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Darden said, and I hope it was in the record, “I object

to anybody who starts off saying ‘I’m a scholar’”.

Johnnie Cochran at the sidebar, 3 March 1995

I’m a scholar interested in the public perception of dialogue interpreters, in

this case court interpreters. The 1995 criminal trial of O. J. Simpson provides

suitable matter for this interest in that it was an international cultural event,

indeed an occasion for considerable social debate. It helped air people’s ideas

about the way courts operate, no matter how unfounded those ideas might be

with respect to more run-of-the-mill justice. The trial also used interpreters

in the week from 27 February to 3 March 1995, when Rosa López, a housekeeper

from El Salvador, chose to testify in Spanish rather than English. The

intense public attention on the trial thus fleetingly presented interpreting as a

contentious object of knowledge. I am interested merely in how that object

was constituted.

266 Interpreters at the O. J. Simpson Trial

As such, I remain a relatively external scholar. I claim no special expertise

in the practice of court interpreting. And given the fairly atypical nature of

my material, I cannot pretend to speak here about what interpreters normally

do or should be trained to do. I am merely a scholar trying to grasp the social

sense of one particular object, in fact just one fairly brief dialogue from the

trial in question. I take the phenomenological position that the object as

noumenon (a thing in itself, uninterpreted) is unknown; its sense is to be

constructed through a series of epistemological precepts and processes. My

tools for recovering and attributing those precepts and processes will partly

be the loose metaphors of visibility and concealment – such are the terms

currently dominant in interventionist translation studies – but will more

seriously be ‘theories’, broadly in the sense of problem-solving ‘passing

theories’ of the kind used in the dialogic construction of any meaning (cf.

Davidson 1984). This means, first, that I personally do not pretend to know

what this object is; I can only try to show sets of hypotheses or provisional

models by which one might come to some kind of knowledge of the object.

It also means that a whole range of social agents, including interpreters, can

be seen doing the same thing, and from similar positions of initial ignorance.

I will attempt to locate the ‘theories’ of court interpreting operative in the

court itself, in the social debates that surrounded the events, and in the solicited

opinions of a linguist and an interpreter-teacher. All those theories are assumed

to help constitute the rationalist content of public perceptions. I will close

with a suggestion about how to distinguish good from bad theories, leading

to a rather cautious plea for scholarly intervention in the general field of

dialogue interpreting.

1. The story so far

Just as great dramatic conflicts like Calderón’s La vida es sueño and Corneille’s

Le Cid begin with a slap, so my account of this, the public drama of

our own age, begins with something similar: Nicole slapped Michelle. It may

be recalled that Nicole was O. J. Simpson’s former wife, whom Simpson

was accused of murdering. Michelle was the Simpsons’ maid (Am. ‘housekeeper’),

a friend of Rosa López, who was a maid in the same neighbourhood.

These facts are of some importance because, at the stage of the trial that

interests me, Rosa López is the only person prepared to provide Simpson

with an alibi: she says she saw his car somewhere else at the time of the

crime. If she is telling the truth, Simpson is probably innocent. So the prosecution,

in the person of counsel Christopher Darden, is intent on showing

that she is lying. She might be lying because she likes O. J. Simpson. And

she might like him because she disliked Nicole Simpson, O.J.’s murdered

wife. And she might have disliked Nicole because, argues the prosecution,

Nicole slapped Rosa’s friend, the maid Michelle.

Anthony Pym 267

Such is the context of the following fragment of the court transcript (taken

from Jack Walraven’s website). The questions are by prosecuting counsel

Darden; the answers are by witness Rosa López; objections are from Johnnie

Cochran, one of the defence counsels; ‘the Court’ is Judge Lance Ito; the

terms in italics are the ones that particularly interest me:

1 Mr Darden Well, you do know that Nicole slapped Michelle one day,

correct?

2 Rosa López Because she told me that.

3 Mr Darden Okay. And Michelle was very upset when she told you

that, correct?

4 Rosa López She was very sad.

5 Mr Darden Okay. And she told you that she hated Michelle or rather

she hated Nicole, correct?

6 Mr Cochran Objection. Hearsay. Also irrelevant and immaterial, your

Honor.

7 The Court Overruled.

8 Rosa López She didn’t tell me she hated her.

9 Mr Darden Pardon me? What was the answer?

10 Rosa López She didn’t tell me that she hated her.

11 Mr Darden Well, she was crying when she told you that she had been

slapped, correct?

12 Rosa López Anyone would cry, sir.

13 Mr Darden Well, was she crying?

14 Rosa López Yes, sir. A lot.

15 Mr Darden And were you upset that Nicole had slapped Michelle?

16 Rosa López No. I just try to console her.

17 Mr Darden Well, isn’t it true that you didn’t like Nicole?

18 Rosa López I only saw Nicole once. I can’t say that I don’t like her.

19 Mr Darden Well, didn’t you tell someone that you did not like her

because –

20 Mr Cochran Objection, your Honor.

21 Mr Darden – because she slapped Michelle?

22 Mr Cochran Vague, your Honor.

23 The Court Sustained.

24 Mr Darden Did you ever tell anyone that you disliked Nicole because

Nicole had slapped Michelle?

25 Mr Cochran Objection. Objection.

26 The Court Overruled.

27 Rosa López It’s true. Nobody likes to get slapped, sir.

28 Mr Darden And so you were angry at Nicole for having slapped

Michelle, correct?

29 Rosa López No. She didn’t hit me. Because if – I would have hit her

back.

268 Interpreters at the O. J. Simpson Trial

Darden’s moderately successful strategy here is to push the witness into a

more antagonistic frame, repeating questions so as to encourage her to express

a more violent attitude toward Nicole, perhaps emblazoning the act in

the mind of the jury. He mentions the verb slapped no less than four times,

using every available occasion to do so before he finally gets the witness,

through the interpreter, to use the same term. No matter how much defence

counsel Johnnie Cochran intervenes to slow down the pace of the exchange,

to protect his witness, Darden knows that if he can keep Rosa opening her

mouth, she will eventually put her foot in it. And she does, in a way. Apart

from the increasing rhythm and mounting intonation on both sides (the tension

 

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تاریخ انتشار: سه شنبه 24 تير 1393 ساعت: 13:24