Assessment Of Court Interpreting Quality In China:From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Failure

Court interpreting is a complex activity involving language,law,translation,and many other academic disciplines.With the increase of the foreigner-related cases in China year by year,the demand for court interpreters has also been on the rise.As a bridge between different languages,cultures and legal systems,court interpreters play an indispensable role in safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of the parties,ensuring the fairness of legal procedures and maintaining the international image of China's justice system.However,improving the quality of court interpreting is a prerequisite to ensure the full realization of the above-mentioned court proceedings.This thesis approaches court interpreting from the perspective of failures in pragmatics,whereby court interpreters' goal is to interpret from the source to the target language in such a way that the listeners in the target language understand and react to the message in the same way that listeners in the source language would,which has been referred to as “pragmatic equivalence”(Hale 2007).Therefore,the improvement of the quality of court interpreting is conductive to enhancing the judicial efficiency and protecting the defendant's basic litigation rights fairly and justly,which will,to a large extent,solve this recurring problem that people have been suffering a lot during the judicial process(Hale 2010).To be specific,the present study approaches the quality of court interpreting by focusing on the pragmatic failures in court interpreting found in the data collected by means of field work,such failures including misinterpretation of directives,uneven distribution of turns,extensive use of hesitant words,misinterpretation of deixis(main person deixis,time deixis and place deixis)and incorrect addition or omission of discourse markers.It is found that these various types of pragmatic failures committed by the interpreters in the process of court interpreting not only undermined the authority of the presiding judge or the prosecutor,but also altered the language style of the discourse and reduced the efficiency of the court trial,leading to confusion and mistrust of the Chinese legal system by foreign defendants,their relatives and government representatives who appear in court session.In addition,the author has summarized the frequency distribution of each type of pragmatic failure on the basis of previous transcription,tagging and statistics in this thesis,compared the frequency distribution of all pragmatic failures in each corpus and the ratio of these pragmatic failures in the whole courtroom discourse(except the interpreter's contributions to the discourse).This comparative assessment and analysis of the quality of court interpreting in different court cases is expected to contribute a new approach to the study of quality assessment of court interpreting and improving interpreters' performance.