La Gabacha Esa
13 Years Experience
Borderlands, US
Female, 37
I interpret for people who speak only or primarily Spanish who come into contact with the justice system as case participants defendants, witnesses, or family members. I have 10 years of experience in state and federal courts, freelance and staff, in the Northeast and Southwest, and also teach and train court interpreters and am active in our local and national professional associations.
As far as lexicon, for the most part every language has the same issues--differences in the legal system and legal terms that don't have equivalents in the other language. Every language has its words with no equivalent in the other, but usually not to such a degree that one stands out from the others. (American Sign Language, though, does have a particular lexical difficulty because it has no generic terms like "vehicle, weapon, go." You have to make it clear what type of vehicle, what type of weapon, how the person went [speed, direction, walking vs driving vs flying, etc.].) Grammar/syntax is a much bigger problem--the more different a language's structure is from English, the greater the décalage (lag time) needed in simultaneous interpreting. Spanish can keep fairly close behind the English (maybe 2-5 seconds?) because its sentence structure is similar, but Hindi lags farther behind (10-15), and Navajo farther than that (15-20). (Incidentally, I have heard inexperienced interpreters of non-European languages claim that it's "not possible" to interpret simultaneously into their language because it's so different from English; but that's not really true--a well-trained, experienced interpreter of any language can interpret simultaneously with enough lag time. And occasionally I have had students in my interpreting classes say the same thing about Spanish! It's just that people don't realize what they are capable of until they actually do it.) The biggest language issue that courts across the country face right now is finding interpreters in the smaller indigenous languages of the Americas, especially in Central America. We can usually find the major ones like Mixtec, Zapotec, Quiche; but there are many languages spoken by only a few hundred people and if we are very lucky, there is one or even two trained interpreters in that language--if we are *extremely* lucky, that person interprets direct into English instead of doing what we call relay interpreting (he or she interprets Quiche into Spanish, and a Spanish interpreter interprets into English). For just about any language that someone speaks somewhere in the US, there is a court somewhere that has needed to find an interpreter for that language. Other than Latin America, the hard-to-find languages I've seen requested most are spoken by small populations in Africa, southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands. Of course, the less populated the area you live in, the fewer qualified [i.e. trained, certified, and experienced] interpreters you have ready access to. I don't have any qualified Polish interpreters locally, and that's a huge shock when you come from a state that gets so many Polish requests that one district has one *on staff*.
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Well, first off, despite what the media tells you ("Voice of Translator"), it's interpreter, not translator. (Actually there's a Supreme Court case on that issue going on right now). :-) They're actually fairly different fields, like say cardiology and oncology, or being a classical pianist and rock keyboardist. Some people do both, or change from one to the other, but it's rare. I could take the State Dept's escort interpreter exam, which would qualify me to do that if I passed, but there are tons of State Department interpreters already and the demand for Spanish isn't high (the percentage of Spanish speakers in the US is much higher than the percentage of countries that speak it). Also, that's a really tough gig (mucho travel, long days without breaks, and a lot of standing around at state dinners watching people eat when you're hoping you'll have enough time to scarf the sandwich you're carrying in your bag. Plus the risk of starting a war.) I like court work,... and I like the lawyers who become judges better than the ones who become politicians. To do escort interpreting, you have to be far more adventurous than I am. The State Department also certifies interpreters in conference and seminar interpreting, which is for things like international summits, not usually politicians (although it's the type used at the UN). I've tried for that a couple times, but I'm underqualified because of my lack of on-camera experience, so I can't get a staff position and I'm not brave enough to go back to independent contractor work. (I'd have to get experience first as a contractor. Also, move to DC, although I'd love to do that anyway.) The federal courts accept State Dept credentials, but not vice versa, unfortunately.
