Services

For bilingual speakers of the older mother tongues, access to services and public information in their preferred language is a right, closely linked with personal identity. For more recent arrivals whose English may be limited, translators and interpreters are essential in ensuring that people are fully informed of their benefits and rights. In both cases, great strides have been made in recent years.

Language in public life

Of the Celtic languages, Welsh finds itself in by far the strongest position, although this was not always the case. The Acts of Union passed in the sixteenth century banned all use of Welsh from public life and it was not until some 400 years later, that the 1993 Welsh Language Act made provision for it to be treated equally. Members of the public who communicate with central government in Welsh will receive a reply in the same language. Growing numbers of forms from both central and local government are produced bilingually, and officials are often able to deal with members of the public in the language of their choice.

Gaelic does not yet have legal status in Scotland, although it is used in some committees of Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council) and by the Highland Council’s Gàidhlig Committee. Members of the public can use the language in their dealings with the Western Isles Council and to a lesser extent with the Highland Council. Some documents and forms are available in Gaelic. Under the Small Landholders Act of 1911 Gaelic may be used before the Land Court, but there have never been written proceedings in the language.

The UK government does not grant any official legal status to the Irish language. No public service forms are available in Irish, although the Irish language community has lobbied for many years for Irish or bilingual versions of driving licences and certificates of births, deaths and marriages. The government recognises and accepts the use of Irish in official correspondence, although replies will be in English.

While other languages have no official status, their presence is recognised in a range of settings. However, the principal issues in this case are related more to access than to identity.

Visible language

In recent years Welsh, Gaelic and Irish have become increasingly visible on public notices, road signs and street names. They are important for psychological and symbolic reasons, sending strong, clear signals about the relevance and legitimacy of lesser used languages and the uniqueness of the areas in question.

The use of official signs has also had an important impact on the private sector. The Welsh Tourist Board’s Sense of Place scheme offers financial support for private bilingual signs and particularly favours ‘cluster schemes’ where all the businesses in a particular neighbourhood apply for funding in order to make a stronger visual impact. Bilingual signs contribute to ‘a sense of place’, a clear selling point for visitors. The Welsh Language Board also has a small grants scheme which offers financial support for producing marketing and promotional material.

Public road and village signs in Gaelic are used only in the Western Isles, while bilingual signs are to be found the Gaelic-speaking areas and in the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. Financial assistance is available for organisations wishing to adopt bilingual signage in Argyl and Bute, the Western Isles and parts of Glasgow.

Signs in other languages are now commonplace in many places with large minority communities: street names appear in Chinese and English in the Soho area of London; in Southall, which has an important Sikh community, the station sign appears in the Gurmukhi script used for Panjabi as well as in English; signs in public buildings such as hospitals and council offices in many cities are in several Asian languages.

Bilingual signs are also a common sight in many British schools. Welcome notices, and children’s names on coat hooks raise the visibility of the languages spoken in the school, while signs (head teacher’s office, library, staff room, reception, etc.) help visitors to find their way around. Schools can choose from ready-made signs and labels and ones which meet their special requirements, either ordered from specialist suppliers, or wordprocessed using their own multilingual software.

For those speakers of more recently arrived languages whose fluency in English is limited, the ability to access services and information is an even more pressing concern. Dr Savita Katbamna of the Faculty of Medicine at Leicester University has been working to highlight issues of access to health care and social services for minority communities for the last fifteen years. Language has been an important issue both in establishing the needs of different client groups and in ensuring that these needs are met.

As a Gujarati speaker, Dr Katbamna was at a clear advantage when investigating the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth of other Gujarati women.⁴⁰ However, when researching Bangladeshi women, she needed to recruit and train female interpreters in interview techniques. Their role was not simply to interpret but to ensure that the questions were relevant and the wording appropriate. Sensitivity to language and culture was equally important in another project on carers from the South Asian communities. Researchers organised a series of separate focus groups for male and female carers, facilitated by bilingual interviewers who were matched for language and gender with the carers.

Service users with limited English are particularly vulnerable because they may not understand their entitlements or know where they can find information. Dr Katbamna highlighted, for instance, the stresses on elderly parents caring for their disabled children: ‘Those who don’t speak English find it very hard to find out what support they can get or information about the condition, the diagnosis and how to care for their children. They end up suffering from distress and depression because they feel that they are on their own.’

Official recognition of the need for interpreters and translators has been slow and there remains considerable room for improvement. None the less, progress has been made in understanding their importance for equal access to services. Although solutions have sometimes been ad hoc, they often show great flexibility and good will on the part of all concerned.

Bridging two cultures: interpreters

It is inevitable that any children who speak English more fluently than their parents will be called upon to act as intermediaries. Sukhwant Kaur, a British born Panjabi primary teacher has undertaken a study of over fifty children from the West Midlands and Humberside.⁴¹ She draws attention not only to the heavy responsibilities which fall on children as they accompany their mother to the doctor’s surgery, negotiate rental agreements, and handle bills or even the sale of a house. She also highlights the significant skills which they develop in the role of interpreter – ‘increased maturity, astuteness, assertiveness and self-reliance, born of early adult experience’.

Some schools have found a way of giving formal recognition to these skills. Fifty or more languages are spoken by children in some city schools. This sometimes creates a problem on occasions such as parents’ evenings, particularly since professional interpreters are expensive and are often not available for all the languages required. North Westminster Community School has responded imaginatively to this challenge with a training programme for twenty or so of its seventeen- to eighteen-year-old students.⁴² The course, developed by Sagarika Bhattacharjee, a teacher at the school, leads to a curriculum enrichment certificate. The students look at ethical issues such as confidentiality and impartiality and practical issues such as specialist vocabulary (detention, exclusion, module, coursework, etc.).

