Location: San Diego County

The Objective: For over 5 years, Trans-Lang has provided the Legal Aid Society of San Diego (LASSD) – a provider of free civil legal assistance for low-income clients – language support including: on-site and video remote interpreting, translation of documents and language examination for newly hired employees.

Primarily, Trans-Lang provides the critical service of translation of documents related to the legal proceedings the Legal Aid Society of San Diego undertakes for its clients. These documents include everything from discovery material to client statements to the translation of marriage certificates.

Trans-Lang also provides on-site interpreting for client/attorney interviews that are an important part of the intake process for the Legal Aid Society.

Lastly, Trans-Lang routinely provides language examination for new-hires at the Legal Aid Society. Our staff includes language exam raters certified by the State of California who determine if a candidate meets the minimum fluency requirements necessary to communicate with non-English speakers or for whom English is not a primary language.

Unique Challenges: The variety of content and languages make our work with the Legal Aid Society uniquely challenging. Although work in to and out of Spanish makes up approximately 70% of our work with the LASSD, we have worked with them in over half a dozen other languages including Tagalog, Russian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Farsi and Chinese.

Solutions to problems encountered: What makes our working relationship with the LASSD valuable is that we provide a range of services in a multitude of languages. The LASSD knows that it can come to us with any language service request and even if we don’t provide it as a core service, we will find a solution to their problem.

Final outcome: Our work-levels with the LASSD have continued to increase throughout the years. We also offer many more services know that what we initially started out with. In addition to translation, on-site and video remote interpreting and language examination, Trans-Lang looks forward to solving any language service need the LASSD encounters, thereby enabling them to continue their important work of helping underserved low-income clients with the legal services they need to support themselves and their communities.