Mr. FAZIO. Do you sense that we are going to be replacing some of those retirees? I mean, clearly, if we had all our capability eliminated, you have to consider replacing them. You have to evaluate the need, the demand. The Spanish language probably would stand out among all the requirements in closeouts.

Mr. MULHOLLAN. One of the things we are working with is at what point in a Member's office does it behoove a Member to have a Spanish speaking language capacity within their office? And when should they be able to sufficiently, episodically, to be able to rely upon a centralized agency to help them? Those are the issues that we are going to try to work out.

Mr. FAZIO. Certainly, Hispanic communities are present in almost every district, although in some cases it is a very small percentage. Because my district is probably close to 20 percent, I have always had an Hispanic staff component, people who not only relate culturally but also speak and write the language.

Perhaps I am uniquely required to do that, but if I did not have someone, I would not know where to turn. I cannot ask my colleague for that assistance. I have to go to some central agency.

Mr. MULHOLLAN. But I am faced with the situation of literally do I try to acquire someone else to help me in health reform, where we have had to cut back, or hire someone to help with the Hispanic translations. And if I take legislative assistance as a higher priority than representational needs, then the health reform analyst is hired before the translation analyst. But those are the sort of choices we face.

Mr. FAZIO. Well, I have put in the record the exact question. I do want to highlight the fact that there is a constituency in the institution that is very interested in that issue.

Mr. MULHOLLAN. As are we, sir.

ONGOING TRANSLATION SERVICES

I would like to add that a significant number of translations are handled by the Library of Congress as a whole.

Mr. FAZIO. I was about to ask that question. It would seem to me that part of what you are doing is simply a practical application of skills that exist in the Library.

Mr. MULHOLLAN. If you will bear with me, one of the problems, of course, is someone who has a language capacity to read is significantly different than someone who has the capacity to translate. Translation, particularly when it is not from the native language to English but from English to the native language requires a particular expertise. And the Library has been very great in having a cataloger who, let's say, knows Vietnamese or Cambodian to help with the translation. The issue comes in, does that person have the expertise to translate to the other end?

Mr. FAZIO. Yes. And I guess you think your first requirement is to cover almost all the world's languages before you develop further?

Mr. MULHOLLAN. We know where our workload is and we have been able to manage that, but at a certain point we have to take a look at and ask Congress, if this is something you want us to do, then what do we cut back instead? That is where we are.

Mr. FAZIO. My biggest district problem is among the tribesmen who have no written language.

Mr. BRAESTRUP. The Hmong.

Ms. PRICE. We found that for the more exotic languages-Burmese, Vietnamese, Greek-that there are people in the Library who are happy to do the translation because their substantive work does not always take full time or this provides them with some relief.

But, unfortunately, the demand comes for German, French, Spanish and Russian, and those are areas where our specialists, at least, are overburdened and we do not have that excess capacity. Additionally, in law at least, the questions involve a very technical vocabulary and if you do not know that vocabulary and if you cannot

Mr. FAZIO. Much more specialized than we would realize.
Ms. PRICE. It is a different profession.

Dr. BILLINGTON. I should say this is a crisis in this country generally in our educational system. When we got rid of foreign language requirements for college we significantly lowered the competence of otherwise educated, literate people to handle foreign languages, and it will be a particular problem coming up in the decade for the Library because we hired so many people right after World War II who were refugees from various places abroad. These are going to be very difficult people to replace.

Mr. FAZIO. Mr. Moran's district is a very diverse one because almost every revolution that fails leads to deposit upon his shores. A very interesting community.

Dr. BILLINGTON. Another question that is interesting to discuss, and I discussed it with General Colin Powell a couple of years ago, is: Could we work out a plan to use the Army language school for some of this exotic language training in in the future? He was sympathetic to it and I think the present management at the Pentagon is too, but there are difficult problems of executive

Mr. FAZIO. Maybe we have now lost all the immigrants with natural capability, and we are not producing enough people out of our own institutions to do it.

Ms. PRICE. Not only that, but the requirement that an American citizen has to be favored over an immigrant leads us to have problems even for jurisdictions where there is a ready supply of people but we cannot hire them.

