Investigating lawyer-interpreter working relations and their impact on the effectiveness of interpreted legal interviews in Australia

Lawyer-client interviews constitute an important stage in the legal process. However, largely due to their private nature, limited studies have been conducted to investigate this particular legal setting. Even less is revealed as to how they are conducted in a multilingual context where an interpreter is present. With the aim to add to the existing knowledge of interpreted interviews, I set out to investigate how interpreting is practised in the legal setting by examining lawyer-interpreter working relations and their impact on the effectiveness of interpreted lawyer-client interviews. Within a theoretical framework that examines the two professionals’ working relations from their interactions and mutual perceptions, I used a mixed research method to collect data at the Legal Aid Commission in the state of New South Wales (Legal Aid NSW), Australia. Specifically, my study included observations of interpreted lawyer-client interviews, involving face-to-face and telephone interpreting, post-observation interviews with the observed lawyers and interpreters, and an online survey of a wider audience of lawyers and interpreters. My findings show that lawyers generally knew how to work with interpreters in most respects: they spoke directly to their clients; they actively coordinated the turns at talk; and they rarely asked interpreters to perform tasks that go beyond the interpreter’s ethical role. However, the effectiveness of their interviews was often impaired when they worked with untrained interpreters who acted unethically, or outside their role. In comparison, trained interpreters with a higher accreditation level generally had a clearer understanding of their professional role and were better at meeting their ethical requirements. In addition, my findings also reveal that when lawyers and interpreters worked over the telephone, their interactions were more similar than different compared to when they worked face-to-face. Although telephone interpreters faced more challenges due to technical issues and a lack of visual interaction, lawyers’ active coordination, such as feeding interpreters with visual cues, counteracted some of the constraints. These findings suggest that to establish sound working relations between the two sets of professionals, in addition to the lawyers knowing how to work with interpreters, it is critical for interpreters to be professionally trained and to act ethically to achieve effective interpreted communication.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2019

Author dc:creator

• Xu, Han

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/

Language dc:language

EN

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/3643

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/61528