11 May 2015
Courts Service
pays more than €1m for interpreters
Yoruba,
Cebuano, Lingala, Iloko and Tagalog were some of the obscure, exotic and
far-flung languages spoken by those accused of offences before the courts in
Ireland last year.
The
Courts Service confirmed on Sunday, in response to a Freedom of Information
request, that the bill for providing interpretation services for 68 languages
in the courts during 2014 totalled just over €1 million. The figures show that
most of the fees were paid to Forbidden City Ltd (or their trading name,
translation.ie), which received €832,324.
According
to the Courts Service, Polish was the language interpreted most often last year
in the courts, with interpreters required on 2,151 different occasions,
accounting for 28.8 per cent of the languages interpreted.
This
was followed by the demand for Romanian interpreters, who were required 1,367
times in court, making up 18.3 per cent. The other languages to feature in the top 10 were Lithuanian (14.8 per cent), Russian (9.9 per cent), Mandarin (4.5 per cent), Latvian (3.4 per cent), Vietnamese (2.6 per cent), Portuguese (2 per cent), Arabic (1.7 per cent) and Czech (1.5 per cent).
