With unclear guidelines and a shortage of qualified people, Ontario’s courts are muddling along when it comes to dealing with language interpreters.
That was certainly the case last month in
R. v. Blair, a matter in which Ontario Court Justice Gregory Campbell had to rule on whether a conditionally accredited interpreter could participate in a preliminary hearing against Eric Blair to determine whether the accused should go to trial on charges of robbery, assault with a weapon, and breach of probation.
The case involved interpretation of two complainant witnesses by a conditionally accredited interpreter, Edward Liu. After learning of his conditional status, the court moved into a voir dire to assess whether he should continue.
The Crown said he should, while the defence argued otherwise.
There were a few interesting issues the court had to deal with in deciding whether to allow Liu to continue.
First, there was the fact that the province has only five fully accredited interpreters for Mandarin. Second, evidence during the voir dire revealed the Ministry of the Attorney General’s policy on the issue.
It allows those with conditional status to provide services for simpler matters such as bail hearings and guilty pleas that are shorter, don’t involve difficult vocabulary, are more informal, and allow the interpreter to control the pace.
“It is noteworthy that neither trials nor preliminary hearings are listed” as matters deemed suitable for conditionally accredited interpreters, Campbell noted.
Campbell went on, however, to approve Liu’s participation in the preliminary hearing. Among the factors that led him to that decision was Campbell’s “quite satisfactory” English.
In addition, he noted that Liu would be interpreting for two witnesses rather than the accused and that there would be opportunities to seek clarification of what people were saying. At the same time, he noted Liu had recently provided interpretation during trials.
In issuing his decision, Campbell went against other rulings that determined either that the court couldn’t move into a voir dire to ascertain a conditionally accredited interpreter’s qualifications or that it couldn’t overrule the objective standards developed by the ministry.
“The fact that the Ministry of the Attorney General has developed a uniform standard for court interpreters has not changed the role of the court to satisfy itself that an individual being proffered as having a particular expertise necessary to assist the court is suitably qualified to do so,” wrote Campbell.
That’s a reasonable approach to take given the obvious difficulties the courts find themselves in as the province faces a shortage of fully accredited interpreters. But going down that path doesn’t negate the broader problems with the system as it stands.
The biggest issue, of course, is the lack of fully qualified people to do the work in the first place. At the same time, it’s not ideal to have the court assess the ability to interpret on the basis of someone’s “quite satisfactory” English.
While it’s great that someone speaks English well, that’s not proof of the ability to interpret accurately from another language.
With many languages, in fact, the testing required by the ministry for accreditation doesn’t involve bilingual assessments but instead looks at English proficiency. That’s an obvious gap when it comes to being sure someone can interpret to the level of accuracy necessary in court.
It’s an issue that has come up in other cases that have also revealed that the court isn’t always able to fully assess someone’s abilities.
Of course, the province has long been in a difficult position when it comes to court interpreters. On the one hand, it wants to hold interpreters to high standards for full accreditation.
But at the same time, it needs to ensure there are people to do the job. In addition, the compensation they receive is an issue as interpreters have long complained that the daily rate is inadequate.
Boosting the pay may attract more people to the job, but that’s expensive and doesn’t necessarily resolve the accreditation issue. One thing that might help that probably wouldn’t cost that much is training.
If we want people to get full accreditation, let’s train them beyond the test preparation classes and sessions on court regulations that the ministry currently offers.
While the justice system relies on people who work on a freelance basis, sometimes it’s necessary to invest in training them in order to ensure an adequate supply of interpreters to do the job.
Leaving it up to the interpreters to reach the standard by themselves isn’t working. It’s also leaving judges in the difficult position of having to assess qualifications without all of the necessary information and the full ability to do so.
More training, then, would help increase the supply of fully accredited interpreters and lighten the courts’ burden.
