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.
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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Well, two main reasons: first, most state constitutions require the record to be kept in English. Mine is the only exception I know of--if the judge, defendant, both lawyers, the. Probation officer, and court reporter all speak Spanish [or any other language] then the hearing can be held in that language. Second, most lawyers/judges who claim to speak Spanish, don't (most of them learned at home as children but never studied it formally). At least, not the highly educated legalese they'd need. I work with a lot of "bilingual" attorneys (at least half the ones I work with regularly) and at least half of them speak enough to vacation in Costa Rica without difficulty (the other half can just about order a beer and enchiladas), but maybe half of those speak it the way someone who'd studied law in Mexico does--because of course they haven't. They study American law. We study linguistics and comparative international law. And to hear a casse in Spanish, everyone would need to be thinking American legal argument *and* figuring out how to explain it in Spanish at the same time. Also, judges have to be assigned to cases at random, so you couldn't give all the Spanish speakers to the same judge.
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Court administrators who don't know anything about what actually happens in the courtroom. Most court staff never see the inside of a courtroom (think finance, IT, HR, file clerks, etc.). When I had my orientation at my staff job, there were 30 of us who'd all been working there for 60-90 days, and I was the only one who'd actually entered a courtroom in that time. Then those people get promoted over and over without ever learning what the court is here to do, until (for example) you have a CPA trying to tell which interpreter to hire based on financial concerns rather than who can actually interpret the best. I had been going to say "court administrators who don't know anything about interpreting," but really, what we do is contribute to what goes on in the courtroom, so if they'd ever seen the inside of a courtroom, they'd trust us to do our job the way the judges, lawyers, courtroom clerks, etc. do.
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You mean starting a language in college and becoming an interpreter in a country where their first language is spoken, directly after graduation? Probably not--four years of classes are probably not enough.
Start the language in college, move to a country where it's spoken, and become an interpreter there? Or even live in that country for awhile (years, not months) and then move back and interpret in one's home country? Happens all the time.
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That's sort of a complicated question to answer, but the gist of the answer is that (1) in nearly all cases, assigned attorneys are competent to handle the cases they're assigned and are doing the best they can, and (2) the higher the stakes, the better an assigned attorney will be--and the more good private representation would cost. Truly great attorneys work in courts that pay more and have more interesting work, but a straightforward minor case can be handled just fine by an attorney who's merely competent. There are always a few (both assigned and private) who "phone it in," but in my experience the judges will weed out bad assigned attorneys fairly quickly because ultimately, those attorneys answer to the court--whereas if it's a privately-retained attorney, the court can't interfere in the private attorney-client relationship, so they have to be *really* bad to get the court to do anything about it. All in all, if the stakes were high *or* I wanted to admit my crime and accept the consequences, I'd prefer an assigned attorney. If it were a low-stakes case (e.g. municipal) I wanted to fight, I'd probably hire one--not because I think an assigned attorney wouldn't do his/her best, but because he/she *might* not be quite as good and/or *might* have too many cases to devote enough attention to mine. In my courtroom personally, I would always, always say you should take an assigned attorney if you qualify.
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Believe me, the judges want things to move along as much as you do. There are a lot of things that need to be decided on the spot because they have to be decided based on what's already happened, and that explains a lot of the long recesses in the middle of the trial. Also, both sides' attorneys have the responsibility to "zealously advocate for" their clients, and so the judge can't limit that too much.
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In my experience, a freelance court interpreter who's good enough both at interpreting and at other professional stuff like networking, punctuality, etc., will make $60-100K annually by working more or less full time and without getting into things like State Department work. That holds pretty steady across the country, though it can vary by location within that range. So how hard it is to find a staff job depends mostly on how much that job pays and partly on how many qualified people are available locally. In my state, a staff interpreter job starts at $32K/year, so pretty much no one wants to do that rather than freelance. In a state where a staff interpreter starts at $60-65K, there's a pretty good balance--most people who want staff jobs can get them, but there's enough qualified applicants to fill the staff jobs that arise. And in federal court, which starts at close to $80K and goes up quickly from there, the jobs are highly in demand and very hard to get. (There are also fewer of them--about 100 positions nationally to be filled by about 1000 federally certified interpreters.)
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