Entry

 

 

SPA Interpretación judicial

 

contents
Introduction - Definition and general contextualization | Regulation of court interpreting, deontology and triggers for professionalization | Purpose of court interpreting and the role of the court interpreter | Research potential

 

  Introduction - Definition and general contextualization

Court interpreting is the (sub)genre of interpreting that takes place in courts of law and court-related instances (e.g., public prosecutors' offices), which are a clear example of institutional and culturally marked settings. For the purposes of this entry, the criminal court system will be taken as a point of reference, since interpretation is usually provided ex officio. A wide range of proceedings and communicative encounters may take place in these settings. They may vary from one region or country to another, and involve, on the one hand, legal operators (members of the judiciary, prosecutors, lawyers, etc.) and, on the other hand, individuals who are either subject to the proceedings themselves (mainly suspected or accused persons) or who are required to appear in them (victims, witnesses, experts, etc.). While the former group will usually use the official language of the proceedings, the latter might sometimes not be proficient enough in that language and are thus prevented from fully participating unless language assistance is offered. This assistance will mainly be oral (or signed), but it could also be written through translation. This entry will not discuss the particularities of sign language interpreting in court settings, nor will it address written translation generated in this field which, despite having clear links to the practice of legal, official, institutional or even community translation, presents its own set of specific features (cf. Ortega-Herráez, Giambruno, & Hertog 2013). 

Image courtesy of the SOS-VICS project: dialogic consecutive interpreting with a victim of gender-based violence during a trial in Spain.

Key concepts for court interpreting such as language and legal system do not necessarily have a two-way relationship. Thus, we can find countries that share an official language but not a legal system (Belgium with respect to France, the Netherlands or Germany); a legal system that is conveyed in several official languages (English and French in the case of Canada; Dutch, French and German in Belgium); courts that use a language other than the official languages spoken by the majority of the population they serve (Hong Kong; Ng 2018); or even national languages that are foreign to the prevailing legal system (indigenous languages in Latin American countries such as Peru (de Pedro (2018), Mexico (Kleinert & Stallaert (2015) and Ecuador (Berk-Seligson 2008), to name but a few cases). In addition to all this, on a daily basis legal systems have to accommodate citizens who take part in the proceedings and do not master the language used. In these instances, the role of the court interpreter becomes particularly important.

Court interpreting, alongside interpreting in police and asylum settings, constitute legal interpreting, which is considered by some (mainly in North America) to be a genre in its own right with its own characteristics. Other authors (mainly European and Australian) consider it to be a sub-genre of Community or Public Service Interpreting (PSI) on a par with other sub-genres such as healthcare or educational interpreting. This disparity of conceptions is also echoed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which has separate standards for community interpreting (ISO 13611:2014) and legal interpreting (ISO 20228:2019), a situation that can be explained by the existence of different regulatory frameworks applicable to the various settings where the profession is practiced worldwide.

 

Relationship to other (sub)genres of interpretation

One of the aims of academic disciplines is to organize and classify knowledge. Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) is obviously no stranger to this, although it seems to have followed a different pathway. Curiously enough, it is striking to see how interpreting as carried out in a judicial context of such historical relevance as the Nuremberg Trials helped to lay the foundations of the conference interpreting profession as it is known nowadays, and does not seem to have had the same impact in court interpreting itself:

The Cinderella of interpretation: an unglamorous girl who is only of late developing a degree of appeal. Unlike conference interpreting, court interpreting has no well-defined beginning but rather existed, in a low profile from the very beginning of the justice system as we know it. Paradoxically, the Nuremberg trials interpretation helped establish the profession of conference interpreting but did little for court interpreters.

(Repa 1991: 595) 

Panoramic view of the interpreters during the Nuremberg Trials.

Therefore, trying to outline the relationship between court interpreting and other (sub)genres of interpretation may prove a useful endeavor.

First of all, it is worth clarifying the notion of genre, which, together with that of interpreting mode or technique, is what has traditionally been used to establish a categorization of interpreting. In this case, the term genre refers to interpreter-mediated encounters showing specific functional and communicative characteristics. It is a synonym of other terms such as communicative setting or encounter.

When using the notion of genre to set up the boundaries of interpreting, aspects such as socio-professional recognition and the specific regulations governing the activity are of utmost importance. It may well be that the differences that can be found in various existing classification proposals lie in the above mentioned aspects. Those proposals tend to coincide in establishing clear boundaries when addressing conference interpreting, while for non-conference settings the task is not as straightforward and there is even certain degree of controversy.

