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Research on court interpreting has by and large pointed to the court interpreters' incompetence or otherwise lack of training as the main cause of inaccuracy or non-equivalence in their rendition of the source-language (SL) speaker's message into the target language (TL). Drawing on the authentic data of nine criminal trials from the courts of Hong Kong, this study demonstrates judges' intervention in witness examination as a cause of omissions in court interpreting. his study is situated in the bilingual Hong Kong courtroom, where the interpreting service in a trial conducted in English is a sine qua non due to the linguistic dichotomy between English-speaking legal professionals and Cantonese-speaking lay litigants. The access of non-English-speaking (NES) participants to utterances produced in English in witness examination is made possible by the interpretation provided in the consecutive mode in open court. his study illustrates how a judge's intervention in the proceedings can lead to omissions and/or a change from the consecutive mode to the more restrictive chuchotage mode of interpreting and discusses how this may impact on the participation status of NES court actors and potentially compromise the administration of justice. It concludes by suggesting solutions to the problems identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined the effect of three different types of suggestion on children's recognition memory. Younger (7-year-olds; n=38) and older (11-year-olds; n=47) children listened to a class presentation about China. Three days later, they were interviewed using suggestive questions that were divided into three categories: questions suggesting that details were present when in fact they were not (commission errors), questions suggesting that presented details were absent (omission errors), and questions suggesting that details were presented differently (change errors). The following day, children participated in a recognition-memory task that contained items that referred to information suggested during the suggestive interview. Children in both age groups were more likely to erroneously endorse items involving change errors than they were to endorse items involving commission or omission errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]