Translation and Interpreting Services You Can Trust

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.

With another election coming up, many voters are already thinking about casting their ballots fairly soon. US citizens who speak languages other than English will often have access to election materials in their primary language thanks to federal provision requiring that state and local elections officials provide translated ballots and other documents. To understand why this is essential, it’s important to consider how translation improves access to and participation in the electoral process. For this article, we’ll consider how the federal government mandates and advocates for language accessibility. This may help you maintain compliance with federal standards--or simply learn more about them.