The United States government
has issued an unusual RFP
for translation services: The target languages are all indigenous to
the US.
The contracting
agency is the Office of Indian Economic Development (OIED), which falls under the
Bureau of Indian Affairs that governs programs concerning federally
recognized American Indian Tribes. OIED has allied with the
Department of Agriculture, or USDA, in this contract. This
will provide a means whereby diverse agencies can
request translation into Native languages.
The RFP features
a set-aside for Indian Small Business Economic Enterprises,
meaning that only companies meeting certain revenue and ownership requirements
may apply. OIED would prefer to award a single contractor work for all four
languages.
"This is a
one-year project that will respond to federal agency requests for ongoing and
diverse Native Language translation that will be specific to the federal agency
needs," the RFP states, noting the contract may be
extended more than once, but only for an additional period of up to six
months. Work covered under the contract is between January 20,
2025 – January 19, 2026.
The ultimate goal is to make available the range of
content from official documents, and signage, to Web sites of the "widest
possible audience of the Tribal Nations."
There are 574 federally recognized Tribal Nations. Of those, 229 are located in the
state of Alaska. The other 345 Tribal Nations are spread across
35 other states.
This would, in turn deal with "more prevalent
native languages", most likely the ones which are spoken more frequently.
Stats and Translation Requests
The four target
languages are Yup’ik (Central dialect), Cherokee (Western dialect), Ojibwe
(Western dialect), and Navajo. The contract estimates that each language will
require 610 hours of translation — a somewhat uncommon way of pricing
translation — for a total of 2,440 hours.
According to the
American Community Survey for 2009-2013, Navajo is the most-spoken indigenous
language in the US, with nearly 167,000 speakers, 35,250 of whom self-report as
speaking English less than very well. The latter would be considered individuals
with limited English
proficiency (LEP).
The other three
languages have fewer speakers overall, and fewer individuals with LEP,
including about 6,000 speakers of the Alaska Native language Yup’ik; 1,460
speakers of Cherokee; and 1,100 speakers of Ojibwe.
With relatively
small populations of people with LEP, the impetus for the RFP goes beyond
numbers.
Indeed, the
outgoing Biden-Harris Administration issued on December 9, 2024 a “10-year National Plan on Native Language Revitalization,”
described as charting “a path to help address the United States government’s
role in the loss of Native languages across the continental United States,
Alaska, and Hawai’i.”
Some Tribal Nations
have resources to handle (certain) translations on their own. The Cherokee Nation Translation Department, for instance,
offers free translations for nonprofit uses related to education, health, and
legal services. But there are limits.
“Due to the large
volume of requests, Cherokee Nation Translation does not accept unsolicited
documents such as poetry, scripts, screenplays, and book manuscripts for
translation,” its website states. Nor does it translate tattoos or “names in
Cherokee for children, family members, [or] pets”.
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