What you don't learn at law school - continuing ed for laywers in a big good way

Off in Colorado lives and works a very cool lady, Nina Ivanichvili, who runs a fine translation establishment geared to the lawyerly crowd, All Language Alliance by name.

Working with lawyers has taught her some things; not least of which is that attorneys don’t typically get cross-cultural training at school. What with globalization, this becomes a handicap. How can they be trained?

Nina is not the sort of person who would shy away from a challenge. She has written an online Lawyer’s Guide to Cross-Cultural Depositions, and responses to it have been such that she has embarked on an ambitious new project: a blog for lawyers about translation.

Friends, translators, multiculturals – this blog is the cat's pyjamas, the bee's knees, and the owl’s unmentionables. It is a resource unlike any other, geared directly to the people who need it most. I won’t be surprised when this becomes required reading for advanced courses in international litigation.

Of course, there is a certain bunch of attorneys in Maryland which could have used Nina’s whitepaper. Everyone else is talking about it, so I won’t belabor the point. My favorite statement on the debacle and ways to prevent it was made jointly by the ATA and NAJIT, who have put together a resource for attorneys and court clerks, to help schedule interpreting in rare languages (also known as languages of limited diffusion).

This ties back in to Nina's blog and white paper. Any attorney dealing with a case that has multilingual implications should read these. Prosecution, as well as the defense.

Now all we need is a good language resource for judges. Anyone want to take on the challenge?