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This book shows how participation of interpreters as mediators changes the dynamics of police interviews, particularly with regard to power struggles and competing versions of events. The analysis of interaction offers insights into language in the legal process

This book shows how the participation of interpreters as mediators changes the dynamics of police interviews, particularly with regard to power struggles and competing versions of events. Employing a range of approaches including conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and legal narrative theory, "Interpreter-mediated Police Interviews" provides a detailed study of the impact of interpreter mediation on this area of the justice system. It reveals how turn-by-turn decisions of communication by all three participants, including the interpreter, affect the trajectory of the institutional discourse. By providing a better understanding of police interview discourse and exploring the practical implications of interpreter participation, this book contributes to the improvement of interpreter-mediated investigative interviews and will be of great interest to legal professionals as well as interpreters and their trainers

Recent studies have challenged the assumption that the interpreter is an 'invisible' mediator and have demonstrated a departure from the 'conduit' role often assigned to interpreters in their professional ethics guidelines (e.g. Russell 2000, Wadensjö 1998, 2004; Yoshida 2007). In this paper, I address the issue of interpreter's role as an invisible mediator through an examination of interactional 'repairs', one of the key aspects of interaction management mechanisms in the tradition of Conversation Analysis. The context of interpreting is Australian Federal Police interviews mediated by Japanese-English interpreters. While some repair sequences in interpreter-mediated police interviews followed common patterns of monolingual police interviews, there were also some features of repairs specific to interpreter-mediated discourse. In particular, due to the interpreting of each turn, in some cases, it is not always possible to ascertain whether it was the primary speaker's turn or the interpreted version that was the source of 'trouble' leading to an interactional repair. The paper demonstrates interpreters' vulnerability to being identified as the 'troublemaker' in repair sequences and consequential face-saving strategies. These strategies included modifying the primary speaker's utterances or providing explanations for why a need to repair was perceived or why a repair sequence failed to rectify a problem. It is demonstrated that in engaging in these types of problem solving activities, interpreters at times shift roles, sometimes pushing the boundaries of their professional ethics. The paper argues that, while interpreters are often viewed as operating within a third 'invisible' space between interlocutors, this invisibility needs to be questioned. It is suggested that the expectation of a completely invisible, or neutral, third space is unrealistic, and that interpreters as cultural and linguistic mediators, and as social beings, continuously negotiate their identity with their clients while interpreting.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Foreword -- 1 Languages and Identities in a Transitional Japan -- PART I Cultural Transition -- 2 National Identity and the Transition from Internationalization to Globalization: "Cool japan" or "Closed Japan"? -- 3 The Geopolitics of Japanese Soft Power and the Japanese Language and Studies Classroom: Soft Power Pedagogy, Globalization, and the New Technologies -- PART II Ideological Transition -- 4 Paradoxes of Learning English in Multilingual Japan: Envisioning Education for Border-Crossing Communication -- 5 "Internal Internationalization" and Language Ideologies in Japanese Criminal Courts -- 6 Metrolingual Tokyo: "C'est un Peu Difficile, mais it's very Fan desu yo -- PART III Pedagogical Transition -- 7 "To Know What It's Like to be Japanese": A Case Study of the Experiences of Heritage Learners of Japanese in Australia -- 8 Transcending the Role of Japanese Language Education: A Humanistic Approach in Australian Learning Contexts -- 9 Assimilation Versus Multiculturalism: Struggles Over the Meaning of 'Tabunka Kyōsei' in Education for Language Minority Children in Japan -- Epilogue -- 10 Japan-in-Transition: Reflections and Futures -- Contributors -- Index.

The issue of e-politeness has been attracting increasing attention in the field of foreign language teaching and learning. This article examines how students of Japanese as a foreign language in Australia negotiated power and solidarity in their email correspondence with 'facilitators' in Japan who provided support in essay writing tasks. Their relationships, which were neither completely status-unequal nor status-equal, offer a unique social context for an examination of politeness. The study examines whether and how power and solidarity shifted over the 12 weeks of email exchanges. The results show varying levels of rapport and orientations to politeness developing over time, as well as evidence of students applying implicit input from the facilitators' email messages. The article also considers the impacts, on the politeness phenomena in the data, of students' cultural backgrounds and prior exposure to casual Japanese. The findings are discussed in relation to the question of 'appropriateness' in fostering foreign language learner ability to negotiate power and solidarity in intercultural communication.