New York city to Support Translations in All Tongues

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes, December 12, 2003

City Hall Is Said to Support Translations in All Tongues

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

  In a reversal, the Bloomberg administration is expected to announce its
support today for a law that requires city human services agencies to make
all documents available in six languages and to provide translation to
clients on demand for all languages. In theory, such legislation would ask
city agencies to tackle the formidable task of providing translation to
poor New Yorkers seeking services in as many as 200 non-native dialects,
including Tajik, Pashto and Xhosa, a South African language that is made
with tongue clicking.

With Mr. Bloomberg's support, passage of the Equal Access to Human
Services Act into law is almost inevitable as it enjoys broad support on
the City Council. Until quite recently, City Hall, following the lead of
the Giuliani administration, had opposed such legislation, saying it was
unnecessary and would be prohibitively expensive and cumbersome. A city
official said enough concessions had been won in a month of intense
negotiations, some sessions lasting past midnight, to be sure the bill was
"significantly less burdensome than when it was originally proposed." The
city official said a city representative would make those details clear
during testimony in front of the City Council today.

But the primary sponsor of the bill, Councilman John C. Liu, a Democrat of
Flushing, said that the City Council agreed to a five-year phase-in of the
law, instead of two years, and agreed to six primary languages for
document and in-person translation, instead of 22 as originally proposed.
In a move that puzzled some of the bill's advocates, it was the city's
Human Resources Administration that insisted that all languages be
covered, the advocates and a City Council staff member said. Under the
current terms of the bill, city agencies and their contractors that
provide human services would have to provide in-person translation only
for frequently requested languages like Spanish and Chinese.

But the city would have to provide translation by phone or computer for
any language, no matter how obscure, within a reasonable period of time.
That period is not specified in the law. The Bloomberg administration is
said to believe that online technology and translation services already on
contract would make this doable and affordable. The other agencies
affected by the law would be the Departments of Homeless Services and
Health and Mental Hygiene and the Administration for Children's Services.

Estimates of the cost vary. Early predictions by the Human Resources
Administration, made before the recent negotiations, ran about $30 million
a year. By contrast, the City Council has said it expects the change to
cost no more than $5 million a year by 2008, when the new standards are
fully phased in. Proponents said the costs, in any case, were negligible
compared with the benefits. Human Resources has a huge budget, Mr. Liu
said, "but so many feel locked out because their English is not good." He
added, "This is an incremental cost, and it is well worth the investment."

He added that the bill would help the city come into compliance with
federal civil rights laws, which demand no discrimination based on
national origin, and would let the city recoup some of the costs of
translation in previously lost federal dollars. But Mark Hoover, who was
first deputy for human resources under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, said the
city was setting itself up for potentially much larger costs down the
line. "With 200 languages in New York, there is no practical way to
implement the law," he said. "it will set up the city stupidly so that it
will fail and be sued and have to hire more staff and so on."

Some businesses that contract with the city to provide social services
also expressed dismay at the likely passage of the law. Peter Cove,
founder of America Works, which contracts to provide job location services
to 7,000 city clients a year, said, "It will be a terrible inconvenience,
and it may well cost money that we can ill afford." Andrew Friedman, a
co-director of Make the Road by Walking, a advocacy group based in
Brooklyn, said that because the law would not phase in for five years,
employers would have plenty of time to hire bilingual personnel for the
most commonly used second languages. He doubted that there would be much
demand for less common languages, but said that the city would honor
itself by serving those populations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/12/nyregion/12LANG.html