False Friends in Englishes of Central Australia

In a monolingual courtroom, an assumption is made that Aboriginal witnesses know and understand the English language; and can testify with minimal interpreting assistance. But what variety of English do they know? This article will focus on communication failures in legal interpreting, based upon the author’s recent experiences as a legal interpreter in courts and in police interviews.

The volumes in this series set out to provide a contemporary record of the spread and development of the English language in South, Southeast, and East Asia from both linguistic and literary perspectives. Volumes in this series reflect themes that cut across national boundaries, including the study of language policies; globalization and linguistic imperialism; English in the media; English in law, government and education; 'hybrid' Englishes; and the bilingual creativity manifested by the vibrant creative writing found in a swathe of Asian societies.

Of those women who seek asylum in Britain, a proportion will find their way into psychology services. Many of these women do not speak English and so interpreters are used. This paper investigates how interpreters make sense of and cope with interpreting rape stories.

The Alyawarr Language Region is located in the Sandover and Barkly areas of the Northern Territory. Alyawarr is a language with around 2000 first language speakers. Although the Alyawarr language has been studied since the 1930s, only recently has long-term detailed fieldwork been undertaken in Alyawarr. Alyawarr verbs are agglutinative, suffixing and compounding. Alyawarr is in rich inflectional and derivational morphology. One significant category is Motion. Chapter One is an introduction to the Alyawarr language and reviews the literature on the language. Verb roots and types of word formation are explored in Chapter 2. Subsequent chapters explore different categories which follow the verb root. Chapter 3 covers Derivation and Number. Chapter 4 explores the categories of Motion and Aspect. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the inflectional categories of Tense and Mood and to complex clauses. This research represents seventeen years of research in the Alyawarr language based upon extensive text collections and data elicitation. Although this thesis builds on that of Stanham (1972), Turtle (n.d) and Yallop (1977), it contains new perspectives on understanding the Alyawarr verb and further refines previous analyses. This thesis is also distinctive and interesting because of further detailed information about reduplication in Alyawarr. Basic Motion verbs are explained and the category of Motion including an account of vertical motion. Another feature of this thesis is an exploration of the aspectual system of Alyawarr and its relationship to the categories of tense and mood along with a number of hitherto undescribed inflections.

The goal of this article is to propose three, action learning “hypotheses” to be considered by interpreter educators as conceptual pillars for a comprehensive pedagogical framework that reinvigorates the original Deaf invention of community interpreting. The theoretical claim is that temporality is neglected in most discourse and research about simultaneous interpreting because it has been taken for granted that the speed of information transfer is a highly significant and non-negotiable measure of effective interpretation. Arguments about the values and benefits of taking or using time to generate better interpretations and/or guarantee mutual understanding among interlocutors have been absent from scholarly reflection about simultaneous interpretation but present in Deaf criticism. This criticism shows how engineering-based metaphors about the interpreter as a transmission machine perpetuate an informational bias at the expense of relationships: the ideology of speed interferes with the Deaf voice. To counter this, “holding time” is suggested as the essential function of an authorized interpreter using role space according to culturally-Deaf principles for the special intercultural communication practice of community-oriented simultaneous interpretation. This relational model pre-exists within traditional Deaf cultures and can therefore be considered a Deaf invention.

A review of the literature on faithful interpretations and translations, with comments from the author, an ASL and International Sign interpreter

This research used a constructivist grounded theory approach in order to explore Aboriginal women’s attitudes and beliefs about sexual violence. Data were derived from semi-structured interviews with seven professional Aboriginal women who resided in Perth, Western Australia. As the research was conducted by a non-Aboriginal person, it was overseen by a Critical Reference Group of Aboriginal women, who provided cultural guidance regarding all aspects of this study. From the participant interviews a number of themes emerged, including the historical context that contributes to current attitudes and beliefs to sexual violence in Aboriginal communities, including the breakdown of traditional governance and family systems; and the impacts of historical/transgenerational trauma. Participants’ responses also described the contemporary factors that they identified as contributing to sexual violence in Aboriginal communities, including ongoing community disadvantage, internalised oppression and racism. Additionally, the importance of family to Aboriginal people was described by participants, along with the power of ‘shame’ in an Aboriginal context. These historical and contemporary contributing factors were seen by participants as shaping attitudes and beliefs in Aboriginal communities, along with responses to sexual violence in Aboriginal communities. From these data a model was developed which showed the interrelationship between contributing factors as described by participants. Additionally, the basic social process of ‘weighing up’ was identified from participant responses which involved the weighing up of competing contexts, thus determining the actions and interactions described by participants in relation to sexual violence. Recommendations based on the findings are discussed.