- Email: [email protected]
The bilingual courtroom: Court interpreters in the judicial process
Book reviews
599
does seem a constant across Japanese and U.S. cultures is that characteristics and patterns of talk associated with women and with men are not only heard as different but as of different value. An English-speaking businessman, who assumes that the successful businessman talks with, say, blunt assertion, might think that Japanese businessmen speak not only differently but also ineffectually. Other topics in the book include differences in teenagers’ use of dialect vs. standard forms, person references of Japanese and American children (part of [de’s impressive and programmatic studies of gender and language), linguistic politeness, deletion of the particles u,a and ga, terms used to talk about wornelI, and written discourse. Many of the authors in this collection refer to cultural differences between Japan and the U.S. or European countries. The editors perhaps could have helped provide a context for these discussions by providing a systematic discussion of these differences. As it is, the reader will need to make her or his own outline of those differences by drawing upon all the articles and on other sources. Also left to the reader is the task of sorting out the relevant importance (to speakers, to sociolinguistics) of the varying aspects of speech studied in these essays. (For example, Japanese speakers will be much mc *e attuned to the importance of the differing use of particles such as zo and ze and no and MYI.)Since the editors are both active, respected scholars in the field of language and women, they wou!d have been able to provide these kinds of framework. On the the other hand, had the editors tried to provide a framework within which to study Japanese women’s speech, they would perhaps have prematurely imposed a unity that doesn’t exist now in the literature. Rather, we have here pragmatic analyses, some descriptive sociolinguistics studies, and some feminist analyses. The authors have fulfilled their goal of bringing together in one book a wide variety of studies of Japanese language and gender.
Susan Bddkligson, The bilingual courtroom: Court interpreters in the judicial process. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 299~~. US $57.50 (cloth).
Reviewed by Mel Greenlee” I. htroductior~
In this volume, Susan Berk-Seligson provides a seminal treatment of language use in a population whose presence in U.S. courtrooms seems to be increas* Correspondence address: M. Greenlee, Cslifornia Appellate Project, I Ecker San Francisco, CA 94105, USA.
Place,Suite400,
600
Book reviews
ing, but who have, until now, been regarded as invisible. Her basic thesis is undeniable: far from acting as mere conduits or translation machines, interpreters can and do affect the judicial process. Since interpreters affect not only lexical, but also discourse meaning, the author argues that interpreters’ training needs to be upgraded to reflect those features which linguistic research has identified over the past 10-15 years as important components of contextual meaning. Only by paying attention to interpreters (rather than pretending they are not there, as the law often seems to do) can non-English speakers be accorded their own rightful voice in U.S. courtrooms. 2. Audience for the book Ideally, Berk-Seligson’s findings could be useful to readers in three professions: interpreters (and those who train interpreters), linguists and attorneys. However, since these groups do not share a common vocabulary for discussing language, and because the author’s exposition does not assume a uniform level of background knowledge in the three fields, some readers may come away dissatisfied. The author acknowledges (p. 97) that readers without a background in linguistics may be unable to follow certain sections of the book. Some important linguistic terms are minimally explained or relegated to remote onesentence footnotes; see e.g., the discussion of register and the significance of differences in register on pages 169-170. The author’s definition of diglossiu (ch. 2, n. 3) would not inform an unsophisticated reader that diglossia is not itself one of the two contextually-bound speech varieties in a diglossic community. Readers may also be confused by the author’s misuse of grammatical terms and by some mistakes in editing translated segments. For example, the author describes verbs in “the progressive moo&’ (p. 1IO), rather than as having progressive aspect. On page 1 E5, there is a good example of both on error in translation and misapplication of the grammatical term case: “He says at one point, ‘As I’ve indicated . . . the defendant has pleaded not guilty,’ using the present perfect tense and active case for the verb ‘indicate.’ The interpreter renders this as, ‘Como se ha indicado, el dcfendiente se ha declarado culpable en esas acusaciones. “’
Lack of the word no before culpable (i.e., ‘not’) in the Spanish rendition surely is an editing error . l The correct translation of this sequence can be found on page I 14 (Example 6.3). Apart from these flaws, Berk-Seligson’s book is a highly readable introduction to a complex and interesting subject. A similar slip in editing renders Example 5.23 (pp.76-77) confusing. Apparently, the word in the witness’s Spanish utterance should be cumioneta; otherwise the interpreter’s explanation of the two possible meaning:; of camioneta is irrelevant. l
troque
601
