Teaching Tools, Strategies, and Resources, continued

Exercise 1. Planning Language Services for Linguistically Diverse Groups, continued

Step 3. Devise a language services plan that best meets the language preferences and needs of the entire system or organization. First, it may be necessary to create for this purpose a group that includes key stakeholders, clinicians, and frontline staff. In other instances, use existing community advisory committees or other structures to inform this process. Give careful consideration to the most appropriate mix of the following:

• telephonic interpreting;
• contract interpreters provided by an outside agency or language bank;
• trained dual-role staff interpreters (considering the percentage of time they should devote to interpreting and the burden on other staff members and their supervisors, and also considering pay differentials for this added skill);
• dedicated trained and/or certified professional interpreters for specific languages and locations of high need whose only job is to provide language services; and
• translation of signage, legal forms and related documents, and other written materials.

Suggested Strategies for Implementing Step 3

Several resources, including Hablamos Juntos (http://www.hablamosjuntos.org) and The California Endowment Web sites (http://www.calendow.org/), are available to assist with planning processes.

Additionally, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Public Health has downloadable assistance for implementing internal procedures for interpretation services at http://www.state.ma.us/dph. The Center for Applied Linguistics (http://www.cal.org/) and the American Translators Associations
(http://www.atanet.org/) have general information on interpretation and translation.