District councils' failure to provide bilingual documents is discrimination

I refer to the report ('District council is urged to use more English', July 1).

Yau Tsim Mong district councillor Chan Wai-keung talked about the 'paucity of English translation' of council 'meeting documents'.

As a Sai Ying Pun resident, I wrote to the chairman of the Central & Western District Council in May about documents on its website which are not bilingual and as I could not read Chinese I was unable to understand any of the minutes of its meetings.

This matter came to my attention when I tried to find out from the district council's website about a new escalator that is being constructed at Centre Street. However, to my surprise I could only read the agendas, as these were written in English, but not the minutes, as they were all in Chinese. I have also reviewed the websites of other district councils and many appear only to display documents in Chinese, with the exception of Southern District Council, which has documents in a bilingual format.

In its reply to me, Central & Western District Council said that as it had 'limited resources' it could not produce bilingual documents.

It said if I wanted any information from the minutes written in Chinese, I would need to contact the council and specify the individual sections I wanted translated, so it could arrange for this to be done. Clearly, this is both unsatisfactory, inappropriate and more importantly discriminatory.