Interpreters Bureau Back Up, Running
By Michelle Hunter, The Times-Picayune
The first time Sgt. Nancy Pearson needed an interpreter, back in 1980, the last person she expected to respond was her boss, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee.
But Lee had been listening over the radio to the plight of a Chinese family whose home had been burglarized. Lee, a Chinese-American, came to help.
“I went out there, but I remember I needed to call somebody else because it was a different dialect,” Lee said. Soon after, Lee resurrected the Sheriff’s Office’s Interpreters Bureau, which organizes and trains translators for the department but had been inactive for several years.
Now a major, Pearson oversees the bureau’s 17 Sheriff’s Office employees and community volunteers who speak 11 languages, including Vietnamese, German, Korean, Chinese, Arabic and Turkish.
Operators in the 911 call center have a list of participating interpreters and their home telephone numbers. The bureau averages three to five phone calls per month, said deputy Alan Welch, the program’s day-to-day coordinator.
Vincent Loy works as a motor pool mechanic for the Sheriff’s Office and has been translating with the bureau for 21 years. He speaks Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French. He said calls can come at any time of the day, even the wee hours of the morning.
“It can be for almost anything,” he said.
Loy has been called out to translate for minor incidents such as traffic stops and fender benders. He’s interpreted for the district attorney’s office and testified in court. But he also has been called in to help detectives on bigger cases. He worked undercover for a few weeks with the narcotics division, buying drugs from Spanish-speaking dealers.
Most of the time, Welch said, the interpreters can assist by phone, but they have been called out to crime scenes. Loy once translated a letter written in Spanish from a man accused of killing his wife.
Interpreters fluent in Vietnamese and Spanish receive the most requests.
Perhaps the least-used translator is Iranian-born Akhtar Alavi, who works in the uniform shop and has been called out only once in 13 years to interpret Farsi. She got her phone call when an elderly Persian woman visiting Jefferson Parish got lost while out for a walk.
Pearson said Sheriff’s Office employees are not paid extra for their work as interpreters.
William George is one of the community volunteers on the bureau’s roster. A drafter, he has served as an interpreter for three years in Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish.
“It’s really a relief for the officer,” George said. “It’s also a relief for the person involved. They’re more relaxed because they understand what’s going on.”
It takes more than a passing familiarity with a foreign language to serve as a translator for the Sheriff’s Office, Welch said. Interpreters must go through a four-week training course during which they familiarize themselves with the law and basic procedures such as Miranda rights.
Interpreters also must learn the importance of translating word for word.
“If we’re interrogating a suspect, they have to interpret what is being said and exactly how the question is answered. It’s what we’re going to be using” as evidence, Pearson said.
Several local agencies have called on the Interpreters Bureau for help: the Jefferson Parish courts, the FBI and the police departments in Kenner, Westwego, Harahan and Gretna. The sharing means many false alarms for Alavi.
“They call me from the airport a lot. They think Farsi is Arabic,” she said.
The bureau will begin training new interpreters in January, and Welch said there’s a great need for people who speak Arabic.
“Very few people in this country can speak it fluently,” he said.
And with a large Spanish-speaking population in Kenner and a growing Vietnamese population on the West Bank, Pearson said, the Interpreters Bureau is more important than ever.
“We have to be able to communicate,” she said.