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.
It's been fun for me, too. I do a lot of trainings and info sessions for people who are getting into the field, but I rarely get to hear questions from "outsiders," so to speak. Thanks! I should mention that overall, I do really believe in our justice system. It gets a bad rap, but if you're in it day in and day out, it mostly works the way it's supposed to. So actually, the only *criminal* case that comes to mind is one where I honestly felt that the defendant was innocent but the jury found him guilty, and in that case the judge ended up entering what's called a "judgment notwithstanding the verdict"--basically acquitted him despite the verdict. (If you're wondering, it's *very* rare for that to happen, and it can't happen in reverse--if the jury acquits, the judge can't convict anyway.) But actually the most heartbreaking cases are always the ones involving children, especially abuse and neglect cases. I spent a long time working in a family court system that presumptively removed all children where abuse was considered a possibility (basically, guilty until proven innocent). The ones that have been hardest for me have been ones where the parents actually were innocent (probably because (1) if they weren't, then the system was working as it should and (2) I rarely ever saw the children themselves). The worst was a newborn removed from her very young, very distraught parents because she had 3 major broken bones in her first month of life ... and it took 90 days of lost parent-child bonding time for the initial diagnosis of brittle bone disease to be confirmed (that is, the doctors suspected brittle bone rather than abuse from the start, but the baby was *still* taken from her parents, who were only allowed to see her with close supervision while the testing was carried out). That's probably the hardest case I've ever done, and while we mostly rotate so it's rare for a case to only ever be handled by one interpreter, I did happen to be there for almost all of their hearings (including the 6-month and 12-month follow-ups), which is probably why it sticks with me.
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Well, simultaneous interpreting is a skill like anything else--you start by doing the simplest possible component and build from there. In this case, you start by doing what's called "shadowing"--repeating a speech given very slowly (usually starting at 100 words per minute) in the same language. Most people can learn to do that to some extent, eventually--just like with any other profession, not everyone has the talent to do it well enough to make a living at it. Some people do listen to the input with one ear and the output with the other--personally, I find it easiest to get the input in both ears. The downside to that is that it's harder to control the volume you're speaking at. I said that normally we start practicing at about 100wpm. We're tested at 120wpm on the Consortium exam (the exam used by most state court systems--National Consortium on Language Access in the Courts) and at varying speeds from 120-160wpm on the federal exam. Normal, comfortable speech is usually 160 (this is the speed audio books are recorded at), and people who are fast talkers or are reading aloud often top 250wpm. (The exam is more difficult grammar and vocab-wise than natural speech would be, which compensates for the slower speed.) As for asking someone to slow down ... Generally speaking, yes we absolutely are allowed to (and in fact required to) ask the judge (or whoever) to slow down if necessary. But generally speaking, we should be able to keep up, even with the 250wpm rate--mostly because people simply can't talk significantly slower than is natural for them and maintain natural flow, which is more important to us than speed. (Also because judges hate to be interrupted, and asking once is never enough.) I heard a suggestion once to ask people not to slow down (because it's subjective and they can't do it anyway), but to pause after every complete sentence (a concrete instruction that's easier to follow). That's particularly effective with someone who's reading aloud, because they can see the end of the sentence. In any case, fast but straightforward speech is much easier to interpret than slow but convoluted speech. (Fast, convoluted speech is, of course, really hard.) Or in short, we *can* ask, but being able to learn to speak fast enough to keep up is one of the skills you need to acquire to make it in this field. (Incidentally, the person we're interpreting for can and often does speak up if the interpretation is too fast, which will be the judge's cue to slow down so we can. But most people can comfortably understand up to about 300wpm.)
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Now there's a dangerous question to ask a Spanish interpreter, especially a federal one. In general, the more people you know in a given situation, the more sympathetic you are to their situation. So yes, working on a daily basis with people whose children are starving to death or whose spouses are dying of cancer because there's no work in Mexico or because their store was burned down and brother murdered because they couldn't come up with a big enough bribe to the local cartel does change one's perspective. I'll skip the entire lecture, but the two main points are that (1) I'm far from convinced that illegal immigration is actually doing more harm than good to this country, either economically or in any other way, once you balance all the benefits against the negatives; and (2) trying to stop it by the current policies is a lot like trying to cure a brain tumor by giving the patient ibuprofen--you may manage to reduce the symptoms a little, but there's no way in heck it's going to get anything but worse unless you actually address the problem itself--the reason that people are choosing to leave their home, their families, everything they've ever known and loved to come here and live in fear and be treated like **** for wages most teenagers wouldn't accept. Also, I think most of this country either never studied US history or finds it more convenient to forget that their forebears from Ireland, Italy, China, Germany, and so forth were looked upon just the same way that today they're looking at Mexicans.
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Yes and no. Yes, because everyone makes mistakes and sometimes one word can have a huge impact in ways you can't foresee. No, because part of the job is owning up to your mistakes ASAP. I have had to correct the record in front of the jury or in a transcript before, but as far I know none of my mistakes has ever gone to the judge/jury with the error uncorrected.
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Roughly equal, although most of my cases are immigration-related so obviously it's rare for a native English speaker to have that type of charge. Equal access is what interpreters are trying to achieve and I think we mostly more or less do. Studies have shown that testimony is usually considered a bit more credible when delivered without an accent (so testifying through an interpreter instead of in heavily accented English) but the content and demeanor is far more important. That's the only major difference and it's between using/not using an interpreter, not LEP[limited English proficient] and native speakers. Some potential jurors hate when people use interpreters, but the court tries to weed them out.
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Well, to be a judge, you have to be a lawyer first, so that knocks "judge" off the list of career paths for me. I don't have the patience for legal research that lawyers need. In my job, the research is presented to me (well, to the judge, but I get to see it) already done, and I just read it. Finding the caselaw I need would drive me crazy. Also, law school is really expensive, and lawyers (at least the ones who work in criminal justice) work really grueling hours, whereas my job is mostly 40-hours-a-week.
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Actually, there was a case earlier this year in Toronto, Ontario, in which a mistrial was declared due to errors in the interpretation from Hindi to English, on the grounds that the defendant had effectively been prevented from being present at his own trial. But that's pretty rare (both in Canada and in the US). Most caselaw relates to the interpreter's qualifications or lack thereof, not to problems with the interpretation per se, and any errors in interpreting have to be pervasive--one error (even a major one) has never caused a reversal that I know of; it's being consistently bad throughout the whole proceeding that *can* lead to a reversal. But most appeals on the grounds of interpreting error, fail, for several reasons. 1. It can be hard to prove because interpreter renditions aren't usually recorded. 2. In most situations, if an error is not objected to on the spot, it cannot be objected to later (that goes for all sorts of errors, not just interpreter errors). 3. In the case of an error in the interpretation of witness testimony, usually if the evidence is so overwhelming in one direction or another that the result would be the same without that witness's testimony, the decision is allowed to stand. I believe the overall trend is that it is slowly becoming more common for appeals to be granted based on interpreting errors, but the most recent caselaw I can find written evidence of, dates from about 2000. I've been to conferences more recently where this issue is discussed, though, and that's been my impression.
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