How do cities in your country provide important foreign language info?
August 17, 2016 9:51 PM
I’m from the US working at a city government in Japan, and I want to know how local governments in other countries handle providing important information in residents’ native languages.
For example, let’s say a city in your country wants to distribute information about where residents should evacuate in the event of a flood. How does that city reach residents who don’t yet speak the local language?
Does it make foreign language information available in community centers? Put it online? Give the info to an org. working with that population and hope the info spreads through word of mouth? Does the city have a list of foreign residents and just mail it directly to them? Mail foreign language information to every resident because they don’t have a list like that, or can’t use it because privacy?
I’m asking because I’m not satisfied with some of the methods used here to provide foreign language info. ("Let's just make a Facebook page")
It would be especially awesome to hear from people who work in local government and deal with this directly, or people who live abroad and receive information from their local gov`t in their native language using such-and-such method.
Does it make foreign language information available in community centers? Put it online? Give the info to an org. working with that population and hope the info spreads through word of mouth? Does the city have a list of foreign residents and just mail it directly to them? Mail foreign language information to every resident because they don’t have a list like that, or can’t use it because privacy?
I’m asking because I’m not satisfied with some of the methods used here to provide foreign language info. ("Let's just make a Facebook page")
It would be especially awesome to hear from people who work in local government and deal with this directly, or people who live abroad and receive information from their local gov`t in their native language using such-and-such method.
In NYC, when there are major weather crises a second speaker comes on after the mayor in the press conference and repeats the information in Spanish. Sometimes the mayor has tried (emphasis on "tried") to do this himself, leading to the hilarious El Bloombito.
posted by praemunire at 10:27 PM on August 17, 2016
posted by praemunire at 10:27 PM on August 17, 2016
Hey, I'm also an American in Japan, and I do some web and translation work, occasionally for local governments. I've found in my prefecture (Shiga), there's usually more effort for this stuff at the prefectural level than the city level.
I know one prefectural employee who's in charge of this very thing, but his department simply runs a multilingual site/blog and sends out a monthly paper bulletin in a few languages to local city halls. He's also organized occasional one off events, promoting on facebook, for teaching foreigners about safety and disaster preparedness- not sure what kind of turnout they had.
Some of my regional cities also have their official websites translated, usually not the whole site, sometimes nothing at all, but depending how big the international community is and/or how much tourism they get.
I get the impression that the level of international focus is very sporadic and inconsistent from place to place here. If there is money budgeted and people motivated then it may develop, but would be nice to see more standards in place.
posted by p3t3 at 12:39 AM on August 18, 2016
I know one prefectural employee who's in charge of this very thing, but his department simply runs a multilingual site/blog and sends out a monthly paper bulletin in a few languages to local city halls. He's also organized occasional one off events, promoting on facebook, for teaching foreigners about safety and disaster preparedness- not sure what kind of turnout they had.
Some of my regional cities also have their official websites translated, usually not the whole site, sometimes nothing at all, but depending how big the international community is and/or how much tourism they get.
I get the impression that the level of international focus is very sporadic and inconsistent from place to place here. If there is money budgeted and people motivated then it may develop, but would be nice to see more standards in place.
posted by p3t3 at 12:39 AM on August 18, 2016
People tend to have a community leader they trust and often a doctor who speaks a common language. There are some government services employed to find these leaders and engage them to build relationships with specific language groups around different issues. One I have direct experience with works in 26 target language groups. If you're interested send me a memail. (In Australia)
posted by taff at 12:41 AM on August 18, 2016
posted by taff at 12:41 AM on August 18, 2016
in Denmark, for example, the Odense.dk site regarding evacuation is in danish, with a google translate link at the top right corner. That translate link is ubiquitous throughout the site.
posted by alchemist at 1:20 AM on August 18, 2016
posted by alchemist at 1:20 AM on August 18, 2016
Houston City Hall To Start Offering Info In Five Languages.
