Translation and Interpreting Services You Can Trust

Lawyers act on behalf of their clients at some of the most challenging times of their lives. Legal advocacy is often a very serious matter, when an individual's freedom may be at stake. In this high-stress environment, effective communication between client and advocate is always difficult, but it becomes even harder when there is a language barrier. Translation services significantly reduce that burden, helping attorneys to provide the best possible work for people who depend on them.

Why is Communication So Important?

When a lawyer retains a client, he or she has broad authority to act on the client's behalf. This authority is not without checks and balances, but without proper communication it is easy for misunderstandings to occur. This not only hampers the lawyer's ability to follow the client's instructions, but to properly convey advice. Communication must be free, open, and accurate, in order for the lawyer to fully understand the circumstances and to give adequate representation.

Who is at fault when parents misunderstand medical instructions due to a language barrier, and their child dies as a result? Public pressure to answer that question caused laws to evolve several times recently because of such a situation.

Improving active involvement in local government for all citizens is important to many cities, but sometimes it’s not easy to know where to start. A language access plan (LAP) can provide you with a roadmap that the entire city government can use to help determine where each department is at in the process of increasing language accessibility. From there, the city can consider progress towards specific benchmarks that were created to guide the process. With a LAP, your city knows what language access goals are in-progress, which local languages are prominent, and how your government agencies plan to improve accessibility. LAPs provide guidance and serve as useful tools in promoting language accessibility in city governments.