It turns out the mortgage crisis was good – for the translation business.
Local translation companies are seeing a boost in business from a new law requiring key terms of mortgage documents to be translated into the language spoken by the borrower.
AB 1160, by Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-Mountain View, took effect July 1. It requires mortgage lenders to translate loan terms into five languages commonly used by non-English-speaking borrowers in California: Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Korean.
The bill came in response to complaints that borrowers often did not understand the terms of the mortgage loans they were signing, especially if they did not speak English. There are translation requirements for other types of credit, such as auto loans, but there had been no requirement for mortgage loans.
“We’ve added about four new Spanish translation teams and are hiring additional contractors, with much of this growth resulting from this new law,” said George Rimalower, president of ISI Translation Services in North Hollywood. Teams consist of four: a translator, editor, internal reviewer and a proofer.
The new hires have swelled ISI’s internal staff to 21 from 17. The company also uses a couple of dozen independent contractors.
Another company, JR Language Translation Services in the Mid-Wilshire District, expects to see more business in the next few months.
“In the last two months, we have seen an increase in banks asking for estimates on how much it would cost to translate mortgage documents,” said Jackie d’Empaire, project manager for JR Language Translation.
There also may be
more work to come as a result of state mandates. Rimalower said his company is also starting to see a pickup in translation requests from pharmacies and prescription drug makers in anticipation of laws requiring translations of prescription drug labels.
