Legal transcription service in the light of access to justice in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Regional State (SNNPRS) judicial system

Abstract

This paper focuses on the serious but not well-acknowledged problem related to legal transcript production in SNNPRS High Courts. It sheds light on how distortions of content are made in the testimonies of witnesses to the extent they may affect the legal evidential purpose transcripts could serve. Textual data were collected through audio-recording of court proceedings, review of legal transcripts and interviews. The findings indicated that legal transcription is conducted by employees who had qualification in computer science, but no training in legal transcription and the role that transcripts have in the judicial process. The High Courts of the region employ unilingual and inter-lingual modes of transcription, depending on whether limited court language-proficient witnesses who testify in their native tongue are provided with a court interpreter or not. Major language use problems that are observed in the legal transcripts were found to be attributable to lack of training, and lack of awareness on the part of judges, the judicial system and legal transcribers.