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High Court Interpreters

LOMER has extensive experience of supplying interpreters for High Court proceedings, for commercial and other civil cases. We also provide interpreters for the European Court of Justice, the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal.
Our interpreters have provided Court interpreting services for industries ranging from finance to shipping, and with direct industry experience and knowledge of terminology have the expertise to add significant value.
In addition to providing interpreters to the Commercial Court and Admiralty, we have also provided interpreters for divorces in the Family Division, including for some of the largest divorce settlements in legal history!


Our Uzbek interpreter has extensive High Court interpreting experience having previously obtained a bachelor’s law degree in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.

Upon graduation in Tashkent, he worked as a notary’s assistant, then as a barrister’s assistant, and as a Court Clerk.

Uzbek is a language spoken by some 16 million people, of which circa 1 million people in Afghanistan. The written language can be traced back to Chagatai, sometimes also called ‘Old Uzbek’, which was written in the Arabic script, and was the literary medium of the Court of Sultan Husain Baykara who ruled from 1469-1506. There is also a strong Persian influence on the language, so that unlike most Turkic languages which have a ten-vowel system, Uzbek follows Persian with a six-vowel system. Uzbekistan was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1924 and started to be written using the Latin alphabet in 1927. It was not until 1940 that the Cyrillic script was adopted. Nowadays, Uzbek is again written using the Latin alphabet, but the Cyrillic script is favoured by the older generation.

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We are pleased to announce that we have a Yiddish High Court interpreter available, who is experienced in Court procedure and civil Court cases, and who can also read, write and translate Yiddish if required.

What is Yiddish?

The earliest identifiably Yiddish documents date back to the fourteenth century. Yiddish is most closely related to German but incorporates words from other languages including Aramaic and Hebrew. Yiddish is traditionally written in the Hebrew script, but there is also a transliteration into the Latin alphabet, which is based on the Lithuanian pronunciation of Yiddish.

What is the current total number of Yiddish speakers?

Before the Second World War, the total number of Yiddish speakers was well over five million. About three-quarters of its speakers were killed by the Nazis during the war. Today it is estimated that Yiddish is spoken by circa two million people. These speakers are likely to be the children of the pre-war generation when Yiddish was widely spoken.

Yiddish today is still spoken in ultra-Orthodox communities across the world, with the largest such communities in Israel, New York and London. Yiddish is now an endangered language because due to increasing globalization, young families may be under pressure to speak their national language, such as Hebrew or English, or Spanish in Argentina. However, in Sweden, Yiddish is listed as a minority language and in the UK, Yiddish is encouraged and nurtured in some schools. Since Yiddish is spoken across the world, rather than nurtured in a specific territory, it has come under threat from changes in political situations or repressive regimes.

Mayrev Yiddish is the Western dialect spoken in Germany and Bohemia, whilst Mizrakh Yiddish or Eastern Yiddish encompasses Polnish, Litvak, and Galitzianish-Ukraynishe. In dealing with customers who speak Yiddish, since there are many different dialects of Yiddish, a starting point would be to ascertain which country the customer is originally from.

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Our Mandarin High Court interpreter has experience of Mandarin High Court interpreting for the widest range of high-worth individuals and company representatives, including in the fields of finance and shipping.
Our Mandarin interpreter has held office employee jobs in finance, such as for the Bank of China in Beijing and for Standard Chartered Bank in Guangdong, and has worked as an interpreter for Morgan Stanley, American Express, Morley Fund Management and BNP Paribas on a project basis. In view of her economics degree and interpreting experience, she has acted as the Mandarin and Cantonese interpreter for the Board of Governors of Grant Thornton, BDO’s Directors’ Round Table, and the International Capital Market Association’s UK Seminar on Shanghai Free Trade Zone Bond.
She has provided Mandarin interpreting services at the High Court and International Dispute Resolution Centre for international finance disputes where the agreed jurisdiction was England.
Our Mandarin interpreter has also provided interpreting services for some of China’s wealthiest individuals, who have elected the English Courts to resolve their disputes, including at The Principal Registry of the Family Division. The English Courts are not corrupt and operate on the basis of hundreds of years of English case law, providing decisions and valuations that are realistic, taking due account of the price of English property.

