Lending a Needed Voice : Interpreters Bring Relief to Pressure Situations

Betty Lewis was awakened at 2 a.m. by a call from the Women’s Resource Center hot line. A Spanish-speaking woman had apparently just been raped.

Could Lewis make it to the Oceanside Police Department to interpret?

The San Diego State University senior pulled on her jeans and was out the door, leaving her 2-year-old son with an elder brother. Her mission was to offer emotional support in Spanish for the victim and to glean the facts needed by police to find the attacker.

“How would you like to be a rape victim in South America and be taken to a hospital where no one spoke any English or understood the nuances of your culture?” asked Sharon Newcomb, Lewis’ volunteer coordinator at the Resource Center. “I imagine you could get by without it, but it would be difficult.”

In a San Diego Municipal Court room, interpreter Alee Alger acted as the ears of a defendant in a wife-beating case while fellow court interpreter Mary Lobato spoke for the wife.

Neither husband nor wife spoke enough English to go on the record without an official interpreter. As Lobato interpreted the wife’s testimony from Spanish into English, Alger interpreted anything said in English back into Spanish for the husband.

While answering an attorney’s questions about her fractured arm, the wife broke into a nervous giggle. She was severely reprimanded by the judge, who interpreted her laughter as disrespect.

The interpreters knew better but said nothing.

“Here, we’re nothing more than a voice,” said Alger, a past president of the California Court Interpreter’s Assn. “We’re not here as an advocate for one side or the other.”

At Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, amid the Sunday afternoon bustle in the emergency room, nurse Donna Chirichetti slipped behind a curtain and into a cubicle. She deftly extracted an intravenous needle from a patient’s arm, checking pulse, temperature and temperament.

“Como se siente ahora , senora?” she asked. (How do you feel now, madam?)

The patient, a 58-year-old flower trimmer from Michoacan, Mexico, suffered dizzy spells from an ear infection. She spoke no English and could not read or write Spanish. She had good reason to feel disoriented, embarrassed and scared, but instead she turned imperiously to Chirichetti and waved the nurse from the room while she dressed, confident that the nurse/interpreter was hers to command.

“I’m sorry I can’t speak much of anything,” the woman confessed in Spanish after a doctor’s exam in which Chirichetti interpreted both questions and answers.

“For someone who doesn’t know how to say anything, madam, you’re certainly doing a good job of it,” Chirichetti replied.

Lewis, Alger and Chirichetti are part of a select few in the county who interpret in critical, high-pressure situations for native Spanish speakers who are unable to communicate in English.

The work is exacting, often misunderstood, but increasingly in demand in San Diego, which, because of its nearness to the border, has a growing need for interpreters.

Once Spanish-speakers in San Diego could be at the mercy of someone like a nearby janitor who might be pressed into service to interpret, as best he could. But laws requiring that a defendant receive a detailed explanation of charges, complicated drug cases, and a wave of medical malpractice suits have changed things. In San Diego’s hospitals, courtrooms and police stations, non-English speakers have been accorded the same legal rights to health care, due process and police protection as everyone else--and in their own language.

“Way back when the feeling was that if the guy’s Latino, who cared what he had to say,” said William Brown, chairman of the court interpreters association’s San Diego chapter. “But when you get enough cases being thrown out of court (for lack of proper interpreting) and patients dying on you, it begins to make a difference, especially with the increased (political) status Latinos have been acquiring.”

Brown became fluent in Spanish while teaching English in Mexico City after marrying a Mexican. He said court interpreting requires more than just bilingual ability. The legal terms alone constitute another language. “It’s a little bit like typing or shorthand--a combination of things you know and things you can do,” he said.

If a court interpreter has to curse violently at a judge to echo the vernacular of a street gang member, the words and tone must be absolutely verbatim or a case can be thrown out.

Under state and federal laws, an interpreter is provided to anyone in a court case who requests one. Courts now routinely line up Spanish interpreters whenever a Hispanic surname appears on the docket.