Students who successfully complete the course are responsible for contacting parents by telephone to let them know about parents’ evenings and to offer their services as interpreter. They are not used, of course, for sensitive matters such as special needs or family problems. The school and parents clearly benefit from this arrangement, but so, too, do the students. As Avni Byqmeti, an Albanian speaker from Kosovo, explains: ‘It’s not just the certificate. We see it as a service, a way of helping people out, and it is good to mix with other cultures at the group sessions.’

Translation

While interpreting deals with the immediate demands of communication, translation allows more time for reflection. Since any translated document is likely to be consulted by many people over time, the final product must be highly polished. Translation is, of course, a costly business, though many imaginative solutions have been found which reduce the burden. The Welsh Language Board, for instance, offers a service to small businesses, posting or e-mailing translations of small amounts of text free of charge. Clients who require translations of longer or more demanding texts can consult their Directory of Translators.

As its name suggests, Learning Design, part of the Tower Hamlets Education Dirctorate, deals with web, video and audio, and print. Rather more surprisingly, they also act as an agency for translation and interpreting. Multilingualism first became an issue in the aftermath of the Civil War in Somalia. Because of the long-standing link between Somali seamen and Tower Hamlets, refugee children had started to arrive in local schools. In response to requests for materials in Somali, Learning Design produced some bilingual books. Their list now also includes books in Albanian, French, Greek, Irish, Tigrinya and Turkish.

It was only a small step from multilingual publications to interpreting and translation. Learning Design uses a network of freelance translators to respond to requests from a variety of clients in Tower Hamlets and beyond. Their translators regularly deal with signage, council documents, standard letters to parents, letters from the housing department, and publicity materials for social services. They recently completed a phrase book in twenty-eight languages for the London Ambulance Service.

Most people are happy that their mother tongue has greater visibility. As the director, Eddie McParland, explained: ‘It’s a way of enabling them to pass their language on to their children – it gives it validation.’ However, he also points to certain practical limitations: ‘It’s not a very cheap option. If you were to do everything in every language, it would cost a fortune. You have to select what you’re going to do and you can only deal with those groups that are big enough to make the economics viable.’

East End Life is another Tower Hamlets initiative. Established by the local council in the early 1990s to make public information more easily available, the balance has gradually shifted over the years from information to news, and now it has the feel of a local newspaper – 72,000 free copies a week are delivered to every home in the borough. The council funds the paper to provide public information, while other aspects of its work are covered by advertising revenue.

In a multilingual community like Tower Hamlets, it is unlikely that information can be disseminated effectively in English only. Although English is the main language of East End Life, two pages of each issue are dedicated to the other main languages of Tower Hamlets – Bengali and Somali. A MORI poll commissioned by the paper showed that it was the main source of information about news in the area for non-English speakers.

Schools struggling with limited budgets can seldom pay for translation. In areas where there are large numbers of children from other language backgrounds, the local education authority usually provides some form of centralised support. Elsewhere, teachers need to engage in lateral thinking.

Binfield Church of England Primary School in rural Berkshire receives children from families who come from all over the world to attend a nearby theology college. Experience has taught Karen Vive, a teacher at the school, of the need to communicate basic information to the children, information that would ‘keep them warm and safe and help them feel part of the school’. Much of this can be done with the help of a confident friend, or with mimes and gestures, but not everything. To this end, she decided on a booklet of useful phrases which parents could translate for use in the early days.

Most of her initial research was carried out using simple questionnaires completed by other members of staff. There was a great deal of overlap in suggestions about what to include, which made the final selection much easier. Older children also offered useful feedback. The parents provided translations which older children could read for themselves. The teachers made transliterations which allowed them to read back the sentences to any children who were not fluent readers. Once produced for one language, the phrase book is then available for any other speakers of that language who arrive in the school.

Librarians have also needed to respond to the challenges of diversity. When staff don’t speak the language of the enquirer, they clearly cannot respond to requests for information. If the language in question uses a different script, the cataloguing system will not be able to cope. The first major breakthrough for Chinese came when Westminster Charing Cross Public Library developed a computerised catalogue that held Chinese characters.⁴³ This inspired Helen Wong, a computing student, and Alan Seatwo, a Chinese librarian, to develop Britain’s first bilingual Chinese–English system for the Liverpool Public Library Service. An added benefit of the system is that it has helped to break down barriers between Chinese users and English-speaking staff. The next phase of development is an on-line public access catalogue, so that Chinese users can search for information themselves.

Attempts to make services more accessible in the UK can usefully be placed in a wider European context. Astonishingly, the largest single item on the European Commission budget is translation and interpreting. Advocates of English as a language of wider communication believe that this represents a very inefficient use of resources. However, it is also possible to argue that the use of skilled intermediaries is a vital investment for a body in the course of integration. The same argument can, of course, be made for any multilingual society.

Interesting web sites

East End Life

http://www.eastendlife.com/

European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages

http://www.eblul.org/

Gaelic in public life

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/cnag/failte/

Highland Council

http://www.highland.gov.uk/

Discussion points

• Which language(s) are used for the delivery of services in your country?
• What are the arrangements for people who do not speak the official language(s)?
• What is the point of using bilingual signs and providing bilingual services in settings where the population already speak English?
• Why is translation and interpreting so important for speakers with limited English?