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HomeResourcesJapanese Patent Translation BulletinNo. 1: Japanese Real-Time Court Reporting Japanese Patent Translation Bulletin No. 1 (November 30, 2005) Japanese Real-Time Court Reporting by William Lise Summary:  Realtime court reporting, a technology that has become a given in IP litigation in the US, will not be given a chance to succeed in Japan. As a Japanese deposition interpreter, I often enjoyed the benefits of real-time reporting, which greatly reduces the note-taking burden on the interpreter (at least on the English side), but I rarely have the opportunity to see court reporting from the inside. On November 26, 2005, together with a Japan-based court reporter from the US, I participated in a Tokyo gathering of the Japan Electronic Stenography Research Association, a group engaged in developing and promoting the use of "Hayato-kun,” a Japanese realtime steno system. The sad truth, however, is that, while these efforts are going on, the Japanese court system is in the process of doing away with court reporters entirely. In fact, real-time court reporting is not actually allowed in Japan, even if the reporters are capable of real-time reporting. There were 75 reporters at the gathering, of the total of 317 court reporters in Japan. This number probably represents nearly the total subset of court reporters "unofficially" involved with real-time court reporting in Japan. Japanese court reporters use steno machines of the same type as used in the US, which have been adapted to the Japanese language. However, they are still several quantum leaps behind their US counterparts, since their real-time feeds are not used by and may not be used by people in courtrooms. The upcoming replacement for the court reporters is a system of taping court proceedings and outsourcing their transcription. This is essentially like someone trying to promote a reversion to the use of slide rules in 1980, well after Hewlett-Packard introduced its revolutionary HP-35 calculator in the 1970s; a great leap backward. The active court reporters in Japan essentially work only in courtrooms. Japan does not have the discovery process that exists in US civil procedure, and so there are no depositions to report outside of and before trials. All court reporters are full-time government workers. They were hired based on aptitude test results and were sent to a court reporting school for two years (with salary) after being hired. The situation at present is that these reporters are awaiting the hammer that will surely fall. They will not lose their jobs, but will all be switched to the position of court clerk, one that does not neatly map onto the responsibilities of a "court clerk" in the US, I am told. At the gathering, a US court reporter I and a US court reporter here in Japan gave a demonstration of English realtime reporting; lots of oohs and aahs were heard from the audience. The reporter essentially recorded in real-time the speech of a mock deposition played out by myself and a Japanese assistant, who read the attorney's part in the script. Then, unexpectedly, we were asked to run through the same script in Japanese to allow the Japanese reporters to demonstrate their skills. A bit to my surprise, I discovered that Japanese real-time court reporting works. In order to test the ability of Japanese court reporters to record mistakes, false starts, and corrections made by speakers, I purposely worked several such problems into my part of the Japanese mock deposition. Unfortunately, I was told later that the reporter doing the demonstration purposely corrected my intentional mistakes, but that she could have included them. Naturally, in the US such things get into the record, as a false start by a witness answering a question could reveal something that the witness suddenly realized should not be said. In the US real-time some people with court reporter skills are used to create closed captioning for broadcasts. I have never seen this done in Japan. Another application of real-time reporting that has not (and probably will not) hit Japan is realtime reporting for hearing-impaired students in schools. In Japan, the hearing impaired go to special schools and only after long court battles did the first one or two recently win approval to attend school with "regular kids." Although there has been some interest in real-time court reporting in Japan, and it seems to work, the Japanese court system has effectively sealed its fate, choosing rather to employ more traditional technology in a system that spreads the profits to outside vendors, some of which might not exactly be at arm's length from the people who order the work. There appears to be an organization of retired bureaucrats between the consumers and the providers of the transcription services that are replacing court reporters. That aspect of Japanese business is not something that is likely to change very soon.

www.lise.jp/20051130.html © Lise & Partners, Inc. Last modified: Friday, 07-May-2010 02:38:57 GMT