While I crank out dozens of emails, texts and Facebook posts a day, I haven’t actually written a letter in over two decades, so this feels a bit daunting. But here it goes…

Those of us from the Proteus staff are very excited about our new format—thanks to the tireless efforts of Executive Director Rob Cruz and his team. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do! We are also very excited about this issue’s feature articles: a special report on immigration court, a discussion of a controversial jury instruction in California that asks jurors to notify a judge when they believe the court interpreter has made an error, and a review of Javier F. Becerra’s new online English-Spanish legal dictionary. These, along with our regular columns, should provide you plenty of food for thought, and hopefully some enjoyment, too.

And yet there’s so much more we could publish! How about a column on interpreting and technology? Perhaps a review of a simultaneous interpreting app? An article on how video remote interpreting is used in your area? The new contractor promising improved working conditions for U.K. court interpreters, or Afghan interpreters waiting for a visa?

These are just some of the issues we would like to shed some light on. Of course, there are many, many others. It’s very easy for us interpreters to get caught up in our own geography as we focus almost exclusively on the issues we are currently facing in our respective regions, and in our own courts, whether federal, state or immigration, at the expense of checking up on our colleagues from other corners of the U.S., or the world for that matter.

We invite you to submit an article from your corner of the interpreting community. We are eager to hear about the problems you are encountering and, more importantly, your solutions. Each of us is adapting to tight budgets and technological innovations the best we can. Our hope is that a publication such as Proteus can help us do so even better.

With kind regards,
Dan DeCoursey, Proteus Editor-in-Chief