Indigenous Communities Disadvantaged by Legal Translation Deficiency

A project initiated by a researcher at Darwin’s Charles Darwin University is intended to try and reduce the amount of incarceration experienced by the indigenous community in Northern Australia. The researcher, Dr Samantha Disbray, has identified deficiencies in the translation of legal language as being one of the contributors to misunderstanding between law enforcers and Aboriginal communities.

The linguist’s project is the Language and Law Project and is being funded to the tune of $A28,000 by the Law Society Public Purposes Trust and hopes to focus on three communities in particular in Central Australia and help them to understand legal terms in English as well as translate them better in their own languages. The project may help NAATI translators cope with the all important translation of interactions within the communities, police stations and courtrooms that can end up in tragedy when translations get lost in misunderstanding.

Examples of the way legal terms can lead to misunderstanding include the way the word “guilty” is translated into Warumungu and Wumpurrarni, just to take two indigenous languages in the target area. When the word is translated it may simply mean “remorse” when the legal meaning in its English sense implies culpability for a crime. The project will attempt to explain what terms like these mean even if there is no exact word for them in the communities’ own languages.

Another word that often confuses indigenous people who are not fully bilingual themselves is the word “kill”. There is no confusion amongst native English speakers themselves, but when translated, indigenous people may believe that it means “hit” or beat” instead – vastly different meanings. It also means that when Aboriginal people communicate with police or lawyers and use the word “kill”, they may actually mean “using violence of some sort”.

It is easy to see how when translation service providers in Adelaide or other city in a state or territory where there is a significant indigenous community do not appreciate the way translation has become “lost” that individuals can end up being incarcerated needlessly, a situation which has all too often in the past led to tragedies such as suicide.

Because of the specificity of the different Aboriginal languages other linguists have been engaged by the project to look into legal translation in Pitjantjatjara and Alyawarra, two more languages widely spoken in the Central Australian region.