Research Report 14 - Deaf jurors' access to court proceedings via sign language interpreting: an investigation (by Jemina Napier, David Spencer and Joseph Sabolcec)
Updates and background for this project (Digest) A project funded by the NSW Law Reform Commission and
the Macquarie University External Collaborative Grant Scheme.
Executive summary
Most research on legal interpreting to date has focused on court interpreting. Typically the person requiring the interpreter is the victim, witness, defendant or complainant. No linguistic studies have been carried out on the efficacy of interpreting for the purposes of a deaf juror. In order to assess the ability of deaf jurors to access court proceedings via signed language interpreters, this pilot study sought to investigate:
1. the ability of legal concepts to be translated from English into Auslan; and
2. the level of comprehension of six deaf jurors as compared to a control group of six hearing jurors
Quantitative and qualitative approaches involving post-test interviews, content and discourse analyses found that an interpretation from English into Auslan was highly accurate and that there was no significant difference in the level of comprehension between deaf and hearing participants. The conclusion is that with trained and skilled interpreters, deaf people could effectively access court proceedings via signed language interpreters, and perform their function as jurors, although further research is needed to investigate this issue in more depth.
This report details the findings of the study.
- Section 1 provides an introduction to the issue of deaf people serving as jurors, and the impetus for this research study.
- Section 2 gives an overview of the relevant literature to foreground the study.
- Section 3 introduces the research questions explored.
- Section 4 discusses the preliminary study which led to the research reported in this publication.
- Section 5 provides details of the methodology and results for this study.
- Sections 6 and 7 discuss the findings and implications of this research.
- Section 8 contains recommendations and suggestions for further research.
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