Telephone Interpreting Now Available to All District Courts A federal district court needs an interpreter to participate in a 15-minute pretrial hearing for a defendant who does not speak English, but no qualified person can be found in the city where the court is located. The only solution for most federal trial courts has been to import help. This can be costly and inefficient. ANow, however, U.S. district courts nationwide may be just a phone call away from getting an interpreter's help. A successful telephone interpreting program, available for the past several years to a limited number of trial courts, is about to expand. "With the present complement of interpreters, we believe we have the resources to make this service available to federal district courts nationally," AO Director Leonidas Ralph Mecham said recently. The Judicial Conference of the United States first approved a pilot program for telephone interpreting in 1989, and initial funding was provided in 1990. The Conference in 1994 approved the program for short, pretrial proceedings such as initial appearances and arraignments. Today, district courts in four cities - Las Cruces, N.M., Los Angeles, Miami, and the District of Columbia - make their staff interpreters available or find qualified contractors for user courts in 15 judicial districts. These courts save money because interpreters can be used for multiple assignments on the same day, and because of reduced time-and-travel costs compared to importing interpreters from outside their areas. Overall, the demand for interpreting services overwhelmingly involves Spanish speakers. There were 181,303 court interpreter events in fiscal year 2001, and 171,331 (94 percent) of them resulted from the need for a Spanish speaker. Other languages to make the top ten in fiscal year 2001: Mandarin, 1,140; Arabic, 1,058; Russian, 836; Cantonese, 727; Vietnamese, 696; French, 487; Haitian-Creole, 475; Korean, 450; and Portuguese, 306. In all, federal court interpreter events involved 88 different languages - a mere smattering of the some 7,000 languages in use around the globe. In fiscal year 2001, the telephone interpreting program was used for 1,400 court events in 19 different languages with 77 percent of the telephone-interpreting events handled by a provider court's staff interpreter. The Administrative Office plans to monitor usage to be sure telephone interpreters are available as needed. Mecham said the number of languages available will be expanded "as additional interpreters receive training and gain experience with the system." There are three categories of interpreters: *Certified interpreters have passed a certification examination, but federal certification programs exist for just three languages--Spanish, Navajo, and Haitian-Creole. When these languages are involved, courts select only from available interpreters who have met Administrative Office criteria for federal certification. *Professionally qualified interpreters are those who have had previous employment as a conference or seminar interpreter with any federal agency, the United Nations, or a similar entity, so long as their employment was predicated on passing an examination. Someone also can be deemed professionally qualified if they are a member in good standing of a professional interpreter association that requires a minimum of 50 hours of conference interpreting experience. That person also must be sponsored by three active members of the same association who have been members for at least two years and whose language(s) are the same as the applicant's. *Language-skilled interpreters are those who can demonstrate to a court's satisfaction their ability to interpret effectively from a foreign language into English and vice versa in court proceedings. Certified and professionally qualified interpreters are paid $305 a day; $165 for a half-day. Language-skilled interpreters are paid $145 a day; $80 for a half-day.