Testimony Is Sometimes a Matter of Interpretation

A disagreement over the translation of a word during court testimony last week focused attention on the usually unobtrusive role of court interpreters.

Juror Elizabeth Cobarruvias, who is bilingual, was dismissed last Monday in the murder trial of Rogelio and Gabriela Hernandez after she told the judge she disagreed with the interpretation of testimony in the case. The couple are accused of beating their 2-year-old daughter to death.

Cobarruvias told Superior Court Judge James P. Cloninger that the interpreter used the word “cure” when she said a witness actually said “treat” in Spanish.

The juror insisted that she could not be wrong about the interpretation and told the judge that she could not trust the translation.

“I couldn’t ignore all this,” said Cobarruvias last week from her home.

Cloninger had instructed all the bilingual jurors before the beginning of the trial that if they felt there was a mistake in a translation to bring it to his attention, she said.

But in the interest of having all the jurors deliberate on the same body of evidence, Cloninger also said that those jurors should consider only the English interpretation. That way, for example, lawyers on both sides know what the jury is hearing and can raise objections to testimony they consider inadmissible.

Cobarruvias, a preschool teacher who works with Spanish-speaking students and their parents, told the judge she couldn’t ignore what she heard.

“He asked me if I was a certified translator and I said ‘No, I didn’t need to be certified to understand what they were saying.’ ”

The day after Cobarruvias was dismissed, Cloninger said he had reviewed the transcripts and talked to the interpreters and said he was satisfied with the accuracy of the translation. So were the attorneys for both the defense and the prosecution.

But the incident brought into focus the difficulty faced by court interpreters who must instantaneously translate everything from clunky legal jargon to emotion-laden testimony.

“It’s not an exact science,” Cloninger said during the hearing.

State law requires all Spanish-language court interpreters to pass a difficult written certification exam every two years, said Cecilia Isaac, who coordinates the Ventura County court’s interpreters.

And the interpreters are constantly honing their skills, Isaac said, attending specialized seminars on such things as homicide, ethics, sobriety testing, family law and small-claims court.

The interpreters work not for the prosecution or defense, but for the court. “We have to be neutral,” Isaac said. “If there’s a mistake it is up to us to correct that for the record.”

The difficulties in conveying nuances of language can be a challenge, she said.

“For example, if I tell you ‘She was dressed to kill,’ that could mean several different things,” Isaac said. “Does it mean the person is ready to go out and kill someone, or that she looked really good? It all depends on the frame of reference.”

And the interpreters, who are from a mix of Spanish-speaking countries, also must struggle with idioms that might be peculiar to one country and mean something completely different in another.

So the interpreters also spend a lot of time studying and comparing notes, Isaac said. And they must brush up on everything from the vulgarities and profanities to the latest slang.

To prepare for a case, a court interpreter might review a transcript of a preliminary hearing to prepare for the kind of testimony they will hear during the trial.

Although most of the demands for interpreters in court are for Spanish speakers, Ventura County courts have required translators speaking everything from Arabic to Vietnamese.

“I would say the interpreters we have here are some of the best in the state,” said defense attorney Victor Salas. “That’s not to say mistakes are not made, though. I know that happens and I’ve had to point that out when it does.”

Salas, who is bilingual, said most of the problems he has had are with translators who are from South America translating for someone from Mexico.

“We have different idioms, different colloquialisms that I think sometimes are not caught,” he said.

But even when the interpretations are flawless, filtering testimony through an interpreter subtly alters testimony, said Myrna Raeder, a law professor at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles.

Emotion and tone are sometimes hard to convey in translation, Raeder said.

But bilingual jurors in cases are regularly told before a trial begins that they should listen to the translators, she said.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld the right of a prosecutor to exclude Spanish-speaking jurors from a trial if those jurors seemed unwilling to defer to official translation.

“It’s not that it comes up all the time, but it happens,” Raeder said.

Last year, an attorney in Riverside attempted unsuccessfully to get a jury fluent in American Sign Language seated in a case involving both a deaf victim and defendant.

The lawyer felt only jurors who know sign language could understand the nuances of body language used in sign language.

Raeder said that although filtering witness testimony through a translator can be problematic, it is the only alternative in a multicultural society.

“Of course the translator must be qualified and independent,” she said. “Maybe if we had a magical machine that could automatically do the translation that would be the best solution, but we don’t.”