Abstract
Playing a Dangerous Game of Telephone: the Role of Court Interpreters and Interpretation Error in Immigration and Other Court Proceedings analyzes the role of the court interpreter in immigration and other types of court proceedings. Like the game of Telephone, court proceedings are inherently acts of communication. Unlike Telephone, however, the communication chain is rather complicated. At their most basic level, court proceedings generally involve one judge, two attorneys, and a court reporter. When the chain is expanded to include parties, juries, or interpreters, the chain becomes more and more tenuous and subject to failure. In cases where court interpretation is involved, breakdowns along the chain of communication lead to discrepancies between the original and the interpretation, which are certainly not comical. In fact, these errors may actually result in fundamental injustice. In the worst cases, errors in interpretation result in the incarceration of the innocent or in improper deportations.
The first two chapters introduce the reader to the topic, explaining the structure of the U.S. court system and how state and federal courts approach the use of court interpreters. Additionally, these chapters examine developing case law involving court interpretation outside of immigration proceedings, with an explanation of the difference between them vis a vis the concept of due process. The last two chapters focus on the immigration law setting. Concentrating on credibility hearings, this thesis analyzes case law regarding interpretation error in immigration proceedings and offers a practical guide to legal practitioners for anticipating where errors may occur through examples drawn from Russian and other language
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