OMG, WTF?: Textspeak in the Courtroom - May 24, 2025
2-hour live webinar
Saturday, May 24, 2025
12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Eastern
Instructor: Ellen Wingo
2-hour live webinar
Saturday, May 24, 2025
12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Eastern
Instructor: Ellen Wingo
2-hour live webinar
Saturday, May 24, 2025
12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Eastern
Instructor: Ellen Wingo
Course Summary:
Screenshots of texts, tweets, and Facebook posts: new media are everywhere in our lives, so naturally they are finding their way into the courtroom. Lawyers and litigants see them as hard evidence to prove their cases; court interpreters see them as something out of a nightmare. The abbreviations and emojis that are typical of new media can make textspeak appear as foreign as Egyptian hieroglyphs, making an accurate sight translation a seemingly impossible task. But the code can be cracked. Through practical exercises, glossary building, and an open discussion on ethics and best practices, this session will address various approaches to deciphering textspeak and to deciding how and when to sight translate in court.
About the Instructor:
Ellen Wingo is a state and federally certified court interpreter and a contract
seminar interpreter with the Department of State. Based in Washington, DC, she has
thirteen years' experience working in courts, as well as in conference settings. She
has taught classes on note-taking and consecutive interpretation in the DC area, to
both new and veteran interpreters. She holds a Master’s degree in Translation and
Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
