Interpreters and translators from the Language Factory have been training and increasing their skills in order to assist public housing residents in many aspects of their lives.

They are assisting in many aspects of community life including providing assistance for drug and alcohol treatment and prevention, and for the community planning and consultation processes surrounding the Fitzroy and Richmond estate redevelopments.

Language Factory interpreters and translators recently attended a workshop run by Turning Point to learn more about how to interpret effectively on topics around drug and alcohol treatment and prevention.

Language Factory is a social enterprise and a community resource that aims to provide affordable and responsive interpreting and translation services to diverse sectors of the community; government, non-government & community organisations.

The initiative has developed capacity in interpreting and translation in several languages of which some are Oromo, Dari, Indonesian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Totem, Croatian, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Dinka, Cantonese, Macedonian, Arabic, Hakka, Somali and Turkish.

The aim of the Language Factory initiative is to generate employment and learning opportunities for public housing tenants through the partnership of agencies and community resources.

Public Housing residents employed by Language factory are continually encouraged and assisted to enhance and increase their skills and capacity to work.  This allows them to help make their community a better place to live and improve the responsiveness of government, local services and the community in supporting public housing residents.

The social enterprise program provides translation and interpretation services to different types of meetings, such as a transition group, and information sessions regarding community and safety, health and well being and election information.

They also assist in interpreting tenant meetings, board meetings, workshops, development meetings and some individual private matters.

The Language Factory enterprise came out of the Infoxchange Australia Digital Inclusion Social Development Program, and is now participating in, and making a significant contribution to the extremely important consultation process for the inner city public housing estate redevelopments.

Participants of the Language factory program are assisting the City of Yarra in the transition process for the Fitzroy and Richmond public housing redevelopment projects by communicating the redevelopment plans to residents who, due to language barriers, may not otherwise understand the process.

To ensure the success of the housing redevelopment projects, the Language Factory employees have been assisting a public housing transition and governance group with consultation and community planning processes to improve and increase tenant participation across the City of Yarra.

As part of the transition process, the interpreters have so far translated four different documents  into Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese and Somali, Hindi and Panjabi, and have assisted in interpreting 6 series of development sessions in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Mandarin, Dinka and Arabic and Vietnamese.

The fact that over 38 different languages are spoken in inner city communities ensures a large number of interpretation jobs need to be filled in order to keep the wider community engaged with issues and changes. This makes the Language Factory an extremely valuable community resource.

For more information on Language Factory, visit the website or email the staff on  info@languagefactory.org.au.
To find out more about  Turning Point visit http://www.turningpoint.org.au/