Published in JURIST: "When Court Interpretation Failed in Taiwan, I Turned to a Chatbot"
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JURIST, the legal news service run out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, published my commentary on 29 September 2026. It is the first time the record of my case has been set out, start to finish, by an outside legal publication, with its editors' questions answered and every document linked. If you have followed this blog, this is the piece to send to someone who has not.
“When Court Interpretation Failed in Taiwan, I Turned to a Chatbot” — JURIST Commentary, 29 September 2026, by Ross Cline. About 2,900 words.
In the author's words
“My argument is simple: machine translation is already the interpreter of record for unrepresented non-citizens, not by any policy decision but by default, in the space the guarantee was supposed to occupy. That makes enforcement of an existing procedural right the most effective AI-policy intervention available to any court system, and one that costs nothing new to enact. I know this because I did it for four years. Two things belong up front: I was the defendant, and I am not asking anyone to retry the facts.”
— from the JURIST commentary
What the piece says
When a court does not provide the interpreter its own law requires, the defendant does not go without interpretation; he goes to whatever is on his phone. In my case that meant free machine translation and chatbots reading the summonses, the prosecutors' letters and, eventually, the judgments. The piece shows what that looks like from the inside: two systems reading the same official sentence and giving opposite answers, neither of them signalling any doubt, and a reader who cannot check. Taiwan's own National Human Rights Commission reported in April 2026 that the court-interpreter system fails systemically, mostly for migrant workers from Southeast Asia, who have no chatbot at all. The fix the piece asks for is not a new law. It is the enforcement of the one Taiwan passed in 2020: a defendant who does not understand the language shall be assisted by an interpreter.
The record in six dates
| 15 July 2020 | Taiwan amends Article 99 of its Code of Criminal Procedure: a defendant who does not understand the language shall be assisted by an interpreter (應由通譯傳譯之). Before this: may. |
| 20 February 2023, 18:55 | Taichung District Court. The interpreter cannot be reached. The judge asks, in Chinese, whether I understand Chinese and agree to proceed. I answer, in Chinese: “I understand a little Chinese” (我聽得懂一點中文). The hearing proceeds; my rights are read in Chinese. No document in the case was ever translated for me. |
| 16 October 2024 | Conviction final at the Supreme Court. Both appeals were written by me, with no interpreter and no lawyer. |
| 18 November 2024 | The summons to serve the sentence: “if you do not understand Chinese, please bring your own translator” (如不識中文請自行偕同翻譯到場協助). |
| 22 December 2025 | The Supreme Prosecutors Office declines to reopen the case. It does not dispute the absence of interpretation or translation; it reasons that legal-aid counsel's presence at first instance was enough. That counsel did not interpret. |
| 18 September 2026 | Declined a second time. Whether an interpreter was used “obviously did not affect the finding of facts or the outcome”, because my own appeals, written without an interpreter, had not argued that it did. |
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 the evening hearing above. 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.
Where things stand
A Taiwanese wrongful-conviction foundation is reviewing the file, with a written result expected around December. A second consultation with the Legal Aid Foundation is booked for 23 October. On 7 October I take part in an Asia-wide roundtable on the right to effective interpretation, where the record has been circulated as case-study material. A university human-rights clinic held an intake interview this week. In Canada, an electronic petition to the House of Commons, sponsored by my MP, has gathered the five supporters the House requires and is now with him for authorization; a public link will follow when the House publishes it. A freedom-of-information request to Taiwan's Judicial Yuan, asking how many times courts have actually appointed interpreters under the 2020 rule, is a month overdue and was chased today.
The documents
- iLearn.tw/newsbrief — the documents, with working English translations: the two prosecutors' letters, the hearing record, the summons, the judgments.
- Press page — the case in sixty seconds, every case number, and a short video.
- The JURIST commentary — the argument in full, with the editors' links to the statute, the Judicial Yuan and the rights commission's report.
What you can do
Read the piece and pass it on, especially to anyone who works in or around Taiwan's courts, or with the migrant workers who face them. 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.
