The Linguist

8 The Linguist Vol/62 No/3 2023 thelinguist.uberflip.com FEATURES In a long and complicated assignment in the family courts, finds a series of worrying issues with interpreting services D uring a recent assignment, I was called to interpret in a complex case in the Family Court in Leeds, which involved multiple defendants who were accused either of child abuse or of failing to protect the children from abuse.* The defendants were scattered around Europe – some in the UK, others abroad – and none spoke English to a sufficient level to understand legal proceedings. They all needed interpreters working with fairly common languages: French, Italian and Hungarian. Hearings were held in a hybrid manner: the lawyers were mainly on site, whereas the defendants and experts initially attended remotely, and later in person where possible. I decided to attend in the same way as my client, one of the defendants, who was based in the UK. So for the first few months I was connected to the court through MS Teams and to the client over the phone. This allowed me and my client to communicate more flexibly without affecting the hearing. Technical matters, such as the determination of jurisdiction, direction hearings, management hearings, and certain terms and roles, needed to be explained to the client, who was not familiar with English law and legal institutions. BAD BOOKINGS What really struck me was the difficulty of finding qualified interpreters from day one, even though so many professionals work in the required language combinations. Each defendant had their own interpreter, sourced by their solicitors, but while some were qualified and vetted, others were not. For the first hearing, one of the interpreters – booked by one of the parties through an agency – had no idea what an interpreter's role was. I was shocked to realise that this person had not had any kind of interpreting training. For example, when the court asked the defendant a question, the person acting as an interpreter not only failed to relay the message to the client, but also replied, quite confused, "I don't know", as if they were the one being questioned. It then turned out that the person could not even speak the client's language (French) at a conversational level, let alone interpret in court for such important proceedings. I was left wondering how they had been selected by the agency, what criteria the agency had applied when hiring them, and what level of scrutiny had been used to verify qualifications and working languages. For the upcoming hearings, a different interpreter was secured for the defendant, booked directly so as to bypass the agencies. To ensure continuity of service, the availability of the interpreters was confirmed when it came to setting the date of the next hearing. Nevertheless, in an attempt to obtain a cheaper contractor for an assignment, one agency appeared to deliberately sabotage this continuity with some underhand tactics. They told the booked interpreter that the client had cancelled the job, and the client that the interpreter was no longer available, neither of which was true. They then advertised the job to their pool of interpreters at short notice in the hope of finding someone with lower fees. In the end the issue was resolved with the best outcome for the client and a guarantee that the case would not be reassigned, provided that the interpreter ensured their availability. By this point I was appalled by the unprofessional behaviour of the agencies involved, who did not seem to care about anything other than profit. The interpreters, on the other hand, could clearly see the impact that these antics were having on the proceedings, on the defendants and on the children involved. The issue of finding a qualified interpreter presented itself again when the case reached the expert witness stage about one year into SAFETY OF THE CHILD © PEXELS

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