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.
Happens all the time, actually. Depending on how long the hearing is expected to last, how long of a sentence the defendant is facing (shorter sentence = more urgent), and the particular language, we would get someone by telephone or bring them in from out of town. With very rare languages, sometimes a court will need to train someone who's bilingual in that language and English to interpret.
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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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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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