AMS publishes a state-of-practice report on court interpreting in California each year. This 2026 edition is built on the Judicial Council of California Court Interpreter Workforce Study, delivered to the Legislature in December 2025 under Government Code section 71900, together with the Judicial Council language access program and the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. Every figure names its source. Claims that could not be traced to a published document were cut from this edition rather than carried forward.
What changed since the 2025 edition
- California certifies court interpreters in American Sign Language plus twelve spoken languages. Filipino (Tagalog) is on that certified list. Khmer and Western Armenian are not, and earlier editions of this report said otherwise.
- Federal certification is a Spanish program. The Administrative Office states that the federal examination "is currently offered only in Spanish." Programs once developed for Navajo and Haitian Creole are no longer offered.
- The Judicial Council published its first Court Interpreter Workforce Study in December 2025. It is the first statewide dataset on interpreter supply, testing and method of delivery, and most of the numbers in this report come from it.
- About a third of the credentialed workforce is at or past retirement age, which the study treats as the central risk to interpreter supply over the next decade.
Section 1. The certified language roster
The Judicial Council of California certifies court interpreters in twelve spoken languages: Arabic, Cantonese, Eastern Armenian, Farsi (Persian), Filipino (Tagalog), Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Punjabi (India), Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese. American Sign Language interpreters are credentialed separately under Evidence Code section 754. The Judicial Council newsroom and the language access program site both publish this list, and they agree.
Certification requires passing a written examination and the Bilingual Interpreting Examination, which tests simultaneous, consecutive and sight translation under timed conditions, and then enrolling with the Judicial Council. As of July 2024 there were 1,820 interpreters on the Judicial Council Master List of certified and registered court interpreters, serving 58 superior courts. Spanish accounts for 88 percent of courtroom interpretations statewide.
Source: Judicial Council of California, Language Access Services, certified spoken language interpreter page; Judicial Council newsroom, branch facts on language access.
Section 2. The registered category
Every spoken language without a certification examination is handled through the registered category. The Judicial Council states the rule directly: all non-certified languages are considered registered languages. A registered interpreter has passed the required examinations for a non-certified language and enrolled with the Judicial Council.
The registered list is long and includes Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Hebrew, French, German, Polish, Romanian, Somali, Hmong, Haitian Creole, Ukrainian and dozens of others. Note that Filipino (Tagalog) is not among them, because it is certified. Where neither a certified nor a registered interpreter is available, courts may appoint a provisionally qualified interpreter, with the qualification established on the record at each proceeding. The study counted 468 provisionally qualified interpreters used in FY 2023-24, up about 51 percent from FY 2020-21.
Source: Judicial Council of California, registered spoken language interpreter page; Workforce Study, December 2025, Figure 3.
Section 3. Federal court interpretation in California
Federal court interpreting rests on the Court Interpreters Act, 28 U.S.C. 1827, enacted in 1978 and amended in 1988. The Federal Court Interpreter Certification Examination began in 1980 and, in the words of the Administrative Office, "is currently offered only in Spanish." Certification programs were developed for Navajo and Haitian Creole but are no longer offered; the Administrative Office describes those interpreters as having been certified only during the early nineties. More than 900 Spanish interpreters have been federally certified, and Spanish is about 96 percent of federal interpreter usage.
In every other language, federal courts appoint interpreters classified as professionally qualified or language skilled, decided case by case by the local court. Certified and professionally qualified interpreters are paid at a higher rate than language skilled interpreters. California state certification is not a federal credential, though in practice state-certified interpreters are routinely engaged in federal proceedings.
California has four United States District Courts: the Central District at Los Angeles, the Northern District at San Francisco and Oakland, the Southern District at San Diego, and the Eastern District at Sacramento and Fresno. The Central District is the busiest.
Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Federal Court Interpreter Orientation Manual and Glossary, revised December 2024; Administrative Office interpreter categories page.
Section 4. Team interpreting
Team interpreting, two interpreters covering one proceeding and trading off, is standard practice for long or complex matters. Federal policy provides for it in those terms: to mitigate the effects of interpreter fatigue and safeguard the integrity of interpreting services, long or complex proceedings may be covered by two interpreters through team or tandem interpreting.
What the federal guidance does not do is set a time threshold or a rotation interval. It tells the team to agree in advance when and how they will switch, and to inform the courtroom deputy so the arrangement can be stated on the record if the court wants it there. It also assigns the interpreter who is not actively interpreting a working role: staying in the courtroom, noting names and numbers for the active interpreter, handling equipment, and researching terminology.
Numbers do circulate for this, a switch every twenty to thirty minutes and a one-hour trigger being the usual ones, and they are widely repeated on agency and law firm pages. They do not come from the federal policy, which sets neither. Treat them as practice conventions rather than as a standard, and treat the decision as one for the court and the interpreters. What counsel can plan for is cost: teaming roughly doubles the interpreter line, and it should be raised with the court at scheduling rather than on the day.
Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Federal Court Interpreter Orientation Manual and Glossary, revised December 2024, Chapter on courtroom protocol; Guide to Judiciary Policy, Volume 5, Chapter 5, section 530.
