David Hill – Written evidence (ITS0005)

As a UK citizen and a 30-year veteran of the translation profession, I am delighted to know that the House of Lords Public Services Committee is conducting an inquiry into Interpreting and Translation Services in the Courts.

I have been concerned for some time about the anti-competitive activities of the National Register of Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI).

If you want information about what this organization is, do not consult Wikipedia. There is no page about the organization on that site, but instead, searching for it takes you to a page that purports to be about UK public service interpreting as a whole – except that the page is blatantly promotion for the NRPSI.

The NRPSI is a private-sector non-profit company, whose sole source of revenue is fees paid by the exact same language professionals whom it promotes. There are approximately 1,700 people registered with the NRPSI, according to its own website. This is a very small sample of the entire profession. Yet the NRPSI has been arguing lately for “protection of title” – which would mean that only its paying registrants would have access to public sector interpreting or translating jobs such as those in courts or hospitals.

The NRPSI calls itself an independent regulator, yet it does not even pretend to keep an arm’s length distance from the profession it supposedly regulates. Instead, it frequently collaborates with other private-sector organizations that represent small minorities of the translation and interpreting profession, such as the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) and the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI).

The NRPSI’s leadership includes a board that has three practitioner members. That is to say, they are active public-service interpreters themselves. So, in addition to being among those fee-payers to the NRPSI who benefit from its lobbying, they are also active in the leadership of that same organization.

It is vital that the NRPSI be unsuccessful in asserting “protection of title,” because this would mean that the supply of public-service interpreters and translators would be reduced to a bottleneck of about 1,700 individuals, all fee-payers to the NRPSI itself and probably also to the closely linked ITI and CIOL. All of these are private-sector organizations that lobby on behalf of their fee-payers, who represent a minority of the translation and interpreting profession,

Thank you for considering my insights.

18 November 2024