Soft Market Testing: Interpretation Services for Oxfordshire – Digital Technology and Quality Assura...

Oxfordshire County Council has in place contracts to deliver interpretation services to ensure that it meets its legal duty, which requires us to provide information in the most appropriate ways so that people have access to the same quality of information and receive fair and appropriate services. All interpretation services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year and are requested / accessed by a professional on behalf of the service user.

Currently Oxfordshire have services categorised as; face to face language interpreting,
telephone interpreting, deaf or deafblind interpreting. These arrangements will need to be re-tendered in the near future.

As we will need to re-write our specification to reflect some of our new requirements. We have recently issued a similar questionnaire dealing with specifically Face to Face services (experience and qualifications of interpreters & fee scales). We would like to ask for additional feedback/views on the following areas:

• Can you provide both Language Face to Face and Telephony-based Interpreting? If not why, and could this change?

• In what ways do you think interpretation and translation services could be delivered using digital technologies, and how easy would it be to adopt this way of working? Are there areas where this could not happen? Do the advancements in digital services blur the differences of traditional face to face and telephony-based interpreting?

• How does your organisation quality assure the service provided?

• Imagine you are having trouble providing support due to availability of interpreters, complexity, or urgency of demand - How feasible is it to work in partnership with other organisations either through sub-contracting or other models to ensure timely delivery?


Please upload your response using the document provided by 19th October.

This request is not part of a formal tender exercise. The new tender will be advertised on the ProContract Proactis portal https://procontract.due-north.com/Register separately.