3. Methods Berk-Seligson arrives at her conclusions about the state of interpreting through ( I ) analysis of tape recordings of S anish/English interpreters in the courtroom and (2) an experimental study in which listeners rated participants in interpreted proceedings for selected characteristics. Excerpts or portions of dialogues from the first ana!ysis provide a sample of interpreter errors, which vary from minor to truly egregious. Unfortunately, the reader is Icft wondering how often such mistakes occur, or whether an interpreter’s level of certification affects the type or rate of interpreting errors, because there is no overall quantitative analysis of mistakes in interpreting. 2 Likewise unfortunate are two doubtlessly unintentional tendencies toward stereotypes. The first concerns gender. The author notes that most interpreters are women (ch. 1, n. 1) and refers to interpreters throughout the book as ‘she’. Attorneys and judges, on the other hand, are referred to as male, even though 4the author’s own data contradict this impression (see Example 5.3, pp. 58-59). A single, uniform pronoun usage for all would be far preferable to this not-sosubtle relegation of women to the courtroom’s lower ranks. The second tendency concerns Latinos. Although the author points out in the introductory chapter that Spanish interpreters are used in a wide range of criminal and administrative proceedings for a variety of witnesses, a great many of the interpreting excerpts in her book concern Spanish-speaking witnesses who are undocumented persons testifying about incidents of smuggling. Precisely because the interpreting vignettes are telling examples of interpreter errors, these excerpts are likely to capture more attention than general statements about witnesses. Readers’ seiective attention, in turn, could lead to the erroneous inference that most people who need Spanish interpreters in U.S. courtrooms are ‘illegal aliensI This false impression could have been avoided through a more representative selection of excerpts and a more appropriate use of descriptive terms. 4. Orgunkation
qf the hook
The book’s first three chapters provide a basic introduction to the nature and scope of interpreted proceedings in reprcscntative regions of the U.S., to sociolinguistics as a discipline, particularly ;iththis relates to legal settings, and 2 For example. the prompted exchange quoted on pirgt‘s 61-63, in which the defendant’s guilty plea is extracted from her only after three courtroom p,rrescipants - the judge, the defense attorney and the interpreter - all engage in extcnsiwe prompting. IS mdeed ludicrous. Nevertheless, it is very important to know how typical such a coerced dialogue might be, and how often the non-English speaker in fact yields to it. J The author uses this term to denote undocumented persons; see, e.g., “Mexican illegal alien” (p. 81).
602
Book reviews
to tilt: legal foundation for provision of interpreters. Chapter 4 describes how dsta on interpreted proceedings were recorded and transcribed.4 Chapters 5-8 are the heart of Berk-Seligson’s book, where she presents her research results. For many reasons, chapter 6 may be both the most interesting chapter for linguists but also the most problematic. In this chapter, the author concentrates on instances in which an interpreter shifts between active and passive verb forms in going from the source to the target language. The analysis is complicated by the fact that several factors may influence the choice of verb forms in interpreted speech. In Spanish, as is well-known, there are many ways to express passive voice, such as (1) the reflexive passive (se rompi el VQSO,‘the glass broke’), (2) the dative of interest (se 1~ rompz6 el vaso, ‘the glass broke on him’), and (3) the full ser passive (4 vaso fue roto por Juan, ‘the glass was broken by John’). However, the full passive form, which is the closest grammatical parallel to the English passive construction, rarely occurs in spoken colloquial Spanish. 5 En everyday Spanish, one factor which influences the choice among these forms is the speaker’s view of an agent’s responsibility for the action. As Berk-Seligson has shown in earlier research with Costa Rican Spanish speakers, in the examples above, if the speaker believes that the agent broke the glass by accident or inadvertently, it is more likely that the speaker will describe the event using the dative of interest or reflexive passive, rather than an active verb. Extending her earlier research, the author sets up a hypothetical scale of imputed responsibility according to the speaker’s choice of Spanish verb form. (See figure 6.1, p. 103.)” The problem for interpreters begins when the complex Spanish system of alternative passive forms is confronted with legal English, larded as it is with full (‘was broken by John’) or truncated (‘was broken’, ‘got broken’) passives. In rendering these into Spanish, the interpreter’s choice of verb forms will be influenced not only by factors at work in ordinary discourse, namely (1) a .frequency dimension (awareness that full passives are rare in spoken Spanish) and (2) a discourse dimension (degree of perceived agent responsibility). In addition, the interpreter may be constrained by (3) a syntactic-parallelism dimension (in rapid, particularly simultaneous interpretation, it may be easier to maintain syntactic parallelism rather than switch forms). The first and third dimensions will conflict in instances where an English full passive form is to be interpreted into Spanish. In her analysis of active/passive Lifts, Berk-Seligson focusses exclusively on one of these three dimens; G-Y-- the imputed dkourse motivation - and 4 This chapter is overly detailed in some respects, fiw example, in the description of scheduling problems. In other areas, it is less detailed than necessary: there is no discussion of intertranscriber reliability. 5 See pp. 10040’1. 6 This hypothetical scale deserves testing, particularly on other dialects of Spanish.
