Ghostwriters of crime narratives: Constructing the story by referring to intercept interpreters' contributions in criminal case files.

Abstract

Introduction In the French film La Daronne (2020), directed by Jean-Paul Salomé, the impressive actress Isabelle Huppert plays an intercept interpreter: she works for the drug squad in Paris and interprets the secretly surveilled phone calls of drug dealers from Arabic to French. It is an exhausting job, and she is overworked and underpaid. To make matters worse, she is under pressure to pay for her mother’s expensive nursing home. One day, she becomes involved in a failed drug deal and has access to many kilograms of cannabis. While she continues her job with the drug squad, she changes sides and becomes a drug dealer herself. It is only when the police involved another interpreter in the surveillance process that her disloyalty is revealed. The movie foregrounds how dependent the police are on the intercept interpreter and her important, active role in making a criminal case. In fact, through her interpretation, Huppert does not merely mechanically translate one Arabic word into a French word. As an intercept interpreter, she does what intercept interpreters do: they select information, decipher codes, attribute importance to some parts of the intercepted conversation, neglect other parts, paraphrase or summarize sequences of the intercepted conversations, add contextual knowledge, provide their own interpretations of unclear statements when transforming them into written transcripts of translated wiretap records (TWRs; Capus and Havelka, 2022; Drugan, 2020: 314; González Rodríguez, 2015: 114; Nunn, 2010; Park and Bucholtz, 2009: 31). Intercept interpreters often (but not exclusively) present the content of a TWR as a seemingly word-for-word translation and transcription of original conversation that is structured as a dialog between two participants. Moreover, they guide the drug squad, indicating when a handover will take place and when the police should move out for an arrest, a house raid, or to seize drugs. In the movie, Huppert gives hints (sometimes misleading ones) and shapes the course of the investigation in a dynamic