Current Issues in Court Interpreting:
Spain, A Case Study

Cynthia Miguélez

Spain is one of many countries throughout the world today that continue to grapple with the challenge of providing adequate translating and interpreting services in the legal realm. The legal foundations for these services exist in the constitution, in legal codes and in legal precedent. Furthermore, with the creation of the intérprete jurado and official recognition of the legal effects of the work done by these individuals dating back to 1841, there is a long-standing tradition of "sworn interpreting" in Spain,. In spite of all this, the provision of interpreting services in the courts is still greatly mismanaged, and the procedures used to qualify or accredit individuals either as staff interpreters or sworn interpreters have been much criticized by professionals and academics alike for several years. Recent legislative changes in response to the criticism have only slightly improved the state of affairs and did not go far enough to answer the objections. However, one cause for optimism is that universities will now be involved in the process of certifying individuals as sworn interpreters. Before discussing what the future might hold, let us look at the recent past and the present situation.

Interpreters who work in Spanish courtrooms generally fall into three categories. The first are the staff interpreters who have passed a Ministry of Justice qualifying exam and are employed by the Ministry as long-term contractual employees. The second are freelance interpreters who are credentialed, in other words, those who hold the title of intérprete jurado. The third group encompasses everyone else, ranging from individuals who may be experienced in some other type of interpreting or translating, to those who have completed studies in this field but have no direct experience, to those who are simply perceived as bilingual by some court official and pressed into service in response to a specific situation.

Staff interpreters are perhaps the worst off of the three groups. Their status is low, their skills and abilities misunderstood and unappreciated, and their work often taken for granted. They obtain their positions by taking a competitive civil service exam and undergoing a merit evaluation process. Although the process may be altered from one job announcement to the next, the procedures used are relatively standard and do not change substantially. The exam given in recent years has consisted of two exercises: first, candidates are required to translate two texts, the first from language A to language B, and the second the other way around. Time allotted for each translation is one hour, and the use of dictionaries is not allowed. Those who successfully complete this portion of the exam --scoring at least 50%-- are subsequently called to sit for a one-hour written exam on the government, the Ministry of Justice, the court system, and the laws and regulations governing their rights as workers. A list of topics included in a recent job announcement included the Spanish Constitution, the King, the Legislative and Executive branches of government, workers' rights, collective bargaining, the Ministry of Justice, and the organization of the courts. There were no topics related to the functions of a court interpreter or to the ethics of court interpreting. It is quite telling that no interpreting is required of candidates for a position as a court interpreter. As a matter of fact, no oral exam of any type is required for these positions, even though the lion's share of the work done by a translator/interpreter is oral language mediation in courtrooms or at other stages of the legal process.

The qualifications required to apply for a position and the professional prestige a position enjoys are important indicators of how management and, to some degree, society as a whole view the duties and responsibilities of that position. In Spain, Ministry of Justice staff interpreters are only required to have a high school diploma or its equivalent. No advanced level academic work, specific training, or actual work experience is required to apply for these posts, although post-secondary school study and certain types of experience are taken into account in the final ranking of candidates. Nevertheless, the exam itself is the single most important part of the qualifying process, accounting for fully two-thirds of the total 150 points possible. This makes it all the more important for the exam to be valid and reliable.

In professional rank, Ministry of Justice staff translator/interpreters are classified as Group C contract employees, along with psychologists, autopsy assistants, maintenance personnel, heating technicians, administrative clerks and valets. The official annual salary for this category of employee is embarrassingly low, and given the fact that the total number of staff interpreters throughout Spain is approximately 50, they do not have sufficient bargaining power as a group to really effect any changes. Advancement or promotion within interpreting services is not possible. Transfers to other divisions do occur, but these do not usually imply promotions, simply lateral movement. The responsibilities of staff interpreters include providing interpreting services in courtrooms and other legal venues, doing written translations of legal documents, and arranging for freelance interpreters when the language involved in the proceedings is not one that the staff interpreters can offer, or when interpreting services are needed in more courtrooms than they can cover. A staff translator/interpreter's normal work day is usually quite full and quite unpredictable. Interpreters work mainly on an on-call basis. In the great majority of cases, they receive no advance notice that their services are needed. The court calendar does not usually stipulate linguistic considerations and therefore in most cases, the interpreter is contacted only moments before a proceeding begins. Only when an important and complicated case requiring the services of an interpreter for longer periods of time (several hours or more than one day) is the interpreter's office contacted in advance. Materials are then sometimes made available.¹

