I’m asking you again! Chinese student interpreters’ performance when interpreting declaratives with tag questions in the legal interpreting classroom

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the findings of a small empirical study in which interpreting students were asked to interpret authentic legal discourse from a video clip showing a lawyer cross-examining a witness in a New Zealand murder trial. The paper focuses on the way in which Mandarin-speaking students chose to interpret declaratives with tag questions. These were a common question form in the clip, which involved a lawyer engaging in aggressive cross-examination of an ambulance officer. The authors present an analysis of the manner in which Mandarin-speaking students interpreted the declaratives with tag questions, using assessment criteria developed by the first author. It is hoped that the findings may be beneficial to (legal) interpreter educators and students working between English and Mandarin.

KEYWORDS:

• Authentic courtroom discourse
• legal interpreter education
• cross-examination question types
• pragmatic equivalence

Acknowledgments

We wish to express our gratitude to all students who participated in the study. We are also grateful to Dr Elizabeth Turner for her very detailed feedback on the first version of this article. We would like to thank the Faculty of Culture and Society at Auckland University of Technology for funding the original research study, and the Ethics Committee at Auckland University of Technology for their advice. Ethics Approval Number 14/216.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Wei Teng is a practising interpreter and translator, and a lecturer in the Chinese programme at Auckland University of Technology. He is currently completing his PhD focusing on developing assessment criteria for achieving pragmatic equivalence in community translation.

Jo Anna Burn is a senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology. She teaches legal interpreting and has specific interests in authentic courtroom discourse and innovative approaches to interpreter training using audiovisual technology.

Ineke Crezee is an associate professor at Auckland University of Technology. She is a linguist and practising translator and interpreter. She focuses on introducing situated learning approaches in interpreter and translator education.

ORCID

Wei Teng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3057-9901

Notes

1 Bold font is used in examples to draw the reader’s attention to the word or particle being discussed, not to signify any prosodic features.

2 The first author is a native Mandarin speaker, as well as an accredited interpreter working between Mandarin and English.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand: [Grant Number 14/07].