## Bente Jacobsen*

## Pragmatic Meaning in Court Interpreting: An empirical study of additions in consecutively interpreted question-answer dialogues

## Introduction

My PhD thesis investigates the interpreting process in criminal proceedings in Danish district courts. The investigation centres on questionanswer dialogues, that is, the questioning of defendants and witnesses by judges, prosecutors and defence counsels.

The interpreters in my investigation were authorized interpreters and therefore competent professionals fully aware of trial procedures and the role of participants. The mode of interpreting was the consecutive mode:  The  interpreter  took  notes  while  the  primary  participant  was speaking and delivered her interpretation of his utterance after he had fi  nished speaking. The interpreting was bi-directional, and the two languages involved were Danish and English.

## Point of departure

The point of departure for my investigation has been the confl  ict between, on the one hand, the offi  cial perception of the court interpreter as a kind of 'translating machine', which simply transfers language products from one language to another, and, on the other, the reality of the interpreting situation in the courtroom, where mechanical trans  lations may result in miscommunication.

*   Bente Jacobsen Department of English The Faculty of Language and Business Communication Fuglesangs Allé 4 DK-8210  Aarhus V BJ@asb.dk

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Interpreted courtroom dialogues are conducted face-to-face and are essentially  three-party  transactions,  involving  two  primary  speakers and one interpreter. The immediacy of the face-to-face encounter and the sensitive nature of the interaction are bound to exert considerable infl  uence  not  only  on  the  production of source texts, but also on the production of the interpreter's target texts. Nevertheless, ethical guidelines generally instruct court interpreters to provide verbatim translations of original utterances. Thus, in Denmark, the guidelines for interpreter behaviour, which are laid down in the document Instructions for Interpreters 1 ,  instruct  court  interpreters  to  translate  speakers'  originals 'using the same words and phrases, whenever this is possible'. As a result, the guidelines are generally perceived as instructing interpreters to  produce  word  by  word  translations  of  speakers'  originals,  unless there are specifi  c reasons, such as language differences, why such translations may be impossible.

Two facts in particular provide evidence that court interpreters tend to be regarded as a mechanical devices:

- (1)   Court interpreters are not expected to prepare for their assignments to any great extent, and they are not expected to need dictionaries, law books, etc.
- (2)   Participants in courtroom proceedings generally regard interpreter competence  as  being  measurable  by  comparing  the  number  of words  in  a  speaker's  original  utterance  to  the  number  of  words in the interpreter's translation of his utterance. In other words, if there seems to be a discrepancy between the length of a source text and the length of its corresponding target text, this is regarded as evidence of interpreter incompetence.

Cecilia Wadensjö (1998: 7) points out in her study of dialogue interpreting in Sweden that this general perception of the interpreter is very much infl  uenced by a 'transfer' model of communication, what Michael Reddy (1979) called the conduit model of communication. A similar observation is made by Ian Mason (2000: 218) in his article on dialogue interpreting research. According to Reddy's model, communication consists of transporting defi  nable entities from producer to receiver via a process of decoding and re-encoding. So, laypersons tend  to  think  of  interpreters  as  conduits,  or  as  channels,  through which  prepared  messages  go  back  and  forth.  Indeed  interpreters often think of themselves in this manner.

1 Instructions for Interpreters was published by the National Commissioner of the Danish  Police  ( Rigspolitichefen )  in  1994  and  is  directed  at  police  interpreters  only. How  ever,  the  document  constitutes  the  only  offi  cial  guidelines  for  interpreters  in Denmark, and it is generally regarded as applying to court interpreters also.

Throughout my thesis, I argue that the general perception is wrong. I argue that court interpreters do not function as mere transporters of other people's words, but play a much more active part in the communication process in the courtroom than is generally expected.

## Hypotheses

Based partly on previous court interpreting research, and partly on my own experiences as a practising court interpreter as well as discussions with some colleagues in the fi  eld, I established the following two hypotheses:

- (1)   The  actual  behaviour  of  court  interpreters  will  show  evidence  of a  preoccupation  with  pragmatics,  that  is,  with  building  a  mental model of speaker meaning and with conveying this mental model to end receivers, and
- (2)   as  a  result  of  this  preoccupation,  their  target  texts  will  contain  a variety of additions.

