Neat article about court interpreters in LA

[ColbertWatcher]

From the Los Angeles Times
American justice in a foreign language
L.A. is known as a mecca for court interpreters, but when a defendant or witness speaks a rare dialect, officials may resort to unusual remedies.
By Victoria Kim
February 21, 2009

The international phone line connecting a downtown Los Angeles courtroom to a cellphone 1,500 miles away in Texcoco, Mexico, was repeatedly disconnected and difficult to hear at times.

But on that line hung the constitutional rights of Candido Ortiz, accused of drunkenly stabbing a man with a broken beer bottle and charged with attempted murder. Ortiz, 20, spoke only a variant of Mixe, a language used by about 7,000 people in the mountains of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

In a case that is unusual even for Los Angeles, a place that some call the mecca of court interpreters, officials were unable to find anyone in the United States who could translate for Ortiz. A three-month search eventually led officials to Eduardo Diaz, a university student in Mexico.

At Ortiz's preliminary hearing earlier this month, Diaz was teleconferenced in from Mexico to interpret over a speakerphone. A Spanish interpreter in court translated the proceedings from English to Spanish, then Diaz translated the Spanish into Quetzaltepec Mixe, also spelled Mije.

(more)

--Los Angeles Times