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Attorney As Interpreter: A Return To Babble, Bill Piatt

Faculty Articles

Attorneys should not represent their clients and simultaneously act as interpreters. The harm far outweighs the benefit when an attorney acts as an interpreter for a client in litigation. In 1970, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Negron v. New York determined that the Sixth Amendment's confrontation clause requires that non-English speaking defendants be informed of their right to simultaneous interpretation of proceedings at the government's expense, however the use of an interpreter is still at the trial court's discretion.

Courts will ordinarily not appoint an interpreter in the absence of a request to do so, but the failure …