03/21/2008
After several years as a litigator in New York City, I thought I'd encountered every obscure language that plaintiffs spoke — and demanded translations of to press their lawsuits.One was an African language called either "Konobo" or "Kron Konobo" (phoenetic, Google doesn’t bring up anything for "Kron Konobo")[VDARE.com Note: That’s Krahn Konobo, one of the indigenous languages of Liberia.] that sent my client scurrying to the U.N. to find a translator. Amazingly, we found one, although the plaintiff’s daughter complained halfway through a deposition that the translator spoke the eastern version, while her mother spoke a western version. I was later told that this language had no written version. Oy vey, as they say.
Here’s one I missed. An Alexandria, Va. judge recently denied a rape defendant’s motion for a re-translation of his entire court transcript (something taxpayers would foot the bill for) on grounds that the first court-appointed translator of Amharic screwed it up. Amharic? Turns out, it’s a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia.
All of which might make for a nice little geo-linguistics lesson, if we can get past the fact that there’s an Ethiopian running around who shouldn’t be here to begin with, either as an (alleged) rapist or confounder of a legal system that has enough trouble operating under one language.
Funny, I can’t get past that.
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