I keep seeing adverts in my local paper for Interpreters. Somebody, I think it is either local government or the NHS or someone like that, wants an interpreter capable of being there to translate English to Arabic and back. Or English to Bulgarian. They want another to do English to Cantonese. Another doing English to Czech. A fifth doing English to Czech Slovak. There’s also English to Kurdish. And English to Mandarin. English to Pashto. English to Persian Farsi. A tenth doing English to Polish. Next is English to Russian. Then English to Somali. English to Tamil. And finally, number 14 is English to Turkish.
Ok, let’s explain this again. They are looking to employ 14 interpreters. Each will get paid at approximately £15 an hour for their skills. Over a (say) 40 hour week that’s £600 a week, each. There are to be 14 of them, so that’s £8,400 a week these people will cost. That’s not far off half a Million Pounds a year. That’s year in year out, forever.
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| “Sorry, I can’t translate the word ‘wanker’ for you” |
Half a Million Pounds a year for people to keep translating things from other languages into English and back again? And that’s just in Liverpool. Crazy.
Surely it would make far more sense and save so much more money in the long term, not to mention add to community cohesion rather than division and isolation, to be spending that sort of money on teaching immigrants how to speak English?
The alternative is a huge industry of translation services and that is unacceptable in the current economic climate. Completely unacceptable.
England's England 
I heard that the word 'wanker' translates to the same in any language: 'Christopher England'.
Ho ho ho. Happy Christmas.
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