Not Muted, Not Silent: The Work of Translation in Poetry and the Courtroom

Bringing together her practices as a translator and interpreter, a linguist is challenged to hold space for voices not her own and to reckon with what it means to speak for someone without speaking over them.

A particularly heavy lull hung over the federal courtroom, just a few miles north of the border with Mexico, where I waited for my case to be called. Lawyers shuffled papers; the commercial carpet muffled the click of oxfords and stilettos; a half-door, entrance to the area before the judge, swung open and closed. The judge entered.

I was there to interpret for a man from Chiapas, Mexico, who was pleading guilty to illegally entering the United States. His first language was Ch’ol, a Mayan language spoken by a quarter-million people in southern Mexico. I was hired to interpret the proceedings from English into Ch’ol and what he said from Ch’ol into English.

I learned Ch’ol through my work as a linguist in Chiapas beginning in 2015 during my doctoral studies. When I first arrived in the Ch’ol community where I would be working, I realized that, despite being in Mexico, my Spanish would be useless.

Using the Ch’ol–Spanish dictionary and a dissertation published in 2011 by Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez on the grammar of Ch’ol, I tried to form sentences and decipher what was being said around me. The family I stayed with, fortunately, was encouraging and patient during my first summer and my nascent language-learning journey. Every time I said a new word, they would respond happily, “You’re learning our language!”

When I returned a year later, my Ch’ol had, thankfully, improved. The family even asked, “Where did you learn all this Ch’ol?” I smiled and said, “From you!” Perhaps none of us realized the progress I had made the first summer. It has been ten years since I first went to Chiapas, and during that time I’ve learned to read, write, and speak Ch’ol.

Learning to speak Ch’ol was only the beginning. My first experiences with translation came not in court, but through poetry. Before I ever stepped into a courtroom, I had spent two years translating poetry from Ch’ol with my co-translator, poet Charlotte Friedman.

Poetry translation, like poetry itself, is an art, a process.

Poetry translation, like poetry itself, is an art, a process. It requires close readings of every line, every word—sonic qualities, sentiments, tone, length. This is especially important for the Ch’ol language as many words are made up of small parts, called morphemes, capable of shifting a word’s meaning in subtle but significant ways.

For example, the possessive phrases ipisil x’ixik and ipislel x’ixik can both be translated as “the woman’s clothing,” but they carry different nuances. In the second form, the suffix -el appears (and a regular phonological process deletes the third i), indicating that Ch’ol distinguishes between types of possession. Ipisil x’ixik could refer to clothing the woman is holding, possibly someone else’s, or to laundry. In contrast, ipislel x’ixik implies a deeper, more intrinsic connection: clothing she wears, owns, or identifies with. A single suffix can shift the meaning.

Charlotte and I paid particular attention to these kinds of meaning shifts in our translation work. When Juana Peñate Montejo, a Ch’ol poet who won the 2020 award in Indigenous Literatures of Latin America, asked me to translate her poetry from Ch’ol to English, Charlotte and I would discuss across many meetings how to translate these subtle meaning differences.

For example, in a poem titled “Icha’añoñ ak’lel” or “I Belong to the Night,” the first line, jiñi ak’lel woli ibäk’oñ tyi ipislel, literally translates as “the night covers me in its clothing,” where ipislel (clothing) appears in its intrinsic possessive form. We translated this as “cloaked by darkness” to indicate both the action of the night but also the deeper relationship between night, darkness, and metaphorical clothing.

Other times, we admitted that meanings embedded in a word or phrase might be less accessible to English readers. Nevertheless, we trusted the poem’s original message, knowing that not all meanings would cross over completely. This happened in one poem, “Ak’eñoñ achumtyäbal” (What You Have Lived Through), where a hummingbird is mentioned. In many Indigenous cultures, including Ch’ol, hummingbirds are messengers from the afterlife, a significance that may not be apparent to readers unfamiliar with this symbol.

To make these decisions, I consulted with Ch’ol speakers to arrive at the precise English equivalent. At times, I would ask Juana herself. These choices were made with much time and consideration. Each of our translations began with a literal translation, often clunky, then, through edits and re-edits, we shaped something that felt to us close to the original poem.

By 2023, we had translated two of Juana’s collections and published about two dozen of our translations in literary journals, including WLT (March 2022, 32). Just as Charlotte and I were beginning to find our rhythm in poetry translation—deliberate, reflective, full of pauses—I was thrust into a very different kind of language work, one driven by urgency, where the stakes were high.

