The collaborative and selective nature of interpreting in police interviews with stand-by interpreting

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This study explores interaction in two authentic interpreter-mediated police interviews with suspects. The analysis focuses on the interpreting regime used: stand-by interpreting. The interactional regime in the analysed interviews featured exolingual communication in English between a Spanish-speaking suspect with emerging competencies in English and English-speaking interviewers, with intermittent interpreter participation. Drawing on Conversation Analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, this study analyses how the interpreting regime was negotiated, how it was constructed over the course of the interviews, and the observable function of interpreting episodes. The analysis revealed a markedly collaborative nature of stand-by interpreting, differences in the distribution of interactional power over interpreting episodes among the three participants depending on their activity role and the interview phase, and the multimodal nature of turn-management. Interpreting was used selectively as a resource to either repair or prevent miscommunication, aligning with the way the interpreting regime was set up. Rather than advocating for or against the stand-by mode of interpreting, this paper describes its features in the police interview and highlights both its potential and its risks for communication in interpreter-mediated police interviews as a discourse genre.</jats:p>

Contextual diversity in telephone interpreting: Voices from healthcare interpreters in Scotland

“…Our work is exploratory and our research design does not allow us to generalize our findings to any other areas of interpreting or to any other geographical context. We acknowledge, however, that some of our findings have already emerged in the practice of TI in other settings and parts of the world (e.g., police contexts: Angelelli, 2015;Monteoliva-García, 2017).…”

A Dutch discourse marker in interpreter-mediated police interviewing with drafting: A corpus-based approach to dialogue interpreting

“…Studies focus almost exclusively on police interpreting in legal systems that belong to common law: Australia in Nakane (2014); the United Kingdom in Krouglov (1999), Russell (2001), Gallai (2013Gallai ( , 2017, Blakemore and Gallai (2014), Kredens (2017), Monteoliva-García (2017) and Tipton (2021); and the United Kingdom and the United States in Filipović (2022). Only Komter (2005), Defrancq and Verliefde (2018), and Verliefde and Defrancq (2022) deal with police interpreting in continental Europe, the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively.…”