As already mentioned, one of the main points of debate when dealing with court interpreting would be to establish whether it is a genre in its own right, whether it would be the most prominent component of a separate higher genre characterized by taking place in legal and quasi-legal settings (cf. amongst others González, Vásquez, & Mikkelson 2012; Harris 1994) or whether it would constitute a sub-genre of Public Service Interpreting as can be inferred from Pöchhacker’s (2015) or Hale's (2007: 30) proposals.

A closer look at Harris’ (1994) and Pöchhacker’s (2015) taxonomic proposals shows that both include five major genres, although there is no full agreement as to the extent of each one of them, perhaps due to the evolution of the interpreting profession in the time elapsed between the publication of both proposals, the criteria used to build them and the personal and academic bias of both proponents. The following table shows a contrastive presentation of these two classifications. The original layout set out by Harris (1994) has been retained and the five basic genres identified by Pöchhacker (2015) have been juxtaposed to it. In those cases where a full coincidence in terms of the label used has been identified, Pöchhacker’s categories have be placed at the same level as Harris's basic genres. When there is no terminological coincidence, they have either been added to the lower part of the table, or the link between genres and subgenres of both proposals has been sought, trying not to break the internal relationship that each of these two proposals established. In this way, the areas of coincidence and divergence between the two can be more clearly visualized.

Comparative taxonomy of interpreting genres.

As the table shows, one of the genres in which differences are most salient is that of legal interpretation. Here the Canadian bias of Harris's contribution is clearly visible, as is also the case with other North American scholars. Thus, given the great development that the court interpreting profession has achieved in countries such as the United States, it is common for this genre of interpreting to be presented neatly detached from PSI, something that academics from other regions of the world do not always agree with. It is also striking how Harris divides court interpreting into two categories: interpreting in higher courts and in rather high-profile trials would be included within conference interpreting, while interpreting in lower courts would fall under legal interpreting, where police interpreting and paralegal interpreting would also find their place.

In Pöchhacker's (2015) classification, legal interpreting is one of the sub-genres of PSI, on a par with interpreting in healthcare, educational, religious and even prison settings. And as in the previous taxonomy, this sub-genre would be further subdivided into court, police and asylum interpreting. Furthermore, two other categories related to court interpreting can be identified: interpreting in so-called truth and reconciliation commissions, such as the one that took place in South Africa; and tribunal interpreting, to account mainly for interpreting in the context of international tribunals, a setting which, from the profession’s point of view, usually falls under the umbrella of conference interpreting.

The difficulty in establishing the boundaries of the different genres has led to questions about the actual usefulness of this classificatory effort when it comes to explaining the true nature of interpreting and to give a cohesive image of the profession:

This analysis of the different types of interpreting has shown that regardless of the adjective preceding the word "interpreter," practitioners of this profession the world over perform the same service and should meet the same standards of competence. What accounts for the tremendous disparity in working conditions and status is not the nature of the interpreting itself, but external factors that affect the market in which interpreters render their services. The way to lessen this disparity is to recognise the commonalities in interpreters' work and to form strong professional associations and alliances that will unite practitioners striving to achieve common goals.

(Mikkelson 2009)

For this reason, some authors try to approach the study and classification of interpretation from wider approaches.

Thus, Mason (1999, 2001) advocates focusing on those aspects that shape linguistic interaction, rather than on situational descriptions. Hence, he proposes the term dialogue interpreting to explore those instances whose "defining characteristic [is] being interpreter-mediated communication in spontaneous face-to-face interaction" (Mason 1999:147). In such instances the interpersonal dimension is particularly relevant, even more so than aspects such as the interpreting mode used. Thus, despite the fact that in certain contexts it is usual to resort to dialogic consecutive interpreting, Mason's comprehensive proposal also accommodates those encounters in which simultaneous interpreting is used (e.g., during a trial). This allows for the inclusion of sign language interpreting, which by nature is performed exclusively in the simultaneous mode; telephone interpreting, however, is to be excluded as it does take place face-to-face.

