The Role of Court Interpreters in Oklahoma’s Legal System
Court Interpreters Assist Individuals from Diverse Backgrounds
Hi, I’m Oklahoma personal injury attorney Mike Ashworth. Many of us in America are the descendants of people who came from other places. And Tulsa in particular has become a huge melting pot recently. We are proud of our history of diversity here, bringing in people from other cultures and helping them to succeed in the American way of life and pursue their dreams.
In the past few weeks, I’ve met people that drive Uber from Myanmar, which used to be known as Burma, India, Venezuela, and the Philippines, to name just a few. I want to get to this point. The point is I have talked to them about the law and handed them my business card and answered legal questions for them. Because many times they have legal questions but they’re absolutely terrified of the legal system because the places they come from the legal system is corrupt, harsh, difficult to understand, elitist, and they don’t know what to do here about going to court.
And the other thing is that many of these people are still learning the language. I have one driver from Ukraine who very much wants to learn English and speaks Ukrainian and Russian. So going to court not knowing the language is intimidating. So what happens? Well, we’re going to talk today about court interpreters. And we have a special group of those people here.
What are Court Interpreters?
Interpreters are those who interpret word to word, spoken word to spoken word. So if I sit here and say good morning, how are you? And you say hola, bueno, all right, that’s what an interpreter would do. Now a translator is somebody that would take something in writing like a contract that may be in Spanish and translate it into English. That’s a translator.
In Oklahoma, to be called a court interpreter, you must take a course and pass a test, which is a very rigorous one. The same thing goes to be a translator. You must pass the test, a very rigorous one. But understand that the court system, particularly in the larger communities like Lawton, Norman, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, have interpreters available for most languages. Some languages they don’t. Many of them are Asian languages. You won’t find many interpreters, if any, that I’ve seen for Cambodian or Laotian, also known as Hmong. But we do have Vietnamese interpreters.
How to Access Court Interpreters
So if you’ll go online if you’re someone from another nation, you’re a friend of someone from another nation that may need a court matter taken care of, go online to the Oklahoma Administrative Office of the Courts and you can find out if there’s an interpreter available for that individual.
Get a Free Consultation Today
My name is Tulsa personal injury lawyer Mike Ashworth. Contact us at TulsaPersonalInjuryLawyer.pro or at 918-924-5528. And we do have people here who do speak other languages. So give us a call.
