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Courts: Translation Services

Asked by Nick TimothyConservativeMinistry of JusticeTabled Answered 25 March 2026UIN 121516

The question

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many court interpreters have been requested for translation services in each year since 2020, broken down by the language requested.

Answered by Jake Richards

The Ministry of Justice publishes quarterly data on the volume of completed language interpreter and translation services requests, split by requestor type, as part of the Criminal court statistics release. However, published data is not broken down by language.

Criminal Court Statistics: Criminal court statistics - GOV.UK

The Ministry of Justice has provided a table in the attachment showing the number of completed service requests both through contracts (with thebigword Group Ltd and Clarion UK Ltd) and off-contract, for each year from 2020 to 2024, split by language. The table is a breakdown of the published figures, split by language.

Given the request for ‘court interpreters’, we have filtered the data to include criminal courts and civil & family courts. We have not included data for Tribunals or other types of Ministry of Justice interpreter usage.

Data has not been provided for 2025 as we do not yet have a complete dataset for this year.

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