Following significant media interest in our investigation into how UK councils manage their translation spend, we want to clarify both the findings and Lingo24’s own view on how the situation could be improved.

The key findings were:

• UK councils spent just under £20m on translation in 2009
• The policies and budgets of individual councils differ tremendously, with no evidence of consistent government policy or a discernible relationship between translation spend and size of ethnic minority population
• The majority of councils are not aware of important translation-related technologies they, or their suppliers, should be using to keep costs low, such as translation memory software
• Many councils are spending money on the translation of documents of questionable importance, such as ‘guidance on feeding pigeons’.

To be clear, we fully support expenditure on translation by councils. We believe many councils’ budgets should actually be larger if they are to serve the translation needs of their community in a professional way. But we believe the way in which councils’ translation needs are organised needs a radical overhaul for taxpayers to feel confident their councils are getting value for money.

Lingo24 originally undertook this investigation to see if we could help councils optimise their translation spend, and our conclusion is that the current overall set-up could be significantly improved.

We’d propose the Local Government Association (LGA) or another government body tenders out the running of a centralised translation repository through which all councils’ translation requirements are ordered. Whenever there was a new requirement for translation, the text would be matched against previously translated material. Any sentences or phrases which had previously been professionally translated by another council would not need to be translated again. This would save time, reduce cost and improve terminology consistency both within and between councils.

The LGA should also give much clearer guidelines on what needs to be translated. It doesn’t seem fair that requests for translation often come from the foreign language speakers themselves – under such a system, many people who need translations but don’t know how to voice this need simply don’t get the service they require.

We think council documents should be classed at source as being important enough to be translated, and that the decision to translate should be based on the number of speakers of a given language who’d need the document. If councils had accurate statistics on the real language situation within their geographies, they would be better prepared to decide on an appropriate strategy, which would include but not be restricted to translation. They could manage the language barrier much more effectively, and bring in supplementary measures such as English lessons for smaller minority groups to bring the overall cost of translation to the taxpayer down.

The recommendations above are necessarily simplistic, but Lingo24 intends to approach the LGA with more detailed proposals in the near future. If you work for a council and order translation and would like to contribute to the discussions, we’d be delighted to hear from you – please contact us via Twitter.