In other words, I hypothesized that the primary objective of court interpreters is successful interaction; they are aware that, in order for this objective to be reached, participants will have to fully understand each other's intentions. The interpreters instinctively judge that, by prov  iding merely verbatim versions of speakers' originals, they will not bring about such understanding, since end receivers who are unfamiliar with the context (linguistic and/or situational) of the interaction will not be able  to  fully  infer  speaker  meaning.  In  order  to  compensate  for  the lesser  inferencing  ability  of  end  receivers,  therefore,  the  interpreters adopt a strategy for conveying source texts which will ensure that a speaker's communicative intention, and not only his words, is available to an end receiver.

A brief look at some aspects of the background of the investigation will serve to illustrate this further:

Danish courts base their decisions on oral presentations only, that is, on statements and witness testimonies, which means that, as a rule, documents and statements will have to be read out in court in order to be considered evidence. This is known as the principle of orality , and it  emphasizes  the  crucial  role  of  spoken  discourse  and  therefore  the importance of obtaining proper statements and witness testimonies.

The  setting  of  the  investigation,  a  courtroom,  is  controlled  and agenda-bound. Trial procedure, including the procedure for extracting statements and witness testimonies, is governed by Danish law ( The Administration of Justice Act ), which provides that questions must be precise,  unambiguous  and  explicit,  so  that  defendants  and  witnesses will know exactly what is required of them and will be able to provide the  requested  information.  Courtroom  participants  generally  assume that  this  provision  prevents  misunderstandings,  but  questions  are  in fact not always precise, unambiguous or explicit, and answers do not always seem to provide the requested information. In other words, even in  courtroom interaction, a speaker's communicative intention is not always easily available, especially to an end receiver who is unfamiliar with the context of the interaction.

Consequently, a court interpreter will often fi  nd herself in a situation when  she  cannot  reach  her  objective  of  successful  interaction  and comply with the ethical guidelines at the same time. I hypothesize that, when an interpreter fi  nds herself in such a situation, her objective of successful interaction will override her attention to offi  cial guidelines or the perception of primary participants.

## Data

The collected data were recorded at two trials, a mock trial and a simulated trial. The alleged offence in the mock trial was rape, and the witness at that trial was also the alleged victim of rape. The alleged offence in the authentic trial was fraud; the defendant had allegedly purchased a large number of items in various shops in Copenhagen with the aid of stolen credit cards. Finally, this defendant did not have English as a mother tongue, but he had specifi  cally requested an English interpreter, since, or so he said, he had lived in Great Britain for most of his life and was fl  uent in English.

The data collection process was extremely complicated. Of course, collecting data for interpreting research is generally a very diffi  cult process, as many researchers will attest to (e.g. Dam 1995: 95; Gile 1995: 2021). First of all, it is often extremely diffi  cult to get permission to record interpreted interaction, and, secondly, interpreters don't always like to have their target texts recorded and scrutinized. In addition, interpreted courtroom interaction is a relatively new and under-researched object of study, especially in Denmark where my investigation is the fi  rst of its kind. So, I had to assume right from the beginning that the collection of authentic data presented a serious challenge, for two reasons:

- (1)  Though court hearings in Denmark are public, as a rule, the legal system tends to exhibit caution when it comes to the publication of details from a hearing, especially from a criminal trial, where the rights of defendants or victims have to be considered. Also, as a rule, the recording or transmission of sound or sounds from a court hearing is prohibited.
- (2)  Since my investigation is the fi  rst of its kind in Denmark, I had to assume that interpreted proceedings in a criminal trial had never been recorded for the purpose of analysis. This meant that I would have to fi  nd a way of convincing the legal system of the benefi  ts of allowing the publication of details from trials for research purposes.

