10 January 2017 by Monidipa Fouzder
Government fee cut ‘led to interpreter
blunder’
Professional interpreters
have blamed government fee cuts for problems that have arisen in courtroom
interpreting, following news that sentencing of a man who attacked two police
officers with a hammer was delayed because his interpreter went to the wrong
court.
The Daily Mail reported this week
that an interpreter who could speak Afghan-born Jamshid Piruz’s Dari language
went to a court in a different town at the wrong time, without telling anyone.
Piruz will now be sentenced
at Hove Crown Court on Friday, the report states. The Mail said his case
‘exposes the Ministry of Justice’s shambolic privatisation of legal translation
services’.
Leeds-headquartered
international language services company thebigword, which took over from Capita
Translation and Interpreting to provide courtroom interpreting in October,
confirmed it was asked to provide an interpreter for the hearing.
In a statement, thebigword
chief executive Larry Gould said: ‘We were asked to provide an interpreter to
Lewes Crown Court for Friday 6 January at 9.30am.
‘We did so. However, the
sentencing hearing was in fact scheduled to take place at Hove Crown Court at
2pm. Once we were made aware of the different venue and time, we made every
possible effort to send an interpreter to Hove Crown Court. We did succeed
in sourcing another interpreter but the hearing had already been adjourned.’
Professional Interpreters
for Justice (PI4J), an umbrella group representing more than 2,000 interpreters
from the National Register of Public Service Interpreters, told the Gazette
that problems arise when inexperienced people are used to stand in for
professionals.
PI4J’s Alan Thompson said:
‘Any professional interpreter who is given a court assignment will check the
location of the court, the time the case is listed and, where possible, the court
number beforehand. They will also research their route to the court and the
time required to reach it.
‘On arrival at the court,
the first thing they will do is to report to court staff. They would never
leave the building without first being released by the court.
‘The problem arises when
inexperienced people are used to stand in for the professionals. They are
unfamiliar with court procedure and do not know what to do. That is why
blunders like this occur.’
The Gazette
understands that thebigword was made aware of the different venue when the
interpreter discovered the error in the morning and subsequently contacted
thebigword.
A spokesperson for the MoJ
said: ‘We introduced a new system for booking interpreters in 2012, as the
previous system was costly and inefficient. Since this change complaints remain
low and so far we have saved £48m for the taxpayer.’
However, PI4J said the
ministry ‘may have saved a few pounds here by cutting the interpreter’s fee,
but the ensuing chaos has cost the taxpayer thousands’.
The ministry remained
tight-lipped on how many complaints have been received about interpreting
services since the new language services contracts came into force.
Details of the number of
complaints relating to the language services contracts appear in the ministry’s
quarterly statistics. Figures relating to the latest contracts have yet to be
published.
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