Mr. FAZIO. Is this at all a qualitative issue? Can you argue that, well, yes, that is a distinction, you are a citizen and this other person is not, but their level of acumen is so much greater that you are really not competing?

Mr. MULHOLLAN. As my colleagues have pointed out, there is an increasing need for committees looking at foreign language materials, and you have the BCCI examples, where certain committees all of a sudden had significant need for Farsi; and the Law Library had to take a look at certain investigations. That is very labor-intensive and very expensive and we have been there to help. But if you only have a limited amount of money, is that where you place the resources. That is the point.

FUNDING OF TRANSLATION SERVICES

Mr. FAZIO. How is this attributed in the Library and CRS budget?

Mr. MULHOLLAN. A certain amount is attributed for translations that we have and there has been some contract monies. And that has been a network we have established to help, besides the translation, the Office of Language Services that we have.

Mr. FAZIO. The Office of Language Services is in the Library?
Mr. MULHOLLAN. In the CRS.

Mr. FAZIO. In the CRS. And that is simply to serve your congressional clientele?

Mr. MULHOLLAN. That is correct, solely.

Mr. FAZIO. But we also back it up by using the Library.

Mr. MULHOLLAN. The Library of Congress. When we have language skills we cannot manage there, they go to the Library.

Mr. FAZIO. What percentage of the work, in effect, is handled out of the Library's budget?

Mr. MULHOLLAN. We are actually trying to get a better handle on that, as a matter of fact.

Dr. BILLINGTON. I can give you one current example. I know of two and I have heard a third Congressman request to see a translation of Zhirinovsky's autobiography. And that is a long volume, particularly the original version. He has a cleaned-up version that he circulates as a campaign document, but it tells all in its original version, which is what people want to see. It is a very long book. Should we do that or not? That is a couple months work.

Mr. MORAN. Before the last election I would have said no, but I am not so sure now.

Mr. FAZIO. Someone was pointing out earlier about Mein Kampf not being translated until 1940.

Mr. MORAN. That was yesterday, yes.

Dr. BILLINGTON. Unfortunately, I have read it and it is unfortunately as bad as you have been told. In fact, almost worse.

Mr. FAZIO. Well, the other question that comes to mind again goes back to the Library of Congress. What about using executive branch capability? We have the State Department, we have other agencies of the executive that obviously need the same kinds of skills for other purposes. Are we getting the full utilization of some cross-jurisdictional, cross-branch assistance here? I know they would come to you at times.

MS. PRICE. Right. What we are finding more and more as they are losing staff is that they are making demands on us, that they would have handled in-house three or four years ago. And, again, our problem is that the Economy Act does not work quickly enough for us to be able to get a reimbursement mechanism in place even if they did have the money to reimburse us and they no longer do. Mr. FAZIO. Well, I would certainly urge that this branch of government needs to take care of that problem. We have got to make sure that people know there is a price when they come and ask for help. Otherwise, they may get rid of all their services, and shift all the burden elsewhere. They feel put upon, I am sure, given the treatment they get annually in Congress.

MS. PRICE. The Department of Commerce worked out a good system with the FBIS, an intelligence agency, to do_translations of commercial documentation from various Eastern European countries, and it would appear that that is an appropriate agency which might otherwise go out of business.

Mr. FAZIO. I think I would like you to engage in one other interagency task force to try to figure out how we can better utilize all the resources of the Federal Government, sometimes for the benefit of Congress, but sometimes as well for the benefit of the executive branch. We really do have to be a lot more focused on how to share all this. I don't mean to imply that we now do not, but I think for us it is becoming a problem we would like to see you help solve. I have a few questions on CRS to submit for the record. [The questions and responses follow:]

Question. Give us an idea of the CRS workload. How many requests do you handle for Members and Committees? Update the workload data from last year's hearings. Response. During fiscal year 1993, CRS requests and services totalled 615,913. This workload consisted of: Analysis, Information and Research Requests-266,653; Cited Materials and Products Requests-192,081; Seminar, Institute and Training Participants-13,649; Self-Service Use of CRS Reference Centers-55,979; Congressional Use of Automated Services-87,551. During the year, CRS provided services to all Members and Committees of Congress.

The chart showing the distribution of this workload by type of work and client category follows: