Politeness and gender in interpreted police interviews

要旨

This paper discusses the role of gender and linguistic politeness in police interviews mediated by English-Japanese interpreters in Australia. While the role of the interpreter is often assumed to be that of a neutral 'conduit', such expectations have increasingly been found incongruous to the reality of interpreting as dynamic interaction. In the study reported here, police interviews involving seven English-Japanese interpreters, four female and three male, were analysed. Drawing on Wadesjos (1998) framework of interpreter roles, the study illustrates how various aspects of interpreters' social identity, in particular gender, and to some degree sociocultural background, play out in the rendering of the police officer's utterances into Japanese for the Japanese suspect. Although the female interpreters were found to use honorific expressions to a larger extent than male interpreters, instead of drawing any simplistic conclusions relating the linguistic realization of politeness to the gender variable, the paper explores the complexity of relationships among politeness markers, gender and the interpreter's role in the context of police interview. Furthermore, the paper aims to contribute to the improvement of legal interpreting practice by identifying the impact of politeness shifts through interpreting on the efficiency and fairness of the legal process.

主題