Book reviews
603
ignores the potential influence of the other two. In her view, interpreters tend to reduce agent blame by use of the passive voice and to attach blame by use of the active voice, regardless of the actual voice of the source language verb. In order to test the author’s discourse-based hypothesis and examine the role of the other two dimensions, it would be important to have quantitative as well as ethnographic information on active/passive shifts: the form of the verb in the source language, the form of the verb in the target language, and whether certain patterns of shifts tend to occur only in a certain direction, e.g., more passives rendered as actives when the target language is Spanish. Quantitative analysis of shifts could reveal the influence of language specific grammatical factors. Patterns of shifts could also reveal an interpreter’s training, since some trainers counsel interpreters to render English full passives as Spanish actives in order to avoid stilted-sounding Spanish. The quantitative data that the author presents in chapter 6 group many categories together and thus, do not aid in sorting out the influence of language-specific grammatical factors versus over-riding discourse concerns (see table 6.1). Furthermore, in discussing these data, the author observes that English passives were rendered equivalently in Spanish (with ser + past participle) 21.1% of the time, belying the notion that true passives are rare in spoken Spanish (p. I 17). But interpreted Spanish is a special sort of Spanish; statistics on the frequency of full passives in this context are not necessarily an accurate measure of their frequency in other types of speech, due to the possible influence of tendencies toward syntactic parallelism. In summary, chapter 6 sets out a number of intriguing areas for further research on the syntax and discourse of interpreted proceedings. The author’s claim that shifting between passive and active forms in interpretation is a function of ‘psychological reasons’ can only be verified by considering both grammatical and discourse factors which may influence interpreters’ verb choice. Chapter 7, like chapter 5, focusses on various sorts of pragmatic changes interpreters introduce. The chapter includes a general figure on how frequently lengthening occurs in interpreters’ renditions of Spanish testimony, but there are no specific data on how often different types of lengthening techniques occur. This gap in the analysis is important because certain types of lengthening - hedges and rephrasings - may lead the jury to viebl;a witness negatively; other techniques (for example, expressing ‘understood’ material and avoiding ellipsis) may’ cause the witness to appear more certz:in. These latter techniques, like politeness, may be viewed positively by a jury. Chapter 8 analyzes listener ratings of interpreted testimony. Variables tested were: t I) politeness markers, (2) ‘hyperformal’ speech, (3) hedges, (4) passive versus active forms in English, (5) interruptions of either the attorney or (6) 0: the witness, and (7) prompting of the witness. The large number of subjects
tm
Book review
and attention to design make this an impressive experiment. Nevertheless, statistically significalnt results were not obtained for ali variables. Moreo-*et=, the author’s report of listener ratings is marred by erroneous captions on
some of the tables and a lack of illustrative tables for the last three variables.’ The author thoughtfully has provided transcripts of the experimental tapes in an Appendix, so that readers may judge for themselves whether the recorded interpretations accurately portrayed the variables of interest. Although tapes were designed to be similar except for the experimental variable, in the transcript of Tape A.6.1 (non-polite interpretation), there is considerably more speech than in the counterpart ‘polite’ interpretation. For listeners as a whole, interpreted testimony which included politeness markers and ‘hyperformal’ speech contributed to more positive ratings. Interpreters’ interruptions of attorneys caused attorneys to be viewed as less competent. When interpreters included hedges, listeners as a whole rated the witness as less convincing, competent, trustworthy, and intelligent. But hedges carried no significantly negative connotations for Hispanic listeners. In the rating task, the author also queried whether interpretation of the witness’ Spanish speech with the English passive construction would cause listeners to rate the witness negatively. In general, this