The Function and Definition of Court Interpreters

Introduction

From a legal perspective, Taiwan currently lacks a unified certification system for professional court interpreter language examinations, and examinations and appointments are mostly handled by individual district courts. It is questionable whether interpreters possess the professional competence in court translation necessary to enable defendants to present a full defense and to assist judges in understanding the facts of a case. According to the current Article 207 of the Code of Civil Procedure, if a participating arguer does not understand the national language or is deaf-mute and unable to express meaning in writing, the court shall use an interpreter. However, the Code makes no similar provision for witnesses who do not understand the national language; yet the testimony of witnesses is undeniably important for the protection of the parties' rights and the judge's understanding of the case.

Function and Definition of Court Interpreters

According to Black's Law Dictionary, an interpreter is a person sworn in a judicial proceeding to explain the testimony of a foreigner or a deaf-mute person to the court. American linguistic scholar Roseann Duenas Gonzalez, in her book Fundamentals of Court Interpretation, views a court interpreter as a bilingual individual whose responsibility is to act as a communication conduit between the court and persons who do not understand English. According to Gonzalez, an interpreter must convert the meaning heard from the source language into the target language without editing, summarizing, deleting, or adding to its meaning. A court interpreter must accurately convert messages into another language while staying as close to the original meaning as possible.

Meanwhile, American scholar Elena M. De Jongh, in her book An Introduction to Court Interpreting, defines interpretation as "the activity that facilitates communication between two or more parties who do not share a common language." De Jongh further argues that an interpreter should eliminate not only language barriers but also cultural barriers. The Los Angeles Superior Court Interpreter Rules stipulate that when a witness is deaf-mute, unable to understand English, or unable to express themselves in English, the court shall use an interpreter.

Domestic legal scholar Kuan Ou suggests that "court interpreter," when used as a verb, refers to conveying the same meaning of a message among people who speak different languages. Functionally speaking, an interpreter refers to a person who bears this function within government departments. Mr. Su Shih-teng, in his article "Random Thoughts on Court Interpreters," defines a court interpreter as: "When interlocutors do not understand each other's language, a third party who understands the languages used by both parties acts as an intermediary to translate, enabling the interlocutors to understand each other's expressions of intent. As a noun, the aforementioned conduit for communication is the interpreter."

Analyzing the various definitions above, we can see that a court interpreter includes at least five elements: 1. the court; 2. trial/adjudication; 3. witnesses, judges, lawyers, parties, and the jury; 4. source language and target language; 5. communication. By comparison, Gonzalez's definition emphasizes that a court interpreter should faithfully reflect the original meaning of the source language, which is linguistic legal equivalence. Furthermore, according to Section 1827(d)(1) of the U.S. Court Interpreters Act, court interpreters also include sign language interpreters.

According to Gonzalez, interpretation can be preliminarily categorized into: 1. conference interpretation; 2. escort interpretation; 3. seminar interpretation; 4. business interpretation; 5. medical and psychological interpretation; 6. legal interpretation. Japanese scholar Takuya Chino provides an even more detailed classification: conference interpreters, enterprise inspection interpreters, business negotiation interpreters, in-house corporate interpreters, broadcasting interpreters, tour guide interpreters, entertainment interpreters, police and court interpreters, inflight interpreters, etc. Among these, police and court interpreters are also known as judicial interpreters.

The biggest difference between an interpreter and other types of interpreters is that interpretation is carried out within a courtroom. The ethos of court interpretation lies in preserving the "legal equivalent" of the original content. An interpreter must faithfully translate the original content without additions or omissions. In general settings requiring interpretation, commonly used methods include Consecutive Interpretation, Simultaneous Interpretation, Summary Interpretation, and Sight Interpretation. These four interpretation methods are introduced below:

1. Consecutive Interpretation

   In this method, the interpreter must pay attention to and analyze the content of the speaker's speech. Knowing that an interpreter is present, the speaker will pause their speech, and the interpreter will interpret as completely and accurately as possible during the pause. When using consecutive interpretation, the speaker and the interpreter do not speak at the same time, giving the interpreter a reasonable amount of time to conduct an overall analysis of the source language and making it easier for the interpreter to understand the speaker's ideas and message. With this method, the interpreter often shares the same location with the speaker and faces the public, which imposes relatively greater pressure on the interpreter as they also feel the pressure experienced by the speaker.

   Scholar Danica Seleskovitch considers consecutive interpretation to be the most noble of all interpretation, for the simple reason that if the interpreter fails to translate accurately, completely, and faithfully during interpretation, it is very easily detected. Forensic linguists also universally recognize note-taking as the fundamental tool for consecutive interpretation. With the help of notes, consecutive interpretation can indeed translate the source language more completely and faithfully. In other words, the greatest benefit of consecutive interpretation is that the interpreter has ample time to fully and correctly express the source language in the target language. However, its disadvantage is that it is more time-consuming, troublesome, and disruptive to the overall proceedings.

