Negotiation and communicative accommodation in bilingual police interrogations: a critical interactional sociolinguistic perspective

When geographically displaced persons who have limited proficiency in English undergo custodial interrogations in police stations in the USA, they are not necessarily guaranteed the services of professional interpreters. In fact, research shows a growing trend toward the use of police officers as interpreters at such interrogations. This trend is viewed as problematic for several reasons: police interpreters are unfamiliar with judicial norms requiring neutrality and impartiality toward those for whom they conduct interpreting; they frequently shift footing out of interpreter role into police detective interrogator mode; they may be unqualified to perform interpreting either because they lack the necessary interpreting skills or because their proficiency in the second language (L2) is not sufficiently high as to perform interpreting adequately. A microanalysis of the custodial interrogations of three Latino young men accused of serious crimes demonstrates that when both the detainee and the police interpreter have insufficient proficiency in L2, the outcome is negotiation and communicative accommodation; however, such efforts aimed at communicating successfully are made primarily by the interlocutor who has less power in the interaction, the detainee. Even when both interlocutors are fluent bilinguals, the outcome is adversative for the detainee: unable to perform both interrogator and interpreter roles simultaneously, the police detective imposes pressure on the suspect to answer questions in English, despite the suspect’s repeated efforts to switch to Spanish.

from the International Journal of the Sociology of Language

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