Workforce Language Services

An article in the Dallas Morning News describes the current scarcity of licensed court interpreters in multilingual Texas.  This scarcity is attributed to the rigorous certification procedure, which one interpreter points out is a positive thing because Texas is a state with the death penalty. 

As a border state, Texas has a unique cultural mix that integrates Spanish into daily life and Anglicisms which creep into speech in Spanish.  This, along with false cognates and idioms, makes the interpreters job all the more complex and specific to the region:

Precision was at play at a recent training session for court interpreters in McKinney. Elegible in Mexico commonly means a person who legally can be elected. It doesn’t mean eligible.

“It is an Anglocism; but Anglocisms are becoming more and more common,” Holly Mikkelson said as she led the training for the Texas Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators.

Mikkelson warns about the word crimen. It doesn’t mean just any crime but is instead reserved for unusually violent crimes. In English, the word “delinquent” refers to a petty offense by a minor. But in Spanish, delinquencia can mean any crime by a person of any age.

To read the article, click here.