As  a  result,  the  data  collection  process  involved  a  large  number  of considerations and practical issues, from getting access to proceedings to  choosing the right recording equipment. Almost 2,5 years went by before  I  was  able  to  collect  authentic  data,  and  in  the  meantime  I resorted to staging the mock trial.

Of course, now that I am able to put the enormity of the task be  hind me,  I  am  thrilled  that  I  was  actually  able  to  collect  authentic  courtroom data. Moreover, since my investigation has shown that it is in fact  possible  to  record  interpreted  courtroom  interaction  for  research pur  poses  without  obstructing  proceedings  or  violating  the  rights  of participants,  and  without  hindering  the  interpreting  process,  I  have presumably managed by my efforts to pave the way for a lot more studies of court interpreting in the years to come.

## Method

In order to test the two hypotheses presented earlier, I set out to answer the following four research questions:

- (1)  Will the target texts of the court interpreters in my investigation include a variety of additions?
- (2)   If so, can the additions identifi  ed in the interpreters' target texts be categorized?
- (3)  If categories are established, will these then indicate the court interpreters' motives for including the identifi  ed additions in their target texts?
- (4)  If motives are indicated by the established addition categories, may these then be linked to a preoccupation with pragmatics on the part of the court interpreters?

So, having recorded and transcribed interpreted question-answer dialogues at the two trials referred to above, I answered the fi  rst research question by conducting a source-text/target-text comparison of the collect  ed data. This analysis identifi  ed a large number of additions in the court interpreters' target texts.

I  then  answered  the  second  research  question  by  registering  the iden  tifi  ed  additions  according  to  their  impact  on  the  semantic  and/or pragmatic content of the source text. This enabled me to establish three main categories and a number of subcategories. Also, since I collected the mock data fi  rst, I initially based the categories and subcategories on fi  ndings from an analysis of those data, and then tested them through an analysis of the authentic data.

Having  established  addition  categories,  I  answered  the  third  and fourth research questions by applying to the investigated interaction the pragmatic theory of conversational implicature, which was proposed by the philosopher Herbert Grice (1975, 1978, 1981), and which provides a  framework for analysing how hearers infer speaker meaning. I set up a basic model accounting for implicature in question-answer dialogues  in  criminal  proceedings,  and  I  discussed  eight  strategies  that a court interpreter may be assumed to resort to when confronted with implicature in an original utterance.

I also discussed the implications of the inference process for court inter  preters, applying the notion of audience design proposed by Allan Bell (1984), which distinguishes between different receiver groups and their infl  uence on a text producer's style.

Finally, by matching Grice's theory and the various assumptions to the established categories and subcategories of additions, I was able to reach certain conclusions regarding the interpreters' motives for including the identifi  ed additions in their target texts.

## Addition categories

The various categories and subcategories of additions identifi  ed in the collected data are presented in Table 1:

Table 1: Additions identifi  ed in the collected data 2 :

| Additions with no impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text          | Repetitions               | Repetitions                                                                                                        |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|---------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Additions with no impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text          | Silent pauses             | Silent pauses                                                                                                      |
| Additions with no impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text          | Voice-filled pauses       | Voice-filled pauses                                                                                                |
| Additions with no impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text          | False Starts              | False Starts                                                                                                       |
| Additions with minimal impact on the semantic and/ or pragmatic content of the source text    | Repetitions p             | Repetitions p                                                                                                      |
| Additions with minimal impact on the semantic and/ or pragmatic content of the source text    | Fillers p                 | Fillers p                                                                                                          |
| Additions with minimal impact on the semantic and/ or pragmatic content of the source text    | Paralinguistics p         | Paralinguistics p                                                                                                  |
| Additions with minimal impact on the semantic and/ or pragmatic content of the source text    | Explicating additions     | Obvious-information additions                                                                                      |
| Additions with minimal impact on the semantic and/ or pragmatic content of the source text    | Explicating additions     | Connective additions                                                                                               |
| Additions with minimal impact on the semantic and/ or pragmatic content of the source text    | Explicating additions     | Additions explicating non-verbal information (mock trial)/ explicating culture-bound information (authentic trial) |
| Additions with minimal impact on the semantic and/ or pragmatic content of the source text    | Elaborating additions     | Elaborating additions                                                                                              |
| Additions with significant impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text | Emphasizing additions     | Emphasizing additions                                                                                              |
| Additions with significant impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text | Down-toning additions     | Down-toning additions                                                                                              |
| Additions with significant impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text | New-information additions | New-information additions                                                                                          |

