Ariadna walks into court with 11 unstamped sheets

At 12.04, counsel Ariadna Pous lays eleven sheets on the bench of family court number 3 in Terrassa and says out loud, for the record, that not one of them carries a stamp.

"Sworn translation?" the judge asks, without looking up.

"Signed translation. Not sworn. I ask that the reason be entered in the record."

The judge looks up then. A sworn translation is one signed and stamped by a professional accredited by the State, and it is the only thing nobody can argue with. On the other side of the room, Tamar Kvaratskhelia, thirty-eight, care assistant at a nursing home in Rubí, stands up without anyone having asked her to.

"I brought the papers," she says, in slow, exact Spanish. "I brought them in March."

"Sit down, madam. I will come to you."

Tamar sits down. She has swapped two shifts to be here. The eleven sheets are the ruling a court in Tbilisi handed down in 2029 on the custody of her son, and without them today's hearing decides nothing.

"The Registry closed on 1 October this year," says Ariadna. "The last sworn translator of Georgian in the province has had his accreditation expired since that date. He has translated the eleven sheets for me and he has refused to stamp them. He is sitting in the back row."

The judge looks at the back row.

"Mr Cifuentes, do you know Georgian?"

"Thirty-one years, Your Honour."

"Come forward."

At 12.11, the court clerk accredits him by decree and the judge takes his oath. Modesto Cifuentes, sixty-one, swears to tell the truth as an interpreter appointed for this act and for no other, standing, with no stamp, no registry number, right hand raised in front of eleven people. Then he reads aloud, in Spanish, the ruling and the two pages that matter, stopping twice to explain something that fits in no box on any form.

The first stop is on page seven. He explains that the boy appears written three different ways on three different papers, that all three are the same child born on 14 March 2027, and that the difference comes from carrying Georgian over into the Latin alphabet, not from two separate files. The second is on page nine, where the Tbilisi court uses a word that translates into Spanish as "custody" and that over there means something narrower: who decides on the school. The judge makes him repeat that sentence and the court clerk writes it down in full.

The hearing really begins at 12.19. Of everything said in Spanish that morning, Tamar understands exactly one word, and it is her son's name, pronounced correctly for the first time since she walked into the courthouse.

11.31

Modesto lives on a second floor with no lift on Carrer Sant Pau and opens the door with the sheets in his left hand, stapled.

"All eleven are there," he says. "And they go unstamped."

"Modesto, unstamped this is nothing."

"Unstamped it is a translation done by a man. Get your coat, I'm coming down with you."

"You're coming down with me?"

"The State took my stamp. It didn't take my voice. If the judge wants, let her swear me in there and ask whatever she has to ask; any court can do that and has been doing it for ever with the languages that have nobody. And if she doesn't want to, I walk back and we've lost nothing."

Ariadna goes down the two flights ahead of him, phoning the court to say that two of them are coming.

10.50

There are three things on Modesto's table: the Georgian ruling, a keyboard, and the full birth certificate issued by the civil registry of Rubí in 2031. Tamar is sitting opposite, coat still on, because she has not wanted to take it off.

Modesto is on page seven. He stops.

"Tamar, come here. What is your son's name?"

"Luka."

"In the Tbilisi ruling he appears twice as ლუკა, which is Luka, and four times in the transliterated heading as 'Lukas', because the clerk who typed it used the Russian spelling. And on the Spanish certificate it says Lucas, with a c, because in the Rubí registry they wrote it down by ear."

"It's the same boy."

"I know it's the same boy. The judge doesn't."

Tamar takes the school enrolment slip from Rubí out of her coat pocket, folded in four. There the boy is "Luka K.", because the surname did not fit in the box. And she adds, without being asked, that on the nursing home rota she has been down as Tamara since 2032 and that she stopped correcting it in the second year.

Modesto notes both things in the margin of his notebook, not on the sheet. He crosses out the line he has just written and starts page seven again. Three spellings, one single child born on 14 March 2027, and somebody who will have to say so out loud and answer for it.

9.40

"I can't," Modesto said at the door, an hour and ten earlier, without letting her past the hallway. "I'm telling you now and we save ourselves the morning."

Ariadna is carrying the ruling in an elastic folder and her phone in her hand, the screen lit on the list of the twenty-four languages that the Certifica platform issues instantly, signed, downloadable, valid in any court in the country. Romanian is there. Ukrainian has been there since April. Georgian is not there, and has not been for three years, because there are two thousand registered speakers and the contract was awarded by volume.

"It takes forty seconds," she says, and it is true: forty seconds and a sixteen-digit verification code at the foot of every page.

"For the twenty-four. For yours, nothing."

"The hearing is at twelve."

"And my accreditation expired on the 1st. It isn't that I don't want to, Ariadna: if I stamp that, I'm signing as something I am no longer. That has a name in the criminal code and it has had one since before you were born."

"There's one in Zaragoza."

"Two hundred and ninety kilometres away and booked solid until Thursday. I called him myself this morning, at twenty past eight, before it occurred to you to call me."

Ariadna leans on the door frame and does the only thing left to her, which is to stop asking him for what he cannot give and ask him for something else.

"Then translate them. Unstamped. I'll work out what to do with them."

Modesto stands still for two seconds. Then he steps aside and lets her in.

8.12

The letter from the Registry arrived on 2 October and has spent nineteen days on the table, under the stamp, which is a rubber cylinder with a wooden handle and dried blue ink. Modesto eats breakfast standing up, as he has every day since his wife took the morning shift at the nursing home. The letter says that, as of 1 October 2036, the Registry of Sworn Translators and Interpreters will accept no renewals, that the certification of translations will henceforth be provided by automated means, and that registered professionals retain the right to use the title for professional and advertising purposes.

For professional and advertising purposes. Thirty-one years swearing before a court that what it said in Spanish was exactly what it said in Georgian. Two extraditions, fourteen adoptions, the death certificate of a sailor from Poti that reached Barcelona inside an envelope with the stamp stuck on crooked, and an afternoon in 2014 when he stopped an entire hearing because the original document said "brother by the mother" and the previous interpreter had written "brother". And what they leave him of all that is the right to put it on a business card.

The phone rings at 8.14. It is a Terrassa number he does not have saved.

Modesto looks at the stamp before answering. He picks it up, turns it over, reads his own name backwards in the rubber. Then he puts it in the top drawer, shuts the drawer and takes the call standing up, his notebook already open.