Table Of ContentAcknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Law and Language 3. The Bilingual American Courtroom: A Legal Raison d'Etre 4. Fieldwork Procedures 5. The Ethnography of Bilingual Courtroom 6. Interpreter-Induced Alternation in Pragmatic Blame Avoidance Mechanisms 7. The Intersection of Testimony Styles in Interpreted Judicial Proceedings: Pragmatics and the Lengthening of Testimony 8. The Impact of the Interpreter on Mock Juror Evaluations of Witnesses 9. An Appellate View of Interpreting Issues 10. Recent Developments in the Field of Legal Interpreting Notes References Name Index Subject Index
SynopsisDrawing on more than one hundred hours of taped recordings of Spanish/English court proceedings in federal, state, and municipal courts--along with extensive psycholinguistic research using translated testimony and mock jurors--Susan Berk-Seligson's seminal book presents a systematic study of court interpreters, and raises some alarming, vitally important concerns: contrary to the assumption that interpreters do not affect the contents of court proceedings, they could potentially make the difference between a defendant being found guilty or innocent of a crime.