![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Courtroom interpreting requires a high level of accuracy due to the strategic use of language in such an institutional setting. It is generally agreed among interpreting scholars that quality interpreting in court should accurately relay both propositional content and illocutionary force of the original utterances. This high standard of accuracy poses challenges to practitioners who may have only received generic training, if any at all, but little specialised legal interpreter training. A number of studies have shown alterations in the dynamics of interpreter-mediated courtroom examinations. Consequently, there has been a call for specialised training to improve the practice of court interpreting. However, there is a lack of discussion and a dearth of empirical studies addressing the effectiveness of such training. This paper will therefore present results of an experimental study that aimed to gauge whether specialised legal interpreter training is effective in improving interpreting accuracy among trainee interpreters. Using a quasi-experiment, the study found that specialised training is conducive to improving interpreters’ pragmatic accuracy and that interpreters who receive more training tend to perform better on accuracy than those who receive less. These results affirm the value of specialised training.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) is the accreditation body for translators and interpreters in Australia. See https://www.naati.com.au for more details.
2. Degree programs refer to those programs which have a clear focus on legal interpreting and confer Bachelor’s, Graduate Diploma, or Master’s degrees. While there are many short courses in legal interpreting and translation (with most being non-language-specific), they are not included in our discussion.
3. Students usually take 4 subjects each semester. During the 1.5–2 years’ program, students usually take 12 to 16 subjects. The course Interpreting in Legal Settings is one of the courses taken by students. The course lasts for 14 weeks, including one week’s break for postgraduate students. The 13 weeks include 12 lectures, one each week, and one week for court observation.
4. See Appendix 1 for an overview of the content of the course.
5. See Appendix 2 for an overview of the content of the workshop series.
6. The potential challenges were informed by another study conducted by the first author: Pragmalinguistic challenges for trainee interpreters in achieving accuracy: An analysis of questions and their translation in five cross-examinations.
7. The term ‘quasi-experiment’ acknowledges that there was no complete random assignment in our design. Instead, we used a semi-random assignment technique for the allocation of control and treatment groups. In doing so, we controlled and balanced the variation that could be caused by different enrolment status of our participants in the two groups.
8. These students were only excluded from the present study, for example their renditions were not recorded or analysed. However, they were still allowed to participate in the extra workshops. The exclusion from the study did not affect their enrolment status with the course.
9. There were no lectures or tutorials in weeks 6 and 7, as students had one week’s semester break and one week for court observation.
10. Cronbach’s alpha is a commonly used measure of internal consistency and scale reliability. A value ranging from 0.70 to 0.95 is usually considered an acceptable value (Tavakol and Dennick Citation2011).
11. 难道 is an emphatic adverb usually used to give force to a rhetorical question. It does not have a propositional meaning, but can be roughly translated to ‘don’t tell me…’.
12. Mean scores are presented after rounding. Original scores for illocutionary point are 4.147 and 4.153 for control and treatment groups, respectively.
13. Independent samples t-tests are often used to compare the means of two independent groups with the purpose to determine whether there is a statistical difference between them. The null hypothesis for the test is that there is no difference between the two population means. In social research, the significance level alpha at .05 is widely used. In the pre-intervention test, the p-value of the t-test is bigger than .05, which means the null hypothesis is not rejected.
14. Cohen’s effect size is used to measure the magnitude of a treatment effect. A value of 0.8 and above is usually considered as a large effect size. See Cohen (Citation1988) for more explanation of Cohen’s d.
15. Paired-samples t-tests (also called dependent-samples t-tests), as the name suggests, compare means between two related groups. In this case, participants’ scores of the pre-intervention test were compared to those of the post-intervention test.