Robert Green wrote:
"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
In article , wrote:
stuff snipped
Of the many things she does, she translates for the deaf at trials.
Still think they don't need to be licensed?
Why? This could just as easily be taken care of the same way you get
okayed as an expert witness. I had testified many times before I got
any kind of certification. They asked about my training and
experience, etc.
My dad was an "expert witness" and many courts will simply eject a
witness even with credentials when they start reaching impossible
conclusions. I've seen it happen in a case where a forensic expert
tried to reconstruct a fire's origin based on blurry 3 by 5 photos
that he had not even personally taken. He hadn't visited the fire
scene, either. Zoot! Out he went. The outcome might have been
different if it has been a jury trial, I'll admit, but smart lawyers
make sure the witnesses they hire are credentialed out the wazoo and
well-spoken, too, before they take the stand. For engineers, the
credentials part usually (not always) means having a PE license.
As for licensed translators being more competent then their unlicensed
brethren all I can say is there's no shortage of appellate briefs
alleging translation errors during criminal trials and in my limited
experience, those allegations often prove true. That's because
translation is subject to all sorts of errors.
A brief review of POTUS errors in translation (ostensibly the best
translators money can buy) will reveal "I am a donut!" and "my wife is
frigid," the two Presidential translation errors most cited in the
press. Extra credit if you can tell me what they were really trying
to say.
The first was JFK trying to convince Germans that he was a native of Berlin
("Ich bein ein Berliner").
Don't know about the second. That's not surprising, though. Inasmuch as the
phrase has been uttered, at most, once in the last century, it's rare enough
to not have been recorded.