Brighton and Hove health bosses are spending more than half a million pounds a year on interpreters for patients visiting GPs and dentists.
The £557,000 annual cost came to light in a report in The Sun, which put the national cost at £22 million.
The newspaper said that Brighton and Hove paid the fifth highest sum after two inner London NHS trusts, one in Manchester and one n Birmingham.
The figures exclude the cost of translators for hospital patients.
Across the country the languages most often being translated were Polish, Turkish, Farsi, Kurdish, Mandarin, Somali, Arabic and Bengali.
The costs were detailed in a survey of 152 primary care trusts using the Freedom of Information Act.
The high costs in Brighton and Hove were believed to relate to the high number of foreign students, tourists and East European workers in the city.
