There are different skills involved when a forensic linguist needs to transcribe an audio recording or translate a written statement. If the writer leaves these elements out it can lead to a misunderstanding of the Polish content and consequently the translation into English may turn out to be inaccurate: lek (medicine) instead of lęk (fear), for example. Someone might say that this is not important as the Polish reader will understand it, but this is not quite true. Or, for example, take the backtranslation of a Polish witness statement where the description of an event has been written down without Polish diacritics. ‘I saw this man at around 6.00 at the station’, and the police detective fails to ask additional questions regarding the time during the investigation, a forensic translator will not know which part of the day the event took place. This includes an analysis of details that could have an impact on the outcome of the trial.įor instance, if a witness is specifying the time when describing a particular event and they say: They are combined in a three-stage functional model called a ‘forensic analysis model’. In order for forensic translation to be useful during criminal or civil cases there are specific rules for analysing the source content. This means that forensic translation focuses on translating the non-English court evidence as accurately and faithfully as possible, without compromising on important facts which can be used in a criminal or civil trial. It can be defined as an application of pragmatic translation models to foreign written evidence. Since forensic linguistics combines an analysis of written and oral evidence, there are plenty of times when evidence that is not written in English has to be submitted to a court. In this way it may be possible to find out whether the messages that claim to be a victim’s letters, for example, are authentic documents or clever fakes.įorensic translation is part of this field. They look through the habitual use of specific words, their order, grammar and/or the overall syntax of the content in question. When it comes to a criminal context, the forensic language analyst investigates almost as a police detective would.
It might also come up in business: for instance, commercial agreements in which there is a possible dispute over the meaning of a particular sentence or part of a sentence. Definition and practiceĭr John Olsson of the Forensic Linguistics Institute describes forensic linguistics as ‘the interface between language, crime and law, where law includes law enforcement, judicial matters, legislation, disputes or proceedings in law, and even disputes which only potentially involve some infraction of the law or some necessity to seek a legal remedy.’ In short, it is a discipline analysing language-based evidence that might help to solve a crime or legal disagreement. This was how I discovered a specialism called forensic linguistics and started thinking about how this discipline might be applied to the industry more broadly. My interest in forensic translation began when I was first looking at all the different specialisations open to translators, and started doing some academic research on legal translation in a criminal context.
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