The National Police Agency (NPA) has launched a pilot project for online language interpretation, aiming to help foreign residents report crimes and deal with judicial procedures, the agency said yesterday.
The project would be conducted in six local jurisdictions from next month to February next year, said Yu Jen-pai (游任白), an officer in the agency’s International Affairs Division.
The project is a collaboration of the police departments in Taipei and New Taipei City, as well as Nantou, Pingtung, Hualien and Taitung counties, Yu said.
Interpreters would provide assistance through an online system to foreigners, helping them report crimes, fill out judicial documents and when being questioned as part of an investigation, he said.
“The service will ensure that foreigners’ language rights are guaranteed,” Yu said. “It will also protect the rights of crime victims and of those being questioned as part of an investigation, as well as criminal suspects. It will improve communication and case handling by law enforcement officers when dealing with foreigners.”
The scarcity of interpreters at rural police precincts makes the project necessary, the agency said.
The project would also include classes for police officers, judicial interpreter testing and work on telecommunication links, it said.
It would also help officers deal remotely with people with unknown COVID-19 infection status during the pandemic, it added.
However, the agency still prefers in-person interpretation, if possible, Yu said.
NPA data showed that there are 1,384 police interpreters in Taiwan, including 1,096 for Southeast Asian languages such as Vietnamese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia and local languages of the Philippines.
While most other interpreters speak English, French, Spanish or Italian, the pool also includes native speakers of Russian or other eastern European languages, Yu said.
The project would be evaluated next year, and the NPA hopes that it can expand the service and attract more interpreters to join, Yu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching