About us

Health Language Services (HLS) is a 24-hour multilingual and sign interpreter service.

Our services are FREE to public patients in public health facilities of South Western Sydney Local Health District.

Contractual arrangements are made with other organisations for the provision of interpreter services and are on a 'fee for service' basis.

The Health Translation Unit is a unit of HLS, which provides a FREE service to SWSLHD for short documents directly related to individual patient care. All other documents are chargeable at reasonable and competitive rates.

Health Language Services has Interpreter bases located at:

Languages Available

South Western Sydney Local Health District Health Language Services employs staff and sessional interpreters.

Staff interpreters are available for the following languages:

Arabic, Assyrian, Bosnian, Cantonese, Croatian, Dari (Persian/Farsi), French, Greek, Hebrew, Hokkien, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer (Cambodian), Korean, Lao, Macedonian, Malay, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Teo-Chew, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Our Sessional Panel includes Interpreters speaking the following languages as well as the ones listed above:

Albanian, Amharic (Ethiopia), Armenian, Auslan/Deaf Sign Language, Belorussian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chaldean, Czech, Dinka, Estonian, Fijian, Finnish, Fuzhou, German, Hakka (Chinese), Hakka (Timorese), Hindi, Hungarian, Ilocano, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Maori, Oromo, Pashtu, Punjabi, Romanian, Samoan, Shanghainese, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Swedish. Syriac, Tagalog, Tamil, Tetum, and Urdu.

All of the languages above and other minority languages:

Azerbaijani, Cook Island, Creo, Fijian Hindi, Gujarti, Karen, Kikamba, Kikongo. Kikuyu, Kineru, Kinganarwanda, Kirundi, Kurdish, Lingala, Lugana, Madi, Mende, Sidamic, Swahili, Sudanese and Tingrinya.