A story from India shows us how even local elected officials can find themselves in need of language services.

India is one of the world’s most complex linguistic patchworks.

According to the 2001 census, 30 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000. (Another census took place in 2011, but language data does not appear to be available yet.)

This diversity can lead to some intriguing situations, such as the one in which the mayor, the deputy mayor and other elected officials of a city need interpreting equipment to understand each other:

“In a move that has raised several eyebrows in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), the new Mayor who does not follow Telugu language has put forward a proposal to purchase multilingual interpretation equipment to listen and understand the proceedings during the standing committee meetings. This is on the lines of Parliament and Legislative Assembly and the GHMC is expected to acquire the simultaneous multilingual interpretation equipment soon. According to sources, this has become necessary as a majority of the corporators [officials], including Mayor Majid Hussain and deputy mayor G Raj Kumar, are not able to understand 'other languages'. ‘The Mayor does not understand Telugu, while the deputy mayor does not know Hindi or Urdu,’ sources said.”

Source: IBNLive.com

This all sounded a bit comical, or even anecdotal, until I checked the population of the city involved: Hyderabad. It is India’s 4^th most populated city, with nearly 7 million people within the city limits.

The language gap is actually not that surprising, given the number of languages spoken in India.

Betty Carlson

See Also

• Language Translation, Inc.
  A leading language translation and interpretation service provider for more than 20 years.