Teaching And Research On Legal Interpreting: A Hong Kong Perspective

Abstract

Court interpreters have long been a fixture in the bilingual Hong Kong courtroom, where English was once the only official court language and remains dominant to this day especially in the High Court, although litigants appearing in court as witnesses and defendants mostly speak Cantonese. The installation of the Digital Audio Recording and Transcription System (DARTS) in the courts from the mid-1990’s gave birth to a bilingual reporting system, which provides not only verification ensuring a better administration of justice, but also a valuable source of data for the teaching and research of legal interpreting. Based on the recorded court proceedings of nine interpreter-mediated trials in the Hong Kong courtroom, this paper discusses the benefits of using audio courtroom data for pedagogical and scholarly purposes. While the use of real courtroom data as training material helps enhance students’ learning experience, research findings of this data-driven study further shed light on the training needs for interpreter education in the legal setting. This paper investigates the Hong Kong courtroom as an atypical bilingual setting and in the light of the findings makes recommendations for best practice in the courtroom and for institutional and administrative practice.