Clarifying professional relationships
…Ailleurs en Europe.
An article in the “Slovak Spectator” (An American newspaper aiming American immigrants) refers to an amendment of February 2018 passed by the parliament to govern how courts, prosecution bodies or other public bodies (public authorities) manage the use of authorized experts, translators and interpreters.
Lance Ng comments on it in Slator: “This new law, proposed by the Justice Ministry, imposes on the public authorities a new ‘information duty’. This includes reporting the faults of experts, translators and interpreters whom they have used to the Justice Ministry. The Ministry would then decide on the punishment. No further details on the kind of punishment were available.
Such faults include “refusal to execute a job, causing delays or making a professional mistake”. If punished, the details of the incident would be published on the Justice Ministry’s website.
However, the amendment allows for experts, translators and interpreters the chance to “suspend their activities based on their own request, but only three times at the most, with the maximum timespan being two years”.
On the flip side, the new law also sought to benefit these group of professionals. For instance, public authorities are now required to settle linguists’ bills in a timely manner. Peter Zoricak, CEO of Tetras Translations, told Slator that this could be because “authorities did not pay on time and it caused a lot of translators and/or experts to refuse to work for them”.
Slator also reached out to Jakub Absolon, owner and CEO of ASAP-translation.com, who welcomed the new law: “I think these provisions will increase the transparency of the process and define clearly the responsibilities of both translators and public authorities. It helps to better protect honest, professional sworn translators and also the recipient of such services (citizens).”
The story doesn’t say whether the provision was passed but it underlines the necessity to tidy up the relationship between expert translators/interpreters and the authorities using them.
Although the Minister of Justice in France has now realized the extent of this sticky problem, the outcome is not clear yet.