Years ago, I used to visit the Tokyo District Court to watch the work of other interpreters. I was there in the gallery watching a criminal case one day, in which the accused was a US marine who was charged with assaulting a customer at a bar—if I remember correctly, it was Gas Panic, often frequented by foreigners.
The interpreter stumbled numerous times, and one time she could not remember the expression for shin in English, which is where the victim was said to have been kicked by the accused. She tried to finesse it by saying the “front of the bottom part of the leg.”
I must have cringed visibly from the gallery, because when the session had finished, the judge, having gotten into the elevator with me, after verifying his suspicion that I was an interpreter, invited me into his office, where he asked if I was interested in being a court interpreter.
What ensued was an education about how court interpreters are paid in Japan. I believe a figure of something like 50,000 yen for a full day was mentioned. The problem, however, is that full days almost never occur, and you only get paid for the actual hours you’re in the courtroom interpreting, which could be an hour or two. There’s no minimum charge or compensation for travel and no compensation for preparation. That would bring the effective compensation down to a small fraction of what deposition interpreters normally bill, and an even smaller fraction of the amount that, ironically and atypically, I was paid by the special investigators (essentially the same organization as the courts) for interpreting in the slammer up in Kosuge back in 2018-19. I gave a non-committal response, but there was no chance of me becoming a court interpreter.
After this encounter, the government mentioned a plan to establish court interpreter qualifications, but I don’t know what happened to that plan.