I began court interpreting in 2023, when a court in California found my doctoral dissertation on certain grammatical properties of Ch’ol and asked if I spoke the language. A man in custody at the local county jail, who had been charged with ten serious felonies, had requested a Ch’ol interpreter. That case, my first, culminated in a five-week-long criminal jury trial in the summer of 2024.

With our poetry translations, we had weeks to mull over drafts. In court, I had seconds. In simultaneous interpreting, I needed to listen to the English and interpret in real time without compromising the natural flow of conversation. This left very little room for error or hesitation.

Since there is no official certification test for Ch’ol (or for many Indigenous or minoritized languages), judges swear me in before a hearing, asking me to pledge that I will interpret “to the best of my knowledge, skill, and judgment in an ethical, honest, and legal manner.” Because of how quickly that first case progressed—and the absence of a certification program for Ch’ol—I began interpreting with little formal training.

In court interpreting, no one was there to give me feedback on how I was doing. I had to trust myself and my abilities. There was no guide on legal terminology in Ch’ol, so I collaborated with many Ch’ol friends to create a glossary. Translating legal terms such as “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” the threshold for conviction in the United States, was difficult. We thought for weeks about how to translate this. (Even for jurors this concept is onerous to define.) In the end, we settled on tsa’ ts’äkäl päsli, “it has been proven firmly.”

Translating legal terms like translating poetry is rarely just about vocabulary. Sometimes the best interpretations draw on memories, intuition, and cultural understanding.

Once, during opening statements, a lawyer made an analogy between proving all elements of a case and the ingredients of a Caesar salad. I did not think the analogy would resonate in Ch’ol. In all my time in Ch’ol communities, I had never seen a Caesar salad. But I remembered savoring pats’, a Mayan tamale made from masa and fresh beans, wrapped in a banana leaf and boiled over a fire. Using pats’ instead of a Caesar salad in the analogy worked. The man I was interpreting for nodded in understanding.

To translate or interpret ethically is not to presume full understanding of another’s voice but to listen with care, translate with respect, and remain alert to gaps and silences. Both practices demand a fidelity that is not only linguistic but moral—a responsibility to carry meaning without distortion.

To translate or interpret ethically demands a fidelity that is not only linguistic but moral.

My experiences in poetry translation and court interpreting have shaped each other in unexpected ways. Poetry taught me to attend to tone, rhythm, and emotional charge; interpreting grounded that sensitivity in urgency and consequence, where language can shape a person’s freedom, their story, their ability to be understood. Together, these practices have challenged me to hold space for voices not my own and to reckon with what it means to speak for someone without speaking over them.

That reckoning came into sharp focus that day in the federal courtroom on the border, when the judge instructed the Ch’ol man to answer her questions with a simple yes or no. I felt a familiar tension. Past experiences had taught me that such simplicity is not so straightforward for many Ch’ol speakers. Culturally, it is common for Ch’ol speakers to repeat a question, or part of it, as a sign of respect. Linguistically, there are multiple ways to say yes in Ch’ol—woläch, muk’äch, tsa’äch, to name a few.

I felt the weight of this mismatch: English, where a yes/no functions like flipping a switch, and Ch’ol, where an affirmative answer depends on verb type, context, and cultural norms of respect. To bridge that gap, I interpreted the judge’s instructions, specifying that the answers should be juñp’ajl ty’añ, one word.

“Are you entering a plea of guilty?”

“Woläch.”

“Do you understand that by pleading guilty, you are giving up your right to a trial by jury?”

“Muk’äch.”

“Have you discussed this case completely with your attorney?”

“Tsa’äch.”

He understood.

In her collection Dance of the Rain, Juana published a series of poems about Ch’ol people leaving their ancestral lands in southern Mexico, migrating north in search of better opportunities, perhaps like this Ch’ol man tried to do. In one poem from this series, Juana writes: “You live in foreign speech. You exist, / muted and silent.”

Those lines remind me why I do this work. When I interpret for someone in court or collaborate on translating a poem, I seek to bring a person into the room, a voice that might otherwise remain silenced. I do this work, not just to translate words, but to make space for someone to be heard, to understand, to feel less alone, and to ensure that the person speaking or writing is not muted and not silent.

When I finished interpreting for the man in that courtroom on the border, he looked at me with relief. His time in the United States, spent mostly in a detention center, was finally coming to an end. Something seemed to return to him—clarity, maybe, or dignity. As he and I both stood to leave—me through the courtroom’s main entrance, him through a side door back to a holding cell—he turned to me and said, “Wokox awälä.” Thank you.

University of Oklahoma