By José A. Navarrete

I am a full-time Spanish/English staff court interpreter/translator at the Santa Barbara Superior Court on California’s central coast performing linguistic tasks daily for criminal/civil judges, attorneys, court staff and the community at large. After a successful start as an independent contractor in the counties of Los Angeles and Orange, I made the decision over 14 years ago to move 100 miles north and accept permanent employment in this rural county in California’s state court system. The year was 2004. The state legislature had recently passed a law that for the first time gave judicial interpreters the option to become employees. Whether or not the system was ready for us, or whether we were ready for the system, is still being determined; so far, it has been a bumpy ride. Although I am happy to report that, despite the many challenges that professional court interpreters still face today, there is some light at the end of this dark tunnel—namely, the glimmer of hope that can be seen in future generations of judiciary language professionals. Please allow me to tell you about the outreach we have accomplished at local schools in Santa Barbara County in an effort to introduce the community to the value of professional language access and to encourage bilingual schoolchildren and teens to consider a career as an interpreter/translator.

EARLY RUMBLINGS AND SEISMIC WRATH

This story, however, starts off in a very negative place some 10 years ago. It was one thing to be an autonomous operator, running the streets of LA not beholden exclusively to any employer, and quite another to be directly overseen by a system that hardly understands or appreciates the nature of your work. Having grown up during the turbulent 70s/80s in LA on a steady diet of hardcore punk and hip-hop (both in their nascent stages, no less), it’s never been difficult to readily find myself frustrated, angry or bitter with the state of the world or, now, with my chosen career. Because of this, I was programmed to often find myself misunderstood, to find all the injustices in life, then allow the fury to overwhelm me and rebel against the world with scorching defiance. Now, court interpreting is a career that is frequently misunderstood. Many wouldn’t even know it actually exists, unless they find themselves in court and see an interpreter in action. Even after seeing an interpreter at work, some might not think of it as a career at all, but rather just a simple task that anyone can come in to perform when the need arises. As the late Rodney Dangerfield might say, I dress up in a suit and tie every day of the week, but I get no respect. Our regional union of judiciary interpreters had just come back to work after an unsuccessful strike, which all but confirmed what I already felt: as professionals, we get almost no respect from our own employers, and/or the public.

As if that weren’t bad enough, it turned out that society at large didn’t think too much of us either. After about six years on staff, I had already realized that we live in a town, and actually in a state and nation, where many think that they have a certain command of the Spanish language. This pervasive hubris has eroded the language itself and our profession. I do not mean to suggest that people shouldn’t try to learn and practice this beautiful, complex language, but when it comes to providing service in Spanish, I expected people to be more responsible. I never correct people during casual conversation, because it’s not my place; people learn and speak in their own style, at their own pace. I’m not a language instructor or purist. I do, nevertheless, take issue with those who insist on making themselves out to be bilingual professionals, when they clearly don’t possess the skills. And yes, I lashed out hard, made several enemies and rubbed certain folks the wrong way with direct confrontation. It was just outrageous to me that every type of federal, state, county and city agency has staff, and written material, that employ deficient to mediocre Spanish to communicate with the vast majority of monolingual Latinos that make up the populace. I let them all know exactly how I felt, as many as I could, and definitely got into big trouble because of it. As a result, I was almost fired at least twice.

My outrage led me to call out these “bilingual” individuals: Chicanos, Latinos and Hispanics that grew up speaking and practicing limited Spanish in a monolingual household, or non-Latinos that had marginally studied the language. You communicate well enough with your gardener and housekeeper, and you can order a taco, so of course you know Spanish, right? And, most U.S. Chicanos and other, even native or foreign Latinos grew up speaking Spanish at home (then neglect their study of Spanish, and awkwardly assimilate to English), so of course they’re fluent enough to translate, right? Wrong! I thought about my own childhood, growing up with parents who were looked down upon by both white people and whitewashed Hispanics for barely speaking English. The fact that the articulate Spanish that did speak went unappreciated made the flames of my rage only grow, fanned by the bellows of this collective ignorance and subtle form of racism.

