Accuracy of court interpreting : a study of the interpretation of English questions into Arabic

Questions in the courtroom are used strategically to accuse, provoke, argue and ridicule the defendant/witness. These purposes are realised pragmatically through the question form and prosodic delivery. For example, although modal interrogatives are conventionally used to make requests, they are used as commands in the courtroom. As Arabic has no direct equivalents for most of the coercive types of questions, interpreters, therefore, are required to interpret them pragmatically by producing pragmatic equivalence irrespective of the syntactic form. This task is challenging, according to the literature on court interpreting. Therefore, the study hypothesized that Arabic interpreters, like their Spanish colleagues in Hale’s (2004) study, would most likely render the propositional content of the courtroom questions at the expense of the intended/pragmatic meaning. To explore the research hypothesis, the thesis used a combination of empirical and theoretical approaches. Through the theoretical approach, the similarities and differences between Arabic and English questions with reference to their formation and function were investigated. This was undertaken in the light of relevant pragmatic theories, such as speech act theory. Based on these theories, a theoretical model was devised to be utilised to achieve three objectives: First, to formulate pragmatic equivalence in Arabic for the courtroom questions that were problematic for Arabic interpreters; second, to generate pragmatic equivalents for the pragmatic markers used in the courtroom questions; and third, to devise strategy to maintain in Arabic the register of the courtroom questions. Empirically, the data consisted of spontaneous interpretations of the taxonomy of courtroom questions performed by professional Arabic interpreters in live interpreting sessions (LIS), and the respondents’ views on register-related issues collected through a questionnaire. The Questionnaire also contained 10 taxonomy questions that were translated by the respondents. The interpreters’ renditions were evaluated and assessed to determine their success in delivering the source questions’ illocutionary force, pragmatic markers and register. This was performed with reference to the working model established in the theoretical approach, and against the benchmark of accuracy. The thesis concluded with a number of recommendations for stakeholders, based on the findings of the empirical research