MOJ spends £23m a year on translators

Government officials have spent £450,000 a week on language experts to provide translations for foreign language-speaking criminals and people caught up in the UK’S legal system. The Ministry of Justice spent £23.4million on a total of 143 dialects including Oromo and Bravanese.

GOVERNMENT officials have spent £450,000 a week on language experts to provide translation services to foreign language-speaking criminals and people caught up in the UK’S legal system.

Ministry of Justice officials spent £23.4million between April 2019 and March 2020 for a total of 143 different dialects, including £20,000 on Oromo and £1,000 on Bravanese. Most of the money is spent providing expert assistance to foreign language-speaking crime suspects, who need legal papers translated and then require an interpreter for their trial proceedings.

This year’s bill for translating legal cases increased eight per cent on the figure of £21.6million for the previous 12 months between April 2018 and March 2019.

Much of the spending was on Polish, Lithuanian and Romanian speakers. There were also big spends on Bengali, Punjabi and Urdu speakers.

The figures were released in response to a Freedom of Information request. It is not clear if the number of crime suspects requiring the translation service has increased, or the cost of the services has increased.

Some costs covered lesser spoken languages, including a £418 spend on providing interpreters for somebody who spoke Cebuano, a language spoken by people from parts of the southern Philippines. It is the major language spoken in the Philippines’ Visayan Islands and has around 16million native speakers.

The service, paid for by the Ministry of Justice, also provided translation and interpretation for a total of three different versions of creole, at a cost of £23,000. The services provided include face to face interpreting, telephone interpreting and written translation and transcription.

A total of £1,000 was spent on Bravanese, a language spoken in Somalia, which is also called Chimwiini or Chimbalazi and is spoken by the Bravanese people, the predominant inhabitants of Barawa, the capital of the South West state of Somalia. Speakers of

Oromo, which is spoken in parts of Ethiopia, received £20,000 of funding. Oromo is the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, numbering about 37million and representing 34.5 per cent of the population.

Just over £42,000 was spent on providing interpreters for Welsh speakers and £2,500 on Edo, which is a regional dialect in Nigeria and was spoken by about 1.6 million people in 2015 according to Ethnologue – an annual publication that provides statistics on living languages across the world.

The lowest spend was just £2 for Zulu speakers, followed by £40 for Swedish speakers. Just £53.90 was spent on speakers of Kinyamulenge, a language spoken by the Banyamulenge

– a Tutsi ethnic minority in the Democratic Republic of Congo and who originally come from Rwanda. Translation services for Arabic speakers cost £1.26million, the fifth highest spend.

James Roberts, political director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Taxpayers will be lost for words to hear the bill for translations has once again gone up.

“There will always be some cases where a translator is needed to give everyone a fair shot at justice, but those who live in Britain should learn to speak English so that they are not a continuing burden on taxpayers.”

A MOJ spokesperson said: “Foreign criminals could not be convicted without interpreters but we always seek best value for the taxpayer.”