Criminal Court “C” Judge Gets Translator
FLASHBACK: Suspected leaving the court after the trial began
By Garmah Never Lomo, garmahlomo@gmail.com
Amidst difficulties to find translators for two foreign defendants in the US$100 million drug trafficking case going on at Criminal Court “C”, Judge Blamo Dixon has received a machine translator from the government through request from the Ministry of Justice.
The Machine is intended to tackle the problems surrounding the US$100 million cocaine trafficking case; a move to buttress government’s effort to prosecute those involved within the right timeframe.
Machine translation is the process of using artificial intelligence to automatically translate text from one language to another without human involvement.
It can also make works very fast, translating millions of words almost instantaneously, it can translate large amounts of data, such as real-time chat or large- scale legal cases. It can also process documents in a foreign language, search for relevant terms, and remember those terms.
The machine is employed to aid the court after the defense team rejected five other interpreters from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on grounds that they were not fluent in the language.
Mr. Conte, a Guinea-Bissau national who is fluent in Arabic while Issam is Portuguese, requested the court to provide interpreters as English is not their main tongue.
The two along with two others are linked to the US$100 million cocaine bust in October 2022, and were subsequently indicted by the Grand Jury of Montserrado County on charges including money laundering, as well as unlicensed possession and importation of controlled drugs, and criminal conspiracy.
However, the trial cannot easily take place in the absence of translators for Conte and Issam which Articles 20 and 21 of the 1986 Constitution provides them said right where it is their “deeply and firmly rooted” rights of translators to alleviate communication barriers in ensuring free and fair trial.