2022 - Converting a Litigant Into a Court Interpreter

This study demonstrates that self-interpretation does indeed occur in Kenyan courtroom

proceedings, a situation that necessitates the use of a language other than the regular and official

languages of Kenyan courts. Such language use rendered mostly in terms of self-interpretation

has far-reaching ramifications on the content, facts, style, and meaning predispositions of a

witness’s testimony. Most studies in courtroom communicative interactions, language, and speech

manifestations, have been largely and dominantly sociolinguistic in approach and there is so

much that has been asserted in that dimension. However, this study’s point of departure is that

it seeks to adopt a Translation Studies approach to analyze self-interpreted presentations made

by four witnesses in selected criminal cases at Kisii Law Courts in Kenya. Their self-interpreted

testimonies which constitute the data used in this discussion were collected between October 2020

and June 2021. The testimonies rendered constituted: one murder case in the high court, one rape

case, and two assault cases in the magistrate court. The overarching aim of this study is an attempt

to show that, bilingual litigants, who have habitually and for a long time been regarded as persons

of limited language competence, can in practical renditions be astute self-interpreting persons

in testimony presentation. However, the confrontational experience they undergo throughout

has adversarial effects on the facts of the case and the eventual outcomes of such cases, the

disadvantages of their competence in L2 (the official language of the court) notwithstanding.

Consequently, a translation studies approach, as applied in this paper, offers a framework of

reference through which it is possible to analyze the encumbrances of comprehending legal

procedures, terminology, and propriety which litigants undergo to accentuate meaning shifts,

stem contextual meaning deviations besides the overall factual misrepresentations which emerge

during and as a result of self-interpreted renditions as constrained by the contextual imperatives

of traditional courtroom language.

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