New York City is planning on translating their website into multiple languages for better access for their highly immigrant workforce. This is great news for the millions of city residents who do not speak English as a primary language. This is also great news for city services which should be relieved by being able to provide services on the web without having to find live interpretation services. Read more.

The city of many tongues will soon have a Web site nearly everyone can understand.

City Hall plans to translate nyc.gov - the city’s English-only, multiagency Web site - into several languages “to better serve the city’s diverse population,” said Mayor Bloomberg’s spokesman Matthew Kelly.

At least 36% of the city’s population are immigrants, and the census data show that nearly half of the city’s residents speak a language other than English.

The city Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications began advertising last week for companies that may be interested in taking on the task.

While only in the infant stages, the goal is to allow visitors to click on a button that translates the information into Spanish, Chinese and several other languages - an option already available on Access NYC, a site that lets residents know what services they qualify for.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.