Adversarial interpreting in asylum tribunals

The right to asylum is a universal Human Right under Article 14 (United Nations, 1948). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
"The applicant should be given the necessary facilities, including the services of a competent interpreter, for submitting his case to the authorities concerned"
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (1992), part 2A, 192(iv)

Additionally, in the UK, official Home Office publications state that each asylum seeker has the right to an interpreter at public expense (Home Office, 2019). However, in my work as an immigration caseworker, I met many clients who complained retrospectively of poor-quality interpreting, particularly in asylum appeal hearings. Improper provision of interpreting services could place a significant obstacle to asylum seekers ability to accurately convey their story to a judge. I conducted preliminary observations into this topic and met with solicitors who revealed that they send 'monitor' interpreters to asylum appeal hearings to observe court interpreters and intervene if they believe they have made a mistake.

The presence of a 'monitor' interpreter in legal settings has been coined adversarial interpreting by Kredens. According to Kredens (2017), there has been no research into adversarial interpreting or its effect on the overall communicative process. I propose to rectify this and conduct the first systematic study dedicated to adversarial interpreting. This is an important academic gap to fill, because the presence of a second, challenging interpreter, could have a huge impact on the outcome of an asylum case, and on an individual's access to Human Rights.

My primary research question is: What effect does adversarial interpreting have on the communication process in UK asylum hearings?

I will analyse data from 10 adversarial-interpreter-mediated asylum tribunals. My over-arching analytical approach will be that of Discourse Analysis (DA), a method which lends itself well to interpreting research (Hale & Napier, 2013). Kredens' (2017) typology of interventions will be a structuring device to allow me to categorise my data, and I will draw on existing Interpreting Quality Assessment (IQA) criteria to make sense of it. There is an extensive body of research into IQA, and criteria include items such as sense consistency and register (Pöchhacker, 2001). The general consensus in interpreting literature is that quality can only be assessed with consideration of the unique requirements of each context (Kalina, 2012), so linking interventions to IQA criteria will reveal information about the communicative requirements of the adversarial-interpreter-mediated asylum appeal tribunal. For example, if interventions are mostly corrections of lexical items, it would suggest that the IQA criterion of sense consistency is problematic, and interpreters are lacking in lexical knowledge. This would impact the asylum seeker's ability to communicate facts and events to the judge.

Hymes' (1974) ethnography of communication will provide a useful theoretical lens for analysis of the overall communication process in the asylum hearing, as it addresses how speakers use language to communicate effectively in culturally-dependent contexts. To enhance the dataset, I will also conduct semi-structured interviews with other court actors to elaborate upon the findings.