Sergio Viaggio

LEGAL AND JUDICIAL INTERPRETING AT INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS

Legal and judicial interpreting are different things, the former being simply a modality of conference interpreting. At judicial organisations, cultural differences and individual psychological traits come to the fore, whereby the fact that interpretation from “non-international” languages is provided by interpreters who are native speakers of them and are thus intimately familiar with the respective cultures becomes relevant. Interpreting into a B language may pose problems with accent and idiomaticity compounded by the additional effort of elocution. The different protocols of legal and judicial interpreting require different tactical options, as does, in the case of judicial interpreting, the direction of interpretation. This both shows the futility of fixed rules attempting to square the communicative circle and foregrounds the importance of an interpreter’s deontological discretion when it comes to his approach to the specific task. The perquisites of competent interpretation in general as well as into and out of one’s A language are also visited.

BIOGRAPHY

Sergio Vaggio (Buenos Aires, 1945). Translator, interpreter and former Chief Interpreter with the UN Office at Vienna. Author of several articles and A General Theory of Interlingual Mediation/Teoría General de la Mediación Interlingüe. He has lectured in several T&I schools (Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Panama, San José de Costa Rica, Morelia, Monterrey, Havana, Kingston, New York, Montreal, Granada, Alicante, Madrid, Barcelona, Vic, Leeds, Bradford, Bath, Salford, Brussels, Trieste, Beirut. et al.)