The Interpreter

Elena Villalobos had been a court interpreter in Los Angeles for fourteen years, and in that time she had learned that the most dangerous words in a courtroom were rarely the long ones. Long words had definitions. It was the small ones, the everyday phrases people used without thinking, that could quietly change the course of a trial.

The case that Tuesday was a robbery at a garage in East Los Angeles. The defendant, a nineteen-year-old named Danny Ortega, sat very still beside his lawyer. The prosecution's key witness was a woman in her sixties, Mrs. Graciela Amaya, who had been closing the laundromat across the street on the night in question. She had come to the United States from Mexico thirty years earlier and had never needed much English. She had certainly never been in a courtroom.

Before the witness took the stand, Judge Harriet Coleman addressed the court. "It is essential that the witness be given every opportunity to answer in her own words," she said. "I would ask that counsel keep their questions short and that the interpreter render everything, including any hesitation, as faithfully as possible." Elena nodded. It was what she always did. She had no idea, at that moment, how difficult it was about to become.

Mrs. Amaya was frightened. Her hands shook as she took the oath, and Elena had to lean close to hear her. The prosecutor, a brisk young man called Mr. Lindqvist, began gently enough: the time, the street, the lighting. Then he came to the question everyone was waiting for. "Mrs. Amaya, the man you saw running from the garage. Do you see him in this courtroom today?"

Mrs. Amaya looked at the defendant for a long time. Then she said, quietly, "Se me hace que era ese muchacho."

In the half second that an interpreter has, Elena saw the whole problem. Word for word, the phrase meant almost nothing in English. In meaning, it was somewhere between "I think it was him" and "I have a feeling it was him", and the distance between those two was, in a criminal trial, enormous. If she said "I think it was him", the jury would hear a witness who was fairly sure. If she said "I have the impression it was him", they would hear a witness who was guessing. Either way, it was not her place to decide which the witness meant. Her job was to make sure that the jury heard exactly what Mrs. Amaya had said, no more and no less.

"Your Honor," she said, "the interpreter requests permission to clarify a regional expression with the witness." There was a murmur in the room. Mr. Lindqvist frowned. The defense attorney sat up. Judge Coleman looked at Elena over her glasses. "Permission granted. I would remind the interpreter, however, that the court requires she limit herself to the meaning of the expression and not ask about the facts."

Elena turned to the witness and asked, in Spanish, what she meant by the phrase. Was she sure, or did it only seem to her? Mrs. Amaya twisted her handkerchief. "It was dark," she said. "He was the same size. The same jacket. But I only saw him from behind and for a second. It only seems that way to me, that is all. I would not swear to it."

Elena rendered it into English, every word, including the pause before I would not swear to it. Then, for the record, she gave the court her translation of the original phrase: "It seems to me that it was that young man." Mr. Lindqvist asked for a short recess. When the court resumed, he asked only two more questions, neither of which concerned the identity of the man.

Three weeks later, the jury acquitted Danny Ortega. Elena read about it in a two-line notice on the court website. She never learned what had persuaded the jurors, whether it was Mrs. Amaya, the lack of other evidence or something else entirely. Perhaps her choice had made no difference at all. She found, though, that she thought about it often, usually on the bus home: the frightened woman, the silent young man, and the three small words in which, for a moment, his future had been held.

When new interpreters asked her for advice, she always told them the same thing. "It is vital that you be invisible," she would say. "But invisible is not the same as passive. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is stop, and ask, and make sure that the person speaking is the one who is really being heard."