Translanguaging in Court Proceedings: How Interpreter Pedagogy Needs to Address Monolingual Ideologies in Court Interpreting That Delegitimize Litigants’ Voices

The majority of court proceedings are based on monolingual ideologies that assume that the court is speaking one, specific, bounded language and the litigant another. Thus, interpreting processes in this context are framed as an L-B to L-A interchange, a bridge between two linguistically and culturally discrete entities. In increasingly superdiverse societies, however, court interpreters are finding that their clients do not always respect these rigid boundaries, often engaging instead in what has become to be known as translanguaging, a form of linguistically fluid, hybrid, and often creative discourse that sources all the client’s (para)linguistic repertoires, acquired throughout their personal and working life experiences. Drawing on preliminary research, this article explores how monolingual biases appear to persist in community or public-service interpreting and suggests that interpreters are little prepared to deal with translanguaging practices. Moreover, findings suggest that such a phenomenon needs to be addressed in interpreter training pedagogy