21 students completed TLC’s November Court Interpreter Workshop which qualifies them to register with the TN Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) as interpreters. Most of the students were fluent in English and Spanish, but there were two who were fluent in English and Kurdish who completed the course.
The Fall Court Interpreter Workshop had 26 participants representing 16 counties in Tennessee. For the first time, an interpreter for Karen, the language spoken in Myanmar and parts of Thailand, took the course. This workshop provided by the Tennessee Language Center is the first step in becoming an interpreter with the Administrative Office of the Courts.
The Tennessee Language Center’s Summer Court Interpreter Workshop had 27 participants from 16 different counties and two states (TN and MS). Our students included a Metro Nashville Police Department officer who wanted to improve his interpreting skills in order to better assist the Hispanic community he serves, an Afghan refugee currently working as a Dari interpreter in community settings who wanted to expand his services to the legal field, and a polyglot African student who speaks English, Swahili, French, and Portuguese, who also wanted to take his interpreting skills to the next level. TLC’s Court Interpreter Workshop is an approved training program for court interpreters in the state of Tennessee consisting of 14 hours of training on the Tennessee court system, ethics and standards of practice, and interpreting skills.
22 people from 10 counties across Tennessee as well as New Mexico and South Carolina recently completed TLC’s “TN State Court Interpreter Ethics and Skills Building Workshop.” Languages represented included French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish.
Congratulations to the 21 Court Interpreter Students who completed the TN State Court Interpreter Ethics and Skills Building Workshop at the Tennessee Language Center on June 7, 2021. The workshop is the first requirement to becoming a Certified Court Interpreter in the State of Tennessee.
The students were from the U.S., Spain, and Mexico and representing the following languages: Spanish, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Arabic, Portuguese, and French. These students will now be put in direct contact with the TN Administrative Office of the Courts , which will guide them through the remainder of the court interpreter registration and, eventually, certification process, after which they will begin interpreting in courts and attorney offices statewide.
Some translation mistakes can have a lasting, if mostly harmless, impact. Like early Biblical translators thinking Moses was “horned” instead of “radiant,” leading to some really interesting sculptures, statues, and illuminations of Moses with horns on his head. Or people thinking that Mars had manmade “canals” on it instead of erosion-created “channels” due to a translation error. But other translation mistakes can have lifelong, or even deadly, consequences, as Richard Ponce-de-Leon Monosalva, Interpretation & Translation Project Manager, illustrated during his presentation “Language Access in the Courts” at a recent MTAS Conference for Municipal Court Clerks from across Tennessee on May 21.
TLC provides certified court interpreters, and also offers training for court interpretation throughout the year.