{"id":33208,"date":"2023-06-27T22:27:42","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T04:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/durango-hires-spanish-interpreter-for-municipal-court-proceedings\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T02:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T08:07:09","slug":"durango-hires-spanish-interpreter-for-municipal-court-proceedings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/durango-hires-spanish-interpreter-for-municipal-court-proceedings\/","title":{"rendered":"Durango hires Spanish interpreter for municipal court proceedings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Two
Two dozen residents attended a preliminary budget meeting Thursday at Durango City Hall. It was a chance for the public to express priorities or ideas for spending as it relates to next year\u2019s budget.<\/span>Durango Herald file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The city of Durango has a new municipal court interpreter to provide on-site translation services for Spanish-speaking residents who have court appointments. Now, the city must get the word out.<\/p>\n

Faye Harmer, city clerk, said the city has long had translation services, with conference calls available in around 100 languages, but the problem when it comes to municipal court is that many interpreters, as skilled as they may be, aren\u2019t court certified.<\/p>\n

That means they don\u2019t necessarily have a strong understanding of court and legal terms, such as \u201cdeferred judgment,\u201d a certain kind of plea agreement that can be used to avoid a conviction, she said.<\/p>\n

Using the long-standing translation services, people at a municipal court hearing would wait on hold for up to 30 minutes at times just to be put in touch with a court certified interpreter, she said. It wasn\u2019t an efficient use of anyone\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to make sure all of our defendants have the full scope of everything that\u2019s available,\u201d she said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want them to simply come in and pay the ticket because that\u2019s the easiest thing to do. There are other options. Deferred judgments or other things that we want to make sure they understand are available.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said Durango resident Jean Lyle, who works in federal immigration court in Denver, was hired as the city\u2019s new Spanish interpreter for the municipal court, but Lyle\u2019s case load is small right now.<\/p>\n

Harmer said she expects Lyle to get more work opportunities as residents become aware of the interpretation services she provides.<\/p>\n

Lyle made her first appearance in municipal court on June 16 when she provided interpretation services for a defendant, she said. The defendant had a deferred judgment and will be back in court on July 5, which Lyle will also attend. After that, she is scheduled to again provide interpretation services on July 28.<\/p>\n

It is up to residents to request Spanish or other language interpretation services for their court appearances, and they can do that by filing a request with the city clerk\u2019s office at City Hall, she said. The clerk\u2019s office will reschedule their days in court to dates that work with Lyle.<\/p>\n

Scheduling is a little \u201cad hoc\u201d while Lyle settles in, but the city hopes to have dedicated court dates \u2013 the third Friday of every month, for example \u2013 for cases requiring interpretation services, Harmer said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll be scheduling those dates on a month-by-month basis initially until we kind of figure out what works for (Lyle),\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She said the search for Lyle was challenging because most interpreters in the Durango area aren\u2019t court certified. But the city budgeted for a dedicated Spanish-language interpreter as part of its ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.<\/p>\n

And, the city has a multilingual group that was put together by its human resources department to assist in general translation or interpretation services.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are various people around the city that speak multiple languages, and that program is great for the people that come into the lobby at City Hall or River City Hall that come in for general city services,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

cburney@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Providing accurate translation services part of city\u2019s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[364,133,950,28,2681],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-33208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-community","tag-courts","tag-durango","tag-headlines","tag-language"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82103,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33208\/revisions\/82103"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33208"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=33208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}