100 interpreters and 40 languages: Clark County courts program makes sure everyone understands the proceedingsSubscriber ExclusiveUpdated 1 hour ago

When a teenage girl sought a domestic violence protection order, she marked on the form she needed an American Sign Language interpreter. From then on, Luanne Conner appeared at each hearing to interpret the judge’s orders into ASL, ensuring the girl and the person she sought protection from understood.

Conner is one of more than 100 interpreters Clark County District Court has contracted with this year, translating hearings into more than 40 languages. The office, which coordinates interpreters for the entire local justice system, has grown over the years as the county’s population has ballooned in size and diversity.

In Coordinator Bryan Day’s one year with the office, they have brought on more than 30 new interpreters.

“The program has definitely increased, and I think it will continue to increase as our community becomes more and more diverse every single year — the need for interpreters will increase with that,” District Court Administrator Bryan Farrell said. “Just as a comparison, prior to Bryan (Day), we would contract with about 75 interpreters a year, and now we’re at least up to 105.”

Day knows how important it is for people to have access to the already confusing justice system through their primary language. Ensuring people understand proceedings and court orders helps decrease rates of criminal defendants reoffending, Day said, and helps keep people from “slipping through the cracks.”

“Law speak is a different language, and these people who don’t speak English proficiently, they come in and they’re kind of just lost,” Day said. “It’s the responsibility of the court, and I take that responsibility very, very strongly.”

When someone contacts the justice system — to make a first appearance on a criminal allegation or to seek a divorce — they can request an interpreter for hearings. Day’s office receives the request and sends the assignment out to the county’s contractors for that language. If the county doesn’t already have a contract with an interpreter for that language, Day seeks one out, which is sometimes tough.

“There are a total of three registered Samoan interpreters in the state, and it can be very difficult to get that scheduled every once in a while,” Day said. “One of the ones that I’ve struggled with most recently is an African language called Mandingo. I had never heard of it, and luckily, the previous interpreter coordinator had dealt with this language in the past, so we already had a contact for this, which made things a lot easier.”

The county’s most common interpreter needs are for Spanish, Chuukese, Russian, Ukrainian and ASL. But Day said sometimes the county gets requests for rarer languages to the area. Recently, the county provided a Farsi interpreter for a trial in Superior Court.

“It kind of varies day to day how many different languages we have on the schedule,” Day said. “There are days where sometimes it’s just Spanish and Chuukese, or some days we have 15 different languages on the schedule.”

For a majority of the county’s interpreters, the language they’re certified in is their first language.

“It definitely helps with the colloquialisms, specifically with Spanish,” Day said. “There’s so many varieties and so many different language variants that it’s very helpful for people from a similar area to hear somebody speaking the same way they do, like somebody from Colombia would speak just slightly different from somebody in, say, northern Mexico.”

For Day, the job has meant they have been exposed to a variety of languages and cultures. Day has been able to meet people from all over the world from their office at the county courthouse.