The Impact of Interpreters ’ Linguistic Choices in Bilingual Hearings

Interpreters have an ethical and linguistic responsibility to maintain the legal equivalence of the source language (SL) in the target language (TL), which means respecting the speaker’s language level, style, tone, and intent in the target language. Berk-Seligson (1999), Morris (1999), Alvarez and Vidal (1996), and Hale (1999) assert that good interpreting hinges not only on linguistic content, but also on social, cultural, and psychological variables. Accurate interpreting must reflect both a semantic and a pragmatic view of an utterance if it is to convey the intended meaning of a speaker’s speech act (Yule, 1996). Therefore, interpreters need to pay attention to the context, culture, and situation of witnesses and defendants in order to make sense of their linguistic accounts, maintain legal equivalence, and avoid putting witnesses and defendants at a linguistic disadvantage