Early on in my interpreting career, I learned an important lesson: the Judge is the king or queen of the courtroom. What they say goes. This means that as interpreters, we should address the judge when we need anything. And we do need things, on...

“Your Honor, why don’t we have the interpreter read the script generated by Zoom?” This was a question that came up in one of my latest remote hearing cases. If that was not enough to surprise many of us who are court interpreters, the judge’s...

For a long time, I have wondered why the interpreting profession is respected more in some places than it is in others.  I have asked myself how this affects the work we do and the pay we receive for it.   I believe part of this...

Using wireless interpreting equipment provides a plethora of advantages. So why are so many of us still not using it? This technology allows interpreters to whisper into a microphone so our interpretation can be heard through headphones. The transmitter and the receiver(s) are not connected...

Three years ago I retired from thirty years as a Spanish<>English court interpreter. Before that I was a classical guitarist — a good one, but not so phenomenally good as to make a reasonable living out of it. At around age thirty, I quit music...

As we were reading the Summer 2023 issue of Proteus (a great issue, by the way), we were both struck by an article entitled “Are we comfortable telling someone that they are limited because English is not their language?”, written by Ingrid Oseguera, an experienced...

The popular phrase “follow the money” is what people recommend when you are trying to get to the bottom of a suspicious matter.  What if, instead, we follow the words?  What truths can words reveal? Last night, as I was cooking a huge pot of...

You are sure to have encountered jokes concerning non-Thai speakers’ mistakes in their attempts to speak a tonal language. As funny as it may be, these jokes have a firm basis in real life since, from a tonal perspective, Thai is much more complicated than...

There is a practice in some of the courts where I have worked, in which the judge will call several defendants at the same time for proceedings like initial appearances, arraignments, or guilty plea hearings, each one having a different case. Sometimes they all need...