Susan Berk-Seligson - The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process

dramatic changes in the worlds geopolitics have made the need for judiciary interpreters even more critical than ever before. The book was published only months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., an event that eventually resulted in the unprecedented movement of people around the globe. Inevitably, countless thousands of these people, displaced by further terrorism, invasions, wars, and famine, have ended up in police stations, migration hearings, and courtrooms proper, the venue that defines the subject of this book, the bilingual courtroom. In the U.S. itself, where for decades before the first edition of this book had been published, Spanish speakers had already become a significant presence in the judicial system, rising waves of immigrants from around the world who speak little or no English have stimulated a growing recognition of the need to provide them with linguistic access to the justice system. This has meant providing interpreting services far beyond Spanish, to serve the needs of speakers of 117 languages by 2013, in U.S. federal district courts alone (Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, 2014a). This dramatic increase should be compared to the status quo of 1986, when only fifty-seven languages were used for interpreted proceedings, according to this books first edition. The sharp increase in the number of languages used in federal courts understates the even greater increase in interpreted proceedings in the course of those decades. Whereas a total of 46,475 court proceedings employed interpreters in 1986, 330,607 proceedings used interpreters in 2013, a 611% increase. This upsurge is particularly striking in light of the far smaller31%growth of the U.S. population during that period (from 240,000,000 in 1986 to 315,000,000 in 2013). While Spanish dominated the interpreting scene in 1986, it continued to do so in 2013, accounting for 96.7% of all reported interpreting events in that year.

The superdiversity of languages found in metropolises such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles comes as no surprise to sociolinguists. Over the past twenty years, however, the demand for court interpreters has spread to even small towns, where not only has Spanish language interpreting become commonplace, but the need for interpreters who speak less commonly used languages (e.g., Kich Maya, an indigenous language of Guatemala) has been rising as well. In such cases, relay interpreting will be called for, whereby a bilingual Kich/Spanish speaker will interpret from Kich into Spanish, and a second interpreter will interpret the Spanish into English. Through this complex process, accommodations are made to serve the needs of speakers of less commonly spoken languages. However, when interpreters are not obtained at the outset of the judicial processfor example, in police interviewsthe outcome for the limited English-proficient person can be disastrous. This was the case of a Tibetan/Nepali bilingual single mother living in New York City who lost custody of her ten-year-old son for several months because it took three days to find a Tibetan interpreter while she was held in jail for child negligence (Davis 2016). She had left him home alone, because the school bus that transported him to school never appeared, and she feared that if she did not show up for work she would lose her job. If an interpreter had been provided for her at the outset, and not three days after her arrest, her son would not have ended up in a foster home for months, according to an American Bar Association attorney (Davis 2016).

The need for interpreters has been highlighted by the 20152016 immigration crisis involving hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from war-torn countries of the Middle East (largely Syria, Iraq, and Libya) and Africa (primarily Nigeria and Somalia). Making their way to Europe via perilous journeys by sea, in the hands of ruthless human smugglers, and then across Europe by foot, hitchhiking, and by train, they crossed one border after another, and in each country faced law enforcement authorities speaking languages very different from their own. The trauma experienced by these refugees, many of them asylum seekers seeking safety, has produced a crisis in Europe, the proportions of which have not been experienced since the end of World War II. These countries became transit points where, at best, temporary camps were set up to provide food and a place to sleep, as these migrants made their way from Greece or Turkey, through Macedonia and Hungary, headed for northern European countries, primarily Germany and Sweden. Using English as a lingua franca, these hundreds of thousands of people eventually would need to make their case for refugee or asylum status at formal hearings. Those who were fortunate would have the assistance of a court-appointed interpreter who knew their mother tongue, or some other language that they spoke. As this new edition of the book will show, the experience of many asylum seekers is often one of great frustration, due in large part to communication barriers between themselves and government officials. Sociolinguistic research on asylum hearings reveals where the problems lie.