The use of reported speech and the perceived neutrality of court interpreters

Abstract

A mock trial, with two-way consecutive interpreting between Cantonese and English, was used to test perceptions of a court interpreter’s neutrality when interpreting into Cantonese in reported rather than direct speech. Monolingual Cantonese speakers played the part of witnesses using the interpreter. Three groups were created: a control group (16 participants), receiving interpretation of all English utterances into Cantonese in direct speech; and two experimental groups (17 participants each). The experimental groups received interpretation with occasional switches to reported speech. These were introduced by third person pronouns (e.g., “he said”) for one group (the ‘pronoun group’), and by professional titles (e.g., “the judge said”) for the other group (the ‘title group’). Participants afterwards completed a questionnaire, assessing neutrality and alignment on a 5-point Likert scale. The title group not only perceived the interpreter to be aligned with the English speakers, but also gave a significantly different assessment of neutrality from the control group. The pronoun group perceived the interpreter to be aligned with them, but did not differ significantly from the control group in their perception of neutrality. Use of pronouns or professional titles in the reporting clauses thus affected the interpreter’s perceived neutrality differently.

Interpreting the Manner of Speech in courts: an overlooked aspect

“…This short opinion article is intended as a position paper for general readers. There have been several studies on question types (Liu, 2020), reported speech (Cheung, 2012(Cheung, , 2014(Cheung, , 2017(Cheung, , 2018 and speech style features (Lee, 2009(Lee, , 2011 and the implications for procedural fairness and judicial outcomes in interpreter-mediated courtroom interactions. However, little has been explored about the concept of the Manner of Speech.…”

Pragmatics in Translation

“…The study of reported speech, and the identity role assignment it explicates, gained momentum in court interpreting (since it is important to be able to assign agency before assigning blame). Cheung (2012) and Cheung (2014) are examples of studies focusing on pronoun choices of court interpreters in Hong Kong. However, agency and participant roles can come into play in other domains as well, for instance, political meetings (Zhan, 2012) or international conferences on such disparate subjects as publishing and floral art (Chang & Wu, 2009).…”

Media Interpreting Into Malaysian Sign Language

“…This also increased the demand for concentration by the interpreter, who not only needed to focus on the message but also on the surroundings where the media was taking place in a different location from the interpreter. Under such circumstances, there were occasions where the interpreters resorted to indirect speech, which inevitably influenced the audience perception of the interpreter as being aligned or otherwise with one or more of the interlocutors as they were switching very quickly on the screen (Cheung, 2018(Cheung, , 2014b.…”