Доклад М.Гаммала (Австралия)/ Muhammad Y. Gammal (Australia)

[Irina Tivyaeva]

POLICE INTERPRETERS: ANSWERING THE CALL

Muhammad Y. Gammal

Abstract

In multilingual societies, such as Australia, interpreters provide an essential service for both the police and the community. Yet, police interpreting is not perceived as a specialist area and training lags behind. The interpreting profession tends to view legal interpreting as only ‘court interpreting’ and indeed current academic training in legal interpreting stands only for court interpreting. The paper examines the professional context of working for the police: the tasks, the challenges. It argues that the time has come for police interpreting to be examined a specialist area.

Key words: community interpreting, ethics, legal interpreting, police, training.

Introduction

Police interpreting continues to be overshadowed by the more examined and more public specialization of court interpreting (Ozolins: 2010). In the field of legal interpreting, court interpreting has come to denote only or at least mostly court interpreting. Yet, when a case that requires an interpreter reaches the court, the interpreter is only working at the final stages of the case. For prior to its listing and the appearance of the interpreter, another interpreter has been involved from the first minute in what is called the pre-committal process. This is the world of police interpreting (Gamal: 2012). Police interpreting is a complex and sophisticated area in legal interpreting that places unreasonable demands on the interpreter. These demands and challenges are different to those experienced by the court interpreter. More often than not court interpreters have a very good idea about how their day will be planned and when it will come to an end. Police interpreters do not have this luxury.

Training

In the undergraduate community interpreting degree, students examine interpreting contexts in a wide variety of settings that revolve around the settlement experience of newly arrived migrants or overseas visitors varying from tourists to workers. Thus educational, medical, legal, government, banking, industrial relations and consumer affairs are among the main contexts examined. In the postgraduate degree students can choose to specialize in a particular area and usually the choice is between legal or medical. In the legal setting, the emphasis is predominantly on court interpreting where police interpreting is not treated as a specialist area. This focus in the academic training of community interpreters is unsound. For it leaves a significant professional area unexamined and interpreters unprepared for work in what is considered an essential area of community interpreting: police work.
It must be remembered that while court interpreters are booked days and weeks in advance, more often than not, police interpreters are called on the spot and rushed to various locations at odd hours of the day and the night. This work-setting calls for attention to the preparation of interpreters in areas other than the usual linguistic and legal domains. Police interpreters require training to work while standing and moving, while tired and hungry, to interpret under pressure, to make decisions and to interpret in situations where they wished they were not called for. This is an area that deserves more attention. While studies have been conducted on politeness in police interviews (Krouglov: 1999), interpreter-mediated police discourse (Nakane: 2009), the examination of police discourse (Berk-Seligson: 2000) very little work has been done on the actual work of police interpreting, the conditions under which interpreters work or the challenges facing them (Herraez and Rubio :2008). There is a serious lack of case studies in police interpreting. This paper is based on first-hand experience in working for the Australian police force for more than thirty years and is informed by training community interpreters within the Australian legal system for 20 years.

Working for the police

The police recognize the need to work with interpreters and they allow for their use when the need arises. It is now an established practice that in criminal investigations qualified interpreters are required to attend when a police record of interview is conducted or a statement is taken. However, the police have no input neither in the training or preparation of interpreters who work for the force. The police do not have a pool or a register of interpreters that have met their requirements and are deemed appropriately qualified for the task of interpreting for the force. When the need for an interpreter is established, the police discharge their duty by calling on an outside agency to locate and provide an interpreter. When the need arises, the police call an agency that sends the ‘first available interpreter’ and regardless of their qualification, experience, aptitude, availability for the entire job or mental or physical state. As soon as the interpreter accepted the job the agency has also discharged its responsibility of responding to the police call. This situation is not optimal either by the professional agency or by the police.

