For those who don’t speak English in Jacksonville, the court system is overwhelming enough. Are they getting interpreters who can speak up for them fairly and accurately?
by Liz Daube
Staff Writer
As Jacksonville’s non-English speaking population grows and requires more interpreters in the courts, some people are seeking stricter guidelines to protect defendants who cannot speak for themselves.
“The state is working on organizing a Supreme Court board to set out the rules for what they want for [interpreter] certification,” said Jan Rhodes, who coordinates translators for the Duval County Courthouse. “Right now, there are no specific guidelines.”
That lack of guidelines can hurt some of the most vulnerable people in the legal system, according to Sharon Caserta. She’s an attorney who heads Jacksonville Area Legal Aid’s Deaf & Hearing Legal Advocacy Program. Caserta’s job is to help deaf people who need legal representation, but haven’t sought it because they only communicate with American Sign Language (ASL). She said a Florida statute that passed in July will create specific requirements, which take effect in 2008, for all spoken language court interpreters – but not ASL interpreters.
“No oversight is really problematic,” said Caserta. “The stakes are high in a courtroom. It [interpretation] needs to be accurate. If we don’t know the quality of what they’re getting, we don’t what kind of accuracy they’re getting.”
Rhodes said the county courthouse currently has two ASL interpreters and six spoken language companies or individuals hired on contracts. She said due process requires the courts to provide defendants with interpreters for any language, and the local translation trade has grown in recent years. When Rhodes started scheduling the interpreters two years ago, the number of cases they were needed for totaled about 50 a month. Now, it’s 200.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t have at least one interpreter in the courthouse,” she said. “There’s definitely a need. There are so many people in this city who do not speak English at all.”
While there are training and certification courses available to interpreters, they are not mandatory yet. Public Defender Bill White said the process of sorting good translators from bad ones is largely trial and error.
“The attorneys will come to us and say, ‘Don’t ever use this one again,’ ” he said. “With the bad ones, the person gives a two-sentence answer, and the translator goes on for five minutes.”
While he said many interpreters seem to do their jobs well, White added that court translators should be able to meet high standards for accuracy and privacy.
“Translators are within the attorney-client privilege,” he said. “Whatever they say in front of a family member could get back to the state attorney.”
Because of the rising need for court interpreters, some people with foreign language skills think interpreting will make them fast money, according to Charles Pickard. He has owned local translation company Pickard International for 35 years and holds a master’s degree in Spanish. He said he had five interpreters speaking a total of five languages when he started his business. Now, he has a network of 200 part-time interpreters speaking about 35 languages total.
Pickard said he’s seen several local court interpreting companies start and fold in recent years. The pay for interpreters is good, he said – Rhodes said the county pays between $40 and $80 per hour – but the demand fluctuates, and the quality of the service is imperative.
“We pretty much weed them [poor interpreters] out,” said Pickard. He said court interpreters have a legal liability to be neutral and interpret “word for word,” not “summarize.”
“The problem sometimes – we don’t have that problem – is when an interpreter gets involved,” said Pickard. “Sometimes they will make a suggestion to the defendant.”
He mentioned a Vietnamese translator he fired a decade ago, who said she wanted to help the man she was translating for. Pickard said she continued to advise him after her termination, and when the man appealed a guilty verdict, part of his argument was poor translation.
“The court administrator called me and said, ‘Did you hire this woman?’ I said, ‘No, I fired her,’” said Pickard. “She said, ‘Good. We’re being sued.’ ”
Pickard said he supports required training and certification programs for court interpreters, although he hopes to be “grandfathered in” for Spanish translation after decades of living and working in Mexico. Pickard said he has always encouraged his employees to take optional courses on court interpreting: He pays them more.
While the details of the new interpreter requirements are being worked out, Caserta said she will continue to lobby for stricter standards for ASL translators.
“There is actually federal law – ADA [American Disabilities Act] – and Florida code for mandatory, qualified interpreters [for the hearing impaired,]” she said. “That’s where the problem lies because the term ‘qualified’ in Florida hasn’t been defined. Sometimes the person down the hall who knows a little ASL gets called in.
“We don’t know the effect it’s having on due process rights. How do we know the case was heard fully ... when you’ve got unqualified people being put into these very serious settings?”