Mayor's Order May Not Translate Into More Interpreters
By DAVID SIMS
Mayor Bloomberg today signed an Executive Order enacting citywide translation services in all city agencies, but it remains unclear whether it will create many new translator jobs.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: 'Makes city more accessible.'

Executive Order 120 establishes uniform standards for translation and interpretation services for city agencies that interact with New Yorkers, recognizing the difficulties of many immigrant communities in the city, especially those for whom English is not a first language or even a spoken language. The languages that will be addressed most heavily are referred to as the "Top Six": Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, French Creole and Italian, which are the most-spoken foreign languages in the city.

'Up to the Agencies'

Despite the obvious burdens that will be placed on city agencies in terms of hiring translators to provide these required services, the Mayor's Office declined to state how many new jobs, if any, would be created by the Executive Order. "It's hard to pinpoint how many people are going to be hired ... each agency has to come up with their own plan," said Evelyn Erskine, a mayoral spokeswoman.

The order specifies only that each city agency must designate someone a "Language Access Coordinator," and that person will be responsible for formulating an implementation plan within the agency. "So many factors differ from agency to agency," said Ms. Erskine, who indicated that agencies may hire translators from within or externally.

Mayor Bloomberg, however, was upbeat about the impact the order would have on the city at large. "This Executive order will make our city more accessible, while helping us become the most inclusive municipal government in the nation," he said during a press conference to sign the order.

He also said that he hoped that agencies would recruit "everyone we possibly can in the city ... the best people" in the city to work as translators, while acknowledging that in cases involving more obscure and less widely-spoken languages, agencies might have to use outside services, which would patch through a translator for any of the 170 different languages spoken in New York City.