14th August 2022
Translation errors in police interviews could send innocent people to jail
Picture this. You are in a foreign country. The police arrest you and realise that you don’t speak the language. So, they organise someone to translate. If you’re lucky, the person they contact is a professional interpreter. If you’re unlucky, the person is a multilingual police officer who happens to speak your language just well enough to scrape through an interview. Either way, you are now having to talk through someone else.
Does this interpreter-mediated interviewing put you at a disadvantage? If so, how much? The answer to this lies at the intersection of criminal psychology and cognitive linguistics, where researchers have realised that interpreters are an overlooked barrier between suspects and their freedom.
One of the most active researchers looking at these issues is Luna Filipović, a professor of language and cognition based at the University of East Anglia. She has been studying the effects of multilingual police interviews for more than a decade.
She writes that having someone to translate can be taken for granted, and that it’s enough to make a police interview fair, but this is incorrect. It ignores how difficult translation is, and the problems that come from the logistics of translating in typically high-pressure, highly emotional legal settings.
An interpreter might not speak both languages equally well, so important words or descriptions can get mistranslated. Some words don’t have equivalents, and turns of phrase translated literally can become nonsensical or misleading. Then there’s the issue that if everything is translated without emotion, words lose context… but acting things out theatrically can equally distort how statements are perceived.[…]
Read more here: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/translation-errors-in-police-interviews-could-send-innocent-people-to-jail/
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