Interpretare per i minorenni: osservazioni su un'esperienza con alunni della scuola primaria e secondaria di secondo grado

Pre-trial questioning of minors is a widely unexplored field. Since many challenges may arise from working with children in legal settings, especially if an interpreter is involved, further research is needed. To gain some insight about how children, interpreters and interviewers interact, this dissertation aims at providing examples of how communication works in four interpreter-mediated interviews with children and teen agers. They involve two German-speaking interviewers, two Italian children aged 6, 8, and two Italian teen agers aged16 and 17 and a professional interpreter who had not worked with children before. The data analysis shows that our interviewers and interviewees communicate successfully as demonstrated by the interviewers’ satisfaction with the information they have gathered. However, some interpreter’s initiatives may have limited the interviewees’ participation in the communicative event. This happened in particular with divergent renditions and some zero renditions. Examples of how interpreters may impair children’s participation in communicative events can be found also in some previous studies, like the ones by Keselman (2010) and Hitching & Nilsen (2010), among others, focusing on questionings of asylum-seeking minors. Children are vulnerable because of their age and they are even more so when involved in legal proceedings of which they do not share the language. Also, they communicate in a way that may be different from adults. Professionals who work with children in legal settings, including interpreters, should therefore be aware of what they should pay attention to in order to work effectively and in the best interest of the child. The amount of analysed data is very limited and needs expanding, still this study could be considered as an attempt to show that traditional training is not enough to deal efficiently with all the challenges involved in an interview with a child and that specific training for working with children is needed.