Charlotte's Corner

Web on the Web — Part V

Alexander Rainof

Charlotte, a pedagogue at heart if ever there was one, has been ecstatic for over a year now with the superb Web site that Court TV has on the internet, located at http://www.courttv.com/. As demonstrated in the brief overview below of previous installments, this Web site alone can be used to orchestrate a comprehensive, cross-language, step-by-step methodology in forensic translation and interpretation, culminating in a thematic approach.

In "Web on the Web - I" Jacqueline Onassis's and Elvis A. Presley's last wills and testaments were selected to demonstrate how a specific technical vocabulary, in this instance a probate terminology glossary, could be developed from primary texts, and how this research could be applied subsequently to the study of testamentary documents of increasing difficulty for sight and written translation exercises.

In "Web on the Web - II", this methodology was extended to documents dealing with weapons and drug terminology, two areas of paramount importance for the forensic interpreter. Medical, financial, and other specialized terminology texts are also available on the Court TV Web site, and the same methodology can be used in these lexical areas. The advantage of this approach is that the terminology being studied is not learned in a vacuum but in context, and through constant reinforcement. Moving on to sight and written translation, "Web on the Web - II" then introduced documents such as the transcripts of the Timothy James McVeigh and Orenthal James Simpson trials that can be used for consecutive interpretation training. The O.J. Simpson area, by the way, has been expanded to include all of the civil trial materials as well as those relating to the criminal trial, and has a new location: http://207.175.199. 182/~walraven/simpson/

With court transcripts such as these, training can be done in groups of three. One student or practitioner reads the questions from the transcript in English, a second person in the group does a sight translation of the answers in whatever target language is desired (thus Rosa Lopez can answer in Tagalog, Japanese, or Hungarian), and the third person in the group interprets back and forth. Every two or three pages the members of the group trade roles, which means that every six to nine pages one member of the group has the restful task of just reading the questions in English, and can plunge, with renewed vigor, into the sight translation and consecutive interpretation tasks of the next rotation.

"Web on the Web - III" focused on documents on the Court TV Web site suitable for both consecutive and simultaneous interpretation involving the foibles of famous politicians such as President Bill Clinton, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Senator Packwood. For civil legal terminology, and in a lighter vein, the epic story of "Stephen Spielberg: The Doughnut Case" was introduced.

"Web on the Web - IV" discussed one of the most useful aspects of the Court TV web site, the collection of documents on specific topics. The topic presented in "Web on the Web IV" was patholysis or medically assisted suicide.

The pedagogical strategy of focusing on a specific topic is known as the thematic approach, and is equally effective at all levels, from elementary to graduate school levels. This approach is ideally suited to the field of translation and interpretation, all the more so when a plethora of source documents have already been grouped around a specific theme, as they are on the Court TV site.

The Death Penalty, at http://.www.courttv.com/library/capital/, is the thread Charlotte will use today to spin her web on the web. This section of the site includes forty-two documents ranging in length from two to twenty pages. First, the student/practitioner could be directed to read all these documents with an eye to developing individual glossaries of terms relating to the death penalty. The individual glossaries could then be discussed in class or in a training seminar and a group glossary could be created which would include the lexicographical work of all the participants. This is an excellent exercise in both terminology compilation and team-work. A quiz, or several, could then be administered in English and in whatever the target language might be.

Once the relevant terminology is learned, the student can move on to the next level. Just Say Revenge, one of the forty-two texts, is at a fairly basic level, an excellent document for sight and written translation exercises:

Our criminal justice system is supposed to serve several purposes: deterrence, rehabilitation, punishment. Most people agree that the death penalty does not deter crime. No one has the ability to argue that it is rehabilitative. Thus we are left with two options: One, it is necessary to kill these people for our own safety; or two, these are revenge killings . . . As a nation we find it hard to kill - that's why there are few murderers among us. With the legitimized institution of killing enshrined in our nation's death penalty statutes, it seems that the only way we can get past our inborn abhorrence of taking human life is to demonize the killers. . ."

The article "Court Ponders Limits of its Own Power" is an excellent exercise text on a more technical level. It discusses the overlap of powers between the Supreme Court and the Congress, and the thorny problem of recent habeas corpus limitations in capital punishment cases:

According to legal scholars, this may very well be the first time in recent years that the Supreme Court will squarely address the issue of whether Congress can all but eliminate the Supreme Court's ability to review a particular issue... On May 3, the court agreed to hear argument on whether the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 unconstitutionally infringes on the Supreme Court's own power, by drastically cutting back on inmates' ability to reach out to the high court in successive habeas petitions.

Another excellent text in this group, for written and sight translation purposes, is "Connecticut Supreme Court Leaves no Doubt About the Constitutionality of the Death Penalty." This text can easily be used for consecutive interpretation practice by putting the arguments for and against the constitutionality of the death penalty. So can interviews with inmates on death row.

Some of the more interesting cases involve Mumia Abu-Jamal, Michael Ross and Lloyd Schlup. Mumia Abu-Jamal's case is outlined in "Guilty and Framed." Jamal, arrested when 27 years old for killing a police officer, has been on death row for some fifteen years after a trial which is now considered marred by "police misconduct and probably rampant police perjury; ineffective and underfunded defense lawyering; inappropriate prosecution arguments to the jury and egregiously bad judging by a notoriously biased, pro-prosecution [judge]." This section, which has very interesting articles dealing with the Jamal case, contains wonderful materials for both consecutive and simultaneous training.

Wonderful too are the articles surrounding the Michael Ross case: "Michael Ross: Why a Killer Offers to Die," and "Probably Innocent, Almost Executed," which presents the case of another death row inmate, Lloyd Schlup. Schlup, accused of murdering a prison inmate and proven many years later to be innocent, would have been executed before his innocence could be proven had the recent laws governing habeas corpus not existed at the time of his appeals.

The Schlup dossier makes a strong case against capital punishment. Pro and con articles on capital punishment abound in this section. And as they deal with a burning issue and are highly interesting, they can and should be used for consecutive and simultaneous interpretation training. Furthermore, they can be used for conference simultaneous interpretation, some of them to be read in the original English and some, having already been translated in previous written and sight translation exercises, to be read in whatever target language is needed.

Thus, one could devise a mock capital punishment conference and read some of the papers from the Court TV Web site. There are many other sites on the Web covering capital punishment in great detail. Some of the more noteworthy are John Stuart Mill's "Speech in Favor of Capital Punishment," http://ethics.acusd. edu/Mill.html; Tom Guilmette's historic overview of capital punishment, http://www.academic.marist.edu/guiltr/cappun.html); "Wesley Lowe's Pro Death Penalty Webpage," http://www.rit.edu/~ww12461/cp.html; the University of Alaska Anchorage "Justice Center Web Site," http://www.uaa.edu/just/death/, which has a wealth of death penalty-related links, some of which are opposed to the death penalty, such as: "Searching the Soul on the Death Penalty," http://www.rit/edu/~nrcgsh/life/; "Journey of Hope . . . from violence to healing," a Web site that studies alternatives to the death penalty, http://mason.gmu.edu/~dmelia/hope.html; and three American Civil Liberties Union articles: "ACLU Briefing Paper - The Death Penalty" http://www.org./library/pbp89.html; "The Case Against the Death Penalty," http://www.aclu.org/ library/ case_against_ death.html; and "The Death Penalty," http://www. aclu.org/issues/death/hmdp.html.

This last Web site is prefaced by a Camus quotation from "Reflections on the Guillotine," a brilliant essay published by Calman Lévy in 1957 under the title "Réflexions sur la peine capitale," a collection of essays by leading European intellectuals against capital punishment. Camus' and Koestler's essays were published in English under the title "Reflections on Hanging" (New York: MacMillan,1957), and since these essays and others have already been translated into numerous languages, the texts could be integrated into the mock capital punishment conference for simultaneous interpretation training.