Turkish Forum

Tag: courts

  • Violent clients, traumatised victims, late payment – the life of a court interpreter

    Violent clients, traumatised victims, late payment – the life of a court interpreter

    Very few people know what the job of a professional court interpreter involves. ALS is trying to get it done on the cheap

    Magdalena Glowacka

    The interpreter s story
    Mirela Watson says the new arrangements could lead to a miscarriage of justice. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

    Very few people know what the life of a professional interpreter is like. I have worked as a Polish interpreter for a number of years, and although I am probably not the most experienced person in the field, I have worked long enough to find the deal under which the Ministry of Justice has contracted Applied Language Solutions to supply all linguistic services in English and Wales unacceptable. We are not too greedy or proud to accept the new rules. We can see how how flawed they are.

    Only very few professions require someone to be totally flexible – and I mean totally. I no longer recall how many times I have been called in the middle of the night to come down to a police station to interpret for someone in custody, or to assist with a witness statement, nor how many times I have had to call off a meeting with people I care about because the job comes first.

    How many professionals have to deal with a beaten and traumatised wife, a woman pushed onto a railway track by her loved one on Valentine’s Day, a small girl raped by her stepbrother, or a man who had been raped in prison? How many of you have had to deal with the threats of being stabbed because the client didn’t realise the interpreter was there to help him? I have. People have vomited on my suit. I have stepped into puddles of urine on a cell floor. Nobody warned me that I would have to deal with such situations. I had to learn how to cope with them.

    Only people who have been done this job for a number of years know what it is like to stand in the witness box for hours as a defendant is cross-examined, or how it feels when your client is mentally ill and talking nonsense or insulting the judge. It takes strength and courage to interpret their words into English. Only a professional interpreter knows what it is like to sit in the dock next to someone charged with murder or an offence involving serious violence.

    Nobody else really knows that it is extremely difficult job, which carries incredible responsibility, and which is emotionally exhausting. Some critics of the interpreters who are protesting about the new system have no idea of what the job involves. Let’s take the payments. Although the rates of pay were decent, they were never good. The old national agreement that used to regulate our work stipulated that we should be paid within six weeks for each job. I can barely ever remember being paid within that time. On countless occasions I have awaited payment for months. Most Christmases, I was totally cashless due to the fact that the court staff was too busy to sort out the payments before the end of the year. I no longer remember how many times I have had to chase courts for money, remembering not to be too harsh so I might be booked again. On numerous occasions I came to court to interpret for one client and ended up interpreting for three or more during the day, or was put in a position when I had to interpret for two or three defendants in the same proceedings because of ‘cost savings’.

    I do not want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but there have been a number of occasions when I was paid just for coming to court and once I arrived there turned out to be more than one interpreter booked for one case – or a case was simply discontinued and nobody bothered to cancel the interpreter. Those sorts of things are never mentioned when the cost to the taxpayer of interpreting services is quoted. And we pay taxes too.

    We are not too proud to work for ALS, although perhaps we should be – given that they require us to work for the same rates as people without any qualification whatsoever that would entitle them to work as an interpreter in the old system. We just feel it is not right. Besides, lots of professional interpreters did not just acquire the recommended minimum qualification under the previous system, which is a Diploma in Public Service Interpreting and 400 hours of experience. Many hold at least one masters’ degree, if not more, in translation, conference interpreting or law, as well as attending conferences and short courses.

    To be completely frank, the system was not working well, but we were doing a good job. We were helping people to communicate with their lawyers. We were the ones who explained to people how the UK court system works. When they were not represented, for whatever reason, we very often acted as psychotherapists – listening to the problems of complete strangers and dealing with personal tragedies. Sometimes we were asked for small change for a ticket home, something to eat or a cigarette, or a client asked if they could make a call from our mobiles at our expense. Try telling someone who is, like you, a foreigner in this country and in a seemingly hopeless situation that “it’s not my job” to agree to these requests.

    I have a confession to make. Apart from being an interpreter, I also work as an examiner for a body that was providing the necessary qualifications to perform this job. Each year I have been told that I cannot pass anybody whom I would not trust to act as my interpreter, if I could not speak English. This was, until recently, a minimum standard threshold for all professional interpreters. I don’t know what standards will operate under the new system, but from what I have heard they are considerably below that threshold. Anyone who can hire someone who can simply speak two languages, at times very poorly, has no idea of the importance of interpreting within the criminal justice system.

    So it is not that we do not want to work for ALS: in spite of all these drawbacks, most of us love the job. But we do need recognition and respect for the job we have been doing. Put simply, the current offer is ludicrous.