The fi  rst main category registers additions which I judged to have no impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text. These ad  ditions  were  identifi  ed  as  features  typical  of  normal  conversation. Such features may generally be attributed to the particular nature of spok  en  interaction,  requiring  fast,  almost  instantaneous  production and  understanding.  Therefore,  I  presumed  that  their  presence  in  the inter  preters'  target  texts  could  be  attributed  to  the  special  nature  of the interpreting process, also requiring fast, almost instantaneous production  and  understanding,  but  this  time  in  two  different  languages. Prob  ably,  the  additions  functioned  mainly  as  disguised  translational repairs, that is, as stalling devices (cf. Stenström 1994: 76) meant to 'buy'

2   This model was inspired by Anne Schjoldager's (1996: 110) model of target-text/ source-text relations.

the interpreters time to process inputs and prepare outputs. In any case, since the additions had no impact, I did not considered them relevant for the purpose of my investigation, and I identifi  ed and categorized them purely for elimination purposes.

The  second  main  category  registers  additions  which  I  judged  to have minimal impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text. The fi  rst three subcategories of additions in this category I identifi  ed as having potential impact only, marked with a p .

Additions registered as belonging to the subcategory of Explicating additions explicitly expressed information which was implicitly present in the context of the interaction. I divided this subcategory into three more  subcategories: Obvious-information  additions , Connective ad  di  tions , and Additions explicating non-verbal information (identifi  ed only in the mock data) or Additions explicating culture-bound information (identifi  ed only in the authentic data). These subcategories are illustrated in example 1 (additions are underlined):

| Example 1:                                       |                                    |
|--------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
| Obvious-information additions:                   | when did you arrive at her flat?   |
| Connective additions:                            | and they had sexual intercourse    |
| Additions explicating non-verbal information:    | there was a mark here on my arm.   |
| Additions explicating culture-bound information: | we went to Eskildsen, a watchshop. |

Finally,  the  fi  fth  subcategory  of  additions, Elaborating  additions, re  gisters  additions  which  elaborated  on  items  that  had  already  been rendered once in an interpreter's target text. I shall also illustrate this sub  category by an example:

```
Example 2: Elaborating additions: did you feel intoxicated? did you feel drunk
```

The  third  main  category  registers  additions  which  I  judged  to  have signifi  cant  impact  on  the  semantic  and/or  pragmatic  content  of  the source text. These additions introduced information, either explicitly or implicitly, into the interaction for the fi  rst time. Again, I shall exemplify the different subcategories:

Example 3:

Emphasizing additions:

did he actually say that?

Down-toning additions:

it may have some consequences.

New-information additions:

did you have a knife in your hand?

As demonstrated in Table 1, the same categories and subcategories of additions were identifi  ed in both kinds of data, with the aforementioned exceptions: the subcategory of Additions explicating non-verbal information , which occurred only in the mock data, and the subcategory of Additions  explicating  culture-bound  information ,  which  occurred only  in  the  authentic  data.  Neither  subcategory  occurred  more  than once, but this fact may be insignifi  cant, for two reasons:

- (1)   Non-verbal information only had to be interpreted once at the mock trial, and culture-bound information of the kind explicated by the interpreter in the authentic trial did not occur in the mock trial; and
- (2)   non-verbal  information  did  not  occur  in  the  authentic  trial,  and culture-bound information was generally explicated by the speaker, which meant that the question of whether or not the end receiver would be able to infer the information did not arise very often.

However,  I  regard  as  signifi  cant  the  fact  that,  apart  from  these  two sub  categories, all other categories and subcategories of additions were identifi  ed in both kinds of data. Clearly, the established categories and subcategories must be considered valid categories and subcategories. Consequently, the fi  ndings from the two data analyses not only demonstrate  that  additions  do  occur  in  court  interpreting,  but  they  also demonstrate that not all additions have equal impact on the semantic and/or pragmatic content of the source text.

