Yet another year of change in our Fee-for-Service Department. If change is truly the spice of life, no wonder our department is such a lively place. Although we’ve had a few staff changes during the past year, our core of incredibly diligent and enthusiastic staff members proved again that they are prepared and ready for all new challenges.

Translations Department staff–Chava Glouberman, Tanja Krzman, Veronica D’Angelo, Alice Lian and our newest staff member, Rachna Bhagi–managed to not only improve their already considerable efficiency, but also introduce a number of new quality control measures. As much as the success of the Translation Department ought to be viewed as a team accomplishment, Veronica D’Angelo’s accomplishment deserves a special mention. During the past year, she was not only a great team member, but also became mother to a baby boy, affectionately called “translations baby tm” by department staff.

Once again, we upgraded our hardware and software to keep up with publishing and printing houses. We’re now equipped with a number of software packages which enable us to provide desktop publishing services in over 65 languages.

Our translation fund–established in 1997–proved to be a big success, and we will be replenishing the fund again for this year.

The Interpretations Department kept up its incredible pace over the last year. In addition to handling more than 20,000 intakes, our hard-working, incredibly efficient and dedicated staff–Bessy Ferris, Joyce Chan, Kian Ghaffari and Phung Ho–succeeded in improving our emergency services. We have now been contracted as the emergency interpreting services provider for the Ministry of Children and Families. In the spirit of healthy competition with Veronica, Claudia Jonsson (who formerly worked only for the Interpretations Department) demonstrated that she was capable of learning the complicated procedures of the Translations Department and became a valuable help for Tanja and Chava. As well, she successfully completed a number of courses at Simon Fraser University (she’s majoring in both French and Spanish while concurrently completing a TESEL certificate) and, not to be outdone by Veronica, gave birth to her second baby!

As a result of the diligent efforts of Amy Yu, our Project Supervisor, we managed to secure our major contracts with MHR, WCB, and others, as well as to dramatically improve our quality control. Our cash flow and accounting system were much improved due to Nicole Delplace’s work in collections and due to the overall streamlining of the entire accounting process.

The Translation Demonstration Project was an important partnership undertaking for us over the past year. We provided translation services and input on translation standards for the project, which ultimately developed its own WEB site (www.healthtrans.org). Information made available at the website includes multilingual health-related documents which were translated in accordance with standards developed by this project.

We remained actively involved in lobbying for quality interpreting and translation services during the past year. We firmly believe that equal access to services is an undeniable right of every person. We know that language is one of the major barriers people encounter in their everyday lives.

Our plans for the future? We’ll work on further improvement of our quality control, we plan to maintain, expand and diversify our client base, and we’ll continue our quest for equal access to services for people with language barriers.

Jiri Adler
Director

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