Chapter 9: Recreating A New Courtroom Reality: Misinterpretation of Calques in Immigration Hearings

Immigration interpreters play a consequential role in the comprehensibility of messages, yet they often incorporate potentially misleading calques and incorrect literal translations into their target language renditions. Monolingual defendants and witnesses experience greater difficulty in deciphering them than do bilinguals. This study employs conversational and discourse analytical approaches to show how these interpreters alter the message and create confusion as they attempt to explain what they meant, thereby making defendants and witnesses seem hesitant, long–winded, uncertain, or even untruthful, and possibly compromising the defendant’s right to a linguistically equivalent legal hearing according to the ethical standards set for U.S. interpreters.