Link to: Johnson County’s increasingly multilingual nature is posing challenges.

It took a little time to get this particular ball rolling but thanks to our own Kathy Brown, esq. and a Johnson County Sun reporter Mr. Loren Stanton exposes another example of how citizens pay for the non-English speaking immigrants. BB

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Written by Loren Stanton

Wednesday, 09 December 2009

>snip< Language interpretation services have become essential to police, fire, ambulance, hospital and court personnel. In fact, applicants for jobs in any of those fields often have an edge these days if they can speak a foreign language.
Spanish speakers are most frequently in need of interpretive help, but a host of other languages are encountered.

Overland Park Municipal Court dealt with individuals speaking 19 languages in 2008, including Mandarin, Samoan, Swahili, Vietnamese, Korean, Punjabi and Cantonese.

>snip< Providing these relatively new services comes at a price. Johnson County District Court pays a full-time language coordinator more than $60,000 annually in salary and benefits. The court pays another $120,000 to $140,000 a year for interpretive services the coordinator cannot personally provide.

(Please go to the above link for the entire story.  BB)