No Picnic, But Better Than
Two Weeks in the Gulag

Laura E. Wolfson

Imagine the following scene: you are interpreting at a probation interview with a Russian-speaking defendant.

"Were you ever incarcerated in your home country before you came to the United States?" asks the probation officer.

"No," the defendant replies, looking boldly back at the officer.

The former is seated with his hands folded on the table in front of him, across from the probation officer. The officer's gaze drops to the interviewee's hands, where he sees a tattoo in the Cyrillic alphabet. "Magadan," you read silently. Your heart gives a little jump.

"What does that say on your hand?" inquires the probation officer idly, squinting at the cryptic letters.

"Magadan," replies the defendant.

"What is Magadan?"

You are from the old Soviet Union, though you've been in the West so long that the world order has changed several times since you've been here. Magadan embodies some of the very reasons you changed hemispheres. You know Magadan as one of the most feared penal institutions in the system called the Gulag, which housed millions of common criminals as well as political prisoners.

A shiver runs down your spine as you look at the faded dark green inscription across the veins on the man's hairy hand. You imagine snowy, wind-scoured wastes, rations of dried bread and watery gruel in dented tin bowls. The name Magadan is as familiar to you as Sing-Sing or Attica is to the average American. The emaciated prisoners dragged heavy loads through ice and mud in a desolate corner of the Russian Far North, eleven time zones east of Moscow.

You assume an expectant pose, pen suspended over your pad. What will the defendant say?

"Oh," he answers, "it's a Russian resort on the Black Sea. I got this tattoo when I was there on a summer vacation, back when I was young." He smiles, as if basking in pleasant recollections of golden sands and gentle sea breezes. Your knowledge of Russian slang tells you that among convicts, "resort" has a second meaning: "prison."

What do you do? Are you duty-bound to share your cultural knowledge with the probation officer?

We Russian interpreters, unlike our Spanish-speaking colleagues who constitute the majority of NAJIT's members, rarely have the opportunity to gather together in language-specific groups to debate this sort of issue and perfect our craft in other ways. One does not have to look far for the reason: over ninety per cent of interpreted judicial proceedings involve Spanish. Russian is not even a distant second on the list of languages.

And yet, Russian is becoming an ever more important language in the world of interpreted judicial proceedings, as indicated by an unprecedented event in the interpreting community: this past January the federal court in the Southern District of New York sponsored a two-week training course for Russian court interpreters, at which conundra like the one above could be discussed at length and with feeling. (Incidentally, there was initial disagreement on how an interpreter should handle this situation, but following consultation with a judge, the instructors concluded that the interpreter should remain silent.)

The course was organized and funds to cover all associated costs were secured by the indomitable Nancy Festinger, Chief Interpreter for the Southern District of New York. How she was able to convince the black-robed colossi of the court that raising the quality of Russian interpretation and increasing the pool of qualified, available Russian court interpreters justified an outlay of ten thousand dollars, is a mystery.

But we do know this: Russian judicial interpreting is a growth industry. The recent trial of a Russian-speaking woman who, with the help of her cousin, chopped her husband into dozens of pieces and disposed of them in numerous garbage bags in a river in New Jersey has convinced many of this. Ditto the case of Yaponchik, a well-known Russian crime figure who stated with a straight face after his arrest for extortion last year that his primary activity in New York was writing children's books. "According to one of the course instructors, Russian Aguest artists," i.e., criminals who come here on a temporary basis (as opposed to the more settled, émigré criminal) now consider a U.S. prison term — preferably a brief one, to be sure — as prestigious an entry on their résumés as an MBA from the Wharton School is for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

Crime among Russian-speakers in America has come a long way since the old days when émigré pickpockets opened freshly-filched wallets only to find them empty of cash and full of credit cards, whose use the new arrivals could not fathom, leading them to toss aside their haul in disgust.