hypothesis was poorly supported, particularly among the Hispanic listeners, who might be expected to be sensitive to the discrepancy in forms between the original and the interpreted version. Chapter 9 provides a case round-up from state and federal courts of appeal. For attorneys mounting an appeal, the chapter is a useful starting point for legal research, because it highlights those cases in which specific interpreter behaviors were at least a partial basis for the appellate court’s decision. The interpreter’s poor performance has been alleged to be grounds for reversal where there was (I) no oath sworn by the interpreter, (2) summary rather than verbatim interpreting, (3) lack of judge voir-dire on interpreter qualifications, or (4) derisory comments made on the record by the interpreter about the defendant. The chapter shows that the absolute number of appeals based on interpreter behavior has increased during the last two decades. The increase probably reflects not only problems with interpreter behavior, as the author notes, but also simply the fact that, since the passage of the Court Interpreters Act, interpreters are more often involved in the judicial process. As interpreted proceedings become more frequent, it is !ikely that more disputes among courtroom participants over interpreting inaccuracies will occur, such as the one over ‘La Vado’ (pp. 2 13-214). In Hernandez V. New York, 111 S.Ct. 1859 (1991), the U.S. Supreme Court recently determined that 7 Typographica: reversal of the extremes on the l-7 scale in tables 8.4, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, and 8.10 are confusing. The captions should read: ‘(b) Scores for each attribute range between 1 and 7, 7 being the most positive evaluation and I being the most negative’.
Book review
605
prosecutors may properly exclude bilingual prospective jurors who seem hesitant to adhere only to the English (interpreted) version of Spanish courtroom testimony; the Court found that their exclusion violates neither prohibitions against racial bias in jury selection nor the constitutional doctrine of Equal Protection. In a strongly worded dissent, Justices Stevens and iih~shdi warned that the majority’s view may condone race bias in jury selection under the guise of language considerations. In fact, as an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in Hernandez amply demonstrates, prospective jurors who hesitate are being honest, for the prosecutor’s demand flies in the face of much psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research on language comprehension and use in bilingual communities. 8 Berk-Seligson shows, in chapter 8, that by and large, bilingual evaluators are affected by speech in the original language; these listeners may not be expected to merely ignore a witness’ Spanish testimony. Finally, the book’s several appendices provide worthwhile information on federal and state statutes providing for court interpreters, as well as standard oaths and ethical standards which apply to interpreters.Q 5. Concllusion
In summary, Berk-Seligson’s book is a useful compendium of case-law, statutory provisions and empirical research on how Spanish/English interpreters function in U.S. courtrooms. Her remarks about interpreters’ unwitting alterations in the pragmatic effect of witnesses’ testimony must surely find their way into interpreter training programs and eventually, into certification exams. Legal practitioners will find this volume a valuable source book for starting research toward an appellate brief based on interpreter behavior; the book provides persuasive evidence that both languages should be recorded at the initial proceeding in order to lay the groundwork for appeal. Lastly, the book sets the stage for further comparative linguistic research on the syntax and pragmatics of Spanish and English. This research will in turn, contribute to enhancement of language use in the bilingual courtroom.
A Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Amicus Brief in /fern&e= V.Neno York, 111 SCt. 1859 (No. 89-7645). V Legal practitioners searching for cases on interpreters will be disappointed to find that the author’s case list (pp. 292-293) contains a number of editing errors. The title of the Gurdiuna case is listed erroneously, several of the federal court of appeal cases are cited without information on the circuit, other cases have no page numbers and Mercure v. A.G. Suskatchewn (which should be cited as 1 SC.. IX.234 (1988)) has only a date. In the text, similar problems sometimes occur in citation of statutes.
