THE RIGHT TO A FAIR TRIAL: THE ROLE OF THE TRANSLATORINTERPRETER IN THE CRIMINAL TRIAL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15837/aijjs.v7i4.851Keywords:
the right to a fair trial, Romanian Constitution, the judicial dialogue, New Code of Criminal ProcedureAbstract
The judicial dialogue, as an expression of judicial controversy, is organized in thenational language. In order to observe the principle of audi alteram partem, when a litigant
speaking another language is present, it is required that the dialogue should be reconstituted
with the assistance of a translator-interpreter. The latter informs the litigant who speaks
another language of “all acts that may affect him to a certain extent”, in order to make the
counsel understand the proceedings and to protect the rights of the person he defends. The
translator-interpreter is thus the protector of the rights of the person for whom he translates,
allowing the accused to participate in the debate. The presence of this occasional
collaborator is a guarantee of good justice. Standing among the actors of a trial, the
interpreter is the faithful transmitter of each person’s words by the search of equivalences
between two utterances. The translation must render as accurately as possible the intentions
of the author of the translated utterance, thus becoming an “accurate re-creation”, a
“creation of meaning”. Frequently based on “syntactical archaisms” and “stereotyped
formulas”, these turns do not have an equivalent in other languages.
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