Non-English-speaking defendants in the magistrates court:a comparative study of face-to-face and prison video link interpreter-mediated hearings in England

This study compares interpreter-mediated face-to-face Magistrates Court hearings with those conducted through prison video link in which interpreters are located in court and non- English-speaking defendants in prison. It seeks to examine the impact that the presence of video link has on court actors in terms of interaction and behaviour. The data comprises 11 audio-recordings of face-to-face hearings, 10 recordings of prison video link hearings, semistructured interviews with 27 court actors, and ethnographic observation of hearings as viewed by defendants in Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. The over-arching theme is the pervasive influence of the ecology of the courtroom upon all court actors in interpretermediated hearings and thus on the communication process. Close analysis of the court transcripts shows that their relative proximity to one another can be a determinant of status, interpreting role, mode and volume. The very few legal protocols which apply to interpretermediated cases (acknowledging and ratifying the interpreter, for example), are often forgotten or dispensed with. Court interpreters lack proper training in the specific challenges of court interpreting, whether they are co-present with the defendant or not. Other court actors often misunderstand the interpreter’s role. This has probably come about because courts have adjusted their perceptions of what they think interpreters are supposed to do based on their own experiences of working with them, and have gradually come to accept poor practice (the inability to perform simultaneous interpreting, for example) as the norm. In video link courts, mismatches of sound and image due to court clerks’ failure to adequately track current speakers, poor image and sound quality and the fact that non-English-speaking defendants in pre-and post-court consultations can see and hear interpreters but not their defence advocates are just some of the additional layers of disadvantage and confusion already suffered by non- English-speaking defendants. These factors make it less likely that justice will be done.

Frontline agents of globalisation:the German merchant community in Glasgow, 1840s to 1914

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a German business community of about one hundred merchants and commercial clerks developed in Glasgow. Their trade networks extended not only to Germany but also to other world markets. The main arguments and findings of the microhistorical analysis include: numbers were significantly higher than previously assumed; endogenous recruitment based on ethnic and family ties was prevalent; migrants benefited from their migration-induced social capital (training, languages, intercultural competence) to fill a skills-gap in Britain; labour market competition at the junior career level was less pronounced than contemporaneous assessments suggested; naturalisation was taken out for purely pragmatic reasons; there was a sense of community at intra-ethnic level, but also with the local business elite. The case study is embedded into the larger context of Anglo-German economic relations and globalisation. A purely local perspective does not suffice to do justice to the wider significance of expatriate business communities in an age of economic globalisation.