I began to blame some senior court interpreters, who had been operating in this town and state for several years, for producing and perpetuating sub-standard work, and over-charging for the same. I argued that they didn’t realize that our standards have improved, or that they simply refused to work up to those higher standards.

This includes the legions (a whole swath of society that outnumbers us certified interpreters/translators) of “bilingual” attorneys, clerks, secretaries, peace officers, advocates, paralegals, receptionists, community activists, politicians, program directors, administrators, facilitators, counselors, doctors, nurses, notaries, mediators, case managers, or just people in general who insist on using their rudimentary Spanish and/or English, volunteer or charge money, and act like interpreters and translators all over the place, just winging it with choppy, simplified verbiage, when they clearly lack any training or even true, academic preparation in the Spanish language. They insist on using their inadequate Spanish and English to interpret or translate, without bothering to accept the preparatory rigors of the language profession. Aside from terminology (which is huge), their incompetence and lack of sophistication is also apparent in the poor syntax employed in their texts and speech. The message comes across as unnatural and, ultimately, unprofessional. I was not shy about deriding their commonly specious and disingenuous arguments: “the commoners won’t understand the ‘big words,” or, “it’s important to use ‘plain language’ so that people understand.”

In my experience, monolingual Spanish-speakers actually understand proper terminology 95% of the time, and they DO appreciate it when I use the language correctly. Supposedly bilingual people should not attempt to assess a person’s full knowledge and culture based on his or her perceived working-class appearance or educational background. It is wrong to simply assume that a person is illiterate and then and use this deficient assessment as an excuse to dumb down the language (culture, ultimately) for one’s own convenience or to avoid displaying one’s incompetence? I saw this kind of behavior as dishonest, offensive and downright lazy, and did not hesitate to say so..

These were the queries and exasperations that swirled around in my head, and it didn’t take me long to realize how much this boiling poison was literally killing me inside. I was angry at the world, and I wanted to tear it all down with ferocity. I was losing hope. I was becoming self-destructive. Is the world truly this awful? How do I avoid tearing myself apart for picking a career that has devolved? Is it naïve to believe that there can still be hope? What can I do to turn this dark energy into something more productive?

A GLEAM OF HOPE

Your hopeful narrator signed up and got promptly tested for tuberculosis and background-checked. Why not? I always wanted to be a teacher of sorts, probably the noblest profession of them all. If society, my employer and some of my fellow interpreters were not willing to understand what my career has to offer, then perhaps it was up to me to reach out and educate others through any forum I could. I asked for vacation time at work, and to my immense surprise,  the executive director, my supervisor at the courthouse, decided I needn’t use my personal time to attend: I would be participating in these Career Days on the clock, officially representing the Court. (Unbeknownst to me, perhaps someone at work was paying attention to my craft and passion…? Do positive things come to light when you begin changing your perception for the better?) I was quite surprised, and felt further compelled to take this new responsibility very seriously. Every school year since then, Partners in Education sends me the list of Career Days at all the middle schools in the district, sometimes as far as Lompoc, Santa Maria and the Santa Ynez Valley; I let my awesome coordinator at the court know, and she schedules them around my regular court assignments. They always take place only in the morning, so I only have to be away from my duties for half a day.

PREPARING TO REACH OUT

The day before each presentation, I make copies of all my handouts: False Friends/Cognates, a list of examples; Court Terminology, a sample list of terms and their respective translations; and Animal Sounds, a list of some animals in Spanish, their translation into English, and their different sounds, using the simple present tense. I pack my file of transcripts of a real court case for some role-play. I also take a bunch of books to give the students a sense of the language resources I have used to prepare myself for the work on interpreting: my old Larousse Spanish dictionary, my old Larousse English/Spanish-Spanish/English dictionary; the seminal textbook Fundamentals of Court Interpretation authored by Dueñas-González, Vásquez and Mikkelson; a Spanish thesaurus; a Spanish grammar and orthography textbook; Sandro Tomasi’s Glossary of Criminal Law Terms; as well as a number of laws, codes and constitutions I have collected over the years. I pack everything into a big old, fat brief case that was bequeathed to me by this sweet and wacky Colombian lady I used to interpret for years ago at a clinic, whose late Jewish husband had been an accountant and used this dark cherry leather box during his career. It gets heavy with all my materials in it, but I don’t mind. It’s the kind of baggage that actually feels good to carry around for a change.

