In a typical week, Susan Green tries to find foreign-language interpreters for about a dozen of the cases unfolding in Baltimore County Circuit Court.
Most involve litigants or witnesses who speak Spanish or Russian, or Chinese and Vietnamese. But increasingly, the requests from lawyers, judges and the court's assignment office are for speakers of languages she's never heard of.
"When I see something like that, it really does make you wonder," Green said of a recent request for an interpreter in an African language called Ewe. "With some of these, I look it up on the Internet and see that it's spoken by 10,000 people in a little village."
The interpreter requests pouring into Green's office in the Towson courthouse represent a fraction of the increasing need in courtrooms across the state for speakers of uncommon languages.
Although Spanish remains by far the most-requested language among courts requiring interpreters, the fastest-growing need is for languages spoken by fewer than 100,000 people worldwide, according to Darrell Pressley, the deputy director of the Maryland Court Information Office.
"That's where the growth is," he said.
The challenges that come with meeting that growing need were illustrated in a ruling this month in Montgomery County, where a judge dismissed a case against a Liberian immigrant charged with raping and repeatedly molesting a 7-year-old girl. The judge ruled that the nearly three-year delay in bringing the case to trial - mostly because of the court system's struggle to find a competent interpreter fluent in the man's native West African language of Vai - had violated his right to a speedy trial.
Lawyers and court clerks responsible for finding interpreters in the Baltimore metropolitan area said they were unaware of any other serious criminal case in which charges had been dismissed because of difficulties in finding an interpreter.
They mentioned many examples, however, of the great lengths that are sometimes required to find interpreters in unusual languages.
Melanie Merson, who works in the administrative offices of Howard County Circuit Court, fielded a request seven or eight months ago for an interpreter fluent in Gujarati, a language native to the Indian state of Gujarat and the first language of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
