ABSTRACT
Domestic courts universally have been slow to respond to societal change and have achieved only limited success in incorporating participants who do not speak the language of the court (Colin, Morris 1996; Hale, Stern 2011; Morris 2001; Stern 1995). In superdiverse societies, including Australia, communication challenges in court have been heightened by the proliferation of ‘new and emerging languages’ – an official Australian term to denote the languages of recent migrant and asylum seeker communities, mainly from South Central Asia and Africa. Communication with speakers of these languages in legal settings, even through interpreters, has been problematic for several reasons, not the least the courts’ being unable to adequately address the problem of intercultural and bilingual communication and adapt their settings.
It can be argued that similar problems have been addressed by international courts and tribunals (ICTs), with their added complexity of several languages being used and their unique legal and socio-political settings. Years of experience of international trials, beginning with the Nuremberg trials, have led to the creation of courtroom settings intended for multilingual communication. A complex model of multilingual communication has been developed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the 1990s, with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the early 21st century being proactive in developing these settings. How have these ICTs enable effective multilingual interactions for daily professional use inside and outside the courtroom? In the absence of a shared convention and shared knowledge, is mutual understanding in such a setting indeed achievable (Blommaert, Rampton 2011: 6)? How do interpreters and interpretation users mediate a shared meaning when ensuring communication between the French and English speaking Western-style courts and its culturally and linguistically distant defendants and witnesses who come from regions as diverse as the former Yugoslavia and the African continent?
With the domestic courts as a backdrop, this chapter will examine international courtroom settings and interpreted communicative practices, paying particular attention to the role of ICTs in creating multilingual settings for effective communication.