    Interpreters are holding a protest outside the Commons this afternoon about the ALS contract with the Ministry of Justice

    www.guardian.co.uk, 15 March 2012

  • UK, Racism; From the streets to the courts

    UK, Racism; From the streets to the courts

    a6A mini-pogrom in Ulster has shocked Britain. But a legal battle with the far right is brewing on the mainland.

    RACIST bogeymen leered out of newspaper pages in both Britain and Northern Ireland this week. On the mainland, the far-right British National Party (BNP), which won its first two seats in the European Parliament earlier this month, was given an ultimatum by Britain’s equality watchdog to step in line with non-discrimination laws or face legal action. Separately, white thugs in Ulster hounded more than a hundred Romanian immigrants—mainly Roma gypsies—out of their homes and, in most cases it now seems, away from the province altogether.

    The attacks in south Belfast were of the sort that Northern Ireland hoped had died with the Troubles. Over several nights crowds stoned the homes of immigrant families, smashing windows and posting extracts of Mein Kampf through letterboxes. Tension between locals and east European immigrants had simmered since football hooligans clashed at a match between Poland and Northern Ireland in March. When the intimidation reached a peak on June 16th, the Romanians were moved to a church hall and then to a leisure centre. On June 23rd Northern Ireland’s government announced that most had decided to return to Romania.

    Northern Ireland elected no far-right politicians to the European Parliament in the polling on June 4th. Nonetheless, many in Britain reckon that their neighbours over the water are a more prejudiced bunch than they are themselves. Socially, Ulster leans to the right: civil partnerships, greeted with a shrug by most British Tories, attracted protests in Belfast when they were introduced in 2005; abortion is also more restricted than on the mainland.

    It may be that these conservative attitudes extend to scepticism about outsiders. A survey published on June 24th by Northern Ireland’s Equality Commission, a statutory watchdog, found that nearly a quarter of the population would be unhappy if a migrant worker moved in next-door. People were even more hostile to Irish travellers, sometimes called gypsies (and often confused with Roma). Just over half said they would mind having travellers living next to them.

    Comparing these results with the rest of Britain is hard because surveys produce different answers according to how a question is worded. Across the United Kingdom, less than a tenth of whites say they would mind having a black or Asian boss (though nearly a third admit to being at least “a little” racially prejudiced). But the trends on the mainland and in Ulster are in sharp contrast. British hang-ups about minorities have fallen pretty steadily over the past 20 years, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey, a big questionnaire. By contrast, Northern Irish dislike of travellers is up by a quarter from 2005.

    Yet sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland are relatively low. Only 6% now say they would mind having a neighbour of a different faith. One theory goes that the fizzling out of the old disputes has helped to stoke other ones. “The attitudes that facilitate sectarianism may find new outlets in new times,” suggested Bob Collins, the head of the commission. Immigrants are not the only victims: anti-gay sentiment, falling across Britain, has gone up by more than half in Northern Ireland since 2005.

    Glass houses

    The election of a man with a conviction for inciting race hatred to represent northern England in the European Parliament spoils any pretty notion that all is well on the mainland. But the selection of Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, and his colleague Andrew Brons, a former National Front chairman, has provoked a legal challenge from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), a mega-watchdog.

    The EHRC wrote to Mr Griffin on June 23rd that it believed the BNP fell foul of the law in its race-based membership policy, its hiring (which appears to be restricted to party members) and what the EHRC interpreted as hints that the party would not provide an equal service to constituents of all races. Unless the BNP changes its ways by July 20th, the watchdog will seek a court order to force it to; if the party held that in contempt it could face fines, imprisonment—and publicity.

    Why pounce now? First, the EHRC was born only in 2007. Its predecessor, the Commission for Racial Equality, lacked the power to pursue this sort of independent legal challenge. Second, the law has been clarified: the law lords ruled in November 2007 that certain functions of political parties are indeed subject to the Race Relations Act of 1976, which had been in doubt.

    Most obviously, the action was triggered by the electoral success of the BNP which, coupled with talk in Westminster about voting reform likely to benefit small parties, has made it harder to dismiss as a sideshow. Others have moved against the BNP since the election: the Royal British Legion, a veterans’ group, publicly called on Mr Griffin to stop wearing its poppy emblem; the government is pondering banning BNP members from teaching, just as they are already banned from the police and prison services. A forthcoming bill on equal opportunities is expected to include a clause explicitly to stop the BNP and its ilk from insisting on race-based membership.

    If the EHRC’s complaint goes to court, it will not be the first time a case against a political party has tested race-relations laws. The 1976 act followed a House of Lords ruling in 1973 upholding the right of East Ham South Conservative Club to ban a Sikh because of his race. And the 2007 Lords’ ruling that has clarified the grounds for the EHRC’s current case was over a complaint by a Pakistani man—upheld by their lordships—against the Labour Party.

    Economist