PROJECT TITLE: The quality in translation as an element to safeguard procedural guarantees in criminal proceedings: development of resources to help court interpreters of Spanish - Romanian, Arab, Chinese, French and English.
ACRONYM: TIPp (Translation and interpreting in criminal proceedings or Traducción e Interpretación en los procesos penales in Spanish)
REFERENCE: FFI2014-55029-R
FINANCIAL INSTITUTION: SPANISH MINISTRY OF ECONOMY AND COMPETITIVENESS
ANNOUNCEMENT: Spanish State Grant Programme of Research, Development and Innovation related to Society Challenges
EFFECTIVE DATE: January 2015 - December 2017
In Spain, in contrast with its timeline in other countries, court interpreting has been an under-researched area until recently. In the last two decades, however, research in court interpreting has emerged as a major topic in Europe. In fact, within the Horizon 2020 Programme, the Directorate-General for Justice of the European Commission, through the Justice Programme 2014-2020, is offering grants to undertake research in this area. Nevertheless, the European projects which have been carried out so far have focused on the analysis of language barriers in the access to Justice and on the need to set similar standards regarding training, accreditation and recruitment of interpreters.
In Spain, a new law was published in the Spanish Official Gazette (BOE, 28 April 2015) which modified the Spanish Code of Criminal Procedure as a result of the transposition of both the Directive 2010/64/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 October 2010 on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings and the Directive 2012/13/EU of the European Parliament and of the Ouncil of 22 May 2012 on the right to information in criminal proceedings.. This turned translation and interpreting into an essential element in the rights to effective legal protection in the exercise of lawful rights and interests before the courts in order to avoid any state of defencelessness, namely the right to be informed of the accusation against them, the right to a public process with all procedural guarantees and the right to self-defence, as enshrined in Article 24 of the Spanish Constitution.
Accordingly, the research projects previously undertaken by the research team of this project (for instance, see the doctoral thesis entitled Interpreting in courts. The case of Romanian in the courts in Barcelona) revealed that currently court interpreters lack the required technological and research resources to carry out their tasks with accuracy, rigour and diligence.
The objective of this project was, thus, to create digital resources to facilitate court interpreters’ performance: a code of good practice, a protocol for conduct and behaviour in the most frequent situations for a court interpreter, a set of guidelines for Justice personnel on the interpreters’ role and on how to interact with interpreters, and a database containing problematic units most frequently encountered by court interpreters in criminal proceedings with potential solutions, comments and two-way translation options in the most frequently translated languages, i.e. Arab, Romanian, Chinese, French and English (into Spanish). These are some of the resources created:
Arumí, M.; Bestué, C.; Gil-Bardají, A.; Orozco-Jutorán, M.; Vargas-Urpí, M. (2020) "Recomendaciones para una mejora de la interpretación judicial", en Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB.
Arumí, M.; Bestué, C.; Gil-Bardají, A.; Orozco-Jutorán, M.; Vargas-Urpí, M. (2019) "Recomendaciones a operadores judiciales", en Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB.
Arumí, M.; Bestué, C.; Gil-Bardají, A.; Orozco-Jutorán, M.; Vargas-Urpí, M. (2019) "Recomendaciones a intérpretes judiciales", en Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB.
Videos: With the Interpretrer's permission
