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Welcome to the NAJIT Observer

The NAJIT Observer (TNO) was created in 2011 in response to NAJIT’s members need for a tool

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On Saturday, July 12, 2014, the Franklin County Municipal Court auditorium played host to Operation Street Smart,  presented by a couple of officers with the D.A.R.E Special Investigation Unit of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, and sponsored by the Community and Court Interpreters of Ohio...

Beware of false friends! I don’t mean the people, I mean the words.  One of the first impulses a young interpreter must overcome is the use of words that may, at first glance, seem to be equivalent terms and concepts in two languages... but are not. Taking that direct path from similarly-sounding words in our source and target languages is not always wrong, but part of being a good interpreter is knowing exactly when to take this path and when not to. In the rapid pace of judiciary interpreting, our brains may lean heavily towards cognates in source and target languages. Cognates are words with a common origin or etymology. True cognates, like “library” and “librería” in Spanish or “livraria” in Portguese, with a common Latin root -- liber -- may come to have new and different meanings with usage and the passage of time. In this example “library” is a place where books are kept for people to read or borrow, whereas “librería” or “livraria” is a place where books are sold. So although they may be true cognates, these words have become false friends, or faux amis.