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Talking Trash: Throwing Out the Big Apple

Public Access Design

Language Rights are Civil Rights!

If you don’t speak English in NYC and you’re trying to access government services, NYC and NY State’s innovative language access laws guarantee you the right to the assistance of an interpreter. But many immigrant communities aren’t aware of this right and routinely lose access to critical services because they don’t speak English. In 2012, CUP worked with designer Melissa Gorman and the Language Access Project at Legal Services-NYC to create Language Rights Are Civil Rights!, a wallet-size foldout on language access that you can also use to ask for an interpreter.

This issue of Public Access Design is fully translated into Spanish, Chinese, Bengali, Russian, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Urdu, Korean, Polish, and French – the 10 most commonly spoken languages of the city’s limited English proficient population.