UK translation SCANDAL

Town halls and Whitehall spend 50 million sterling a year on translation and interpretation for the benefit of people who cannot speak English.

It is a well-intended initiative which is meant to offer immigrants a helping hand.

Yet now an investigation has found that many of the expensively-produced foreign-language leaflets have never been read.

Documents which have failed to attract a single reader include a pamphlet for gipsies translated into Polish, and a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender directory translated into French.

No-one read the Haringey Women's Directory when it was translated into Albanian, Bengali, Kurdish, Somali or Urdu.

All were made available by Haringey council, in north London, on its website, which records the number of times each document is downloaded.

A spokesman for Haringey Council said: There are some 193 different languages spoken. We generally offer translations where required rather than translate routinely.

"Where translations are produced they will be made available on our website as an additional service"

Dudley council, in the West Midlands, produced two leaflets that were only read once each: one called "Information for Parents and Carers" translated into Gujarati, and one called "Information for Young People" translated into Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Punjabi and Urdu.

Yet the growth in spending on translation comes despite a call in 2007 by Hazel Blears, then the communities secretary, for councils to think twice before translating documents.

She argued that the integration of established immigrant communities was better achieved by encouraging them to learn English, rather than providing paperwork in their native tongues.

Only a handful of councils were able to say how many times translated documents had been read online.

Haringey admitted that of 77 translated documents it published online, 26 were never viewed. Most of the rest were only viewed once or twice.

Further Haringey documents that were never viewed include a "carer's assessment" form in Hindi, Kurdish, Punjabi, and Somali, and a "frequently asked questions about the new secondary school" pamphlet in Polish, Somali and Turkish.

Haringey translated into Albanian, Kurdish and Somali a leaflet for recommending council staff for internal awards. Only 12 people ever viewed the documents.

The council also translated into French, Greek, Kurdish, Somali and Turkish, an "unsung women's awards" form, which was read by seven people.

Across the UK, Polish was the most commonly-used foreign tongue, with 254 councils translating documents into the language. It was followed by Chinese, into which 227 translated documents.

Obscure languages into which only a single council translated documents include Karen, spoken in eastern Burma, Ga, spoken in Ghana, Sierra Leonean Creole, and Yiddish. Two councils translated documents into Jamaican patois.

The public bodies which spent the most on translations last year were the Metropolitan Police (10.6 million), the Department for Work and Pensions (4 million), West Midlands Police (2.3 million), the Welsh Assembly (2 million) and the Crown Prosecution Service (1.5 million).

The five biggest spending councils in the same year were Glasgow (433,470), Haringey (386,665), Birmingham (361,096), Southwark (360,999) and Sheffield (360,000).

Matthew Elliott, chief executive at the TaxPayers' Alliance, said the findings were evidence that local authorities and Government departments seemed to have "lost touch with reality".

"Spending taxpayers' hard-earned cash on translation services that no one will ever use is shocking," he said.

"If they have surplus money, ordinary families need it back, it shouldn't be wasted on pamphlets people clearly neither want nor need."

Sayeeda Warsi, the shadow minister for community cohesion and social action, called the revelations a "colossal waste of taxpayers' money that flies in the face of common sense".

"Instead of translating documents which no-one is going to read, they should have spent the money on teaching people English," she said.