Parker said the effort will be directed to the "most needed" languages rather than the most frequently spoken.posted by Brittanie at 2:54 AM on August 18, 2016
"The city already does just about everything in Spanish," she said. "Houston also has a significant south Asian population, Pakistani and Indian, and Hindi is a commonly spoken language.
In Seattle/King County, the local public transportation system ("Metro") places 20 non-English languages into three tiers, prioritized in order of language usage in the region, based on census data. These three tiers place priorities on public signage, staff, translation and other services. Their planning documents may be of use.
The King County Public Health department does something similar for its online materials, and more broadly across other local government departments, based on similar usage criteria as Seattle Metro.
In the other direction, perhaps, in Europe, if you are in a non-English-speaking country you can dial 112 to request emergency services and speak to someone in English.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 3:19 AM on August 18, 2016
The King County Public Health department does something similar for its online materials, and more broadly across other local government departments, based on similar usage criteria as Seattle Metro.
In the other direction, perhaps, in Europe, if you are in a non-English-speaking country you can dial 112 to request emergency services and speak to someone in English.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 3:19 AM on August 18, 2016
In NYC, when there are major weather crises a second speaker comes on after the mayor in the press conference and repeats the information in Spanish. Sometimes the mayor has tried (emphasis on "tried") to do this himself, leading to the hilarious El Bloombito.
Also, all city information is generally made available in a whole bunch of languages: generally at least Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Hatian Creole, and less commonly Urdu, Bengali, and Arabic. Translations for many major government forms are available online, and city public service ad campaigns are run in all sorts of languages. The MTA, the body that runs the subway system, puts up posters in English with translations in other languages at the bottom - here's a photo.
NYC is something of an extreme outlier on multilingualism, though, for obvious reasons.
posted by Itaxpica at 5:54 AM on August 18, 2016
Also, all city information is generally made available in a whole bunch of languages: generally at least Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Hatian Creole, and less commonly Urdu, Bengali, and Arabic. Translations for many major government forms are available online, and city public service ad campaigns are run in all sorts of languages. The MTA, the body that runs the subway system, puts up posters in English with translations in other languages at the bottom - here's a photo.
NYC is something of an extreme outlier on multilingualism, though, for obvious reasons.
posted by Itaxpica at 5:54 AM on August 18, 2016
In Hong Kong...
- Almost all public employees are Chinese/English bilingual to varying degrees and all public and private written documentation that affects the public is available in both languages; I have lived here for four years and speak no Chinese at all and have zero bureaucratic difficulties aside from monolingual Chinese telemarketers. I don't even bother to ask if an official at the tax office or a postal worker speaks English; I just begin speaking. Many public-facing workers are explicitly trained to use English with non-Chinese-looking people even if they begin the interaction in Cantonese.
- English speakers are almost never at a disadvantage when dealing with official channels (though private businesses are a different matter, especially outside the urban core). Even if no English is written on a menu or in a shop someone inside or nearby invariably speaks some (or excellent!) English, perhaps even another patron. But really, English speakers living on Hong Kong Island and in the expat-heavy enclaves of Discovery Bay or Lamma Island may not need to deal with Chinese at all in daily life.
- HOWEVER, English is not the issue here. It's the treatment of the speakers of the other minority languages we have. Very few government officials are from ethnic minority communities because the need to be fluent in written and spoken Chinese as well as English de facto means that basically all government workers are ethnically Chinese. Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents are not native Chinese or English speakers, notably the Filipino and Indonesian domestic-helper/live-in maids, who total perhaps 300,000 individuals. We also have communities descended from generations-old migrations from around Asia, especially from the Indian subcontinent, and a permanent population of maybe a few thousand people from Africa and Latin America as well. Many of these people, especially those of south Asian descent, are far less affluent than the average Chinese-speaking Hong Konger, and without good Chinese language skills (which many do have), may end up excluded from university and in low-salary industries like food service and construction.
- More recent migration from Korea and Japan has been primarily very affluent and centred around the idea that these people are on temporary postings with existing Japanese/Korean companies; the government really only publishes tourist information in Japanese and Korean, as I think they assume they all have private healthcare and education and can manage the public services they need with English. This is the same for the 50,000+ French speakers here - it is assumed, I think, that all Europeans and anyone affluent can be dealt with in English.
