See you in court: how do Australian institutions train legal interpreters?

Legal and court interpreters require advanced professional skills to perform their demanding tasks. How well does Australia prepare interpreters to fulfil the linguistic needs of its numerous communities, including 'established' migrant, indigenous, 'new and emerging' and deaf, in a variety of legal settings? Based on the online data and interviews with educators, this study provides an overview of formal legal interpreter training offered by two types of educational institutions, academic and vocational. The survey of the existing courses, curricula, aims and outcomes, content and settings, teaching methods and assessment, identifies the characteristics of these two approaches, considers advantages and disadvantages of each system, and questions their effectiveness for preparing competent graduates for legal settings. Relying on the educators' opinions, we consider what roadblocks Australian educational institutions encounter in meeting the requirements of the legal system and satisfying the needs of communities where qualified legal interpreters are particularly lacking.