Legal Speech Acts In Courtroom And Strategies For Court Interpreting

This paper studies the realization of legal speech acts within the information structure of courtroom discourses. Courtroom discourse may be, to a great extent, considered as a cluster of various speech acts. As it is marked with outstanding characteristics as extemporaneous, interactive and normative, it may be quite difficult to solve the dilemma between abiding by the judicial requirements and the inevitable subjective intervention. A good understanding of the different felicity conditions from which courtroom speech acts take shape as well as their constitutive rules will enable the interpreters better to meet the challenges under such a linguistic context.According to such structure, each legal discourse has a core proposition consisting of a series of subordinate information knots, which symbolize the relationship between information units made up of propositions. Each information unit contains a number of information elements. This paper attempts to find out the connections between the LSA and the changes of information elements.Observing the changes of information elements, the influential factors can be categorized into objective and subjective. Objective influential factors, in the present study, refer to differences between two languages and between legal Chinese and legal English; while subjective factors are further classified into translator's preference and misunderstanding of the source text.Furthermore, such changes have affected the realization of LSA in courtroom discourses by means of affecting the distribution of information in a proposition or through addition or loss of information elements or information knots. These changes, however, directly influence the achievement of "legal equivalence" between the ST and TT. The data collected are drawn from the court trials in the legal corpus, for part of which quantitative analysis has been adopted. The analysis of all the extracts from courtroom discourses reveals that changes of information elements are unavoidable but patterns can be summarized, which would be beneficial to the development of court interpreting in the future.