Court interpreting services provided for refugees in Turkey in the context of community interpreting: An evaluation in the light of actor network theory

This study began with the assumption that interpreting service in the courts, one of the sub-fields of community interpreting, is affected by the actors in the social environment and the interactions between these actors. The study aims at defining the network and the actors involved in the network of court interpreting service in Turkey, and at exploring whether the actors in the network affect the perception on the position and the duty of the court interpreters or not. In this context, case studies were conducted in two trials, where the refugees benefit from the interpreting service in Arabic-Turkish language pair in Kayseri and Antalya cities. The data sources are composed of the semi-structured interviews with the court interpreters, open-ended questionnaires administered to the judges and the officers in the court registry and the short interviews conducted with the refugees. Additionally, the second data sources include the observation notes of the trials, research diaries and available codes, regulations and documents in the field. The findings have been discussed as divided into the categories of position, communication and intervention and through Actor-Network Theory put forward by Callon and Latour with the aim of defining the social network by tracing the actors. The position covers the themes of the interpreter's physical and social position, the attitude towards the profession, status and role. The communication comprises the themes of communication before and after interpreting and the cooperation between the interpreters. The intervention involves in the themes of the interpreting techniques, the difficulties encountered during the interpreting and the intervention to the interpreting, the interpreter and the speaker in the course of trial. The findings demonstrate that the networks have been temporary and have varied in each trial, and moreover, the court interpreters have created local and small networks before interpreting in order to be involved in the network safely because of the deficiency in the procedures. In addition to that, it is concluded that the actors such as the bilingualism of the interpreters, the definition of the interpreter's duty in the code, the communication between the actors before interpreting in the network could affect the perception of the human actors' on the position and the duty of the court interpreters.