Bromberg & Associates attends Fall Professional Development Event in Ohio

In spite of the shortage of professional opportunities for interpreters and translators in the Midwest, you still can find some great events, if you are not afraid of getting up at 4:30 am.

The court interpreter never knows what curveball will be thrown at him/her during the next assignment. It could be a trivial DUIA hearing or it could be an expert witness testimony in a medical malpractice case. Thus, working interpreters seize any opportunity to increase their knowledge of specific subject matters, especially in the areas where information is not easily accessible, such as ballistics, polygraph examination, or forensic DNA analysis. That is why the Fall Professional Development Event offered by Community and Court Interpreters of the Ohio Valley and by the Interpreter Service Program of the Ohio Supreme Court last October attracted more than 40 participants from the Midwest region. Irina Jesionowski and Jinny Bromberg of Bromberg & Associates were the only representatives from Michigan to attend this worthwhile event. As the only translation company in Michigan to offer legal, medical and conference interpreter training to bilingual individuals, B&A is always interested in sharing ideas and experiences with other organizations, even if it involves getting up before dawn.

This fascinating day started in London, OH at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation. CSI fans had a field day! Forensic scientist Michelle Yezzo started the tour at the lab where documents of any kind, from checks to sections of wall, are examined for authenticity, forgery, alteration, and other purposes. Next stop was at the Polygraph Unit. Participants learned about various goals and methods of “lie detection”.

At the firearm lab, experts demonstrated how they utilize the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (NIBIN) and Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS) to compare firearms related evidence stored in the database. IBIS digitally captures the images of fired bullets and fired cartridge cases from crime scenes and test fires from recovered firearms. When a new image is entered, the system searches the existing database for a match.

Another classic forensic tool is fingerprints analysis or dactyloscopy. Fingerprint specialists employ a highly sophisticated Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, more commonly known as IAFIS. It is a national fingerprint and criminal history system maintained by the FBI, Criminal Justice Information Services Division. The IAFIS provides automated fingerprint search capabilities, latent searching capability, electronic image storage, and electronic exchange of fingerprints and responses, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

DNA testing has become an invaluable tool in forensic science that helped to convict many criminals and, more importantly, acquit the innocent. One of the major devises available for DNA experts is CODIS, Combined DNA Index System. CODIS is a computer software program that operates local, State, and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence, and missing persons. The success of CODIS is demonstrated by the thousands of matches that have linked serial cases to each other and cases that have been solved by matching crime scene evidence to known convicted offenders.
The final stage of the educational session was dedicated to trace evidence, that is any physical evidence other than ballistic, fingerprint, or DNA related evidence. Paint, glass, hairs, fibers are examples of trace evidence, to name a few.
By the end of the tour, interpreters’ brains were loaded with specific terms, concepts, and priceless sources of information.

In the afternoon, the participants joined Susan Berk-Seligson of Vanderbilt University in finessing their skill of precise interpretation of leading questions employed in legal procedures. This academic hair splitting was geared mainly toward Spanish interpreters, though the rest enjoyed solving linguistic puzzles in language-specific groups as well.

Finally, Bruno Romero, the Interpreter Services Program Manager, presented an impressive set of court interpretation services policies that are now reviewed by the Ohio Supreme Court. This set includes Court Interpreter Code of Ethics, recommendations for the interpreter qualification verification, interpreter appointment procedures, and disciplinary provisions for court interpreters. The latter concerns violations of the Code of Ethics, misrepresentation of qualifications, and gross underperformance.

This Fall Professional Development Event demonstrated that the Ohio legal community views court interpreting as an integral part of justice system and legal interpreters as true officers of the court. Bromberg & Associates believes that continuing education of the legal community and professional advancement of legal interpreters will help to make strides in adopting same outlook in Michigan. In addition to the regular training seminar B&A conducts in a monthly basis, the company decided to launch a mentoring sessions to further educational development of the language professionals in our state.