Mireia Vargas-Urpi, University Pompeu Fabra
The Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to translation and interpretation and the Directive 2012/13/UE on the right to information in criminal proceedings were transposed into the Spanish State and, by extension, into Catalonia through the Act 5/2015 that amended the Spanish Criminal Procedure Act. The amendments underline the importance of translation and interpretation as key elements to guarantee the procedure and fulfill other rights, such as the right to information about the charge, the right to a fair trial and the right of defense, contained in article 24 of the Spanish Constitution.
Although these changes are recent, court interpreting has been a reality for many years in the courts of Catalonia, a region with high immigration and tourism rates during the last decades and, therefore, with an evident linguistic diversity in all the spheres of the public sector. According to the reports of the Department of Justice, the languages that have been interpreted the most during the period 2010-2014 were Arabic, Romanian, English, French and Urdu (in this order). These reports did not register which one was the working language in the trials (Catalan or Spanish), or which one was the mother tongue of the defendants, victims or witnesses that required interpretation. In any case, various reports have revealed that Catalan is a minoritised language in the justice system (Riat, 2016).
Whereas court interpretation is a topic that arouses interest at an international level, the research in Catalonia has been quite limited. Among the few exceptions, Onos’s thesis (2014) needs to be mentioned. She explores the case of the court interpreting of the Romanian language in Barcelona. Her research results brought to light the interpreters’ inadequate preparation and the lack of specific means to interpret the Romanian language, among other aspects. However, other studies on court interpreting with a global perspective and based on a more systematic compilation of data are needed.
In order to fill in this research gap, the group MIRAS started the project TIPp, “Translation and interpreting in criminal proceedings” in 2015. This project is building and analysing a corpus of transcriptions of real trials in which interpretation was required. In order to build this corpus, the High Court of Catalonia has allowed access to the records of the trials in which interpretation was requested in 10 courts of Barcelona during the period 2009-2015. Since the volume of data is substantially big, we have decided to focus the first phase of the project on the trials conducted in 2015 and the interpretation of English, French and Romanian. In the ongoing research, other different tasks are being performed concurrently:
- Selection of the trials that will be transcribed (depending on the sound quality and the duration of the bilingual part);
- Annotation of the general features of the trials (metadata);
- Transcription of the selected trials using the free program Exmeralda:
- Annotation of the trials from the point of view of the two aspects of the interpretations proposed by Wadensjö (1998): textual and interactional aspects.
The final objectives of the project are to be able to provide recommendations aimed at improving the judicial interpretation, not only for interpreters, but also for legal practitioners (judges, lawyers, etc.) as well as improving specific resources designed to translate the frequent terminology in the language combinations under study.
In this contribution, we will focus on two questions which may provide new insights into the multilingual research in the legal sphere. Firstly, based on the metadata, we will pay attention to the usage of the Catalan language in interpreted trials. Does the fact that there is interpretation minoritise the language even more? Secondly, the first annotations of the English and the French interpretations seem to reflect quite a frequent reality: these languages are used as lingua franca, although the Directive 2010/64/UE is clear and recommends interpreting in the defendant’s mother tongue. How is the communication in these trials in which defendants must express themselves in a second language which, in turn, must interpreted into another?
References
Directive 2010/64/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 October 2010 on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings.
Directive 2012/13/EU of the European Parliament and the Council of 22 May 2012 on the right to information in criminal proceedings.
Justice Department (2014). Statistical Data. Court Interpreting and translating. Generalitat de Catalunya. URL: http://administraciojusticia.gencat.cat/web/.content/home/seccions_tematiques/servei_de_traduccions_i_interpretacions/informe_interpretacions_traduccions_2014.pdf
Riart, Montse (2016). El català, llengua minoritària a la justícia, Ara.cat, 17 April. URL: http://www.ara.cat/dossier/catala-llengua-minoritaria-justicia_0_1560444005.html
Wadensjö, Cecilia (1998) Interpreting as Interaction, London & New York: Longman.