legends · 4 min read ·
Interpreter's Notes
A court interpreter understands a witness in a language no one identifies, and finds that it is her own name.
**Crown Court at Carrowby — Interpreter's Notes (Registered Interpreter: V. Almeida)**
**Case:** R v. Pender (witness statement) · **Language requested:** unspecified (witness described as "a foreign national, language unknown") · **Date:** 14 October
*Interpreter attended at 10:00. Witness is an adult female, mid-fifties, calm, with an untroubled manner. She sat at the witness box and put her hands flat on the ledge.*
· · ·
**Transcript extract (witness sworn, first questions)**
**COUNSEL:** Madam, would you state your name for the court?
**WITNESS:** *[Speaks. Duration approx. 6 seconds. Language not identified.]*
**INTERPRETER:** I am unable to identify the language. It has features I recognise from several families, but it is none of them. I would put it as an isolate. I will attempt to render it.
**COUNSEL:** Please proceed.
**INTERPRETER:** The witness says: *"My name is the name the room gives me."*
· · ·
**Interpreter's notes (V. Almeida, 14 October)**
I have worked in twenty-three languages and I have a good ear for the rest. This was none of them, and yet I understood it. Not slowly, as with a language one half knows, and not by guesswork. I understood each sentence the instant it was spoken, as if she were speaking directly into the part of my mind where meaning is kept, and the sounds were only the courtesy she paid to the courtroom.
I have never had that happen. I rendered what she said with perfect confidence.
· · ·
**Transcript extract (examination in chief)**
**COUNSEL:** Did you see the defendant on the evening of 3 September?
**WITNESS:** *[Speaks. Duration 11 seconds.]*
**INTERPRETER:** She says: *"I saw him in the corridor. He was alone. He was not alone. There was one of him, and one behind him, and one behind that, and they walked in step."*
**COUNSEL:** I'm sorry, madam, I'm not sure I follow.
**WITNESS:** *[Speaks. Duration 4 seconds.]*
**INTERPRETER:** She says: *"No. You do not. But the interpreter does."*
· · ·
**Interpreter's notes (continued)**
I checked my own rendering in the lunch recess. I had translated her answer correctly. Every word was accurate. But I noticed a thing about the sentence the witness used when she said the interpreter understood: it did not have a subject.
In every language I know, a speaker says *I*, or *you*, or *he*, or *the interpreter.* She said none of these. She named the person who was listening. There was no word in her sentence for me. It was a gesture, a pointing. And when I looked at the transcript, I saw that in every sentence she had spoken she had used the same pointing, at the same person, which was not the defendant and not the counsel.
· · ·
**Transcript extract (cross-examination)**
**DEFENCE COUNSEL:** Madam, can you tell the court why you are able to speak to the interpreter, but not to the court?
**WITNESS:** *[Speaks. Duration 9 seconds.]*
**INTERPRETER:** I am required to render what she says. I will. She says: *"Because I am not speaking. I am being repeated."*
**DEFENCE COUNSEL:** Repeated by whom?
**INTERPRETER:** *[Pause.]* She says: *"By the one who is doing so now."*
· · ·
**Registrar's memo (Carrowby Crown Court, 15 October)**
The interpreter has asked to be relieved. The Registrar has reviewed the transcript and finds that the interpreter's renderings do not correspond to the witness's utterances. The utterances recorded on the court's audio system are in an unknown language, but the audio, played back, is identical to the interpreter's own speech in English. The witness's voice does not appear on the recording. The interpreter's voice appears twice: once in English, once in the unknown language, spoken at the same time.
The Registrar has concluded that there was no witness. The witness box was empty throughout the hearing.
· · ·
**Interpreter's notes (final, V. Almeida, 18 October)**
I do not translate any more. The Registrar has taken my accreditation. I do not mind. I understood a thing in that court that I was not meant to, and I would rather be unaccredited than keep it.
I do not render. I repeat. A witness was heard, in the language of the room, and nobody was there to speak it, and the court heard her anyway, through me. She said her name was the name the room gives her. I know the name now. I have been saying it in my sleep.
It is my own.