The TIPp project : developing technological resources based on the exploitation of oral corpora to improve court interpreting

In Spain, new laws have been passed that significantly reinforce procedural guarantees in criminal proceedings, as they provide regulation on the right to translation and interpreting in criminal proceedings as well as on the right to information of an accused person in relation to the subject of the criminal proceedings, so that they can exercise efficiently their right to self-defence. Translation and interpreting thus become an essential element in the right to effective legal protection in the exercise of lawful rights and interests before the courts in order to avoid any state of defencelessness. In the light of this new situation, the research group MIRAS, of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, launched a research project called TIPp (Translation and Interpreting in Criminal Proceedings) aimed at describing the reality of court interpreting and at creating a computer application which comprises all the necessary resources to facilitate court interpreters' performance. These include recommendations for court interpreters and courtroom personnel on interpreters' role and on how to interact with interpreters, monolingual glossaries in Spanish for different contexts, such as certain type of crimes or 'general vocabulary' for criminal trials and a pilot sample of five databases - one in each language combination (English, French, Romanian, Arabic and Chinese from and into Spanish) - containing the problematic units most frequently encountered by court interpreters, as observed in the TIPp corpus. This article explains the design and the methodology used to compile and exploit the corpus, which will be made publicly available, as well as some of the results from the outcomes of this project