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Problems in non-native speakers' communication in legal sttings: Two cases of U.S. police interviews with suspects

  • T&I REVIEW
  • Abbr : tnirvw
  • 2021, 11(1), pp.57-86
  • DOI : 10.22962/tnirvw.2021.11.1.003
  • Publisher : Ewha Research Institute for Translation Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Interpretation and Translation Studies
  • Received : March 31, 2021
  • Accepted : June 7, 2021
  • Published : June 30, 2021

Jieun Lee 1

1이화여대 통역번역대학원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines communication problems or miscommunication in legal settings. When the participants in the communicative interaction do not share similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds, they are more likely to create misunderstanding or develop miscommunication. Non-native speakers with limited linguistic resources are restricted from fully participating in legal communication, where understanding and clarity is vital. Their linguistic disfluency and deviations from the so-called standard English may cause serious misunderstanding that have legal ramifications. Based on a discourse analysis of video-recorded US police interviews, this paper examines miscommunication during the investigative interviews with suspects from Korean speaking backgrounds, which involved two non-professional interpreters. While both of them were Korean-American police offciers, they differed in terms of the extent of the provision of interpreting. In one case, the interpreter played a very minimal role as an interpreter during the interview, while the suspect largely managed communication in English on his own, and this contributed to the lack of certainty over his confession to the crime and eventually led to his acquittal. In the other case, the interpreter interpreted throughout the investigative interview of the suspect but her interpreting added to the complexity of the communication problem, mainly due to her lack of interpreting skills. It is argued that given that a greater possibility of miscommunication in legal communications involving non-native speakers and the serious consequences in legal settings, extra caution in needed to ensure clear understanding and effective communication, which essentially includes quality language services, namely professional interpreting services.(Ewha Womans University, ROK)

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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