Sunday trivia

For those who have tried cases in the Middleeast or Asia, for example with local witnesses, here's something may interest you. Note, the same can happen in court or with counsel's interviews of witnesses.

Picture this. You are in a foreign country. The police arrest you and realise that you don’t speak the language. So, they organise someone to translate. If you’re lucky, the person they contact is a professional interpreter. If you’re unlucky, the person is a multilingual police officer who happens to speak your language just well enough to scrape through an interview. Either way, you are now having to talk through someone else.
Does this interpreter-mediated interviewing put you at a disadvantage? If so, how much? The answer to this lies at the intersection of criminal psychology and cognitive linguistics, where researchers have realised that interpreters are an overlooked barrier between suspects and their freedom.
One of the most active researchers looking at these issues is Luna Filipović, a professor of language and cognition based at the University of East Anglia. She has been studying the effects of multilingual police interviews for more than a decade.

Dr. Julia Shaw, Translation errors in police interviews could send innocent people to jail. Science Focus, August 14, 2022.