Debra Russell and Sandra Hale (Eds.). Interpreting in legal settings.

Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2008. 180 pp. ISBN 978-1-
56368-396-1.
Reviewed by Susan Berk-Seligson

In their edited volume, Interpreting in Legal Settings, Debra Russell and Sandra
Hale have put together a collection of six highly interesting, empirically based pa-
pers covering the field of interpreting across six countries and incorporating a
number of important theoretical and practical issues. As the title conveys, the con-
tributions share a research focus on interpreting in legal settings. In addition, they
are divided substantively between interpreting for the deaf and interpreting for
hearing persons. The data come from Israel, Austria, Denmark, Australia, Canada,
and Malaysia, from a set of highly reputable scholars in the interpreting field. The
chapters are reviewed below in the order in which they appear in the volume.
Ruth Morris’s contribution, “Taking Liberties? Duplicity or the Dynamics
of Court Interpreting,” focuses on the frequent accusation leveled at interlingual
interpreters that the errors they make are due to treason or duplicity, and con-
vincingly demonstrates why this is rarely the case and why it is an unjustifiable
criticism of those who work in legal settings. In her analysis of the 1987 trial in Je-
rusalem of Ivan (John) Demjanjuk — a Ukrainian speaker who had been living in
the United States for about 35 years and who was accused in Israel of having been
the gas chamber operator at the Treblinka concentration camp during World War
II — Morris makes the case that if interpreters are “expected to consistently betray
the court’s expectations of completeness and fidelity” (p. 1), it is because they “can
be placed by other participants in legal proceedings in a position in which they
are required — or encouraged or allowed — to use differing degrees of power and
latitude in performing their role of interlingual mediation” (p. 5). Specifically, the
author shows how the principal interpreter at the trial, whose interpretations from
English to Hebrew are the object of analysis in the chapter, in a sense acted as a
gatekeeper who to some degree controlled the flow of information and had “signif-
icant power to manipulate channels of communication” (p. 22, as quoted in O’Barr
& O’Barr 1976: 22). So, while Morris acknowledges that the interpreter exhibited
manipulative behavior in her work role, it was not because she was “unscrupulous,
incompetent, irresponsible, lazy, or unaware of what she was doing, nor by any
stretch of the imagination unethical. Rather, at times she deliberately adjusted her
renderings pursuant to instructions from the bench, to whom she saw herself as

Interpreting 13:2 (2011), 258–263. doi 10.1075/intp.13.2.07ber

issn 1384–6647 / e-issn 1569–982X © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Book Reviews 259

ultimately responsible, or requests from the witness who was being questioned
through the medium of her interpretation” (p. 22–23). Thus, rather than acting
as a conduit or machine, the chief interpreter “was trying to contribute to the
communication process taking place in the courtroom as effectively as she could,
at times balancing conflicting demands and expectations, some overt and some
unspoken” (p. 23). Because of the complex dynamics of the interpreting situation
presented by this trial (e.g., some witnesses testified in Yiddish, when only one of
the three judges on the adjudicating panel understood the language; the judges’
comprehension of English varied greatly; Demjanjuk’s original defense attorney
was from the United States and did not understand Hebrew; German and Russian
interpreting had to be added at some points), the main interpreter often took on
the role of gatekeeper, editor, and mediator. At the same time, at many points dur-
ing the multi-year long event, the presiding judge blamed the interpreter for what
appeared to him to be lack of comprehension on the part of the defense counsel
and counsel’s objections to the interpreter’s lexical choices (e.g., the use of “Lower
camp” versus “Camp 1” in reference to a concentration camp, a distinction that
became a major point of contention among a witness, a defense counsel, and the
presiding judge). Speed of delivery of attorney questions and its adverse impact
on the interpreter became another sore point at the trial. In short, for numerous
reasons, Morris argues, the Demjanjuk trial demonstrates “how interpreters can
be placed by other participants in legal proceedings in a position in which they
are required — or encouraged or allowed — to use differing degrees of power and
latitude in performing their role of interlingual mediation” (p. 5).
The second contribution to the volume, “Interpreting in Asylum Appeal
Hearings: Roles and Norms Revisited,” by Waltraud Kolb and Franz Pöchhacker,
presents the results of an empirical study of interpreting practices in appellate
phase asylum interviews at Austria’s Independent Federal Asylum Review Board
(IFARB). Applying an ethnographic data-gathering methodology and using
both functionalist translation theory (i.e., skopos theory) and interactional dis-
course analysis following Wadensjö (1998) as their theoretical framework, the
authors examine 25 hours of audio-taped interviews with appellants from three
anglophone African countries. Consistent with the findings of other scholars
who have been observing the role of interpreters at asylum hearings, Kolb and
Pöchhacker find that interpreters do not act as “neutral linguistic mediators,”
but instead, often “take on tasks that go far beyond an interpreter’s normative
role as laid down in professional codes of ethics and standards of practice, and
these extended roles are ostensibly ratified by the adjudicators in the interaction”
(p. 46). Providing evidence from their corpus, the authors show how some inter-
preters take on an “active co-interviewer role,” using various strategies to elicit
narratives from asylum seekers (p. 46). By facilitating information gathering,
260 Book Reviews

