… and other less busy ones in Scotland.
Author: Kuba Hiterski Photo: Jane McPhelim
Continued from part 5 (You can also find the whole article on our blog here).
10) The future of interpreting in Scottish Courts. Scotland has the potential to lead the world.
Given all of the above, what will be the Scotland’s future approach to court interpreting? How will interpreters be perceived by others, including the publicly funded parties of the Scottish criminal justice system? Will we be seen as making easy money helping foreign criminals by mumbo-jumbling some weird gibberish amateurs or professionals who work with their best intention to assist the courts, prosecution and defence agents do their jobs where the interests of public safety and the rights of an individual to a fair trial collide? To me this was, still is, and will always be our role. Once again, our task is to remove linguistic and cultural barriers allowing for effective and efficient communication with those people in the courtroom for whom English is not their first language. Ultimately, this makes Scottish legal system even better at protecting all people in Scotland.
Due to Brexit and the current global trend in anti-immigration sentiment (see previous post here) I fear Scotland (and indeed the whole United Kingdom) may lose out on what they have built during the past two or three decades as far as court interpreting is concerned and what has been a remarkable and still to my knowledge an unparalleled achievement anywhere else in Europe. Sadly, I have not thus far found any publication evaluating court interpreting policies and practice across Europe. I suspect, however, that just as in the case of the UK leading Europe in medical interpreting the same could be said about court interpreting, although probably with some differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK.
Some say, if they can’t expect to get the same service in France or Poland, why should they want to keep it here? Maybe the answer is that, if you are good at something and can be seen as leader in that particular area, you should have the courage to lead the rest of the world by example, which is what I wish Scotland to become in the years to come.
Finally, this is the first time I have written for this blog (that is the first mini-series of blogs) and so I tried to be brief in conveying each of the above points. I hope you have enjoyed reading these posts and if you wish to make any comments or would like to explore any of them further, please feel free to message me or comment below.
Warm regards
Kuba