Raising the level of formality, in the direction of court officials (Spanish into English):

Witness: … . me me agarró aquí el dedo. (lit: he he got me here, on the finger)Interpreter: … he injured my hand.

(Hale 1997: 46)

Witness: Ahora, si yo no tomé ningún acto de echarla, porque yo le prometí que no la iba a echar. (lit: Now, if I didn’t take any act to throw her out, because I promised her that I wouldn’t throw her out) 

Interpreter: And also I had promised her that I wouldn’t evict her.

(Hale 1997: 47)

Lowering the level of formality, in the direction of defendants and witnesses (English into Spanish):

Magistrate: So, you would say that your relationship with Mrs X has been at least acrimonious?

Interpreter: Sería, usted diría entonces que su relaxión con la señora X has sido bastante, en un situación bastante mala? (It would, you would say then that your relationship with Mrs X has been rather, in a bad situation?)

(Hale 1997: 49)

Solicitor: And you are the defendant before the court?

Interpreter: Y usted es el que está aquí en le corte? (And you are the one who is here in court?)

(Hale 1997: 49)

Hale explains this tendency as a form of ‘“empathy” with one’s audience’ (1997: 52), a natural communicative need to accommodate our listeners by adjusting our speech to match what we deem to be their expectations. This may well be true, but it is also clear from these examples and other strategies reported in the same article that interpreters are simultaneously positioning themselves in relation to the court (projecting themselves as part of its professional apparatus and aligning themselves with its function) and in relation to those who are positioned on a lower social scale (projecting themselves as their superiors by virtue of ‘talking down’ to them). In each case, interpreters employ a register that reflects their own assumptions about where each type of participant fits into the social and educational hierarchy, and

their very use of this register participates in locating each participant in social space.

Variation in register also allows interpreters to position themselves emotionally vis-à-vis the witness or defendant. Hale reports, for instance, that one interpreter in her study never interpreted the diminutives used by the witness in Spanish, but she herself used the diminutive ‘to express familiarity and sympathy towards the witness’, as in the following examples:

Sergeant: With your wife and daughter.

Interpreter: Estaba con su esposa y su hijita. (You were with your wife and your little daughter)

Magistrate: When you had gone back to look after your child.

Interpreter: cuando cuando usted fue a ver a su niñita, as su hijita. (when when you went to see your little girl, your little daughter)

(Hale 1997: 50)

Finally, repositioning in translation can also influence the interplay between ontological and public narratives, resulting in a different level of visibility of the personal in the context of shared, collective experience. Polezzi (1998, 2001) describes the cumulative effect of shifts in tense and pronoun use in To Lhasa and Beyond, the 1956 English translation of Giuseppe Tucci’s A Lhasa e Oltre, and explains the effect of these shifts:

The continuity between narration and description guaranteed by the generalized use of the present tense, and the identification of traveller and reader encouraged by such devices as the use of personal pronouns, give the whole of the source text the status of an objective and timeless account, one which the reader can still access as if through his or her own eyes but also accept as an authoritative expert account of the ‘reality’ of Tibet. The English translation, on the other hand, clearly defines the boundaries of personal experience through the use of different tenses (the present for the initial, general introduction and the past for the account of travel experiences), and discourages personal identification with the narrator, transforming ‘the scientist’ Tuci into just one of the many travel writers whose personal accounts the reader can draw upon to obtain an interesting and learned, but only partial and definitely historicised, vision of Tibet.

(2001: 128)

May (1994: 76–7) discusses similar tense shifts in English translations of Russian literature which result in suppressing the narrator’s voice. Like the downplaying of personal, anecdotal aspects of a text or utterance, erasing the voice of the author/narrator also contributes to reconfiguring the balance between personal and public narratives.

The purpose of this chapter was to highlight and exemplify the framing function of translation and some of the wide array of devices available for fulfilling this function. Whatever local strategies a translator or interpreter opts for, their cumulative choices always have an effect beyond the immediate text or event. Individual textual narratives do not exist in isolation of the larger narratives circulating in any society, nor indeed of the meta-narratives circulating globally. As social actors, translators and interpreters are responsible for the narratives they help circulate, and for the real-life consequences of giving these narratives currency and legitimacy.

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