Locating users of interpretation in the court

The paper discusses the procedure and findings of a research project that studied the perceived impact of literal vs. meaningful renditions in a mock court situation involving Chinese migrants residing in Sydney. We will begin with a description of a research procedure known in linguistics as matched guise and will then continue with discussions of the use of the procedure in the present project including designing the guises, sampling the subjects and formulating a questionnaire. Then there will be discussions and analyses of the data collected from the survey, which were generated with social-sciences statistics software. The findings generated on the basis of the data are discussed in terms of general statistical patterns, and with special regard to the subjects’ perceptions about the solicitor’s professionalism, solicitor’s personality, court milieu, anticipation of the possible final verdict and knowledge of the judicial procedures. We will conclude the paper with a preliminary discussion of what may have contributed to the shaping of the perceptions formed by the subjects.

To the best of our knowledge, the project discussed in this paper is one of the very few that attempts to study the impact on the users of interpreting, hence its academic and professional significance.