He said ‘I will ask you questions’: A case study of interpreter impact on rapport building in an authentic sign language interpreter-mediated police-suspect interview
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12807/ti.117201.2025.a02Keywords:
Interpreting Studies, police interviews, rapport management, rapport building, cognitive interviewAbstract
In police-suspect interviews it has been argued that rapport building and management plays a vital role in collecting good quality evidence. How rapport building and management is achieved in the presence of an interpreter is an understudied topic. To examine how the interpreter manages this feature of communication we present an interdisciplinary case study analysis of an authentic police-suspect interview involving a deaf suspect, a British Sign Language interpreter and two police officers. Discourse-based interpreting research has determined that interpreters are participants within the interpreter-mediated interaction, and that a high level of discursive expertise and sensitivity is a necessary skill for interpreters working in police interview settings. For this study we draw on policing research to apply a rapport model used in police interviews, and on interpreting studies to examine the interpreter’s use of expanded renditions (Wadensjö, 1998) and source attribution (Metzger, 1999) and the interpreter’s impact on rapport building. These rendition types contain what appears to be conscious or unconscious additions to the source message that seem to support the suspect’s ability to understand the interpreted message but, in some cases, potentially jeopardise the officer’s rapport building strategies. The examples we provide demonstrate the delicate balance needed because expansions to meaning, repetitions or source attribution utilised by the interpreter may lead to unintentional coercive outcomes.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Translation & Interpreting

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).