599
does seem a constant across Japanese and U.S. cultures is that characteristics and patterns of talk associated with women and with men are not only heard as different but as of different value. An English-speaking businessman, who assumes that the successful businessman talks with, say, blunt assertion, might think that Japanese businessmen speak not only differently but also ineffectually. Other topics in the book include differences in teenagers’ use of dialect vs. standard forms, person references of Japanese and American children (part of [de’s impressive and programmatic studies of gender and language), linguistic politeness, deletion of the particles u,a and ga, terms used to talk about wornelI, and written discourse. Many of the authors in this collection refer to cultural differences between Japan and the U.S. or European countries. The editors perhaps could have helped provide a context for these discussions by providing a systematic discussion of these differences. As it is, the reader will need to make her or his own outline of those differences by drawing upon all the articles and on other sources. Also left to the reader is the task of sorting out the relevant importance (to speakers, to sociolinguistics) of the varying aspects of speech studied in these essays. (For example, Japanese speakers will be much mc *e attuned to the importance of the differing use of particles such as zo and ze and no and MYI.)Since the editors are both active, respected scholars in the field of language and women, they wou!d have been able to provide these kinds of framework. On the the other hand, had the editors tried to provide a framework within which to study Japanese women’s speech, they would perhaps have prematurely imposed a unity that doesn’t exist now in the literature. Rather, we have here pragmatic analyses, some descriptive sociolinguistics studies, and some feminist analyses. The authors have fulfilled their goal of bringing together in one book a wide variety of studies of Japanese language and gender.
Susan Bddkligson, The bilingual courtroom: Court interpreters in the judicial process. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 299~~. US $57.50 (cloth).
Reviewed by Mel Greenlee” I. htroductior~
In this volume, Susan Berk-Seligson provides a seminal treatment of language use in a population whose presence in U.S. courtrooms seems to be increas* Correspondence address: M. Greenlee, Cslifornia Appellate Project, I Ecker San Francisco, CA 94105, USA.
Place,Suite400,
600
Book reviews
ing, but who have, until now, been regarded as invisible. Her basic thesis is undeniable: far from acting as mere conduits or translation machines, interpreters can and do affect the judicial process. Since interpreters affect not only lexical, but also discourse meaning, the author argues that interpreters’ training needs to be upgraded to reflect those features which linguistic research has identified over the past 10-15 years as important components of contextual meaning. Only by paying attention to interpreters (rather than pretending they are not there, as the law often seems to do) can non-English speakers be accorded their own rightful voice in U.S. courtrooms. 2. Audience for the book Ideally, Berk-Seligson’s findings could be useful to readers in three professions: interpreters (and those who train interpreters), linguists and attorneys. However, since these groups do not share a common vocabulary for discussing language, and because the author’s exposition does not assume a uniform level of background knowledge in the three fields, some readers may come away dissatisfied. The author acknowledges (p. 97) that readers without a background in linguistics may be unable to follow certain sections of the book. Some important linguistic terms are minimally explained or relegated to remote onesentence footnotes; see e.g., the discussion of register and the significance of differences in register on pages 169-170. The author’s definition of diglossiu (ch. 2, n. 3) would not inform an unsophisticated reader that diglossia is not itself one of the two contextually-bound speech varieties in a diglossic community. Readers may also be confused by the author’s misuse of grammatical terms and by some mistakes in editing translated segments. For example, the author describes verbs in “the progressive moo&’ (p. 1IO), rather than as having progressive aspect. On page 1 E5, there is a good example of both on error in translation and misapplication of the grammatical term case: “He says at one point, ‘As I’ve indicated . . . the defendant has pleaded not guilty,’ using the present perfect tense and active case for the verb ‘indicate.’ The interpreter renders this as, ‘Como se ha indicado, el dcfendiente se ha declarado culpable en esas acusaciones. “’
Lack of the word no before culpable (i.e., ‘not’) in the Spanish rendition surely is an editing error . l The correct translation of this sequence can be found on page I 14 (Example 6.3). Apart from these flaws, Berk-Seligson’s book is a highly readable introduction to a complex and interesting subject. A similar slip in editing renders Example 5.23 (pp.76-77) confusing. Apparently, the word in the witness’s Spanish utterance should be cumioneta; otherwise the interpreter’s explanation of the two possible meaning:; of camioneta is irrelevant. l
troque
601
