Published in MultiLingual: "The End User Nobody Plans For"
Teilen
Rectification file · Published 10 November 2026
MultiLingual, the language-industry magazine, has published my essay “The End User Nobody Plans For”. It is not about law. It is about what fills the space where language access should be, when a country has written the right into its statute book and the person at the defence table still cannot follow what is being said about him: friends, an interpreter who came some days and not others, and the translation app on a phone. It is the third outside publication of this record, after JURIST on 29 September and Magdalene on 8 October, and the first written for the people who build the tools and train the interpreters.
Read the essay at MultiLingual →
“The End User Nobody Plans For” — MultiLingual, November 2026, by Ross Cline.
What it says
The language industry sells to institutions, and its architecture assumes that the person in the chair receives what the institution procures. For four years I was the person in the chair, in a jurisdiction that had procured almost nothing for me. The essay describes what filled the gap, in the order it filled it.
- Friends. Legal mail arrived in Chinese, with deadlines inside it. I would photograph a page, send it to five bilingual friends, and get five different accounts of what it said. Bilingualism is not translation, and a legal document is where the difference is widest.
- The court’s own interpreter, when there was one. On the days a sworn interpreter was present I was not more informed; I was differently uninformed. How much was being left out, the court had no way of knowing, and neither did I.
- The phone. By 2025 every official letter went from the envelope into a photograph and into a chatbot. In April 2025 I ran one page of a prosecutors’ letter through one system, believed its reading, and relied on it in public. On 28 October 2025 I ran the same page through a second system for the first time; it read the letter the opposite way, and when each was shown the other’s reading neither budged. That disagreement is the moment I knew I could not trust what I had published. The written reply of Taiwan’s Control Yuan to my petition reached me the same evening and, once I could read it with help, said the same thing in one line. I retracted publicly on 3 November 2025.
Three things about that last episode are what I most wanted the industry to hear. The fluent rendering and the wrong rendering were the same rendering. Neither system gave any signal of uncertainty. And the only evidence that something was wrong was the disagreement between two machines, which I found six months late and which a lay reader finds by accident or not at all.
What would change it
Neither fix is a product. The first is a record: a fixed field in every hearing record and judgment that says whether an interpreter was present and in what language, and a figure published every year. In a sample of 105,762 criminal judgments from four months between 2021 and 2025, none states in its header whether an interpreter was present, which proves not that no interpreter attended but that nobody can tell. The second is verification: keep the hearing audio at least until the appeal period has run, and give the party a named route to raise a concern about accuracy. Taiwan’s National Human Rights Commission recommended a quality check in March 2026.
The card
The most practical thing to come out of those four years is a one-page card, in English and Chinese, with Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai and Tagalog versions to follow: seven things to ask for, each in words a clerk will recognise, because “help” is not a request anyone can act on and Article 99 of the Code of Criminal Procedure is. It carries no case story. It is free to reproduce; write to me for it.
The record, stated precisely
The courts found that in 2021, during a dispute with my landlord, I posted online documents that contained her personal data, including our lease, and that some of the material stayed online for months. My own account is that the lease itself was online for about two days, and that the witnesses I applied to call on that point, in March 2024, were never summoned. Taiwan enforces its Personal Data Protection Act criminally: I was sentenced to six months in prison, final at the Supreme Court on 16 October 2024. I could not read the judgments and no one ever translated them for me; I learned what they say only in September 2026. I am not asking anyone to retry the facts.
On the language: no document in the proceedings was ever translated for me. Some hearings were held with no interpreter at all; the court’s own file records an evening hearing in February 2023 that went ahead after the judge asked me, in Chinese, whether I understood Chinese. At other hearings a sworn interpreter was present and, by my account, conveyed a fraction of what was said. Legal-aid counsel appeared at the first-instance trial but did not interpret; I had no counsel on appeal. In December 2025 the Supreme Prosecutors Office did not dispute any of this when it declined to reopen the case; in September 2026 it declined again, writing that whether an interpreter was used had made no difference to the outcome, because my own appeals, written without one, had not argued that it did.
Where things stand
On 20 and 21 October a letter from five scholars of law, interpreting and forensic linguistics, from Canada, Australia, Korea and the United States, went to Taiwan’s Judicial Yuan. It asks for three measurable things: a published count of interpreter appointments, a fixed field in every hearing record and judgment, and a quality check. A petition asking the Legislative Yuan to take up the same three steps was posted by registered mail on 29 October, and a submission on the missing number went the same day to the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers. On 29 October the Judicial Yuan refused my request for the number, on the ground that a Canadian living abroad has no standing to ask; an administrative appeal against that refusal was posted by registered mail on 9 November. On 3 November the Ministry of Justice formally transferred the same questions to the Judicial Yuan and asked to be told how they are handled. A second consultation with the Legal Aid Foundation is set for 16 November. On Friday 13 November The Translation Podcast premieres a half-hour conversation on the case: background and chapter list. In Canada, an e-petition to the House of Commons on consular service standards (e-7910), with my MP named as sponsor, is gathering its five supporters.
The documents
- iLearn.tw/newsbrief — the documents, with working English translations: the two prosecutors’ letters, the hearing record, the summons, the judgments, and the two letters on the interpreter statistic from the Judicial Yuan and the Ministry of Justice.
- Press page — the case in sixty seconds, every case number, and a short video.
- The JURIST commentary — the argument for lawyers.
- The Magdalene op-ed — for Indonesian workers in Taiwan and their families: the seven things to ask for, by name.
What you can do
If you work in translation, interpreting or localisation, send the essay to the person in your organisation who decides how a machine-translated legal document is labelled. If you train interpreters, the card is yours to use. If you are a journalist, a podcaster or a researcher, I am reachable by video from Phnom Penh at any hour.
Two things I say everywhere: my correspondence and these posts are prepared with AI assistance from my own documents, and I check every fact personally; and in 2025 I publicly relied on a mistranslation of one official letter and corrected the record after written clarification. The Chinese originals govern; my translations are working translations.
