Dakota County Newsletter - Fall/Winter 2025 - Speaking your language

Interpreter services available at all service and license centers

All Dakota County residents need access to county services. This can be challenging when there is a language barrier between the resident and county staff.

To make it easier for non-English speaking residents, the county provides language translation at all service and license centers. This gives everyone the ability to access driver’s licenses, game and fishing licenses, vehicle titles and registration, property records, and more.

To get translation help, residents can make a request to any county staff. Signage with instructions is also displayed at all locations in English, Spanish, Somali, Chinese, Russian and Vietnamese. These languages are the most used non-English languages in the county, but translation can be provided in more than 260 languages.

County staff will call a professional on-call interpreter who will help the resident complete their task. Since the service started in July 2022, the Service and License Centers staff have made 422 translation calls. More than 93 percent of those calls were to translate in Spanish.