3. Methods Berk-Seligson arrives at her conclusions about the state of interpreting through ( I ) analysis of tape recordings of S anish/English interpreters in the courtroom and (2) an experimental study in which listeners rated participants in interpreted proceedings for selected characteristics. Excerpts or portions of dialogues from the first ana!ysis provide a sample of interpreter errors, which vary from minor to truly egregious. Unfortunately, the reader is Icft wondering how often such mistakes occur, or whether an interpreter’s level of certification affects the type or rate of interpreting errors, because there is no overall quantitative analysis of mistakes in interpreting. 2 Likewise unfortunate are two doubtlessly unintentional tendencies toward stereotypes. The first concerns gender. The author notes that most interpreters are women (ch. 1, n. 1) and refers to interpreters throughout the book as ‘she’. Attorneys and judges, on the other hand, are referred to as male, even though 4the author’s own data contradict this impression (see Example 5.3, pp. 58-59). A single, uniform pronoun usage for all would be far preferable to this not-sosubtle relegation of women to the courtroom’s lower ranks. The second tendency concerns Latinos. Although the author points out in the introductory chapter that Spanish interpreters are used in a wide range of criminal and administrative proceedings for a variety of witnesses, a great many of the interpreting excerpts in her book concern Spanish-speaking witnesses who are undocumented persons testifying about incidents of smuggling. Precisely because the interpreting vignettes are telling examples of interpreter errors, these excerpts are likely to capture more attention than general statements about witnesses. Readers’ seiective attention, in turn, could lead to the erroneous inference that most people who need Spanish interpreters in U.S. courtrooms are ‘illegal aliensI This false impression could have been avoided through a more representative selection of excerpts and a more appropriate use of descriptive terms. 4. Orgunkation
qf the hook
The book’s first three chapters provide a basic introduction to the nature and scope of interpreted proceedings in reprcscntative regions of the U.S., to sociolinguistics as a discipline, particularly ;iththis relates to legal settings, and 2 For example. the prompted exchange quoted on pirgt‘s 61-63, in which the defendant’s guilty plea is extracted from her only after three courtroom p,rrescipants - the judge, the defense attorney and the interpreter - all engage in extcnsiwe prompting. IS mdeed ludicrous. Nevertheless, it is very important to know how typical such a coerced dialogue might be, and how often the non-English speaker in fact yields to it. J The author uses this term to denote undocumented persons; see, e.g., “Mexican illegal alien” (p. 81).
602
Book reviews
to tilt: legal foundation for provision of interpreters. Chapter 4 describes how dsta on interpreted proceedings were recorded and transcribed.4 Chapters 5-8 are the heart of Berk-Seligson’s book, where she presents her research results. For many reasons, chapter 6 may be both the most interesting chapter for linguists but also the most problematic. In this chapter, the author concentrates on instances in which an interpreter shifts between active and passive verb forms in going from the source to the target language. The analysis is complicated by the fact that several factors may influence the choice of verb forms in interpreted speech. In Spanish, as is well-known, there are many ways to express passive voice, such as (1) the reflexive passive (se rompi el VQSO,‘the glass broke’), (2) the dative of interest (se 1~ rompz6 el vaso, ‘the glass broke on him’), and (3) the full ser passive (4 vaso fue roto por Juan, ‘the glass was broken by John’). However, the full passive form, which is the closest grammatical parallel to the English passive construction, rarely occurs in spoken colloquial Spanish. 5 En everyday Spanish, one factor which influences the choice among these forms is the speaker’s view of an agent’s responsibility for the action. As Berk-Seligson has shown in earlier research with Costa Rican Spanish speakers, in the examples above, if the speaker believes that the agent broke the glass by accident or inadvertently, it is more likely that the speaker will describe the event using the dative of interest or reflexive passive, rather than an active verb. Extending her earlier research, the author sets up a hypothetical scale of imputed responsibility according to the speaker’s choice of Spanish verb form. (See figure 6.1, p. 103.)” The problem for interpreters begins when the complex Spanish system of alternative passive forms is confronted with legal English, larded as it is with full (‘was broken by John’) or truncated (‘was broken’, ‘got broken’) passives. In rendering these into Spanish, the interpreter’s choice of verb forms will be influenced not only by factors at work in ordinary discourse, namely (1) a .frequency dimension (awareness that full passives are rare in spoken Spanish) and (2) a discourse dimension (degree of perceived agent responsibility). In addition, the interpreter may be constrained by (3) a syntactic-parallelism dimension (in rapid, particularly simultaneous interpretation, it may be easier to maintain syntactic parallelism rather than switch forms). The first and third dimensions will conflict in instances where an English full passive form is to be interpreted into Spanish. In her analysis of active/passive Lifts, Berk-Seligson focusses exclusively on one of these three dimens; G-Y-- the imputed dkourse motivation - and 4 This chapter is overly detailed in some respects, fiw example, in the description of scheduling problems. In other areas, it is less detailed than necessary: there is no discussion of intertranscriber reliability. 5 See pp. 10040’1. 6 This hypothetical scale deserves testing, particularly on other dialects of Spanish.
