Consecutive courtroom interpreting and the management of long turns Video-mediated hearings at the French appeal court for asylum demands
Résumé
Multilingual courtroom hearings almost always involve question answer sequences which are usually interpreted in a consecutive mode. This provides for an ideal template for such sequences, question, interpreted question, answer, interpreted answer. We have video-recorded an extensive corpus of such multi-lingual courtroom sequences in appeal hearings for asylum-seeking cases, with asylum seekers appearing remotely through a video link, and the interpreter either in the courtroom or beside the remote asylum seeker. We analyze here how this ideal interpreting template for the consecutive interpreting is put to the test by the possibility that the answer gets to be elaborated into a developing ‘long turn’. We discuss on the basis of naturally occurring data:
-How do participants display a concern with the potential tension between recognizably ‘long’ turns and consecutive interpreting?
-How do they manage emerging long turns, and what kinds of categories, rights and obligations does their collaboratively achieved fragmentation of long turns make publicly available?
-How do issues of control and power surface in such circumstances at characteristic sequential juncture, in particular with respect to speaker selection after the interpretation of a recognizably ‘partial’ answer?