When someone claims asylum in the UK, their case rests on a record. An interpreter helps produce that record. The interpreter is not always qualified.
I have spent two years looking at what happens to meaning in asylum interpretation. The failure is usually quiet. Structural. Layered.
The Procurement Chain
The Home Office does not hire interpreters directly. It contracts agencies. Agencies recruit from available pools. The person choosing the interpreter is several steps away from the room. Each step adds risk. The asylum seeker carries it.
The chain is built around cost. Home Office to contractor. Contractor to agency. Agency to interpreter. Lower rates get booked. Lower rates often mean weaker qualifications.
The Qualification Problem
UK asylum interpreters do not have to hold a qualification. The main professional qualification is the DPSI, a level-six test of language, ethics, and legal context. The system does not require it.
Asylum interpretation is hard. The account may be fragmented. Trauma does not run in clean chronology. The interviewer keeps pace with a schedule. The interpreter makes judgments in real time, with little preparation and almost no feedback.
An interpreter told me something that stayed: interpreters omit and edit things. Usually because they have to. Rendering is never word for word. The applicant cannot see those judgments. They speak. The interpreter renders. The record captures the rendering. The decision uses the record.
What Gets Lost
The losses are often hidden. Researchers at Ghent University call one pattern false fluency: the rendition sounds coherent, relevant, and complete. It satisfies the decision-maker. It is still wrong. In one case, an interpreter confused Turkey and Greece when describing a border crossing. The answer made sense. It was also false.
Most errors live in the record as truth. The working record is the English transcript. Audio captures the applicant's own language, but nobody produces a transcript of it. An inconsistency in the record might come from the applicant. It might come from interpretation. The system cannot tell, because it never built a way to check.
The Dialect Problem
Dialect makes the qualification problem worse. Arabic covers many regional varieties. A rural southern Iraqi dialect differs from formal Modern Standard Arabic. Dari in Afghanistan and Farsi in Iran can look close on paper and diverge in speech.
The asylum system records a language category: Arabic, Farsi, Tigrinya. It often misses dialect. Then it assigns whoever is available. For many applicants, a lawyer told me, the choice is "him or nobody."
What Should Change
Two reforms would change the record without new legislation.
First: mandatory accreditation. For widely spoken languages, require DPSI or equivalent under Home Office contracts. For languages of lesser diffusion, require a language-specific competency pathway. No interpreter should enter an asylum interview without verified competence.
Second: transcribe and retain the applicant's original-language testimony beside the English record. Audio should not sit outside the decision chain as unanalysed evidence. If interpretation is challenged, there must be something to check.
These are basic requirements for a system claiming to offer fair hearings.
The gap between what an asylum seeker says and what the record contains is a justice problem. The people with power have left it open. The cost falls on the people least able to make them stop.