Book reviews
603
ignores the potential influence of the other two. In her view, interpreters tend to reduce agent blame by use of the passive voice and to attach blame by use of the active voice, regardless of the actual voice of the source language verb. In order to test the author’s discourse-based hypothesis and examine the role of the other two dimensions, it would be important to have quantitative as well as ethnographic information on active/passive shifts: the form of the verb in the source language, the form of the verb in the target language, and whether certain patterns of shifts tend to occur only in a certain direction, e.g., more passives rendered as actives when the target language is Spanish. Quantitative analysis of shifts could reveal the influence of language specific grammatical factors. Patterns of shifts could also reveal an interpreter’s training, since some trainers counsel interpreters to render English full passives as Spanish actives in order to avoid stilted-sounding Spanish. The quantitative data that the author presents in chapter 6 group many categories together and thus, do not aid in sorting out the influence of language-specific grammatical factors versus over-riding discourse concerns (see table 6.1). Furthermore, in discussing these data, the author observes that English passives were rendered equivalently in Spanish (with ser + past participle) 21.1% of the time, belying the notion that true passives are rare in spoken Spanish (p. I 17). But interpreted Spanish is a special sort of Spanish; statistics on the frequency of full passives in this context are not necessarily an accurate measure of their frequency in other types of speech, due to the possible influence of tendencies toward syntactic parallelism. In summary, chapter 6 sets out a number of intriguing areas for further research on the syntax and discourse of interpreted proceedings. The author’s claim that shifting between passive and active forms in interpretation is a function of ‘psychological reasons’ can only be verified by considering both grammatical and discourse factors which may influence interpreters’ verb choice. Chapter 7, like chapter 5, focusses on various sorts of pragmatic changes interpreters introduce. The chapter includes a general figure on how frequently lengthening occurs in interpreters’ renditions of Spanish testimony, but there are no specific data on how often different types of lengthening techniques occur. This gap in the analysis is important because certain types of lengthening - hedges and rephrasings - may lead the jury to viebl;a witness negatively; other techniques (for example, expressing ‘understood’ material and avoiding ellipsis) may’ cause the witness to appear more certz:in. These latter techniques, like politeness, may be viewed positively by a jury. Chapter 8 analyzes listener ratings of interpreted testimony. Variables tested were: t I) politeness markers, (2) ‘hyperformal’ speech, (3) hedges, (4) passive versus active forms in English, (5) interruptions of either the attorney or (6) 0: the witness, and (7) prompting of the witness. The large number of subjects
tm
Book review
and attention to design make this an impressive experiment. Nevertheless, statistically significalnt results were not obtained for ali variables. Moreo-*et=, the author’s report of listener ratings is marred by erroneous captions on
some of the tables and a lack of illustrative tables for the last three variables.’ The author thoughtfully has provided transcripts of the experimental tapes in an Appendix, so that readers may judge for themselves whether the recorded interpretations accurately portrayed the variables of interest. Although tapes were designed to be similar except for the experimental variable, in the transcript of Tape A.6.1 (non-polite interpretation), there is considerably more speech than in the counterpart ‘polite’ interpretation. For listeners as a whole, interpreted testimony which included politeness markers and ‘hyperformal’ speech contributed to more positive ratings. Interpreters’ interruptions of attorneys caused attorneys to be viewed as less competent. When interpreters included hedges, listeners as a whole rated the witness as less convincing, competent, trustworthy, and intelligent. But hedges carried no significantly negative connotations for Hispanic listeners. In the rating task, the author also queried whether interpretation of the witness’ Spanish speech with the English passive construction would cause listeners to rate the witness negatively. In general, this hypothesis was poorly