Tackling Issues of Court Interpretation through Listening Skills and Language Awareness of World Englishes

Abstract

This article aims to address the issue of dealing with varieties of English, namely upper and lower class English, and the paralanguage (use of stress and punctuation) within translation and interpretation. The study will use some episodes taken from a popular BBC television series entitled ‘The shadow of the Noose’ and from the film noir ‘The Raging Tide’ as a context to introduce the importance of how stress, punctuation, and pauses can turn a hopeless court case, as described in The shadow of the Noose, into a winning case. This provides much insight for interpreters to take non-verbal clues into account in their process of rendering the meanings conveyed by the witnesses apart from the content of the message.