The Oklahoma Bar Journal September 2022

few years of piano lessons. Even attorneys who grow up speaking Spanish in their homes do not automatically know the terminol ogy or the techniques to interpret professionally. An interpreter could certainly never do an attorney’s job. Should an attorney be allowed to do the interpreter’s job? Until all judges and attorneys embrace the irreplaceable role of certified interpreters, Spanish speaking defendants and victims will not have full access to the U.S. legal system. If court author ities want to ensure fairness for non-English speakers, they will remember the vision of the Arizona Supreme Court in the 1970s and allow interpreters to make it a reality. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mr. Cozzens is a certified courtroom interpreter in Oklahoma and a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma.

On another occasion, an attorney told me he could speak Spanish fluently. However, as he attempted to discuss a plea agreement with his Spanish-speaking client, he did not know how to explain that by accept ing the agreement, his client would waive certain rights. When I later accompanied the defendant before the judge, the defendant panicked at the idea of waiving his rights, and the proceedings stopped with a jerk. The goal of court interpret ers is to ensure that defendants with limited English understand everything native English speak ers would understand in their position. To achieve this goal, they not only learn languages at a professional level, but they also learn simultaneous and consec utive interpretation techniques as well as sight translation (read ing English documents aloud in Spanish). They use each of these skills in criminal proceedings. If the history of the profession alization of interpreters since the 1970s teaches us anything, it is that these abilities do not just appear when someone learns a little Spanish or when they have a Hispanic name. The ability to interpret fully and accurately in court requires more than a few years of high school Spanish, just as performing Chopin and Schubert in concert requires more than a

ability of – court interpreters and standardize interpretation prac tices. In Oklahoma, where I work as an interpreter, authorities have done much in the past decade. One of the main tasks now is to trust certification, which means allowing interpreters to do their jobs. In courtrooms around central Oklahoma, I sometimes run into attorneys who say they do not need interpreters because they already speak Spanish. They may, indeed, but I have yet to hear an attorney interpret it in a way that would pass the certification exams. Knowing neither the tech nique nor the vocabulary, lawyers who brush off interpreters seldom know words such as DA , arraign ment , enter a plea , waive , deposition , stipulation or call docket . In criminal proceedings, these terms are ubiq uitous, and lawyer-interpreters regularly omit or change them. On one occasion, I heard a defense attorney change the crime of “burglary and assault” to “robbery and assault” because he did not know the term for bur glary. Imagine how confused the defendant must have felt. After all, he may have broken into a build ing, but no one else in the court room had even insinuated that he had stolen something.

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THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL