the boy next door
Joined: 08 Jun 2008
Location: next door
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 Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2008 9:34 pm Post subject: Translator docs pressure on L2 speakers in court proceedings |
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The thread title doesn't really do justice to this article or the important issue it raises for those of us in the business of educating second language learners.
Basically, the translator in this case involving illegal immigrant workers charged with document fraud has documented how they could not really understand the charges against them and under great pressure from prosecutors, pled guilty where they might not have had to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us...hp&oref=slogin
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In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.
In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.
He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.
�The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,� Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. �The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.� |
| Quote: |
He suggested many of the immigrants could not have knowingly committed the crimes in their pleas. �Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security card was or what purpose it served,� he wrote.
He said many immigrants could not distinguish between a Social Security card and a residence visa, known as a green card. They said they had purchased fake documents from smugglers in Postville, or obtained them directly from supervisors at the Agriprocessors plant. Most did not know that the original cards could belong to Americans and legal immigrants, Mr. Camayd-Freixas said. |
A similar article by Aneta Pavlenko in a recent issue of TESOL Quarterly looked at the interrogation by the police of a high level ESL learner in a murder case. It showed how, even with an exceptional level of English, she was unable to comprehend that she was being treated as a suspect, not as a material witness, and thus endangered any possible defense by continuing the interview without a lawyer present.
Of course, "native speakers" with little education also fall into these traps, a point which suggests the irrelevance of the idea of native speaker of a language in comparison with the concept of expert user of a language in a particular domain. Our advanced learners in the classroom will still not be able to cope in English with many domains they have not been exposed to, regressing, as it were, to lower levels of performance. And sometimes, as these cases suggest, it may be really important.
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