Freelance interpreters are called in to serve in the courts when staff interpreters are not available. Attempts are often made to find certified or sworn interpreters, but there is no legal mandate to do so. Freelance interpreters are compensated on an hourly basis for their service to the court. As a matter of fact, the wage paid to freelance interpreters far surpasses what would be an equivalent hourly wage for staff interpreters.² The sworn interpreter, or intérprete jurado, has a long history in Spain. The profession was created and has been modified and regulated by means of several Royal Orders dating back to 1841. The most recent modification can be found in Real Decreto 79/1996, dated January 26, 1996. For the first time, the oral work of interpreters was recognized as having legal effect or carácter oficial, a status that prior to this decree was reserved for the translation of written documents into Spanish, in spite of the fact that the official title has always been intérprete and not traductor jurado. The certification process was also minimally modified to accommodate this new definition or status, but, since the new format of the exam has only been administered once, the great majority of practicing, certified interpreters in Spain were qualified under the old system. Furthermore, the modifications are so poorly conceptualized that the new procedures represent virtually no progress towards a valid and reliable certification process that can guarantee even minimum competency in the skills areas that a court interpreter should possess.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has traditionally been charged with the design and administration of the intérprete jurado exam. It is important to point out that a sworn interpreter is not a public employee and that passing the certification exam does not constitute an offer of employment by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or any other government service. Intérpretes jurados see themselves as the only group qualified to work in the sphere of legal translating and interpreting and have carried on a lively battle to limit access to this professional arena to those who have passed the MFA qualifying exam. They have met with little success in their struggle, due in part to the general lack of understanding of the role of the legal or sworn interpreter not only by society in general but by important sectors of the judicial system.³

Before serious consideration is given to whether or not sworn interpreters should be used exclusively in the court system in Spain, it is important to evaluate the exam used to certify this category of professionals to determine if it does indeed offer reliable evidence that candidates who pass the exam are qualified to carry out the duties required of a language mediator in legal settings.

The MFA exam has traditionally consisted of two timed, written translation exercises, both from the foreign language involved into Spanish. The use of dictionaries and/or glossaries is only allowed in the second exercise. The first exercise, which is eliminatory, consists of the translation into Spanish of a text taken from a popular news magazine or journal, usually on a topic of general interest or a current event. For the English exam, articles (or excerpts from them) have frequently been taken from Time, Newsweek or The Economist.

Even a cursory examination of selections used as exam texts in the last ten years shows a significant amount of disparity in many elements of the exam, including overall length (ranging from 299 to 502 words), average sentence length (from 16.5 to 33.2 words), lexical and structural density, and level of difficulty. A basic study of linguistic density on a random selection of five of these texts containing idioms, slang terms, figurative speech, proper names, specialized legal terminology, culturally bound items and unusual descriptors produced some very interesting results. The study showed that these texts had very few examples of what could be classified as specifically legal terms (ranging from 0 to a maximum of 4) but were replete with idiomatic and figurative language, and slang or culturally bound terms. Some examples of these include "bugbear," "Clintonomics," "Rugged Individualism," and "special task force." At the phrase level we find "to stage a comeback," "he seems genuine, off the pedestal, really there," "there was this classic Bushism," "the courage of one's nastiness," "getting under the presidential skin," "trying to flim-flam the American people," "shrug off such barbs," "the Administration is beginning to . . . well, not shoot but talk back," "whose decency, unfortunately, is about an eighth of an inch thick," and so on.

The frequency of this type of language ranged from approximately 15 occurrences, which happened to coincide with the shortest text, to well over 40 occurrences in the longest text. Candidates had two hours for this exercise but could not use dictionaries or aids of any kind. As mentioned above, only candidates who passed this portion of the exam could proceed to the second exercise.

The text for the second exercise has always been a legal or economic/commercial document of some kind, for example, an excerpt from a legal code, a piece of legislation, or a contract. As was the case with the first exercise texts, there has been substantial variance in the length of these texts over the last several years (ranging from 472 to 794 words for the examples we have cited) and in average sentence length (from 50 to 158 words per sentence, with the longest sentence encountered in each text ranging from 135 to 391 words). As with the first exercise, the time period allotted for completion has always been two hours. A look at these texts also reveals a great deal of stylistic and thematic variety.⁴ The shortest text, a definition of the term "salvage," although relatively dense as regards specialized terminology, cannot be compared with the level of difficulty and amount of specialized jargon found in the longest text on the jurisdictional immunities of foreign states.It would appear that care has not been taken to ensure equivalency from one exam session to the next -- a basic concept in evaluating the reliability of an exam -- and it is reasonable to think that the same candidate sitting for different versions of the exam could get very different results.

