Liaison Interpreting in International Business Contract Negotiations: the Legal Interpreter at the Crossroads

In the ever-growing and competitive global marketplace, companies must look for new ways to gain a competitive advantage. One of these ways is to negotiate provisions orally while drafting the contract in istanti with four hands. This practice – meant to foster trust, cooperation, and fair understanding – has made it imperative to seek collaboration with interpreters to navigate diverse laws, business practices, and above all, cultural differences. In this more nuanced, deeply interpersonal form of transaction, liaison interpreting in contract negotiations presents itself as a complex, challenging, and fruitful area of expertise. Yet, no previous study has explored this domain, whose originality for interpreters lies in that it combines two challenging aspects: the legal language of contracts with cooperative negotiation strategies in the business field. To address this gap, the study examines an authentic, interpreter-mediated meeting between German buyers and an Italian ceramic tile manufacturer. In this scenario, English serves as the lingua franca for the negotiation. Drawing on Wadensjö’s (1998) framework for interpreting roles and renditions, along with Duranti’s (2004) concept of Agency for related ethical and socio-cultural aspects, the interpreter’s choices are ultimately evaluated from a purely unbiased and descriptive perspective within the cognitive-pragmatic framework of Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986). Findings reveal that legal interpreters need to constantly redefine and reconsider their role in this “hybrid” setting (Bhatia and Nodoushan 2015), thus blurring the boundaries between the purist vision of the impartial interpreter tasked with addressing crucial legal matters, and the involved cross-cultural mediator engaged in renegotiating identities and meanings when mutually beneficial business outcomes are expected to be achieved. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research, emphasizing the need to abandon broad interpreting clichés in favour of defining ad hoc quality standards for this area of expertise lying at the crossroads between legal and business domains.