Issues affecting non-English speakers

I attended a hearing with a Spanish-speaking client today (my first client where I have been the translator). We lost unfortunately. Although all of the attorneys that I work with lost in front of this Commissioner this week in cases where we should have won. So I'm not sure what was up this week.

But what I was most frustrated with was the disadvantages non-English speaking clients face in our court system. In addition to the issues associated with having a translator that I spoke about in this post, today the translator didn't keep up with the translation and left out pieces, sometimes critical pieces, when translating into English. Usually this is a very good translator so it surprised me a bit. But then I realized that the Commissioner was fluent in Spanish so for the purpose of today's hearing, it really didn't matter how much the translator translated. But as we discussed the de novo review process with our client afterwards, I realized that the transcript of today's hearing would not very accurately reflect what the petitioner and respondent had actually said, which could be a huge hindrance to a fair de novo review.