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Garment, or Upper-Garment? A Matter of Interpretation?

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International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In an adversarial common law courtroom, where one party tries to defeat the other by using words as weapons, polysemous words more often than not pose a problem to the court interpreter. Unlike in dyadic communication, where ambiguity can be easily clarified with the speaker by the hearer, court interpreters’ freedom to clarify with speakers is to a large extent restricted by their code of ethics. Interpreters therefore can only rely on the context for disambiguating polysemous words. This study illustrates the problem of polysemy in an interpreter-mediated rape trial. It exemplifies how the interpreter’s goal to avoid contradictions by making her interpretation of a polysemous word consistent with the preceding context runs counter to that of the bilingual cross-examiner, whose primary goal is to identify inconsistencies in the hostile witness’s testimony in order to discredit him. This study also manifests a denial of the interpreter’s latitude in the interpretation of contextual clues and her loss of power in a courtroom with the presence of other bilinguals.

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Notes

  1. Percentage of criminal cases conducted in Chinese in 2011:

    Court of First Instance—26.8 %; District Court—32.9 %; Magistrates' Courts—78.6 %.

  2. The appeal case (CACC153/2010) between the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKSAR) and Ng Pak Lun is an example of DARTS serving as evidence of misinterpretation, which however had gone unnoticed in court as the judge and counsel for both sides in this case were all English-speaking expatriates. It was during the review of the DARTS transcript necessitated by an appeal against the conviction that the interpretation problem was uncovered, which subsequently led to the conviction being set aside by the Court of Appeal and to a trial de novo.

  3. I am indebted to the High Court Registrar of the Judiciary of Hong Kong for granting me access to the DARTS recordings of court proceedings, and the Leung Kau Kui Research and Teaching Endowment Fund of The University of Hong Kong for funding this project in part.

  4. Romanisation of Cantonese characters in this study is based on Jutping, a Cantonese Romanisation system developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. This system distinguishes 6 tones in Cantonese and the number at the end of a syllable is a tone marker.

  5. I witnessed the empanelling of the jury on the first day of this trial as I took my students to the High Court for a visit.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Eva Nga Shan Ng

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  1. Eva Nga Shan Ng
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Correspondence to Eva Nga Shan Ng.

Appendix: Abbreviations and Transcription Symbols

Appendix: Abbreviations and Transcription Symbols

1.1 Abbreviations

J Judge, I Interpreter, D Defendant, DC Defence counsel, PC Prosecution counsel, W Witness.

1.2 Transcription Symbols

=:

latched utterances, with no pause between the end of one utterance and the start of the next (i.e. no pause between turns)

::

a colon indicates prolongation of the immediately prior sound. The length of the row of colons indicates the length of the prolongation

< >:

angle brackets contain transcriber’s descriptions rather than transcriptions

(2):

a number in parentheses indicates the length of a pause in seconds

(.):

a dot in parentheses indicates a brief pause of less than a second

[:

left square brackets indicate the start of an interruption and the utterance which is interrupted

boldface :

words in boldface represent elements under discussion in this paper

CAPS:

words in capital letters indicate a louder voice relative to the adjacent talk

Italics :

words in italics are the author’s transliterations/translations of Chinese utterances/back-translation of the interpreter’s Chinese rendition

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Ng, E.N.S. Garment, or Upper-Garment? A Matter of Interpretation?. Int J Semiot Law 26, 597–613 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9290-9

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