Abstracts Category : Other

Achieving accuracy in a bilingual courtroom: pragmalinguistic challenges and the role of specialised legal interpreter training

by Xin Liu

In cross-examination, questions are used by counsel strategically to maintain controlover witness testimony. In a bilingual courtroom where communication is interpreted, itis crucial that lawyers' intended questioning strategies be adequately relayed from onelanguage to another. Failure to do so can affect the effectiveness of courtroomquestioning and potentially even the outcome of a case. However, achieving such a highlevel of accuracy is an extremely complex task due to the intricacy of courtroomdiscourse. Previous studies on the interpretation of courtroom questions havedemonstrated interpreters' inadvertent modifications of the pragmatics of courtroomquestioning. However, most of these studies are based on English-Spanish courtroomdata; interpreters' influence on courtroom questions in other language pairs is rarelyinvestigated. This thesis, therefore, focuses on interpreting cross-examination questionsfrom English to Chinese. More specifically, it investigates the most commonpragmalinguistic challenges for achieving accuracy and the role of specialised legalinterpreter training in improving accuracy. This thesis, adopting a mixed-methodsapproach, consists of two components: a discourse analytical study on studentinterpreters' pragmatic accuracy in a moot court exercise and a quasi-experiment withI&T Masters students at UNSW. Findings show that it can be challenging to producepragmatically accurate renditions. Chinese interpreted questions have an overallweakened illocutionary force compared to the original English questions. Declaratives,reported speech declaratives, modal interrogatives, and tag questions are particularlydifficult to interpret into Chinese. Some of the pragmatic shifts are related to theinherent cross-linguistic differences and some occurred despite the similarities betweenthe two languages. Such pragmalinguistic challenges can be addressed by specialisedlegal interpreter training. Results of the quasi-experiment show that specialised trainingis conducive to improving interpreters' pragmatic accuracy, that is, interpreters whoreceive more training tend to perform better on accuracy than those who receive less.This thesis is steeped in a number of research areas: legal interpreting, forensiclinguistics, and interpreter training. It not only fills the gap in the knowledge ofinterpreting courtroom questions from English to Chinese but also has importantimplications for the education of legal interpreters.Advisors/Committee Members: Hale, Sandra, Languages & Linguistics, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW, Stern, Ludmila, Languages & Linguistics, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW.