Society Increasingly Multilingual : L.A. Courtrooms: Judge, Jury--and Interpreter

Taking the witness stand in the Chinatown shoot-out case, a Los Angeles police officer confidently testified how he administered the Miranda rights warning in Chinese to defendant Thong Huynh.

Defense attorney Michael Yamaki countered by calling Huynh’s court-appointed interpreter to the stand. The interpreter, Keung Wong, testified that the warning against self-incrimination had been recited in the Toi-shan dialect. Yet Huynh had responded in Cantonese, which is essentially a different language.

As a result, Los Angeles Municipal Judge Samuel Mayerson ruled inadmissible Huynh’s confessional statement during last month’s preliminary hearing stemming from the killing of Police Officer Duane Johnson.

Although Mayerson ordered Huynh to stand trial based on other evidence, the judge’s ruling spotlighted the expanding role of foreign languages in local courts and the increasing reliance placed upon courtroom interpreters.

As Los Angeles becomes ever more multilingual--the Latino population alone doubled and the Asian population nearly tripled between 1970 and 1980--county courts have become a veritable United Nations of criminal defendants. To deal with the influx--and with a series of judicial interpretations guaranteeing defendants and witnesses the right to court-appointed and paid-for interpreters--the ranks of courtroom linguists, and their importance, has swelled.

Court-appointed interpreters are now available for Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Tagalog, Tongan, Turkish--80 languages in all--apparently more than in any other county court system in the nation, according to Burdette L. Harris, director of court staff services.

“Interpreters are critical--we have so many languages coming before us in court that without the interpreters, we simply couldn’t do any business,” said Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan, who estimates that almost half the cases in his courtroom involve interpreters. Ten years ago, county officials maintained a lineup of 100 courtroom interpreters, 80 of them Spanish speaking. Now, the roster is 425 strong, including 200 for Spanish.

No longer are the interpreters, about half of whom work full-time, viewed as amateurs like the stereotypical “Mrs. Pepita from the corner grocery store,” said Linda Krausen, vice president of the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the California Court Interpreters Assn. “Today, we are a fact of life.”

Rewarding Job

Among their ranks are actresses, interior decorators, chemists, law students and housewives. The job, interpreters say, is rewarding and weighty--one that in extreme cases can mean the difference between conviction and acquittal, or conceivably, life and death.

“ ‘The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,’ hangs heavy in the minds of interpreters here,” said nine-year veteran Sharon Spence, referring to a 1982 film in which differences between the Spanish words for horse and mare led to the slaying of a Texas sheriff.

Translating word for word, and cautioned against taking sides, interpreters compare themselves to tape recorders with hearts.

“You have to be part psychologist,” said Hanne Mintz, of the county court interpreter’s office. “In addition to being a linguist, you have to be a mensch (in Yiddish, a responsible person).”

But the increasing role of interpreters has been accompanied by questions concerning both the quantity and quality of their work.

For example, officials faces difficulties locating enough interpreters on short notice, Harris said, in cases involving “exotic” languages--court lingo for any foreign language other than Spanish.

Independent Contractors

The problem exists in part because the county’s interpreters are independent contractors free to accept or decline assignments depending on their outside schedules (which can include privately paid civil court work). While many of the Spanish interpreters are assigned full-time in criminal courthouses, most exotic linguists are needed only part time.

Adding to the workload are court rulings stemming from a 1974 state constitutional amendment guaranteeing defendants the right to an interpreter. In the last year alone, California’s higher courts have held that defendants and witnesses do not have to share interpreters and that each defendant in a multi-defendant case has the right to his own interpeter. If defendants were forced to share their interpreters with witnesses, an appellate court reasoned, the defendants could not communicate with their attorneys--a constitutional right--without interrupting the proceedings.

Consequently, courtrooms are sometimes packed with interpreters, their low-pitched monologues as omnipresent as the hum of the air-conditioning unit. In one recent case in Torrance Superior Court, Harris said, six Tagalog (Filipino) interpreters were needed at once. “That pretty much exhausted our list,” he sighed.

To deal with the rising demand, the county frequently seeks qualified candidates through consulates and universities, particularly in more obscure languages. Harris is now on the lookout for interpreters of Hmong (spoken by Laotian mountain tribesmen) and Chamorra (a Philippine dialect).

For 15 years, a written test for Spanish-speaking Superior Court interpreters has been administered by Harris’ department. But for interpreters in the exotic languages, the approval process has been little more than an oral interview and background check. That has occasionally allowed problems to slip through the cracks, Krausen conceded.

“Now that the Spanish interpreters are more professionally oriented because of the test,” she said, “the legal community is accustomed to the more professional behavior. There are a lot of complaints about the exotic language interpreters because they are not uniform, their level is not always dependable, they don’t always know what to do.” The situation is understandable, she said, since most such interpreters work only part time and are not as familiar with the court system.

A current case that illustrates the range of problems faced in the profession is that of Fumiko Kimura, the Japanese-born mother from Tarzana charged with murder after having waded into Santa Monica Bay clutching her young son and infant daughter in an apparent suicide attempt.

Accuracy Questioned

At Kimura’s preliminary hearing, testimony was postponed for six hours because of difficulties finding a second linguist. As it turned out, both interpreters assigned to the case were Japanese interpreters of Korean heritage, and relatives and a Santa Monica police officer of Japanese heritage questioned the accuracy of their translations.

Later, the interpreters themselves differed over the Japanese word for sanity. Eventually, one of the interpreters suggested that the judge find an interpreter of Japanese ancestry.

At a later session with new interpreters, further problems arose, particularly when the officer was questioned about the manner in which he administered a Miranda rights warning to Kimura. The issue became clouded when courtroom observers questioned whether the interpreter was truly translating the officer’s testimony word for word. Finally, Kimura’s attorney called two interpreters, whom he discovered in the audience, to the witness stand. Both testified that the court interpreter had cleaned up the officer’s language.

Judge Rex Minter ruled that the officer’s choppy Japanese appeared to have been insufficient, though he still allowed the Miranda warning to stand because of Kimura’s understanding of English.

In the Chinatown case, Huynh’s Miranda rights had been offered only in the Toi-shan dialect.

Ruling Has Impact

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Morrell said that when Huynh comes to trial on a charge of harboring an alleged murderer, he will seek to have the judge’s ruling thrown out, since a tape recording of the interview indicates that Huynh was able to understand the officer’s statements.

Regardless, the ruling will have an impact on the Los Angeles Police Department.

“You’re seeing a situation where legal niceties are involved,” said Lt. Glenn Ackerman, head of the department’s Asian Task Force. “But given that ruling, we’ll have to be more concerned in the future . . . . We’ll probably be involved in some re-evaluation.”

In addition to differences in dialects, some exotic languages do not contain words for such legal concepts as privacy and self-incrimination. The only remedy, says Vietnamese interpreter David Doan, is to try and explain each concept in several words, a skill perfected only through experience.

To help ensure reliable interpreting, training programs are offered at colleges including UCLA and Cal State Los Angeles. The county, meanwhile, hired Mintz this year to establish a comprehensive testing program for exotic languages. In March, she administered a pilot test to 190 interpreter candidates in 37 languages. And for the first time, exams are also being given to the current roster of exotic linguists, Mintz said, as a step toward increased quality control.

Generally speaking, attorneys and judges appear satisfied with the bulk of the interpreter corps.

“It’s an art form,” said Judge Tynan. “They have to hear a continual stream of words, translate them and speak in the other language while still listening. It’s a fascinating thing to watch the good ones work.”

But there are also some bad apples, observers add.

“Some are very good,” said Los Angeles attorney Leslie Abramson, “and some are not so good--it depends on each individual interpreter.”

According to staff services director Harris, some court interpreters have been replaced because they summarize testimony rather than interpret it verbatim or because witnesses and defendants have difficulty understanding their dialects.

Since interpreting is mandated by the courts, funding is not a major issue, Harris said. This year, the county expects to spend $6 million for interpreting services in Superior and Municipal courts, and the figure is steadily increasing.

Daily pay for interpreters is also increasing in order to remain competitive with private positions. The rate beginning May 1 will be $130 per day.

That’s a far cry from the pre-World War II era when, as courthouse lore has it, people familiar with Spanish, including actor-to-be Anthony Quinn, were summoned from bars and poolrooms of downtown Los Angeles to interpret for $5 a day.

Interpreters these days are a far more specialized lot.

Radha Zaidi, a longtime Indian actress who still wears flowing native outfits to court, moved to Los Angeles four years ago. In her homeland, Zaidi said, she performed in nine different languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati and Urdu. Now, she supplements her income as a travel agent by courtroom interpreting.

Gary Balekjian, who immigrated to America in the late 1950s, is a professional chemist in Glendale who interprets Turkish and Armenian in his spare time. Due to his Armenian heritage, some Turks, wary of the friction between the two cultures, are at first reluctant to have him interpret.

But they change their minds, Balekjian said, because they quickly realize that “when I come to court to translate, I’m a machine. I think only of the right word with the right color to depict what is actually being said.”

The only Albanian translator on the county’s roster is Peter Prifti, a free-lance writer from San Diego. But Prifti hasn’t been very busy of late--he was last called for a case in Los Angeles more than a year ago. “Albanians have been very law abiding lately,” he joked.

Spanish interpreters, on the other hand, are rarely without work, and their jobs are made no easier by the differences in dialect among various Latin cultures.

“We don’t know every word that comes up,” admitted Christine Martin, one of two Spanish interpreters assigned full time to a single arraignment courtroom at the downtown Criminal Courts building. “You have all these different dialects; Columbian, Cuban, Salvadoran are all different. You are going to run into words you simply don’t know. If you are a good interpreter, you state that the defendant has used a word the interpreter is not familiar with . . . then you (receive permission to) ask, ‘What the heck does that mean?’ ”

Examples of multiple meanings, Krausen said, include guagua, which translates to baby in Chile and bus in Cuba; cartara, which means wallet in Mexico and purse in El Salvador; and chingaste, which means coffee grounds in El Salvador and a curse word in Mexico.

Most often, Spence said, interpreters have difficulty understanding recent Cuban immigrants.

“Their tempo and the syllables they stress are completely different,” she said. “While we’re talking 33 (r.p.m.), they are talking 78.”

Spanish linguists have one added burden: closer scrutiny than that faced by interpreters of uncommon tongues. It was an easier job back in the 1950s, veteran interpreter Raquel Carrasco reminisced. Back then, “No judge understood Spanish, no jurors spoke Spanish and no attorney was there to challenge our Spanish.”

The Spanish interpreters frequently compare notes to keep on top of changing conditions.

“We really talk together and work things out and semi-annually, we put together a new glossary, especially of drugs,” Spence said. “The street slang for drugs changes almost month to month.”