- So going back to HK's local ethnic minority groups, the most VITAL information on issues of education, public safety and the law, health and other topics is available in minority-ethnic languages like Indonesian, Tagalog, Nepali, Hindi/Urdu, Thai, Burmese and Vietnamese through the government's gov.hk multilingual portal. The information isn't great or complete; the information on the environment available for Indonesian speakers talks more about littering than the hours of public beaches, for example. But it is much more than nothing and mostly organised well and would tell you, for example, the hours of a hospital or how to find out whether your child will be eligible for dental care and other basic information like this. Also, the likelihood that the reader will know an English or Chinese speaker intimately is extremely high - virtually all of Hong Kong's residents speak one or the other - so the information is not totally obscure, but does perhaps require a relationship with someone who can cross that linguistic barrier.
- The government also has an excellent app/service called 1823, which is a bit like calling 311 in the USA, a one-stop way to contact the local government. It is very efficient but you need to be a Chinese or English speaker to use it, though I imagine an interpreteer would be available on request and with some notice. From taxis who refuse your fare to complaining about a sagging tree in a public park, the service directs your complaint to the appropriate department and they have to follow up in your preferred language within X number of days. I have had calls and emails (email is much easier!) with the Transport Department and Police this way and successful outcomes each time.
- My local metro station has a poster reminding people that the minimum wage is what it is in all of the minority languages I mentioned above, I'm guessing because I live in a pretty working-class area with many (for HK, so perhaps 10%?) non-Chinese/non-English native speakers around. Posters vary based on the audience, I have noticed - Wan Chai, a district where in some neighbourhoods over 30% of the residents are not native Chinese speakers, has a much wider proliferation of multilingual public notices than, say, Northern district on the Chinese border, where maybe 2% of people are not Chinese readers. This information may be poorly targeted or out of date - I have seen, for example, a dusty, years-old public health leaflet display with documents in Urdu and Thai among others tucked into the corner of a museum gift shop.
- Notably, elections are only open to permanent residents. I have never seen an election ad in any language other than Chinese or, rarely and only on Hong Kong Island, English.
- Issues affecting one minority language community in particular (like enrolling Urdu-speaking children in kindergarten or representing abused Indonesian maids in court cases against their employers) are often managed by the government liaising with local, private organisations like Unison that work with that community to put on informational evenings and seminars. They are often attended by people who will not or cannot travel to the main hubs of government to seek out information on their own, or who do not have good-enough connections with the media and community at large to access "general knowledge".
- RTHK, HK's public radio broadcaster, has an "community inclusion" service mandate unlike HK's private stations, and puts on a comparatively large range of programming for minority language listeners, in which public affairs are very frequently discussed. Programmes are run by local organisations and this quarter include programmes in Tamil and Tagalog. Many of these programmes run in English though, because it is the lingua franca between everyone who is not Chinese here.
- People who fall through the cracks in terms of not getting written government messages firsthand and maybe needing to rely on others to pass it along: the old and illiterate (they are out there, especially among HK's oldest people, many of whom were refugees from the Chinese Civil War and never finished school); refugees, who are not allowed to work while their cases are in limbo and so suffer from extreme linguistic and social isolation; people semi-permanently here like foreign business travellers in and out of the city for a few months at a time in a services apartment or AirBnB situation with no local connections; and oddly, Mandarin speakers, especially new migrants: while many Hong Kongers can speak some Mandarin, it is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese, Hong Kong's primary language, and differs somewhat in terms of written form as well. Public bodies publish Mandarin versions of documents but there may be no one in an office whose Mandarin is good enough to really have a conversation with you, despite China being less than an hour away from anywhere in the city.
