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Scenario (based on actual case): Christian Farsi speaking asylum seeker attends Home Office interview with his CofE vicar. His faith puts his life at risk if he is returned to the country he has fled from. Home Office official, sceptical about his claimed faith, pounces on his apparent ignorance of Christian things when the supplied translator (human rather than machine) innocently translates the Farsi word the applicant uses to refer to the vicar as “priest”. Home Office official doubts his veracity because the vicar, not being a Roman Catholic, is not a “priest”. The official’s reaction was plain wrong on so many levels (not the least of which is that those who become Anglican vicars must actually first be “ordained priest” in the language of the CofE). The reality is that the Farsi word used has a broad range of potential translations – “priest”, “cleric”, “clergyman”, “padre”, “ecclesiastic” are just a few – and the translator just picked one of them to use. Fortunately, the vicar understood what had happened but what if he had not been there?

The point is that, even with human translators, translation is never a mechanical process; there are always grey areas, and the importance of cultural and societal issues cannot be stressed too highly. A major factor in relation to court translation is the huge differences in the judicial systems used by different countries. Someone coming from a non-Commonwealth judicial system may be totally at sea in a UK court-room so that the concepts being used, and referred to in the language being spoken by the various ‘players’ as translated to him/her, may be perceived as meaningless or may be misunderstood. It is part of a good translator’s role to navigate the language minefield and help the foreign language speaker’s understanding.

If we then replace the human interpreter with a machine, however sophisticated the programming and fine-tuned the algorithms, the machine can know nothing of the cultural and societal issues that may be in play. The translation it provides is therefore incapable of matching the quality of a good human interpreter. But, hey, if it costs less then that is all that counts!