TransPerfect Donates Services to Aid New York City COVID-19 Response

Mayor Publicly Recognizes TransPerfect for Providing Pro Bono Translations to Assist New York City in Communicating with Culturally Diverse Residents

NEW YORK, August 3, 2020 – TransPerfect, the world’s largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business, announced its engagement with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Communications Department as well as the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) to translate critical information and communications pertaining to the city’s COVID-19 response. TransPerfect is donating all requested services. 

Mayor de Blasio and team understood the critical need for accessible communications to ensure safety as well as access to aid programs and municipal services. The city accepted TransPerfect’s offer to provide translation services free of charge for these official communications. To date, TransPerfect has translated critical information related to: social distancing guidance, face covering recommendations, hate and bias awareness, animal FAQs, and unemployment benefits information, as well as tweets coming from Mayor de Blasio. 

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New York City is one of the most linguistically diverse populations in the world, and making communications accessible to as many residents as possible required translations in as many as 30 languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dari, Farsi, French, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Igbo, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Tibetan, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yiddish, and Yoruba.

Given the rapidly evolving pandemic situation, most requests have had rush turnaround times, often demanding translation, formatting, and desktop publishing for multiple languages on 24- to 48-hour timetables. 

Mayor de Blasio commented in televised remarks, “I’m feeling tremendous gratitude as we go on in this crisis [to] all the people who have stepped up…TransPerfect, which is focused on a very particular need right now, making sure we can help people get what they need in the language they speak…we thank them for that.” 

A representative from the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs stated, “We want to express our thanks to TransPerfect for all this generosity during this difficult time. We are very grateful that through this offer, we were able to render critical information to our communities in over 20 languages.”

TransPerfect President and CEO Phil Shawe remarked, “TransPerfect was founded in New York City, and it has been home to our global headquarters ever since. We consider ourselves very fortunate to be in a position to contribute to the city’s fight against COVID-19, and we thank the Mayor and his staff for allowing us to help.”

About TransPerfect

TransPerfect is the world’s largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business. From offices in over 100 cities on six continents, TransPerfect offers a full range of services in 170+ languages to clients worldwide. More than 5,000 global organizations employ TransPerfect’s GlobalLink^® Product Suite to simplify management of multilingual content. With an unparalleled commitment to quality and client service, TransPerfect is fully ISO 9001 and ISO 17100 certified. TransPerfect has global headquarters in New York, with regional headquarters in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit our website at www.transperfect.com.