Beyond translation equivalence: Advocating pragmatic equality before the law

Abstract

Where legal-lay communication involves linguistic difference between participants, institutional and scholarly responses have long focused on the translation of propositional content, but there is increasing evidence that the pragmatic implications of communicating in different languages or varieties are equally important. Drawing on research on interpreting in small claims court (Angermeyer, 2015) and on recent studies on the treatment of speakers of African American English in US courts (e.g. Rickford and King, 2016), this paper explores how the ability of individuals to communicate in the courtroom, specifically to give narrative testimony, is impacted by the ways in which legal professionals approach linguistic difference. The observed practices of court interpreting and attorneys' practices of questioning speakers of other dialects both lead to a fragmentation of narrative (Harris, 2001), reducing the coherence of testimony by comparison to that of participants whose language use matches the expectations of the court more closely. These observations converge with findings of other studies that have likewise shown how interpreting practices constrain the participation of other language speakers in institutional settings, and it is argued that advocacy for other-language or other-dialect speakers should consider such pragmatic inequality, rather than focus on the transference of referential meaning alone.