Mandarin-Speaking Interviewees’ Understanding and Perceptions of Police Interviewing Mediated by Interpreters

Scholarship on police investigative interviewing has advanced considerably over the past few decades. Significant attention has been paid to the strategic wording and formulation of police questions that aim to obtain accurate and comprehensive information from interviewees in monolingual English settings. Some types of police questions have been argued to be productive for gathering information, while others are classified as non-productive. As interpreter-mediated police interviews in bilingual settings are receiving increasing attention, studies of police interpreting have revealed semantic and pragmatic shifts in interpreted police questions and difficulties in achieving interpreting accuracy in police settings. However, existing scholarship has mainly adopted the perspective of the source language to examine whether police questions are faithfully interpreted into the target language. As yet, it is largely unknown if English police questions, either productive or non-productive, work as intended on interviewees in the target language and culture after language mediation. In addition, significantly fewer studies have focused on English–Mandarin police interpreting. Research on this language combination is urgently needed in the multilingual Australian context, where Mandarin is currently the second most spoken language in the country. This thesis, therefore, adopts Mandarin-speaking interviewees’ perspectives and Chinese linguistic and cultural frameworks to explore their perceptions of police questions rendered into Mandarin from English in investigative interviews in the Australian context. This empirical research is exploratory in nature and adopts a qualitative approach. It consists of two sequential phases with two groups of participants: (1) a discourse analytical study of Mandarin trainee interpreters’ renditions in a simulated English–Mandarin police interview, and (2) a survey of native Mandarin-speaking interviewees’ perceptions of the Mandarin renditions of English police questions. The first phase is a simulation of police interviewing mediated by six trainee interpreters from RMIT University. Through pragmatic and syntactic analyses, it was found that some renditions would either fall into a different functional question type or exert a different level of control in the Chinese context to the original in English. Other pragmatic deviations were associated with the focus, neutral wording, and tone of the police questions. The renditions featuring these traits form the basis of the research instrument for the survey in the second phase: a monolingual Mandarin police interview and questionnaire to collect the perceived pragmatic features of the selected renditions. In the survey, individual native Mandarin-speaking respondents (n=21) listened to the audio recording of the Mandarin police interview segment by segment and responded intuitively to the turns containing the selected renditions as if they were in the exchange. Their perceptions collected by items (administered online) were analysed using descriptive statistics, and their oral responses to flexible probing elements were coded using an inductive approach. Findings show that the respondents’ perceptions deviated from the pragmatic features of the English questions in the aspects of the information sought, the controlling force over the answer, question focus, neutral wording, and tone. Overall, different ways of interpreting the same police questions led to different perceptions and, therefore, different responses. This study argues that linguistic, interpreter-related, interviewee-related, and contextual factors may have caused the pragmatic deviations. For police interpreting, the research highlights the difficulty of recreating the pragmatic features of police questions across languages and the importance of interpreters’ pragmalinguistic knowledge of their working languages. For police investigative interviewing, it suggests that English-speaking police interviewers should be aware of possible pragmatic deviations in bilingual interviews by adding follow-up questions to obtain further details. In addition, the differences between what was perceived by the respondents in the study and what has been argued in the existing scholarship point to the need for larger-scale research in future. It is hoped this initial step will encourage further research in the area of interpreter-mediated police interviewing between English and Mandarin, as well as other languages.<p></p>