A couple of interesting talks on legal translation and court interpreting are coming up in the next few days and weeks…

1. For over 20 years now Marijana Milunović has been actively cooperating with the Greek police and the Thessaloniki courts, offering court interpreting services. Building on her experience in the field, she will give a talk on “Legal translation in Greece. Court interpreting: The legal framework vs. reality” at the XV International Scientific Conference “Translators And Challenges Of The Third Millennium”, hosted by the Association of Scientific and Technical Translators of Serbia (5-6 October 2018, Belgrade).

The talk aims to present the extremely poor situation in Greece in the court interpreting sector, and to open dialogue with colleagues from other countries by learning from their example. Focusing on court interpreting she will look at the legal framework currently in place (Article 233 (1) and (2) of the Hellenic Code of Criminal Code, and Directive 2010/64/EU), and at how that framework actually operates in the context of the Greek court system.

Some of the more specific topics to be addressed are:

• the criteria for inclusion in the list of court interpreters
• how this is applied in practice
• the obligations imposed on court interpreters
• the fees that are envisaged and the method of payment
• the social framework and roles played by the court interpreter, judge, public prosecutor and lawyers
• the issue of professional ethics and their adequacy since professional ethics has a critical role to play in court interpreting.

The talk will conclude by looking at proposals to improve the situation and will highlight the type of support that is necessary to achieve this goal.

2. Next week the University of Manchester’s CTIS Research Seminar series opens on Thursday, 11 October (14:00-15:20, Theatre D, Simon Building), with a seminar by Rosario Martín Ruano on Legal Translation and the Challenges of Recognition.

According to the blurb for the event, “translation is often depicted as a safeguard of the egalitarian ideals multilingualism  purportedly guarantees, as an activity of prime importance in the development of healthy multicultural and diverse societies. However, in the prevailing globalized, asymmetrically multicultural order, certain long-standing legal and institutional translation practices may be contributing, albeit involuntarily, to engendering or perpetuating unequal relations of hegemony and subordination between dominant cultures and powers, and minoritized languages and identities”.

The seminar will identify a number of factors which accentuate translation’s potential proclivity to exercise symbolic violence in our day and age, and, drawing on the concept of recognition,  will present a number of examples illustrating alternative translational approaches aligned with the ideals of cultural pluralism.

Rosario Martín Ruano is Associate Professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain, where she is member of the Research Group on Translation, Ideology and Culture and she currently leads the research project entitled VIOSIMTRAD (‘Symbolic Violence and Translation: Challenges in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Society’, FFI2015-66516-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE). She has published widely on translation and ideology, gender and post-colonial approaches to translation, and on legal and institutional translation.

3. And the following week as part of the Transius Talk Series, James Brannan (European Court of Human Rights) will give a lecture entitled “Conveying the right message in ECtHR judgments: the implications of multilingualism” on Tuesday 16 October at 12.15pm in room 2130 of the Uni Mail building (Geneva).