Section 5. Where the shortages actually are
The Workforce Study is the first document to quantify this. For each language it compares the credentialed interpreter pool against the share of court events actually covered by a certified or registered interpreter, and estimates how many more interpreters full coverage would take. Spanish does not appear, because Spanish need is generally met.
| Language | Credentialed interpreters | Share of events covered by a certified or registered interpreter | Additional interpreters needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Punjabi | 3 | 28.10% | 8 |
| Mixteco | 3 | 31.31% | 7 |
| Arabic | 10 | 37.89% | 17 |
| Portuguese | 8 | 51.05% | 8 |
| Tagalog | 6 | 54.85% | 5 |
| Farsi | 11 | 62.68% | 7 |
| Mixteco Alto | 2 | 64.75% | 2 |
| Romanian | 9 | 66.77% | 5 |
| ASL | 50 | 82.06% | 11 |
| Cantonese | 25 | 83.79% | 5 |
Two observations that matter for anyone scheduling. First, Punjabi and Arabic are certified languages with severe coverage gaps, so a language being on the certified list says nothing about whether an interpreter will be available in your county on your date. Second, Mixteco and Mixteco Alto appear here with three and two credentialed interpreters statewide, which is the indigenous language gap in numbers rather than in adjectives.
Section 6. Indigenous Mesoamerican languages
Speakers of Mixteco, Mam, K'iche', Q'eqchi', Triqui, Zapoteco and other indigenous languages appear in California proceedings as criminal defendants, civil witnesses, asylum applicants and workers compensation claimants. The recurring failure is misclassification: a speaker with working Spanish as a second or third language is booked as a Spanish speaker, and the testimony that results is not the testimony they would give in their first language.
The Workforce Study records Mixteco at 3 credentialed interpreters and 31.31 percent coverage, and Mixteco Alto at 2 interpreters and 64.75 percent coverage. It also notes that interpretations completed by provisionally qualified interpreters rose by more than 100 percent between FY 2020-21 and FY 2023-24 for Punjabi, Mixteco, Farsi, Portuguese and Mixteco Alto, and that demand for Mixteco de Guerrero has grown sharply. That is the supply picture: a handful of credentialed interpreters, and rising reliance on the provisional category to fill the gap.
AMS position, offered as opinion rather than as a finding: identification at intake is the cheapest available fix. Asking any witness from southern Mexico or highland Guatemala what language they speak at home, before booking a Spanish interpreter, costs nothing and prevents most of these failures.
Section 7. The workforce itself
The study is blunt about supply. Roughly a third of credentialed California court interpreters are at or past retirement age, and the pipeline replacing them is narrow because the examination is hard to pass.
| Age group | Interpreters |
|---|---|
| Under 24 | 1 |
| 25 to 34 | 53 |
| 35 to 44 | 221 |
| 45 to 54 | 425 |
| 55 to 64 | 516 |
| 65 to 74 | 448 |
| 75 to 84 | 125 |
| 85 and over | 23 |
That puts 596 of 1,812 interpreters, about 33 percent, at 65 or older. On testing, the study reports that the Bilingual Interpreting Examination pass rate "previously averaged less than 10 percent," and that participants in the near-passer training the Judicial Council launched in 2021 average 21 percent. For comparison the study itself draws, the California General Bar Examination passed 53.8 percent in July 2024 and 55.9 percent in February 2025.
Court employee positions are also going unfilled. The study reports vacancy rates by classification for two consecutive fiscal years, and all three classifications got worse.
| Classification | Total FTE 7/1/2023 | Vacancy 2023 | Total FTE 7/1/2024 | Vacancy 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Court Interpreter Pro Tempore | 29.6 | 71% | 26.2 | 75% |
| Interpreter | 204.7 | 27% | 207.8 | 29% |
| SB 371 Interpreter | 534.5 | 28% | 519.6 | 30% |
The study names the causes: difficulty passing the required examinations, a retiring workforce, geographic constraints, contractor reluctance to take salaried court positions, and competition from other industries. It also finds that California interpreter salaries are nationally competitive but remain below federal levels.
Section 8. How interpretation is being delivered
California courts have moved back to in-person interpreting more completely than most observers assume.
| Fiscal year | In person | Remote and VRI | Telephonic | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY 2020-21 | 384,560 | 48,892 | 16,765 | 450,217 |
| FY 2021-22 | 549,420 | 33,386 | 12,995 | 595,801 |
| FY 2022-23 | 639,583 | 25,401 | 8,325 | 673,309 |
| FY 2023-24 | 698,877 | 22,078 | 7,377 | 728,332 |
Remote and video remote interpreting peaked at 11 percent in FY 2020-21 and is now 3 percent. Telephonic went from 4 percent to 1 percent. In-person is 96 percent. Regional variation is wide: the study puts remote use at 6.5 percent of interpretations in Region 1 and 0.2 percent in Region 4. The Judicial Council reads the decline as underuse rather than as a return to normal, and recommends expanding video remote interpreting specifically to reach the shortage languages in Section 5, where no local interpreter exists at any price.
Section 9. Practical guidance
- For California state proceedings, engage a certified interpreter where the language is one of the twelve. For every other spoken language, the registered category is the correct tier, and provisionally qualified is a fallback that has to be established on the record.
- Do not treat the certified list as an availability guarantee. Punjabi and Arabic are certified languages with coverage below 40 percent.
- For federal proceedings, federal certification means Spanish. In any other language, ask which federal classification the interpreter holds, professionally qualified or language skilled.
- For witnesses from southern Mexico or highland Guatemala, establish the first language before booking. Booking Spanish by default is the single most common failure in this category.
- For long or complex matters, raise teaming at scheduling. Budget for two interpreters and agree the switch protocol before the proceeding, which is what federal guidance directs.
- For a rare language in a county with no local interpreter, ask about video remote interpreting rather than assuming it cannot be covered.
About this report
AMS publishes this report as a free public reference and revises it when the underlying sources change. Where this report states an opinion rather than a finding, it says so in the sentence. Sources are named at the end of each section; where you are citing a statistic, cite the underlying Judicial Council or Administrative Office document, and note the date you consulted this page. Corrections to scheduling@accessmultilingual.com are welcome and are made promptly.