Participants' and Interpreters' Perception of the Interpreter's Role in Interpreter-Mediated Investigative Interviews of Minors: Belgium and Italy as a Case

The CO-Minor-IN/QUEST research project (JUST/2011/JPEN/AG/2961, January 2013 – December 2014) studied the interactional dynamics of interpreter-mediated child interviews during the pre-trial phase of criminal procedures. This automatically involves communication with vulnerable interviewees who need extra support for three main reasons: their age (i.e. under 18), native language and procedural status (as either a victim, witness or suspect). An online questionnaire originally distributed in six EU member states targeted professional groups from various areas of work involved in child interviewing, i.e. interpreters, police and justice, child support professionals. Since both closed and open questions were asked in the survey, the results are both of a quantitative and qualitative nature. This enables us to map the existing expertise, beliefs and needs of the main actors in the field of pre-trial child interviewing by using two methods. In this regard, it is interesting to see how representatives of a northern country (Belgium) are distributed differently compared to the ones of a southern country (Italy): in Italy there were many child support workers among the respondents, while in Belgium the justice and policing sector appeared to be the largest group. The number of interpreters appeared, on the contrary, to be much smaller in both countries (39 out of 226 or 17 % and 16 out of 104 or 15 % respectively). This has to do with several factors: firstly, there was the snowball and network distribution method of which the outcomes turned out to be rather unpredictable. Secondly, terminological issues play an important role in Italy where a “mediatore linguistico” or even “mediatore linguistico e culturale” (language mediator or language and cultural mediator) is not always clearly distinguished from an interpreter as such, as it is defined in the rest of Europe. The aim of this contribution is to answer the following questions: how different are the views on the role of the “interpreter” as expressed by the interpreters themselves (in Italy and Belgium), by the child support workers and legal actors in Italy and the legal actors in Belgium? Consequently, do they also express different needs? If this is the case, how can they learn from each other and exchange best practices?status: publishe