抄録
One of the growing concerns in police interpreting is the use of “bilingual” law-enforcement officers as interpreters for interviews. While such countries as the U.K. and Australia refrain from this practice, their use is increasing in other parts of the world, including the U.S. and Japan. Despite the often claimed advantages of this practice, such as response to urgency, confidentiality, technical knowledge, interrogation efficiency, and costs, the fundamental issues continue to be their qualifications and translation accuracy. This paper looked into these issues, using the data originally collected for the “hearsay” issue research of police interpreters (a total of 228 federal and state cases from 1850 to 2018, by 242 interpreters, 70 of whom officer interpreters). The result shows that for all the gravity of their interpretation tasks, most of them were barely qualified for the job from a technical standpoint, with no formal training or sufficient experience, not to speak of certifications. Also, potentially serious translation issues were identified, with a significant difference between their performance and that of non-officer interpreters, though many of the non-officer interpreters were also untrained, ad-hoc bilinguals.
