I get a lot of hits from people asking various questions about using a translator for their tests. It always strikes me as odd that anyone who can search in English and find an English language blog should find themselves in urgent need of a translator for whichever driving test they are taking.
Perhaps this story in the Birmingham Mail goes some way to explaining at least some of those people’s motives.
A Chinese translator, Peter Hui, has been jailed for giving people the answers as he translated the theory test for them. Police estimate Hui scammed around £50,000 in 2012, with another £25,000 worth of bookings before he was caught. He is believed to have made money from the scam in 2011 as well.
It makes you wonder how it is possible for people to be so stupid – and I’m referring to the idiots who pay people like Hui to do this sort of thing for them. It works out that Hui was earning the equivalent of about £1,000 a week out of this. The story doesn’t say how many translations he was doing per week, but even if it was 5 per day, he was obviously charging at least £40 a time – and the candidates would have had the £31 test to pay on top of that, and they still had to do the Hazard Perception part on their own, with the risk of failure that goes with it.
The Theory Test isn’t hard. All you have to do is read up a little on the subject. If it’s too hard for you after that then you really shouldn’t be let out alone.
The report also notes a separate issue where an Urdu translator believed to have been helping bus and HGV drivers cheat has been bailed until September. Of course, this begs the question: why the hell was someone who can’t speak English being allowed anywhere near a bus driving job in the first place?