Opinion ID: 202880
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Spanish-Language Documents.

Text: We next address a threshold matter. In support of its motion for summary judgment, the Station submitted an array of papers. These included several Spanish-language documents unaccompanied by corresponding English translations. Submission of these documents contravened a local rule requiring all litigation papers to be submitted in English. See D.P.R.R. 10(b). The district court granted the Station leave to file these Spanish-language writings but ordered certified translations to be furnished within one month's time. The Station failed to comply. More than two months after ordering the filing of translations, the district court entered summary judgment for the Station. Dávila, 2006 WL 2092570, at . In its decision, the court did not allude to the missing translations. The appellant contends that the rendering of summary judgment with the untranslated documents in the record constituted reversible error. It is well settled that federal litigation in Puerto Rico [must] be conducted in English. González-De-Blasini v. Family Dep't, 377 F.3d 81, 88 (1st Cir. 2004) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); see 48 U.S.C. § 864 (requiring that all pleadings and proceedings in the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico . . . be conducted in the English language). When a district court accepts foreign-language documents without the required English translations, an appellate court cannot consider the untranslated documents on appeal. See Estades-Negroni v. Assocs. Corp. of N. Am., 359 F.3d 1, 2-3 (1st Cir.2004); Fed. R.App. P. 10. Where the record shows that English translations were used in the trial court but somehow were not put into the record as they should have been, the parties may invoke Fed. R.App. P. 10 to correct the record. See, e.g., United States v. Vazquez Guadalupe, 407 F.3d 492, 498 (1st Cir.2005). That is not the situation here. If the untranslated documents are or may be essential to the resolution of an issue raised on appeal, and are not subject to cure by means of Fed. R.App. P. 10, the lack of translation may undermine meaningful appellate review. United States v. Rivera-Rosario, 300 F.3d 1, 10 (1st Cir. 2002). The documents in question here, translations of which have been made available on appeal, consist of the appellant's performance evaluations, letters from the Station's president notifying him of his appointment and termination respectively, and excerpts from his deposition testimony. It is crystal clear that none of these documents bear on any of the issues that the court found dispositive in adjudicating the summary judgment motion. In any event, in addition to the untranslated documents, the Station submitted other documents with its motion for summary judgment. These included a sworn statement, in English, from Nancy Piñero, the director of the Station's legal division. In that statement, Piñero summarized the contents of the appellant's personnel file, including the three performance reviews. Whatever additional information might exist in the untranslated documents is wholly extraneous and, therefore, inconsequential to the district court's resolution of the matter. In short, the existence of the Piñero statement makes it readily evident that nothing contained in the documents had any bearing on the district court's ratio decidendi. That ends this aspect of the matter. Because the untranslated documents had no potential to affect the disposition of the case at the summary judgment stage, we conclude that the mere presence of the untranslated documents in the district court record cannot support a claim of reversible error. See González-De-Blasini, 377 F.3d at 89.