The circuits are split over whether the federal law providing that the losing party in a lawsuit may be required to reimburse the winning party for costs for “compensation of interpreters” includes the costs of translating written documents from a foreign language into English. The case is Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific Saipan, Ltd., in which $5,517.20 in translator's costs are at stake. The Sixth Circuit view is that the provision covers translation. But a story in the Wall Street Journal speculates that 7th circuit judge Richard Posner's contrary view, as expressed in Extra Equipamentos E Exportação Ltda., v. Case Corporation, may have played a part in persuading the Court to grant cert:
There is greater merit to Extra's complaint about the award of translation fees. The statute refers to "compensation of court appointed experts, compensation of interpreters, and salaries, fees, expenses and costs of special interpretation services under [28 U.S.C. § 1828]." 28 U.S.C. § 1920(6) (emphasis added). (Section 1828 creates a program for the provision of interpretation services in federal criminal and habeas corpus proceedings.) The specificity of section 1920(6), and the character of section 1920 as a whole, makes us reluctant to interpret "interpreters" loosely to include translators of written documents, in this case the exhibits presented by Case at depositions and in support of its motion for summary judgment, and also the exhibits on its list of proposed trial exhibits. An interpreter as normally understood is a person who translates living speech from one language to another. He is a type of translator, see, e.g., Yu Cong Eng v. Trinidad, 271 U.S. 500, 508-09, 46 S.Ct. 619, 70 L.Ed. 1059 (1926); Gjerazi v. Gonzales, 435 F.3d 800, 807 (7th Cir.2006); Ememe v. Ashcroft, 358 F.3d 446, 448 (7th Cir.2004), but the translator of a document is not referred to as an interpreter. Robert Fagles made famous translations into English of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, but no one would refer to him as an English-language "interpreter" of these works.
The case is being argued before the Court today.
