The Professional Association of Sworn Translators and Interpreters (BBVT) is sounding the alarm about the dire shortage of translators and interpreters at the Ministry of Justice. “Many interpreters and translators avoid the judiciary and the police as clients. Court cases are therefore delayed,” says press officer Henri Boghe. “It is so problematic that for court cases it is apparently enough that you just speak a language, you don’t even have to be a qualified interpreter anymore.” The associations of the translation and interpreting sector ask to sit together at the table. “It is high time that Minister Van Quickenborne took our concerns seriously.”
The registry of the French-speaking court of first instance in Brussels sent an email to several interpreters on Wednesday saying that they are looking for three people who speak Finnish for the period from January 3 to 6. “Everything indicates that it concerns interpreters for the process of the attacks,” says a press release from BBVT. “The fact that within the Ministry of Justice it is believed that speaking two languages is sufficient for interpreting is a mockery of the profession of interpreter and of all efforts to professionalise within the Ministry of Justice since 2014. It is urgently time to make the profession more attractive.”
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But many interpreters and translators avoid the judiciary and the police as clients. “Assignments are not paid per hour, but per minute and the rates are sadly low,” it sounds. “As a result, there is an acute shortage of interpreters. Those who do are overburdened,” says Boghe. According to BBVT, Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open VLD) had indicated in his policy memorandum earlier this year that he wanted to make the position more attractive, but in recent months it has become clear that little will change. “On the contrary, next year the Ministry of Justice wants to save even more on operating costs while there is an indexation of ten percent. If this continues, we fear that we will return to the situation of 2014-2019. Then the money ran out in September, and interpreters, among others, had to wait until February for payment.”
The shortage of interpreters is an old problem. The translation and interpretation sector has already warned several times that there are few or no sworn interpreters and translators available for various EU languages such as Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Slovenian. Police services in and around Brussels also hardly find an interpreter from French to English. The Supreme Court of Justice stated in a memorandum from 2019 that many court cases are delayed because experts and interpreters have to be called in, who are not always available or have too much of a workload. “And that in a city where, due to the many international institutions, there are more interpreters per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world,” says Boghe.