In interpreter-mediated face-to-face communicative encounters there is a three-way interaction that shapes both the process and the product. The interpreter is actively involved in this triadic communicative interaction in which, among other things, there are shifts of footing between participants, as the distribution of power throughout the interventions is, on its turn, a reflection of conflicting social and institutional discourses (Mason 2001:ii). Mediated professional encounters that can be analyzed from this perspective explicitly include those that take place in the legal-judicial sphere. Note that based on the concept of dialogical interaction, a fruitful research paradigm emerged and is currently widely used for the study of a variety of contexts, including, court contexts (Wadensjö 1998; Roy 2000; Baraldi & Gavioli 2012).

Pöchhacker (2016:13-17) also makes an interesting proposal to categorize the study of interpreting in a comprehensive way. While admitting that, from a historical point of view, it is perhaps most obvious to start from the notion of the communicative situation, he points out that throughout the historical evolution of interpreting there has been a gradual shift along a spectrum from inter-social to intra-social spheres of interaction, accompanied by an increasing institutionalization of interpreter-mediated encounters.

Moreover, he goes a step further and adds the notion of situational constellation of interaction to the equation, which allows him to accommodate the triadic exchanges referred to above and establish a clearer distinction between conference interpreting and dialogue interpreting. The combination of this idea with that of the spheres of social interaction, results in interpreting being conceived as a conceptual spectrum that runs from "international (conference) to intra-social (community) interpreting" (Pöchhacker 2016: 16-17). His proposal highlights the importance of transcending the mere juxtaposition of specific genres and the need to understand the differences that arise depending on whether the focus is on the level of socio-cultural communities and their members/representatives or on the format of communicative interaction (multilateral conferences vs. face-to-face interactions).

Thus, court interpretation, as institutional communication, can be situated at different points on the spectrum depending on whether it takes place in a national (intra-social) or supranational framework. In the former case, communication revolves around face-to-face conversations; in the latter it will be more akin to multilateral encounters. And in both cases, a certain degree of overlapping is always possible.

In the case of Spain, in some high-profile proceedings (the Madrid train bomb trial in 2007, the Prestige oil tanker trial in 2012-2013), linguistic solutions close to conference interpreting were chosen (cf. Martin & Ortega-Herráez 2013; Ortega-Herráez 2010), contrary to what is usual for any other type of national proceedings. On the other hand, in international jurisdictions (cf. Court of Justice of the European Union, International Criminal Court, Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia), due to their multilingual nature at multiple levels (institutional, composition of trial judges panels, etc.), interpretation is taken into account from the moment the courts are established and proceedings instituted. This is not usually the case in national jurisdictions, which by definition tend to be monolingual institutions, where the need for interpretation is to some extent a "windfall occurrence" in most cases. There lie some of the differences between the two jurisdictions (cf. Stern 2012; Pascual Olaguíbel 2015). However, in some international jurisdictions we can also find analogue situations to face-to-face encounters typical of intrasocial settings, such as those that can occur in the taking of witness statements in situation countries with field interpreters (cf. ICC-Registry: document / video).

For the purposes of this entry, we consider that the defining features of PSI, as identified and categorized by Abril-Martí (2006:35-86), are perfectly applicable to the specific case of interpreting in judicial contexts. 

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Regulation of court interpreting, deontology and triggers for professionalization

One of the distinctive features that have perhaps contributed the most to the development of court interpreting is the existence of a specific set of norms and regulations. They are not confined to modern societies and can be traced back to ancient times, as Giambruno (2008) attests in the case of the detailed regulatory framework of legal interpretation in Latin America during Spanish colonial rule.

The international cornerstone of the current regulatory framework is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 8 and 10), with versions translated into over 500 languages through the UNHCR. This declaration becomes binding through another international instrument, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 14). Both documents enshrine the right to translation and interpretation in the judicial sphere in very general termss.

The same is also true at European level, through the European Convention on Human Rights (Articles 5 and 6) within the Council of Europe. In addition, there is the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (Brannan 2016), which outlines various questions on the actual enforcement of the right to linguistic assistance as set out in the aforementioned Convention.

For its part, the European Union (EU), as part of its efforts to establish a European Area of Justice, launched in 2009 the so-called roadmap to strengthen the procedural rights of suspected or accused persons in criminal proceedings. The first measure approved was Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings. The importance of this instrument lies in the fact that it establishes a minimum common denominator to safeguard the right to translation and interpretation in criminal proceedings, as well as the quality of these services. While the directives set the goals that EU Member States have to meet, these countries have leeway as to the legislation and measures to be implemented for reaching those goals. Therefore, since 2010, Member States have been adopting new regulatory frameworks to transpose the mandate of the directive into their national legislation (cf. National transposition measures; Ortega-Herráez & Hernández 2019).

