Horrible Interpreting in Court
After reading this article in the Fernandina Beach, Florida News-Leader, I think you will agree that "horrible" is a perfectly appropriate term. Imagine going to court over a child support case and the person who ends up interpreting for you is your ex-spouse! This is what happened to one deaf man who went to court and found his court-assigned interpreter was so unqualified that she could not even interpret the judge's questions.
It gets worse. According to the article, Florida does not have any laws to require national interpreting certification. In addition, there is no licensing requirement, AND interpreters only have to be "qualified" with that term lacking clear definition.
Deaf and hard of hearing people in Florida have been trying for years to get a licensing law passed. Their efforts are being stymied by the Florida Medical Association.
Hat tip to Deaf News Today.
Jamie, many thanks for posting this “extremely important” article to raise awareness and ingite the real activism within the state of Florida.
More and more people leave the state of Florida. That explains the real reason of leaving the very
backward state (the Sunshine State).
Why in the world, the Florida Medical Association have the say on the qualification of sign language
interpreter??
Many deaf people in Florida often got imprisoned at the behavioral center for just being deaf whenever they go to the ER or hosptial. That is all truth!
RLM
These events are so commonplace.
I can’t use an ASL Interpreter as I was not able to learn ASL so I use CART services (look it up, NOT a court reporter but similar). I requested CART in court but all they would do was shackle me up (!!!!) and allow me to be near the court reporter to read the onscreen text (full of unclear text)!
To this day I don’t know what really went on about that event and had to do a lot of guessing. This was in Marin, CA!
The courtroom should be the most important place of any to have qualified Interpreters and CART services. Not the last place! At least Sonoma County, CA provided one for small claims court (I can’t remember the quality of it though).