Late Payment-Impago

Late payments or even lack of payment (impago in Spanish) are an unfortunate occurrences in  the interpreting and translating professions. Here you have two posts, one in Spanish (impago) and one in English (Late payments) , that deal wit the issue and give concrete advice on what to do if you find yourself in such situation.

Understandably, both posts refer to Spanish and British law. They discuss relevant legal means of reacting and protecting yourself in either country. Read them (if your LOTE is not Spanish, do a bit of research to find something similar in your language) and start thinking about  the equivalent situation in Australia. What can you do if you are not paid for a translation job? What venues do we have here if an interpreter is not paid in time or not paid at all?

If you want to keep in touch with issues related to interpreting and translating during the summer holidays, follow professionals like the ones in the blogs linked in this post (Silvia Ferrero & Oliver Carreira). There are many links on the right side bar of this blog and most of the blogs have twitter buttons for you to follow their authors.

Happy reading!

Court Interpreting

Last week I attended the launch of professor Sandra Hale's report “Interpreter Policies, Practices and Protocols in Australian Courts and Tribunals– A National Survey,” by the Hon. Justice Ian Harrison, NSW Supreme Court.

Today, while looking at my regular dose of translating and interpreting blogs, I came across this very relevant post by Juan Jimenez Salcedo, Intérpretes de cartón piedra. It looks as if the situation is not much better in Spain where a judge can use as an interpreter any person who can speak the language other than Spanish. No questions asked about qualifications or even knowledge of the Spanish language. It looks as even the interpreting agencies send unqualified people as interpreters for court interpreting.

Read the post, watch the TV news within it and listen to this Radio National about Courtroom interpreters.You can use it at consecutive practice and later on as transalting practice (the script is provided).

Translation, traduccion.

I have been forwarding interesting blog posts on translation to a couple of students I'm friends with in facebook, and I thought everyone else may be interested, so here they go:

• El Gascón Jurado publishes a link in Spanish to Traducciones de leyes españolas por el ministerio de Justicia
• Legally yours from Spain writes in depth about the same legal translations recently published by the Spanish Ministry of Justice and he does it in English. Read his analysis of the different styles used by  the translators of those documents. 
• La paradoja de Chomsky publishes a very interesting post,¿Dónde me apunto para ser traductor?, about what it really means to be a translator as opposed to knowing two languages and thinking that this qualifies anyone as a professional translator. Read the comments, they are all great!