Multimodality in legal interaction

Matoesian, Gregory; Gilbert, Kristin Enola

doi:10.4324/9780429030581-20

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The interaction between language and the law is undeniable, and although it is particularly appealing to applied linguists, whose main concern is addressing language issues in real-life, it is also of interest to legal scholars and practitioners. Law is language [32] and although, as a social institution, it is manifested in non-linguistic, multimodal ways [50], it is largely a linguistic institution [32]: "[l]aws are coded in language, and the processes of the law are mediated through language" (p. 156). This view that law is a linguistic institution has motivated critical analyses both from linguists and legal practitioners.…”

Section: The Case For Forensic Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fighting the Fake: A Forensic Linguistic Analysis to Fake News Detection

Sousa‐Silva

2022

Int J Semiot Law

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Fake news has been the focus of debate, especially since the election of Donald Trump (2016), and remains a topic of concern in democratic countries worldwide, given (a) their threat to democratic systems and (b) the difficulty in detecting them. Despite the deployment of sophisticated computational systems to identify fake news, as well as the streamlining of fact-checking methods, appropriate fake news detection mechanisms have not yet been found. In fact, technological approaches are likely to be inefficient, given that fake news are based mostly on partisanship and identity politics, and not necessarily on outright deception. However, as disinformation is inherently expressed linguistically, this is a privileged room for forensic linguistic analysis. This article builds upon a forensic linguistic analysis of fake news pieces published in English and in Portuguese, which were collected since 2019 from acknowledged fake news outlets. The preliminary empirical analysis reveals that fake news pieces employ particular linguistic features, e.g. at the levels of typography, orthography and spelling, and morphosyntax. The systematic identification of these features, which will allow mapping linguistic resources and patterns used in those contexts, contributes to scholarship, not only by enabling a streamlined development of computational detection systems, but more importantly by permitting the forensic linguistics expert to assist criminal investigations and give evidence in court.

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Section: The Case For Forensic Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fighting the Fake: A Forensic Linguistic Analysis to Fake News Detection

Sousa‐Silva

2022

Int J Semiot Law

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“…Many different modalities, such as gestures, positioning, and kinesics, play together alongside verbal language (Kress, 2020;Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001;Matoesian and K. E. Gilbert, 2020) making language a holistic phenomenon. Regardless of the linking of visual and auditory elements in linguistic expression, the superiority of verbal language in terms of intersemiotic representation ultimately becomes apparent when it is written down (Nevile, 2015, p. 132).…”

Section: Embedding the Translational Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting intercepted communication: From talk to evidence

Havelka

2024

Trans-int

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This paper examines the multi-layered translational process of intercepted conversations which appear as evidence in court files in the form of translated wiretap records. The translational challenge here is to transfer the multimodal content of a spoken text in the source language into a written text in the target language. Based on audio data from 17 original intercepted communications and case file documents from a Swiss criminal investigation, the multimodality of the resulting hybrid translational action is explored. In this paper, the process of interlingual decontextualisation and recontextualisation of intercepted communication is examined from the bottom up. The analysis shows that there are different levels of contextualisation that must be considered to achieve a fuller picture of the meaning of a wiretapped conversation.

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Interpreting Intercepted Communication: A Sui Generis Translational Activity

Capus

Havelka

2021

Int J Semiot Law

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Legal wiretapping has gained importance in law enforcement along with the development of information and communication technology. Understanding the language of intercepted persons is essential for the success of a police investigation. Hence, intercept interpreters, as we suggest calling them in this article, are hired. Little is known about this specific work at the interface between language and law. With this article, we desire to contribute to closing this gap by focussing particularly on the translational activity. Our study identifies a fragmented field of research due to the difficulty in accessing workers in this specific field who interpret in a highly confidential phase of criminal investigations. The findings, which are drawn from scarce studies and our empirical data derived from an online questionnaire for a pilot study in Switzerland, demonstrate the wide range of the performed activity intercept interpreting. This article is the first to present translational activity from the perspective of intercept interpreters. The activity differs in many ways from interpretation in court hearings or police interviews. Hence, we suggest categorising interlingual intercept interpretation as a translational activity sui generis and—since previous research has not done justice to the ethical and deontological questions that intercept interpretation raises—advocate for further transdisciplinary research in this field of translation.

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Multimodality in legal interaction

Cited by 4 publications

References 1 publication

Fighting the Fake: A Forensic Linguistic Analysis to Fake News Detection

Fighting the Fake: A Forensic Linguistic Analysis to Fake News Detection

Interpreting intercepted communication: From talk to evidence

Interpreting Intercepted Communication: A Sui Generis Translational Activity

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