Practitioners’ Corner: A Guide to the Language Portal
By Laureen Laglagaron, Policy Analyst
National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy
Migration Policy Institute

The Language Portal is a digital library of close to 600 resources relating to the use of language access services in social services and public safety agencies.  The Portal includes legal guidelines, service models, master contracts for service providers, hourly translation and interpretation rates for different languages in key areas of the United States, pay differentials for multilingual staff, and sample translated documents.

Developed with guidance from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Language Access Practitioner’s Network and support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy has sought to leverage existing knowledge and expertise on language access issues and services through the creation and launch of our Language Portal. 

We begin our project as states and localities increasingly provide services to Limited English Proficient (LEP) immigrants, a response to high sustained flows and greater dispersal of immigrants.  Not only are immigrants moving to new growth states such as North Carolina and Nevada, they are moving to new suburban and exurban destinations.  However, there is very limited national or federal leadership on how best to bridge communication barriers between local government agencies and their LEP immigrant clients.  Consequently, state and local agencies in new growth areas face significant political and economic challenges as they seek to quickly build their knowledge in the establishment of high-quality, affordable translation and interpretation services.

The Portal’s search engine is primarily designed for government agency administrators who seek to create or strengthen existing language access services.  Initial documents within our digital library were obtained through extensive research and through the contributions of practitioners from various agencies and levels of government.  We hope that our Language Portal will be a catalyst for practitioners to share existing knowledge with their peers nationwide, and we plan to develop the depth and breadth of this digital library through suggestions from practitioners and the contribution of additional documents.

To use the Language Portal, you may perform a basic search by typing in search words of your choosing (for example, “Chinese” or “public safety”) or you may perform an advanced search.  With the advanced search option, you may select by state, service area (social services, health care, education, or public safety), language, and/or service delivery component (telephone hotline, case management, legal decision).  We have also provided several keywords you may select individually or in combination to aid your search for documents.  For example, a search may yield

• special rates of pay for employees whose jobs require communication in a language other than English;
• an interpretation and translation services fixed price contract;
• a police directive for sign/foreign language interpreters;
• a language assistance plan.