Vol. V, No. 2 - Spring 1996

ERA OF BUDGETARY CONSTRAINTS

Interpreter Services Not a Priority

Nikito Nipongo

Don’t look now, but due process may soon be downsized. Interpreters take an oath to interpret accurately and completely, but court administrators may be placing roadblocks in their way. In her address to the membership at the recent NAJIT convention in Miami, Lydia Pelegrin, Chief of the Administrative Office’s (AO) Court Administration Division, summed up the current climate in Washington by warning with disarming candor that “we have to see what is reasonable within what we can do...the pot will not be getting any larger.”

Federal courts near you may be subject to the limited use of team interpreters for long proceedings and the tacit acceptance of using non-certified interpreters even when certified interpreters are reasonably available. The AO is struggling to make interpreter services nationwide more cost-effective and efficient while accomodating shrinking budgets, but the district courts are functioning at 84 percent of full staffing, and the crunch is being felt even in Ms. Pelegrin’s office. It is now clear that freelance fees, which have not risen in five years, will remain frozen at current levels indefinitely.

A newly recomposed Court Interpreters Advisory Subgroup met recently in Washington. One of its stated aims is to review the Manual of Policies and Procedures for federal court interpreters, a document so mired in controversy it has taken ten years and countless drafts to get to its current incarnation. Interpreters who have followed its history have lost all hope of its eventual publication.

One of the reasons the manual remains unfinished, Ms. Pelegrin pointed out, is the difficulty in setting a uniform policy that judges will find reasonable for 94 district courts in a decentralized system. There is no nationwide standard, she said, because practices vary greatly: for example, in some districts simultaneous interpreters go for 45 minutes without relief and in others, six hours; furthermore, one must not lose sight of the fact that the AO has an advisory, not an enforcement role. Although Ms. Pelegrin meets personally with the Chief Judges in every district, she insists the AO is powerless to influence local policy, even if that policy includes the routine use of non-certified interpreters. During the discussion that followed Ms. Pelegrin’s remarks, she agreed that a gentle reminder to all district court judges to use certified interpreters would not be overstepping the AO’s advisory role.

Another subject touched upon was test development and administration, a separate appropriation in the budget that has run to $700,000 a year in the past. Out of a desire to reduce that figure, Spanish certification may be streamlined. The AO recently hired an outside test developer to evaluate the current certification program by the University of Arizona. Some cost-cutting measures under consideration are: limiting the number of testing sites, reducing the number of oral examiners from three to two, and eliminating certain testing portions.

Government-sponsored examinations for court interpreters in languages other than Spanish, Navajo and Creole, although recommended by the Judicial Council some years ago, is now considered a utopian proposition: at an estimated cost of $35,000 per certified interpreter, the government insists it simply can’t afford it. In the AO’s view, since 92 percent of interpreter requests involve Spanish, the variety of languages constituting the remaining eight percent do not merit substantial expenditure.

Though downsizing may be the wave of the future, Ms. Pelegrin assured NAJIT members that the Court Interpreters Act had not been revoked. Yet her audience expressed concern over why her office was not doing more to encourage compliance with the law.