Overall, there's a really multilayered approach to getting the official message out and it's obviously very effective for Chinese speakers, quite to very effective for English speakers, and very variably effective depending on how much the government cares for everyone else. You will definitely see NO LITTERING signs in Indonesian and Tagalog, but never a POLLING PLACE sign. I've never heard of a kindergarten openly welcoming Nepali speaking parents with a Nepali language application form, but I have heard of kindergartens only offering them a Chinese language form hoping they don't enrol because they worry that having non-Chinese speaking students would bring down the school's reputation. And no Korean takeaway place would dare to put only English and Chinese on the menu, even if none of its customers and staff are Korean.
Language is power here, and if you don't speak one of the two prestige languages well, you know it.
posted by mdonley at 8:37 AM on August 18, 2016
- Almost all public employees are Chinese/English bilingual to varying degrees and all public and private written documentation that affects the public is available in both languages; I have lived here for four years and speak no Chinese at all and have zero bureaucratic difficulties aside from monolingual Chinese telemarketers. I don't even bother to ask if an official at the tax office or a postal worker speaks English; I just begin speaking. Many public-facing workers are explicitly trained to use English with non-Chinese-looking people even if they begin the interaction in Cantonese.
- English speakers are almost never at a disadvantage when dealing with official channels (though private businesses are a different matter, especially outside the urban core). Even if no English is written on a menu or in a shop someone inside or nearby invariably speaks some (or excellent!) English, perhaps even another patron. But really, English speakers living on Hong Kong Island and in the expat-heavy enclaves of Discovery Bay or Lamma Island may not need to deal with Chinese at all in daily life.
- HOWEVER, English is not the issue here. It's the treatment of the speakers of the other minority languages we have. Very few government officials are from ethnic minority communities because the need to be fluent in written and spoken Chinese as well as English de facto means that basically all government workers are ethnically Chinese. Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents are not native Chinese or English speakers, notably the Filipino and Indonesian domestic-helper/live-in maids, who total perhaps 300,000 individuals. We also have communities descended from generations-old migrations from around Asia, especially from the Indian subcontinent, and a permanent population of maybe a few thousand people from Africa and Latin America as well. Many of these people, especially those of south Asian descent, are far less affluent than the average Chinese-speaking Hong Konger, and without good Chinese language skills (which many do have), may end up excluded from university and in low-salary industries like food service and construction.
- More recent migration from Korea and Japan has been primarily very affluent and centred around the idea that these people are on temporary postings with existing Japanese/Korean companies; the government really only publishes tourist information in Japanese and Korean, as I think they assume they all have private healthcare and education and can manage the public services they need with English. This is the same for the 50,000+ French speakers here - it is assumed, I think, that all Europeans and anyone affluent can be dealt with in English.
- So going back to HK's local ethnic minority groups, the most VITAL information on issues of education, public safety and the law, health and other topics is available in minority-ethnic languages like Indonesian, Tagalog, Nepali, Hindi/Urdu, Thai, Burmese and Vietnamese through the government's gov.hk multilingual portal. The information isn't great or complete; the information on the environment available for Indonesian speakers talks more about littering than the hours of public beaches, for example. But it is much more than nothing and mostly organised well and would tell you, for example, the hours of a hospital or how to find out whether your child will be eligible for dental care and other basic information like this. Also, the likelihood that the reader will know an English or Chinese speaker intimately is extremely high - virtually all of Hong Kong's residents speak one or the other - so the information is not totally obscure, but does perhaps require a relationship with someone who can cross that linguistic barrier.
- The government also has an excellent app/service called 1823, which is a bit like calling 311 in the USA, a one-stop way to contact the local government. It is very efficient but you need to be a Chinese or English speaker to use it, though I imagine an interpreteer would be available on request and with some notice. From taxis who refuse your fare to complaining about a sagging tree in a public park, the service directs your complaint to the appropriate department and they have to follow up in your preferred language within X number of days. I have had calls and emails (email is much easier!) with the Transport Department and Police this way and successful outcomes each time.