The most recent offering of the exam for intérprete jurado followed the new directives included in the legislative modifications mentioned above. This "new" exam includes four exercises. Two of the four correspond to those that comprised the previous test. The two additional exercises reflect the new legislation´s recognition of the fact that intérpretes jurados translate into foreign languages and do oral interpretations as well as written translations into Spanish. Therefore, one of the new exercises is a written translation from Spanish into the foreign language involved, and the other is an exercise meant "to prove [the candidate´s] ability to speak and understand the language in question to the satisfaction of the Examining Board." The written exercise from Spanish to the foreign language is a literary or journalistic text, similar to the first exercise from the foreign language to Spanish. The oral exercise consists of the candidate reading a text in the foreign language and then summarizing it and answering a few questions as posed by members of the Examining Board. Candidates only take this part of the exam if they pass all three of the previous sections. The following is a brief description of the most recent exam session for the Spanish-English language pair. The first exercise consisted of a text in English to be translated into Spanish on the tobacco industry and on issues of compensation for damages. Although no title or citation was given, it was clearly an excerpt from a journalistic article. It had 393 words and included phrases such as "the principle that the polluter should pay has suffered another setback," "being saddled with a huge compensation bill," "to let the industry off the financial hook (and rescue its shares)," "shift the burden on to the shoulders of ordinary people," "the industry has … been very coy about revealing the fine print," "contest liability," "exclusion clauses," and "health care reimbursement."

The Spanish text (to be translated into English) was published in El País, a national daily, entitled "El Rey, primer jefe de Estado extranjero que hablará ante las dos Cámaras italianas" ("The King, the first foreign Head of State to speak before both chambers of parliament in Italy"). This text had 413 words but virtually no figurative language, idiomatic expressions, specialized terminology or challenging translation problems. The third text was a section taken from the "House of Commons Standing Orders on Public Money." Candidates were allowed to use dictionaries for this exercise. There was no translation of a specialized legal or economic text into English.

Finally, the fourth part consisted of candidates randomly choosing one of three texts available to them upon entering the exam room, having five minutes to read it through and collect their thoughts and then five minutes to provide a short summary and answer three or four general questions. One of the texts used in the oral exercise this year was "Even in Virginia, Second Thoughts," which dealt with capital punishment. Although no citation was given, this text once again appeared to be taken from an American news magazine.

The most obvious problem with this new test format is that it does not in any way test a candidate´s ability to translate a legal document into the language of certification or to interpret in any of the three modes. The exam is not domain-referenced and lacks even the most basic standards of validity and reliability. Therefore, it still falls far short of guaranteeing the Spanish judicial system and Spanish society in general competent translating and interpreting in legal arenas.

Now, after painting the somewhat bleak picture above, I must point out that there is a small ray of hope in recent legislative modifications, which also permitted universities with undergraduate degree programs in Translating and Interpreting to qualify individuals for certification. This provision has the potential for transforming the field because in order to get certification through universities without having to sit for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs exam, candidates must hold an undergraduate degree in T&I, which in itself implies four years of focused study and practice, and must also meet certain special curricular requirements. These requirements are broadly drawn in the legislation, leaving final decision-making powers to the universities. It is certainly possible for academic institutions to botch this opportunity by not taking the challenge seriously. After all, most professors of translating and interpreting are not practicing legal translators or court interpreters. But it is also possible that, as academics, they will review the existing literature, consult with professionals and experts in the field, and institute original research and collaborative projects aimed at establishing rigorous and sound standards for certification. In this case, it is conceivable that the MFA might review and even revise its own procedures, thereby producing a situation in the relatively near future in which members of the judiciary and any language-handicapped individual involved in a legal action in Spain can be assured of the highquality of the language mediators entrusted with the delicate task of ensuring justice through linguistic understanding.

Cynthia Miguélez, Ph.D., is Acting Associate Director for the National Center for Interpretation Testing, Research and Policy of the University of Arizona in Tucson and teaches at the University of Alicante (Spain).