## Interpreter motives

My discussion of the court interpreters' motives for including the identifi  ed  additions  in  their  target  texts  focused  on  the  categories  of Additions with minimal impact and Additions with signifi  cant impact . Thus, I did not discuss the interpreters' motives for including additions with no impact, for the reasons outlined earlier.

As regards additions with minimal impact, I argued that, with the exception of additions with potential impact which, like additions of no impact, could be attributed to the special nature of the interpreting pro  cess, additions with minimal impact were included for the specifi  c purpose of making speakers' intentions available, or more easily available,  to  end  receivers.  In  other  words, Explicating and Elaborating addi  tions were triggered by the interpreters' instinctive judgment that end receivers who were unfamiliar with the context of the interaction would need assistance to infer speaker meaning.

I further argued that additions with signifi  cant impact were included for a similar reason. Thus, I argued that the fi  rst two subcategories of additions, Emphasizing additions and Down-toning additions , were included for the specifi  c purpose of directing end receivers' attention to information which was implicitly present in the context of the original utterance and which had to be inferred (in the case of Emphasizing additions ) or verifi  ed (in the case of Down-toning additions ) in order for  speaker  meaning to be available. In other words, the interpreters in  cluded these additions based on their instinctive judgment that end receivers would not be able to spot the presence of implicit information, but would be able to infer it once it was spotted.

Finally,  I  argued  that  the  last  subcategory  of  additions  with  signifi  cant  impact, New-information  additions ,  were  included  because the interpreters selected interpretations of source texts which included this  information.  The  fact  that  the  interpreters  occasionally  selected inter  pretations  of  utterances  which  did  not  appear  to  match  what could  be  derived  from  the  originals  could  likewise  be  explained  by refe  rence to their preoccupation with building and conveying a mental model of speaker meaning. So, though I was not able to explain these additions by reference to the interpreters' instinctive judgment of end receivers' ability to retrieve speaker meaning, I was still able to link the interpreters' motives for including them to their preoccupation with pragmatics.

## Conclusion

Following my discussion of interpreter motives, I was able to conclude that the presence of additions in the target texts of the court interpreters in my investigation could be explained by reference to their preoccupation with matching speakers' utterances to relevant aspects of context and with ensuring the retrievability of speaker meaning. Thus, I concluded that the actual behaviour of the court interpreters provided evidence of a preoccupation with pragmatics, and, in turn, that my fi  ndings served to support the hypotheses.

Further  support  for  my  conclusion  was  presented  by  the  various examples of implicature that I found in the data. I did not systematically register implicatures, since I only registered implicatures that occurred in connection with one or more interpreter additions with either minimal or signifi  cant impact. However, the court interpreters conveyed these implicatures by adopting strategies which either explicated, or partly explicated, them. Thus, it seems that the interpreters' choice of strategy for  conveying implicature was likewise triggered by their instinctive judgment concerning the inferencing ability of end receivers who were unfamiliar with the context of the interaction.

Finally, my conclusion was supported also by three kinds of interpreter behaviour that I observed in the collected data:

- (1)   The  interpreter  who  assisted  the  defendant  in  the  authentic  trial invariably corrected his grammatical errors,
- (2)   all three interpreters completed fragmented source texts as a rule, and
- (3)  all  three  interpreters  engaged  in  dialogue  with  the  foreign  participants who requested repetition or clarifi  cation of source texts in Danish.

The three kinds of behaviour demonstrated not only that the interpreters were  preoccupied  with  pragmatics;  they  also  demonstrated  that  the interpreters  were  prepared  to  violate  ethical  guidelines  in  order  to achieve their primary objective of successful interaction.

In conclusion therefore: The court interpreters in my investigation did not function as mere mechanical devices, simply transferring language products from one language to another. On the contrary, they participated actively in the communication process in the courtroom in order to reach their primary objective of successful interaction.

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