Courts record everything. The date the application was filed. The time the hearing started. The case reference number. The documents submitted. The name of the judge. The name of the legal representative.
They do not record the quality of the interpreter.
That is a choice. The record passes through an interpreter before it exists. Competence, dialect, specialist terminology, speed under pressure. All of that shapes the document. None of it is tracked.
Consider what this would mean in another context.
A clinical trial measures variables: dosage, duration, patient history, method, conditions. The finding depends on knowing what produced it. Leave a variable unmeasured and the result turns noisy. Medicine understands this. The courtroom does not.
Engineering knows it too. A bridge is tested under known loads, known materials, recorded conditions. You can investigate a collapse only if you know what held it up.
Asylum proceedings make credibility findings about people whose lives depend on them. The main way to establish what they said is interpretation. The interpreter is selected through a procurement chain built around cost, often without mandatory accreditation or a minimum qualification threshold.
Then nothing. Maybe a name somewhere in the file. No clear record of qualification. No dialect competency. No sign of whether the interpreter knew the terminology the account required.
The system then uses the output of this unrecorded variable to assess credibility.
Inconsistency becomes credibility. In asylum, credibility can be the whole case. If the inconsistency came from interpretation, the system has no way to know. The official record shows what the interpreter produced. That differs from what was said.
That is a bad way to make life-changing decisions.
Medicine tracks variables. Science tracks variables. Engineering tracks variables. An untracked variable is an error source you cannot correct because you cannot see it.
Asylum proceedings track the applicant's account for inconsistency. They do not track whether the account was accurately rendered in the first place.
The minimum standard is to treat the interpreter as a variable. Record qualifications, dialect competency, accreditation, and the body that granted it. Give that information to the applicant and lawyer before the hearing. Build a way to raise concerns.
Until then, the official record is a record of what the procurement chain produced. The system calls that testimony.