Vol. 13 (2024)
Precedent in EU Law: The Linguistic Aspect

Research Articles

Interpreting rapport: Cross-linguistic challenges in police communication with victims

Published 08.11.2024

  • Maria Gomez-Bedoya

Maria Gomez-Bedoya
University of East Anglia

Abstract

Rapport-building is considered to be one of the keys to successful investigative interviewing. Given the importance of rapport-building techniques, this study focuses on how rapport is linguistically conveyed in interpreter-mediated police interviews with victims of crime, bearing in mind that rapport-building is linguistically and culturally sensitive, which means that it is important to prepare individuals (police forces, but also other parties involved, such as police interpreters or social workers) to bridge the gap between different languages and cultures in legal proceedings and other sensitive communicative contexts. Using a discourse-pragmatic approach, the study analyses trainee interpreters’ renditions of police rapport-building, focusing on the linguistic conveyance of rapport-building in training practice, in order to explore how these trainee interpreters deal with aspects of rapport-building in police interviews into English and into Spanish. The findings confirm that conveying rapport and rapport-relevant expressions is challenging, particularly in relation to pragmatic equivalence. These findings provide a better understanding of the factors that impact the outcome of the interpretation in the context of rapport-building conveyance, and have theoretical and practical implications for interpreting training.

Keywords

police interpreting, rapport, cross-linguistic challenges, investigative interviewing

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