Cost of court interpreters tops €1m

EXOTIC African and Asian tongues such as Yoruba, Cebuano, Lingala, Iloko and Tagalog were among the languages spoken by defendants in the courts here last year.

The bill for providing interpretation services in 68 languages in the courts last year totalled just over €1million, the Courts Service said.

Polish, though, was the language translated most often last year.

Interpreters in that tongue were required on 2,151 different occasions. Polish accounted for 28.8 per cent of the top ten most interpreted languages last year.

Romanian was second. Interpreters were needed on 1,367 occasions in court, making up 18.3 per cent of the top ten languages translated.

Other languages in the top ten were Lithuanian, Russian, Mandarin, Latvian, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Arabic and Czech.

Yoruba is spoken by 35million people in southwest Nigeria and neighbouring southern Benin.

Cebuano is spoken by the largest native population of the Philippines while Iloko and Tagalog are also both spoken by millions in the Asian country.

Lingala is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Other languages interpreted in court last year included Zulu, Uzbek, Tamil, Somali, Pushto, Punjabi, Nyanja, Mongolian, Bini and Amharic.

Last year, interpreters were ordered on 7,475 occasions from contracted suppliers by the courts.

The figures show the lion’s share of the fees was paid to translation.ie or Forbidden City Ltd, which received €832,324.

The firm’s most recent accounts show accumulated profits rose by €128,743, going from €482,044 to €610,787 in 2013. Its cash pile increasing ten-fold to €447,524.

The Courts Service said it was a public service ‘challenged over the past two decades to meet the challenges of increased ethnic diversity in a positive and proactive way’.

A spokesman 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.’

Between 1997 and 2008 there was a 30-fold increase in the need for the use of interpreters in court, the Courts Service said.

But the spokesman said there has been a steady decrease in recent years due to a fall in inward migration, lower demand for the services in court and an open public tendering process.

The €1million spent in 2014 represented 16 per cent reduction on the €1.2million language interpretation bill for the courts the year before.

The costs compare to expenditure of €3.6million in 2008 and €3million in 2009.

‘Challenges of ethnic diversity’