Court reporters speak of ALS interpreting shambles
When court reporters clearly see that something is wrong with the interpreters who attend court these days, surely the Ministry of Justice cannot continue to pretend that it is right to meet targets at the cost of Justice? Here is another independent report, apart from numerous recent newspaper articles, just to demonstrate that neither interpreters nor solicitors are making this stuff up:
26/07/12 Crown Court
London (Old Bailey) in Latvian and Russian (same interpreter)
Case: KB and KR
What happened:
Interpreter agreed to translate in BOTH languages but was clearly struggling with one (not sure which). One of the defendants was pulling faces, which I took to mean he didn't understand.
He also failed to translate anything except the indictment and, after being specifically directed by the judge, the prosecution opening.
None of the other discussions or submissions were translated for either defendant.
My comments:
I'm a court journalist, and so can hopefully be regarded as an independent observer. We are repeatedly seeing incidents like this at the moment, and this one made me furious. The interpreter was clearly not fluently trilingual, and made zero attempt to translate enormous chunks of the hearing. A clear violation of both defendants' convention rights.
Redacted from a report filed ar rpsi.name/default.
Collator
