Reaching shared understanding during court hearings is a prerequisite to ensure a fair trial and maintaining legal certainty. Every month between 2,000 and 3,000 court hearings in Sweden make use of interpreters. Interpreter-mediated conversations involve an extra discourse compared to monolingual conversations which increases the risk of misunderstandings. Using methodology of conversation analysis the study explores how bilingualism is expressed during interpreter-mediated court hearings, at which occasions the Spanish-speaking laymen switch to Swedish and what function the codeswitching fulfills. The study identifies patterns in codeswitching and categorizes them into six different types. Furthermore the ideology of monolingualism in court is challenged and the advantages and disadvantages of codeswitching is discussed. The analysis concludes that even though certain types of codeswitching lead to delays in the conversation, the interaction is mostly favored by the Spanish-speaking party understanding some Swedish. Court proceedings would benefit from being more permissive toward bilingualism and the types of codeswitching that favor intersubjectivity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-119289 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Mata, Iracema |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap, Linköpings universitet, Filosofiska fakulteten |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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