Interpreting in police settings

Whereas court interpreters sit in comfortable chairs in barristers’ chambers, solicitors’ offices or sit next to a witness before the judge in a highly hierarchical setting, police interpreters work in what seems to be a different world compared to their court counterparts. Apart from the standard police statement that is interpreted over the counter at a police station, the usual statement the police may prepare after speaking with a complainant or a victim or the lengthy record of interview the police may conduct with a defendant or a suspect, the work of police interpreters could see them mobile and working outside the police station. It is settings such as these that interpreters could easily find themselves in unexpected or unexplained situations.
A phone call at 2 am requires an interpreter to be at the police station ASAP. Half- awake the interpreter rushes to the station where he is placed in another police van that turns on the siren and zooms to another location. The interpreter is almost awake. At the address, he is physically rushed to interpret for a senior detective who is investigating an armed robbery that went wrong, horribly wrong. The interpreter is standing next to an injured man outside in the garden on a cold and wet night. Now the interpreter is awake. He interprets everything but he does not know what is going on. He is expected to perform his best as a professional would do. At 3 am he is expected to be at his best: without sufficient sleep, food, coffee or appropriate attire (it is now raining) he is expected to perform well. Unlike their court counterparts who listen to horrible details about crimes committed and injuries sustained, police interpreters have the unenvious experience of seeing it, first hand, and interpreting for the victim/injured person as well. This is not only unreasonable but also unfair for the police are all doing their night shift and are prepared as much as the circumstances allow them. However, it is also unprofessional to plunge the interpreter in medias res without a word of encouragement, a caution or a proper brief.
While community interpreters are qualified and as professionals they endeavor to do their best, a word of encouragement is still expected at 3 am in such unusual circumstances. Equally significant is the word of caution that the case is not simple but complex and it requires some mental fortitude on the part of the interpreter. And finally, a context would be highly appreciated by the interpreter who is trying to do his best under these circumstances. This is a professional area that transcends the teaching and training of community interpreting and goes into training professionals on how to work with interpreters. Again, in the context of police interpreting, little work has been done on training the police to work with interpreters particularly in complex situations such as crime scene investigations, counter terrorism or organized crime. Some of these issues have been addressed by the Improving Police and Legal Interpreting project (ImPli Project ) in Europe in 2012 (www.eulita.eu).

Briefing the interpreter

The issue of not briefing the interpreter has been debated in academic and professional settings over the past four decades and since the introduction of community interpreting professionally in Australia. Till today, both the courts and the police subscribe to the notion that a “fresh interpreter” is the best guarantee for unbiased interpreting. The least your interpreter knows the best the interpreting will be. Interpreters for the police are engaged and work on several complex and sophisticated cases without proper briefing and the police and the judiciary still believe that this is the best working condition to guarantee unbiased or contaminated views by the interpreter.
This notion of uncontaminated views clashes violently with what interpreters perceive as the process of interpreting. Without going too deeply into how interpreters work and the process of interpreting it would suffice to say that interpreters practice decision-making almost every minute in their interpreting task and their learning ability is enhanced by an accelerated process of data gathering and analysis. Furthermore, the interpreting operation involves a self-editing process that continues as long as the interpreting job lasts. Thus to say that a piece of information would contaminate their views is like asking your doctor to figure out what is ailing you without giving him/her any symptoms for fear of contaminating his/her views.
It must also be said that some members of the police lack understanding of the interpreting process and how interpreters work. Professional interpreters need to prepare like any professional in any field. However, due to the fast changing nature of police work, interpreters would, professionally appreciate a context to interpret in. Giving interpreters such context is not and should not be seen as time wasted but rather as time well-spent that will guarantee that the qualified interpreter will make correct linguistic decisions in the course of their interpreting. Professional interpreters will stop and correct themselves and will seek clarifications if and when they believe that the context they are in is too ambiguous. To argue otherwise, or to argue that interpreters could do so, without briefing, is contrary to the fundamental principle of interpreting: that the interpreter should be invisible and communication should be as smooth and natural as possible. Police records of interview as indeed other court procedures where an interpreter is used will show, clearly, if an interpreter has been sufficiently briefed or not.

