Miranda Lai

Interpreter linguistic intervention in the strategies employed by police in investigative interviews

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.

Police Investigative Interviews and Interpreting: Context, Challenges, and Strategies

Police interviews with suspects and witnesses provide some of the most significant evidence in criminal investigations. Frequently challenging, they require special training and skills. This interaction process is further complicated when the suspect or witness does not speak the same language as the interviewer. A professional reference that can be used in police training or in any venue where an interpreter is used, Police Investigative Interviews and Interpreting: Context, Challenges, and Strategies provides solutions for the range of interview demands found in todays multilingual environments. Topics include: What interpreting is, the skills required, and the role of interpreters in any job context Investigative interviewing in law enforcement Concerns about interpreter intervention and its impact on interview outcomes The value of word-based over meaning-based interpretation in police and legal contexts Nonlinguistic factors that can have an impact on the interpreting process The book explores the multi-faceted dynamics of conducting investigative interviews via interpreters and examines current investigative interviewing paradigms. It offers strategies to help interpreters and law enforcement officers and provides examples of interpreted interview excerpts to enable understanding. Although the subject matter and the examples in this book are largely limited to police interview settings, the underlying rationale applies to other professional areas that rely on interviews to collect information, including customs procedures, employer-employee interviews, and insurance claim investigations. This book is part of the CRC Press Advances in Police Theory and Practice Series.

Training Refugees to Become Interpreters for Refugees

This is an exploratory inquiry into signed language interpreters’ perceptions of interpreter e-professionalism on social media, specifically Facebook. Given the global pervasiveness of Facebook, this study presents an international perspective, and reports on findings of focus groups held with a total of 12 professional signed language interpreters from the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, all of whom are also Facebook users. The findings reveal that Facebook is seen to blur the traditional boundaries between personal and professional realms – an overlap which is perceived to be compounded by the nature of the small community in which signed language interpreters typically work –necessitating boundary management strategies in order to maintain perceptions of professionalism on the site. Facebook is considered a valuable professional resource to leverage for networking, professional development, problem solving and assignment preparation, but it is also perceived as a potential professional liability for both individual interpreters and the profession at large. Maintaining client confidentiality was found to be the most pressing challenge Facebook brings to the profession. Educational measures to raise awareness about e-professionalism were generally viewed favourably.The study probes into translation students’ perception of the value of online peer feedback in improving translation skills. Students enrolled in a translation degree in Australia translated a 250-word text on two separate occasions. On each occasion, the students were given another fellow student’s translation of the same text to mark and provide anonymous peer feedback. The original translations from all the students, together with any peer feedback, were uploaded onto an online forum. The students were encouraged to download their own translation to review the peer feedback in it. They were also encouraged to download and peruse other students’ peer reviewed translations for comparison. Upon completion of the project, the students were surveyed about their perceptions and appreciation of their engagement in the process in the following three capacities: (i) as a feedback provider, (ii) as a feedback recipient, and (iii) as a peruser of other students’ work and the peer feedback therein. Results suggest that translation students appreciate online peer feedback as a valuable activity that facilitates improvement. The students found receiving peer feedback on their own translation especially rewarding, as it offered alternative approaches and perspectives on tackling linguistic/translation issues. In comparing the three capacities, students perceived reviewing feedback on their own work and perusing other students’ work as more beneficial than engaging in giving feedback to others.Title: Tarjamat al-khadamaat al-’aammah ( Community Interpreting and Translation) Author: Dr. Mustapha Taibi (University of Western Sydney) Year of publication: 2011 Publisher: Dar Assalam , Rabat (Morocco) ISBN: 978-9954-22-088-7 191 pagesAccent is known to cause comprehension difficulty, but empirical interpreting studies on its specific impact have been sporadic. According to Mazzetti (1999), an accent is composed of deviated phonemics and prosody, both discussed extensively in the TESL discipline. The current study seeks to examine, in the interpreting setting, the applicability of Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson and Koehlers (1992) finding that deviated prosody hinders comprehension more than problematic phonemics and syllable structure do. Thirty-seven graduate-level interpreting majors, assigned randomly to four groups, rendered four versions of a text read by the same speaker and then filled out a questionnaire while playing back their own renditions. Renditions were later rated for accuracy by two freelance interpreters, whereas the questionnaires analysed qualitatively. Results of analyses indicated that 1) both phonemics and prosody deteriorated comprehension, but prosody had a greater impact; 2) deviated North American English post-vowel /r/, intonation and rhythm were comprehension problem triggers. The finding may be of use to interpreting trainers, trainees and professionals by contributing to their knowledge of accent.The title Conference of the Tongues at first sight raises questions as to the particularities of its pertinence to translation studies, i.e. the range of possible subject matters subsumed, and is somewhat loosely explained in the preface by a short and factual hint to its historical origins (in sixteenth-century Spain in a paratext to a translation of Aesop). There is no further elaboration on the motivation for the choice of this title however.The market for translation services provided by individuals is currently characterized by significant uncertainty because buyers lack clear ways to identify qualified providers from amongst the total pool of translators. Certification and educational diplomas both serve to reduce the resulting information asymmetry, but both suffer from potential drawbacks: translator training programs are currently oversupplying the market with graduates who may lack the specific skills needed in the market and no certification program enjoys universal recognition. In addition, the two may be seen as competing means of establishing qualification. The resulting situation, in which potential clients are uncertain about which signal to trust, is known as a signal jam . In order to overcome this jam and provide more consistent signaling, translator-training programs and professional associations offering certification need to collaborate more closely to harmonize their requirements and deliver continuing professional development (CPD) that help align the outcomes from training and certification.Interpreting is rather like scuba diving. With just a bit of protective equipment, we interpreters plunge for a short time into an often alien world, where a mistake can be very serious, not only for ourselves but for the other divers who are depending on us to understand their surroundings. And as all who dive, we interpreters find this daily foray into a new environment fascinating, exhilarating, but also at times, challenging. One of the high-risk dive sites into which we venture often is the sea of healthcare, where the strange whale-song of medical dialogue, the often incomprehensible behavior of local denizens such as doctors, and the tricky currents of the healthcare system itself require special knowledge and skill to navigate successfully. Did you ever wish for a dive manual for unique world of healthcare? Well, here’s a good one, from linguist, RN and interpreter trainer, Dr. Ineke Crezee of New Zealand.Among all the difficulties inherent in interpreting, numbers stand out as a common and complex problem trigger. This experimental study contributes to research on the causes of errors in the passive simultaneous interpretation (SI) of numbers. Two groups of Italian Master’s degree students (one for English and one for German) were asked to interpret simultaneously a number-dense speech from their respective B language into their mother tongue, Italian. Note-taking was allowed during the test and both the study participants and their lecturers completed a questionnaire afterwards. Data analysis was conducted with statistical and qualitative methods, combining the cognitivist and contextualist approach. The objective was to ascertain whether one main variable may be held responsible for the high error rate related to interpreting numbers and the difficulty perceived by students in the task. The analysis quantifies the relative impact of different causes of difficulties on participants’ delivery of numbers. It stresses the crucial role of the subjective variable represented by interpreters’ skills. Didactic implications and directions for future research are discussed in the conclusion.

