Doing justice to the manner

Abstract

In our globalised world, interpreting the language of law in court is never an easy job. Justifiably, much of the public and professional attention has fixated on the content of the utterances in high-stake institutionalised courtroom discourses, since what is said seems to be more substantive than how it is said when it comes to sentencing and judicial decisions. However, in our study, we establish a counterclaim that the long-neglected manner in which the lawyers and defendants express the content that (re)produced and (re)presented by interpreters in technology-enabled remote criminal proceedings is equally important. To bridge this gap in knowledge, we conducted mixed-methods research, surveying fifty certified interpreters in Australia and triangulating results with their interpreting performance data. Our initial findings point to a mismatch between what they said they would do with what they actually did. Despite expressing ethical decisions on reproducing manner-related features, interpreters still misrepresent lawyers’ questioning techniques, particularly tag questions in court. One possible explanation could be language-specific difficulties in attaining paralinguistic accuracy in interlingual and intercultural transfers. The contributions of this study include (1) increasing linguistic ‘manner awareness’ in specialised court interpreting, (2) promoting interprofessional understanding and collaboration, and (3) compassing targeted pedagogies in future interpreter education.