Sustainability Initiative
Immigrant Services needs your support to be able to run our community-based Translation and Interpretation Program Services (TIPS) a service that is essential to the families of many immigrants.
These examples will let you know how important this service is for the whole community of Guelph and Wellington.
In a parent teacher meeting, parents who cannot communicate in English usually have to rely on their children to act as a conduit for information. You can imagine how hard it is for the child to be the interpreter in this case and how demoralizing it is for the parents to have to rely on their child to convey a simple yet important message. An independent interpreter could have saved them this agony as well as maintaining confidentiality and the professionalism needed in this situation
Imagine an elderly person who does not have any member of her family close to her. She has been brought to the emergency departmentand all she can concey is the pain and the area of the pain. In normal circumstances she can communicate enough to get by for her daily life, but not when she is in distress with pain and severe physical symptoms. The nurses and the physician on duty are also troubled by the lack of communication. The situation is becoming more and more complicated and in a busy emergency room time is valuable and a trained interpreter could have been instrumental in saving life and saving money.
A woman with acute paranoid symptoms finds her way to a mental health clinic, no one can understand her and no one can identify that what the problem is. An immediate call to Immigrant Services enabled the mental health nurse to secure an interpreter.
There are many other cases where having a trained interpreter saves time for service providers and prevents a crisis for the client.
Would you consider supporting Immigrant Services and the TIPS? Your donation to this program has a triple effect:
- Help new immigrants with language difficulties to access services in their time of need;
- Help community organizations spend less time and energy assisting their clients with language barriers;
- Provide community interpreters and translators with an opportunity for additional training and to build their own professional networks within the community.
