The role of silence in interpreted police interviews

Silence is rarely treated as something that should be translated in the interpreting process. Drawing on the principles of conversation analysis, the article explores, the role which silence plays as a meaningful unit in police interviews mediated by Japanese–English interpreters. It also attempts to demonstrate that, despite the status of silence as an ‘uninterpretable’ unit, silent pauses are treated as meaningful units by interpreters. Silent switching pauses were found to function as repair initiators for interpreters, prompting self-repair of renditions. The analysis also reveals that, through the management of silent pauses before and after the suspect's utterances, interpreters exercise a certain extent of control over the questioning, sharing the power of interrogator with the police officer. On the other hand, there are opportunities for suspects to resist such power through silences once they hold the floor. The ambiguous, ‘untranslatable’ yet ‘interpretable’ nature of silent pauses was found to provide opportunities for participants in interpreted police interviews to break away from the questioning sequence typical of monolingual police interviews.