
Making the announcement, Tory Shadow Communities Minister Sayeeda Warsi said: “Taxpayers’ money should be spent on teaching people English rather than keeping people apart by translating into a plethora of languages.”
She was responding to the news that at least £10.9 million and possibly as much as £20 million is spent by councils across Britain each year translating official documents into a variety of languages.
The correct policy is, of course, not to allow mass immigration in the first place which would prevent this problem from occurring — but that simple solution is not on the Tory or Labour agenda.
According to the figures, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to hundreds of councils across Britain, official documents are currently translated into more than 120 different languages from around the globe.
The most frequently translated language was Polish, with 208 councils catering for those speakers, closely followed by Cantonese and Mandarin.
Asian and African languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Urdu, Arabic and Farsi appear on the list as do dozens of obscure tongues including Bambara, Ewe, Xhosa and various dialects of Mandarin Chinese.
Three councils — Hackney, Newham and Oxfordshire — even cater for Maltese, even though English is an official language on the bilingual island of Malta.
The figures show that the council with the biggest single translation budget is Southwark in south London, which spent £358,349 on translators in the 2007/08 year.
The languages in which Southwark provides its documents include Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Mandarin, Farsi, Hungarian, Kurdish, Polish, Latvian, Somali, Turkish, Vietnamese and Urdu.
No comments:
Post a Comment