The United States has an important regulatory framework for court interpreting, and perhaps its best known instrument is the Court Interpreters Act (1978). This federal law, in addition to establishing the obligation to provide ex officio interpretation services in federal criminal and civil proceedings for parties who are not fluent in the language of proceedings, laid the foundations to develop, among other elements, a professional accreditation system including a solid certification process in the English-Spanish combination, which has served as an inspiration for state authorities to develop their own regulations and certification instruments in other languages. Many of these efforts derive from the general framework provided by the Civil Rights Act (1964) and since 2000 by Executive Order 13166 to ensure equal access to federally funded public services for citizens with limited English proficiency (Ortega-Herráez, Giambruno & Hertog 2013).

In some Latin American countries, the so-called public translation/interpreting (traductorado público) is a well-established profession, although it is true that this figure lends itself to be analyzed within the sphere of sworn or official translation. Institutional movements for the training of court interpreters in indigenous languages also seem to be observed in this region.

Finally, other instruments exist that, in spite of not being legally binding, contribute to the implementation of good practices in court interpreting. Firstly, the guidelines issued by the ISO through its ISO 20228:2019 Interpreting services – Legal interpreting - Requirements consider the specificity of this professional sector and the need to establish a general reference framework, as is the case with other standards in the translation and interpreting sector. The second document of particular interest and usefulness for the case at hand is the Recommended National Standards for Working with Interpreters in Courts and Tribunals, published by the Australian Judicial Council on Cultural Diversity (JCCD). Australia is a pioneering country when it comes to the advancement of interpreting in community and public service settings and a source of inspiration when it comes to good professional practices: the existence of a solid training system, an advanced and renewed system of professional certification (with a specific certification for the legal field) by an independent organization such as NAATI, and a strong national professional association, AUSIT.

In addition to specific regulations governing both access and professional practice, another relevant element in the professionalization of court interpreting is the existence of professional associations (Ortega-Herráez 2020). Due to space constraints, references are limited to specific associations of court interpreters, which may constitute a valuable point of reference given their active role in aspects such as continuous training, the establishment of protocols on aspects of special interest, the drafting of technical reports, dialogue with the competent authorities and even the promotion of research. It is undoubtedly worth mentioning the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT) in the United States, one of the pioneers in this sector, which, as mentioned above, has created its own structure to promote research, training and professional certification (Society for the Study of Translation and Interpretation, SSTI). In the European context, the European Legal Interpreters and Translators Association (EULITA) was created in 2010 to bring together the sector's associations in the EU and the EEA and provide them with a single, solid voice before EU and national authorities. EULITA has around 36 full member associations in 2020, with a total of 93 associate members from 39 different countries. It is also actively involved in EU-sponsored research and knowledge transfer projects. In Spain, the case of APTIJ is worth mentioning as it brings together court, sworn and police translators and interpreters, thus reflecting the variety of situations in this country. This association has been very active in defending the profession and denouncing the shortcomings of the current system for the provision of court and police interpreting services. In Argentina, the Colegio de Traductores Públicos de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (CTPCBA) is a valuable Latin American example, given the important role that the legislation in force in the country has bestowed upon this association in regulating access to the profession and its daily practice.

Finally, codes of ethics also play an important role. These documents, mostly generated within professional associations (although it is possible to find courts or legal systems with their own regulations that include ethical principles) play a crucial role insofar as they contain the principles that should guide the interpreter's conduct. Although they are usually binding only for the members of the organizations proposing them, they constitute a reference for the profession as a whole. Among the codes of ethics specific to court interpreting, the following associations and organizations are mentioned by way of illustration: NAJIT, representative of the US context; EULITA for the European context; APTIJ, as an example of the Spanish context; and lastly, the code of the Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, as an example of an international court code. It can be safely stated that almost all codes of ethics in court interpreting include the following key principles: confidentiality, impartiality, linguistic accuracy and professionalism. For a comparative and comprehensive analysis of different codes of ethics in the field see Hale (2007:101-36) or Bancroft (2005:22-28).

Furthermore, these codes are sometimes complemented by standards of practice that provide interpreters with guidance on how to apply a particular ethical principle in the face of the many challenges that they may encounter in their daily professional practice. It is also possible to find standards for good practice aimed at legal practitioners to guide them in achieving effective communication through interpreters. The standards manual of the Judicial Council of  California's programme for court interpreters are an illustrative example. Given its pioneering nature in Spain, APTIJ's Guide to Good Practices on Court and Police Interpreting also deserves mentioning. 

