Videoconferencing in legal context: a comparative study of simulated and real-life settings

The corpus we want to examine is a very specific and rather exceptional one: it is an authentic video recording of a court case in Belgium (Flanders). More specifically, it concerns a hearing of a witness via videoconferencing (VC). The hearing took place between Brussels (Belgium) and Innsbruck (Austria). The interpreter is a legal interpreter for Dutch, based in Austria, sitting in a courtroom equipped with VC equipment, while the witness is in Brussels accompanied by a prosecutor, a police officer and a technician. The case was a supposedly simple testimony in an assault case during a skiing holiday in the Austrian Alps. The technical conditions were tested the day before so that everything was prepared to make the hearing run smoothly. Nevertheless, this routine hearing turned out to be a failure with a lot of frustration and anger on both sides because of the bad quality of the interaction, and the lack of professionalism of both the legal interpreter and the legal professionals. The actual length of the hearing exceeded the estimated length (i.e. 20 minutes) and took almost 5 times as long. This timing clearly points at a low degree of efficiency. In our chapter, we would like to present a transcription of (part of) the interaction. We will focus on the main reasons for this failing interaction. -We will present a quantitative analysis of the number of interpreting errors (to be defined as omissions, additions and problems with accuracy) but also of linguistic problems and problematic paralinguistic items like turn-taking and overlap. We also want to analyze the audio-visual parameters (e.g. both technical and visual (gaze)). Finally, we will pay attention to the behavior of the legal professionals (ethical code and professionalism). A striking example shows that the Austrian legal professionals tried to behave during the VC session as if it were a face-to-face setting, without realizing that - except for the magistrate and the legal interpreter - nobody was visible for the participants on the Belgian side. Our ultimate aim is to compare our findings based on this real case with the results of the Avidicus 1&2 project. We would like to compare the simulated role-plays of Avidicus 1&2 with our real case. In the Avidicus roleplay, the interpreter and the legal professional are in the same place while the witness is at a remote location. It would be interesting to find out whether the results will be similar or rather divergent. In the end, we will discuss methodological issues (simulations and experiments vs. real life case studies) but we will also try to formulate recommendations for both legal professionals and legal interpreters on how to handle VC hearings, based on the case study. Finally, we want to formulate recommendations on how to avoid these problems by professionalizing the legal interpreting sector, and by offering joint trainings for legal interpreters together with legal practitioners.

ISBN:978-1-944838-22-5

Jaar van publicatie:2018