Our Mandarin interpreter has also acted as the interpreter for politicians and for prominent people including:
Chinese President Xi Jinping, Chinese Vice Premier Madame Liu Yandong, US President Bill Clinton, H.R.H. The Prince of Wales, H.R.H. Duke of York,  International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, The British Prime Minister Tony Blair, The British Prime Minister David Cameron, The British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, The ex-British Foreign Secretary William Hague, The former London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Our Mandarin language interpreter provides a guarantee of high level security clearance, an economics degree and a post-graduate qualification in interpreting, discretion and a guarantee of confidentiality in matters of press interest.

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The proprietor of this agency for interpreters has had a life-long interest in Portuguese language and culture.

This started when I was looking through my father’s collection of gramophone records and found an LP entitled Teach Yourself Portuguese together with the accompanying book. The idea was to play the record, listen to the sentences in Portuguese and repeat them. It was difficult to hear the Portuguese due to the noise of the crackling of the needle on the record. I was particularly struck by the formality of the sentences and the nasal sounds. There was no humour in the course, and the record had been produced in the nineteen sixties at a time when the dictator, Salazar, was in power in Portugal.

I then read short Portuguese grammar books by Hugo and Berlitz, and watched a BBC series aimed at teaching Portuguese speaking for British tourists.

Then I enrolled in O Level and A Level Portuguese in England. At around this point, I discovered Willis’ An Essential Course in Modern Portuguese which provides a comprehensive overview of Portuguese grammar.

Shortly afterwards, I read Southey’s Journal of a Residence in Portugal. Southey provides magical descriptions of the Portuguese landscape and wine, and interspersed in the text are references to his reading of the classics of eighteenth century literature. Southey is one of a number of early nineteenth century English writers to bring alive the magic of journeys in Portugal to a readership at home.

At this stage, still depending on the foreign view of Portuguese, I discovered Portuguese Literature by Aubrey Bell, first published in 1914. Bell views Portuguese Literature not from a Portuguese contextual perspective, but from a British or Western European literary perspective. As such it can be unfairly damning in its judgement, the language can be pompous, and now seems so dated that it can be hard for a modern reader to understand. But this handbook is wide-ranging, and in the absence of any similar overview in English, has remained a point of reference, at least for Portuguese literature from Portugal.

A far broader overview of Portuguese literature was published by Inocêncio and this looks at Portuguese books from the point of view of book-collecting, and notes the various successive editions and collations, and even what prices the books changed hands for. Inocêncio also provides endearing, personal commentaries with regards to the books he has come across. As such, Inocêncio has remained the bible of antiquarian book-dealers and collectors, and whilst not always accurate, his good-humoured approach is endlessly quotable.

For an English reader from a protestant background, it is necessary to accept that Portuguese literature is sometimes inevitably permeated by the promotion of the Catholic faith. This is unavoidable.

For the reader who is simply looking for a good read, the sixteenth century sonnets of Camões, Diogo Bernardes and Sá de Miranda offer instant pleasure and lasting satisfaction.

Eighteenth century writers such as Manuel Bernardes and Manoel Consciencia exhort their readers never to deviate from the Catholic faith, and their work can also be appreciated as examples of classical Portuguese writing.

Whilst Southey described Portugal in the early nineteenth century for English readers, the tables are turned in the late nineteenth century in works such as Uma Família Inglesa by Júlio Dinis which is a careful study of an English family operating in the city of Porto, which at times hilariously borders on parody, and Cartas de Inglaterra by Eça de Queirós, which describes English society to the Portuguese – both critically and with affection.

As I now arrange interpreters in Portuguese for High Court hearings in London, I can confirm that this agency has speakers of Portuguese from Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Madeira and Cape Verde.

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Fijian Bauan is a language spoken by perhaps half of the 300,000 people on the Fiji Islands in the Western Pacific. Although there are a number of islands in the archipelago of Fiji, resulting in a number of Fijian dialects, Bauan is the official language. Bauan, also known as Old High Fijian, was spoken by missionaries who visited the islands in the early nineteenth century, and is spoken in Church and is the language used in the Fijian Bible. Due to the remoteness of the islands, and the extreme distance of the islands from any major land mass, it is understandable that a number of local dialects have emerged. It is thought that most Fijians can understand Bauan even if they cannot speak it. But Fijian Bauan is not universally understood, and some 50,000 speakers of Western Fijian are unable to understand it at all. To aid communication between different islands, some inhabitants speak Pidgin Fijian, a simplified version of Bauan: whereas Bauan has 135 distinct forms of pronouns, Pidgin Fijian has only six.

In dealing with customers from the Fiji Islands, it is therefore vital to ascertain if they understand and speak Fijian Bauan.

 

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