£110 million a year on translation for migrants
At a time when issues of integration and cross-cultural understanding are hot political topics in the UK, the British government has revealed, according to this report in the Daily Express, that it spends £110 million a year on translation services for immigrants.
Apparently, the costs include a local council translating details of its refuse collection service into 15 languages so that non-English speakers can understand the recycling system, and one-to-one “Quit Smoking” sessions in Turkish.
The report quotes the head of MigrationWatch UK as saying “We should expect immigrants to learn English and should not remove the incentive to do so by spending millions on translation.” A Bangladeshi woman quoted in the report agrees, saying “When you are trying to help us you are actually harming… We don’t need to speak in English at all.”
On the other side of the argument, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality is quoted as saying that the costs were a feature of globalisation that we should “just soak up”, and a project manager for a local council project says “If they need it in their language we make sure they have it… everybody should have equal access to knowledge of the services”.
So, who is right?
Could this money be better spent on teaching English, to help migrants integrate into British society, taking on the “obligations that come with the privilege of living and working in Britain” as Tony Blair pointed out in a speech on migration two years ago.
Or should everyone have the right to access knowledge in any language regardless of the cost to the British taxpayer?
What do you think? Post a comment below…
December 14th, 2006 at 9:25 am
The article says that spending all that money on translation services reflects the government’s obsession with political correctness. I couldn’t agree more. It’s an absurb waste of money. I’m not suggesting that no money should be spent in this way - it’s important to give migrants the necessary support when they first come to the country, and obviously you can’t expect people to learn English overnight, but the primary goal should be to teach them English, not enhance divisions and lack of cultural understanding by providing everything in their own language. It’s no wonder we have so many problems in this country.