Education of Translators and Interpreters as a Determinant of Access to Court - A European and Polish Perspective

Abstract

The right to a court is a subjective right focused on an entity, which is the basic guarantee of the realization of other rights. It implies an obligation of the state to organize the judiciary in order to ensure effective legal protection. In the case of persons who do not speak the language of the proceedings that they participate in, the key element for the realization of their access to a court is a properly qualified translator or interpreter providing good quality assistance.This article aims to discuss European legal regulations concerning the right to a court as well as respective regulations of the Polish national law, to present the role of an interpreter as a guarantor of this right. Next, on the basis of the guidelines of corpus-based translation, this paper proposes a new method of training court translators and interpreters. The application of the new method may optimize court interpreter training process in terms of time efficiency and quality.