Of wiretappers and linguists

In ‘The Interpreter’, the character portrayed by Nicole Kidman becomes a witness to a crime. Their work is rarely that dramatic, but they still wield much influence. | Image: Maximum Film / Alamy Stock Photo

Whether it’s audio messages, telephone conversations or bugged recordings: The secret surveillance of communications undertaken by state authorities has become increasingly powerful. But if the police officers involved can’t understand the language spoken by their suspects, none of their technology is of use at all, regardless of how sophisticated it might be.

This is where the language professionals come in. They provide simultaneous interpreting services during wiretaps, or translate recordings of conversations after the fact. While they often have no professional experience of criminal proceedings, their work can have a major impact, either setting further investigations into motion, or, conversely, even jeopardising a conviction.

Lawyers were long convinced that so-called cross-linguistic transfer does not alter the content of what is actually said. “That’s not the case”, says Nadja Capus of the University of Neuchâtel, who last October completed a research project on the work of community interpreters in the secret interception of communications in criminal investigations. “For one thing, linguists choose what they write down out of everything that they hear. And their prior knowledge and training also influence their transcripts – thereby influencing the investigation too”. Transcribing the entire text of any surveillance activity would cost too much, and in any case it isn’t always effective, she says. For example, when a drug dealer talks to an addict, Capus says their dialogues can sometimes be “really Kafkaesque”.

Invisible linguists

Capus and her team – which included a sociologist, a linguist and an interpreter – analysed over 1,000 transcripts, 22 criminal files totalling almost 60,000 pages, and 90 wiretapped telephone conversations transcribed from Serbian and Bosnian into German. They also conducted interviews with police officers and linguists, and were allowed to observe investigative work in real time.

They discovered that the work of the linguists is often made invisible. Police reports sometimes don’t even state when recorded statements are in fact being given in translation. The lack of any standardised guidelines is a further problem. “Each instance determines more or less on its own what prior knowledge their linguists ought to have”, says Capus. This includes deciding whether they should be told the nature of the accusations against the suspects, or whether they would work better “without any filter”.

There’s another important issue. How should linguists make it clear when they are providing their own interpretation of what they’re hearing? “It makes a difference whether they write that they can hear typing and rustling, or whether they think they can hear drugs being packed”, says Capus. There have even been cases where linguists have seen themselves as auxiliary police officers, and misinterpreted ‘codes’ when translating what they heard. “In one case”, says Capus, “a harmless greeting was assumed to be a coded announcement of a drug delivery”. She and her team are campaigning for the professionalisation of language services in the criminal justice system, and for an increased awareness of the complexity of linguistic mediation on the part of the authorities.

Further training for linguists in Zurich

In many cantons, there are hardly any qualitative requirements for employing linguists. In fact, Capus says that the authorities are often dependent on finding someone – anyone – who can speak both the required language and German. But these tasks are very complex. Community interpreters have to take cultural peculiarities into account, untangle linguistic confusion, be able to work with special police software, be quick to grasp what they hear, and also quick at writing.

For the past year, the canton of Zurich has been running courses for linguists active in the justice system. These have been designed by an inter-agency group of experts headed up by Tanja Huber of the Central Office for Language Services at the Cantonal High Court in Zurich. Those involved have many years of experience and have also drawn on the findings from Capus’s project. “Until this valuable work was conducted, hardly any scholarly data existed on language mediation in secret communications interception”.

The new course lasts two days and is followed by exams. This process of professionalisation is an important step, says Huber. “Defining and harmonising standards is necessary if we’re going to ensure the quality of language services and prevent both formal deficiencies and referrals to lower instances”.