Agencies (including Legal Aid organizations) have many options when deciding how they will serve LEP clients. One of the most favorable of these options is hiring bilingual staff people. This is preferential because they are on-site during the workday, they understand the agency’s policies and procedures, and clients are likely to feel more comfortable if they do not have to speak through an interpreter.

It is easy, however, to take advantage of the convenience of having a bilingual staff person by overusing their services, leading to their burnout.Overuse of bilingual staff by non-bilingual staff for interpretation or translation purposes usually happens very innocently. The non-bilingual staff person may have a “quick phone call” for which they need an interpreter or a “short letter” that needs to be translated. While a single request for this type of assistance may not be problematic, the bilingual staff person may be receiving these types of requests from many non-bilingual staff. Taken together, these “quick” translating/interpreting requests can account for a substantial portion of the bilingual staff person’s work time, impairing their ability to fulfill their regular job duties.

With a little planning, it is possible to avoid overusing your bilingual staff. First, job descriptions for bilingual staff must be written specifically enough so that the staff person knows in which situations he or she is expected to translate/interpret for another staff person. Job descriptions for bilingual and non-bilingual staff should be written so that the overall workloads will be comparable, instead of expecting a bilingual staff person to handle the same workload as a non-bilingual colleague while also fulfilling some or all of the agency’s language access needs.

Agencies must also develop clear guidelines regarding when it is appropriate to have a bilingual staff person assist in communication with LEP clients and when an outside interpreter or translator should be accessed. After a plan is established, all staff need training on what the guidelines are and how to apply them. This will insure that they only ask a bilingual staff person to translate or interpret when it is acceptable to do so. The process of accessing an outside interpreter should be made as simple as possible to increase the likelihood that non-bilingual staff will follow the guidelines.

By Anne Struby, Staff Attorney, Legal Services of Western Missouri