ABSTRACT
Multiculturalism has become an important aspect of Korean society with a large influx of migrants since the early 2000s. Following such demographic changes, the Korean government sought ways to assist migrants’ settlement and facilitate their adaptation and integration into a fledging multicultural society, introducing legislation to support multicultural families that consist of a Korean spouse and a migrant spouse. Among various government-funded services for migrants, this paper concentrates on language services for migrant women, particularly marriage migrants. The translation and interpreting services for marriage migrants are provided by T&I staff, who are also marriage migrants, at Multicultural Family Support Centers across the nation. This chapter sheds light on some of the key features of community language services for marriage migrant women and attempts to evaluate the overall service system based on surveys and interviews of 204 interpreting and translating staff and their supervisors. Based on both qualitative and quantitative data, the paper identifies a number of areas for improvement and offers suggestions for enhancing T&I services through T&I staff capacity-building and their professional career development as community interpreters.
