The World is in Serious Crisis in terms of Qualified Legal or Court Interpreters

One of the interesting fields in the translating services industry is interpreting. Superficially, interpreting and translating seem very much the same. However, there are fundamental differences between the two. One positive consequence of the globalised economy is that it pushes more potential big clients and business people to aim for something even bigger. Thus, there are more of business meetings that would happen around the world, resulting in economic growth. In addition, the need for qualified interpreters is not only for business purposes but also for legal systems as well as for judicial proceedings or some international organizations.However, the higher the increasing number of businesses in the world, the higher the demand for translation and interpreting services.  However, experts believe that there are now some issues around the globe like not having a fair court trial because of the lack of a qualified interpreter. Is this because there is a crisis or lack of qualified interpreters? This could be the case.In South Australia, defendants are being kept in the custody for too long due to lack of aboriginal court interpreters. Australian authorities said that there are some instances where the legal interpreter would show up late or fail to turn up during the hearing procedure. This is one of the reasons why some court cases in South Australia are effectively dismissed by the court. In addition to this, the court found out that some interpreters are not able or not skilled enough to interpret the Aboriginal terms and dialects, and that there is a tendency for the interpreter to elaborate the questions to the witnesses without translating them back to the court. Thus, some people believe that judgments against Aboriginal defendants may be sometimes unfair because of not having a proper access of court interpreters.On the other side of the world, the United States of America is claimed to have a crisis of qualified court interpreters as well. America consists of multilingual people, and nonnative English speaker have difficulties in hiring court interpreters. The National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators explained that people’s legal rights in the U.S are not fully protected since there is a difficulty in recruiting, training and extensively testing qualified translators. In addition, because of the lack of resources or access for qualified judiciary interpreters, the court sometimes use telephone links for live interpreting access from the interpreter that may be based in another state of the country. However, the court is worried about court interpreting through the phone; it may fail due to lack of attention of the interpreter to the subject.A Mexican was put in prison for murder in Oregon not for what he actually did, but because the interpreter that was use for the defendant was Spanish. However, the defendant’s native language was Mixtec, an indigenous dialect in Mexico.Furthermore, Scotland is facing the same dilemma about judiciary interpreters. Because there is shortage of qualified court interpreters in the country, Scottish courts are being required to hire a qualified translator from England. Thus, it only shows that they may have poor training for translators and interpreters.Judiciary interpreting is not a child’s  game, for anybody to be engaged in who wants to interpret something. It should be learned and then you must be tested. In that way, you will be marked as a qualified and certified interpreter. It may well be true that there is a crisis for qualified judiciary interpreters, and it is just sad to know that somehow it may affect the rights of every human being.