Introduction

Abstract

The increased movement of individuals across borders in the modern world has created a variety of urgent challenges for national legal systems. One such challenge arises from the growing number of courtroom participants in criminal court proceedings who are unable to speak or understand the native language of the courtroom. The traditional solution in such situations has generally been to employ a court interpreter to allow the foreign-language individual to communicate with the other courtroom participants, thus seemingly removing the linguistic barrier. Historically, court interpreters have been left to do their job with little supervision or oversight from the legal system. The addition of an unsupervised court interpreter into the otherwise well-regulated ecosystem of a criminal proceeding, however, can severely undermine the fairness of that proceeding. In short, interpreters routinely make mistakes. Interpreting studies scholars have for decades researched and discussed the multitude of errors and missteps that court interpreters consistently make in criminal settings. The effect of these mistakes on criminal proceedings, though, has largely gone unanalyzed by legal scholars. The purpose of this book is to correct this omission by analyzing the impact of court interpreters on the right to a fair trial under international law, which forms the minimum baseline standard for national systems.