Session Description: In this 3-hour workshop, participants will explore the usage of profanity in American English and will review interpreter ethics and protocol regarding register. Participants will learn the functions and categories of profanity and learn to search for context and intent. Participants will learn strategies for finding equivalents in their working languages and will begin developing initial glossaries.

Objectives: Participants will leave this session with a better understanding of American English profanity and will have a foundation to find appropriate solutions when interpreting into and from English and their other working language(s).

Javier Castillo is president of Castillo Language Services, Inc. in Greenville, NC. He is an interpreter, translator, consultant and internationally recognized speaker.   He is a Federally Certified Court Interpreter, NC AOC certified court interpreter, a Certified Medical Interpreter, (CCHI) and contract interpreter for the U.S. Department of State and routinely interprets for international delegations and high-level speakers across the United States and abroad. Javier is a frequent speaker and trainer at national and international conferences. He is the President of the Carolina Association of Translators and Interpreters (CATI), a director on the board of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT) and Head of the U.S. Chapter of the International Association of Professional Interpreters and Translators (IAPTI), and an active member of the American Translator’s Association.

Session Description: Join Agustín de la Mora and James Plunkett for a highly interactive, skill-building workshop for the simultaneous mode! Designed for intermediate to advanced skill levels, this presentation takes a practical approach to preparation and improvement through the analysis of real court material and detailed self-evaluation exercises using discourse analysis as a frame of reference. Be sure to bring a recording device and headsets.  Don’t miss this chance to apply the interpreting theories that continue to make DE LA MORA Institute a nationally recognized name in interpreter education.

Objectives: At the end of this training, participants will attain an enhanced level of understanding and processing of legal and lay speech in court settings, with which they will produce more accurate, complete, and faithful renditions in the simultaneous mode. To achieve the goal, participants will improve understanding of the speaker’s speech/discourse/message and purpose in a legal setting, analyze the quality of the message and the speaker’s intentions and learn three/four steps to analyze real, legal speech and prepare the translated rendition.

Agustín Servin de la Mora is the President of DE LA MORA Interpreter Training. He was born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico, and has been a professional interpreter for 30 years, both as a freelance and a staff interpreter. He is one of the supervisor raters for the National Center for State Courts and has been a lead rater for the federal and consortium oral exams for court interpreters. He was the lead interpreter for the Ninth Judicial Circuit for over a decade, and served as a member of the Project Advisory Committee responsible for the creation of the National Standards for Healthcare Interpreter Training Programs for the NCIHC. He was a member of the Florida Court Interpreter Certification Board and a voting member of the Technical Committee of the National Consortium for Interpreter Certification. He is a state and federally certified court interpreter, as well as a certified medical interpreter. He has been a consultant for the National Center for State Courts for 20 years.

James Plunkett III is a nationally-known interpreter instructor and trainer of trainers. He also trains new judges and court staff on how to work with court interpreters. He is certified by the AOUSC as a Spanish and English court interpreter. He is a rater for a national credentialing program for interpreters. He has worked as a court interpreter for the 13th Judicial Circuit in Florida and as the Coordinator of Interpreting Services and Language Access Program for the District of Columbia Courts. He is staff interpreter of the U.S. District Court, based in Tampa, FL. He holds a BA degree in General Social Studies from Providence College. He was raised in Lima, Peru. He also communicates in Portuguese, some French and basic Mandarin.

Session Description: Webex has recently introduced a long-awaited new feature: simultaneous interpretation. In this workshop, the trainer will explain what is needed to get this feature up and running. There will be a practical part where participants will test-drive the simultaneous interpretation feature with a booth mate.

Objectives: In this training the participants will learn what is needed to add this feature, how to set it up and how it works. They will also have hands-on experience with this feature.

Maha El-Metwally is a conference interpreter in the Arabic booth. She works for a wide range of international organizations, including the European Institutions and the United Nations. She is a member of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC), the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL) and the American Translators Association (ATA). She is also a Fellow of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI). She served on the ITI Board member and Membership Committee for 6 and 9 years respectively. Maha has an MA in interpreter training from the University of Geneva. She is associated with a number of universities both in the UK and abroad where she contributes to the curriculum. She is passionate about technology in the field of interpreting and offers courses on the subject internationally both in person and remotely.

Session Description: We’ve all been there. An attorney or a conference delegate walks in, comes over, hands us a document (a speech, a proffer) and says, “I tend to read very quickly so I brought you a copy.” We thank the speaker, skim through it, and make some notes. What happens next is key. Do you put it aside, close your eyes and just focus on the spoken words? Or do you read along, interpreting as you go and adjusting to additions and deletions on the fly? If you are in the former group, this session is for you! Attend and learn key techniques to translate your sight reading skills into the simultaneous mode. Come prepared to practice.

Objectives:  Participants will learn how to skim a document to identify key elements in advance.  They will also learn how to listen and read at the same time, then how to listen, read AND interpret at the same time, and how to adjust to changes in the text.  Finally, they will know how to help their partner when working from a prepared text.

Katty Kauffman is a seasoned conference and court interpreter, a member of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) and TAALS and an instructor at York University’s graduate school (Glendon MCI). Trained in Chile and the United States, her extensive conference experience includes presidential summits, general assemblies of international organizations, and countless events for the private sector. She regularly provides services in person and, more recently, online, to the U.S. Department of State, the OAS and ECLAC, among others. In the judicial field, in addition to her work as a freelancer in Miami and the Washington, DC metro area, she has served on staff at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Her language combination is ES/EN: A; PT: C.

Session Description: This pre-conference workshop is part two of last year’s workshop and builds on it. Deposition basics will only be reviewed briefly.

As some court systems have reduced the rates for judiciary interpreters, court interpreters look for assignments outside the court system. There are plenty of opportunities available at depositions, which are typically held at law offices. Unfortunately, there is little training for interpreters in depositions, and this workshop will provide a detailed, in-depth, advanced overview of ethical conundrums, the role of check interpreters, best practices, fixing mistakes, special situations, sample deponent responses, high-level depositions, stand-by interpreting, and more.

Objectives: Attendees will learn about the finer points of depositions, including how to handle challenging situations, how to deal with standby and check interpreting, how to avoid conflicts of ethics, and how to make sure law firm clients come back to retain the interpreter again.

Judy Jenner is a Spanish and German business and legal translator and a federally court-certified Spanish interpreter. She has an MBA in marketing and runs her boutique translation and interpreting business, Twin Translations, with her twin sister Dagmar. She was born in Austria and grew up in Mexico City. She’s a former in-house translation department manager and serves as one of the spokespersons for the American Translators Association. She writes the blog Translation Times, pens the “Entrepreneurial Linguist” column for The ATA Chronicle, and is a frequent conference speaker, including at recent events in Czech Republic, Brazil, Sweden, Norway, etc. She is the co-author of The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation. She teaches translation and interpreting at UC-San Diego and at UNLV (University of Nevada, Las Vegas).

“With only a small degree of hyperbole, the immigration laws have been termed second only to the Internal Revenue Code in complexity. A lawyer is often the only person who could thread the labyrinth.” Baltazar-Alcazar v. I.N.S., 386 F.3d 940, 948 (9th Cir. 2004).

Immigration is a vast and complex field of law, and nearly all interpreters have provided interpretation related to some aspect of an immigration claim. Have you ever wondered how a case ends up in immigration court? Or how it ends up in federal court from either USCIS or EOIR? Or have you noticed that immigration practitioners tend to use the same terms that you hear in state court, but seem to mean something different when immigration attorneys and judges use them? Come join Tamber Hilton and Drew Bahr, two practicing immigration attorneys, that are also Spanish interpreters, offering this introductory session on immigration law and terminology.  This presentation will answer all of these questions and more to help attendees feel confident and prepared to work in an immigration setting, particularly in immigration court. Because of the specialized nature of immigration law, the fast pace of court proceedings and the daily frequency with which interpreters work adjudicative hearings rich in fact and law, it is essential for interpreters to understand the law to make informed terminology choices and keep up with the pace of proceedings. In this session, attendees will learn how the U.S. immigration system is structured and the contours of its relationship with the state and federal justice systems. They will also learn about the most common types of immigration remedies that interpreters may encounter in both immigration court and at USCIS, with a focus on understanding what it is that practitioners are arguing in each type of case, so that attendees can better formulate their renditions of argument and predict what might come next in a given proceeding.

Objectives: Participants will be able to articulate the different agencies that make up the federal immigration system and understand the role that state and federal courts can play in immigration claims. They will be able to describe the most common immigration remedies and differentiate between remedies that are available exclusively as a defense to removal, exclusively affirmatively, and those that may be available in both contexts. Finally, they will learn to evaluate terminology options for different concepts in immigration law and assess the legal validity of these options, using statutes where relevant.

Tamber Hilton is a practicing Spanish court interpreter and immigration attorney based in Tucson, Arizona and Washington, D.C. She is federally certified and court certified in the state of Virginia. She has extensive experience as an interpreter for the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), state, and federal courts in the D.C. area and elsewhere. She was admitted to the Maryland bar in 2021, and has a small immigration practice focusing on humanitarian relief such as asylum, motions to reopen, SIJS, and others. She has a passion for immigration issues unique to border regions, and volunteers regularly at a migrant shelter in Tucson, Arizona. She loves to hike and explore the mountains and canyons of Tucson in her spare time.

Andrew (Drew) Bahr is a practicing immigration attorney focusing on removal defense and an experienced interpreting instructor. Before practicing law, Drew worked as an immigration court interpreter and freelanced for assignments at the Department of Homeland Security, Virginia and D.C. jails, federal jails and prisons, at white shoe firms in downtown Washington, D.C., at many non-profits, and for the Virginia Circuit Courts. Outside of work and teaching, Drew enjoys reading science fiction, playing table-top games, and trying new foods.

Session Description: Attendees will enjoy a 2-hour tour of the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit Courthouse located three miles away from the conference hotel. Judge Jose Izquierdo will join the tour and speak with attendees. There will also be an opportunity to observe Bond court, where interpreters can be found both in-person and remotely. This tour is limited to 20 attendees. NAJIT will provide transportation to and from the conference hotel, provided attendees meet at the designated area. Instructions will be emailed to attendees before the conference. Please allow a minimum of 3-hours for the tour and travel time.