Effective Attorney Work through an Interpreter

6 Engage your counterpart, not the interpreter When speaking through an interpreter you should always engage with your counterpart (the person you are addressing) directly—not with the interpreter. In the courts, I perceive that those attorneys who engage directly with the person who doesn’t speak English, ignoring the language barrier, experience a valuable side benefit of connection and better levels of trust. Maintain eye contact and remain focused on your counterpart and not on the interpreter. Building trust and rapport tend to be harder when attempted through an interpreter. Eye contact helps immensely, don’t underestimate its value even if the other person doesn’t speak your language. Also, keep in mind the many other means available to connect as humans, other than spoken language. 7 Use direct speech (first person) Once the process of interpreting has started, think of the interpreter as your own voice: You must always address the other party in first person. This means that if you are talking to Mr. Lopez, a defendant who doesn’t speak English, you will say things like: “Good morning Mr. Lopez, you and I need to talk about your bond situation today…” as opposed to talking to your interpreter and saying: “Please tell Mr. Lopez that we must address the bond issue today”. For the communication process to be effective and objective, the parties should at all times use this direct speech. This is now a world standard in communication when using interpretation, as opposed to asking the interpreter to convey the message to the receiving party like in the example above. 8 Sentence structure —worth a million words One of the worst ways an attorney can shoot himself in the foot is to structure a question badly to a key witness in a jury trial when using an interpreter. I know every attorney tries to be careful about structuring phrases even in a monolingual courtroom, but think of careful structure as being three times more important when there’s a language barrier being crossed. The problem, as I see it in the courtrooms day after day, is that most attorneys simply underestimate a not-so-little detail of language interpretation complexity. 9 Avoid false starts and repetition Most of us speak in broken sentences. We start a sentence, then mentally erase, re-start and complete it. Sometimes we don’t even complete the sentence, and count on the guessing skills of our listener. Well, now you know that your interpreter will re-start exactly the way you did, literally, faithfully and very confusingly for the nervous witness at the stand. “...just a second please…I thought I had that document here…aha...Ok Let’s go back to…Oh!, I am sorry. Good morning Mrs. Ampuero…oops...bear with me…” As noted, court interpreters are governed by a code of ethics to provide a complete and accurate interpretation, without adding, altering or omitting anything to what was expressed by you. Likewise, their duty is to preserve your language level (in this context, language level is the degree of complexity that you are using in your speech) and style, such as pauses, false starts and repetitions. The objective of this level of fidelity is ultimately good for you, because at the end, your message should have the same effect on the target language receiver as the original message had on the source language.