Abstract (eng)
This thesis focuses on the court interpreting system of Guatemala, a country with one official and 23 additional recognized languages, and tries to determine whether and, if so, to which extent the Republic of Guatemala fulfills its obligation to guarantee adequate access to justice for indigenous peoples through its court interpreting system. In a first step, the Mayan lan-guages, as well as Xinca and Garífuna are presented with their respective speaker statistics. This is followed by an analysis of the applicable laws and international treaties from which the necessity of multilingual justice and, therefore, of a court interpreting and translation system derives. Next, the thesis examines the instruments and bodies created by the Guatemalan state to deliver its court interpreting and translation services, as well as data on their extent and quality. The results of this thesis show that the Republic of Guatemala’s current court inter-preting system fulfills its obligations to provide adequate access to justice for its Mayan citi-zens on a qualitative level, but also that the created structures have neither the necessary re-sources nor the critical mass to ensure a sustainable and tangible improvement of the system.