The Building Mutual Trust 2 project offers audio-visual training scenarios demonstrating best practice when working with suspects, defendants and witnesses through a spoken language interpreter.
With the increasing need for interpreters in police stations and court rooms throughout the EU (and beyond), the Building Mutual Trust project, financed by the Directorate-General for Justice¹ of the European Commission, sought in its first phase to establish standards, design training courses & materials, and, importantly, was aimed at informing legal practitioners and ‘legal services personnel’.
The second phase of the project has led to the production of various materials, all available free from the project website. In particular the video training scenarios are:
- Designed specifically for law enforcement and judicial professionals
- User friendly for the non-linguist
- Suitable for use by trainers or as self-study materials
- Available free of charge as streamed video clips on the internet.
The three languages represented in the videos are English, Spanish and Polish. Subtitles are available in English, Spanish, Polish and Romanian (the little tiny language codes are under the video on the left – easy to miss). More languages may be available later.
Advice is shown to the right of the video at relevant stages, to help viewers to consider how to adapt their professional practice to working through an interpreter.
Please do pass this post on to anyone you know who might be able use the resource – especially if they are legal professionals. It will be to everybody’s benefit. 🙂
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You might also be interested in Tony Rosado’s post on The ten worst things a judge can do to a court interpreter.
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¹ Its name has changed several times, most recently from Justice, Freedom and Security to Justice and Consumers.
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 