Courts Service pays over €1m for interpreters
The Courts Service, in response to a Freedom of Information request, confirmed the bill for providing interpretation services for 68 languages in the courts last year totalled just over €1m. The lion’s share of the fees was paid to translation.ie or Forbidden City Ltd, which received 832,324.
According to the Courts Service, Polish was the language interpreted most often last year in the courts when interpreters were required on 2,151 different occasions — accounting for 28.8% of the 10 most popular languages last year. This was followed by the demand for Romanian interpreters who were required 1,367 times in court.
The other languages to feature in the top 10 were Lithuanian (14.8%), Russian (9.9%), Mandarin (4.5%), Latvian (3.4%), Vietnamese (2.6%), Portuguese (2%), Arabic (1.7%), and Czech (1.5%).
Yoruba is spoken by the Yoruba people who live in southwest Nigeria and southern Benin and total around 35m, while Cebuano is the largest native-speaking population of the Philippines.
Lingala is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Iloko and Tagalog are both spoken by millions in the Philippines.
Other languages that were interpreted in the courts last year included Zulu, Yue Chinese, Vietnamese, Uzbek, Urdu, Thai, Tamil, Somali, Pushto, Panjabi, Nyanja, Moroccan Arabic, Mongolian, Kurdish, Hindi, Georgian, Estonian, Cantonese, Bini, Bengali, Armenian, and Amharic.
Interpreters were obtained on 7,475 occasions from contracted suppliers by the courts.
A spokesman for the Courts Service said the organisation, “as a public service provider, was challenged over the past two decades to meet the challenges of increased ethnic diversity in a positive and proactive way”.
He said: “Such diversity has seen us provide for interpretation of the spoken word in up to 210 different languages and dialects over the past 20 years.
He confirmed that “in the years from 1997 to 2008 there was a 30-fold increase in the need for the use of interpreters in court”.
He said there has been a steady decrease in recent years, due to a decrease in inward migration, less demand for the services in court, and a public tendering process delivering value for money and quality standards.
The spokesman said that in March 2013, following an open tender competition, the Court Service entered into contracts with three companies to provide interpretation services to the courts.
The spend in 2014 represented a 16% fall on the €1.2m spend on interpretation in the courts in 2013.
The costs in 2014 and 2013 compares to a spend of €3.6m in 2008 and €3m in 2009.
