Interpreting in Spanish criminal courts

Abstract

The quality of the interpreting carried out in criminal courts has come to the fore in Spain with the entry into force of domestic legislation transposing Directive 2010/64/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 October 2010, on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings, and Directive 2012/13/EU of 22 May 2012, on the right to information in criminal proceedings, which enshrines translation and interpreting as an essential element within procedural guarantees. The TIPp project was aimed at developing resources that facilitate court interpreters’ tasks based on the data obtained from a representative corpus of authentic interpreter-mediated criminal proceedings. In this contribution we describe and analyse the corpus, highlighting aspects such as the interpreter’s mother tongue, the type of offence that was tried, the procedural situation of the non Spanish-speaking user and whether there was whispered interpreting or the interpreter was given any instruction.