Designing Student-Based Language Interpreter Programs to Ensure Language Accessible Clinics

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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Providing legal services in a client’s best language is an essential aspect of lawyering, especially cross-cultural lawyering. However, interpreter services can be expensive and drain clinics’ budgets. Students, professors, and clinics around the country have responded by tapping into natural resources that lie within their institutions – multilingual students. These students serve as interpreters within clinical programs assisting student lawyers in providing culturally sensitive legal services. Presenters will speak to the diversity of language interpreter programs across their institutions. Additionally, they will introduce audience members to best practices in training non-professional interpreters and teaching student lawyers how to utilize interpretation services. Audience members will be asked to complete a survey that will help them reflect on the need for language interpretation in their clinical practices in the hope that it motivates them to organize language interpreter programs at their own institutions. Goals/Learning Objective 1. Publicize the breadth of student-interpreter programs in clinics across the country. 2. Introduce clinicians to a wide range of models for student-based interpreter programs. 3. Educate clinicians in best practices with respect to training non-professional interpreters. 4. Prepare clinicians to train student attorneys in using interpretation services. 5. Encourage clinicians to evaluate the need for interpretation services within their clinics and examine barriers that might exist to their services in the absence of student-based interpreter programs. 6. Ask clinicians to assess the need for language interpreter programs within their own institutions. 7. Engage clinicians in reflection on the value student-based interpreter programs could add to their service offerings.