A context for interpreting

Many people, whether victims or defendants, find talking to the police uncomfortable and strained. The language becomes a tool to explain matters, describe persons, locations and things, hide facts, camouflage events, change details, play down effects and exaggerate actions or simply to mislead the police. To ask the interpreter to just interpret, as if a machine, with no regard to the background of the case is not optimal. To better render a sentence through translation it needs a context. If the police don’t supply it, the interpreter will seek to get it. This changes the rules of the game. Rather than focusing on meaning and self-editing for linguistic and cultural issues the interpreter is now playing a guessing game trying to figure out what it is all about. Experienced interpreters take their task seriously and are professionally prepared to do their best however they do not like surprises and they don't like to play the guessing game. Edwards (1995:17) is quite right is pointing out that “If we know what sort of a case we are to work on, we will have an idea before the case starts of what it may sound like”. She dedicates two full chapters in her book on The Practice of Court Interpreting to “Case Preparation” and sums up her position as “Our motto should be “No surprises””. (1995:17)
In The Tourist (2010) there is a scene where the police interpreter asks for a context before interpreting which is met by police surprise or rather disbelief. This attitude distracts the interpreter who is now slowly but surely realizes that the police do not value their contribution or their intellectual and professional work. Briefing is seen by the interpreting profession as a sign of professional maturity and respect by whosoever engages their services. Likewise, Herraez and Rubio (2008: 141) confirm that in Spain the situation is not much different: “the interpreter in police settings acts in impromptu situations, i.e., with just a few minutes or hours’ notice before they have to interpret and in most cases without previous knowledge of the specific topic in question”.

A team-player but not a team-member

In complex police operations when the police are in need of an extra degree of power, one which can’t be imposed by force but by cultural knowledge they resort to enlisting the interpreter as a team player. This entails letting the interpreter into the task, briefing them on what is happening and what is the objective of the meeting or indeed the entire operation. The interpreter is well-briefed because the police need the interpreter to do a good job. The good job here is quite often a sophisticated one and a task that calls on the interpreter’s experience in linguistic, epistemological, life, cultural and communication skills. It is obvious that the police operation has reached a cul-de-sac.
Experienced interpreters working on live police operations quite often find that the interpreting task entails more than just linguistically rendering a statement from the source language to the target language. Quite often, there is a wiretap in place, several surveillance reports, changing hours for work, unforeseen developments (when there is a controlled delivery) or working from a safe house that requires a lot more than just qualification and accreditation. The caliber of the interpreter required for such police task is of a level the interpreter agency has little idea of. Therefore relying on the agency to find an interpreter, any interpreter as long as they are ‘here and now’, is an uninformed policy. The agency will discharge its task by finding the first available interpreter regardless of whether the interpreter has just finished doing a nightshift as a security guard or driving a taxi for 12 hours. The interpreter might be qualified but untrained or someone who does not speak the dialect of the person the police are interested in or in some cases too fatigued to last the entire police assignment.
This shows how the police interpreter, once engaged, as a team player is expected to tackle more than one task at the same time. Interpreting in police operations requires the interpreter to be finely-tuned to the demands of the investigators and despite the physical, cognitive, linguistic and cultural demands, a qualified and well-trained interpreter would not be able to respond to the fast-changing and at times conflicting demands of the police commander unless they are properly briefed. This is an area that has attracted little academic attention (Gamal: 2012). Depending on the circumstances and context where the interpreter is deployed in a police operation, appropriate instantaneous interpreting can save the job and may save life as well. Gamal points out that
“the rules on how to use interpreters in live police operations have not been written yet and the current practices are ad hoc left to the discretion of the commander or team leader conducting the operation” (2012: 663).
Experience attests that in the rare occasion when the interpreter was invited early in the operation, and before the operation has reached a critical point, positive results have been achieved. This clearly shows that there are merits in treating the interpreter professionally: one who is capable of handling classified information and exhibiting mature and professional conduct as a police interpreter. The lack of such qualified and trained interpreter will cost the police time, effort and money. The number of cases dismissed due to the improper use of interpreters by the police is not small and deserves attention to better understand how the police fail to use interpreters and to better train the police and, other professionals, in how best to use interpreters. Professional experience also shows that the failure by the police to become a stakeholder in the training of police interpreters is negatively affecting the results of interpreter-mediated police operations. This particularly applies to long police operations by the Australian Federal Police, in international police negotiations (from extradition to people smuggling) and during serious records of interview by the state police.

Position of the interpreter in police teams

The current reluctance by the police to treat interpreters as members of the team, at a time when they rely on them for the success of their operations, is not too difficult to figure out. It is, however, important to look at interpreters and interpreting from the police’s point of view. The police see the same interpreter very infrequently and therefore don’t have the opportunity to examine their competence either linguistic or cultural. Even if they did, the chances of having the same interpreter on the next job are remote. With many languages and many interpreters particularly in the top ten languages in the community, the police are not likely to remember who did what particularly when they don’t know when the same interpreter is likely to be needed. As for briefing the interpreter, the police feel that the interpreter is an outsider, a person from the community who happens to speak both languages fluently and they have no confidence in them. Quite often the interpreter is seen as ‘not one of us’. There is an underlying police issue here which is the confidentiality and integrity of the operation. The police believe that the less the interpreter knows about the case the safer they are. As for the interpreting process very few police officers understand or, for all intents and purposes, care about how the interpreter interprets as long as the linguistic message appears sober and plausible. However, the police have realized that in some languages, a tried and tested interpreter is a better investment than outsourcing interpreters through a translation agency. While this solution is in place , in some LACs (Local Area Command) it does not address the fundamental issues of treating interpreters as a professional, albeit it external, member of the police team.