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Purpose of court interpreting and the role of the court interpreter

According to the provisions of the legislation in force, court interpretation seeks to ensure that any court proceedings or trial are conducted or held with full observation of procedural safeguards. Equal access to the legal system, full participation in the process and the right to a fair trial are the main elements at stake. To this end, given the particularities of both legal-judicial language and the use of language in the courts, the court interpreter shall seek to render what in the US context has come to be known as the legal equivalent:

[…] a linguistically true and legally appropriate interpretation of statements spoken or read in court from the second language into English, or vice versa. […] The court interpreter is required to interpret the original source material without editing, summarizing, deleting, or adding, while conserving the language level, style, tone, and intent of the speaker, or to construct what may be termed the legal equivalent of the source message […]. It is only when the interpreter is able to consistently produce a legally equivalent interpretation that LEP [Limited English Proficient] individuals are afforded equal treatment on par with English speakers in the judicial system.

(González, Vásquez & Mikkelson 2012: 150)

In short, interpreting should ensure that users who do not speak the language of the proceedings are in exactly the same situation (or at least as close as possible) as a speaker of the language of the proceedings from the same socio-educational background. In addition, the interpreter is intended to interfere as little as possible in the discursive strategies used by legal operators. The same applies to the discourse of defendants and witnesses, whose degree of credibility in the eyes of legal operators can be impacted by interpreting, as research has demonstrated (Berk-Seligson1990; Hale 2004; Lambertini 2016; Hale et al. 2017). The video entitled With the interpreter's permission, edited by the MIRAS research group of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, provides good hints to better understand the value of accuracy in court interpreting.

The role of the court interpreter according to Hale (2008: 102).

The idea of court interpretation that emerges from the legal equivalent notion and, maybe, its over-identification with the notion of literal interpretation has not been without debate. Although the interpreter is required to avoid discursive modifications of the original message (e.g. explaining or clarifying information) at all costs, already at the end of the 1990s there were those who wondered: “isn't it a waste of the interpreter's talent, the court's time, and the taxpayer's resources to have an interpreter standing next to the defendant jabbering away in technical language that the defendant cannot understand?” (Mikkelson 1998). In fact, in the US context, the notion of meaningful legal equivalence has evolved since then. This nuanced concept brings into the equation the degree of understanding of the legal language or the judicial process by defendants and witnesses in need of interpretation, thus following the path of various movements around the world that advocate bringing the language of justice closer to citizens:

Title VI [of Civil Rights Act (1964)] requires interpreters to produce a message that abides by all accuracy standards but also assists the LEP listener to achieve meaningful comprehension. This standard requires the interpreter to utilize terminology, paraphrasing, and definition in order to make the legal equivalent more meaningful to the listener.

(González, Vásquez & Mikkelson 2012: 150)

In fact, some of those who have argued for greater autonomy in decision-making on the part of the court interpreter claim that the sociolinguistic, cultural and historical context surrounding the interpreter should also be considered. This is what Moeketsi (1999) did when analyzing the particular situation of court proceedings in the context of South African official multilingualism, in which the interpreter is necessarily obliged to go “beyond the surface meaning of what has been said to the values embedded in the language and culture of the discourse participants. He becomes a ‘cultural broker’, whose participation involves ‘mediating ideas, laws, customs and symbolisms’ […]”.

Images from Ortega-Herráez's training material: interpreter-mediated mock trial - dialogic consecutive interpreting for the defendant – (left) and simultaneous whispered interpretation for the defendant (right).

This idea of cultural brokerage also seems to underlie the US context when it comes to languages of limited diffusion. In such cases, given their linguistic (and cultural) distance from English, it might be justified to allow interpreters to display a certain degree of flexibility in terms of full observance of the legal equivalent requirement (González, Vásquez, & Mikkelson 2012: 150). A similar position is adopted by Feria (1999) and Herrero (1995), who describe the specificities of court interpreting in the Spanish-Arabic combination at a time when this activity was just beginning to gain importance in the Spanish context and still lacked an adequate regulatory and professional framework.

