Providing English Spanish Translations for Social Services
This is an interesting article that basically says two things… 1) Providing materials in a communities makes sense from a business or from a mission point of view. 2) You need to provide professional translation or you are going to cause more problems that you help. I think the most telling two paragraphs are here:
A cursory survey of documents provided in Spanish by various agencies turned up many riddled with errors, from misspellings and grammar problems to literal renderings bordering on the incomprehensible.
Huszar thinks that written translation should be done by native speakers who have lived in a Spanish-speaking country and studied at the university level. Inaccurate translations or those using “Spanglish” only add to the distortion of the language, she says.
Share ThisHow do The Dalles families who speak only Spanish get information on vital services from local public agencies? More or less imperfectly, it seems, especially when it comes to written text.Local strategies for providing information in Spanish run the gamut from manual translation work by paid, qualified staff to computer-assisted, on-the-fly translating.
And everything in between — or nothing at all.
“They’re not that good,” says Casa Loma resident Fanny Vazquez of the majority of translations done here. The young mother, who was raised in The Dalles and speaks both Spanish and English, often accompanies friends from her west-end apartment complex as an interpreter.
“Most of the Mexicans don’t even understand how they [translate] from English to Spanish,” she says. “[They think], ‘What are they talking about?’”
Still, whatever the challenges, methods, and flaws of the practice, many agencies are increasingly attempting to serve the growing Spanish-speaking community through translation.
“It just makes sense,” says Wasco County District Attorney Eric Nisley, who knows of no legal requirement outside of the court system to provide for interpretation or translation into a language other than English — except sign language and braille, as mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Still, he says, many organizations have made a policy decision to provide information in Spanish, finding that it gives them an economic advantage — or a service advantage in the case of public agencies.
f the local entities The Chronicle talked to, four — the Northern Wasco County People’s Utility District, the Northern Wasco County School District, Wasco Sherman Public Health, and the Wasco County Department of Youth Services — say they regularly provide written information in Spanish.