Tips for Videotaping a Deposition that needs to be Interpreted.
Posted on Apr 8, 2011 12:05am PDT
If you have been in the business of videotaping legal depositions any amount of time you may have run across a situation where a witness does not speak English. If you have not, you will surely run across this situation eventually if you are in it for any amount of time. So what do you as the videographer need to be aware of when dealing with this situation. Well, first off if you have a deponent that does not speak English an interpreter will have to be hired and participate at the deposition to translate. You as the legal videographer must keep this in mind when you go to set up for the deposition. You really need to think of the placement of your camera and microphones in this situation. Where you normally might shoot down the table to capture the participants, you may want to set up the camera to shoot across the table instead. In a typically placement of the participants of the deposition you will have the deponent at the end of the table with the court reporter in between the deponent and the attorneys asking the questions. But for this situation it is best to seat the interpreter next to the deponent so the questions are directed in the same direction. This lessen the chance of the interpreter's head moving back and forth from attorney to deponent as much as possible and keeping the court reporter from having a hard time hearing the answers. Also, it is desirable at the beginning of the deposition to incorporate both of the deponent and the interpreter in the opening shot. Then after the interpreter has been sworn in or affirmed you may zoom in on just the deponent. By video recording the interpreted deposition it not only captures the English testimony but also the other language that was spoken by both the witness and the interpreter as well. So if there is a question about how a translation was translated by the witness and the interpreter it can be reviewed at a later date.
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