supported, particularly among the Hispanic listeners, who might be expected to be sensitive to the discrepancy in forms between the original and the interpreted version. Chapter 9 provides a case round-up from state and federal courts of appeal. For attorneys mounting an appeal, the chapter is a useful starting point for legal research, because it highlights those cases in which specific interpreter behaviors were at least a partial basis for the appellate court’s decision. The interpreter’s poor performance has been alleged to be grounds for reversal where there was (I) no oath sworn by the interpreter, (2) summary rather than verbatim interpreting, (3) lack of judge voir-dire on interpreter qualifications, or (4) derisory comments made on the record by the interpreter about the defendant. The chapter shows that the absolute number of appeals based on interpreter behavior has increased during the last two decades. The increase probably reflects not only problems with interpreter behavior, as the author notes, but also simply the fact that, since the passage of the Court Interpreters Act, interpreters are more often involved in the judicial process. As interpreted proceedings become more frequent, it is !ikely that more disputes among courtroom participants over interpreting inaccuracies will occur, such as the one over ‘La Vado’ (pp. 2 13-214). In Hernandez V. New York, 111 S.Ct. 1859 (1991), the U.S. Supreme Court recently determined that 7 Typographica: reversal of the extremes on the l-7 scale in tables 8.4, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, and 8.10 are confusing. The captions should read: ‘(b) Scores for each attribute range between 1 and 7, 7 being the most positive evaluation and I being the most negative’.
Book review
605
prosecutors may properly exclude bilingual prospective jurors who seem hesitant to adhere only to the English (interpreted) version of Spanish courtroom testimony; the Court found that their exclusion violates neither prohibitions against racial bias in jury selection nor the constitutional doctrine of Equal Protection. In a strongly worded dissent, Justices Stevens and iih~shdi warned that the majority’s view may condone race bias in jury selection under the guise of language considerations. In fact, as an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in Hernandez amply demonstrates, prospective jurors who hesitate are being honest, for the prosecutor’s demand flies in the face of much psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research on language comprehension and use in bilingual communities. 8 Berk-Seligson shows, in chapter 8, that by and large, bilingual evaluators are affected by speech in the original language; these listeners may not be expected to merely ignore a witness’ Spanish testimony. Finally, the book’s several appendices provide worthwhile information on federal and state statutes providing for court interpreters, as well as standard oaths and ethical standards which apply to interpreters.Q 5. Concllusion
In summary, Berk-Seligson’s book is a useful compendium of case-law, statutory provisions and empirical research on how Spanish/English interpreters function in U.S. courtrooms. Her remarks about interpreters’ unwitting alterations in the pragmatic effect of witnesses’ testimony must surely find their way into interpreter training programs and eventually, into certification exams. Legal practitioners will find this volume a valuable source book for starting research toward an appellate brief based on interpreter behavior; the book provides persuasive evidence that both languages should be recorded at the initial proceeding in order to lay the groundwork for appeal. Lastly, the book sets the stage for further comparative linguistic research on the syntax and pragmatics of Spanish and English. This research will in turn, contribute to enhancement of language use in the bilingual courtroom.
A Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Commonwealth of Puerto Rico Amicus Brief in /fern&e= V.Neno York, 111 SCt. 1859 (No. 89-7645). V Legal practitioners searching for cases on interpreters will be disappointed to find that the author’s case list (pp. 292-293) contains a number of editing errors. The title of the Gurdiuna case is listed erroneously, several of the federal court of appeal cases are cited without information on the circuit, other cases have no page numbers and Mercure v. A.G. Suskatchewn (which should be cited as 1 SC.. IX.234 (1988)) has only a date. In the text, similar problems sometimes occur in citation of statutes.