Conference

Abstract for “Privileged and Underprivileged Minority Languages: The Case of Spain at the Beginning of the 21st Century”

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Kim Schulte, University Jaume I

At first sight, Spain appears to be a country with a modern, open and progressive approach to the challenges of a postmonolingual society; crucially, article 3.2 of the 1978 Spanish constitution guarantees individual regions (‘comunidades autónomas’ in Spanish) the right to give their language co-official status. The use of the three existing co-official regional languages (Basque, Catalan and Galician) in formal and official contexts is gradually losing its social stigma due to their legal status and policies that proactively encourage their use. Other minority languages are, nevertheless, far less privileged.

On the one hand, several indigenous historically established Ibero-Romance languages such as Asturian and Aragonese, —the former with more than 100,000 native speakers— have comparatively limited protection and recognition. This raises pertinent questions about the criteria that have led to a distinction between first- and second-class regional languages.

On the other hand, migration in recent decades has led to the emergence of large linguistic communities whose languages have no official status or recognition at all. Thus, there are more native Arabic and Romanian speakers resident in Spain (around 1m in both cases) than native Basque speakers, and in some areas inhabitants of Romanian origin account for more than 20% of the population (cf. e.g. Viruela, 2008). These minorities are far more dependent on access to public services in their respective language, given that most of them have not passed through the Spanish education system and have, therefore, not had the opportunity to acquire a level of Castilian Spanish (or of one of the co-official languages) that would enable them to fully understand complex official or legal documents. Nevertheless, there appears to be little or no intention to provide them with an equitative linguistic acess.

This paper aims to offer an in-depth analysis of the underlying social and political factors that give rise to this prioritization of some minority languages over others, adopting a postmonolingual approach that combines concepts from postcolonial theory (hybridity, neocolonialism) with notions that are central to sociolinguistics, such as prestige, diglossia and language attitudes (cf. Garrett et al., 2003). Ultimately, it is argued that the status and recognition of a minority language is primarily the result of a complex combination of historical, political and economic factors, in which the speakers’ actual need to use their native language is of marginal importance.

References:

Cortes Generales. 1978. “Constitución Española”, Boletín Oficial del Estado: Gaceta de Madrid 311.1.

Garrett, Peter, Nikolas Coupland and Angie Williams. 2003. Investigating Language Attitudes: Social meanings of dialect, ethnicity, and performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Viruela, Rafael. 2008. “De Este a Oeste: la inmigración desde los nuevos países comunitarios (Rumania y Bulgaria)”, Cuadernos de Geografía 84: 127-134.

Conference

Abstract for “Tools and Legal Resources for Translating into Catalan: From the Type of Resources to the Needs of their Users”

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Ona Domènech, Open University of Catalonia (UOC)

The Catalan language, as a minoritized language that has been undergoing a process of corpus and status planning for many years now, has a great number of useful tools and resources for legal translation. These resources are usually described using different criteria essentially based on the more extended textual typologies. Although the importance of current classifications of tools and resources cannot be denied, we argue that these allow to only partially assess their utility in any given translation situation, because they do not relate the type of resource to specific translation needs.

The criteria used to classify the tools and resources that might be useful for translating are usually based on formal typologies, and for the most part classifications take into account the textual type of the resource – they identify categories such as dictionaries and other lexical resources, databases, corpora, linguistic resources or questionnaires, among others. They are useful in identifying the available types of resources, to evaluate the array of existing resources for a particular domain and, as a result, to identify any existing typology gaps. Therefore, the relevance of describing the existing types of resources for legal translation cannot be denied. It is argued, however, that there is a need to complete these resources with an evaluation of their utility from the point of view of their users.

The needs of the users of jurilinguist resources can be explained in different ways. In the context of minoritised languages, translation competence stands out as a practical approach. Many well-known proposals focus on translation competence, but only a few are specifically related to translation competence in legal translation. The analysis of these reveals a common concern to link the needs of users with the tools and resources that may solve them.

This communication aims to evaluate the utility of the existing types of jurilinguist resources according to the legal translation needs that they address (and not only according to their defining typology features). The paper reviews existing typologies of tools and resources that are useful for legal translators and the main contributions in the analysis of legal translation competence, identifying therein the main types of translation needs. An updated repertoire of useful tools and resources for legal translating into Catalan is introduced and the sub-competences of the translation competence are compared with the instructions contained in the existing tools and resources.

The analysis conducted allows to map the tools and resources from the perspective of translation competence and it offers an overview of existing resources for legal translation into Catalan, which shows significant gaps in relation to certain sub-competences.

Conference

Abstract for “Multilingual Trials in Barcelona: A History of Minoritised, Dominant and Invisible Languages”

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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:

  1. Selection of the trials that will be transcribed (depending on the sound quality and the duration of the bilingual part);
  2. Annotation of the general features of the trials (metadata);
  3. Transcription of the selected trials using the free program Exmeralda:
  4. 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.