All articles
Ministry of Justice (MoJ) spent £21.3 million on translators in the last year alone.
The interpreters are used for suspected criminals, victims and crime witnesses.
A record £1.2 m was spent on providing bilingual staff on Albanian suspects.
A barrister found herself having to translate for a man who entered the UK in breach of a deportation order.
No Romanian interpreter was available for the hearing on Tuesday. But Judge Michael Gledhill KC said he was happy for barrister Dana Bilan to translate for Paun, who speaks no English.
Prosecutors dropped charges against a cannabis farmer who claimed to have been enslaved into the drugs trade - and whose lawyer was forced to use Google Translate after an interpreter failed to show-up for a second time.
The case of a man accused of murdering his wife has been adjourned as there was no interpreter to translate proceedings for him.