   According to the provisions of the Court Interpreters Act Amendments, consecutive interpretation is primarily used for witness statements. Because everyone in the courtroom needs to understand the witness's words, the interpreter translates the preceding content only after the witness has finished expounding a segment of testimony. Although it may seem simpler than simultaneous interpretation, some experts still consider it the most difficult method of interpretation. Because the witness's testimony can only be documented based on the interpreter's translation, the interpreter must not only translate the original text word-for-word but also capture the speaker's prosodic structures, such as pauses, pitch, or points of emphasis. The interpreter must face the pressure of correctness and of remembering that segment of testimony. A segment of testimony may be very long or incoherent, and to accurately convey the translation, interpreters may use note-taking or similar methods to aid memory.

2. Simultaneous Interpretation

   By comparison, simultaneous interpretation is much more complex. The interpreter's listening and speaking occur concurrently. The interpreter carefully listens to the speaker, categorizes the content, and begins processing the first segment of content. Upon understanding the content, they then express it as correctly and completely as possible using semantic and syntactic equivalents in the target language. Scholars believe simultaneous interpretation is difficult to account for because, in everyday life, people rarely experience concurrent tasks. While listening to, memorizing, analyzing, organizing, and accumulating data from the speaker's speech in their ears, the interpreter is simultaneously interpreting what the speaker said a few seconds prior.

   In other words, the content interpreted by the interpreter must lag behind the speaker's speech by a few seconds (a period known as décalage). During this time, the interpreter must perform listening and speaking simultaneously: listening to what the speaker is currently saying, while speaking what the speaker said a few seconds ago. Under such circumstances, the interpreter and the speaker do not need to be in the same location; the interpreter can translate from a booth equipped with specialized facilities. Likewise, speakers often ignore the presence of the interpreter, resulting in an overly fast speaking pace that the interpreter struggles to keep up with. Simultaneous interpretation cannot achieve the same precision in quality as consecutive interpretation, and this reduction in quality is indeed the trade-off for achieving rapid interpretation.

   According to the Court Interpreters Act Amendments, from the selection of jury members, trial proceedings, and statements by prosecution and defense counsel, to the expression of jury opinions, simultaneous interpretation is used at any time in the courtroom. Because it is simultaneous, the interpreter must receive and convey the translation at the same time, thus expending enormous energy to faithfully express the original meaning. Furthermore, since simultaneous interpretation is not truly simultaneous, the speed at which the interpreter conveys the translation inevitably lags slightly behind the speaker's original text, often leaving the interpreter exhausted under intense concentration. In addition, in a courtroom, the demand for the interpreter to achieve absolute fidelity in translation is even more profound. Regardless of any obscene words or tones, the interpreter has no freedom of choice and can only strive to faithfully translate every single word and phrase.

3. Summary Interpretation

   In this method, the interpreter listens carefully to the speaker's speech, condenses the content, and translates only the key points. The biggest problem with this method of interpretation is that the interpreter is often forced to make subjective determinations regarding which parts of the speaker's speech are important and which are unimportant, translating only the content they deem important as a summary.

   The U.S. Court Interpreters Act of 1978 mentioned that a judge may change the form of interpretation to simultaneous interpretation or summary interpretation with the consent of both parties. Summary interpretation involves capturing the underlying meaning of the original text and appropriately condensing it before conveying it. However, this method of translation violates the explicit purpose of the law—namely, the purpose of a defendant's or witness's full and continuous statement. Therefore, the 1988 Court Interpreters Act Amendments explicitly stipulated that U.S. courtroom operations shall adopt simultaneous interpretation, while witness testimony shall utilize consecutive interpretation.

4. Sight Interpretation

   Converting a message from a written medium into an oral medium—that is, the interpreter receives written documents in the source language in the courtroom and orally interprets the contents into the target language. When a court has untranslated foreign-language documents as evidence, sight interpretation may be used, with the interpreter looking at the original source-language text and providing an oral translation in the target language.

Conclusion

Research on court interpreters across countries like the United States and Japan reveals that court interpretation is an extremely rigorous and highly complex profession, thus necessitating professionally certified interpretation talent. However, courts, prosecutors' offices, and police agencies currently still cling to a language-chauvinistic mindset, failing to attach importance to interpreters. The selection process treats them akin to bailiffs, and the quality of interpretation personnel varies widely. Lacking professional linguistic competence themselves, this creates the bizarre phenomenon of holding sinecures while contributing nothing. The protection of human rights for parties with language communication barriers is clearly in urgent need of strengthening!