By Ramesh Mathew
Staff Reporter
Expatriate workers seeking the labour court’s intervention in different cases have stressed the need for an adequate number of “qualified” translators on the court premises.
Some of them point out that translators, especially those preparing documents, should be competent enough to handle complicated legal aspects as even a minor error in their work can make matters difficult for the parties involved.
Recently, a public relations officer of a company told Gulf Times that frequent visits to translators rendering services on the labour court premises revealed that most of them were not qualified to do the job.
Around 200 complainants approach the labour court on an average every day, seeking its intervention in different cases. While a few of them come with prepared documents, most use the services of translators available on the premises.
A complainant said a translator who he met recently had little clue about what to do while preparing a document in an accident case, involving one of his friends who worked in a contracting firm that executed electrical works. In fact, he found that the Arabic documents that the translator prepared contained statements that were contrary to what he had explained earlier.
“The meaning of some words he had typed was totally different from what I had told him,” he added.
It is also found that owing to the “dearth of competent” translators on the court premises, Nepalese or Sri Lankan expatriates are sometimes forced to find a non-Hindi-speaking translator from the Indian sub-continent or an Arabic-speaking translator elsewhere.
“This situation can change if there are qualified translators from each of the main labour-supplying countries like India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Bangladesh,” said an expatriate.
The presence of qualified translators in adequate numbers could help solve a number of labour issues more swiftly, said another expatriate.
