Interpreting the 'Language of War' in war-crimes trials

Since 1945, when the International Military Tribunal conducted the trials of the major Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg effective interpretation has been the essential communication mechanism amongst multilingual courtroom participants: court administration, lawyers and judges, and war crimes perpetrators, victims and witnesses. As such, interpreting has been crucial in domestic trials of WWII criminals, such as the 1961 Eichmann trial; the 1989 Demjanjuk trial (Morris 1989, 1998), the 1986-1993 Australian War Crimes Prosecutions (Fraser 2010; Stern 1995), and also in the more recent war crimes trials by international courts and tribunals, including the UN International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR respectively), and the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). These recent war crimes trials have brought together two different legal worlds: that of the western-style, mainly English- and French-speaking courts (domestic courts, ICTY, ICTR and ICC), on the one hand, and on the other that of victims, witnesses and perpetrators who mostly speak the ‘rare’ languages of the countries of conflict, some existing only as vernacular (African tribal languages Lingala, Sango, Acholi) or regional language varieties (Russian/Ukrainian dialects, languages of the former Yugoslavia, French and English African varieties, Swahili in the Congo). In this complex multilingual and multicultural legal environment proceedings rely on accurate provision of evidence about major war crimes. The question I address here is this: what challenges do court interpreters experience when dealing with war crimes related evidence, and how do participants from radically opposed cultural and legal backgrounds achieve mutual understanding? Interestingly, irrespective of interpreting practice and quality, war crimes trials over the years have revealed similarities in the types of interpreting challenges (Stern 1995, 2001, 2004, 2011). Some problems of cross-linguistic transfer have to do with achieving ...