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 a tenth of that sort of money on teaching immigrants how to speak English?
Once everybody can speak the common language, then not only do we all understand each other, but also there’s no translation service industry wasting £Millions.
The alternative is a huge never-ending industry of translation services and that is unacceptable in the current economic climate. Completely unacceptable.
England's England 
My guess is they need those interpreters mostly to deal with situations where there is no time to “teach immigrants” i.e. a court hearing, deportation of illegal immigrants and so on…
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