Why Are Translations Provided By The Dutch Government So Bad?

By procuring low-quality translations as cheap as possible, the Netherlands government is skimping on quality. Common sense dictates that buying cheap comes at a price—“you get what you pay for” so “buy cheap, buy twice”. In its justice system this ultimately means the Netherlands government is cutting corners on your due process rights, such as your rights to clearly understand the charges against you. Imagine a trial where the interpreter’s pronunciation of English is so hard to understand, you hardly comprehend the words, let alone the exact charges and discussion at trial. This happens all the time in the Netherlands where the pronunciation of English is with a thick Dutch or other European accent. By procuring low-quality translations as cheap as possible, the Netherlands government shows it doesn’t really care about the due process rights of those that don’t speak Dutch. If it did, it wouldn’t be cutting corners on the quality of its translation and interpretation services.

If a defendant were to complain about the poor English language in the brochures, the Netherlands government could simply say: “Well, those are machine-generated translations—that’s how we got them that cheap—so blame the machine.” We all know, you can generate machine translations on any random website, social media or even dating apps and we all know about the low quality of those translations. Or the Netherlands government could respond to complaints by saying: “Although we bought them at the lowest price, you can’t complain because you’re getting them for free for your arrest or trial. What did you expect?”

However, that would mean they only have low-quality translators and that is certainly not the case. Quite the contrary, the Netherlands has many high-quality, highly-trained official translators with vast experience in criminal cases. It’s just that all that expertise doesn’t come cheap for those translators. They have to invest significantly in training and expertise. They can’t buy their training and expertise cheap. And yet, their training and expertise is precisely what makes all the difference for you when you receive their high-quality translations in important situations such as police custody or trial.

The main cause for the above problems and current situation is the Netherlands government shift in public procurement since 2021. It reduced its suppliers of interpreting and translation services for, among others, immigration agencies, law enforcement and the judiciary from thousands of sworn interpreters and sworn translators to two agencies which are neither sworn interpreters nor sworn translators. Although the Netherlands government imposed a minimum price for the services, the practical effect was that its minimum instantly turned into a maximum price the agencies pay their interpreters and translators, thus pocketing significant margins.

The agencies also use what most call “contracts of adhesion” requiring interpreters and translators to commit to a business day from something like 7 AM to 9 PM so as to avoid having to pay urgency fees for the many jobs beyond the normal 9 to 5 office hours. To make things worse, the government substantially reduced their pay to stunningly low amounts. They’re squeezing the linguists as much as they can, basically.

The Netherlands government’s stated purpose was to increase competition. That’s evidently a red herring. The public doesn’t know what stake the Netherlands government has in the agencies as it does in the publicly-held bank ABN AMRO, for instance, because the agencies are privately-held corporations that don’t have to give the public access to shareholder registers nor other ownership information.

Besides, you don’t need to be an economist to understand that reducing suppliers from thousands to 2 or a handful obviously has nothing to do with competition. Nor does its stated purpose have anything to do with getting better prices and better quality, quite the contrary, by imposing a minimum that immediately turned into a maximum price, the government is controlling price. If corporations would do this, it would be called price fixing.

Its stated purpose of increasing competition is simply not true. If anything, free market prices and competition have been obliterated, basically. This government action distorts prices, stifles competition, harms the economy and has resulted in an outflow of highly skilled and highly trained professionals who no longer wish to work with the government because it’s bad in virtually all aspects. Those that remain are mostly beginners, less qualified and experienced, willing to work for low pay and under extreme working conditions.

The end result for those that don’t speak Dutch is a chronic and acute lack or decimated availability of highly qualified and experienced sworn linguists and poor-quality translations across the board. The examples above are but a few. There are many horror stories of judges making up translations even though they are not official translators and even of defendants’ relatives trying to help them with some make-shift court interpreting at trial. There’s so much more that could be said about the Dutch situation but we’ll leave it here by saying that Plus Ultra doesn’t depend on the Dutch government.

These examples and circumstances are precisely the reason why Plus Ultra recommends you to understand the language problem you face in the Netherlands and how it affects you in your formalities and proceedings. The purpose of these examples and articles is to show you that you yourself can choose your own translator and not to depend on low-quality texts offered to you by the Netherlands government.

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