Bibliographic record
Abstract
The court-appointed translator is largely an invisible actor in the legal space. The Israeli context provides an extreme example of this invisibility: apart from a general statutory definition of the court's obligation to translate criminal proceedings, the work of translation in the Israeli courtroom is mostly unregulated by state law, rendering it highly susceptible to informal manifestations. This article offers a critical empirical investigation into the micropractices of translation performed in the Jerusalem criminal trial court in 2002. On the face of things, the court-appointed translator performs a technical task in the everyday working of the court. Expected to mediate between the defense, the prosecution, and the judiciary, the translator is usually not perceived as an active participant in the legal procedure. Problematizing this perception, the article examines the multiple tasks of court-appointed translators in the Jerusalem criminal trial court, thereby challenging traditional court roles and legal perceptions. Not exactly court officials yet also not outsiders to the courtroom, the translators exercise a mixed bag of formal and substantive roles. They act not only as linguistic intermediaries, but also as intermediaries between formal legalities and commonsense discourses. The article is divided into three parts. The first part sketches three primary linguistic challenges, as those are identified by the translators interviewed for this study. The second part of the article adds the perspective of other court practitioners so as to depict a dynamic picture of the particular loyalties of the translators. Finally, the third part of the article examines the liminal, "third space," of translation. Precisely for its extreme articulation of sovereign ideologies, the Israeli/Palestinian setting provides an intriguing geohistorical context within which to think about translation. This last part ties the article together by highlighting the dynamic relationship between language, law, and space, as these are constructed and subverted through practices of translation within the particular setting of the Jerusalem courtroom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".