- My local metro station has a poster reminding people that the minimum wage is what it is in all of the minority languages I mentioned above, I'm guessing because I live in a pretty working-class area with many (for HK, so perhaps 10%?) non-Chinese/non-English native speakers around. Posters vary based on the audience, I have noticed - Wan Chai, a district where in some neighbourhoods over 30% of the residents are not native Chinese speakers, has a much wider proliferation of multilingual public notices than, say, Northern district on the Chinese border, where maybe 2% of people are not Chinese readers. This information may be poorly targeted or out of date - I have seen, for example, a dusty, years-old public health leaflet display with documents in Urdu and Thai among others tucked into the corner of a museum gift shop.
- Notably, elections are only open to permanent residents. I have never seen an election ad in any language other than Chinese or, rarely and only on Hong Kong Island, English.
- Issues affecting one minority language community in particular (like enrolling Urdu-speaking children in kindergarten or representing abused Indonesian maids in court cases against their employers) are often managed by the government liaising with local, private organisations like Unison that work with that community to put on informational evenings and seminars. They are often attended by people who will not or cannot travel to the main hubs of government to seek out information on their own, or who do not have good-enough connections with the media and community at large to access "general knowledge".
- RTHK, HK's public radio broadcaster, has an "community inclusion" service mandate unlike HK's private stations, and puts on a comparatively large range of programming for minority language listeners, in which public affairs are very frequently discussed. Programmes are run by local organisations and this quarter include programmes in Tamil and Tagalog. Many of these programmes run in English though, because it is the lingua franca between everyone who is not Chinese here.
- People who fall through the cracks in terms of not getting written government messages firsthand and maybe needing to rely on others to pass it along: the old and illiterate (they are out there, especially among HK's oldest people, many of whom were refugees from the Chinese Civil War and never finished school); refugees, who are not allowed to work while their cases are in limbo and so suffer from extreme linguistic and social isolation; people semi-permanently here like foreign business travellers in and out of the city for a few months at a time in a services apartment or AirBnB situation with no local connections; and oddly, Mandarin speakers, especially new migrants: while many Hong Kongers can speak some Mandarin, it is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese, Hong Kong's primary language, and differs somewhat in terms of written form as well. Public bodies publish Mandarin versions of documents but there may be no one in an office whose Mandarin is good enough to really have a conversation with you, despite China being less than an hour away from anywhere in the city.
Overall, there's a really multilayered approach to getting the official message out and it's obviously very effective for Chinese speakers, quite to very effective for English speakers, and very variably effective depending on how much the government cares for everyone else. You will definitely see NO LITTERING signs in Indonesian and Tagalog, but never a POLLING PLACE sign. I've never heard of a kindergarten openly welcoming Nepali speaking parents with a Nepali language application form, but I have heard of kindergartens only offering them a Chinese language form hoping they don't enrol because they worry that having non-Chinese speaking students would bring down the school's reputation. And no Korean takeaway place would dare to put only English and Chinese on the menu, even if none of its customers and staff are Korean.
Language is power here, and if you don't speak one of the two prestige languages well, you know it.
posted by mdonley at 8:37 AM on August 18, 2016
Wow, thank you so much everybody!! I'm really excited to follow up on some of these.
The area I live in has a pretty small population of foreign people, so providing multilingual info isn't a top priority. Or rather, it's enough of a priority to say it's important, but not enough to get past issues like "which languages do we choose" and "what information would we provide." Having a wide variety of examples and resources on this is way helpful.
I signed up to Metafilter to ask this question. This is so cool. ^^ Thanks everybody.
posted by sacchan at 4:52 PM on August 18, 2016
The area I live in has a pretty small population of foreign people, so providing multilingual info isn't a top priority. Or rather, it's enough of a priority to say it's important, but not enough to get past issues like "which languages do we choose" and "what information would we provide." Having a wide variety of examples and resources on this is way helpful.
I signed up to Metafilter to ask this question. This is so cool. ^^ Thanks everybody.
posted by sacchan at 4:52 PM on August 18, 2016
« Older Seeking magical/whimsical art experiences. Will... | Getting rid of toxic roommate when "GTFO" isn't as... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by pompomtom at 10:04 PM on August 17, 2016