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Well, I think it's a ton, but my colleagues in the courts that are located right on the border laugh at me. Immigration crimes in probably make up about 90% of my caseload by numbers and 75% of my time in court--if I were right on the border, the percentages would stay the same, but I would have three times as many cases and spend about 50% more time in the courtroom. (The number of immigration cases increases the closer you get to the border, and decreases the farther away and also the larger your nearest major metro area is--near New York City, for example, immigration-related cases are probably less than a quarter of the interpreter's caseload in federal court.) 48% of all federal criminal cases in the United States are for the single charge of 8 USC § 1326, Illegal Reentry of a Removed Alien. That doesn't include other immigration crimes, the most common being (approximately in order) Entry Without Inspection (EWI), which is a federal misdemeanor; transporting or harboring undocumented aliens; possession or manufacture of a fraudulent immigration document; perjury on the I-9 form; false claim to US citizenship; and possession of a firearm or ammunition by an undocumented alien. I don't have the numbers for those charges, but I assume that the total easily exceeds 50% of all federal criminal cases; and of course, people charged with those crimes are more likely to need a Spanish interpreter.
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Well, to answer the last question first, if you can pass the (incredibly difficult) certification exam, it's assumed that you know how to do the language part of the job, although frankly, speaking two languages is the easy part. But since you need near-native to native fluency in two languages, there's no particular reason that there should be a requirement as to which is your first. Each has its advantages and disadvantages--you tend to make more, but insignificant, mistakes interpreting into your second language (things like saying the wrong preposition or conjugating a verb wrong), and fewer but bigger mistakes interpreting into your first (saying a completely different word from what was said). At the top levels, it's pretty close to 50/50 which language is someone's A (first) language and which is B (second). I alluded above to the fact that people who learn a language at home, vs. studying it formally, are at a disadvantage. That goes for both languages--the interpreters I know who have the best command of both languages are the ones who lived in a country that spoke one language but studied the other formally, preferably in an immersion situation, from an early age. My school district started us with a couple days a week of Spanish for one quarter in 6th grade, 3 days a week all year in 7th, and it became a regular 5-day class in 8th grade. I have a BA in Spanish and an MA in Spanish Translation and Interpreting, and I've lived briefly in Spain and Ecuador.
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The federal and state laws that specifically govern court interpreters usually apply only to in-court events or ones that are directly part of the judicial process (like interviews outside court by court staff), and in some cases they apply only to certain types of cases (in federal court, for example, it applies only to defendants and defense witnesses in criminal cases; states are slowly expanding to cover all people who come into contact with the courts). But yes, something like Miranda warnings or a consent-to-search can be ruled invalid if they are given only in a language the suspect doesn't understand. But that can mean that it's given by a Spanish-speaking police officer (how well the officer speaks Spanish is frequently a subject of suppression motions) or that a Spanish-language form is signed (ditto for the quality of the translation), instead of using an interpreter.
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Usually the former, partly because they don't know that much English but mostly because they're wearing headphones and can't *hear* what's going on in English (also in some systems, the verdict isn't just 1-2 words, it's a full sentence: "We the members of the jury find defendant Fulano de Tal guilty of the offense of possession with intent to distribute a mixture and substance containing methamphetamine as charged in the indictment."). We try especially hard to keep right on top of the English when interpreting a verdict, for that reason. Trials are much rarer than they seem on Law & Order, though. IIRC, about 95% of defendants in criminal cases plead guilty rather than going to trial.
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Neither, actually. The standard phrasing is "without alteration, addition, or omission"; but that refers to is what we call "units of meaning." One word in one language might have several units of meaning (the phrases "last will and testament" and "power of attorney" are each one word in Spanish ... and "plea bargain" is at least a sentence) and things like "um, uh," tone/volume of voice are also units of meaning that we have to convey. (Sometimes in words--Spanish is very monotone, so someone raising their voice for emphasis in English might get interpreted with an additional word instead. "So you WERE there that night?" "¿Así que sí estaba allí esa noche?" The sí is an extra word to convey the raised voice ... and vice versa, if the person said "sí estaba allí" i'd raise my voice on "I WAS there." To answer the second part, we try to interpret things the way the person would have said them if he/she spoke English (or alternatively, so the listener understands the same thing he/she would if he/she spoke Spanish). A lot of times that's not literal at all (a really common dangerous one is Se me hizo fácil, literally it became easy for me, but it actually means I didn't think before I acted--interpreting that literally gives the judge a much worse impression of the defendant than he/she should have.) We can't always do it 100% though, because the cultures are so different. Spanish uses a lot of religious language that we usually don't in English, for example, and we can't just leave out that whole unit of meaning. It's both an art and a science.
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