Professionally unaligned interpreting in Belgian marriage fraud investigations and its consequences

ABSTRACT

This paper comprises a comparative empirical analysis of the performance of professional interpreters and informal ad hoc interpreters mediating in marriage fraud investigative interviews. These interviews are particular contexts in which interpreting is needed, as they are hybrid in nature and imply interview encounters in both administration and police contexts and can have legal aftermaths. As Belgian law does not provide guidelines for the type of interpreter required to mediate in these interviews, a high degree of variation is found in the type of interpreter selected and in the handling of ethical issues. Based on our analysis of empirical examples, this variation gives rise to professional interpreters’ performance resembling ad hoc or informal interpreting practices with non-normative patterns of turn-taking and footing, non-impartial roles and a definite influence exerted on the selection of information conveyed and entextualised in the report. These practices, some of which are sub-optimal, do not ensure equal treatment and due process as should be expected in a legal-administrative investigation as consequential and high-stakes as a marriage fraud investigation.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogue interpreting
• ad hoc/informal interpreting
• interpreter roles
• turn-taking
• marriage fraud investigations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The fraudulent relations that these units investigate encompass all family reunification applications through which the non-Belgian applicant can obtain residency rights and legal status in the Belgian territory. This includes marriages, cohabitations and paternity/maternity recognition.

2. In each data excerpt, our English translation is provided in small caps. Our translations aim to convey the (in) coherence of the original utterance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Universiteit Gent [BOF].

Notes on contributors

Mieke Vandenbroucke

Mieke Vandenbroucke is a Research Professor (tenure track) at University of Antwerp. She holds a PhD in linguistics from Ghent University and was a Fulbright scholar at UC Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of pragmatics and sociolinguistics and she currently coordinates various PhD and other projects on multilingualism and interaction in specific urban and institutional contexts.

Bart Defrancq

Bart Defrancqis an Associate Professor at Ghent University, where he teaches interpreting and legal translation, and Vice-President of CIUTI. He holds a PhD in linguistics and specializes in corpus-based research into interpreting in search of cognitive, social and interactional determinants of features of interpreted speech, mainly in conference and police settings. He has recently also developed an interest in computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) and experimental methods to study its ergonomics.