Communication failure in court interpreting within a linguosemiotic approach: a mismatch of expectations

DOI

10.2991/ismge-19.2019.38How to use a DOI?

Keywords

court interpreting, communication failure, interactional linguistics, linguosemiotics, legal discourse, translation

Abstract

This article analyzes interpreting of spoken court discourse with a focus on communication failures and their origins. Previous research shows that connection between communication failure and the judiciary’s view on interpreter’s role makes a noticeable impact on how legal experts evaluate translation and interpreter’s credibility. This article presents, therefore, a holistic view on the sources of misunderstandings between the interlocutors in the legal context. This paper addresses a few major questions: Does communication failure always mean that there has been inaccurate interpreting and vice versa? What possibilities do interpreters have to anticipate and to prevent communication breakdown? This paper draws upon a schematic representation of several stages of interpreter-mediated court dialog where communication failure might originate and outlines that some of communication failures lay outside interpreter’s domain, whereas others arise within his field of expertise. The study is conducted within the framework of linguistic semiotics and the paper discusses possible reasons for interpreting-conditioned communication failures in relation to five semiotic dimensions of the language – perceptics, semantics, syntactics, denotatics and pragmatics.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Alina Frantsuzova
PY  - 2019/07
DA  - 2019/07
TI  - Communication failure in court interpreting within a linguosemiotic approach:  a mismatch of expectations
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st International Scientific Practical Conference "The Individual and Society in the Modern Geopolitical Environment" (ISMGE 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 193
EP  - 201
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ismge-19.2019.38
DO  - 10.2991/ismge-19.2019.38
ID  - Frantsuzova2019/07
ER  -