On The Translation Podcast: “When Justice Doesn’t Speak Your Language: A Foreigner’s Fight” (premieres 13 November)
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Rectification file · Published 6 November 2026
The Translation Podcast, Daniela G. Bunoaica's programme for translators and interpreters, has made the case its sixteenth episode. “When Justice Doesn't Speak Your Language: A Foreigner's Fight” premieres on YouTube on Friday 13 November 2026 at 12:00 London time. It is the first time the record has been told in conversation to the profession whose work was missing from it: the people who sit beside a defendant and carry every word across. Daniela's one condition was that we talk about process and language, not politics, and that is what the half hour is.
Watch on YouTube (premieres 13 November) →
“Ep. 16 | Ross Cline | When Justice Doesn't Speak Your Language: A Foreigner's Fight” — The Translation Podcast, Season 2, hosted by Daniela G. Bunoaica, sworn translator and interpreter, London. Recorded in October 2026. Also on Spotify once it goes out.
In my own words
“My pain need not be in vain.”
— from the episode, quoted in the show notes
What the conversation covers
Daniela asks the questions an interpreter would ask, and they are better than the ones a reporter asks. Not “what happened to you” but: at which stage of a criminal proceeding should language support have arrived, and at which stage did it fail? What is the difference between a translator, who works with documents, and an interpreter, who works with the spoken word in the room, and why does a defendant need both? What does it mean to answer a question in court when the question reached you as a summary? What can an AI system do with a judgment you cannot read, and what can it not do? And, for the interpreters listening, what does the person on the other side of the bench actually need from you?
So the half hour runs from the dispute with my landlord in 2021 and a case that lasted four years, through the hearing that went ahead on “I understand a little”, the summons that says bring your own translator, the appeals I wrote myself, with no counsel and no interpreter, and the chatbots that became the only reader I had, to the moment two of them disagreed about the same official letter and I corrected myself in public. It ends where Daniela wanted it to end: on what a foreigner facing proceedings abroad should ask for, by name, and on why professional legal translation and court interpreting are not a courtesy but the thing the trial stands on.
Chapters, from the show notes
- 00:00 Introduction: A Foreigner's Fight for Justice
- 01:10 Ross Cline's Story: 15 Years in a Country and a Legal Dispute
- 03:11 Navigating the Legal System as a Foreigner
- 05:35 Untranslated Court Documents and Missing Interpreters
- 07:09 The Emotional Toll of a Four-Year Legal Battle
- 08:43 Court Interpreting: When Linguistic Support Falls Short
- 09:40 Translator vs Interpreter: What's the Difference?
- 11:24 Representing Yourself in a Foreign Court
- 12:09 The Challenges of Understanding Court Proceedings
- 14:01 Can AI Translate Legal Documents Accurately?
- 16:55 When AI Models Disagree: ChatGPT vs Grok
- 18:04 Using AI to Review Court Recordings and Interpreting
- 20:00 Access to Justice and the Importance of Language Support
- 22:35 When Language Barriers Complicate Police Investigations
- 24:44 Cultural Differences and Navigating Life
- 27:59 Data Protection and the Legal Consequences of Sharing Information
- 28:46 Advice for Foreigners Facing Legal Proceedings Abroad
- 30:30 Why Professional Legal Translation and Court Interpreting Matter
- 31:59 Final Thoughts: Making Access to Justice a Priority
Why this one matters
Everything else published on this case so far has been written: a commentary for lawyers in JURIST, an op-ed for Indonesian workers in Magdalene, a submission to the UN. This is a conversation, with a professional interpreter, for professional interpreters and translators. Daniela's audience is the people who do the job that was not done in my case, and who know better than any journalist what a defendant loses when the interpreting is partial and nobody in the room can check it. If one court interpreter in Taiwan, or anywhere, hears this and decides to tell the court when she cannot keep up rather than summarise, the half hour has done its work.
One thing a half hour on procedure cannot carry, so I will say it here, because an English teacher's interest in procedural detail can look odd from outside: I am homesick. Taichung was my home for fifteen years. My godson is there, and I have not seen him in two years; my closest friends are there, and people who treat me as family. I want to go home, and I do not want to go home carrying a judgment I cannot read and that no one ever translated for me. That is the whole of my motive, and it is why I keep at this.
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, and I do not argue them in the episode.
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. The Supreme Prosecutors Office has twice declined to seek an extraordinary appeal, in December 2025 and again in September 2026. Neither letter disputed any of this; the second said that whether an interpreter was used made no difference to the result, because my own appeals, written without one, had not argued that it did.
One note on the show notes. The chapter titles are Daniela's. Where one of them mentions reviewing court recordings, the precise position is the one above: the only recordings of my hearings are the court's own, which I do not have, so what the AI systems read were the documents, not the interpreting.
Where things stand
On 20 and 21 October 2026 five scholars of law and interpreting from Canada, Australia, South Korea and the United States, Kent Roach of the University of Toronto, Diana Eades of the University of New England and Holly Mikkelson of the Middlebury Institute among them, wrote to Taiwan's Judicial Yuan asking for three measurable things: a yearly count of defendants given an interpreter under Article 99 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a line in every hearing record and judgment saying whether one was present, and a quality check beginning with keeping the hearing audio until the appeal period has run. On 24 October a petition asking the Legislative Yuan to take those steps up was signed, and on 29 October posted. On 29 October a submission on the same missing number went to the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, for her report on migrants' access to justice. The same day the Judicial Yuan refused my freedom-of-information request for the number on the ground that a foreigner living abroad has no standing to ask; it did not say the number does not exist, and the refusal is being appealed. On 3 November the Ministry of Justice formally referred the same questions to the Judicial Yuan and asked to be told the outcome.
In Taichung, a consultation with the Legal Aid Foundation on the retrial file is set for 16 November. In Canada, e-petition e-7910 to the House of Commons, on consular service standards, is gathering its five supporters. Two more pieces are with their editors, and the scholars coordinating a joint submission to the update of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights have invited me to join their drafting group.
The documents
- iLearn.tw/newsbrief — the documents, with working English translations: the prosecutors' letters, the hearing record, the summons, the judgments, the scholars' letter, the Ministry's referral.
- Press page — the case in sixty seconds, every case number, and how to book an interview.
- The JURIST commentary — the argument for lawyers.
- The Translation Podcast on YouTube — Daniela's channel; the episode premieres there on 13 November.
What you can do
Press the bell on the YouTube page so that you are told when the premiere starts, and watch it on the day if you can; premieres live or die in their first hour. Share it with any interpreter, translator or language teacher you know, and tag Daniela (@dgbromaniantranslation) when you do; she made this happen and she deserves the audience. If you are a court interpreter anywhere, I would like to hear what you make of it; write to me through the press page. 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.
