Federal Foreign Language Documents

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the federal agencies which issued documents in foreign languages. GAO noted that: (1) between 1990 through 1994, over 50 agencies issued 265 federal documents in languages other than English; (2) the Social Security Administration issued 19 percent of these foreign-language documents; (3) the foreign-language documents covered topics related to the agencies' missions and functions; and (4) 83.4 percent of the documents were written in Spanish and 4.5 percent in French.