Crown Seeks to Split Trial Over Interpreter Shortage (Canada)
A conspiracy to commit murder trial in Ontario could not proceed for a reason that has nothing to do with evidence, witnesses or lawyers. There was no accredited Arabic interpreter available to sit with one of the defendants for the three to four weeks the hearing was expected to last.
What the Crown was forced to ask for
Prosecutor Glenn Crisp took the unusual step of asking Ontario Superior Court Justice Alfred O'Marra to sever the joint trial of two co-accused, a Farsi speaker and an Arabic speaker charged together. Severing a trial is not a procedural convenience. It means running the same case twice, with two juries, two sets of witnesses and two sets of costs, because the court cannot seat one of the defendants in a room where he understands what is being said about him.
The reason given in open court was stark. There was, at the time, a single accredited Arabic court interpreter in the entire province, and he was unwilling to commit to long trials. One person, one language, one of the largest jurisdictions in Canada.
How a testing reform created a shortage
The shortage was not an accident. In 2009 Ontario introduced a new and more demanding accreditation test for court interpreters, intended to raise standards after a series of appeals in which the quality of interpretation was challenged. Of the 225 interpreters who sat the test, 34 per cent failed outright and were reclassified as unaccredited. Those scoring between 51 and 70 per cent were given conditional accreditation, a status that satisfies nobody.
The Court Interpreters Association of Ontario argued the test was unfair and did not reflect the conditions interpreters actually work in, where a hearing moves between legal argument, street slang and technical forensic evidence within a single afternoon. Whatever the merits of that complaint, the arithmetic was unforgiving. A tougher test applied to a workforce that had never been properly trained produced a smaller workforce, not a better one.
The part that gets missed
Raising a standard without building the pipeline to meet it is a policy failure with a predictable outcome. There was no accompanying investment in interpreter training, no realistic pay scale to attract qualified linguists away from better paid commercial work, and no succession planning for rare language pairs.
Court interpreting is difficult, badly paid relative to its difficulty, and carries a level of professional exposure that most freelance translators would decline. An interpreter in a criminal trial works in real time, without a dictionary, rendering testimony that may put someone in prison. The job demands near-simultaneous processing, legal vocabulary in two languages, and the composure to correct a judge. Provinces that pay it as though it were casual clerical work end up with a list of one name.
Why the right is not negotiable
The right of an accused person to understand the proceedings against them is constitutional in Canada, as it is across most common law jurisdictions and under the European Convention on Human Rights. This is not a courtesy extended to defendants. It is a precondition of a valid trial, which is precisely why the Crown asked to split the case rather than proceeding and risking the entire prosecution being overturned on appeal.
The practical consequences of getting it wrong are expensive. Convictions have been quashed and retrials ordered because the interpretation was found inadequate, and each of those outcomes costs far more than paying properly for a qualified interpreter would have.
The broader pattern in language access
Ontario is not unusual. Court systems in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia have all faced interpreter shortages, usually after outsourcing the service to a contractor whose model depended on paying less than the work is worth. In each case the courts discovered the same thing: the supply of people who can interpret a murder trial in Arabic, Farsi, Somali or Punjabi is small, and it evaporates when the terms deteriorate.
Professional bodies and practitioners have documented this repeatedly, and the frustration is easy to find in communities such as r/interpreters, where court work is frequently described as the least sustainable corner of the profession. The provincial guidance on court interpretation in Ontario now sets out how the service is meant to operate, but a published standard does not conjure a workforce.
What actually fixes it
The remedies are known and none of them are mysterious:
- Fund accredited training programmes rather than testing people who were never trained
- Pay rates that reflect the difficulty, including for long trials, so accredited interpreters do not simply decline them
- Maintain a national register so scarce language pairs can be shared between provinces
- Use remote and video interpreting for procedural hearings, freeing scarce in-person capacity for trials
- Contract with professional providers of legal interpreting services for the languages where the public system has no capacity at all
The distinction between translation and interpretation matters here. Translation works with text and allows revision. Interpretation happens once, in real time, in a room where somebody's liberty is at stake. Treating the second as a cheaper version of the first is how a province ends up with one qualified Arabic interpreter and a murder trial it cannot run.