A challenge without borders

Ruling to drop case in Md. for lack of a translator highlights rising need for interpreters of rare languages in state courts

By Jennifer McMenamin | sun reporter

July 29, 2007

In a typical week, Susan Green tries to find foreign-language interpreters for about a dozen of the cases unfolding in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

Most involve litigants or witnesses who speak Spanish or Russian, or Chinese and Vietnamese. But increasingly, the requests from lawyers, judges and the court's assignment office are for speakers of languages she's never heard of.

"When I see something like that, it really does make you wonder," Green said of a recent request for an interpreter in an African language called Ewe. "With some of these, I look it up on the Internet and see that it's spoken by 10,000 people in a little village."

The interpreter requests pouring into Green's office in the Towson courthouse represent a fraction of the increasing need in courtrooms across the state for speakers of uncommon languages.

Although Spanish remains by far the most-requested language among courts requiring interpreters, the fastest-growing need is for languages spoken by fewer than 100,000 people worldwide, according to Darrell Pressley, the deputy director of the Maryland Court Information Office.

"That's where the growth is," he said.

The challenges that come with meeting that growing need were illustrated in a ruling this month in Montgomery County, where a judge dismissed a case against a Liberian immigrant charged with raping and repeatedly molesting a 7-year-old girl. The judge ruled that the nearly three-year delay in bringing the case to trial - mostly because of the court system's struggle to find a competent interpreter fluent in the man's native West African language of Vai - had violated his right to a speedy trial.

Lawyers and court clerks responsible for finding interpreters in the Baltimore metropolitan area said they were unaware of any other serious criminal case in which charges had been dismissed because of difficulties in finding an interpreter.

They mentioned many examples, however, of the great lengths that are sometimes required to find interpreters in unusual languages.

Melanie Merson, who works in the administrative offices of Howard County Circuit Court, fielded a request seven or eight months ago for an interpreter fluent in Gujarati, a language native to the Indian state of Gujarat and the first language of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

She exhausted her most reliable resources, the Maryland Court Interpreter Registry and the office that runs the statewide court interpreter program. She called interpretation and translation services that the court system sometimes uses, hospitals and even the Indian embassy. She finally found the name of someone out of state - she thinks it was Minnesota - and put him in touch with the judge handling the case.

Arthur Nowaskey, who ran an interpreting service company called the International Language Center in Rockville for 22 years, often visited churches and restaurants to find fluent speakers of less common languages, such as Lithuanian and Albanian.

"The only headache I did have was finding people for certain African countries," Nowaskey said, although he added that he knew where to find them when necessary. "A lot of the languages that came up were small tribal languages that very few people here speak."

Being a court interpreter requires much more than simply the ability to speak English and another language. Interpreters must posses a commanding mastery of both languages, from the street-level vernacular to the most technical vocabulary employed by experts in DNA and other forensic sciences.

They also must decipher witness testimony, lawyers' arguments and judges' remarks word-for-word, often simultaneously while the person is still speaking.

"The important thing is that they understand what's happening and why," said Mya Mya Kin, 80, a native of Burma (now known as Myanmar) who earns a living teaching her native language and doing interpreting and translation work, including in Maryland courts.

The use of court interpreters in all languages has grown in Maryland in recent years, said Javier Soler, administrator of the state judiciary's court interpreter program. The state spent $1.1 million on District Court interpreters last year, compared with $815,000 in 2002. Last year's total expenditure on interpreters in district and circuit courts was $2.4 million.

Court officials said they did not have statistics particular to the more obscure languages.

Nearly 57 percent of all requests for interpreters in Maryland courts are for Spanish speakers, Soler said. Second to that are interpreters of American Sign Language (16.5 percent of all requests) followed by Korean (4.5 percent) and Vietnamese (3.2 percent), he said.

The Maryland Court Interpreter Registry includes 400 speakers of 36 different languages. The state's court interpreter program covered judicial proceedings in an additional 20 languages last year by contracting with private language companies and interpreters from out of state, Pressley said.