Interpreting Intercepted Communication: A Sui Generis Translational Activity

Abstract

Legal wiretapping has gained importance in law enforcement along with the development of information and communication technology. Understanding the language of intercepted persons is essential for the success of a police investigation. Hence, intercept interpreters, as we suggest calling them in this article, are hired. Little is known about this specific work at the interface between language and law. With this article, we desire to contribute to closing this gap by focussing particularly on the translational activity. Our study identifies a fragmented field of research due to the difficulty in accessing workers in this specific field who interpret in a highly confidential phase of criminal investigations. The findings, which are drawn from scarce studies and our empirical data derived from an online questionnaire for a pilot study in Switzerland, demonstrate the wide range of the performed activity intercept interpreting. This article is the first to present translational activity from the perspective of intercept interpreters. The activity differs in many ways from interpretation in court hearings or police interviews. Hence, we suggest categorising interlingual intercept interpretation as a translational activity sui generis and—since previous research has not done justice to the ethical and deontological questions that intercept interpretation raises—advocate for further transdisciplinary research in this field of translation.

Transcribing and translating forensic speech evidence containing foreign languages—An Australian perspective

“…As a starting point, such FTT tasks obviously must be undertaken by people who are speakers of the same foreign language as in the audio, and in Australia and other Anglophone criminal jurisdictions, interpreters and translators are often engaged; similarly, in European countries such as Belgium "sworn translators-interpreters" are engaged to provide the service for legal wiretapping (Salaets et al, 2015), i.e. intercepted communication, while in Switzerland "intercept interpreters" are engaged (Capus and Griebel, 2021;Capus and Grisot, 2022;Capus and Havelka, 2022). American legal interpreting scholars González et al (2012) regard FTT as "one of the most demanding and rapidly growing areas of legal interpretation" (p. 965), and therefore devote an entire chapter to this topic in their seminal volume, Fundamentals of Court Interpretation: Theory, Policy, and Practice.…”

“…In the US context, González et al (2012) assert that once the translation is entered into evidence without objection, "defense attorneys lose the opportunity to appeal, challenging the reliability of the evidence, and the LEP [Limited English Proficient] defendant faces a greater risk for wrongful conviction" (p. 977). According to Capus and Griebel (2021), intercepted communication is often not transcribed first in Switzerland either, and "different procedures seem to be utilized within the Swiss cantons and police stations regarding whether a transcript is produced in the original language before translation" (Capus and Havelka, 2022;p. 1830).…”

“…FTT is fundamentally a "translational activity sui generis" (Capus and Havelka, 2022;p. 1817), in that it entails an auditory input in the SL and a written output in the TL, which distinguishes it from conventional translation (text input to written output) and conventional interpreting (auditory input to oral output).…”

Ghostwriters of crime narratives: Constructing the story by referring to intercept interpreters’ contributions in criminal case files

“…Hence, despite the importance of the act of co-authoring the initial construction of the narrative, this involvement is not as openly disclosed as it could be. We explain this elision of the intercept interpreters’ authorial contributions to the master narrative as stemming from a lack of professional self-perception among intercept interpreters ( Capus and Havelka, 2022 ). In addition, the legal setting in criminal procedures empowers the police and the prosecutor to investigate and construct the story of the case in line with the legal script.…”

“…In fact, through her interpretation, Huppert does not merely mechanically translate one Arabic word into a French word. As an intercept interpreter, she does what intercept interpreters do: they select information, decipher codes, attribute importance to some parts of the intercepted conversation, neglect other parts, paraphrase or summarize sequences of the intercepted conversations, add contextual knowledge, provide their own interpretations of unclear statements when transforming them into written transcripts of translated wiretap records (TWRs; Capus and Havelka, 2022 ; Drugan, 2020 : 314; González Rodríguez, 2015 : 114; Nunn, 2010 ; Park and Bucholtz, 2009 : 31). Intercept interpreters often (but not exclusively) present the content of a TWR as a seemingly word-for-word translation and transcription of original conversation that is structured as a dialog between two participants.…”