Interpreting in court - Alberto Amorrortu

The author offers us a brief analysis of the circumstance under which the work of intelpreting is carried out in the Courts of Justice in the Basque Autonomous Community.

Although the c oexistence of the tuo official languages is reflected in the Administration of Justic e the use of Basque continues to he minority, for sevel al reasons. This means that the working conditions of the interpreter are not aiways as good as could be expected, both frommaterial considerations (the lackof 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, memorisation 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 (organisation, 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.

Memorisation

The large amount of data which the interpreter must memorise (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 0 . order to be able to reproduce the message as accurately as possible.

Transmission

When the source language is Spanish—the standardised language in the legal world and the target language is Basque, certain difficulties arise on occasions 2 due to the fact that the latter has not been used traditionally in this area and its standardisation is still under way. Finally, when the process is reversed, i.e., Basque to Spanish, the interpreter fi equently 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.