Alexander Teutsch
Judicial proceedings tend to favour monolingualism over multilingualism, even where different languages are at play in the courtroom (Maryns, 2012). Courtroom interpretation, for instance, is often considered a technical act, merely transposing oral statements into the “language of the proceeding” (Berk-Seligson, 2017), while prior evidence presented in a foreign language is mostly translated and, where provided orally, rapidly transcribed into a sole language (Bucholtz, 1995; 2007). Even in bi- and multilingual jurisdictions, the preference for a single procedural language leads to the phenomenon of absorption of utterances made in other idioms into that language (Powell, 2008).
This is exemplified by what this paper claims to be the most evident and misleading representation of the “myth of monolingualism”: the judgment. In framing their decisions, judges mostly pretend all the legal material they cite is in the same language as their judgement. Remarks about sources, i.e. evidence, legislation, or case law, issued in another language are rarely made.This paper aims at uncovering this “myth of monolingualism” of proceedings by showing how, in multilingual jurisdictions, language multiplicity constitutes not just the possibility of having a trial, or parts thereof, in one or another language. More precisely, multilingual courts, operating on a national or subnational level, where legal experts work with different languages on a daily basis, should not be reduced to an “either-or” frame. Rather, they should be seen as working in constant interaction between these languages, by engaging in comparison and translation, in spite of a proceeding officially labelled as monolingual. By analysing “monolingual” judgments issued by first instance judges (giudice di pace/Friedensrichter) in the bilingual province of Südtirol/Alto-Adige (German/Italian) in Italy, this paper shows how overlaps between these two languages occur in judicial reasoning. These include (i) “collages”, being single sentences imported from the other language; (ii) literal translations and summaries; and (iii) direct quotations from the other language.
Keywords: multilingualism; language contact; judicial reasoning; forensic linguistics;