The way forward

As court interpreting did not develop overnight, police interpreting, will have to lobby and rally for its recognition as a relevant professional and academic area. This can only be done by inviting all stakeholders from the interpreting profession, academia, civil society, legal profession and the police to examine the logistics of providing a professional interpreting service in police settings. It is insightful to remember that police interpreters do a lot more jobs, with more hours and cover a much wider range of tasks than court interpreters do. By focusing research on the specialization of interpreting for the police and exchanging reports and case studies it is hoped that the field of police interpreting will reach the desired professional status conference and court interpreting have achieved.

Conclusion

Police interpreting is slowly attracting the attention of scholars and researchers (Gamal: forthcoming). The area is of high relevance as it falls under other relevant contemporary topics such as people mobility, enlarged labor markets, human rights, multicultural communities, migration studies and civil rights. This paper hopes to attract attention to the significance of police interpreting as an area sui generis as there are direct relevance and applicable results to practitioners whether working in the enlarged European Union, the Middle East or in Australia.

References

1. Berk-Seligson, S. (2000) ‘Interpreting for the police: issues in pre-trial phases of the judicial process’. In the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Vol 7, No 2.
2. Gamal, M. (2012) Interpreting for the Australian police. In the refereed conference proceedings of the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia. http://humanities.curtin.edu.au/schools ... -Gamal.pdf (Accessed March 2014)
3. Gamal, M. (Forthcoming) Police interpreting. A book that examines the task of interpreters in Australian police settings.
4. Edwards, A. (1995) The Practice of court interpreting. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
5. Herraez, J. O. & A. F. Rubio (2008) ‘Interpreting in police settings in Spain’. In Valero-Garces, C & A. Martin (Eds.) Crossing Borders in Community Interpreting: definitions and dilemmas. Amsterdam: john Benjamins Publishing Company.
6. Krouglov, A. (1999) Police interpreting: politeness and sociocultural context. In The Translator, vol. 5.2. Special Issue on Dialogue Interpreting. St Jerome. Manchester.
7. Ozolins, U. (2010) Factors that determine the provision of Public Service Interpreting: comparative perspectives on government motivation and language service implementation. Article available at: http://www.jostrans.org/issue14/art_ozolins.php (Accessed March 2014)
8. Nakane, I. (2009) ‘The Myth of an 'Invisible Mediator': An Australian Case Study of English-Japanese Police Interpreting’. In Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies. Vol. 6 , No 1. Sydney.

Filmography

The Tourist (2010) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Muhammad Y. Gamal, Ph.D., Adjunct Associate Professor, Arabic Translation Studies, Faculty of BGL, University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia

[HibahShabkhez]

Dear Dr Muhammad Y. Gamal
Would it be possible to modify existing manuals and pedagogical supports for court interpreting in order to create basic training material for the domain of police interpreting?

[muh_gamal]

Dear Dr Hibah Shabkhez,

Thank you for raising the issue of training police interpreters. My position is that Police Interpreting is a specialist area that requires specialist training.
The two domains of court and police interpreting are fundamentally dissimilar despite some obvious similarities. Therefore, a stand-alone training protocol for police interpreters is required.

Briefly, let me outline the reasons for this position:
1- Police interpreting requires interpreters to work under conditions that are sometimes urgent and unpleasant. Interpreting at the crime scene, or shortly after, is different from interpreting for the defendants/victims/ witnesses in court some months or years later.
2- Police investigation employs a discourse different from the one used in court. This discourse is not only different but complex and takes place under different rules of ‘turn taking”.
3- Police documents are different from those used in court.
4- Police interpreter’ role has different aspects and angles, and while primarily the same like the court interpreter’s, it requires attention due to the context and settings of police interpreting.
5- Police interpreting settings are numerous while the court interpreter has almost one setting i.e. the courtroom.