Creating research-based resources for court interpreters: an illustrative study on translation-oriented terminological records about Spanish criminal proceedings

ABSTRACT

The quality of the interpreting services provided in criminal courts has come to the fore in Spain as a result of the transposition into domestic law of the EU Directives on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings and on the right to information in criminal proceedings. Since one of the greatest challenges faced by court interpreters is precisely the lack of appropriate terminological resources, in this article we describe how we used empirical research results (to wit, the exploitation of a corpus of authentic, interpreter-mediated criminal proceedings) to create resources that can help court interpreters to perform their task with accuracy, rigour and diligence. More specifically, we focus on translation-oriented terminological records, as adopted in the TIPp project (on the quality of court interpreting) on the basis of the approach developed in previous research on the translation of technology law (Law10N). We describe in detail the process of creating the Spanish-English record for the illustrative term letrado de la administración de justicia. By describing this process (including term selection, information mining, equivalence search and acceptability analysis), we highlight the usefulness of this type of terminological record and its potential for other thematic subfields and language pairs.

KEYWORDS:

• Court interpreting
• empirical research
• terminological resources
• legal asymmetry
• decision-making

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Dr. Carmen Bestué Salinas, Dr. Catherine Way and Alexandru Surí, who, amongst many others, collaborated in this part of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Francisco J. Vigier-Moreno has been a full-time lecturer at the Department of Philology and Translation at Universidad Pablo de Olavide of Seville since 2015, where he teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in specialised (legal) translation and bilateral (public service – court) interpreting. He was awarded a PhD in Translation and Interpreting by the University of Granada in 2010. Before joining the Pablo Olavide University, he was a lecturer at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at University of Granada, the University of Ulster and the University of Alcalá, where he still teaches legal translation at the Master’s Degree in Public Service Translation and Interpreting (within the EMT network). He has been a practising Sworn Translator-Interpreter of English appointed by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation since 2005. His main research fields include legal translation, court interpreting, specialised translator training, and dialogue interpreting training.

Notes

1 In civil jurisdiction, since each party must bear the costs of interpreting –except in legal-aid cases–, there is a preference for hiring Sworn Translators-Interpreters, who are appointed by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Vigier Moreno, 2016).

2 This three-year delay from the timeline specified in the transposition may be the consequence of professional associations denouncing that the Spanish authorities plan to include not only individuals but also legal entities (i.e., companies) on the lists, which again would create a loophole allowing unqualified people to provide interpreting services in court.

3 See Ortega Herráez (2011) and Gascón Nasarre (2011) to learn more on how interpreting is provided in Spanish courts.

4 Outsourcing is becoming consolidated as the most frequently-used system for the provision of interpreters in the Spanish public services, not only in courts, the police forces and state-run refugee reception centres (Ortega Herráez, 2013) but also in other public settings like public healthcare via telephone interpreting.

5 As put forward by García-Beyaert (2015, p. 54), this has brought about a de-professionalisation of court interpreting in Spain, with interpreting being provided by unqualified, untrained people (with a few honourable exceptions) contributing to its discredit as a professional activity.

6 These include hearings that had to be adjourned because no interpreter was available (see e.g., http://www.larioja.com/20080507/rioja-region/aplazado-falta-interprete-juicio-20080507.html) or because the interpreting provided was simply so poor that the court staff could not communicate with the other language-speaking defendant (see e.g., https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/galicia/2017/02/08/acusado-recuso-traductora/0003_201702G8P12993.htm).

7 See more at http://pagines.uab.cat/tipp/en.

8 Under Spanish criminal procedural law, the procedimiento abreviado is a type of criminal proceedings whereby offences potentially carrying prison sentences of no more than nine years are prosecuted.

9 The procedimientos abreviados carrying a prison sentence of between five and nine years are tried in a higher court, the so-called audiencia provincial, but are less common than those tried in a juzgado de lo penal.

10 See Orozco-Jutorán (2017a, 2018) and Arumi Ribas and Vargas-Urpi (2018) for a much more detailed account of the compilation, transcription and annotation process of the TIPp project’s corpus.

11 The viewing of the video-recordings allowed the research team to extract very relevant data that could offer a more accurate description of how interpreting really takes place in Spain’s criminal courts. One of the most salient results was that whispered interpreting was not provided in a significant number of hearings and, if it was, it was provided very inconsistently. See Vigier Moreno (2017 and 2019) to learn more on this preliminary analysis of the corpus.

12 See Arumí Ribas et al. (2017) for an in-depth description of the results.

13 Even if these records were initially conceived as a resource for court interpreters (since they include terms that were identified in our corpus of real proceedings and focus on the Spanish criminal legal system), they can also be useful for translators, especially for cases of documentary translations like those carried out by sworn translators.

14 For example, in our corpus we identified one expression used very frequently by prosecutors and defence lawyers alike (a definitivas). Once evidence has been heard and exhibited, the judge gives the floor to both counsels for their final pleadings (conclusiones), and when they do not change the pleadings made at the beginning of the hearing, they simply pronounce that expression, implying that they ratify them or make them definite (elevar a definitivas).

15 This project, led by Dr. Olga Torres-Hostench (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and developed between 2010 and 2013, studied the translation of end user license agreements from English into Spanish. See more at http://www.lawcalisation.com/.

16 One of our reference works was the Diccionario del Español Jurídico, a legal dictionary first published in 2016 as a result of a collaboration agreement between the Royal Spanish Academy and the Spanish Judiciary and Spain’s General Council of the Judiciary, and available at https://dej.rae.es/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2014-55029-R).