing may be interfered with by the interpreter in a bilingual setting. The authors discuss the implications of such linguistic intervention for police interview outcomes and propose improvements for the training of interpreters and police.
IntroductionThrough an empirical study, the authors seek to demonstrate how inadvertent word choices by interpreters, using strategies available to them under the constant pressure to perform in real-time, may impact on questioning techniques formulated strategically by the police. Interpreting outcomes may have far-reaching implications beyond the police interviewing room, once the case being investigated moves into criminal proceedings in the legal system.The authors commence the paper with an overview of the importance of police interviewing and the societal context in which interpreted police interviews take place. The role of the interpreter in a bilingual setting, their cognitive processes during performance and the cross-lingual transferring strategies they employ, is then explained. The empirical study is introduced in the following section. In this study, a number of interpreters were required to interpret specially selected excerpts of police interviewing questions in laboratory settings. This section is followed by an analysis of the findings, and discussions on ways to mitigate the impact of interpreter linguistic intervention on police interviewing outcomes.Although over the last few decades significant advancement has been achieved, respectively, in theoretical and empirical research into best-practice police interviewing and in interpreting performance analysis, there has been little evidence of cross-pollination between these two fields. Through this paper, the authors wish to bring to the attention of
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