Creating research-based resources for court interpreters: an illustrative study on translation-oriented terminological records about Spanish criminal proceedings

Abstract

The quality of the interpreting services provided in criminal courts has come to the fore in Spain as a result of the transposition into domestic law of the EU Directives on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings and on the right to information in criminal proceedings. Since one of the greatest challenges faced by court interpreters is precisely the lack of appropriate terminological resources, in this article we describe how we used empirical research results (to wit, the exploitation of a corpus of authentic, interpreter-mediated criminal proceedings) to create resources that can help court interpreters to perform their task with accuracy, rigour and diligence. More specifically, we focus on translation-oriented terminological records, as adopted in the TIPp project (on the quality of court interpreting) on the basis of the approach developed in previous research on the translation of technology law (Law10N). We describe in detail the process of creating the Spanish-English record for the illustrative term letrado de la administración de justicia. By describing this process (including term selection, information mining, equivalence search and acceptability analysis), we highlight the usefulness of this type of terminological record and its potential for other thematic subfields and language pairs.