Thousands of New Yorkers who speak a language other than English are being deprived of translation services for everything from legal proceedings to applications for city services, according to City Comptroller Scott Stringer.
The city’s fiscal watchdog says the situation is a supply-and-demand problem: too few translators are available for the 1.2 million New Yorkers who speak a language at home that’s spoken by fewer than 100,000 (1%) of the city’s total population.
On Tuesday, Stringer announced that he’s asked Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson to consider an idea to close the translation gap: the creation of a Community Legal Interpreter Bank “to recruit, train and dispatch legal interpreters to legal services organizations across the city.”
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