“It’s a stressful job when you’re interpreting in court because you know that one incomplete phrase can change the entire outcome of a trial,” said Karla Barber, one of four full-time Spanish interpreters for San Diego Municipal Courts. Barber recalled a murder trial of three Colombians, part of which hinged on the interpretation of the Spanish word coche. In Mexico, the word means car but in Colombia it can mean a baby buggy .

It was a judgment call, since both a child and a getaway car were involved. When Barber interpreted the word as car, she was challenged by the defendants’ lawyer.

“If the women hadn’t been from Colombia, they would never have used that excuse,” Barber said.

Barber was born in Colombia of German parents and learned Spanish and English in grade school in South America. She became a Municipal Court interpreter 12 years ago.

“What’s most rewarding is when you talk with (Spanish-speaking) defendants before an arraignment,” Barber said. “It’s the first time they have a chance to have . . . procedures explained. As a (court) interpreter you can’t give legal advice, but you can explain the procedure and just that relieves a lot of their apprehension. Can you imagine not knowing why you’re arrested and what’s going to happen to you?”

Standards are high for court interpreters. The pass rate for federal interpreters’ certification, which includes both a written and an oral exam, is less than 10%, according to Alger, who has both state and federal credentials.

Alger started learning Spanish when she was 20 by living with a Mexican family while attending the University of Mexico. She later spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Chile, then returned to San Diego to work as a bilingual secretary.

“When anyone first starts interpreting, it’s terribly frightening because you realize that every word out of your mouth is critical and you think that every word you don’t know is a problem,” Alger said. “The fear of every interpreter is being stuck or being challenged.”

“If your mind goes blank, you simply inform the court of the problem,” said Maria Rivera, a San Diego Municipal Court interpreter for five years. Rivera said the job came naturally to her. She has been interpreting English for her Spanish-speaking mother since she was a child.

“People who are not sophisticated in language think that it must be a very straightforward job, that there’s nothing to it,” said Dori Smith, head of interpreting services for San Diego’s federal courts. “They don’t realize that we’re making split-second decisions.

“You can’t afford to dwell on the information. When a case gets too interesting, it can actually become a distraction to the interpreter.”

On any given morning Smith may be called on to find a Portuguese interpreter, a sign language interpreter who can interpret Latin American signing, or someone to translate an “exotic”--a language like Punjabi, Albanian or Farsi. Often she must make do with a native speaker and give the person a crash course in how to interpret.

“I tell them, ‘Imagine if you were on trial in Finland and didn’t speak any Finnish,’ ” she said.

The daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, Smith was born in Peru and raised in Latin America. She “stumbled” into interpreting in 1970 and now has 10 contract interpreters working under her. The San Diego federal courts use interpreting services in about 5,000 cases a year, more than most other cities in the country. Smith sometimes has to fly in interpreters to meet the need.

In August, Tri-City nurse Chirichetti was on hand to interpret for six North County farm workers who had been struck by lightning. A one-time Peace Corps nurse in Guatemala and El Salvador, she was one of the first to recognize the initial cases of a malaria outbreak in North County.

Other hospitals in San Diego County, including Bay Hospital Medical Center in Chula Vista, UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest and Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, also have Spanish interpreters on their staffs. Some form of interpreting service at hospitals is mandated by a 1983 state law, but spokespeople at most area hospitals say they comply by maintaining a list of foreign-language-speaking staffers and interpreters in the community at large who can be called when needed.

Tri-City’s program is unique in that the hospital’s five full- and part-time Spanish interpreters also are nurses. A Spanish-speaking nurse is on call in the emergency room 24 hours a day.

The program was begun in 1981 after a bilingual nurse overheard a non-medical interpreter botch a patient’s symptoms.

In the course of an hour, Chirichetti may be called on to reassure in Spanish the victim of a black widow spider bite; explain the intricacies of a high-tech, push-button, hospital bed to an injured construction worker; handle a frustrated farm worker trying to pay an overdue hospital bill in cash; check in on a rape victim being questioned by police, and instruct a young mother in proper postnatal care.

