Looking for Quiche over the holidays
As a court management consultant, I participate in a lot of online information exchanges and one such request just came in seeking a court interpreter conversant in Quiche (or K'iche), a Mayan language spoken in the central highlands of Guatemala. It is reminiscent of a tragic criminal case this past summer in Maryland in which child rape charges were dropped because of undue delay seeking an interpreter who spoke Vai, a tribal language from northwestern Liberia and Sierra Leone.
So how far should a court go to obtain a special language interpreter? Read this posting, edited to protect the identity of the court ...
We've tried courts in major metropolitan areas, major universities, AT&T Language Line, and even the Guatemalan embassy in Washington, DC. I noticed in a Google search that a court in Louisville, Kentucky tried to find a Quiche interpreter in 2000 -- not sure if they ever found one. There are also a few appellate cases out there that talk about exhausting all efforts to find a Quiche interpreter, so I know we're not the first court in this situation. We even tried my brother, who happens to be a theology professor working with Bible translators in obscure South and Central American dialects, which led us to a possible translator at a university in Texas, but now that seems to be falling through. We even priced a plane ticket from Guatemala to our court ($697, much less that I thought), but we have no contacts there and the embassy could not offer any.
I happened to have worked on a project in the Maryland court that dismissed the case involving the Liberian dialect, and I can attest first hand that it is an exceptionally well run court. Each day, courts in the US contend with staggering logistics to ensure that parties, case files, witnesses, prosecutors, defenders, prisoners, technology and interpreters show up in the right courtrooms at the right times on the right days.
This bit of behind the scenes intrigue is indicative of the lengths to which court managers go to make the train run on time. Luckily for me, they need occasional help to streamline the processes and apply the right technology to get it done.
Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com