1 An Unchallenged Assumption In the past few decades, the increased rates of international trade, travel and migration have led to a rising number of criminal defendants and courtroom participants who do not speak the language of the court in which they find themselves. Such individuals present numerous prob lems for courts, mainly because criminal justice systems, with some nota ble exceptions, are monolingual in nature and ill-equipped to handle multilingual proceedings. The traditional solution to any courtroom lin guistic problems has been the appointment of a court interpreter, or, more aptly described, the appointment of a multilingual individual to interpret, as it is not uncommon for unqualified and untrained individu als to be drafted into service by the court (Stern 2011, p. 339; see also Chap. 6). This is even more true when the language in question is itself uncommon in the area. Once appointed, court interpreters have usually been left alone by courts to do their job with little oversight. Courtroom participants primarily desire to communicate across any language barriers and they are generally pleased when the interpreter allows them to do so. Removal of the language barrier permits the court to revert back to its innate monolingual nature under the assumption that a comparable fair trial can be achieved through the simple addition of an interpreter. But what if this narrative is an illusion, an overestimation of the corrective capacity of court interpreters? The difficulty with this narrative is that the utilization of a court inter preter comes at a price. Not all interpreters are created equal, and even the best interpreters are not automatic machines capable of flawless per formance at all times. Interpreters exercise judgment, alter information, transform speech styles, and generally make a multitude of undetected alterations that can and do influence the trustworthiness of a criminal trial. Even something so apparently trivial as the accent of the interpreter can have an impact on the proceedings: French Canadian jurors view wit nesses who testify through a European French interpreter more favorably than those who are interpreted by one who speaks Canadian French (Berk-Seligson 1990, p. 146). The shortcomings of court interpretation have long been known to the interpreting community, but have received little acknowledgement from legal scholars. This lack of awareness has led to a scarcity of scholarly attention concerning the legal effects of court interpretation within the criminal justice system, which in turn has allowed courts to operate under the assumption that the mere appoint ment of an interpreter is a sufficiently corrective measure.