especially from persons whose answers are vague and difficult to understand, in-
terpreters “become agents of institutional efficiency” (p. 46). For the authors, the
most striking finding of the study is that most adjudicators expected interpreters
to co-produce the written record, and when interpreters did so, they would go
so far as to accommodate themselves to the typing speed of the recording clerk
and even provide the clerk with instructions for punctuation (p. 47). Kolb and
Pöchhacker’s findings are consistent with those of others who have found that
interpreters in general are neither neutral nor invisible, and that this is true of
asylum hearings as well. Furthermore, such deviations from the expected norm
are equally true of the appellate level of asylum hearings as they are of first-
instance hearings.
The third contribution to the book, by Bente Jacobsen, deals with “Court In-
terpreting and Face: An Analysis of a Court Interpreter’s Strategies for Convey-
ing Threats to Own Face.” Set in a Copenhagen Danish city court, the object of
Jacobsen’s analysis is a prosecutor’s questioning of a defendant in a criminal trial,
viewed in the framework of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness. The
analysis also relies on Schiffrin’s (1988) concept of discourse markers and on con-
versation analysis (CA) for its transcription conventions. Jacobsen’s thesis is that,

in certain situations, interpreters will attempt to clarify ambiguous utterances as

well as mitigate threatening ones, and […] do so not only to attend to the face of
primary participants, but because they fear that the content of the utterances will
reflect on them. They are motivated by the fear that ambiguous or confrontational
utterances may be perceived by intended receivers as reflecting the professional
skills or attitude of the interpreters, rather than the skills or attitude of the original
speakers (p. 55).

Jacobsen’s analysis of the data is well supported on the whole. However, at times
her interpretation of a speaker’s questions or answers as being face-threatening
is itself hedged and not fully committed to its assertion. The following two state-
ments exemplify such hedging: “By requesting clarification, the defendant poten-
tially (emphasis added) threatened the positive face of both the prosecutor and the
interpreter” (p. 58); “Extracts 3 and 4 demonstrate how the prosecutor’s requests
for confirmation of some of the content of the defendant’s answer were omitted by
the interpreter in what might have been (emphasis added) an attempt to save her
own positive face as well as the face of the intended receiver, the defendant” (p. 59).
Perhaps the need to guess at the intentions underlying a speaker’s utterance or to
conjecture about his/her understanding of an interlocutor’s statements are part
and parcel of putting into practice Brown and Levinson’s theory of facework, and
so Jacobsen is not to be faulted for often needing to guess what the speakers meant
by their utterances. Nevertheless, her analyses are often couched in language that
 Book Reviews 261

conveys great tentativeness, and so the reader is left wondering if face-preserva-

tion is in fact the principal explanation behind a given speaker’s words.
The fourth chapter, “Guilty or Not Guilty? An Investigation of Deaf Jurors’
Access to Court Proceedings via Sign Language Interpreting,” by Jemina Napier
and David Spencer, is a particularly impressive contribution to the volume. Nearly
a monograph in length (50 pages, and therefore more than twice as long as any
of the other chapters), the paper does an excellent job of reviewing law reform in
New South Wales (NSW), Australia, the site of their research project, as well as
providing literature review sections on legal interpreting, the nature of legal dis-
course, interpreting courtroom discourse, interpreting for jurors, and the issue of
jurors’ comprehension of legal texts.
Napier and Spencer’s study focuses on deaf jurors’ access to courtroom pro-
ceedings as mediated by interpreters. They propose ten research questions center-
ing on the differences between hearing and deaf jurors’ perceptions of their role,
their comprehension of the courtroom discourse, and the interpreters’ own per-
ceptions of the interaction (pp. 84–85). Clearly the scope of the study is ambitious,
and the methodology very well thought out. The authors designed an experiment,
trying to replicate the courtroom experience, using a small sample: twelve would-
be jurors, six deaf and six hearing. Napier and Spencer emphasize that the reduced
size sample reflects the fact that this was only a pilot study, designed in preparation
for a full-blown larger one. Their attention to methodological rigor is impressive.
Their study yields four major findings (pp. 110–111): (1) it is possible to trans-
late legal facts and concepts into Auslan; (2) Auslan interpreting has the capacity to
provide deaf jurors with effective access to court proceedings, if certain conditions
are met; (3) hearing people also misunderstand court proceedings, even though
they are not disadvantaged by hearing loss; and (4) deaf people are willing and able
to serve as jurors; like hearing people, they regard it as their civic duty. Napier and
Spencer report findings for all of their specific research questions. Some are unex-
pected; e.g., that the comprehension level of deaf jurors who were provided signed
language interpreting was similar to that of hearing jurors, and that the two groups
were also similar in their perception that the judge’s summation was complex and
repetitive. These and eight other findings (p. 113) make this pilot research effort
one that is particularly rich and worthy of replication on a larger scale
The fifth chapter, “Interpreter Preparation Conversations: Multiple Perspec-
tives,” by Debra Russell, addresses the recent trend to use teams of signed language
interpreters in a variety of contexts, including the courts. The rationale behind
this practice is “The expectation […] that team interpreters will correct incorrect
signed and spoken interpretations and support the actively working interpreter
by filling in unheard or miscued speech” (p. 123). Russell’s contribution to the
book is an empirical study that follows up on her previous (2002, 2005) research
262 Book Reviews

