In March 2015 the EULITA General Assembly which convened in Opatija, Croatia, decided to submit a new work item proposal to ISO to further the efforts of legal interpreters towards more professionalism. The project of an international standard on legal interpreting was favorably accepted by ISO members, and work on the standard began immediately. In several rounds of exchanging and coordinating views, ideas, concepts and the practices applied in different countries of the world, the experts developed a text that was ultimately adopted in January 2019. The standard will soon be published in English and French and will hopefully also be translated into many other languages. It will serve professional associations as a reference document in their interactions with ministries of justice, judicial stakeholders and fellow legal interpreters. Trainers of legal interpreters will be able to use the standard as guidance for their educational and research activities. Legal interpreters will use the standard as a yardstick to measure their own performance and to fill any gaps in their qualifications which they might identify.
The adoption of ISO standard 20228 marks a milestone in the work of EULITA under the principles set out in EULITA’s Constitution.