English. When a trial participant does not speak or
understand English, court interpreters are used. The
court interpreter’s task is to completely, impartially, and
accurately reiterate in English the utterances of a trial
participant that originate in a speaker’s native language.
The interpreter also renders the utterances that originate
in English into the native language so that the non-
English-speaking witness or defendant can understand
the proceedings as well.
The number of monolingual and minimally bilin-
gual non-English-speaking individuals who come in
contact with the U.S. criminal justice system is
increasing. According to the 2005 Annual Report of
the Director of the Administrator’s Office of the
United States Courts, the number of cases requiring
the use of court interpreters increased by 1.5% in
2005, with the Spanish language involved in 94% of
these cases. The 2000 U.S. Census indicated that the
percentage of Spanish speakers living in the United
States increased by 3.2% since 1990; additionally,
10% of the Spanish-speaking population was monolin-
gual. This rise in the monolingual Spanish-speaking
population has created a need for Spanish-English
interpreters, in particular in the United States.Perceptions of
Translated Testimony
Linguistic minority speakers are at a disadvantage in the
courtroom. Early research demonstrated that English-
speaking individuals perceive unaccented English more
favorably than either Black vernacular English or
Mexican American accented English. Thus, if linguistic
minority witnesses and defendants choose to communi-
cate in English during the court proceedings, they may
be perceived less favorably by the jury because of their
accented or limited English. Providing translated testi-
mony to counter the linguistic minority speaker’s lim-
ited English does not remove this bias.
Furthermore, the court interpreter’s translation of tes-
timony can shape jurors’ views of speakers in the court-
room due to linguistic alterations in the translation
process. Interpreters tend to lengthen testimony by using
uncontracted versions of words and altering fragmented
speech into a more narrative form. For example, in
Spanish-to-English translation, English interpreters
often add hedges such as “...uh,...well, and...um”
into the speaker’s testimony. These added hedges may
reflect the interpreter’s own performance deficiencies inthe translated language; however, such additions to tes-
timony cause the jurors to perceive the witness, not the
interpreter, less favorably.
Finally, linguistic minority defendants and wit-
nesses are forced to rely on the interpreter to under-
stand the courtroom proceedings. During translation,
interpreters may inadvertently alter an attorney’s
intended meaning during questioning by weakening
the force of leading questions or including additional
words. For example, if an interpreter adds words such
as “well” or “now” to the beginning of an attorney’s
question during cross-examination, the witness may
view the attorney as confrontational. Such alterations
in the structure of the questions can influence the wit-
ness’s perception of the attorney and understanding of
the questions, thus altering the resulting testimony.Impact on Jurors’ and
Juries’ Decisions
The fact that interpreted testimony per se may influ-
ence the outcome of criminal cases has been demon-
strated as well. Empirically derived data reveal that
jurors see criminal defendants who testify in a lan-
guage other than English with the assistance of an
English interpreter more negatively than defendants
who testify in English. For example, data collected in
Texas courts in the 1990s showed that criminal defen-
dants who testified in Spanish with interpretation into
English were at significantly greater risk of conviction
than were similarly situated defendants who testified
in English. That is, the negative perceptions of non-
English speakers were converted into a predisposition
to vote for conviction of the defendant. This occurred
even when people who themselves were Spanish
speakers served on the juries that convicted.
More recent experimental data collected in the
same jurisdictions suggested that the language of a
defendant’s testimony continues to have an impact on
jurors’ judgments about the guilt of defendants but
that now the direction of the outcome has changed.
That is, jurors serving on cases where defendants tes-
tify in Spanish with English interpretation are less
likely to be conviction prone, other things being equal,
than jurors serving on cases with equivalently situated
defendants who testify in English. However, this
effect seems to be diminished when jurors deliberate,
when the language of defendants’ testimony does not
appear to influence juries’ decisions. An importantTranslated Testimony——— 809T-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:44 PM Page 809