How do you provide services to someone who doesn't speak English?
Use a bilingual staff member? A family member? A language line?
Each of these possibilities has limitation and risks. Untrained interpreters can make costly and even dangerous mistakes.
What is your legal responsability?
In the United States, all programs and services receiving feferal funds are required to provide language access for all Limited English Proficient (LEP) clients who seek their services.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act
VOICES helps bridge the gap of language and culture by creaging a pool of professionally trained interpreters to assist clients in accessing services in their community. This fee based program provides trained and skilled spoken language interpreters in over a dozen languages in the Greater Tampa Bay and Miami-Dade areas.This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement and the Florida Department of Children and Families, Office of Refugee Services.
