Monolingual ideologies and multilingual practices in small claims court: the case of Spanish-speaking arbitrators

Abstract

This article explores the institutional policies and practices concerning multilingualism in small claims courts in New York City. Building on prior work that has investigated the language use of court interpreters and of the litigants for whom they translate, this study focuses on the analysis of institutional interactions in which all participants, including the arbitrators who decide the cases, are speakers of Spanish. Court interpreters are routinely used in such cases, though some hearings were conducted without them in Spanish. Comparing these two scenarios and analysing the participants' metalinguistic comments, this study explores the language ideologies that underlie the institutional policies about language choice and interpreter use and how they relate to broader issues about Spanish–English bilingualism in the USA more generally.

Keywords:

• Spanish
• language ideologies
• courtroom interaction
• court interpreting

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Eva Codó, Miguel Pérez-Milans and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I also wish to thank Marcos Rohena Madrazo, as well as audiences at New York University and at the Eighth International Symposium on Bilingualism, Oslo 2011. All errors are my own.

Funding

This paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation [BCS-0317838].

Notes

1. All court proceedings, including arbitration hearings, are public. I was given permission by the court administration to make audio recordings, provided that all participants (litigants, arbitrators and interpreters) gave oral consent to court staff. Participants were provided with written information about participation in and withdrawal from my research in each of the languages included (see Angermeyer, 2006).

2. At the time of the fieldwork, the maximum amount that a claimant could sue for was $5,000.

3. Arbitrators are attorneys who volunteer their time as a public service. They vary in their motivations for volunteering, but the training that they receive from the court counts towards a professional requirement for continuing education. Some hope to become judges and volunteer as arbitrators to gain relevant experience.

4. Court officers or clerks requested court interpreting if communication difficulties arose during their own interactions with litigants prior to a hearing, or if it became apparent that litigants had brought family members or acquaintances to translate for them. As a consequence, some litigants were asked to speak through an interpreter even though they may have preferred to testify in English (see Angermeyer, 2008 and also the discussion of institutional language ideologies in this paper).

5. Arbitrators who knew Spanish as a second language did not always indicate to litigants that they did, and in one case an arbitrator told me that he wanted to hear what litigants said if they did not know that he understood.

6. While I was not able to speak with all arbitrators about their language proficiency or make relevant observations of their language use, at least 15% of the observed arbitrators demonstrated or claimed proficiency in Spanish. By contrast, only one arbitrator told me that she spoke Russian, and none of the arbitrators claimed to speak Polish or Haitian Creole, the other two languages included in my study.

7. Two of them used English exclusively, while the other two engaged in occasional code-mixing (e.g. using phrases like ‘maybe we can reach … un acuerdo’) or codeswitching for full utterances. Neither of these two arbitrators were recorded. In one case I did not have permission to record, and in the other case the recording equipment malfunctioned. The example of codemixing is quoted from my fieldnotes.

8. See Appendix for transcription conventions. All names are pseudonyms.

9. In addition, ‘verbatim’ translation also requires the use of the second person to refer to the person who is addressed by the source speaker. In multi-party interaction, this is not necessarily the recipient of the translation so that LOTE-speaking participants may hear the interpreter use an address form (e.g. Usted ‘you’) that does not refer to them. This may lead to misunderstandings (see Angermeyer, 2005) and may be seen as an alienating practice that does not accommodate to the communicative practices of lay participants (Angermeyer 2009).

10. Spanish speakers in New York trace their origins to many different parts of the Americas, with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Mexicans representing the three largest groups, followed by Cubans, Colombians and Ecuadorians, among others (see Otheguy & Zentella, 2012). Many of the litigants observed in this study were of Dominican descent, but I also recorded litigants from other parts of the Caribbean, Mexico, South America and Central America. Bilingual arbitrators and interpreters were also from a wide variety of origins.

11. Moeketsi (1999) describes comparable situations in courtrooms in the South African Free State province, where trials are conducted in English or Afrikaans with a court interpreter for Southern Sotho, even though all participants (including the judge) speak Southern Sotho. While Southern Sotho is a co-official language, the court records are kept in English and Afrikaans only.

12. In her study of police interrogations in which police officers acted as Spanish interpreters, Berk-Seligson (2009) shows that there is considerable potential for abuse if the role of interpreter is conflated with other institutional roles.

13. In the USA, popular daytime TV programmes have celebrity judges decide in small-claims type cases (e.g. Judge Judy, see van der Houwen, 2006). On the Spanish language versions of such television ‘courts’, ‘court officers’ appear who make announcements like all rise or order in the court in English, evidently increasing the authority of the TV court.

14. Note also that Spanish has been used routinely in municipal government functions, with a prominent example being Mayor Bloomberg's press conferences relating to Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation [BCS-0317838].