Chinese public service interpreting

The chapter opens with an introduction of what public service interpreting is and gives a historical overview of its development. It then reviews the increasing need for language mediation in Chinese speaking counties/regions such as China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, where public service interpreting is in nascent development. Some evidence of court and medical interpreting services available in these places are documented. The chapter moves on to explain the modes of interpreting used in public service interpreting, and the essential skills and knowledge required for practitioners. After ethical considerations and role boundaries for public service interpreters are outlined, the chapter finishes by presenting two case studies and some concluding remarks.

Ethics for Police Translators and Interpreters

This book examines the major theoretical foundations of ethics, before zooming in on definitions of professional practice and applied professional ethics, as distinct from private morals, in general and then focusing on professional ethics for translators and interpreters in police and legal settings. The book concludes with a chapter that offers a model for ethical decision making in the profession.

Remarks by Commentating Editors

This issue of PPR provides a locus for five high-quality articles and two book reviews, which touch on organizational fairness and staff retention in police forces, gaps in research approaches in policing and practices, and publications on sexual trafficking and sexual assault crimes in the US. Issues around organizational fairness and inequities in police institutions impact on job satisfaction and retention of staff. This is the central contention of the first article contributed by Loene Howes and Jane Goodman-Delahunty entitled Career decisions by Australian police officers: a cross-section of perspectives on entering, staying in and leaving policing careers. With good numbers of participants, including both serving and former police officers, and by using a free-response questionnaire, the authors were able to conduct a thematic analysis of the data collected in order to explore factors affecting the respondents’ decision to stay in or leave the force. Three main factors identified for higher police retention are authenticity (in their personal choice to join the force; their subsequent perceived support from the community; and their feeling of agency and belonging as a consequence of good organizational management), balance (of income, job security and work-life balance) and challenge (from opportunities and the enjoyment these engender). This is followed by the second article, Paul Reynolds and Jeremiah Hicks’s qualitative study ‘There is no justice in a police department’: a phenomenological study of police experiences. Despite the small number of participants, the study taps into the perceptions and lived experiences of organizational unfairness and inequalities reported by participant police officers. The authors should be congratulated for this first effort in providing an in-depth account and analysis. The focal concern of this article is powerfully summarized in the words of one of the participant police officers: ‘...how is the police department going to build trust, enforce rules and laws impartially in the community if they can’t even do it in their own backyard?’ All professions rely on robust research and solid scholarship to advance the profession as a whole in order to respond to the changing needs of the profession and society. Policing is no exception. The following two articles in this issue make a valuable contribution to this specific topic. Alex Luscombe and Kevin Walby examine the significance of Access To Information (ATI) requests in Canada in obtaining data which would otherwise remain out of reach for researchers. The authors find that efforts to access data through ATIs are in itself a process that provides a valuable insight into police processes in data handling. The wider implication of ATI intersects the politics of information, issues of government accountability, and quests for justice, all of which are important issues in social scientific research. On the other hand, Michael Jenkins, through a meta-analysis of 88 empirical studies of US police, reports on the grant-dependent, local nature of police research and highlights the low numbers of practitioners working as lead researchers in the pool of studies covered. He also identifies the bias in