Research On Legal Interpreting

With the development of China's economy, more and more cases involving foreign parties are held in Chinese courts and more and more business relationships are established between Chinese enterprises and overseas entities. Under this trend, court interpreting and contract interpreting (collectively known as legal interpreting) emerge as a branch of interpreting and has become a hot topic recently.There were few academic works on legal interpreting before the 21st century and the few existing ones were limited to brief introduction of the court interpreting system of foreign countries like the United States. However, from the beginning of this century, some Chinese scholars have started to write articles and books about legal interpreting in China, some of them even propose to set a legal interpreting course in universities. Professor Du Biyu, the author of the Guide to Legal Interpreting which is published by the University of International Business and Economics Press in 2006, is one of them. This Study tries to find the common rules in legal interpreting by comparing court interpreting and contract interpreting and seeks for skills of training legal interpreters.We may find some similarities as well as differences between the two types of legal interpreting. As regards the mode of interpreting, both include consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting; As regards the type of interpreting, both are divided into listening to interpret and sight interpreting; both court interpreters and contract interpreters are required to make pre-task paper work; both interpreters shall have good short term memory and master skilled note taking; both are challenged by accents and technical terms, etc. And their differences lie in that: court interpreting is focused on the procedure of the trial to maintain order of the trial process while contract interpreting is focused on contents to expedite the business; the roles of court interpreters and contract interpreters are different. The court interpreters are more professional and legally bound than contract interpreters, and they are outsiders to the court while contract interpreters are insider of the company who are more familiar with the interpreting contents and the background information.Based on the abovesaid results of comparison, this study makes some analysis on skills such as memory training, note taking training, listening training and vocabulary building which are specifically required in the legal settings. Furthermore, based on the comparison between an interior court interpreter and an interpreter appointed by a translation company, this Study also forwards the suggestion of establishing an interior interpreting and translation department in Chinese courts.