Interpreting in court
Abstract
The author offers us a brief analysis of the circumstance under which the work of interpreting is carried out in the Courts of Justice in the Basque Autonomous Community.
Although the coexistence of the two official languages is reflected in the Administration of Justice the use of Basque continues to he minority, for several reasons. This means that the working conditions of the interpreter are not always as good as could be expected, both from material considerations (the lack of an adequate place to work, etc.) and with respect to the low level of credibility which is given to his or her work.
Consecutive interpreting —the use which is made of simultaneous translation is virtually nul— requires three stages: comprehension of the message, memorization of same and, finally, coherent transmission into the target language.
Comprehension
As far as Basque is concerned, this stage implies, on the one hand, the need to know the characteristic language of the judicial environment and of laws (organization, types of trials, terminology, references concerning the case in question, etc.) and on the other, should the witness express him or herself in dialect, the need for the interpreter to understand this, in order to avoid errors of comprehension.
Memorization
The large amount of data which the interpreter must memorize (dates, numerical data, names of people and places, etc.) as well as the importance these have in: legal proceedings, make the learning and use of a note-taking system advisable, in order to be able to reproduce the message as accurately as possible.
Transmission
When the source language is Spanish —the standardized language in the legal world— and the target language is Basque, certain difficulties arise on occasions due to the fact that the latter has not been used traditionally in this area and its standardization is still under way. Finally, when the process is reversed, i.e., Basque to Spanish, the interpreter frequently sees the need for adapting the message to the comprehension of the recipient, without altering the contents of same.
Finally, the author offers us a brief compilation, in the form of an appendix, of the articles which exist in several laws dealing with the subject in question.
