30 June 2014 by James Morton
Losing it in
translation
Reading
the Gazette on the current problems of finding interpreters for
defendants reminds me of the 1970s, when competent interpreters were even more
thin on the ground.
Thames
magistrates’ court, with foreign seamen coming up, had particular problems. I
think it was the magistrate Donaldson Loudon, not generally regarded as having
a great sense of humour, who decided he would himself interpret for a German
charged with drunkenness. The first bit went well. ‘Tronk?’ he asked. ‘Ja,’
said the man.
‘Drei
pund,’ said Loudon. ‘He’s only got 10 shillings,’ said the clerk. ‘Funf
shilling’ said Loudon, ‘that’s the trouble in trying to speak a language you
don’t really understand.’
He
did rather better than one of the regular court spectators who, when no
interpreter could be found and presumably sniffing a few pounds, volunteered to
act in another German case. Unfortunately his ability was taken as read. This
lack of testing was cruelly exposed from the opening words. ‘Ask him if he was
drunk’, said the clerk. ‘Voss you drunk?’ barked the soi-disant interpreter in
what he deemed to be a thick German accent.
Things
went downhill so fast that the interpreter ended up with an afternoon in the
cells for contempt.
It
was at Bow Street that I played a small but heroic part in the struggle for
justice. I forget who the magistrate was: it cannot have been David Hopkin who
spoke fluent Italian and once, to keep himself amused, tried to get me to
conduct my mitigation in the language. ‘I could do it in French,’ I
volunteered. ‘No, Italian, Mr Morton, Italian.’ I said something like ‘Mille
scusi’, which he regarded as sufficient.
This
time, however, the Italian interpreter made no impression and turned in despair
to the clerk saying, ‘I can’t make him understand a word. He comes from a very
remote region and speaks only a dialect.’
The
solicitors’ pit was between the bench and the dock and, as I had just returned
from a few days on the Costa del Crime, I twigged what was going on. I passed a
note saying, ‘It’s because she’s talking to him in Spanish’. I never received
the credit I thought I deserved for averting yet another miscarriage of
justice.
James
Morton
is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
