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Multilingual Issues (Summary)
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SUMMARY

SCOPE
This guideline covers the technical aspects of multilingual provision and information retrieval. It also covers to some extent the social inclusion policy issues involved in the provision of services to a multilingual community.

POLICY ISSUES
Multilingual communities may be composed of

1. a native population combined with one or more groups on immigrants. Immigrants may be very recent arrivals or they may be members of communities which have lived in the country for more than a generation.

2. a native population which has always been bilingual, in which case part of the native population is a linguistic minority. The minority language may or may not be recognised by the government of the country, and may or may not be a written language.

Libraries will have complex decisions of policy to make in relation to these different possibilities.

GOOD PRACTICE GUIDELINES

• Libraries serving areas containing an immigrant population must provide effective services to that community, and this may involve carrying out surveys of the catchment area to ensure that services are relevant.

• The recruitment of suitably qualified staff is possibly the single most important measure which a library can take to deal with the problems of an ethnic minority. Staffing should reflect the ethnic composition of the area. Native speakers of minority languages should be recruited to help with various aspects of the services.

• The website of the library should be addressed to any minority communities which the library serves and the design of the libraries website should be thoughtfully designed with bilingualism built into it from the start.

• Multilingual thesauri are vital if cross-linguistic information retrieval is to function as well as the problems of word processing in languages which do not use the Roman alphabet. This may be a practical problem for some libraries which have to provide such facilities to a local minority.

• Machine translation is a technology which has not lived up to its promise though it may be useful for certain purposes.

FUTURE AGENDA
The future should see improvements in the provision for ethnic minorities along the lines of the example set by the Nordic countries. Voice to voice translation.

Home | Technical Responses to 
Multilingual Issues (Summary)
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