in Canada on the preparation strategies of interpreters when working as a team,

specifically as they prepare lawyers and deaf witnesses to work with them. Using
mock trials based on real court cases, the study included lawyers, judges, deaf
witnesses, and non-deaf expert witnesses, and involved the videotaping of non-
scripted discourse. Russell’s methodology is qualitative, a discourse analytical ap-
proach that looks for emerging themes and patterns. Her analysis is based on the
performance of four experienced interpreters (three nationally certified), two deaf
persons, nine lawyers, and three judges.
Russell’s major finding is that the preparatory conversations among the inter-
preters and afterwards between them and their clients “were strongly oriented to
the needs of the interpreters and overlooked aspects that were seen as crucial to
consumers” (p. 142). For example, the judges felt that they could have benefited
from some type of orientation — either in writing or through the prosecutor —
before the trial began (p. 143). When interpreters did hold preparatory conversa-
tions with consumers, both deaf and non-deaf, it was revealed that “interpreters
may in fact overwhelm consumers with details about the specific nature of lin-
guistic and cultural approaches to interpretation, while completely missing the
issues of importance for consumers” (p. 145). These are important findings, with
significant policy implications.
The final contribution to the volume, “Legal Interpreting and the Deaf Com-
munity in Malaysia,” by Zubaidah Ibrahim-Bell, is a sociolinguistically contex-
tualized empirical study involving surveys of seven Malaysian signed language
interpreters, on the one hand, and the president of the Malaysian Foundation for
the Deaf (MDF), on the other. The surveys used written questionnaires, sent to the
respondents via e-mail. While the size of the sample is quite small, the findings are
highly interesting, but perhaps even more interesting is the author’s explanation of
the complex sociolinguistic situation that characterizes Malaysia (i.e., the fact that
Malaysia has one official language, Malay, the language of the majority indigenous
community; one “promoted language,” English, the language of the colonizers;
three “supported languages,” Mandarin, Tamil, and Malaysian Signed Language;
at least three recognized languages of public worship (Arabic, Sanskrit, and Pali);
and a number of “tolerated languages,” i.e., those that are neither proscribed nor
supported by the government (p. 149). As interesting as Ibrahim-Bell’s descrip-
tion of Malaysia’s sociolinguistic profile is her review of the status of signed lan-
guage interpreting in Malaysia and the use of signed language interpreters in the
country’s courts. One notable feature that bears on the use of interpreters is that
“there is no court stenographer, clerk, or mechanical device to keep a record of the
proceedings and no audio or video recordings may be made by third parties. The
presiding officer in the High Court is required by the CPC (Criminal Procedure
Code) to make notes in his own hand” (p. 152).
 Book Reviews 263

Ibrahim-Bell’s surveys, which she analyzes qualitatively, bring to light four

major areas of concern: (1) interpreter competence, including their training and
qualifications, and the role of teachers as interpreters; (2) the impact of witness
and defendant illiteracy; (3) the multiple roles of the interpreter; and (4) issues
concerning professionalism and good practice. Her major findings are that (1)
Malaysian courts rely on interpreters who are incompetent for various reasons
(e.g., the courts do not bother to check interpreters’ credentials or whether they
have had training or experience in the profession, on the premise that being bilin-
gual is a sufficient qualification); (2) very often deaf people who have not learned
any signed language appear in court (requiring the use of two interpreters and a
relay system); (3) with respect to multiple roles, “the SL interpreter is often ex-
pected to be more than an interpreter. In different contexts, and even in one single
interpreting sitting, they may function as confidante, co-worker, assistant, advo-
cate, and counselor” (p. 164); (4) with respect to professional concerns, all the in-
terpreters who participated in the survey complained that occasionally they had
been treated as volunteers, or else had not been paid at a professional rate for their
work. One intriguing finding was that Malaysian courts generally work with their
own resident interpreters, who are civil servants and are considered by the courts
to be impartial, whereas SL interpreters are seen as partial and as having a close-
ness to their deaf clients (p. 160). In short, Ibrahim-Bell’s study, while limited in its
data-base, provides rich, important findings.
This edited volume is an excellent collection of empirically grounded studies.
It would be a useful text for any scholar who does research in this field and ideal
for graduate or advanced undergraduate level courses. With its wide variety of
research methodologies and abundance of important findings, this is a book very
much worth reading.

References

Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness. Some universals in language usage. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
O’Barr, W. M. & O’Barr, J. F. (Eds.) (1976). Language and politics. The Hague: Mouton.
Schiffrin, D. (1988). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wadensjö, C. (1998). Interpreting as interaction. London: Longman.
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