Consider the following. A practitioner describes a case in which the same individual, giving the same account, appears coherent in one hearing and inconsistent in another. The difference is the interpreter. Yet the official record does not record the interpreter as a variable. It records the inconsistency as if it were the applicant's.
This is not an isolated incident. It is the predictable output of a system that selects asylum interpreters through procurement chains that select by cost, with no mandatory accreditation requirement, then treats the record those interpreters produce as a neutral and accurate transcript of what was said.
This article draws on four primary sources gathered during an independent investigation into interpreter procurement failures in UK asylum proceedings: two immigration practitioners, a professional interpreter, and a professional standards body. They point to the same problem: asylum proceedings assume a level of accuracy the system cannot reliably provide.
Asylum interpreters in the UK are typically sourced through a chain running from the Home Office to a primary contractor, then to a sub-contracted agency, and finally to the individual interpreter. The asylum applicant plays no role in this selection. One practitioner described the result plainly, stating that the chain determines who is heard and who ends up marked as inconsistent. When interpreters change across hearings, as they frequently do, the way testimony is recorded changes with them, even when the underlying account is identical. What recordings reveal, when practitioners have access to them, is that accuracy breaks down during interpretation. The institution, however, does not treat this as an interpretation problem due to a lack of trust in claimants. It treats it as an inconsistency problem.
The structural logic of the asylum interview compounds this. A second practitioner described the interview as a process built to test testimony for failure, not to hear it. Discrepancies are sought. The official record is built as material for future scrutiny across the lifetime of a case.
In this context, the interpreter, in this practitioner's framing, is a filter through which the official record passes. The interpreter's specialist knowledge, including familiarity with regional dialect, religious terminology, and the specific language of persecution, determines what survives that filtering. Language fluency alone is insufficient. An interpreter who approximates a culturally specific term, finding no equivalent and reaching for the nearest available word, makes a choice that may be defensible in the moment. Extracted from context and tested against a later account, that approximation becomes an inconsistency.
What the interpreter's own perspective adds is the mechanism. A professional interpreter described the conditions under which asylum interpretation takes place, with significant time pressure, complex testimony, no preparation material, and an institutional expectation of speed. Under these conditions, the interpreter makes choices to omit and edit. They prioritise fluency over precision because precision at such an incredible speed is not possible.
The interpreter described this as producing failures that would constitute automatic failure in any professional examination. The system, however, does not record these choices. They said:
"Their duty is to interpret what is heard and understood... interpreting is not knowing two languages, it is understanding two languages."
This is the core of the problem. The damage is invisible because the process that produces it is invisible. The record does not show what was said in the source language. It shows what the interpreter produced. The system then treats what the interpreter produced as a verbatim record of what was said.
A professional standards body confirmed the structural conditions that make this possible. The Diploma in Public Service Interpreting (DPSI), the main professional qualification for public service interpreters in the UK, works in practice as a basic cognitive test, not a test of specialist knowledge. More significantly, it is rarely enforced. Asylum proceedings routinely rely on agency interpreters who have not completed the DPSI or any equivalent qualification.
The system runs without mandatory accreditation. There is no requirement for asylum interpreters. An agency can supply an interpreter with any level of qualification, or none. The applicant has no means of verifying this. Their legal representative may not know. The record produced by an unqualified interpreter and the record produced by a qualified one are treated identically by the institution.
The system measures consistency in testimony that has already passed through a variable it does not track. An applicant whose account is assessed for inconsistency across multiple hearings may have given a perfectly consistent account in their first language at every stage. What varied was the interpreter. The record does not show this.
This matters because inconsistency is a credibility finding. And credibility, in cases where corroborating evidence is by definition scarce, is often determinative. The question of whether an applicant's account holds together cannot be answered without knowing whether the account recorded is the account given.
The minimal requirement is that the interpreter be treated as a variable in the evidential record, not as a channel that passes testimony through unchanged. This means accreditation requirements with genuine enforcement. It means applicants having a mechanism to raise concerns about interpreter quality. It means the official record reflecting interpreter identity and qualification alongside the testimony it contains.
Until then, what the system produces is the record of a procurement chain.