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Certifying Interpreters a Constant Two-Year Cycle for Federal Courts

October 10, 2007 — In sessions replicated in various U.S. cities for four days in August, some 300 would-be interpreters gathered for an arduous oral examination in which their Spanish language skills were subjected to the conditions that could await them in a federal courtroom.

Each of the candidates was seeking to become certified by the Administrative Office as someone capable of accurately performing simultaneous as well as consecutive interpretation and sight translations from Spanish into English and the reverse.

Although federal courts require interpretation of more than 100 languages in more than 200,000 proceedings each year, Spanish is the language involved in the overwhelming majority.

"Because Spanish constitutes more than 96 percent of interpreter language needs in the federal courts, the certification of Spanish/English court interpreters is critically important to the effective administration of justice," said Robert Lowney, chief of the Administrative Office's District Court Administration Division.

"The availability of federally certified Spanish interpreters ensures that defendants and others involved in cases understand the court proceedings and can participate fully in them," he said. "The certification of Spanish/English interpreters provides judges with a ready resource to call upon when such services are needed, whereas in other languages the judges and/or court staff must independently evaluate the credentials and skills of the interpreters who are used."

In addition to about 80 full-time staff interpreters, more than 1,000 interpreters are certified for contract work in the federal courts nationwide. The demand for additional certified interpreters is constant.

In August, two meeting rooms of a Washington, D.C., area hotel served as testing sites. Over four days, two three-member teams of raters, themselves certified interpreters, administered the 90-minute oral examination to 32 candidates who had passed a written test in 2006 so they could move on to the 2007 orals.

The first part of the test was sight translation - reading from a typically one-page document written in either English or Spanish and translating into the other language. Candidates have five minutes to complete the task, and must begin within 90 seconds.

The second part of the test consisted of two forms of simultaneous translation. In one, the candidate listens to a compact disc (CD) through ear phones and interprets aloud from English into Spanish. In the other, the candidate listens to two people speaking and again interprets aloud, from English into Spanish.

The third part of the test focuses on consecutive interpreting. Two of the raters assume roles of a Spanish-speaking witness and an English-speaking attorney who is questioning the witness. The candidate must interpret the exchange, which typically lasts 15 minutes.

Throughout the examination, the raters score the candidate's performance, noting good renderings as well as difficulties. After the exam, the raters reach a consensus on the candidate's score.

Identical testing took place those same four days in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Jersey City, N.J., Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Portland, and Sacramento. In each city, a week of training for the raters was conducted two weeks before the testing began.

This year brought a new development: a few hundred candidates took the oral exam from trained proctors during three days in July at four locations - in Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, N.J., and Washington. Although not necessarily proficient in Spanish, the protectors had been trained to administer the test using a CD. Later, in a separate location, teams of raters score the recorded performance of the test-takers.

After all the scores from tests taken under the alternative and traditional administration have been statistically analyzed, the AO will have a basis for determining whether the two approaches are equally reliable and valid.