BUENOS DÍAS / _{GOOD MORNING}

When I get to the school, we are given a name badge and a small map of the school so we can navigate the way to our assigned classrooms. Sometimes we’re in the same room for all three periods. We start off the morning in the library, cafeteria or teachers’ lounge where we are treated to some kind of continental breakfast, mixing and mingling with the other professionals: lawyers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers, financial planners, airplane pilots, college professors, dentists, entomologists, hairdressers, movie producers, among many others. My involvement at these Career Days has allowed me to inform these other professionals about the court interpreter’s role and importance in society. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that while most of them knew very little about what I do, many of them seemed intrigued and genuinely curious about my calling.

I then explain the process of looking for words/definitions/translations in dictionaries and glossaries, and our own development of specialized lexicons and sub-glossaries. But to really get things going, I give them examples of the modalities. For consecutive, I ask for random volunteers among them to tell me their names and what they want to be when they grow up. I walk up to them as some of them have soft voices, and I just listen. When they’re done with their exposition, I render their statement into Spanish for the class to hear. Some of the cleverer students will say it in Spanish and reverse it on me. The classmates get a kick out of hearing their peers come up with careers, some earnest, some silly and outlandish, then watching me repeat it all in Spanish. Next is the simultaneous, when I use the transcript of a certified felony plea, and I ask for four volunteers to play characters in the drama of the court: the judge, the D.A., the public defender and the Spanish-speaking defendant, while I interpret their lines into Spanish out loud for all to hear. The activity is raucous and comical enough to pique the interest of schoolchildren, yet they also get a clear sense of the difficulty and complexity involved in our daily task. I explain the importance of shadowing, to exercise the mind in preparation for the demands of the simultaneous mode, and I give them an example of how to shadow. I then engage the class in a discussion/lecture on the pitfalls and complexity of false cognates, a brief sampling of court terms, profanity/slang (they always get a kick out of this part, although I keep it clean by demonstrating, through the use of euphemisms, how we many times, as interpreters/translators, have to calibrate our renditions to equate to the degree of profanity: the teachers ALWAYS appreciate that), the different specialized glossaries and sub-glossaries that we have to acquire and learn (all medical, traffic, all civil, car parts, descriptions, colors, names of crimes, names of trees, fruits, animals, types of dogs, etc.), and by way of example, a sampling of animal sounds. I ask them to look for cat/gato on the list I give them and ask them which of the listed verbs next to cat would be the Spanish translation for “(to) purr,” until one of them figures out it is ronronear. And just as the outreach and the connection with these future leaders purrs along (I could go on and on, when it comes to interpreting/translating, and I encourage and welcome questions throughout my presentation), we are interrupted by the commanding school bell, moving everyone en masse to their next classroom. And so it goes, year after year, the magic happens again, but always different: it’s an evolving, smooth-humming production line of hope and faith in successive generations.

THE SCHOOLCHILDREN DISPATCH THEIR WORDS OF SUPPORT, EARLY SIGNS OF AWARENESS (RETYPED WORD FOR WORD, AS IS)

[Mr. Navarrete was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, bilingual all of his life—his father from Chihuahua, México and his mother from San Salvador.  He studied Spanish Literature and Literary Theory at UC Irvine.  After college he worked at non-profit organizations and dabbled in the corporate world, then began his training at the Southern California School of Interpretation, under the tutelage of Néstor Wágner, becoming state court certified in 2003.  During and after this training, José picked up a variety of assignments, including: Worker’s Compensation Appeals Board appearances, civil trials and hearings, depositions, transcript readings, medical appointments, physical therapy sessions, among others.  After a year and a half of working independently, he finally settled down into a permanent position at the Santa Barbara Superior Court.]

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of NAJIT.