The role of the court interpreter is a complex issue, given the need to reconcile the limitations imposed by regulations and the principles of professional ethics with the divergent expectations that legal operators and other users may have of the interpreter’s work. Thus, the role of the court interpreter would oscillate along a scale in which

At one extreme of the spectrum there are those who believe the role of the interpreter is to help disadvantaged non-English speakers to succeed in their case. This arises out of a sense of social justice […]. The other extreme argues that interpreters act as machines or conduits, repeating verbatim what they hear in one language in another.

(Hale 2004: 8)

In an attempt to clarify some questions about the role of the court interpreter, the same author draws up a classification based on the analysis of two key parameters: the requirements of precision and impartiality. Her proposal is summarized in the table above (Hale 2008:102) and may prove particularly useful for a better understanding of the different roles that court interpreters can adopt.

Court interpreters have to develop and acquire strong skills and competencies as well as specialized knowledge. Following the conclusions of the Grotius2001/GRP/015 project, legal interpreters

• […] must have a thorough knowledge of the two languages involved in the communication to be interpreted or translated (able to deal with: specialized legal language and terminology, slang and technical language).
• […] must be aware of the interpreter’s role in the judicial system and must obey a strict code of ethics.
• […] must be able to perform consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, as well as sight translation (Martinsen and Rasmussen 2003: 48-49).

Image on the state of court interpreting in the UK. Courtesy and © Alejandro Moreno-Ramos

The identification of these skills, competencies and knowledge is essential to inform both the curricular design of specific training programs (cf. Abril & Martin 2008) and teaching materials (cf. BMT project) and the development of professional certification schemes (cf. Giambruno 2014). This is the only way to ensure that court interpreters are able to perform their tasks with full competence and to the best of their capacity.

The provision of court interpreting services and its logistics would also deserve further attention. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions and in many countries, the provision of these services does not meet minimum quality criteria, as exemplified by the following vignette depicting the situation in the United Kingdom. This situation is no stranger to other countries, such as Spain, where both professional associations and representatives of academia have publicly denounced the shortcomings of the system (cf. among others Complaint to the ombudsman by APTIJ; Ortega-Herráez 2013). 

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  Research potential 

Interpreting Studies has broadened its scope from its initial Eurocentric focus on conference interpreting to incorporate, as a result of the social turn of the 1990s, other genres, most notably PSI, including court interpreting. In addition, research in other regions of the world, especially Asia, is currently booming.

The widening of the lens has allowed for greater interdisciplinarity, the use of methodologies linked to forensic and corpus linguistics, sociology and psychology, as well as a combination of methodologies and theoretical approaches, as Hale (2007: 203-204) rightly points out. She identifies four main methodological approaches in the bulk of PSI research: discourse-analytic (based on natural discourse transcripts); ethnographic (based on field observations, interviews and focus groups); survey research (mainly questionnaires); and experimental (based on methods from psycholinguistics and psychology).

In the specific case of court interpreting, it is worth highlighting the solid trajectory of research based on forensic linguistics, with studies on discourse analysis in mediated communicative encounters that measure the impact of interpreting and of the presence of the interpreter in court proceedings. However, a very significant part of this research has been carried out in the framework of adversarial Anglo-Saxon procedural systems, in which the court hearing and the role of lay jurors are of particular importance.

In the specific case of Spain, the trends observed by Vargas (2017) seem to go in the same direction, although she points to the preeminence of research that could be framed within the qualitative paradigm and with clear influences from ethnographic approaches, the main data collection tools being questionnaires and interviews. She also highlights the difficulty of finding empirical-quantitative studies due to the problems that researchers often encounter when trying to gain access to the object of study itself (i.e. transcripts and/or full recordings of interpreter-mediated encounters). In fact, in the judicial field, only recently has this status quo been partially broken and it has been possible to compile a corpus of interpreter-mediated criminal trials that was subsequently analyzed -and still is- using quantitative techniques (TIPp project; Orozco 2017).

As for the avenues of research that should be explored in the future, bibliometric studies deserve attention. They will allow to obtain a broader and more accurate overview of the current state of interpreting research. In addition, the impact of interpreters in judicial encounters, including those other than trials, and their role in different legal systems, should be further studied. It would also be of interest to research the perception of interpreting among different legal users and operators. Multimodal analysis of such encounters also offers ample research possibilities, just as it would be useful to explore the effects of the use of remote interpreting, mainly via videoconferencing, which has already begun to be explored (cf. Braun & Taylor 2012) but which, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, seems to have become even more widespread. However, in all of these cases it is necessary to first resolve the frequently unresolved issue of researchers being able to access the object of study itself. 

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