-- One in Five Americans Speaks a Language Other Than English at Home. Organizations encounter difficulty obtaining rare language interpreting and translation services.
Capital Linguists calls attention to a growing rare language interpretation/translation gap in American courts, hospitals, schools, and elsewhere.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — About 21.5 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Of that group, roughly 8.2 percent describe their English proficiency as below "well." These two figures represent tens of millions of people with Limited English Proficiency (LEP), many of whom walk into hospitals, courtrooms, and/or school offices, and in doing so oftentimes create challenges for those hospitals, courtrooms, and schools that might struggle to find qualified interpreters to help them communicate.
There are at least 350 languages spoken in American households, according to the Census Bureau count. Machine translation platforms do not even come close to covering all of them. Google Translate reached 240 languages after its largest expansion in 2024. Ethnologue, the most cited language catalog in the field, counts more than 7,100 living languages. For every language that falls outside commercial coverage, human interpreters are the only option, and qualified ones remain scarce.
Capital Linguists, a US-based translation and interpreting agency, delivers consecutive interpreting, simultaneous interpreting, document translation, subtitling, transcreation, and website localization across more than 200+ language pairs and combinations, with dedicated coverage for many rare, hard-to-find, and indigenous language pairs. With a network of more than 10,000 linguists, the agency has tracked a steady rise in rare language requests across legal, medical, and social service settings.
Managing Director Philip Rosen, MA, has seen this gap widen in real time.
"What we see more and more is institutions running into barriers trying to obtain rare language interpretation and translation services…" said Rosen. "A patient presents, a witness testifies, a student’s parents arrive, and the parties involved need interpretation between those rare languages and English. This gap is not a niche problem anymore, but has taken on more salience in the last five years, showing up daily in many places across America."
Some of the most in-demand rare languages and languages of limited diffusion reflect specific migration patterns. Minnesota holds the largest Somali-American, Hmong-American, and Karen-American populations in the country, along with the second-largest Tibetan-American community. California and Florida host growing communities of Mayan language speakers, Q'anjob'al (Kanjobal), Mam (Yol Mam or Qyol Mam), and Akateko (pronounced Ah-kah-teh-ko), among them, many of whom have limited or no Spanish proficiency. If a speaker of Akateko has limited Spanish, then a Spanish interpreter will not suffice. While California and Minnesota hold the largest concentrations of these communities, Capital Linguists draws upon a nationwide pool of interpreters to deliver telephonic interpreting, consecutive Video Remote Interpreting (VRI), and Remote Simultaneous Interpretation (RSI) to rare language speakers and their service providers nationwide.
Healthcare interpreting and legal interpreting place identical demands on dialect precision, and both carry legal liability when precision fails. For urgent needs in hospitals or courtrooms, on-demand telephone interpreting (OPI) and video remote interpreting (VRI) connects staff with rare language specialists in seconds, bypassing the geographic scarcity of on-site interpreters.
Challenges compound for languages with recently standardized or digitally under-supported scripts. Karenni, or Red Karen known in Burmese as Kayah is spoken by roughly half a million people from Myanmar's Kayah State, and uses Kayah Li script, a writing system created in 1962 with limited digital resources. Because scripts like Kayah Li often lack robust digital support, Capital Linguists' software localization and desktop publishing (DTP) teams work to make sure translated materials display without error across all digital and print platforms. Dinka, spoken across South Sudan, splits into dialects so distinct that a Dinka Rek interpreter cannot follow Dinka Bor. Matching the right dialect to the right speaker is not a minor detail. In a healthcare interpreting or legal interpreting assignment, it is a big part of the entire job.
When no single interpreter covers both the source and target languages, relay interpreting becomes necessary. Mixteco (Tu'un Savi) is spoken by the Mixtec community (Nuu Savi) concentrated in California, with growing populations in New York, Oregon, and Florida. When a witness speaks Mixteco in a courtroom and no Mixteco/English interpreters are available, it is requisite to use two interpreters – one Mixteco/Spanish interpreter and one Spanish/English interpreter – in such an instance, the Mixteco/Spanish interpreter will interpret into Spanish while the second interpreter will work from Spanish into English and vice versa. When needed to support simultaneous interpretation, Capital Linguists provides simultaneous interpretation equipment, including soundproof booths and multichannel wireless headsets and receivers, ensuring that every listener receives a clear, uninterrupted sound feed of the interpretation.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act both require federally funded programs to provide language access for people with limited English proficiency (LEP). For rare and hard-to-find languages, that obligation is hardest to meet and sometimes left unaddressed.
Capital Linguists handles rare language interpretation assignments through on-demand telephone interpreting (OPI), video remote interpreting (VRI), remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI), and on-site interpreting when practicable. On the translation side, each assignment goes through a TEP process, meaning a qualified translator and a second linguist editor both review the work before delivery. An ISO 9001-certified quality management system and ISO 17100 translation services standards govern a strict vetting process so that even for the rarest dialects, every linguist has at least five years of professional experience. All linguists sign confidentiality agreements before any assignment commences. Each project has a dedicated project manager who coordinates hiring of translators, editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, etc.
"Every language pair we add means that more service providers and companies are able to communicate with rare-language speakers and that in turn helps LEPs access legal and medical services," said Rosen.
About Capital Linguists
Capital Linguists is a provider of translation, interpreting, and interpretation and audiovisual equipment working in more than 200+ languages with a network of more than 10,000 linguists, Capital Linguists operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Contact Info:
Name: Philip Rosen
Email: Send Email
Organization: Capital Linguists
Website: https://capitallinguists.com/
Release ID: 89195826
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