A shortage of court interpreters has grown so acute that anxious judges are poaching them from one another, an Ontario judge told a legal conference Friday.
“Day in and day out, the courts are unable to get competent interpreters,” Ontario Court Judge Casey Hill said to the annual convention of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association. “The competition between courts has become almost cut-throat. There just aren’t enough to go around.”
Judge Hill – who is credited with first exposing the problem of incompetent interpreters several years ago – said that governments, the judiciary and the defence bar have all stumbled badly in responding to the crisis.
The judge said training is still virtually non-existent and competency tests are unreliable. “Our confidence is somewhat shattered …” he said.
Nor is the problem confined to Ontario. Yolanda Salazar Hobrough, a Spanish interpreter in Vancouver who helped create the accreditation process for B.C., said her province stands alone in having made serious moves to improve interpretation services.
“The rest of Canada is just as bad as in Ontario,” said Ms. Hobrough, a partner in an interpreter service, the Language Bureau.
She said that B.C. is able to attract and retain well-qualified interpreters partly because it pays them $45 an hour – almost twice as much as they are paid in Ontario. Unlike other provinces, they are also guaranteed a three-hour minimum and cancellation fees.
“It is a much better situation here,” Ms. Hobrough said. “We are probably the best-served jurisdiction in North America. At least, Ontario is trying to do something about it, but it’s going about it backward.”
Judge Hill said that approximately 150,000 hours of interpretation services are required in Ontario every year, yet the Ministry of the Attorney-General has only 25 full-time interpreters and about 800 freelancers, whose level of competency varies widely.
He urged CLA lawyers to insist that interpreters be as qualified as expert witnesses before they can testify in a courtroom.
Two defence lawyers who spoke on the same conference panel as Judge Hill – Anthony Moustacalis and Lou Strezos – agreed that the bar has been complacent about interpreters who misconstrue evidence, inappropriately summarize testimony and do not bother to translate legal arguments with precision.
“We have had our collective heads in the sand,” Mr. Strezos told the conference.
Mr. Moustacalis noted that court interpreters routinely work longer than the 20-40 minutes at a stretch before resting, which greatly reduces their abilities.
Judge Hill agreed: “Interpretation is very demanding on the brain,” he said. “After 25-40 minutes, there is an unbelievable increase in the error rate. There really ought to be teams doing it.”
Judge Hill said that many judges are apprehensive about cracking down on bad interpreters because the resulting delays will clog their already swollen case lists. However, he emphasized that the right to adequate court interpretation is considered so vital that it is entrenched in the Charter of Rights.
Even those interpreters who appear qualified are often unable to convey legal terms or nuance properly and are out to sea when it comes to local dialects and idiom, Judge Hill said.
“There is a false assumption that being bilingual is enough,” he said.
Judge Hill also noted that the Ministry of the Attorney-General became so concerned about the problem last spring that it instructed prosecutors to agree to any defence request during a trial aimed at assessing a court interpreter’s competency.
The Ontario experience is part of a worldwide problem created by increasingly fluid immigration patterns, Judge Hill added. He said the problem is exacerbated by the fact that many interpreters leave the court system for more lucrative work in the medical system or translating documents for the European Union.
Scottish courts have had to resort to bringing in interpreters from England, while interpreters in the southern United States are often flown from one state to another for cases, Judge Hill said.
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