Today’s post covers both criminal defense and a topic near and dear to my heart: language. Specifically, it speaks about whether police need to use human interpreters or if software tools for translation are “good enough” to meet constitutional requirements.
What Happened?
A federal judge in Kansas ruled that there was not consent to a search when the police used Google Translate to translate the phrase “May we search the car?” and the literal translation of the phrase Google provided was “Can we find the car?”
The case involved what started as a routine traffic stop with a man who spoke very limited English. The driver produced the vehicle registration and visa, but stated that he did not have his Mexican driver’s license on his person.
The police officer did not speak Spanish, so he held an exchange with the defendant using Google Translate on his in-car laptop. Since the officer didn’t speak Spanish, he could not verify that the phrases coming out of Google were accurate. The officer admitted that there were a few times when what came out of Google was so confusing to the Defendant that he had to rephrase multiple times before getting an answer.
The officer issued a warning for an expired registration, but then used Google Translate to ask if he could search the Defendant’s car. Google Translate returned something more like “Can I find your car?” to which the Defendant said yes.
Drugs were found in the car, but the search was challenged on the basis that the Defendant was not aware of what he was consenting to and did not understand that he had an option to say no.
Based on the continual problems with communication earlier in their encounter, and the radically different phrase used to ask about the search, the Judge ruled that the Google Translate exchange did not meet the constitutional requirements for consent to a search and threw out the search and the charges.
What does the Court’s Ruling Mean?
The court in Kansas has essentially made it a rule that a person who actually speaks a language is needed when a translation is made. The court says that machine translation isn’t good enough to meet all the requirements of the constitution, especially when the person using it doesn’t speak the language enough to catch mistakes.
This case is a great example of why anyone charged with a crime needs to contact an attorney to speak about what happened. If there is a problem in how the police handled things, an attorney can use that in your defense.
Where Can I Read More?
If you’re interested in reading more about the ruling, and the facts behind it, there is an article on TechCrunch about the case which also links to the judge’s actual ruling.
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