“I think when they (Spanish-speaking patients) come to the door they’re always looking for a contact person--someone who looks like they speak Spanish,” she said. “When you present yourself as a ‘gringa’ speaking Spanish, someone working there who says, ‘I’m someone who can help you,’ there’s a real sense of relief. We use family members also, but family members can’t cut through the emotions . . . and get to the point quickly.”

Nurse interpreters rely on well-thumbed medical texts from Mexico to write up surgical consent forms in Spanish, furnish precise instructions for follow-up care and decipher which Mexican medications a patient may already be taking.

Chirichetti, 32, learned to interpret as a child, to help an Italian-speaking aunt who had never learned English.

“I grew up in a household where Sunday dinners were conducted in another language,” she said. “It made it more exciting somehow, and I always thought that’s how life should be, that you should always have a couple of languages going at the same time.”

She later majored in Latin American studies at UC Berkeley.

Woman’s Resource Center interpreter Lewis is one of the few Spanish-speaking rape crisis volunteers at the center in San Luis Rey and is much in demand. Most rapes occur late at night when it’s difficult for police and most hospitals to find capable interpreters.

“These women get raped, they go to the hospital, and there’s no one there to talk to or tell them what’s going on,” Lewis said. “Most of the Spanish-speaking rape victims we get are pretty much at a loss--a lot are illegal aliens.”

Lewis herself only learned English when her family moved from Bogota, Colombia, to Torrance 11 years ago.

“Typically, a Latin American woman isn’t going to want her parents to know she’s been raped,” Lewis said. “There’s that macho father asking, ‘Why did you put yourself in that position’ and wanting to beat her.

“I feel there’s very much of a need for what I do in this area.”

Lewis, 23, plans to graduate from San Diego State University in May with a degree in counseling, then get master’s and doctorate degrees in psychology. “There’s a big need for Spanish-speaking counselors and translators,” she said. “The police look on me as a life saver.”

At least two Spanish-speaking dispatchers are available to answer 911 emergency calls on any given police shift, but bilingual patrol officers are the exception rather than the rule in San Diego County.

Chula Vista Police Officers Leonard Miranda, 26, and his brother Carlos are part of an informal network of bilingual officers available to interpret when a police call goes out for a Spanish speaker, for which they are paid an extra $65 a month. However, most police interpreting is done either by non-sworn police personnel or by professional interpreters brought in from outside police departments, according to San Diego Police Department spokesman Bill Robinson.

Leonard Miranda said that, in his four years as a patrol officer, he has never been called on for a primarily interpreting job but has used his Spanish hundreds of times on the streets of Chula Vista.

“It can be in Spanish or in English, but you use the gift of gab to get done what you need to get done,” he said.

The Police Department’s need for Spanish-speakers is seldom a life-or-death issue, Miranda said, but the lack of a Spanish interpreter often means a crime won’t be prosecuted or that critical time is lost in nabbing a suspect.

Miranda feels his bilingualism helps make him a better officer.

“A lot of times a suspect is using Spanish hoping the officer won’t be able to pick up on it and that will end the interview right there,” he said. “A lot of con games are being played in Spanish. You know someone’s lying to you if they say they can’t speak English then they can’t spell their name for you in Spanish.”

When someone lies about his language, there is usually more he’s trying to cover up, Miranda said. Claiming to be an illegal alien is a common ploy used by crime suspects.

Like most bilinguals, Miranda flows between the two languages at the dictates of circumstance.

“The Spanish helps a ton in getting cooperation in the drug realm,” he said. “You’re more effective in the streets if you speak the guy’s language. Maybe he likes you a little more and he might tell you a little more.”

Could the Chula Vista Police Department use more Spanish speakers?

“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m not here 24 hours a day.”

For the most part, Miranda’s bilingual abilities go unnoticed by his peers, he said, until they are needed.

“But me and my brother can rib them a lot (in Spanish) without their knowing it.”