It provides insights into this under-researched interdisciplinary area of criminal justice and translating and interpreting (T&I) studies to establish an understanding of current practice and issues which need urgent attention. This paper reports on a first ever study in Australia on the experiences of translators and interpreters involved in forensic transcription and translation (FTT) for law enforcement for both investigative and evidentiary purposes. For evidentiary purposes, although the actual recording is regarded as the primary evidence and the transcript as secondary ( Gilbert and Heydon, 2021), triers of fact (i.e., judges and jurors) must rely on the translation into English of the original utterances in the audio to access the meaning of the exchanges spoken in a foreign language that they do not understand.
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For investigative purposes, professional interpreters may be employed to listen to live or covertly recorded telephonic communications and asked to provide investigators with either the gist or a full interpretation of the exchanges under surveillance they may also be asked to identify matters of interest or scour for specific items of information instructed by the investigator.
Professional translators and interpreters are, therefore, often engaged by law enforcement in these situations to overcome language barriers, thereby allowing investigators to carry out their investigative tasks and/or to prepare forensic linguistic evidence for court trials. In an increasingly globalized world where crimes do not observe national or linguistic boundaries, covert recordings law enforcement obtain often contain foreign languages. Law enforcement agencies at times need to engage in clandestine operations to obtain private communications to solve or prevent crimes. Recommendations are proposed as the first step to address the issues identified. Deficiencies of the current practice and its associated risks are identified. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis of text answers provide a qualitative account of the status quo which has not been documented before. This paper reports on the first ever survey conducted in Australia on professional interpreters and translators who have been engaged to perform this type of work. Little is known, however, about the people engaged by law enforcement to undertake these forensic translation tasks, what qualification and training they possess, how they carry out the tasks, and if there is a system to safeguard the quality and reliability of their translation output.
In the context of multilingual and multicultural Australia, often such forensic recordings may contain languages other than English, and therefore a translation into English is required to facilitate understanding of the verbal exchanges in the recording. When tendering such recordings as evidence in court for prosecuting an alleged crime, a transcript will often accompany the recording to assist the triers of fact (i.e., judges and jurors) to hear better. Due to the nature of these operations, the quality of the recordings, particularly those obtained by planting listening devices in a car or a house, is often extremely poor. There is a growing body of literature on forensic transcription of covert recordings obtained by clandestine law enforcement operations. Translating and Interpreting, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University), Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
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