BLENDED LEARNING SCENARIOS FOR DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE IN COURT INTERPRETING

By drawing upon cognitive resources, professional court interpreters should uphold as a guiding principle for their choices the need to preserve the pragmatics of the ongoing interaction between legal experts and witnesses during the trial, since participants’ speech style, register and rhetorical strategies are bound to deeply influence the overall outcome of the judicial proceeding. In Italy, however, low quality standards and lack of specific training paint a grim picture of legal services with regard to the achievement of pragmatic equivalence in courtroom settings, thus suggesting the need for further research in this field. Given these premises, the aim of this paper is to propose a new didactic approach to provide adequate preliminary training for future consecutive court interpreters from English into Italian and vice-versa. In particular, after briefly discussing the issues, tasks and challenges of legal equivalence, an actual ESP course – developed in order to widen non-specialists’ pragmatic and sociolinguistic micro-skills in court interpreting – is taken as a reference for effective needs assessment, syllabus design and material selection. The rationale of this approach lies in the creation of a student-centred and rich learning environment where multi-layered teaching methodologies, audio-visual resources and corpus-linguistic evidence are tailored to the learners’ background knowledge and increasingly approximated to real-life situations. Specifically, this paper argues for the need for a flexible syllabus suitable for enhancing students’ understanding of the spoken language of the law through the creation of ‘blended learning scenarios’ in which the analysis of popular legal movies can pave the way for more challenging activities aimed at identifying – in real-life trials – translation equivalents and pragmatic patterns from a cross-cultural perspective, with the ultimate goal of fostering students’ procedural knowledge, i.e. the ability to predict and find the best interpreting solutions in professional situations when constrained by time pressure and extremely high-level expectations.